Why is Jesus the ultimate person of interest? J. Warner Wallace- GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 40

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Got Questions podcast on your questions and biblical answers.

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On today's episode, we're going to have J. Warner Wallace. He's a cold -case detective, author, speaker, a senior fellow at the

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Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and an adjunct professor of apologetics at the Talbot School of Theology and Southern Evangelical Seminary.

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But I think he's most known for two books that he's written, Cold Case Christianity, which was hugely impactful for me, and I found it very useful, and also a book that's about to come out,

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Person of Interest. So we're going to be talking about that a little bit. But Jim, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks so much for it.

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Let me tell you, I'm a huge fan. Your site has been such a blessing to me.

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I have a phone app, and people will ask me questions. On the phone app. And sometimes I will refer them to the articles we've written to answer the questions.

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But I cannot tell you, you are the number one resource that I refer people to, because I don't think there's any better set of answers out there.

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So I'm just glad to be part of your podcast. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for the encouragement. It's always nice to hear.

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So Jim, tell our listeners and me, and I've read it in your book before, but what led you to investigate

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Jesus as a cold case detective? Well, it wasn't like what Lee Strobel, who was a friend of mine who wrote

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The Case for Christ, who was trying to disprove his wife, because his wife became a Christian first, and then he was like,

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God, this is bunk. Let me show you why you're wrong. I didn't even take it that seriously, in the sense that I thought it was such pure fiction that it wasn't even worthy of an intentional investigation.

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The same way you wouldn't be investigating Bigfoot. These things don't exist, so what's the point in investigating it?

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It's all fiction. But my wife was interested in exploring. She did believe there was a

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God. We never talked about it. We had been together 18 years. It was never part of our conversation, never part of our lives.

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I was shocked, really, that she was even wanting to bring our kids into a church. We had young kids, and I think she was interested in seeing what the church could offer in terms of a moral grounding, that kind of stuff.

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I wasn't raised that way. I said, why do we need to do this? Of course, when you're not saved, you have a sense that your way is great, so why can't we just do it the way that I would do it?

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So I went with her just to appease, just to make her happy. I sat in the first time in an evangelical church service and listened to the pastor.

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He pitched Jesus in a way, to be honest, I didn't expect. He said that Jesus was smart.

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In fact, he said he was the smartest man who had ever lived. He said he was the most important person who had ever lived. I thought the smart part got me.

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I was like, really? So why does this guy think this guy is so smart? Now, he didn't really get into much depth in that.

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So I went out and I thought, well, I'm going to buy a Bible. So I bought a very inexpensive pew Bible, like six dollars, seven dollars.

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I came home with it, and I thought I'm just going to read. I know Susie was probably shocked, but I was not, oh,

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I'm a Christian now. No, I just thought I want to see what the smart guy has to say on whatever it is that he thinks is so smart.

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And that's what started me reading the scriptures. And as I read them, I recognized certain attributes.

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In other words, they don't line up. Like if you read Mark and compare it to Luke, you'll see some differences, not only in terms of details that are described by Mark versus Luke, but also in terms of ordering of sequencing of events compared to Luke.

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And so I thought, oh, that's good because that's exactly what happens in eyewitness accounts, is they don't initially line up.

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You're going to have to spend some time figuring out why this guy's perspective versus this gal's perspective is so different that it causes them to describe it in slightly different ways.

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And that was actually the differences in the Gospels that provoked me to examine them as eyewitness accounts.

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And that's part of my journey. That's why I actually started to examine the Gospels. So through your research,

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I know tons of research, I encourage all our readers to pick up a copy of Cold Case Christianity and read through that.

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But that's amazing, just the journey that Jim went on. But what to you was most impactful?

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What in all the research you did eventually led you to accept Christ as your

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Savior? Well, okay. People ask me that question. I think I always have a rather disappointing answer.

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So I'm a cumulative case guy, only because in the past when

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I was a brand new investigator, if I got excited about one piece of evidence that I thought really sealed the deal, several times

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I was wrong about how that really fit in the overall puzzle of evidence. And what I've learned working in cold cases, these are just unsolved murders.

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They are unsolved because people weren't really able to kind of connect all the puzzle pieces.

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And these are always cumulative cases where you have a cumulative set of circumstantial or also called indirect evidences that come together like a puzzle and point to the same reasonable inference.

