Cold-case Christianty: Review

Introduction

Popular apologetics has been around for a long time. The most popular of such apologists have found a unique selling-point that let them rise above the rest. For Lee Strobel it was the "former-atheist investigative-reporter" angle. For Frank Turek, it was the "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist" angle, still being milked today.

Recently a new entrant in this genre appeared. This is the J. Warner Wallace  "investigative detective" angle with his book Cold-Case Christianity. This asserts that the tools of criminal investigation can be applied to the Canonical Gospels and New Testament (NT) to determine they're completely reliable accounts of Jesus' life. Rather convenient really, as it means you don't need to study the society, languages, beliefs and culture of the Roman world and its Eastern Mediterranean provinces. While this hasn't convinced a lot of experts in the Ancient Near East, it has persuaded a lot of internet Christians. Usually of the evangelical flavour. And at times atheists are assured that this book will provide the evidence we have been craving to show that Christianity is true. 

So, in response to the belief that Cold-Case Christianity does provide compelling evidence for their deity, and to show I'm willing to read this stuff, I've written the following review. 

Note that this is just a review and not a point by point rebuttal. I don't have time for that.  

So what about this detecting approach?

This is wildly oversold by Wallace. What we really get is a lot of filler (the anecdotes from his past) which is best skimmed over, and some distillation of what he claims are key detecting principles. Unfortunately these are not at all insightful. It's just a matter of trying to avoid presuppositions, analysing all the evidence and reaching conclusions based on these. There is nothing here that being a Cold-case detective brings that is novel. This book is a triumph of marketing over substance.

Instead, what Wallace does is collect a lot of popular apologetic arguments and tries to link each to one of the detecting principles he's concocted. That's pretty much it. It's a litany of the same poor popular apologetics arguments we've seen many times before. 

Wallace is not even consistent with the principles he espouses. The whole premise that witness accounts from a modern Western country are analogous to the theological literature from an ancient era is is one giant presupposition Wallace never addresses. In the first century, Judaea was populated by a largely illiterate population for whom politics, culture and religion were all one, who were chafing under Roman rule, and who expected a Messiah to appear and rescue them. This is a culture that depended on oral records and anything they wrote would have been through a theological lens. 

Presuming these records would be similar to modern witness statements is a massive leap. If you're not convinced ancient and modern literature are comparable then Wallace's approach is wrong, all the way down. This is exacerbated by the fact we don't have the original crime scenes sic. Our earliest NT manuscripts are from the 2nd century, and these are both few in number and fragmentary.  

Wallace quickly demonstrates the lack of rigour in his approach. The first is how he deals with contradictions. Contradictions always support his belief that the Canonical Gospels are eyewitness accounts. There is no level or number of contradictions that will ever budge his belief. Yet there has to be some trigger point, some number, where the credibility of the accounts is seriously diminished by the contradictions. 

One of the events that is plagued with contradictions is the account of the crucifixion and resurrection. A horizontal reading of the texts shows they contradict on the day of the arrest, when the women visited the tomb, which women visited the tomb, if the women visited the tomb (1 Cor. 15 vs the Gospels), what was seen at the tomb (and that's even if we restrict ourselves to the Canonical gospels), what they did after the discovery and where Jesus later appeared to his disciples. For the single most important event in Early Christianity, dismissing these contradictions as the kind we expect to see in eyewitness accounts is stretching credulousness to its breaking point.  

Wallace can only see the NT literature as either deliberate efforts at deceit, or delusions or describing actual events. Thus he never allows for an alternative theological motivation or the accretion of legendary elements over decades of different oral traditions in different groups of Early Christians. He's mired in presuppositions and an attempt to contort the evidence to match his view the NT is largely eyewitness accounts. 

A second important weakness is his ad hoc 'scene-artefacts' to explain away material not consistent with his view. Thus the errant cigarette butt at a crime scene is analogous to say, the later addition of the story of the adulterer in John. His principle is simply that if you feel something is out of place, it is. This has enough wriggle room to sail a cruise ship through. What's to stop say, someone concluding the dead rising from their graves in Matthew is an artefact? Or the 500 eye-witnesses Paul claims to have seen the risen Jesus? There is none. There is no rigour to this principle as it is simply an ad hoc means for Wallace to dispense with many arguments against the reliability of the Gospels.  Others however could use it to dispense with any details Wallace relies upon, as it seems to them it is also out of place. History needs better standards than this. 

