Best of 2022: The Proof You Need to Believe in Jesus Christ (Part 1 of 2)

I was really struggling as we walked through the aftermath. It just felt like every day was a struggle. It was hard to breathe sometimes. It was hard to just function day to day. And it was so lonely. When Kari learned of her husband's affair, she felt betrayed by God. She lost hope until she heard a Focus on the Family podcast. The reason why I listened to it over and over again is because it felt like I was sitting down with a friend who was telling me, like, I've been there and it's okay. And you can do this and I promise in the end it's going to be worth it.

And it just broke me in a good way. I'm Jim Daly. Working together we can heal more broken marriages like Kari's and give families hope. Please call 800 the letter A in the word family. That's 800-AFAMILY.

Or donate at FocusOnTheFamily.com slash hope and your gift will be doubled. Try to imagine this situation. You're the lead detective on a really important case. You're looking for clues to determine who, what, where, when and why a crime has been committed. But the challenge is there's no evidence.

Or is there? Today on Focus on the Family, we're doing an investigation about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who appeared in human form on this planet more than 2,000 years ago. What is the evidence for him? Well, for his claims.

You'll find out. Thanks for joining us today. Your host is Focus President and author Jim Daly and I'm John Fuller. John, that was a really creative open for the Best of 2022 broadcasts we recorded earlier this year. Our guest was J. Warner Wallace who is a homicide detective and he has a brilliant perspective on how we can prove the existence of Jesus and believe with certainty that the Gospels and the Bible are true.

Absolutely. And when Jim Wallace described his own spiritual investigation to prove or disprove the claims that Jesus made about himself, it was pretty amazing to see how the Lord showed up in a big way to transform his life. And that's the main reason why we want to bring this great content back to you today, because the reality of Jesus and knowing him personally is life changing and the most important decision you're ever going to make.

And you can experience the same transformation for yourself. As we shared before, Jim has been involved in law enforcement for more than 25 years. Before his conversion, he described himself as an actively sarcastic skeptic about God, faith and the Bible. And I love that because he had an honest approach in saying, prove it. And we'll hear more about that proof in the program today. And Jim Wallace wrote about his spiritual journey in a book called Person of Interest, Why Jesus Still Matters in a World That Rejects the Bible. And you can learn more about Jim and the book in the program notes. And Jim, here's how you began the conversation with J. Warner Wallace on this best of edition of Focus on the Family. Jim, it's great to have you here. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, being sarcastic and skeptical is really helpful as a homicide detective in general.

This isn't what I was going to ask you, but how has the Lord dealt with your sarcasm? So if you assume up front that everyone you're talking to is a liar, somebody will eventually go to jail. But if you assume everyone's telling you the truth, no one ever goes to jail.

So I'm trying to balance what works and what's effective based on and then also what God would call me to be. You know, this is totally off topic. But given all your years in detective work, I mean, what are those things that you see about human behavior that kind of makes you scratch your head?

Like, well, I really thought they'd get away with this. Yeah, well, a lot of it is, you know, we don't think really rationally when we think about doing things that are irrational, like killing your spouse. So so a lot of times you're driven by your emotions and that's where we can kind of make some headway.

Right. Because sometimes we overthink it. We're thinking, well, look, if I was doing this, I might do these five things first, because we're thinking as though we're not in the middle of an emotional relationship that is driven by emotion. We're trying to think about it rationally and coolly. But it turns out most of the time.

But here's what I do see. Pretty much everything that I see in human behavior is explained really well on the pages of the New Testament. Oh, that's interesting.

I love the fact that the Bible describes the world the way it really is. And I'll be sometimes working with defense attorneys who they're so convinced that there's no way that they're defending. They're truly convinced that the defendant could not do this, because for the last 30 years, I work cold cases. This guy has been a deacon at a church. He's been, you know, he's a dentist. He's a fireman. He's, you know, he's a city council person. He's just got a regular life.

