Critics for centuries have seized upon specific claims, features, names and silences in the New Testament about the life and times of Jesus Christ. An example of such claims is that of Luke concerning the Roman Governor of Syria, Quirinius, and the census that drew Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem to be registered.

Millions of college students and consumers of popular media have been told Luke’s account can’t be the inspired Word of God because he made mistakes, including attributing the Census around the time of Jesus birth to the time when Quirinius was the Syrian governor.

But Cold-Case Christianity’s J. Warner Wallace, who knows a thing or three about assessing the validity of evidence and the credibility of witnesses, writes the following in a lengthy and wonderfully detailed piece on CCC’s web site:

“Many of the Gospel details related to the life of Jesus have been questioned by critics of the Bible. Skeptics have argued there was no recorded census at the time described in the Bible, no record of a governor in Syria named Quirinius, and no tradition of requiring people to return to their ancestral home for purposes of recording their numbers (these details are mentioned in Luke 2:1-3).

“But archeological findings have now revealed the Romans regularly recorded the enrollment of taxpayers and held censuses every 14 years (beginning with Augustus Caesar). In addition to this, an inscription found in Antioch tells of Quirinius being governor of Syria around 7 B.C. (evidently he was governor twice.) But that’s not all.

“Archaeology has proven the Biblical writers to be correct about hundreds of other details once questioned, like the existence of Lysanias (Luke 3:1), the existence of court called ‘the Pavement’ (or ‘Gabbatha’ as mentioned in John 19:13), the existence of Pontius Pilate, the details of Roman crucifixion, the existence of the city of Iconium (Acts 14:6) , the existence of the proconsul named Sergius Paulus (Acts 13), and the existence of a man named Gallio (Acts 18), to name just a few.

“Critics once thought the Biblical writers to be either mistaken or lying about these details until archeological finds in the last two centuries proved the Bible to be correct.”

Wallace covers a lot of other ground in this piece, including an excellently detailed and full-color graphic presentation of the claims about the life of Jesus written by hostile gentile sources and hostile Jewish sources, compared to those of the Bible. There is a great deal of information that is common to all three, a fact that gives lie to the claim that Jesus never actually existed.

To cite just one other example from Wallace’s extensive treatment of the topic, he points out that the Gospels and the Book of Acts were written considerably earlier than the hostile gentile and Jewish accounts and likely within the lifetimes of many eyewitnesses to the life and acts of Jesus.

Compared to the “first” secular historian, the ancient Greek writer Herodotus, the New Testament is by far the more deeply documented, according to Wallace:

“Yet the work of Herodotus is not nearly as well documented as the work of the New Testament writers. Our earliest copy of ‘The Histories’ (written allegedly in 480 to 425BC), dates at 900AD. That is a 1,350 year gap.

“The earliest New Testament fragments date to within 25 t0 50 years of the writing and our earliest complete manuscript of the New Testament dates to within 300 years of the writing.

“There are only 8 ancient copies of ‘The Histories’ to compare to one another, while there are over 24,000 ancient copies of the New Testament to compare to one another. The Biblical eyewitnesses were not only present to observe Jesus, they wrote and preserved their eyewitness testimony in a manner unlike any other ancient eyewitness.”

Jesus’ claims about Himself — to be God incarnate and the only way to Heaven —are not the sort of claims one can easily dismiss unless you are prepared to argue He was either a liar or a lunatic.

Since where each of us spends eternity depends upon our conclusions about Jesus and His claims, it behooves everybody to examine the evidence and decide for themselves whether He is Lord, Liar or Lunatic. This piece by Wallace is a superb place to start.

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FOR HILL AIDES ONLY!