Globally Optimistic,

I have just finished The Case for Christ and I have to say that I enjoyed it.  Lee Strobel claims to have been an atheist on a journey to find the truth about Jesus after his wife is born again.  And in this book he interviews thirteen experts on the New Testament in an attempt to find out the truth about Christ (this book is very focused on Christ alone and tends to ignore the rest of the Bible).  This book certainly could never have been named The Case of Christ because of the thirteen people that he interviews not one of them is a skeptic.

One of the interviewees brings up some “calculations” made by Peter Stoner.

“Someone did the math and figured out that the probability of just eight prophecies being fulfilled is one chance in one hundred million billion.”

Now this really annoys me because he never says anything about how this number is arrived at.  On it’s face it sounds very convincing, but how exactly does one calculate the odds that Jesus will enter the city on a donkey.  I mean do we have good data on how many people entered the city of Jerusalem on foot versus donkey, or wagon, or horse?  From here Strobel goes on to give the odds for “fulfilling forty-eight prophecies”.  I am not even sure how the number forty-eight is arrived at.  There are a lot of prophecies in the gospels that are claimed to be fulfilled and a lot of these are either not about Jesus or not fulfilled.  And I am sure that this calculation does not take into account that someone might intentionally try to fulfill prophecies or an even more likely scenario is that someone might rewrite the story a little bit to make it fit.  For a much better analysis of the prophecies you can read an essay by Jim Lippard.  Perhaps Thomas Paine was right when he said.

I have examined all the passages in the New-Testament, quoted from the Old, and called prophecies concerning Jesus Christ, and I find no such thing as a prophecy of any such person, and I deny there are any.

Later in the book, he brings to my attention a very interesting quote.

In his book, The Case Against Christianity, for example, Michael Martin says:

In Matthew, when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arrived toward dawn at the tomb there is a rock in front of it…In Mark, the women arrive at the tomb at sunrise and the stone had been rolled back…In Matthew, an angel is sitting on the rock outside the tomb…in Mark a youth is inside the tomb…In Luke, two men are inside…In Matthew, the women present at the tomb are Mary Magdalene and the other Mary…In Mark, the women present at the tomb are the two Marys and Salome…In Luke, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and other women are present…According to John, only Mary Magdalene came to the tomb when it was still dark, thus contradicting the three other Gospels.”

One of Strobel’s main points in this book is that the New Testament is an accurate historical texts.  The above quote is explained away by the logic, if we treat it as a historical text then we can conclude that the core of the resurrection stories are all the same.

Even if you accept his thesis there are still some problems.  For example if you show me a picture of a horse and tell me you have one in the backyard I will probably believe you.  But if you show me a picture of a unicorn and say the same then I will think you just learned photoshop ( I think that this example is from James Randi ).  The more amazing the claim the more evidence you will need to produce to convince people.

The second problem I see here is that the New Testament does not purport to be a historical text.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16 NIV)

This is commonly interpreted to mean that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.  If it is inerrant then the trivial fact that one gospel (Mark 16:4) says that the stone was rolled away and the other gospel (Matthew 28:2) says that the rock was in front of the tomb is enough to make us distrustful of the resurrection story and by extension the rest of the Bible.