I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling.
I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling.
“I think it may be true,” I said to my wife.
“What may be true?” she asked.
“Christianity.” I’m sure she was weary of my growing obsession. For several weeks now, it was all I could think about, and I had already talked her ears off on several occasions. She knew I was more serious about this than I had ever been in the past, so she patiently tolerated my obsession and constant conversation. “The more I look at the Gospels, the more I think they look like real eyewitness accounts,” I continued. “And the writers seem to have believed what they were writing about.”
I knew I was standing on the edge of something profound; I started reading the Gospels to learn what Jesus taught about living a good life and found that He taught much more about His identity as God and the nature of eternal life. I knew that it would be hard to accept one dimension of His teaching while rejecting the others. If I had good reasons to believe that the Gospels were reliable eyewitness accounts, I was going to have to deal with the stuff I had always resisted as a skeptic. What about all the miracles that are wedged in there between the remarkable words of Jesus? How was I going to separate the miraculous from the remarkable? And why was it that I continued to resist the miraculous elements in the first place?
The initial step in my journey toward Christianity was an evaluation of the Gospels. I spent weeks and weeks examining the gospel accounts as I would any eyewitness account in a criminal case. I used many of the tools that I’ve already described to make a decision that changed my life forever. I’d like to share some of that investigation with you.