Yeah. And because they don't understand the enigma of man, you know, the kind of fallen nature, designing God's image, but deeply rebellious. They don't understand that dichotomy. They struggle with understanding how someone like this could do something like that. Well, you know, and you know, what's interesting, too, so much of the culture right now is debating what's true, that there can't really be an absolute truth.

But my goodness, where do you see that show up in police work? I mean, you either did it or you didn't do it. And that's absolute truth. Well, and I always wonder, is this shift from objective claims about truth to subjective claims about truth, is this going to eventually affect us in the courtroom? And I've been watching court cases. Wow, that's interesting.

So you've seen that evolution happening. Yeah, because we're selecting jurors. And I think our questions in the voir dire process are going to, they always have kind of covered these issues. But I think more and more to be able to make sure that the jurors we're selecting actually understand that some things are more than a matter of opinion. Even the claim that there is no objective truth is a claim about truth that's objective, right? So it's self refuting. So we have to at least help and only select the jurors that understand this, right? Because otherwise, how would you render a decision about something that happened in the past that your opinion can't change?

Either it happened or it didn't happen. Right. And that's why that's the approach I took when I first was looking at the script.

Which is so good. Let's get some of the terminology down. Not all of us are familiar with police detective work. So, for example, you mentioned that you're a homicide detective, but you specialize in solving cold case, no body murders.

Now, honestly, this is the first time I've heard that. Describe a no body murder. I think I get it. Yeah, so a no body murder, often these will go cold because they're first reported as a missing persons case.

So this is like we're a husband or a business associate. Usually, though, it's a husband or a wife who kills their spouse and then somehow effectively destroys the body and then says, oh, we had an argument and they just vanished. And so you never find the body. So you don't have a body, maybe not even a murder weapon. Well, exactly.

You don't know. And sometimes they're clever enough to wait three days and they'll walk into like an art station. They can walk into the front desk. So now you're not even calling a police officer to the location.

You're walking into the front counter. You're filing a missing persons report two days later to assign to a detective. Now we're a week behind this thing. Yeah.

And you've had a week to clean the house, to do whatever you want to do. And it's basically a lot harder to solve. And if you never find the body, you have the bigger challenge of number one, demonstrating to a jury that this is a murder and not a true missing.

Right. And then number two, demonstrating that this is the guy who did the murder. So you have two and a lot of DA's just don't want to touch these because they are difficult because there are two things you're trying to prove. And the Cole case is a case that just hasn't been resolved. It could be years, 10 years, 20 years.

Some we're hearing in the media now where 30, 40 year old cases are being solved with DNA improvement. Well, and so every crime has a statute of limitations except for murder. So if you do a robbery and a number of years go by, I can't go back and reinvestigate that because it closes by statute. But murders don't close.

They stay open. And so my cases are like we just did a case two years ago. It was 1972. I remember the case. My dad had the case. He was a homicide detective also. And he I remember I was about 10 when this 10 year old went missing and it shook our community.

And my dad was kind of paranoid about it, you know, because, you know, for his own kids. And so I remember the case and we didn't. Well, I think I opened it in 2003. I think I found the DNA in 2006 or 2007.

We submitted it right away. It had no hit on the kind of predator database we have in California. And then luckily AncestryDNA started to emerge. It's helping to solve some problems, isn't it? It's solving some. That's why I always thank people for searching for their family members with DNA because it eventually means I could take some of your family members to jail.

So hopefully not. But yes, but it does does help describe person of interest. That's another term. I think I know what that means. But help us all better understand that legal term.

Yeah. So this is really something that I think emerged more after 9-11. You started to see a lot of it with the federal agencies looking at persons of interest in certain kinds of investigations. Almost always this ends up being somebody who you suspect is your candidate for the crime. But you just don't want to necessarily put the word suspect on him yet. But it could also be a witness.

Maybe you're looking for no leads at all yet. But we did hear that there was somebody standing over here. That's a person of interest to us. We want to be able to interview that person. So it can sometimes be a witness.

