“If the Jesus of faith is not also the Jesus of history, he’s powerless and he’s meaningless. Unless he’s rooted in reality, unless he established his divinity by rising from the dead, he’s just a feel-good symbol who’s as irrelevant as Santa Claus” (Strobel, 127). Strobel’s reaction to the claim that Jesus wasn’t historical is the same (failed) attempt of the early church to justify the historical Jesus: if he wasn’t historical, he would have been ...