The third weakness is his claimed skill in forensic statement analysis are grossly inflated. Wallace never picks up for instance, that the style of writing and the topics of interest changes, in the many epistles regarded as pseudepigrapha. That is, they are fakes attributed to one of the original apostles by the writer. He never picks up the Gospel of John's Jesus differed in many significant ways from the Synoptics. 

He never picks up that Mark makes regular and creative use of irony in his account [1]. Or that Mark employs many Latinisms that a native speaker from Judaea is unlikely to use. Mark includes Latin words like κῆνσος (census or poll tax), λεγιών (legion), κεντυρίων (centurion), δηνάριονb (denarius), units of measure such as μόδιος (modius), and ξέστης (pitcher) and legal terms such as σπεκουλάτωρ (executioner) and φραγελλόω (to flog) [2]. And this list is not exhaustive. There are also geographical mistakes in the Gospel of Mark (7:31- the journey to Galilee through Sidon). Or even that Mark has Jesus quote Psalm 22:1 as his final words. Instead he claims its what an early eyewitness account would look like. 

In other words, all the things that actual NT scholars use to analyse the Gospels is absent from Wallace's approach. Wallace fails to identify problems with the text that are widely known. He cannot distinguish pseudepigrapha from genuine epistles. He promotes Intelligent Design pseudoscience and rejects evolution (Chapter 3). This does not support Wallace's claim to be skilled at analysing evidence. 

Addressing the Skeptics

The purported goal of apologetics to give good arguments to counter skeptic objections to Christianity. Wallace makes a big deal of being a former atheist and skeptic who was eventually won over. So how well does Wallace address skeptic arguments. 

Curiously, Wallace seems to be an odd former atheist. Allegedly familiar with the works of Ehrman and the like, but claims he thought the Canonical Gospels were of a second-century origin when he was an atheist! And there is an odd thing about the sceptic arguments he takes on. A lot of these, like 'the swoon theory' to explain Jesus' escape from the cross, aren't very popular. Other arguments, such as why we think the Gospels were composed at a much later date are barely touched on at all. This would be understandable coming from a Christian apologist who was never a committed atheist. Their framework often doesn't understand what are considered the most trenchant criticisms. It is really odd however, for a former atheist. 

Similarly, for a former atheist he reveals in Chapter 3 he lacked a rudimentary understanding of evolution and big-bang cosmology. He dispenses with 150 years of research in biology by quote-mining Dawkins to imply Dawkins agrees design occurs in nature. This is the exact opposite of what Dawkins argues. So Wallace not only fails to address skeptic and scientific arguments for why we are unconvinced a deity is behind the Big Bang or the diversity of life on the planet, he establishes a shocking level of dishonesty with his quote mine.  

Now let's consider the dating of the Gospels. Setting aside the academic debate on some aspects, it is (generally) accepted that Mark was composed first (around 65-70 CE), Luke and Matthew about a decade later, and John in the last decade of the first C. These are composed in fluent Koine Greek, not Aramaic, by highly literate writers. In short, the very people the original disciples were not. 

Wallace argues that Luke should precede Paul's letters (so mid 40s CE) and Mark should be even earlier still, because Luke had some dependence on Mark. So how does Wallace deal with the arguments for the later dating? Mark is dated to 65-70 CE because Iraneus says it was composed after Paul and Peter had died (c65 CE). It describes the political milieu of this era- themes of suffering, persecution and martyrdom and alludes to the Jewish War that broke out in 67 CE.

 Wallace's counter is to just ignore Iraneus and the political context of the passages in the gospels. He accuses others of a bias against supernatural explanations and that Mark, really had prophesied the siege of Jerusalem. So he does not deal with skeptical objections at all. Rather he sets up a strawman. He argues scholars concluded Mark was from 65-70 CE  because the authors are anonymous (true, but irrelevant) and have a naturalism bias. 