But it just means that somebody who is another domino that's important to tip over in a series of dominoes leading to an arrest. Yeah. In that regard, you used a methodology that you're trained in as a detective.

Fuse and fallout. Right. So describe that and how you applied that to this pursuit of is Jesus who he said he was. Yeah. So this is kind of like time lining, optimal timeline, different things to see. Is this guy, was he in town when this crime occurred? You're putting things in place in a timeline. But when we're in front of juries, this is where your weird background comes into play. So my dad was a detective, but I didn't think I would be a detective. I thought I would be an artist or an architect. And so I got my bachelor's degree in design and I got my master's degree in architecture at UCLA.

And I was working in Santa Monica when I decided to leave that and work in my dad's profession. But when I got to doing jury trials, that kind of approach, that visual approach to making claims kind of came back up. And so I know I needed to show timelines to jurors.

So I just envisioned the missing on the day of the missing person. So this is a murder. That's a bomb that exploded. Angry. He was angry.

He did something he shouldn't do. But every bomb has a fuse that burns toward the explosion. And after the explosion, there's fallout everywhere all over the blast radius. So what we do in front of a jury is we visualize this fuse. This is all the tension that's rising in the relationship.

Over days, weeks, months. Yeah, he's preparing to do something he shouldn't do. He's buying the stuff he's going to use to kill her or to dispose of her. Yeah, this is the stuff you do before a crime.

And then the day happens and then you've got all of this activity afterwards. This is the blast radius, the fallout that kind of gives you away because, you know, people don't do that. You're destroying your wife's property like you think she's never coming back.

Well, if she's just run off, why would you destroy your property unless you know she's not coming back? So you kind of do things that tip the hat. And so that's what we're doing here in front of a jury.

It's fuse and fallout, fuse and fallout. So what I've envisioned here is if there was no New Testament, no evidence in a crime scene, if I don't trust anything the New Testament tells me about Jesus, is there enough evidence in the fuse and fallout of history to show me what happened in the first century, even if I had nothing from the crime scene, if I had nothing from the New Testament? Now, of course, I think that all the information about Jesus has to come from the New Testament, but I'm just taking an approach that should reflect what's in the New Testament if Jesus is who he said he was. Now, let me ask this question because some are probably thinking it. Why did you even come up with this idea? I mean, what was happening? They said, I wonder if I apply my detective skills to something that happened 2,000 years ago, if it would work.

I mean, what was the motivation? Well, we got into this church. My wife thought, well, we've got kids now and they're six and eight or it's five and seven. Should we raise them in the church? I thought, no. I mean, I wasn't raised in the church.

And I turned out pretty well. Yeah, of course. You always think that, right? Oh, yeah.

I was going to say that for sure. But so I thought, I don't really have a desire to, but I love my wife. And if you want to raise the kids in the church, and she was kind of a cultural Catholic growing up. We didn't own a Bible and she never read a Bible and never read a New Testament. We didn't understand what the gospel was. That wasn't part of our life.

We never really heard it said that way. But we go to this church and she nagged me about it for about three years. Good for her. Actually, Susie is the reason God has used Susie in my life in ways I can't even explain. So without her, I would be nowhere.

But so she convinced me to go. And so I sat in church and the pastor said that Jesus was this, he said a lot of things, but the thing that stuck with me, because I wasn't really interested in any of the other things. But he said that Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived.

And so I thought, well, what's so smart about him? So I did buy a Bible. I bought a pew Bible and I just wanted to read what Jesus had to say. Really expecting it to be more like Proverbs, just like wisdom statements, not so much a narrative from people who want me to believe that this sequence of events occurred in this order, occurred in this location at some point in history.

Well, what is this? This is like supplemental reports in a cold case. I mean, I don't have access in cold cases. I don't have access to the witnesses anymore.

They're dead. So the question then becomes, well, how do you manage these cases? How do you investigate these old cases? Well, so apply that, the fuse and fallout, for example, apply that, what you learned in detective work, to Jesus. How did you apply that? Well, so I thought, okay, I'm gonna do both an inside out and an outside in approach.

