The Gospels: A Perfect Candidate for Cold-Case Detective Work

This one is for all you non-fiction fans…

Do you enjoy criminal investigative shows like NCIS or Castle or Bosch? On a seemingly unrelated note, do you get frustrated or tongue-tied when it comes to defending your faith in the face of skeptics’ caustic assertions, such as the gospels contradict themselves; the apostles lied for their own benefit; the gospels were written years after the eye-witnesses were dead?

Then you might enjoy reading J. Warner Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity, in which he takes his experience working as a cold-case detective and examines the reliability of the gospel accounts, which claim to be written by eye-witnesses.

J. Warner started his investigation as an atheist. He ended the investigation as a believer in Jesus Christ.

“Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.”

Admittedly, I listened to the audiobook, so I have no highlighted sentences or bracketed paragraphs to share (ordering a physical copy is now on my to-do list!). But I kept thinking as I listened that the conclusions J. Warner drew about the veracity of the gospel accounts are quite reasonable. Non-believers often claim that Christians have to throw their brains in the trash in order to believe in the Triune God and the Bible. The truth, however, is just the opposite.

One of my favorite aspects of each chapter is when J. Warner poses popular questions or assertions that shed doubt on the gospel texts. Sometimes, I would think, “Yeah, that’s a valid point. I actually don’t know how to counter that.” And then J. Warner would go on to counter that question or claim based on evidence, facts, and reasonable arguments he’d already laid down in earlier chapters. If you’re a long-time Christian, this book will edify your faith. If you’re a teenager struggling with doubts about Christianity, this will help alleviate those doubts and ground you in facts. If you’re not a Christian and skeptical about Jesus and the reliability of the Scriptures, many of your questions will be answered.

Will all our questions be answered? Not in this one book. But Cold-Case Christianity serves to answer the reasonableness of believing in the gospels, and it offers logical arguments for believing in the rest of Scripture, as well.

And in an age where the Bible is being attacked with increasing fervor and even churches are turning away from what God has revealed and turning instead to the claims of finite, fallible mankind, it behooves the Christian, young and old, to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (taken from 1 Peter 3:15). This book will help us as we prepare those answers.