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Appeal Denied: How Challenging the Verdict Fails to Overturn The
Case for Christ

© Copyright 2002 by
Bob and Gretchen Passantino

This review was first
published in the Christian Research Journal (www.equip.org).  It was awarded the Evangelical Press
Association’s “Higher Goals in Christian Journalism” First Place Award for
Critical Review in 2002.

Challenging the
Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for
Christ”

Earl
Doherty

(Ottawa, Canada: Age
of Reason Publications, 2001)

Two features of Earl
Doherty’s Challenging the Verdict, a response to Lee Strobel’s runaway
bestseller The Case for Christ, compel a critical review. First, it is a
prime example of the sort of false attacks many skeptics bring against
Christianity. Such a review presents a good opportunity to address faulty
arguments skeptics often raise against popular Christian sources on Christ.
Second, it has gained notoriety on the coattails of Strobel’s book because
skeptics have recommended it in customer reviews on The Case for Christ’s
page on Amazon.com. This marketing ploy has probably generated more publicity
for the book than, for example, Drew University professor Robert Price’s gushing
review of Doherty’s book in Free Inquiry magazine (Summer
2002).

Lee Strobel presented his interviews of scholars in The Case for
Christ as though he were a legal affairs journalist (which he was) who is
researching the evidence in the case for Christ. He interviews leading scholars
who gave evidence for the traditional orthodox Christian view of Jesus as the
Christ, the miracle-working resurrected Son of God, and he concluded that the
evidence supports its truthfulness.

Earl Doherty, author of Challenging the Verdict, chose a similar
legal motif, but this time in a courtroom. Where Strobel used this motif
sparingly and effectively, Doherty uses it mockingly and unfairly. Doherty
claims that he provides his opposing side the opportunity to “cross-examine” the
scholars interviewed by Strobel. He neglects, however, to give the
cross-examined witnesses an opportunity to respond to his critical statements.
What emerges is not a coherent collection of evidence and argumentation but a
strange monologue by Doherty while his witnesses remain
silent.

Like Strobel’s The Case for Christ, Doherty’s Challenging the
Verdict is divided into three main parts. Strobel’s “Examining the Record”
becomes Doherty’s “Is the Gospel Record Reliable?” Strobel’s “Analyzing Jesus”
is Doherty’s “What Was the Nature of Jesus?” and Strobel’s “Researching the
Resurrection” becomes Doherty’s “Did Jesus Rise from the
Dead?”

Neither Challenging the Verdict nor Doherty’s Web site tells us
the author’s background. He was, in fact, once the president of the Ottawa, a
Canadian skeptic group, and is an occasional contributor to a small periodical
edited by Robert Price dedicated to denouncing the Bible, The Journal of
Higher Criticism. Doherty’s first book, The Jesus Puzzle, argues
there is no credible evidence to believe Jesus existed as a historical person, a
position that so contradicts the evidence that even most liberals he quotes,
including the ultra-liberal members of the Jesus Seminar, disagree with
him.  Virtually the only current
view similar to his is in G. A. Wells’s volumes discrediting Jesus’ existence,
which have been soundly refuted by, among others, Dr. Gary Habermas in his
critical review in the Journal.[1]

One of the problems responding to Doherty is that, like many skeptics, he
uses a shotgun approach that at first glance seems overwhelming because there is
“buckshot” everywhere. Only as one patiently removes one small pellet at a time
is it evident that the attack has not been fatal. The “case for Christ,” in
fact, emerges from the smoke of Doherty’s attack virtually unscathed except for
cosmetic complaints that could be said of any book dealing with complex issues
in a popular manner.

Nothing New under the
Sun. Most of the arguments
in Challenging the Verdict have been used before, sometimes much better,
by Christianity’s detractors. Skeptics have sought to overturn the evidence for
Jesus and the Resurrection since this historic event. The nonbelieving Jews
unsuccessfully tried to argue that Jesus’ disciples must have stolen His body
from the tomb while the guards were sleeping. Other arguments arose over the
centuries, from the fourth-century emperor Julian the apostate to Robert
Ingersoll in the nineteenth century and Bertrand Russell in the twentieth
century. All were capably answered by Christians’ employing good history and
good thinking. For example, Robert Ingersoll immortalized his disdain for the
Bible in his Some Mistakes of Moses, to which leading biblical scholars
of his day replied convincingly with Some Mistakes of
Ingersoll.

