Was Jesus The Son of God?

Saturday Stories

October 20, 2018

I

A 911 call came from a Chicago suburb about a man with a gun. Police Sergeant Richard Scanlon saw a man in a heated argument with a woman on her doorway – and Scanlon got shot. The suspect, identified as James Dixon, was arrested for attempted murder. Dixon had a prior criminal conviction. A .22-caliber pistol was found in the bushes, and it had been fired – with Dixon's fingerprints. He confessed. The case was closed.

II

But it was not the end of the story. The journalist Lee Stobel discovered what really happened. The case was re-opened – and Dixon was proven Innocent and set free. So why did he confess to a crime he didn't commit? In legal parlance, it's called a plea bargaining agreement: admitting to the charge to get a lighter sentence instead of going to trial. An airtight case was overturned by Stobel, the award-winning legal reporter known for his precision and attention to details. The following year, in the fall of 1979, the most thorough investigation of his career would begin – because of his wife.

III

Lee had been skeptical when his wife, Leslie, had become a Born Again Christian. He has always been an atheist, but he found himself increasingly becoming fascinated with the changes in her. It made him want to know everything about Jesus Christ. "I plunged into the case with more vigor than with any story I had ever pursued," he writes in The Case For Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation Of The Evidence For Jesus, one of his New York Times bestsellers. "I applied the training I had at Yale Law School as well as my experience as legal affairs editor of the Chicago Tribune. And over time the evidence of the world – of history, of science, of philosophy, of psychology – began to point toward the unthinkable."

IV

Was Jesus real? And was he divine? Lee presents the case like a lawyer – with solid evidence, complete with data under the various categories of proof. I'm intrigued with the stories about the historians Tacitus, Josephus and Pliny The Younger, but I think the reader should act as the judge, so I won't reveal anything. It is up to the individual to pass his or her own verdict. "The quality of good judgement," said Plato, "is clearly a form of knowledge and skill, as it is because of knowledge and not because of ignorance that we judge well."

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