Life & Wisdom Quote by Josh McDowell

McDowell’s line is doing quiet courtroom work: it frames the resurrection not as a floating miracle claim but as an event staged against a known historical and cultural set. “Fully aware” is the key pressure point. It doesn’t merely compliment the New Testament writers; it preemptively disarms the skeptical move that early Christians were naive, myth-making provincials who didn’t know any better. The phrase smuggles in credibility by implying a kind of journalistic competence: they understood what counts as normal (death stays dead), what counts as religiously loaded (messianic expectation, prophetic fulfillment), and what counts as politically dangerous (Rome’s interest in keeping order).

The “background” is also a rhetorical bridge between faith and evidentiary argument. McDowell, as a modern evangelical apologist, is speaking to late-20th-century anxieties about belief being embarrassed by history. Instead of asking you to start with doctrine, he asks you to start with setting: burial practices, hostile authorities, public execution, a community that had every incentive to avoid scandal. If witnesses knew the backdrop, then their claims are cast as deliberate and costly, not accidental or symbolic.

Subtext: the resurrection is being positioned as the least convenient thing to invent. It’s an argument from implausibility-to-fabricate, aimed at readers trained by modern skepticism to treat miracle reports as legend. McDowell’s sentence doesn’t prove the resurrection; it attempts to upgrade it from “myth” to “testimony,” shifting the debate from whether miracles happen to whether these particular people knew what they were claiming.