The unsuspecting Christian reader who first encounters criticisms of
Christianity in Challenging the Verdict should be encouraged by the
wealth of counterevidence published both before and after Doherty’s book. This
volume, unlike his earlier one, does not presume that Jesus never existed. He
does, however, argue that the New Testament is completely unreliable in telling
us anything about any historical Jesus. To support this, he presents a variety
of arguments, among them: the Jews never expected a personal Messiah; the Jesus
story has more in common with mystery religion myths than history; Christians
changed the simple morality tale of myth into a pseudo-history; the New
Testament borrows motifs from Old Testament stories and weaves them into Jesus
stories that never actually happened; the Jesus Savior story is no different
than pagan “savior” stories; the earliest Christian beliefs were Gnostic, but
later Christians suppressed them; Paul’s writings speak of a spiritual, not
physical, resurrection of the mythic Christ; early Christianity was a confusion
of bewildering and contradictory spiritual insights and mystical revelations;
and so on.

The interested reader
can find a wealth of information in books such as N. T. Wright’s The
Contemporary Quest for Jesus (Fortress, 2002), Darrell Bock’s Studying
the Historical Jesus (Baker, 2002), Paul Barnett’s Jesus and the Rise of
Early Christianity (InterVarsity, 1999), Gregory Boyd’s Cynic Sage or Son
of God? (Bridgepoint, 1995), Ben Witherington’s The Jesus Quest
(InterVarsity, 1995), and Ronald H. Nash’s The Gospels and the Greeks
(Probe, 1992). Several Internet Web sites have excellent information, including
Leadership University (www.leaderu.com), the Christian Think
Tank (www.Christian-thinktank.com), and Tektonics
Apologetics ().

The Skeptics’ Mythical
Jesus. Doherty embodies some
of the subjective interpretive methods of the Jesus Seminar. He incredibly is
able intuitively to discern the “real” history behind the hopelessly corrupted
New Testament texts to uncover the bare myth of spiritual enlightenment he
claims underlies the phony historical and supernatural claims.

In other ways, his
interpretive methods are novel. His assumption that from myth comes the
erroneous belief in a real, historical character or event is exactly opposite
what most scholars of mythology observe. The reader, nevertheless, is asked to
accept Doherty’s fanciful suppositions uncritically. If the Christian, however,
were to invent his own interpretive system and assert his own dogmatism of a
supernatural Son of God from the text, Doherty would insist on objective proof
of such an indisputable nature that no figure or event of ancient history could
qualify.

This subjectivism seems to blind its adherents, who see nothing
incongruous in their insistence that Christians haven’t proved their point while
at the same time they advance their own subjective theories. Jesus Seminar
founder Robert Funk, for example, once told us that his interpretation of Jesus
as a first-century Jewish cynic sage was based on little more than his
subjective "experience" of the New Testament.

We asked Funk, "If the New Testament text we possess led you to discover
this George Carlin-type of Jesus, what kind of text would there have to be for
you to discover a Son of God, resurrected Jesus Christ?" After we went back and
forth asking the same question a couple of different ways, he responded, "The
exact same text we have already."

"But," we pressed, "if the same text can give some readers a divine
resurrected Christ and others a human rabbi Jesus, then you're saying either
interpretation is subjective — based on some 'inner experience' and not on any
scientific, historic, linguistic, or rational investigation or standard." In so
many words, he agreed, reminding us that with the New Testament we’re dealing
with literature, not science, and therefore, strangely enough, subjective
experience is valid.

Starting with a Bias.
One
of Doherty’s assumptions is that miracles cannot happen. Any account of a
Bible miracle might be explained in a variety of ways, but not as an actual
historical miraculous event. This argument is less sophisticated and persuasive
than nineteenth- century philosopher David Hume’s popular treatise but no less
dogmatic. He first quotes Gregory Boyd, one of Strobel’s experts, concerning the
antisupernatural bias of the Jesus Seminar members. Doherty continues, “Well,
Dr. Boyd, I just wish we were all as biased as the Seminar in rejecting the
supernatural as authentic in the Gospels any more than it is authentic today”
(80).

Nowhere does Doherty give a logical argument or empirical evidence that
miracles can’t happen, he just blindly pontificates.[2] He should follow the
evidence wherever it logically leads him, even if it leads him to the historical
fact that Christ rose from the dead.

