Cold Case Christianity: reply to Wallace's "reasons" to convert to Christianity

Here's my reply to what J. Warner Wallace says in his youtube interview by Lee Strobel:


Wallace at 1:20 asserts that he was skeptical of other Christians during his atheism-days because they couldn't give a reason for their faith.  Unfortunately, the Holy Spirit is not limited to persuading based on empirical facts believed equally by preacher and gainsayers alike.  Peter allegedly got thousands of Christ-hating Jews to repent with a single presumptuous sermon that appealed to no other facts known to such Jews, except that they had murdered Jesus. Acts 2.

Wallace at 1:50 ff says he stayed away from Christianity because in his experience, Christians were either those who couldn't give a reason for their faith, or were criminals whom he was in the process of arresting.  But this is rather stupid...he cannot have been too great of a detective, since Christian books on apologetics have been available for at least the last 100 years. 

Wallace at 3:30 says if you cannot get somebody to say say they saw the criminal do the crime, you don't have a direct-evidence case, you have an indirect evidence case.  While that is true, it is devastating to Wallace who thinks apostle Paul was an "eye"witness of the risen Jesus, yet nowhere in the most explicit accounts of Paul encountering Christ in the NT (Acts 9, 22, 26) is it either expressed or implied that Paul physically saw Jesus.  Paul, Matthew and John are the only sources in the NT with any possibility of coming down to us today in first-hand form.  If we exclude Paul, now we only have TWO possible eyewitness testimonies to the resurrection of Jesus.  We don't know jack shit about Matthew beyond the fact that he was a tax-collector.  If the traditions of the later fathers are correct, Matthew wrote a gospel to leave behind for Jews, which tells us Matthew was a gullible idiot.  How could he possibly figure his simple-minded story of Jesus' virgin birth would suffice to wow the Jews and get them to seriously consider that Jesus really was the messiah?  How hard would it be for such Jews to simply say Mary was lying to cover up adultery or rape, or that the feats Jesus did were not genuinely supernatural?  John's gospel is even worse, coming from somebody whom the Murtatorian Fragment says first wanted the gospel content to simply be the visions the apostles would have after starving for three days.  Methinks you don't have any more accounts of Jesus' resurrection that come down to us today in first-hand form, which means you are forced to make the entire case on hearsay, and I'm sorry, but no right-thinking person will uproot their lifestyle, mode of thinking, and give up friends to make new friends, all because of what 2,000 year old hearsay has to offer.

Wallace at 5:15, uses as an example one of his prior cases where a man was prosecuted in a purely circumstantial case of murder, the jury found him guilty after 4 hours of deliberation, and he later confessed after going to prison.  Unfortunately, Wallace doesn't mention the obvious fact that the more circumstantial the case is, the more likely the the State will fail their burden of demonstrating guilt beyond a reasonable doubt).  But if the NT's only three possible eyewitness accounts of Jesus rising from the dead, don't come down to us in first hand form, or have other equally serious problems, then the WHOLE case for his rising from the dead is circumstantial, and interpreting such weak evidence after 2,000 years of Christians disagreeing on every aspect of it, is an absurdity that has no analogy to modern-day courts, where cold-cases that are eventually tried in courts usually aren't older than about 30 years.

Wallace at 5:50 says the real question is whether your unanswered questions are deal-killers or not.  My answer is "yes", but more specifically, I've gotten enough answers to my questions from the NT data that my skepticism would be justified even if my unanswered questions were answered.


Wallace at 6:35 admits that as an atheist he thought, on the basis of criminal law, that the standard for historical truth was "beyond a possible doubt". 

Wallace was a rather ill-informed atheist. This might help explain why he found the opposite of atheism to be more reasonable.