From Jesus to Lab Coats

A Cold-Case Detective Traces the Scientific Revolution Back to Christ & Christianity

It all happened so long ago.

That’s how many people view the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Set in the distant past, the reports of his birth, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection might be true—or might not. And while we might accept accounts of ordinary events happening in the long-distant past, improbable events (like a virgin birth or a dead man coming back to life) are harder to swallow. How could we ever know for sure?

Person of Interest, a new book by former homicide investigator J.  Warner Wallace (Zondervan, 2021), explains how we can investigate events in the past, and he applies those investigative techniques to the most important missing-body mystery in human history—that of Jesus of Nazareth.

A Cold-Case Investigation

Wallace specialized in cold cases, criminal probes that had “gone cold.” He was given the task of revisiting cold cases, often years after the detectives originally assigned to them had given up and moved on. Wallace proved so successful at solving cold cases that his work has been featured on NBC’s Dateline.

For many years Wallace was an atheist. “As a thoughtful nonbeliever,” he writes, “I considered Jesus and the Bible equally fictional and irrelevant.” Most of the Christians he knew were people he had arrested. One colleague who was a Christian was also a science-denier with a low view of education. This did not incline Wallace to give any credence to the claims of Christianity.

Then personal circumstances motivated him to look at the evidence for the claims of Christ. How did he do this, given that Jesus lived so long ago? By using the same investigative methods he applied to cold cases.

Wallace opens Person of Interest by describing one of his cold cases in which a woman had gone missing. Was she dead? Or had she vanished of her own accord? Detectives at the time of her disappearance had been unable to figure out the answer, and the case went cold. Ten years later, it was assigned to Wallace.

Wallace goes on to explain the steps he used to investigate—and solve—the case. He intersperses discussion of the missing-person case with discussion of his research into Christ, and there are striking similarities between the two situations. “We don’t have Jesus’ body, and we don’t have a ‘crime scene’ to provide us with physical evidence,” Wallace writes. “Despite these limitations, we can still make a case for the historicity and deity of Jesus. We can do it without a body—and without any evidence from the New Testament.”

A Fuse & An Effect

He begins his investigations with an analogy: A crime is like a bomb.

When a bomb explodes, we don’t think it simply sprang into existence when it exploded. Instead, we know that a series of events led to the explosion. Wallace calls this the fuse—a metaphor representing all the prior events that explain why the bomb was built and why it exploded when it did. In this way, Wallace researched events before the “bomb.” He asked: If someone killed this woman, why do it at that particular time in her life? And he asked: If God really came to earth, why do it at that precise moment in history?

We can also look at the effect of the bomb, he says. Like a bomb, a crime produces results that can tell us things about the crime. By looking at the aftereffects, detectives can see who was affected, how much, and in what way. Did someone benefit? Did someone change his life in an unusual way?

Similarly, if Jesus really was God, Wallace says, that’s pretty “explosive.” We’d expect to see aftershocks. So he examined history after Jesus to see whether anything changed dramatically as a result of Jesus’ life. He looked at art, education, music, architecture, and science.

Let’s consider what Wallace found regarding science.

Fallout: A Scientific Revolution

Wallace had long viewed Christianity as a science stopper, but his investigation turned up something else entirely—a massive explosion of scientific advances that followed Christ and the spread of Christianity. Importantly, he also uncovered evidence that this was not mere coincidence, but actual causation (one event causing another).

First, science advanced in “bumps” that matched events affecting Christ-followers. After centuries of cruising along in a fairly straight line, an early bump in scientific progress came when the Roman empire stopped persecuting Christians (allowing those with an interest in studying nature to stop running for their lives and settle into research). The next bump came when Christ-followers were promoting education by establishing monasteries and collecting books. Other even more dramatic bumps arrived as Christians established the first universities, invented the printing press, launched the scientific revolution, and so on into the modern era.

Second, Wallace found that Christians were behind the vast majority of scientific advances, and he lists more than two hundred scientific disciplines in which Christians played crucial roles. They range from physics, chemistry, and biology to mathematics, engineering, and computer science. “Jesus followers didn’t simply contribute to the sciences,” Wallace writes, “they founded and led the sciences.”

What Lit the Fuse?

To a detective, all this raised questions of means and motive. Why would Christians be particularly interested in science? Why would they be particularly good at science? Why would a Christian culture be the very culture that birthed science? Wallace uncovered seven reasons, or “igniters.” Here are three:

Igniter #1. Christ-followers believed matter was good (unlike the Greeks, for instance, who thought the material world was either corrupt, inferior to the spiritual, or essentially untrustworthy). Since Christ-followers believed matter was good, they didn’t hesitate to get their hands dirty studying it.

Igniter #2. Christ-followers believed the world was created in an orderly, rational way by a singular, orderly, rational God (unlike the polytheistic cultures, which attributed various aspects of the world to various gods, many of whom were capricious and far from rational). Since they expected order and rationality in nature, they looked for it—and have found it time and again.

Igniter #5. Christ-followers believed they could better understand God by observing his work in the “Book of Nature.” They honored both the book of special revelation (the Scriptures) and the natural world, believing both revealed the nature and activity of God.

In the sciences, then, there’s been enormous positive fallout from Christ’s appearance on earth, and it is not coincidental but is tied directly to Christ’s life and teachings. Christ was—and still is—a catalyst for scientific discovery.

Testimony in a Lab Coat

Wallace makes other interesting points in his chapter on the sciences (including an explanation of why Muslim scientific advances suffered a sharp decline), but we’ll mention here just one final thought.

In polls taken before the 2020 pandemic, Americans were asked how much they trusted various professions. Scientists topped the list.

“If a scientist says it, most people believe it,” Wallace writes.

Perhaps that’s why I initially rejected the claims of Christianity. . . . I trusted scientists, whom I assumed had nothing to do with Jesus. But as I researched and identified the nearly one thousand premier scientists I’ve described in this chapter, I realized that these Christ followers also had something to say about Jesus.

What do the scientists say about Jesus? “The central claims of Christianity related to Jesus can be reconstructed from the writings of these eminent scientists. In every significant claim related to Jesus, the science fathers agree with the church fathers.”

“I found myself asking,” he continues, “‘If I trust scientists as much as I claim, why am I unwilling to take seriously what the world’s foremost scientists have to say about Jesus?’”

That’s a question any science devotee should be asking.