Luke's date is based on the extraordinary assertion that Paul, clearly showed he was familiar with Luke. Paul's letters are largely the only NT documents that can be reliably dated. This argument depends on a short proverb of little theological import, and a shared reference to a common liturgical practice. This flies in the face of genuine scholarship, which wonders why Paul comes across as so unfamiliar with the Gospels. But you don't need to be a scholar to figure this out. Just try to reconstruct the main elements of Luke, using just the letters of Paul. You can't. There is no virgin birth, no healing miracles, no feeding of the thousands, no clearing of the Temple, no parables, no empty tomb, no women who discovered the tomb first etc. 

So Wallace not only fails to establish his alternative time line has credence, he betrays a lack of awareness of the arguments and evidence for the actual dating. 

So what about that resurrection?

The purpose of trying to shift the gospels as close as possible to the crucifixion, and assert they are eye-witness accounts, is to inflate the authority of the Canonical gospels. This in turns makes the central argument of Christianity, that Jesus was resurrected after his death, more compelling. After all, if all we had were first and second century non-biblical sources and early Christian sources like Paul's letters, the Gospel Jesus would vanish. There are no contemporaneous non-biblical accounts of the Gospel Jesus. Unlike say Julius Caesar or Cicero, Jesus appeared to have written nothing for others to read. We would have no way of reconstituting the fantastic events of the Gospels solely using other sources in this era. So apologists have to go 'all in' on the Gospels being accounts that are based in actual history. Needless to say, Wallace presents nothing that would convince a skeptic that the gospels are eyewitness accounts and have an early date. 

We are left with the resurrection, and if Wallace cannot convince us it is a real event, then there is no reason to accept this occurred. As your common, garden-variety skeptic I would agree, that assuming Jesus existed, some of his earliest followers believed he was resurrected soon after his execution. But I do not think it really happened. 

Wallace tries to establish the credibility of the miraculous resurrection by asserting the 'minimal facts' as our starting point. Conveniently, this bypasses the skeptical arguments against the 'minimal facts'! 

For instance, I'm not convinced there was an empty tomb. The empty tomb isn't mentioned in any E Christian literature preceding the Gospels, which were composed decades later. For such an important detail to be not mentioned across thousands of written words and 3 to 4 decades, is extremely suspicious. The four decades from the crucifixion to Luke and Matthew is long enough for this embellishment to be added and accepted. We can see such embellishments continued, as in the Gospel of Peter from early 2nd C, who included giants and an animated, talking cross in his resurrection account.

However unlikely one feels that Jesus being left on the Cross (as was the common if not universal Roman practice) was, or put into a communal grave pit, these are still plausible alternatives. Both would ensure there was no body and conveniently, help establish the legend of the empty tomb.

We can at least, agree that several of his closest followers soon after, believed they had seen a resurrected Jesus. And that motivated them to continue resume their proselytising, and they were after Paul joined them, recruit into Gentile communities effectively also. 

I tend to the view that these early followers experienced grief hallucinations. This view has a number of proponents, including the late NT scholar Gerd Lüdemann. Grief hallucinations are fairly common phenomenon among people who suffer a loss (I'm one of them).  Auditory and even visual hallucinations of the deceased person are reported. These can be quite vivid but decline over time. This matches the overall progression of these resurrection appearances, which also fade away. 

As an aside, epileptic seizures can also produce vivid religious experiences[3]. The very non-corporeal experience reported by Paul (mimicking a seizure) suggests early Christians were open to visionary, rather than physical appearances of Jesus. 

Wallace however, does not consider the way grief can generate these hallucinations and jumps to the mass appearances (e.g. 1 Cor 15) to refute the hallucination argument. Unfortunately Paul's epistle First Corinthians makes more problems for Wallace's mass-hallucination rebuttal than he acknowledges. The first is that it contradicts the Gospel accounts by having no appearances to any women first. The second is the 500 witnesses are problematic. Nowhere else does anyone describe an appearance to 500 people. What event, if it occurred, is a puzzle [4]. 

