Re:You asked!

As someone who has met Josh McDowell years ago and somewhere still has his book (Evidence That Demands a Verdict) buried in this house, I am fairly aware of his Liar, Lunatic, or Lord case for the claims of Jesus of Nazareth.

And here are my thoughts...

Every attempt to prove anything -in this case the deity of Jesus- rests in the authenticity and verifiability of the facts selected as the basis for the proof - which for McDowell is the New Testament and the few scraps about Jesus scattered in the historical record.

Even the most conservative scholars admit that the vast majority of the New Testament was written and collected many years after the life of Jesus, assembled from words and stories and letters passed around by the early disciples.

Did these things really happen as they were written down? Were the stories distorted by time as they passed from person to person? Is the record embellished in some way by those wanting a consistent set of facts?

The New Testament is obviously the product of thoughtful, meticulous and well-intentioned people, and as far as I can tell, there is nothing there that shows any systematic distortion - but internal consistency is no proof - nor is the existence of Christianity (other religions have arisen similarly), nor the miracles described in the Gospels and elsewhere (miracles are described in many ancient "pagan" writings as well). And on and on...

Josh McDowell's "Jesus as Lord" case is pretty strong - but as Carl Sagan once said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." And for me the circular nature of the arguments from McDowell don't get me all the way to faith. [The New Testament is a valid historical record - therefore everything must be true such as how Jesus claimed to be and acted like the son of God - therefore Jesus must be the son of God - why else would he have sacrificed himself? - why else would the early disciples have kept and collected this record? -why else would they have been so willing to die in his name in the years to come?].

If one is to argue the resurrection like a court case, then one is required to first belief in those who claimed to have witnessed the original events, then in those who passed these stories along undigested, then in those who wrote them down without embellishment, then in those who copied those texts thorough the ages uncorrupted, and finally in the scholarship of those who compiled the ancient manuscripts and translated them into modern languages.

And then, even after all of this, when boiled down to its core essence, the New Testament only shows us that the early Christians were intensely convinced about the resurrection; but this in itself does not _prove_ that they were right.

No matter how well-argued the case is for a risen Christ, in the end the verdict comes down to a matter of personal faith.

And so, my friend, I conclude this...

If my faith in the continuation of life after death were something I could be argued into, I would be there already. But I see now that it can't happen this way for me. And so, instead, I must pray and sense for myself what the answer is to Jenny's continuing existence--deep down inside my heart far far away from my logical and skeptical and angry mind.

Thanks for writing.