So I’ve been reading the book, “The Case for Christ,” by Lee
Strobel, and read something just now that I just have to share. So the book is written by this guy who used
to be an Atheist, and didn’t believe in God’s existence. He was a journalist
and investigator. When his wife became a Christian and he noticed crazy changes
in her life, he decided to investigate the claims of Jesus extremely
thoroughly. He interviewed people from all over, and gathered all kinds of
different evidence in order to find out more about who this Jesus guy is. By
the end of his work, he had come to faith in Jesus. Anyway, where I am in the
book right now, he is interviewing scholarly people in order to find
“corroboration” evidence for the Gospels. In other words, he wants evidence
that proves the truths presented about the life of Jesus from sources outside
the Bible. There are tons of different ancient historians who discuss the life
of Jesus and the His followers, along with the spread of Christianity. There
are so many cool things about all of the “corroborative evidence” and the way
they line up with what is written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but I just
want to quote one that really stood out to me. For the rest of the good stuff, you gotta read
the book yourself ;)
The Bible claims that at the time of Jesus’ death, the sky
turned black Many people are skeptical
of the passages in the New Testament when the Gospel writers say that the earth
turned dark during the time that Jesus hung on the cross. As Strobel writes,
“Wasn’t this merely a literary device to stress the significance of the
Crucifixion, and not a reference to an actual historical occurrence?”
Two different historians provide “corroborative evidence” of
this fact. The first is a historian
named Thallus who wrote a history of the eastern Mediterranean world in A.D.
52, and talks about an “eclipse” happening on that day. The next is a Greek
author from Caria, named Phlegon, who wrote a chronology soon after 137 A.D. As
Strobel put it:
“He
reported that in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad (i.e. 33
A.D.) there was ‘the greatest eclipse of the sun’ and that ‘it became night in
the sixth hour of the day (i.e. noon) so that stars even appeared in the
heavens. There was a great earthquake in Bithynia, and many things were
overturned in Nicaea.’”
Soooo… this phenomenon was evidently visible in Rome,
Athens, and other Mediterranean cities, and there is non-biblical evidence to
attest to this darkness that occurred at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. Wow.
So cool. The book provides so
many examples of interesting things like this, that prove the Bible’s validity.
I’m not finished with it yet, but up to page 87 I give my stamp of approval,
and I would highly recommend reading it!
J
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