And of course, the only way we can accept this mass appearance is to believe that either Paul is telling the truth or that it wasn't a corruption of the text by a later copyist. So in the end, an event that we do not know the location or time of, or who was present, and is possibly a later edit [4], is not the slam dunk against the hallucination explanation Wallace desires. A skeptic is after all, skeptical. 

So for the skeptic, Wallace's arguments against an hallucination explanation appear inept, and further ignores the role of memory distortion. We know that people misremember traumatic events. We are good at adding details to the story later that we think occurred as the following excerpts show. 

Crombag et al. led participants to believe they had seen the moment an El Al Boeing 747 crashed into an apartment building, killing 43 people. Although there was no film of the crash, there was considerable media coverage of the aftermath. Indeed, participants often elaborated on the original suggestion (e.g., the plane was already burning when it crashed). Importantly, and in line with the SMF, Crombag et al. opined that traumatic events might be more susceptible to memory distortion than benign events because they typically provide more avenues for mental imagery...

...Southwick et al. asked Desert Storm veterans at 1 month and 2 years after their return from service, whether certain events occurred during that service (e.g., sniper fire). They found 88% of veterans changed their response to at least one event; 61% changed more than one. Importantly, the majority of those changes were from “no, that did not happen to me” to “yes, that happened to me,” what has been termed “memory amplification.” -Strange and Takarangi (2015) [5]

This has nothing to do with dishonesty but how the mind works. Some early followers would have been shocked by the arrest and execution of Jesus, and there is no reason to suppose they would be immune to memory distortion.  Grief hallucinations get misremembered. They become more vivid, more physical, and more details are added. And in an era where oral transmission was largely used to spread Christianity, those accounts that were more wondrous, more attention-arresting, would have been selected for. And grief hallucinations that evolve into physical appearances are explicable both in terms of memory distortion and oral retelling. 

In the end, the fundamental problem with relying upon the Gospels is that the case for the physical resurrection becomes a circular argument. The Gospels have to be used to prove the (contradictory) accounts of the resurrection in the Gospels are true. There is no other way we can get to the Gospel resurrection claims without them. We can't get to it through other early Christian or non-Christian writing. 

Early Christian Motivation

When Jesus died he left no instructions or guidance to his followers on doctrine. He'd left nothing in writing to use as an authority. There was no hierarchical Church structure where leaders got together to work through the problems. Early Christian groups ended up being a very diverse bunch. We only need to look at Paul's letters. He reveals he has points of difference with other original leaders (who seemed to see Christianity as a sect within Judaism), and his letters often have the theme of correcting what he considered, where wrong interpretations emerging in the Churches he helped establish. 

By the time we get to Iraneus in the Second Century, we have 21 sects that he classes as heretical (this does not account for any that disappeared in say the Roman-Jewish wars in the late 60s and again in the 132 CE). These sects professed doctrines at odds with the view Wallace and others are trying to propagate. Gnostic Christians for instance (and there were multiple branches of these) held that the earthly world was corrupt, that Jesus was the manifestation of a spiritual being and Yaweh was not the true god but a malevolent deity [6]. The first chapter of John's Gospel which includes the words on logos, is suspiciously Gnostic in its perspective. We have many more Gospels than just the four the bible preserves and the Gospel of Peter I mentioned above. Orthodox Christianity with all its doctrines and structures did not spring into being in the first days of Christianity. It emerged after many decades in a contest with rival Christianities. 

It is this background that we need to understand the motivation of the early Christian apostles and early Christian literature. And all of this is absent from Wallace. Rather, he gives the impression that Christianity emerges in its near mature form soon after Jesus' death. Instead he argues that the Apostles and Gospel writers had no motivation to lie or mislead others.