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So when I started to examine these issues related to Jesus, if I got something that I thought was evidentially valid in some way,

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I just put it in my shelf. In my mental shelf, I actually was diagramming this stuff. So I would just collect these pieces because I knew in the end it would never be one piece of evidence that would convince me.

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It would be the overall weight of the cumulative case. And it got to a point where, and this is what always happens, where you're thinking to yourself, okay, now it's almost silly to deny this is my suspect, right?

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I mean, I've got like 15 things that point to him. And now it's to the point where I almost have to be logically incoherent to continue to deny he's involved.

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Well, the same kind of thing was starting to happen for me with Jesus, where I got to a point where I was like, wow, the camel's back is pretty full.

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This pack is pretty full. And so that doesn't make you a Christian, by the way. I just got to a place where I trusted that the

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Gospels were telling me the truth about Jesus. So I had belief that. But to get to belief in,

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I started to read through the New Testament to see what it said, not about Jesus, but what it said about Jim Wallace. And what it said about me opened my eyes to my own need.

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Because for a lot of us, I'm not going to listen to what it has to say about me until I first can verify that what you're saying about everything else is true.

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So once I knew it was saying the truth about history and about Jesus, then I was willing to listen to the

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Gospel authors when they started to describe my condition, especially when Paul is in Romans or is in First Corinthians.

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It was pretty convicting by that point. But again, it's only because I believed that that text had a reliable author.

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Yeah. Now the cumulative case thing, it's powerful in that in my story, similarly,

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I wasn't doing the same type of research you were, but it was the cumulative case of someone who had directly shared the

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Gospel with me, someone who had lived out the Gospel in front of me, someone who had taken the time to answer all the questions that I had.

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So it was a cumulative case in terms of people ministering to me that led me to eventually receive

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Christ, of course, with the drawing of the Holy Spirit as well. But I get that as well. And then for me, most of the research came after I became a

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Christian and digging into it and having, with GotQuestions, the opportunity to do apologetics a lot, to answer a lot of apologetically related questions.

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Now, one question I'd really like to ask you, around every Easter, we get questions along these lines a lot.

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So all of the, what I would like you to do is just kind of approach it from a cold case detective.

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How would you handle these eyewitness accounts, all of the different accounts of the resurrection appearances of Christ?

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There's different ones, there seem to be different order, the stories aren't exactly the same. How do you approach those differences as a cold case detective?

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Yeah, exactly. So I always, listen, if the event occurred two hours ago,

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I wouldn't be surprised to find that you have differences between, because when I get, the one thing I ask dispatchers to do when they're calling me out to a homicide scene is tell the officers who are on the scene to separate the eyewitnesses.

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And we have the eyewitnesses separated because if we don't, we'll get there and we'll get the same story five times.

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Because people will talk to each other and they'll kind of convince them, maybe you're right, maybe it was that. So they'll now agree with you.

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No, no, we want the differences because that's our job, is to figure out, well, why are you only mentioning this and you're mentioning something totally different?

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It does not mean that they're contradicting each other. Because what happens is every set of eyewitnesses, you might think, well, gosh, we're all like video cameras, right?

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We all sit there with our eyes and videotape or video record now the same scene.

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So therefore, we should be able to play that video back and see the exact same detail. But you know, that doesn't really happen that way.

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We all have what's called tunnel vision on things that are of interest to us. And the question is, what is it that's in your background that causes you to focus on some aspects of the scene, yet miss other aspects of the scene?

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And sometimes that's your personal history. It's your likes and dislikes. It's your biases, your motives.

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These are things that play in. So for example, if you had a background where somebody was wearing that shirt that you know that you actually own that shirt.

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Well, I'll bet you if I ask you, what was he wearing? You're going to give me a very distinct description because you actually happen to have that shirt.

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Or if you're somebody who this guy resembles a family member and that family member says something almost the same.

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Do you see how your background and your history could cause you to repeat back to me the things that you saw and leave out things you didn't?

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For example, if you're the witness who is having a muzzle of a gun in your face as they're demanding the cash, you may miss certain aspects of the scene that the person standing just a foot to your left is able to grasp because he did not feel the same level of threat that you felt.

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I mean, there are many reasons why witnesses, it's not just geographic perspective, it's historical perspective, it's emotional perspectives, it's volitional perspectives.