So I did an inside out approach. How do we know that the gospels are telling us something reliable? And I've written about that in a book called Cold Case Christianity. That really is just applying the template for reliable eyewitnesses that we offer to jurors and applying that to the gospel authors. And that showed me a lot. But I also thought, well, look, if Jesus is who you all think he is, are you really telling me that the only people who notice this are four writers in the first century?

Wouldn't you expect that if he's the rock you think he is, when you throw him into the pond, there'd be some ripples, wouldn't there? I mean, I should be able to see this in the fallout of history. But having never been taught that, really, I didn't know what the impact of Jesus was in history. I think this is true for a lot of young people.

As a matter of fact, I think it's really important right now for us to teach our young people how important Jesus is. Look, I think there's two questions that every young person asks now. So for every one what claim we make, we have to offer the two whys.

So I always say you have to give two whys for every what to Gen Z. And the first why is, okay, so you're making this claim about Jesus. Well, why do you think that's true?

On the basis of what evidence? Because everybody else is going to say that their claim is grounded in science, it's grounded in evidence, and you Christians have your wishful thinking. Good for you, but that's not good for me. So I want to know why is this true? And the second why is, why should I care? Even if it is true, why should I care?

So I think young people are more concerned about not the godness of God, does this God exist, but the goodness of God. Does this book, this Iron Age book you folks always, you know, is the source of all misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, you name every phobia you can think of, is this still good? Does this matter anymore? Does anything good emerge from this? Does anything beautiful emerge from this?

Well, those are the kinds of questions I had too. And so this is what the outside in will tell you. Because if the outcome, if the impact of Jesus is evil, then why would you want to examine it? But if this is something that is a source of all beauty, well then it might matter. Jim, you point out how several significant developments in ancient history allowed for the incredible dissemination of the gospel and the exponential growth of Christianity.

Start with the developments of language and writing, why that is so important at that moment. Yeah. So a lot of the times when I'm investigating a fuse, I'm answering my own skeptical questions because I'm anticipating that the jury is probably going to have similarly skeptical questions. So when I'm examining the fuse and history that leads up to the appearance of Jesus in the first century, I'm examining really my own skepticism. So I had a skepticism about a number of things. But one of them was just this question, if Jesus really is God, why wouldn't he just come now when we've got social media and iPhones and we can, you know, so why wouldn't it be a better time to come now?

Like why does he come when he comes? But it turns out that the cultural shifts and the progress of culture and technology actually does benefit the first century in terms of disseminating information historically. So for example, you know, you can't really, if you can't express and articulate the detail of the Jesus story because you don't have the letters in place, you don't have an alphabet in place. If you're just using hieroglyphics to, for example, describe the Sermon on the Mount, well, good luck with that. Right.

That's going to be easy to do. But once you have an alphabet, an alphabet that's widely distributed across the entire region, like the Etruscan alphabet, which is adopted by Rome. And then as Rome conquers the unknown world, it exports the Etruscan alphabet. And you have, you know, Koine Greek, which is being used by the Romans.

You have papyrus, which is much easier to transport than so, for example, clay tablets or stone. So these things emerge in time until by the time Rome is in power and has organized and roads are in place. There's a 200 year period of peace called the Pax Romana that occurs and allows for the Roman Empire to spend money on things that we used to spend on war. It now began to spend on infrastructure like roads.

Yeah. So 47,000 miles exactly caught my attention. It is connecting all of these other empires like the Persians also had great roads. But now the Roman Empire makes sure that all roads lead to Rome. That's not actually one of the goals of the Roman Empire. And they even connected the Silk Road from China.

So now you've got access by way of it. As a matter of fact, the very if you read John's book of Revelation, there are a couple of churches that John is talking about in the first chapter that Paul planted by using roads that were not even available to Paul. A hundred years earlier because they were constructed by the Romans and allowed Paul into places where he could plant churches. So it turns out it's not just that Jesus appears, it's that the infrastructure is in place and the technology, the alphabet, the language is in place so that you can actually transmit the message of Jesus.

