Josephus does not tell us that Christianity is true, and Christians do not need Josephus to tell them that Christ is risen. But Christianity makes claims about things that happened in public history under identifiable rulers, priests, and governors. For that reason, testimony from outside the church matters.
Today, the longing for cultural Christianity on both the left and the right hearkens back to an older version of Christendom that was a mixed blessing for the church in the western world. The cultural mediation of Christian views on created order has certainly benefitted the civilization we’ve inherited. But the gospel itself isn’t something that can be reduced to cultural mediation either. Instead, the gospel as a message stands apart from all human accomplishments and achievements, no matter how beneficial they might be.
The student of Scripture should always have a map open next to their Bible as they read. If possible, they should also travel to Israel, not to make a pilgrimage, but to see the context of the land in which these stories took place. These are not fairy tales made up about fictional fantasy lands; these are stories about real people in real places interacting with a real God.

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The Sixth Sense is a suspenseful and scary movie where a little boy is born with the strange gift of seeing dead people.
Satan cannot stand the Gospel, and so he goes to work to undermine and render God’s Word an impotent and absurd message.
The wound on my hand would not let me forget what happened. The crackled and blistered strip of skin was a memento of the searing pain I felt that day. For the remainder of that year, I was constantly reminded of what I had done.
How strange and yet how comforting: God prays to God for us, the Spirit to the Father. He sees through the fog of our emotions to what we truly need.
By focusing intently on what one wants to avoid, we often crash right into the moral hazard we are trying to evade.
Death is never natural. Death is abnormal. Death is not human. Death is the enemy.
We demand that our Creator defend His judgment and justification of sinners in a courtroom where we are judge, prosecuting attorney, and jury.
The Law though it does many things—restrains, exhorts the Christian unto righteousness, punishes—always rightly accuses and condemns sinners of their sin before a righteous, holy, and just God.
I hear voices in my head accusing me, telling me these sins will be there on the Day of Judgment unless I make atonement.
There’s something very attractive about both the cross-ladder and the cross-crutches. In fact, there’s something about both of them that the woodworker within us finds eminently more appealing than the simple cross of Jesus.
I spend a lot of time talking to people in coffee shops. Some share my Christian faith, some are exploring and questioning faith and others have left the church, having had a crisis of faith.
Having a particularly sad day, I set out to find the Gospel of Happy.