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All of these things come in and account for why every witness gives you a slightly different story.

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And this is so normal that I used to run the experiment with my students as a youth pastor just to show them that I'm going to have someone run in, commit a robbery right in front of you,

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I'll be the victim. He's going to run back out again. And I will guarantee you, I will not get two descriptions of this event that will match.

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And it just happened. Now, in the end, if I said, well, yeah, you all agree on what happened, but you've described some aspect that you haven't.

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And then I can talk about, well, why might that be? Well, why do you think you missed this? Or you were focused so much on that other thing and you'll eventually have them tell you, well, maybe it's because of this.

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So this is the case with the gospel authors also. Here's what you'd be suspicious of as an investigator.

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I come in and five of you tell me the exact same thing with even the niche details being exactly the same.

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We want to be able to collect what we call the gist of the account. You're probably all going to agree on the gist, but you're going to disagree on peripherals.

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This is very common. This is common on every memory. Experts will talk about this.

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So the question is, are the gists are the same? What's different? Are there peripherals? And that's what comes back to background and perspective.

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Fantastic. Now, I remember I've seen one of your videos, I think, where you do that with a group of people and someone runs in and steals something.

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And then you ask them questions. And it was amazing that I found myself agreeing with some of the students in the class and not others.

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So I actually rerun the video and watched it. I was like, huh, I didn't notice this, this, or this the first time.

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It's interesting how our memories work or don't work to a certain extent. And I think part of the problem too, if you think about it, is most people think, well, that's what eyewitness accounts are like, but this is the word of God.

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Like, shouldn't the word of God capture every single detail in the exact same way?

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Well, if what God intended to do was to give us four reliable eyewitness accounts that would also bear the earmarks of reliability, so we could test them later, he accomplished it.

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I think there'd be much more distrust, even amongst the skeptical community, if all the gospels had not a single variation in them.

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You would all say, it's the same story, the same lie being repeated over and over again. No, instead, these have the very texture we would expect from reliable eyewitness accounts.

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So what you've just described is the basic gist of Cold Case Christianity, but who would you say the book

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Cold Case Christianity is for? Well, so you never know who it's for. It's describing my journey, right?

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Now it's not that personal. You won't get a lot of personal stuff in most of my books. You're going to get the case, usually. But this is how

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I removed the barriers that prevented me from even hearing the gospel at all, is

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I had barriers. I thought, well, look, this is not an eyewitness account. This is not history. This is mythology.

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I needed to have some of those barriers removed. That was not my intention was to knock down the walls.

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I actually was there to mine out the smart wisdom statements of, it couldn't even be a fictional character. If years from now we're reading the wise statements of Obi -Wan

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Kenobi, we might actually mine out something of value to ourselves, even though that character is entirely fictional.

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So I was willing to read Jesus, even if he was a character from Shakespeare, might teach you something about how to live.

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So I didn't need him to be a historical character. I just needed him to say something smart. But as I read through the wisdom statements, they are encased in the gospels.

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And I was struck by the similarities in an eyewitness account. And I thought,

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I've got to start to investigate those. And that's really what this is described in Cole's case.

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And so who's it for? Well, I hope it's for people who are like me, who maybe hold a view of Jesus, which is less than historical.

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It's more of a fictional view of Jesus, and really needs that to be knocked down before they can hear the truth about Jesus.

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And I think for a lot of people, that's who they bought the book. Either they bought it for someone like me, or they bought it because they thought, wow,

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I didn't really know you could make a case for this in the way that you're making it.

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Because a lot of us will look, I've seen philosophers make the case for Jesus. I've seen historians make the case for Jesus.

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But to be honest, how many times are you watching a show on TV about a philosopher or an historian? Most of the time you're watching cop shows.

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I mean, everybody is. Those are the most popular shows on television. And you already have a sense of how people build cases in detective work.

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So when I approach it that way, you're like going, oh yeah, I get it now. Because that makes sense, right? Because you already are familiar with what detectives do, because you're always watching those shows.

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Yeah. Exactly. No, you're exactly right. I never quite understood why so many people are so fascinated by whether it's legal shows or art shows.

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But it is interesting to see the process, even though I know the TV shows expedite the process, take something that takes weeks or months and condense it into five minutes.