To spread the gospel. Yes. And this is what I would say.

So the question becomes, well, still would it be better to come now? But here's what I discovered. What I discovered is that let's say we do this interview and we it's viewed by a million people. Well, they're not going to download it physically into a million computers. They're going to view it online. And let's say that they saw a miracle occur in this video for some reason. Well, I think we are the most distrusting even claims about the news.

We are so divided as a nation, so divided as a world that we're going to say, well, who's saying that first? Well, I don't trust that person. I don't trust that information. So we are very distrusting. And then when we see something that looks miraculous, well, I've watched the Marvel superhero movies, too. Right.

Everything looks miraculous. Do you trust anything anymore? You see, but more importantly, you're not downloading the video. Now, why that matters is that if you downloaded it to a million different geographic locations, it would be much harder to eradicate the information in the video. In other words, if the information about Jesus is on physical manuscripts in a million locations, now it's very hard to eradicate the message of Jesus because I can't just flip the server off. So it turns out if you're going to come and you want to have lasting historical impact, you want to come at a time when information is disseminated materially, not digitally.

No, that's good. You also mentioned human beings being hardwired to believe in God. I think that, but I probably think it more so than before I became a Christian. But why is that so self-evident as a detective? Well, OK, so that's one of these three strands of this fuse that are burning up.

One of them is the culture of Rome and developing and taking charge of things and providing an infrastructure so the message can be communicated. The other is there's a spiritual fuse that it turns out that we are created in the image of God. So don't be surprised that we often think about God. And even today, polls have been taken, I think about 83% of all living humans believe in some form of theism or deism. And that's with an incredible secular headwind right now. Oh, absolutely.

Think about that. And these are studies being done by secular groups. As a matter of fact, thought of the Ivy League schools that are mostly secular now have done this research and have discovered that really we are born with the default position of looking at creation and inferring the existence of a creator. That's very natural for children to do. As a matter of fact, this is now kind of said that theism is kind of red in the bone, according to these studies.

I've kind of cited them in the book. So don't be surprised. This has always been the case, even in antiquity. So here's what I would say as a skeptic. Well, I hear a lot about this dying and rising savior named Jesus, but it seems to me he's just a copy of some other dying and rising saviors that he's stolen the story from. We see this a lot in Jesus mythos, who will say that Jesus is not an original story and never lived. He's just a recreation of prior mythologies. And they'll cite similarities between these prior mythologies.

Well, that's a fuse that's burning toward the appearance of the first century, and I wanted to examine it. So if you look and read through all the ancient mythologies, what you're going to discover is they have about 15 things in common. And it turns out those 15 things they have in common are all the things that humans naturally expect of deity. We think about God and we imagine certain things. Well, if he's God, he probably has power beyond ours. So we always, almost every God, for example, can do God things. They can do supernatural miracles because we expect our gods to do supernatural miracles. Many of them appear supernaturally. Well, you kind of expect that too.

Ours does, right? Jesus appears supernaturally. Now, only broadly are these 15 attributes similar in each of these.

So I've charted them all. And no deity, no mythology prior to Jesus has more than about 10 of these. And some have as few as six until you get to the first century. And then Jesus appears possessing all 15 of the ancient expectations of deity. Now, what's interesting about that is if you wanted to come and meet the expectations of the expectors, if the expected wants to meet the expectations of the expectors, Jesus does that.

And Paul even talks about this. You know, you people are very religious. You even worship an unknown God here. Well, we're here to tell you that what you've imagined, we actually saw with our own eyes.

Right. And so he's comparing the myths of humans. Now, when I say myth, I mean the stories of deity to the myth written by God, as C.S.

Lewis says. Not a fiction, but a claim about God that is from the mind of God, from the mind of poets and ancients and expectors to the mind of the expected. That's the difference in Jesus. And so you see that, yeah, he shows up at a time in history when the ancient groups, the vast majority of ancient myth worshippers are still worshipping the ancient myths with common expectations. And Jesus meets these. So all the similarities between Jesus and other deities are not that similar, first of all.