Doherty’s statement presupposes that the only legitimate neutral approach
to the issue of Christ’s resurrection is one of disbelief rather than
withholding of belief. He commits the common fallacy of neutrality,
assuming that one who believes a proposition cannot be objective and that
only one who disbelieves is neutral and objective.

On the contrary, disbelief is a belief against and therefore not
neutral. Neutrality would be to withhold belief, neither excluding the
supernatural nor assuming it, but allowing the evidence to support it or
contradict it. Some scholars adopt conservative positions because
of their critical standards.

Doherty and other skeptics assume that evidence for the Resurrection is
nothing more than partisan wish fulfillment. In other words, we wish it were the
case that God became man, died for our sins, rose again, and reconciled us to
God; therefore, we delude ourselves into believing despite the
evidence.

What if
it is the case, however, that evidence for the Resurrection is the
foundation of belief, not a stumbling block to belief? Contrary to
Doherty’s wish fulfillment idea, it is the evidence itself that led Lee Strobel
to become a Christian and write The Case for Christ: “The atheism I had
embraced for so long buckled under the weight of historical truth.  It was a stunning and radical outcome,
certainly not what I had anticipated when I embarked on this investigative
process.  But it was, in my opinion,
a decision compelled by the facts” (266).

If anyone is guilty of overlooking the evidence in favor of wish
fulfillment, it is Doherty. In Challenging the Verdict Doherty appears to
be biased, committed to a faith, and united with other skeptics in a futile
attempt to promote his conviction that the Jesus Christ of the New Testament
was, at best, a simple Jewish teacher with Greek Cynic pretensions, at worst, a
figment of people’s imaginations. Doherty comes to the table with a bias
against the Jesus Christ of the New Testament.

Bias-Driven
Vocabulary. A sentence in the
opening paragraph of Challenging the Verdict is a good example of
Doherty’s bias: “Not only have increasing numbers of the rank and file in the
established churches rejected old standards of dogma and practice, liberal
circles within New Testament scholarship have been bringing modern critical
standards to the study of the Gospels and found them wanting in historical
reliability” (1). This “loaded” vocabulary implies that the beliefs held by
Strobel and “established churches” are merely matters of dogma and practice and
are not historical fact and that evangelicals have no standards, are not
critical, and are old-fashioned.

False Claims of
Fairness. Doherty’s unfairness
is revealed in his refusal to consult the scholars’ published materials. His
obligation to do so is greater than Strobel’s since Strobel allowed them to
present their own material. Doherty’s cross-examination is not merely supposed
refutations of their evidence but criticisms on issues they didn’t even address
with Strobel. Doherty challenged the scholars with no acknowledgment of their
other materials, which, in most cases, overturn the challenges and affirm the
Christian claims for Christ.

A proper cross-examination seeks to overturn the testimony of the
scholars by showing that they made contrary statements elsewhere, or by
referring to the responses of other scholars to the exact same questions with
contrary evidence and argumentation. By introducing completely new questions and
challenges, Doherty launched an entirely new trial with no legal impartiality or
rigorous standards of evidence. He silences the scholars, reinvents them as
mutes, and then condemns them for not answering challenges never contained in
their original testimony.

When it comes to the witness of history and evidence to the life and
resurrection of Christ, Doherty argues that silence supports his inventive
ideas. Because we don’t have a full copy of the New Testament from the first
century, then obviously, Doherty assumes, no New Testament existed in the first
century. Because we don’t have every early church father explicitly quoting from
and affirming each book of the New Testament as God’s Word, obviously they must
have been ignorant of the New Testament or didn’t consider it Scripture. Because
we don’t have an explicit, comprehensive record of Jesus’ ministry, death, and
resurrection in extant secular history of the time, obviously Jesus must not
have existed! The Doherty-enforced silence of the scholars overturns their
entire body of work, while the patchy silences of ancient history prove
everything for Doherty.

The Living Line of
Eyewitness Testimony. Doherty claims the gap
between the events of the New Testament and our earliest complete copies
contains such a discontinuity that the texts of the New Testament documents are
hopelessly unreliable. There are at least two ways to approach this claim: (1)
Show historical continuity, and (2) compare this gap with those of other ancient
literature that Doherty does consider reliable.

First, we have an unbroken line from the eyewitnesses of the
Resurrection, through Paul and the other apostles, into the early second century
with Papias, Polycarp, Ignatius, and the Didache (an early apostolic
teaching document).

