1. John 11:25.
2. Quoted in Paul Edwards, “Great Minds: Bertrand Russell,” Free Inquiry, December 2004–January 2005, 46.
3. R.C. Sproul, Reason to Believe (Grand Rapids, MI: Lamplighter, 1982), 44.
4. Josh McDowell, The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict (San Bernardino, CA: Here’s Life, 1999), 203.
5. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 16; Joseph Campbell, an interview with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, PBS, 1988; Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland, eds., Jesus under Fire (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995), 2.
6. “What Is a Skeptic?” editorial in Skeptic 11, no. 2, 5.
7. Wilbur M. Smith, A Great Certainty in this Hour of World Crises (Wheaton, IL: Van Kampen, 1951), 10–11.Who Is the Real Jesus? 114
8. The Aramaic word Jesus uttered, tetelestai, is an accounting term meaning “debt paid in full,” referring to the debt of our sins.
9. Matthew 27:45 tells of a period of darkness during Jesus’ final three hours on the cross. Jesus’ death was followed by an earthquake that tore the Temple Veil, a large curtain that had separated the sacred Holy of Holies from the people (v. 51). Jesus’ death removed the wall of separation between God and man represented by the Temple Veil (Hebrews 9:1-9 and 10:19-22).
Historian Will Durant reported, “About the middle of this first century a pagan named Thallus…argued that the abnormal darkness alleged to have accompanied the death of Christ was a purely natural phenomenon and coincidence; the argument took the existence of Christ for granted. The denial of that existence never seems to have occurred even to the bitterest gentile or Jewish opponents of nascent Christianity.” Will Durant, Caesar and Christ, vol. 3 of The Story of Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 555.
10. Vinoth Ramachandra, Gods That Fail (London: Paternoster, 1996), 198.
11. Jim Bishop, The Day Christ Died (New York: Harper Collins, 1977), 257.
12. Quoted in Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 246.