Wallace's Eyewitness Testimony Of A Crime Scene

The author achieved his purpose to investigate the gospels (as well as other New Testament books) in the same manner he would an eyewitness testimony of a crime scene. In the first half of the investigation, Wallace teaches his reader how to be a detective. Initially, he tends to describe detective work like emphasizing the power of circumstantial evidence, the danger of presuppositions, and the critical use of abductive reasoning (distinguishing reasonability versus possibility). He later ties in the process with the Biblical writings, for example, he examines the characteristics of accurate eyewitness, to which the gospels interestingly line up with (the witnesses, who clearly had no motive to lie, were present for the Christ events and gave
It troubles me how insertions were added to the canon by scribes, but that many versions of the Bible fail to separate these late additions from the original gospel material. These artifacts should be treated not as the holy scripture (inspired by God), but rather as what they are. Brackets and footnotes are great tools that can be used for separating comments (which are usually in place to clarify Biblical context) from authentic sound doctrine. In fact, I really wish he had given ALL the textual insertions just so I could know what is what. However, Wallace gives a very helpful illustration of why we skeptics shouldn’t let missing and extra pieces to the puzzle discount the reliability and authenticity of the Bible. We have plenty enough of the puzzle pieces to see the big picture, and while there are some parts that either are absent (that do belong) or extra parts (that don’t), we can still easily make out the main idea. Critics will focus on the “micro” to distract from the “macro.” In Chapter 11, the author lays out a simple, helpful timeline of the gospels in chronological order: Mark writes his gospel (AD 45-50), Luke writes his gospel, (AD 50-3), Paul quotes Luke in his letters (53-7), Luke writes Acts (57-60). In the book, The Case for Christ, the author (Lee Strobel) stated that Acts was the first book of the New Testament to be written. I found this to be a confusing contradiction between apologists. In Chapter 9, the author makes a great argument for theism on the topic of the problem of evil. In summary, he concludes that because all of mankind possesses a transcending sense of right and wrong, the reasonable explanation is God is the “good standard” to which we measure “bad.” In his own words, “the existence of true evil necessitates the presence of God as a standard of true virtue.” This was extremely helpful for me because the problem of evil was