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But obviously no one's going to tune into a six -month -long TV show. That's right. So I hear you have a new book coming out in the next few weeks,

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Person of Interest. Tell us about that. Yeah, it comes out on September 21st, so really soon now.

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And it's a book that does exactly the opposite of what Cold Case did. So Cold Case looks at the evidence in the crime scene, so to speak, of the

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New Testament. What does the New Testament say about Jesus? But I've worked a bunch of cases where we have no crime scenes, where somebody kills his wife and says she ran off, and then he buries her body, and no one ever finds it.

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And you don't even have a body. And we didn't even take the case as a murder case. We reported it as a missing person.

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So no one photographed a crime scene. Six months go by. He moves. He remodels the house.

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Now there's no evidence at all. So now what do we do to prove what happened on the day she vanished?

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Well, I always say on that day, if he murdered her, that an explosion took place. And that bomb went off.

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It was preceded by a long fuse that burned up to the explosion itself. And after it exploded, there was shrapnel all over the place in the blast radius.

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So we make a case, in that kind of case, a no -body murder, by studying the fuse and the fallout.

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And we demonstrate this to the jury. So if we were to take the story of Jesus and remove the core elements, you know, the stuff in the crime scene, which is the gospel accounts.

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If there wasn't a single New Testament available to anyone on planet Earth, it turns out you could reconstruct the story of Jesus in its entirety from the fuse and fallout of history.

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Not just that Jesus had a huge impact, but that every detail of the

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Jesus story, you could actually reconstruct from the impact.

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The data is still out there. Unless you're willing to destroy the entire history of literature, art, music, education, science, and world religion, you're going to know something about Jesus, even if you don't have anything in the crime scene.

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So the person of interest kind of, is that, by the way, I did both of these things kind of simultaneous when

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I was spending the first eight to nine months examining the case for Jesus. But I only wrote about the most people want to know, can

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I trust the New Testament? And so this is basically the perfect addendum to the cold case.

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This is the everything else that the cold case fails to mention. So what would you say are the biggest, in a sense, evidences for Jesus that you can make your case without even using the

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New Testament? Well, I think one of the more surprising aspects that you could look at, and for me, and there's,

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I mean, this is a very visual book. It's only about 300 pages, but there's about 400 illustrations. So some of these are two illustrations per page.

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It's very visual, like a graphic novel in a sense. And I also have a crime story that we're telling the mystery of a missing body case.

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So we're doing that as part of the book. So you can see it's a combination of a couple of creative elements. But as I examine the fallout, what

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I was most surprised, and I knew this from my examination of this 24 years ago when I first became a

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Christian, the impact that most people think, most people kind of see Christianity for whatever reason as kind of an anti -science kind of view of the world, right?

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We believe there's a supernatural being who's responsible for the world. So, you know, people like that, they're not going to be involved in the natural sciences, right?

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But it turns out that the natural, the sciences in general are so deeply indebted to the worldview established by Jesus of Nazareth, and then executed by his followers,

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Christ's followers, that I don't think people have any understanding of how many of the science fathers, these are the founders and fathers of scientific disciplines, all of the modern scientific disciplines from chemistry to quantum mechanics to computer sciences.

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If people had any idea the percentage that were Christ followers and are Christ followers,

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I think you'd be blown away. As a matter of fact, every major scientific discipline was established by a

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Christ follower, and we continue to succeed in these areas. As a matter of fact, more Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences have been

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Christ followers than any other category and all other categories combined. There's no one has performed as well in the sciences because, as I described in the chapter of the book,

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Christ followers actually understood a worldview established by Jesus that had six or seven igniters for the sciences that were not present prior to the arrival of Jesus.

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He initiated this way of thinking of the world that laid the foundation for the natural sciences.

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Now, what's interesting about that is, well, okay, so that's he had a big impact. Well, like no one else, this peasant, this little

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Jewish sage, right, from the first century in a tucked away corner of the world, who was born in a nowhere town and raised in another nowhere town, who never had a family, never traveled more than 200 miles, never worked harder than three years in terms of making his public ministry.

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This guy, who was persecuted by people who had power and people who had money and betrayed by his own followers, who was falsely mocked and accused and eventually executed and then buried in a borrowed grave.

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This is the guy who changes the world, changes our calendar, and impacts the sciences, and from which, those sciences, by the way, if you just read the personal writings of the science fathers all the way from the first century to the 21st century, you can completely reconstruct the story of Jesus, and we did that in the book to show you that you have to destroy the history of science in order to erase the story of Christ, because it turns out the top scientists in the history of science have all written deeply about him.