Even liberal critics such as those Doherty quotes agree that some of
Paul’s letters were written well within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses to
Christ, including his testimony of the bodily resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15.
The apostle Peter, himself an eyewitness, commended Paul’s letters and includes
them with other Scripture (the Old Testament) as God’s Word: “…our Lord’s
patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with
the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters,
speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard
to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the
other Scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:15–16, emphasis added).

In his Acts of the Apostles, the evangelist Luke affirmed that the
teachings of Paul agree with the teachings of the apostles, who were
eyewitnesses of Christ’s ministry, miracles, and resurrection. Paul himself
acknowledged in his letter to the Romans that there were Christians whose
conversions predated his. He pointed out that they agreed that the gospel he
preached is the same gospel they believed from the same Christ they saw
resurrected. There is a continuity of teaching and testimony from the
eyewitnesses through Paul and the other apostles.  Papias, Polycarp, and the other earliest
church fathers claimed either to have known the apostles themselves or to have
known those who knew the apostles.

To discount the testimony of the earliest fathers, who affirmed the
apostles, who affirmed Paul, who themselves are affirmed by the liberal critics,
is to discount the very critics to whom Doherty appeals! Should we believe the
eyewitnesses who affirmed Paul, who was affirmed by the other apostles, who were
affirmed by their immediate successors, whose words are preserved in our
earliest church writings; or should we believe Doherty, the skeptic who
undercuts ancient historiography by discounting the New Testament
texts?

Rules for You, but Not
for Me. Doherty dismisses the
textual evidence for the New Testament as too little, too late, and too
inconsistent. He claims we cannot trust them because there are not enough copies
or citations that are “early enough”; the fragments far outnumber the complete
manuscripts, and the Scripture citations in the early church fathers are
fragmentary.

Such wholesale dismissal flies in the face of the standard principles
used by genuine experts (including those interviewed by Strobel) to date all
classical literature. To dismiss or replace these standards is to disqualify the
authenticity of the texts of other ancient literature, including some Doherty
uses to try to dismiss the supernatural Jesus Christ of the New
Testament!

Doherty assumes when an early writer uses a particular passage from the
New Testament, one can infer only that the isolated passage was known to the
writer, not the book in which the passage occurs, much less the New Testament in
which the book containing the passage is found. With this standard, he could not
affirm most of classical literature, including the teachings of Socrates, whose
work is known to us only by references and quotations by others (such as
Socrates’ Apology). The standard approach is that when an ancient author
quotes or refers to a distinctive teaching or saying of a predecessor, and we
have the larger context of the quoted material in later copies, we assume that
the larger context existed as the ancient writer’s source.

Doherty, furthermore, assumes that unless the early writer specifically
says a specific passage is Scripture, the writer must not consider the passage
as Scripture. This ignores the context in which most of the passages occur. The
context regularly affirms that the writer believes what he is writing or
teaching and that he believes Scripture is God’s revelation, of which the
relevant quotation is a part.

Doherty argues that if there is any gap between the events depicted in
the New Testament documents and our earliest citations, manuscripts, or
manuscript fragments, we cannot affirm any textual continuity. By this
standard, Doherty should reject all the classics because the gaps represented by
them are enormous compared to the New Testament.

The comparatively infinitesimal time gap between the New Testament events
and our first copies and the overwhelming volume of manuscript evidence we
possess far outweigh any similar evidence we have for other classics. Geisler
and Nix list in their A General Introduction to the Bible (408), for
example, that we have only 643 copies of Homer’s Iliad, 8 of Herodotus’s
History, 8 of Thucydides’s History, 7 of Plato’s works, 10 of
Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars, and 20 of Livy’s History of
Rome. [3] Compare those numbers
to 5,366 copies of fragments, portions, and complete books of the New
Testaments, the majority later than the seventh century but with some
significant copies from very early.

The difference in gaps is even more striking. The bulk of the copies we
have for the classic authors come from the middle ages, a thousand years or more
from the composition of the texts. For Herodotus it’s 1,350 years (eleventh
century a.d.), for Caesar 1,000 years (eleventh
century a.d.), and for Livy 400
years (fifth century a.d.) for
one partial manuscript and 1,000 years (eleventh century a.d.) for the other nineteen. The New
Testament gap, in contrast, is only 50 years for our earliest fragment, 100
years for our earliest complete books, 150 years for the majority of the New
Testament, and 225 years for the complete New Testament.

