Josh McDowell Investigates Christianity

I sat across from him in the student union that afternoon, the vinyl chairs sticky from the lunch crowd that had just cleared out. Josh McDowell leaned back, arms folded, the same way he always did when he wanted the whole table to know he had nothing to lose. The rest of us had finished our coffee. He still had half a cup going cold.

He had been watching our group for weeks. Eight students, two professors. We showed up to classes on time, stayed late for discussions that had nothing to do with grades, and never seemed rattled when exams came around. Josh noticed. He said later he liked people who held convictions even if he disagreed with them. That day he finally asked the question out loud.

One of the girls answered without flinching. She told him the difference was Jesus Christ. Josh laughed once, short and sharp, then said he was fed up with religion, fed up with church, fed up with the Bible. She told him she had not mentioned religion at all. She had mentioned a person.

He took the challenge two days later. He said he would examine the claims himself and show us where they fell apart. I remember the exact phrasing because he delivered it like a bet. He wanted the sources, the dates, the legal weight behind the resurrection story. We gave him what we had. He walked out with a list and a look that said this would not take long.

The library became his second address. He arrived before the doors opened most mornings and stayed until the night staff flicked the lights. I saw him there on three separate evenings, stacks of books on either side of him, legal pads filled with notes. He worked through Josephus, the Roman historians, the Jewish sources. He tracked the timing of the trial, the burial customs, the guard detail. He measured distances between the tomb and the places the disciples claimed to have seen the risen Christ.

After six weeks the pads were thicker. He had stopped arguing with us in the union. Instead he asked narrower questions. How many people saw the body before the burial? Who had access to the tomb after the stone was rolled? What Roman penalty applied if a guard left his post? I watched him write the answers down, then cross-reference them with the Gospel accounts. He never skipped a citation.

One afternoon I found him standing in the aisle between two rows of shelves, a single volume open in his hands. He did not look up when I passed. The page was marked with a strip of paper. He turned it slowly, as if the text might change if he moved too fast.

By the tenth week the pattern shifted. He still came to the library, but he left earlier. He started sitting with us again, though he spoke less. The questions he did ask were no longer aimed at holes in the story. They were aimed at what the story would require of a person who accepted it. He never said that part out loud. It showed in the way he closed the books.

December nights in that town were already dark by five. On the nineteenth the wind came hard off the fields. I was in the dorm lounge when Josh walked through the door at eight. He carried nothing in his hands. He asked if anyone was free to talk. Two of us stayed. He sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees, and said he had finished the work he set out to do. The evidence had taken him where he had not planned to go. He could no longer call the resurrection a hoax without ignoring the documents he had just read.