Book review: Person of Interest

Somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century some academic theologians began publicly to doubt the historicity of Jesus, in other words, whether Jesus of Nazareth was an actual person or merely mythical.  The pursuit of the historical Jesus gave rise to the “Christ myth.”   A much more recent effort along this line, beginning in 1985, was the Jesus Seminar.  I sometimes think that, since Jesus lived so long ago, people think that they can assert almost anything about him, including to cast doubt as to whether he actually lived.

However, the actual existence of Jesus is no longer in question by serious historical scholars.  While I could call non-biblical witnesses such as Josephus and Tertullian to testify to the historical existence of Jesus, some witnesses going back as far as 37 A.D. , I’ll just quote from one, mildly hostile witness, Wikipedia: “Virtually all historians reject the Christ myth theory and accept that a human Jesus existed,” according to the second sentence of the article.  It goes on to say

Standard historical criteria have aided in evaluating the historicity of the gospel-narratives, and two events subject to “almost universal assent” are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate. 

How much can we know about Jesus if we don’t rely on the Bible? J. Warner Wallace’s answer is, well, quite a lot, actually. Using non-biblical sources Wallace applies his considerable skills as a detective to find out about the historical Jesus. Employing a strategy he successfully has used in his cold-case detective work in which there was no body and the crime scene had long ago been destroyed, he determined that Jesus’s influence survives even today, independent of the Bible, from ancient times to the present. His influence can be traced from the first century on in the fields of literature, art, cinema, architecture, music, poetry, science, philosophy, education, law, and mathematics. Jesus is, according to Wallace, the most influential person who ever lived.

Enhanced by his compelling spot illustrations, the book is a study of Jesus’s historical influence from the first century to the present. It puts to rest any doubts about who the historical Jesus was. Person of Interest is a convincing and thoroughly researched book that reads at times like a crime novel. Hard to put down, persuasive, captivating, and challenging it is well worth the time investment to read.

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J. Warner Wallace, Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible,  Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2021

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