Reddit mentions of The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ

New Evidence that Demands a Verdict

More Than a Carpenter

Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels On my to read list.

Faith on Trial: An Attorney Analyzes the Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus

The Case for Christ

The Case for Faith

The Case for a Creator

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus On my to read list.

The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ On my to read list.

Besides the apologetics books, you can watch John Lennox on YouTube. He is a very well-spoken and kind (doesn't attack the other debater) debater. Very well thought out responses. The Dawkins vs Lennox debate was awesome! Ditto Gary Habermas as well.

> Christianity is not an evidence-based religion. It's like all other religions, which is faith-based.

While I agree that faith is a necessary component of Christianity, you seem to assert here that faith and evidence are mutually exclusive. I think this is a false dichotomy akin to the oft-repeated "science versus religion" debate topic of the last century.

Faith alone does not a Christian make. True faith always makes itself known (always "discovers itself" in the words of Edwards) in the life of the believer. In other words, faith produces evidence that demonstrates its efficacy. A love for God, a hatred for one's sin, and a spirit that strives to obey God's commands are some examples of this evidence that is apparent not only to the believer but to surrounding people. I certainly see this in my own life.

But this is not to say that one's faith cannot be bolstered by external evidence. In this category we have arguments for the existence of God and the historicity of the events described in the New Testament documents. Chief among these is the resurrection, which Paul identifies as the linchpin of the entire Christian faith.

> The resurrection of Jesus is not historical at all. The historicity of Jesus ends with his crucifixion.

As /u/RighteousDude has already pointed out, we "prove" facts of history not in a binary sense, but with degrees of confidence. Another way to put this is that given the body of evidence (documents, oral testimony, artifacts, and so on), we seek the explanation that can account for all the evidence and do so far better than any competing explanation.

The resurrection should be treated no differently. Given the evidence, virtually all scholars (to include skeptics) agree that 1) Jesus of Nazareth died in Jerusalem by crucifixion, 2) his disciples were transformed from cowards into men who boldly claimed that they saw Jesus after his death and who went on to become martyrs, 3) James (the brother of Jesus and a skeptic) was converted in the same manner, 4) Saul of Tarsus (initially an enemy of Christianity) was converted in the same manner, and 5) the tomb was discovered empty. There are many more facts that can be extracted from the available evidence, but these five are perhaps the most critical, and as mentioned, nearly everyone who studies this subject agrees on them.

So given these facts, what is the best explanation? Many have been proposed over the years, such as ideas that the someone stole the body, or that the disciples fabricated the story, or that Jesus never actually died, or that the disciples hallucinated, or even that this entire story is fiction. But each of these ideas completely fails to account for the whole body of evidence in some way or another. The best explanation that accounts for all the evidence is simply that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that the disciples, James, and Saul were all eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus.

The case I've summarized above is drawn from the work of Gary Habermas, whose Historical Jesus is an approachable introduction to the life of Jesus that pays special attention to the extra-Biblical sources. If you're interested in a more thorough treatment, N. T. Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God_ is a great choice.

I wish I could meet you all in person to have this discussion. My answer is yes, he existed and was crucified, but because I don't have resources in front of me at the moment, I'll just simply point you to a scholar.

Dr. Gary Habermas is a great scholar on this topic. He wrote this book called The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ. In the book he argues for the existence of Jesus and the crucifixion from a historical perspective. Some of his lectures are on youtube.

You might want to read this.

• http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/cr/0899007325/ref=aw_d_cr_books