AMANDA: You haven't done your homework on this one.  Remember what I said earlier, there actually is evidence of Jesus' life, death and resurrection through non-Christian Romans and Jews without even once looking in the Bible.  I think you should talk to Josh McDowell (an American Christian evangelist).  He studied Christianity in order to write a book to disprove it!  Now look at him.  He couldn't disprove Christianity or the Bible and is now a great evangelist for Christ.

BRUCE:  Oh, dear.  I'm afraid it is you, Amanda, that has not done your homework!  I hate to tell you this (okay, I don't really mind telling you . . .), but Josh McDowell is not a name you want to mention in the same sentence as "[doing one's] homework," since that is virtually a contradiction in terms!  McDowell is not an historian and he is not even a biblical scholar; he's a Christian evangelist and propagandist, and a poor one even by Christian apologist standards!  I have several of McDowell's books, including his original two volume Evidence that Demands a Verdict (ETDV), as well as the recent single volume New Evidence that Demands a Verdict (1999), not to mention his More Than a Carpenter, and his co-effort with Don Stewart, Answers To Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian Faith, and each of them suffer from the same problem--they are disingenuous apologetical books designed to cater to already believing Christians, whom he knows will eagerly eat up whatever he says without question! 

McDowell was never an "atheist" who set out to "disprove" the Bible and Christianity; rather, he used the negative image Christians apply toward atheism as a platform from which to promote the Christian apologetic book he intended to write from the beginning!  McDowell does not even attempt to hide his mission and he will do anything he can to convince people of the "truth" of Christianity (to the exclusion of all other religious "truths" out there), and he is not above distorting evidence, contorting the facts, using misleading language, and lying outright in order to accomplish his goal.  There are multiple standing challenges to McDowell to defend his "evidence" in public oral debate, or even written debates in open forums where everyone (not just his uncritical flocks) can see the evidence, as it exists, offered and defended by each side.  But McDowell steadfastly refuses these challenges, lest he be publicly exposed and humiliated in front of his flocks. 

But since you find McDowell so convincing, Amanda, by all means, use him as your guide throughout these discussions about the "truth" of Christianity and the clear "historical" evidence for the historical Jesus of the gospels.

AMANDA: Where exactly did you look in order to come up with this conclusion?  Or are you just presuming that Jesus isn't written about anywhere except for in the Bible?

BRUCE:  Well, Amanda, since you're the one that has cited McDowell as someone I need to read (and, with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in hand, I actually have read through two of his books, and frequently reference ETDV in the course of discussions such as this one) in order to find the extrabiblical information that supposedly refers to Jesus, then perhaps you could start us off by copying and pasting some of this "evidence" from his book and PUT ME IN MY PLACE!  I propose you begin by citing all of the evidence for Jesus as cited by contemporary historians of the day; you know, historians that were actually alive and recording events at the time and in the region where Jesus is said to have been doing all of these glorious deeds.  This should be interesting . . . 

AMANDA: Hence the apostles were around to tell people about Him instead.  And the apostles couldn't make up what they said because the critics were constantly around them, ready to disprove what they said if they were to lie.

BRUCE:  Actually, given that there was a minimum of 50-80 years before the first gospel account even appeared (and many decades more for the others), one could say pretty much what they wanted without having anyone be the wiser to "counter" it by saying, "bull$shit, I was there, and that never happened!"  Every miraculous story attributed to Jesus was already well known from far more ancient Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, Roman and Pesian mythology, so if 50-100 years after the fact some anonymous author starts reformatting these stories around an upstart religious movement, then how could the factuality of those stories be disputed any more than the original stories could be disputed for "lack of proof"? 

For example, the famed Christian apologist, Origen, in his Contra Celsum (3:24), writes of the Greek myth about the healing and resurrecting demigod, Asclepius:

"It is said of Asclepius that a great multitude of men, both Greeks and barbarians, confess that they have often seen and still do see not just a phantom, but Asclepius himself healing men and doing good and predicting the future."  

So, Amanda, since no one is around to "counter" the factuality of these subjective claims about Asclepius, then by what manner do you (and Origen before you) discount the plausibility of the claims?  Since the only accunts we have to document the dramatic "healing and resurrecting" Jesus, are those written by CHRISTIAN apologists decades or centuries after the fact, why should we view their grandiose claims to be any more factual than those attributed to Asclepius or the many other dying/resurrecting/healing savior gods that were well known centuries, even millennia before Christianity was taking it's first baby steps as a religion?

Do you see the problem? 

AMANDA: Everybody has their own version of what they saw.  I can tell you right now that my version of my son and daughters birth will be different to my husband's (who was in the labour ward with me).  The books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each give different views and angles of Jesus, making Him more known and personal to us.

BRUCE:  The difference, of course, is that you and your husband giving accounts of your son and daughter's births would be your own accounts, but the gospels, we are told, are not their own words but those of God himself, produced under the presumably inerrant circumstances of divine inspiration, and therefore without error.  And yet the gospel accounts are filled with errors, almost as if they were authored by--gasp--mere fallible humans!  Some of these contradictions are so glaring, in fact, that two, three, and sometimes all four of the accounts cannot be at once correct!  Do you think you are up to the challenge of defending the inerrancy of the gospel accounts, Amanda?  Do you think Josh McDowell will be able to help you here? <wink>

Bruce Monson