Just broadly similar. But they end up being an evidence for Jesus, not an evidence against him. And you put it in context like that, the exchange of Jesus with the woman at the well. I mean, you get a little sense of God's frustration there. Woman, I'm standing right in front of you. I know.

I am the water. But what's great about it is that we share these expectations and even the modern scientific and sociological experiments we're doing right now demonstrate that created beings have expectations of the creator. It's been going on for thousands of years and Jesus meets most robustly all of those expectations.

And that's not by coincidence. He's the only one in the history of anyone who claimed to be God who actually has all 15 of the characteristics. Like Buddha, for example, has 10 of these 15. Right. No, that's a really interesting observation that he fulfilled even that mythology. That's right. That Jesus is the fulfillment of all of it. He's the actual reality that you've been imagining. In parts and pieces. That's right. In all those expressions.

That's so fascinating. Let me ask this question, Jim. Do you feel if you had to go in front of a jury today on the trial basis of Jesus existence, you think you'd win the case? Well, here's what I always say. You win juries trials, not in opening statements, not in the evidence show, not in closing arguments. You win cases in jury selection.

Sorry, it's just the case. So I would say to anyone listening, if you feel like, hey, I've been sharing the gospel with people, it's about jury selection. And I can't put people on a jury who have presuppositional biases or reasons to reject a truth claim that aren't evidential. So I make sure we have a four-hour process where we select the jury and we eliminate the jurors who are biased against us on either side. On either side.

So the question I would say is, are you taking the time? Are you praying about this? Are you asking God to soften the heart of the potential juror before you begin to present a case?

Because it turns out you can present a case to a juror who's already biased against you and it's not going to go very far. And I can't soften the heart of my hearers. Only God does that.

God calls and then we deliver a message and people respond. So I always say, yes, don't get frustrated though. I think this case is more than sufficient. This case is very compelling, but there will still be people who will resist it.

But it has more to do with jury selection than does the strength of the case. That's really interesting. And that brings us to the conclusion of the first part of our Best of 2022 conversation with J. Warner Wallace.

And we're really looking forward to sharing part two with you next time. By the way, this is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and I'm John Fuller. John, I strongly recommend that our listeners get a copy of this wonderful book, Person of Interest, Why Jesus Still Matters in a World That Rejects the Bible. As Jim mentioned a moment ago, a lot of young people, Gen Z and Gen X, are wondering about the validity and worth of the Bible.

And we need to be equipped to answer their questions. And one way to do so is with Jim's book. Send a gift of any amount to Focus on the Family and we'll put a copy into your hands. You can share this with your children or a friend and maybe get a copy for your church library as well. The place to start is our phone number. That's 800-232-6459.

800, the letter A in the word family. Or donate and get the book. We've got all the details in the show notes. And let me share a final thought with the listeners. This is a critical time for Focus because we raise a significant portion of our annual operating budget with these year-end gifts. And I'm so thankful for the faithful support and prayers of our friends. But if we haven't heard from you in a while or maybe you've never given to the ministry, can I encourage you to donate today? A monthly pledge would be great.

Or a one-time gift. Anything you can do will be so helpful in helping others. And we deeply appreciate your ongoing partnership with us. We'd love to hear from you. And the number is 800, the letter A in the word family.

We're stopped by the program notes for all the details. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family. We'll have more insights about the global impact of Jesus Christ from our guest, J. Warner Wallace, next time. As we once more help you and your family thrive in Christ. Just like a warm fireplace when it's cold outside, the joy the Christmas season gives comfort and draws us closer to loved ones. I'm John Fuller and Focus on the Family is excited to let you know about our Christmas Stories podcast. Each episode brings heartwarming conversations to bring your family closer together and remind you of the hope we have in Jesus. You can enjoy that podcast at Focus on the Family dot com slash Christmas Stories. That's Focus on the Family dot com slash Christmas Stories.