We see the tedious appeal to martyrdom that is common in popular apologetics. The Apostles were willing to die for their beliefs, and did so without recanting, when recanting would have saved their lives. Hence we are told, the apostles were telling the truth about what they witnessed. Obviously this would still hold in the grief-hallucination/memory distortion scenario also. But a closer examination of the martyrdoms of Apostles shows that the opportunity for recanting was not an escape from their executions. James was executed for breaking the law (cf. Josephus). Peter and Paul, who disappeared in Rome around the time of Nero's persecution, would have been executed (if they were) as scapegoats for starting Rome's disastrous fire. Saying they had made up the resurrection story would not have saved them. Outside dubious later Church tradition, we really know nothing about the other disciples. 

The restricted set of motives Wallace employed excludes the theological motivation of the writers. It ignore the theological conflicts the early Christian Church had to work through. And it places a lot of credence on the writings of the early Christians. How do we know the Paul suffered great hardships establishing his Churches? Because Paul tells us so in his writings. Can we verify this? No. And given the horrendous numbers of abuse cases modern Christian leaders have kept from their followers, it would be an heroic assumption that such covert sexual predation was not occurring then. Paul may have been a really virtuous guy, but to rely upon his own writings to establish this, is as smart as using Ravi Zacharias' apologetics to establish he wasn't a vile rapist. It's not likely Paul would be confessing to such crimes in his epistles. Wallace is back to the circular strategy of using the NT to prove the NT. 

Within the first 100 years of Christianity, many Christian groups did not share the orthodox beliefs captured in the Canonical gospels. For orthodox Christians, the value of the gospels was not their historical truth. It was what they saw as their theological truth. John for instance, moves the arrest of Jesus forward by one day. The theological motivation was clear, by doing this before the Passover, it ensured the doctrine that Jesus died for "our sins" as the Passover lamb was established. Wallace however doesn't see this as deliberate, but the kind of mistake an eyewitness would make. 

For a culture who saw everything through a theological lens (unlike modern secular societies), this theological truth is what ultimately mattered. The NT Gospels, the epistles, and even the pseudepigrapha had value, not because they were historically true. They had value because they were theologically true. They established the 'correct' version of Christianity. That is why using them as largely historical accounts twists the goals of the original writers to conform to the far removed, modern orthodox Christianity.  

Conclusion

Wallace fails to see that there was a theological motivation for the Gospels, and the canonical ones were selected because they supported the view of Christianity that became orthodoxy. He fails to consider this because of a profound lack of understanding of how ancient societies differed from modern. Of how ancient literature was composed. 

His claim to have examined the evidence critically is not supported by this book. Rather he takes such a credulous approach to popular apologetic arguments, that I feel he'd find evidence for the resurrection on the cooking instructions of a packet of soup. 

And in the end, his approach shows it cannot honestly represent science, philosophy or history. It conveniently confirms a whole bunch of popular apologetics arguments and does not properly address the objections to them. I imagine Wallace will continue to be popular in evangelical Christian circles, but he has nothing that will persuade a moderately well-informed sceptic he is correct.

References

[1] Fenton, J. C. (2001). Mark’s gospel -- the oldest and the best? Theology, 104(818), 83–93.

[2] Latinisms are described in Incigneri, Brian J. The Gospel to the Romans: The Setting and Rhetoric of Mark’s Gospel. Biblical Interpretation 65. Leiden: Brill, 2003

[3] Devinsky O, Lai G. Spirituality and religion in epilepsy. Epilepsy Behav. 2008 May;12(4):636-43. doi: 10.1016/j.yebeh.2007.11.011. Epub 2008 Jan 2. PMID: 18171635.

"Several case reports and small series document religious or mystical experiences during partial seizures [30], [38], [39], [40]. The nature of ictal religious seizures varies, including intense emotions of God’s presence, the sense of being connected to the infinite [37], hallucinations of God’s voice [30], the visual hallucination of a religious figure [17], as well as clairvoyance and telepathy, or repetition of a religious phrase [40]..."

[4] Ftizmeyer (2008), First Corinthians.  https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300140446/first-corinthians/

[5] Strange D, Takarangi MK. Memory distortion for traumatic events: the role of mental imagery. Front Psychiatry. 2015 Feb 23;6:27. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00027. PMID: 25755646; PMCID: PMC4337233.

[6] A good introduction to the Gnostics is this BBC Religion Podcast discussing it.