Life & Wisdom Quote by Josh McDowell

McDowell’s sentence is doing two jobs at once: it frames an evidence problem and pre-frames the opposition. By reminding us that the New Testament is the “primary historical source” for the resurrection, he pins the entire debate to a single archive. That’s strategic. If your case depends on one set of documents, the most efficient counter-move is to discredit those documents. McDowell names that counter-move upfront, so skepticism starts to look less like open inquiry and more like a targeted campaign.

The phrasing “many critics during the 19th century attacked” is loaded. “Critics” sounds intellectual, but “attacked” sounds hostile, almost ideological. It subtly recasts historical-critical scholarship not as a methodological shift but as an adversarial posture. The subtext: modern doubt isn’t neutral; it’s inherited, organized, and motivated by something other than truth-seeking.

Context matters here. The 19th century saw the rise of higher criticism, expanding university culture, post-Enlightenment suspicion of miracles, and new historical methods applied to sacred texts like any other literature. For apologetics, that era becomes a convenient origin story for “the skepticism problem.” McDowell, writing as a popular Christian evidentialist, compresses that complex intellectual ecosystem into a simple narrative: resurrection claim -> documentary dependence -> critics move to undermine reliability.

It works rhetorically because it shifts the battlefield. Instead of arguing the resurrection directly, it argues about the trustworthiness of sources, and it encourages readers to see challenges to biblical reliability as predictable, almost reflexive, rather than as potentially substantive critiques.