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Reviewed by David Kilgour, M.P.
In a period when a host of anti-human
philosophies and their supporters are in full retreat around the world,
lawyers, among others, are presumably taking a closer look at Christianity.
This work by a former lawyer, who is now a pastor in Sydney, Australia, is a
timely and significant addition to the post-modern debate on the Christ event.
Contrary to some conventional thought,
Ross's thesis is that faith in God is for the intelligent and tough-minded
rather than the mentally weak-wristed. If the proof of Jesus' resurrection can
be shown to satisfy some of the best legal minds in history, he, and no one
else, is deity. If Jesus really died and came back to life, he deserves to be
worshipped because he overcame humankind's ultimate foe: death. If he
demonstrated his Godliness by overcoming death, moreover, humankind can trust
his assertion that he would pay the penalty for our sins and bring believers
eternal life.
Among the eight well-known lawyers
whose analyses are chosen for careful examination by the author are John
Warwick Montgomery, the former English Lord Chancellor Hailsham and Norman
Anderson. Montgomery, for example, a law professor with two doctorates and the
author of numerous books, accepted Christianity "kicking and screaming" while
at university and has since become a leading evangelical scholar. "Christian
faith alone," the reluctant convert concludes, "among the religious claims of
history, is able to stand in the dock and be vindicated evidentially . . . (It)
rests its case on the divine life, sacrificial death and miraculous
resurrection of the incarnate God . . . ."
Montgomery's scrutiny of the gospels
of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is multi-layered and sophisticated. He
concludes that each was written in the first century and reflects accurately
the testimony of firsthand witnesses who saw Jesus die and return to life.
Referring to various copies made of the Gospels from as early as AD 175, he
contends that we can today reconstruct the originals as admissible historical
documents.
Lord Hailsham has been Speaker of the
British House of Lords and a member of cabinet. While doing a logic paper at
the age of 23 at Oxford University, his earlier exposure to Christianity
rekindled and he began attending church again, later committing himself to
Christ. Among other reasons he did so was because he came to realize that
Britain's system of education, its network of hospitals, and its social system
each had a clear origin in Christianity, with secular society largely following
along behind.
A case early in his career in which a
two or three-year-old girl uttered the heartbreaking words, "I'm sorry, Mommy,"
moments before her mother beat her to death seems to have been another turning
point. "the one thing which keeps me sane and well-balanced in such moods of
black despair is the meaning of Christ's passion, his shameful conviction, his
cruel mishandling, his slow death and the ultimate hopelessness of his cry of
dereliction . . . a statement that God the invisible - the Creator, the ground
of all living, without body, parts on passions - enters into human suffering
with us and somehow agonizes in all our private Gethsemanes."
Hailsham examines carefully the
personality and events of the period (e.g., Pilate and Tiberius Caesar) and
concludes that facts we know definitively about Jesus are consistent with what
the four evangelists tell us about the Christ event. If the founder of
Christianity had never been crucified, someone - Greek, Roman or Jew - would
have said so, he concludes.
In short, in a period of Christian
revival, this is a significant book, which every lawyer should read.
Other Reviewers’
Comments
This little book will greatly help
people understand the strength of the rational case for Christianity. It is
written in a clear, interesting style and is eminently suitable for the general
reader.
The Catholic Weekly
If you have friends who believe that
the account of the life of Jesus in the Gospels is a fairy tale, a piece of
Jewish mythology, or that Jesus’ resurrection was a figment of the
disciples’ fertile imagination, then this book is a useful broom to be
applied to their thinking. It will make them consider again what they have
prejudicially dismissed.
Lawyers Christian Fellowship Newsletter
The biographical sketches of the
lawyers are all interesting, and the evidence and arguments are spelled out
clearly with forensic precision.
Kel Richards, On Being
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