I just finished attending a weekend seminar at Biola University on Cold Case Christianity, where a cold case detective applied his skills and tools of investigating cold case murders to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. His conclusion? The eyewitness testimonies of the disciples are reliable and therefore, putting all biases against the supernatural aside, the reasonable conclusion to what happened to Jesus was that he was actually resurrected!
Jim Warner Wallace, author of Cold Case Christianity, was a former atheist prior to writing his book. When he took what he knows about solving murders with circumstantial evidences to the resurrection event of Christ, it changed him. He began to see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together similarly to other eye witness testimonies he heard over decades of being in law enforcement. His experience with interviewing witnesses is that no two people ever see the exact same thing the exact same way, and even though skeptics use this against the gospel accounts when they encounter variations in the stories, Wallace said that made him believe the stories even more.
“If the gospels would have been word-for-word exact testimony, I would be suspect of them,” Wallace explained. He further stated that perspective has a lot to do with how one person views an event over another, and thinks this makes the gospels more reliable because if they had been exact copies of each other, then the eye witness testimonies would be less believable since no two people ever see things exactly the same.
Wallace’s book is a great read for any one wanting to discover the truth for themselves. Check it out at http://coldcasechristianity.com.
A “selfie” of Lisa Quintana and Jim Warner Wallace at Biola University, June 14, 2014.
