Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World That Rejects the Bible

I read this book as it was another one recommended by David Wood on YouTube. He talked this book up as a great one for apologetics. Warner Wallace is a cold-case detective who has an interest in other religions and has studied architecture. He has been on TV a few times for solving some tricky cold cases. The premise of this book is that Wallace sets out to prove Jesus is God without using the New Testament. This is quite a bold task, but he is up for it. He once convicted someone of murder 20 years later with no body or crime scene. This murder case bookends each of the chapters as Wallace explains the evidence, context and situation that lead to that arrest. This helped frame some of the thinking around the same approach Wallace takes in finding out about Jesus without looking at the primary sources (the New Testament).

The working framework of the book is that when some big event happens, like premeditated murder or a great historical figure, there is normally a fuse which leads to the event that then results in a fallout. The fuse could be a series of events in chronicle order that leads up to something, and then the fallout is other effects from the event that are only best explained by the event of interest (like a murder or a great historical figure).

Fuse

With the fuse for Jesus Wallace looks at the cultural elements in place along with the current spiritual temperature and Old Testament prophecies floating around the time of Jesus. 

I had heard some of the cultural arguments before, and it does make a bit of a point. If there was to be some new religion that was going to spread it was defiantly helped by the tools of communication they had invented. It was useful that Alexander the Great has converted all of Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa to use the same Greek language. It was also useful that the Romans were keen to build such a good road network. This meant messages across the whole Roman Empire could spread and be understood from one end to the other. This was unheard of before. Not only that, this book raised a good point about the peace that Rome had achieved. Between 27 BC and 180 AD, there was a great period of peace within the Empire which also meant this window of opportunity allowed for more ideas to flow as people weren't concerned about getting a sword through the chest.

Wallace also looked into various religions of the time and look at what an archetype God would be been considered at the time based on about 15 different character types. Not only this but also types in the Old Testament were looked at such as Moses, Joshua, Joseph, David and Jonah were looked at, to show a bit of foreshadowing of Jesus in these characters, for they too have a bunch of character traits Jesus had, not to mention the extensive Old Testament specific prophecies about the coming Messiah.

Overall I found this bit pretty interesting and except for the Old Testament prophecies, I am not sure if it is altogether convincing. It is interesting that lots of circumstances in the Roman Empire meant it was easy for a message to move, and that the gods of their day had a certain shape and were expected to have certain characteristics. However, I am not sure it is convincing to then say, "this means God showed up at this point in time". The fallout was a bit stronger, although I think Wallace cheated a bit.

Fallout

With the fallout, the areas looked at was the effect Jesus had on the number of books about Him, art, education, and science. Straight off the bat, we looked at the church fathers and between their writings of the first two centuries (before Christianity was the religion of the Roman Empire), there is 87.3% of Matthew, 66.9% of Mark, 86% of Luke and 97.8% of John quoted in their writings. This isn't even mentioning the other New Testament letters that are cited in their works. So while not using the New Testament itself, it seems we are allowed to use those who cite the New Testament and in doing this, it is straight-up an easy sell to show the impact Jesus had on the whole Western world.

With art, there was probably too much on the architecture of churches, but I get that it is the author's thing. Again by looking at the paintings, stained glass windows, graffiti, poetry, etc.. right up to the modern era of songs and music, you would get a very good picture (pun intended) of who Jesus was. Some stained glass windows were built for that purpose when literacy rates were much lower than they were today. Most of this art was of cause referencing directly from the New Testament, so again, while not looking directly at the text, but at the art it created, it feels like it has cheated a little. Still, this shows the influence Jesus had on art, music and films.

The chapters on education and science I think were clear to anyone who wants to look into what Christians did in the early days. Since they were people of the Book, one of the first things they wanted to do was to get people to read the book themselves, so went about educating people and translating texts for them. These old Christian schools eventually set up the university, which is still pretty much modelled on our ones today. What is the one (uni) thing that connects the many (verses) of the world? No one can answer that today, but it was God back then. (I think we are still waiting for a good secular reason for how all disciplines are connected together today.) There was an interesting comparison of both universities and also general scientific discoveries over time. It does seem science and the pursuit of knowledge grew much more after Jesus and much more in Christian counties. It could be a coincidence, or it could be related, it is at least a fact of history that perhaps needs an explanation. The author didn't do the same with hospitals, but I bet the same could be said in the field of medicine.

One other chapter I found interesting was on how some religions post-Jesus changed and adapted. There are text changes about the gods Attis, Heracles, Krishna, Mithras and even Buddhism where Jesus is inserted, or we can see later writings, after Jesus (sometimes 400 after) that the language of their god adapted to describe things in ways Jesus did things.

This whole book was heavily footnoted, clear in its explanation of things, had loads of images to help and was sympathetic to the sceptic, as Wallace was a sceptic for many years before believing. I think his interest in other religions held him back thinking Jesus was just one of many other dead gods in the past. However, that dot point seemed to stand out to him as evidence of Jesus' deity eventually as Jesus doesn't stack up compared to the rest - just look at the fallout of Jesus compared to Dionysus, Tammuz, Osiris or Marduk.

Overall this was an interesting book with lots of detail and facts, however, I have just read another book that looked at the cultural fallout which I think does a bit better job. That book is called The Air We Breathe. It will probably be another month before I write that review.