4. Jesus: The Gospels' Account
Written on 12.11.2025
Someone I did not know once emailed me about one of my books and in passing he noted that he was aware that I was a humanist and was committed to rationalism and the scientific method. He then advised me to read a book by a retired detective in the US which was an account of his evidence-based investigation of Christianity using the skills of his profession. The book is Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace (2013). The author starts out a skeptic, but he finds convincing evidence of the authenticity of the claims of Christianity as reported in the Bible.
I did not take up the suggestion that I should read this book. Over time, I have acquired many second-hand books exploring this and related themes and simply have not the time to read them. I did feel like emailing this person back, pointing out that most of the committed Christians whom I know only feel the need to read one book to convince themselves of their faith. But I didn't. I wanted to avoid the inevitable exchange of arguments and counter arguments that this would provoke. I opt for a quiet life these days.
What I have done is re-read the four Gospels of the New Testament. Plus the Acts of the Apostles. At school in the 1950s and 60s, we spent many hours studying the bible (and being examined on our knowledge) and this was often augmented by lessons at Sunday School-in my case until the age of 13. Around the age of 11, I entered a Bible study competition for which I received a mark of 92%. Since that period, I had not revisited the Bible very much. However, I read the Gospels again to re-familiarise myself with the events reported and because I am interested in how they came to be written.
When I read them, I did so from the standpoint that I was consulting historical accounts of events that occurred 2,000 years ago in a small part of the world now known as the Middle East, written some decades previously. I treated them as one might any similar text by a recognised historian living around that period, in that and other localities. In such circumstances, questions of the soundness of the account and what is authentic and what is unreliable and even mythological frequently arise.
The material in which I was particularly interested was not so much the details of Jesus's life-where and when he was born, his parents, his teaching, his followers, the manner of his death, and so on. The focus of my interest was the reports of the miracles that he and his disciples performed and the claim that the life of Jesus fulfilled prophecies concerning the 'Jewish Messiah' in the Old Testament. In both cases-miraculous deeds and accurate predictions of the details of Jesus's life by people living hundreds of years before he was born-require superhuman powers.
I wanted to adopt a strictly rational and, if you like, a scientific approach to the evidence provided in the accounts of both sets of claims. But how does one go about this? What rules is one to follow?
What do I mean by 'a strictly rational and scientific approach' to this kind of evidence. How does one go about this? What rules is one to follow? I continue in my next post.
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