For Doherty to state we can have no assurance of the dating of the New
Testament documents until we have the complete New Testament in manuscript form
also ignores the standards used to date ancient documents. Aside from its
physical characteristics and the archival setting in which the document is
found, the content of ancient documents can help us date them by (1) what it
claims for itself; (2) the style, vocabulary, grammar, and other literary
features; and (3) the historical and geographical clues within the
document.

It would be possible to date the contents of the New Testament to the
first century a.d. even if we had
no citations from early church fathers and no comments from near contemporaries
about when they believed the New Testament was composed. That is how scholars
date the Iliad to the century of its composition even though our earliest
copies of portions of it are dated nearly 1,000 years
later.

Doherty’s Dubious
Sources. Added to Doherty’s
woeful inadequacy as a textual critic is his wholesale acceptance of a proposed
“source document” for the gospels, called Q (after the German Quelle,
“source”). Regarding Q, we have no copies of Q, no copies of portions of Q, no
references to Q in any of the early Christian writings, no references to Q in
any of the early non-Christian writings, no references to Q in any of the
gospels or the writings of Paul or the other letters; we have, in fact, no
conclusive evidence whatsoever that Q ever existed.[4]

Christianity, the
Witness of History. Doherty ignores one of
the strongest testimonies of the trustworthiness of the New Testament documents.
Christianity is, as Sir Norman Anderson termed it, “the witness of
history.”

We call this a variation on the great-grandfather paradox. Let’s say
we’re discussing the existence of Earl Doherty, skeptic extraordinairé. We can’t
find any biographical material about him other than his stint as president of
the Ottowa skeptics group, his contributions to a small periodical, and his Web
site attacking Christianity. We might suspect he is a figment of some skeptic
groups’ collective imagination, an editorial ghost they have conjured to plague
Christian authors such as Lee Strobel.

Then we meet Earl Doherty. He shows us his driver’s license, birth
certificate, and pay stubs where he works. We are confronted with the
real Earl Doherty. We cannot explain his existence away without a story
about identity fabrication more incredible than believing there really is
somebody named Earl Doherty who thinks he can overthrow the truth claims of
Christianity. It would be ridiculous to argue that Earl Doherty doesn’t exist
merely because we don’t possess his genealogical history back for umpteen
generations. We would be laughed out of the academy of ideas if we were to
argue, “We can’t verify the identity of Earl Doherty’s great-grandfather, so he
must not have had one.” The very fact of the existence of Earl Doherty is proof
that he must have had a great-grandfather even though no evidence may exist
today for that great-grandfather.

The existence of the Christianity of the second or third century that has
as its foundation a belief in the historical verification of its
founder’s miracle-working power, death-defeating resurrection, and thus His
divine identity, could not have come into being from a source that ignores
historical verification, conjures up a founder of mythic proportions, and uses
miracle and resurrection fantasies as a mere motif of spiritual enlightenment.
Today’s history-based Christianity exists as the progeny of a

history-based
event.

If the founders never claimed a historical base, they could not have
produced a history-based religion. Myth-propagating founders can produce only a

myth-perpetuating
religion. There is no need for a myth religion to package itself as a history
religion. The apostle Peter, in fact, declared, “We did not follow cleverly
invented stories [Greek muthos or myths] when we told you about the power
and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2
Pet. 1:16).

Even if there were no intact contemporaneous evidence of the historical
facts of Christianity’s founder, His miracles and His resurrection, the
existence of Christianity as a history-based religion (not merely a
religion that existed in history) argues for a historical origin.
Christianity’s existence today argues for the existence of Christianity’s

“great-grandfather,”
the historic figure of Jesus Christ.

Doherty’s challenge has fallen fatally short of its goal. The Case for
Christ and the faith it examines remain the witness of history. — Bob and Gretchen
Passantino

[1] Vol. 22, no. 3, Winter 1999,
54–56.

[2]
Contradicting himself, Doherty’s first footnote states that scholars
should “follow wherever the evidence leads” (239).

[3]
In each numbered case, the number refers to all full copies, portions,
and fragments of a given work.

[4]
See our critique of Doherty’s use of Q in The Mysterious Case of the
Missing Q, http://www.answers.org/bible/missing_q.html.

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