In The Case for Christ and other books in the series, Lee Strobel paints himself as a serious reporter who know how to ask the tough questions and ferret out the truth. Strobel uses his journalistic credentials to give his book weight, but by lobbing softball questions at a single side of a multi-faceted story, he shows a distressing lack of professional standards.
It is therefore appropriate that Strobel provides the introduction to J. Warner Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity. Wallace is a former homicide detective and cold-case investigator who proposes that his bona fides him unique insight into the most famous death in history: the crucifixion and purported resurrection of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, like Strobel, Wallace does his profession and his faith no favors when he selectively applies his job experience to an unrelated field.
In order for Wallace’s credentials as a homicide detective to bolster his case, he must apply his skills consistently, going through the same process with the death of Jesus as he would with the deaths he investigates professionally. If he fails to apply the same standards to both investigations, he undermines the very thesis of his book. Moreover, Wallace must make solid connections between his cold cases and the case for Christ; he is not a historian, so it is important that he demonstrate that his job experience still applies to 2000-year-old events. By the end of the book, Wallace has failed on both counts.
Wallace can’t make it past chapter 2 before showing his hand. He notes that the deaths he investigates fall into one of four categories: natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. In detective work, there is no category for “supernatural death”. However, when it comes to the death and supposed resurrection of Jesus, Wallace insists that a supernatural option must be on the table. One of his favorite phrases is “bias against the supernatural,” an accusation he lobs at skeptics whenever possible.
So why doesn’t Wallace consider supernatural options as part of his day job? Is he not demonstrating his own “bias against the supernatural” by failing to do so? Wallace never gives any explanation for the differing methodologies. He claims that, in the case of the resurrection, divine intervention “accounts for the evidence most simply and most exhaustively, and it is logically consistent (if we simply allow for the existence of God in the first place).”
However, an all-powerful, omnipresent God is a simple and exhaustive explanation for literally any phenomenon — until, as has happened since the dawn of modern science, a naturalistic explanation supplants the supernatural. The tooth fairy perfectly explains how lost teeth get replaced with money, until one’s parents are caught in the act.
Of course, in order to a find naturalistic explanation for an event once thought to be supernatural, we must at some point acquire new information. In Wallace’s cold cases, this could take the form of new eyewitness testimony or previously unavailable DNA evidence. If no new evidence comes to light, the case remains cold.
In these investigations, Wallace never takes the additional step to say, “I have no natural explanation for this murder, therefore God must have teleported a bullet into this man’s cranium! This explanation is simple and accounts for all the evidence — and saying otherwise shows an anti-supernatural bias on your part!” And yet, this is exactly how Wallace treats the data points surrounding the resurrection. Were Wallace applying his professional standards consistently, Jesus’ death would be filed away with the rest of his cold cases.
The first half of Cold-Case Christianity has Wallace recounting incidents from homicide investigations that he believes are analogous to investigations into the gospel accounts. However, the connections he draws are often specious and unconvincing. One chapter compares the martyred apostles with suspected criminals pitted against one another under interrogation. Why didn’t the apostles rat each other out like suspects often do, instead choosing to go to their deaths? The problem is, Wallace explicitly compares Peter in Rome with Thomas in India, where one was never in a position to rat out the other.
In another chapter, Wallace notes the importance of keeping eyewitnesses at a crime scene separated before detectives arrive, lest they start comparing notes and ultimately give homogenized, collusive accounts. Wallace also observes that the gospel accounts often agree with each other, sometimes verbatim, but to him this affirms their reliability as eyewitness testimony. He says these facsimiles “may be the result of common agreement at particularly important points in the narrative, or (more likely) the result of later eyewitnesses saying, ‘The rest occurred just the way he said.’” But don’t both Christian and secular biblical scholars widely accept that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source? Wouldn’t access to other accounts make them unreliable eyewitnesses by homicide investigation standards?
This is one of many examples where Wallace ignores obvious, well-established objections to the gospel accounts in favor of weaker targets. For instance, he spends a whole chapter defending a very early (pre-70 CE) date for gospel authorship, and he specifically contrasts this with his own atheistic assumption of second- or third-century authorship. Both dates are minority views among biblical scholars; Wallace glosses over the more common view that the gospels were written in the late first century. Why the omission?
In addition to this, Wallace repeats the classic apologetic that the apostles would not have allowed themselves to be martyred for what they knew to be a lie. But what if the disciples weren’t lying? What if they were just plain wrong? Wallace doesn’t address this reasonable alternative, going after the easy mark instead.
Possibly the worst example comes toward the end of the book, where Wallace questions what would have inspired the disciples to preach the gospel even as it cost them their lives. Making a comparison to cold cases, Wallace claims that “Sex, money, and power are the motives for all the crimes detectives investigate. In fact, these three motives are also behind lesser sins as well.” He ably dismantles the notions that the disciples were inspired by any of these three incentives (which no skeptic has ever claimed), but he ignores the elephant in the room.
What about religious fervor? Surely Wallace has seen the lengths people will go and the things people will do in the name of their god. It’s in the news every day! Is Wallace oblivious to the idea that the disciples were religious zealots? Or does he simply ignore an obvious explanation because it doesn’t fit into his narrative?
Going into these books, I try to assume the author is sincere until they give reason to believe otherwise. Unfortunately, Wallace gives plenty of reasons to doubt his sincerity. He seems to have found an interesting hook that looks profound on a book cover, but his apologetics ring hollow because he knows he’s preaching to the choir. He’s not intending for his audience to apply the slightest amount of scrutiny that would reveal the holes in his arguments. If he’s trying to build a legal case for Christ, it would ultimately be thrown out of court.
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