09/13/2025 – “The Case For Christ” by Lee Strobel / Copyright @ 1998, 2016 / ISBN 978-0-310–34586-2 / Once again!: “I don’t have nearly enough faith to be anything but an ‘all in’ Christian!”
Why? To reach loved ones with the assurance of the perfect eternal life through Jesus Christ! It is our mission! This post will be in progress, completed no later than tomorrow, Sept 13th at 6:00 pm.
Lee Strobel documents thirteen different categories of evidence that we serve a resurrected Christ, through interviews with renowned experts: physicians; theologians; historians, here noted: Eyewitness; Documentary; Corroborating; Scientific; Rebuttal Evidence; Identity Evidence; Psychological; Profile Evidence; Fingerprint Evidence; Medical; Evidence of the Missing Body; Evidence of Appearances; Circumstantial Evidence; and the Verdict of History.
I am going to share an excerpt from what many would argue is amongst the weakest categories, Chapter 14 – Circumstantial Evidence. Within Circumstantial, there are five “exhibits” sub-sections: “The Disciples Died for Their Beliefs” ; “The Conversion of Skeptics”; “Changes to Key Social Structures”; “Communion and Baptism”; “The Emergence of the Church”. I am excerpting just Exhibit #3 – “The Conversion of Skeptics”, the weakest of the weakest arguments. haha. Lee interviewed J.P. Moreland, PhD, a “distinguished professor of philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology” when this book was published.
Let’s get started!:
“Exhibit 3: Changes to Key Social Structures”
“In order to explain his next category of circumstantial proof, Moreland had to provide some important information about Jewish culture.
‘At the time of Jesus, the Jews had been persecuted for seven hundred years by the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, and now by the Greeks and Romans,’ Moreland explained, ‘Many Jews had been scattered and lived as captives in these other nations.’
‘However, we still see Jews today, while we don’t see Hittites, Perizzites, Ammonites, Assyrians, Persians, Babylonians, and other people who had been living in that time. Why? Because these people got captured by other nations, intermarried and lost their national identity.
“Why didn’t that happen to the Jews? Because the things that made the Jews Jews — the social structures that gave them their national identity — were unbelievably important to them. The Jews would pass these structures down to their children, celebrate them in synagogue meetings every Sabbath, and reinforce them with their rituals, because they knew if they didn’t, there soon would be no Jews left. They would be assimilated into the cultures that captured them.
“And there’s another reason why these social institutions were so important: They believed these institutions were entrusted to them by God. They believed that to abandon these institutions would be to risk their souls being damned to hell after death.
“Now a rabbi named Jesus appears from a lower-class region. He teaches for three years, gathers a following of lower-and middle-class people, gets into trouble with the authorities, and gets crucified along with thirty thousand other Jewish men who are executed during this time period.
“But five weeks after he’s crucified, over ten thousand Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion. And get this: They’r willing to give up or alter all five of the social institutions that they have been taught since childhood have such importance both sociologically and theologically.’
“So the implication is that something big was going on,” I said.
Moreland exclaimed, ‘Something very big was going on!”
Revolutionizing Jewish Life
I invited Moreland to go through these five social structures and explain how the followers of Jesus had changed or abandoned them.
“First,” he said, “they had been taught ever since the time of Abraham and Moses that they needed to offer an animal sacrifice on a yearly basis to atone for their sins. God would transfer their sins to that animal, and their sins would be forgiven so they could be in right standing with him. But all of a sudden, after the death of this Nazarene carpenter, these Jewish people no longer offer sacrifices.
“Second, Jews emphasized obeying the laws that God had entrusted to them through Moses. In their view, this is what separated them from the pagan nations. Yet within a short time after Jesus’ death, Jews were beginning to say that you don’t become an upstanding member of their community merely by keeping Moses’ laws.
“Third, Jews scrupulously keep the Sabbath by not doing anything except religious devotion every Saturday. This is how they would earn right standing with God, guarantee the salvation of their family, and be in right standing with the nation. However, after the death of this Nazarene carpenter, this fifteen-hundred-year tradition is abruptly changed. These Christians worship on Sunday — why? Because that’s when Jesus rose from the dead.
“Fourth, they believed in monotheism — only only God. While Christians teach a form of monotheism, they say that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God. This is radically different from what the Jews believed. They would have considered it the height of heresy to say someone could be God and man at the same time. Yet Jews begin to worship Jesus as God within the first decade of the Christian religion.
“And fifth, these Christians pictured the Messiah as someone who suffered and died for the sins of the world, whereas Jews had been trained to believe that the Messiah was going to be a political leader who would destroy the Roman armies.”
With that context established, Moreland went in for the rhetorical kill, drilling me with his intense and unwavering gaze. “less,” he said, “how can you possibly explain why in a short period of time not just one Jew but an entire community of at least ten thousand Jews were willing to give up these five key practices that had served them sociologically and theologically for so many centuries? My explanation is simple: They had seen Jesus risen from the dead.”
While Moreland’s point was extremely impressive, I saw a problem in people understanding it today, I told him that it’s difficult for twentieth-century Americans to appreciate the radical nature of this transformation.
“These days people are fluid in their faith,” I said. “They bounce back and forth between Christianity and New Age beliefs. They dabble in Buddhism, they mix and match and create their own spirituality. For them, making the kind of changes you mentioned wouldn’t seem a big deal.”
Moreland nodded. he had apparently heard this objection before. “I’d ask a person like that, ‘What’s your most cherished belief? That your parents were good people? That murder is immoral? Think about how radical something must be to get you to change or give up that belief you treasure so much. Now we’re starting to get close.’
“Keep in mind that this is an entire community of people who are abandoning treasured beliefs that have been passed on for centuries and that they believed were from God himself. They were doing it even though they were jeopardizing their own well-being, and they also believed they were risking the damnationn of their souls to hell if they were wrong.
“What’s more, they were not doing this because they had come upon better ideas. They were very content with the old traditions. They gave them up because they had seen miracles that they could not explain and that forced them to the world another way.”
“We’re Western individualist who like technological and sociological change,” I observed. “Traditions don’t mean as much to us.”
“I’ll grant that,” Moreland replied. “But these people did value tradition. They lived in a period in which the older something was, the better. In fact, for them, the farther back they could trace an idea, the more likely it was to be true. So to come up with new ideas was opposite of the way we are today.
“Believe me,” he concluded, “these changes to the Jewish social structures were not just minor adjustments that were casually made — they were absolutely monumental. This was nothing short of a social earthquake! And earthquakes don’t happen without a cause.”
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Soli Deo Gloria! Spread the good news of our LORD and Savior Jesus Christ!; It is our mission with a very short window of opportunity!