Josh McDowell has written the
book in an easy-to-understand, interesting manner. Numerous times, he quotes
“giants” in the field of biblical scholarship, which lends a lot of support to
the points he makes. When he fails to mention a scholarly work, it’s largely
because he is either quoting the Bible or elaborating on some point or another.
For this, the evident scholarly effort and the comprehensiveness of the book, I
must commend him for doing a fine work. Young Christians interested in biblical
exegesis and some history will find the book a valuable resource especially for
providing a “solid” foundation for their faith. He basically covers all angles
skeptics would launch their “attacks” from, when criticizing the Christian
faith.
His biggest undoing is to
provide quote after quote without providing a coherent explanation accompanying
those quotes, he thus acts as an absent author, the indiscriminate manner of
the collection is also inappropriate. McDowell indiscriminately gets quotes
from anyone (even those who are not an authority in the field) and presents it
as “evidence”. Other weaknesses are addressed at the end of this verdict.
Chapter nine is the longest in
the book and it addresses the very foundation of the Christian faith: the
factuality of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Regarding the importance of the
resurrection, McDowell quotes William Lane Craig as saying: “Without the
resurrection, the Christian faith could not have come into being”. The church
historian Philip Schaff says “The resurrection of Christ is therefore
emphatically a test question upon which depends the truth or falsehood of the
Christian religion”. Thus it is with this in mind that I chose to focus on
chapter nine.
This is essentially a critical
examination of the "evidence" Josh McDowell has presented in Chapter
9 of the book, followed by a verdict.
In examining each section, I will present the authors’
"evidence" in each section and my assessment of them section by
section in the same order used by the author.
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