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That's the kind of impact he's had on the world, and if you think about that, given who he was, it's shocking.

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On the other hand, if he is God incarnate, entering into his creation, that's the kind of impact I would expect on any aspect of culture, and that's the kind of impact we talk about in Person of Interest.

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That's exciting. I really look forward to reading Person of Interest. We will receive questions.

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They'll ask us, so can you show me any evidence for Jesus, but you can't use the

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New Testament. Well, first of all, I'm not going to grant that the New Testament's not a reliable source of information, but once I address that,

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I can say, okay, let's talk about church fathers who wrote in the first and second century, even third, fourth century.

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Let's talk about people who weren't followers of Christ who also talked about him.

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So I'm looking forward to seeing other paths by which you can prove the details of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

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So really looking forward to the book. So just so our readers know, there'll be links to the two main books by J.

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Warner Wallace, Cold Case Christianity and also Person of Interest, both at podcast .gotquestions

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.org, but also on the description in our YouTube channel when this video goes live. So look for that there and also other ways that you can follow

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Jim and the ministry and the teaching that he does. So Jim, with our last question here, what do you see as today the biggest hindrance to people coming to faith in Christ?

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Or in your ministry experience, when you're trying to convince someone of the truth claims of Jesus, the reliability of the

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Bible, what's the argument you run into most frequently? Well, okay.

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So as I look at why people, why in juries, for example, somebody would resist the evidence for any claim, whether it's made by a prosecutor or being made by the defense attorneys, it's going to come down to three things.

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Either they have rational objections, which are grounded in evidence and almost always sound that way. Or they have emotional objections grounded in personal experiences they've had that they reject.

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Or three, they have volitional rejection or volitional resistance because they just don't want something to be true.

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Usually because they want to protect their own autonomy in some way. It's a matter of will. They don't want to bend their knee to it.

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Well, it turns out, if you really think about it, the vast majority of our objections come to our resistance to change, that we want to be our own gods.

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They're volitional. Now, we may couch those and explain those as if they're rational because we want to say, well,

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I just don't want it to be true. But the reality of it is, is that we are inclined to be our own gods. And anything that causes us to have to admit our failings and bend our knee is probably not going to be our first move.

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And so a lot of what I'm seeing now in a culture that is starting to reject the moral teaching of the

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Christian worldview related to identity, related to sexuality, related to marriage, related to the sanctity of life.

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These are areas where I think that the teaching of Jesus is going to be rejected more and more frequently and is going to be seen as repressive or oppressive or exclusive in some way.

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And so I think that those kinds of questions are going to rise. Those are going to be more and more of the objections, questions about the problem of evil.

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Why would an all loving, all powerful God allow this to happen in my life or allow my family to suffer this or allow this thing

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I saw on TV last night? Those questions, of course, have always been big, right? But I do think now as we move forward, we've always lived in a culture that thought that Jesus mattered, even if we didn't want to follow

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Jesus. But I think we are now entering into a season where people don't even think Jesus matters. And that's why

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I wrote Person of Interest, right? I realized, hey, as an atheist, the stuff that mattered the most to me was the arts, visual arts, because I was an architect before I was a cop, music, literature, education, science.

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Those are my top five. Well, it turns out none of those would be what they are today without the worldview inaugurated by Jesus and without the work, persistent work of Jesus' followers.

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We are so deeply indebted that it's hard to believe we are complaining now about the very foundation upon which we stand.

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And that's what we have to go back and help our young people to see that, yeah, you know what? Turns out Jesus does still matter.

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He matters not because those things are important. Those things are important because he matters.

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And they stand on his shoulders. You might want to listen to what he has to say about every aspect of life. But I don't think many of us are going to do that anymore unless we think he matters.

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So I think that's why my work going forward is to try to help the world remember its history that is completely forgotten.

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Yeah. Powerful. So, J. Werner Wallace, Jim, thank you again for being on the show. I could not recommend his book on Cold Case Christianity any more strongly.

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I'm really looking forward to Persons of Interest as well. So again, Jim, thank you for being on the show. Hey, thanks for having me.

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I really am indebted to you. This has been the Got Questions podcast. Got questions?