Cold-Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace

J. Warner Wallace was an atheist and a homicide detective with many years of experience when he decided to apply his professional skills to evaluating the New Testament’s claims about Jesus. Now he’s a believer.

That’s what happens when you follow the evidence rather than your emotions and the orthodoxy of atheist dogma.

The New Testament makes certain claims about Jesus:

• He was conceived through divine intervention.
• He was born at a certain time and place.
• He performed many miracles, including healing, manipulating nature, and raising the dead.
• He was a popular Jewish teacher for a few years.
• He repeatedly clashed with the Jewish religious leadership.
• He was falsely accused of blasphemy and executed on a cross for being a rival to Caesar.
• He rose from the dead and appeared to many people.
• He ascended to Heaven.
• And many others…

While some of these claims can never be proven through evidence one way or another, many of them should have left some kind of trail. The Gospels claim that there were many witnesses to Jesus’ miracles, trials, a crucifixion, and a resurrection. The first century wasn’t completely illiterate, so such remarkable events should have left some kind of historical record that can be examined and dissected in order to discover the real facts, or at least say which claims are more likely to be true than not.

In Cold-Case Christianity, Wallace takes you through the basic logical toolkit of a cold-case detective and applies it to the foundational claims of Christianity. The book is divided into two sections. The first section details ten principles of gathering and evaluating evidence, specifically Forensic Statement Analysis, the art and science of interpreting eye witness accounts and filtering fact from fiction. The second section takes those ten principles and uses them to test the witnesses and documentary evidence of the New Testament.

After reading this book, you will feel entirely justified in ignoring all further historical assertions made by people who claim that Jesus never existed. Nobody’s life is more thoroughly attested by ancient history than that of Jesus, and there is no stronger evidence that a person is historically ignorant than to claim Jesus never existed. By the end, Wallace demonstrates that the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus (aka Yeshua) and for the authenticity of the New Testament (the Gospels in particular) is stronger than for almost any other accepted fact of antiquity.