Who are the greatest living influencers today and frankly, who cares? Let's talk in terms of numbers. On TikTok, professional dancer Charli D'Amelio has over 125 million followers. On Twitter, former US president Barack Obama has over 130 million followers. On Instagram, footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has a whopping 349.7 million followers! Cristiano is also the most followed public figure on Facebook, then it's Mr Bean with 128 million people interested in the funny antics of this fictional character! This just goes to show that just because someone is popular doesn't mean they have to be a real person. Talking about fictional characters, I used to think Jesus was the equivalent to Mr Bean popularity. He said and did things that were legendary in both senses of the word. Feeding the five thousand or raising a person from the dead were cool but he probably didn't even exist and the whole story about his life was probably exaggerated for entertainment. I'm not the only one who has thought this. Many people today believe that Jesus either didn't exist or he probably was just a nice guy that had his ideas inflated into a fairytale to control the masses. That's why Jim Warner Wallace's latest book, Person of Interest is the kind of work I would have appreciated having when I was an atheist investigating who Jesus was. As a former police detective who's had extensive experience solving cold-case murders where there's no body to examine except a trail of clues, Jim's book is an investigation into what we can know about Jesus and the impact he's had on world history using the same detective methods and without using the New Testament Bible.
Like the aftermath of a bomb where each piece of left-over shrapnel tells us something about who set it off and what led to the crime in first place, Jim takes his own story of investigating the real life murder case of Tammy Hayes and weaves his own journey as a skeptic, studying the impact Jesus had on the world we live in today. He traces back to each clue (known as 'the fuse') and connects them altogether in order to make a final case ('the fallout') for the Person of Interest at the centre of the crime.
In Person of Interest, Jim's main argument is that if Jesus was really God with skin on who actually came into this world as a real person, then we would expect the colossal impact that he has had on science, education, literature, art, architecture, music and the cultural values we treasure today.
If Jesus was who he claimed to be, then we would expect Jesus to have split the calendar in two from Before the Common Era (BCE) to after the Common Era (CE). We would expect that God would make himself known by being at the centre of world history itself, being more famous than every person who's ever lived.
If Jesus had Instagram, he'd have 2.3 billion followers. That would make him the biggest influencer alive today.
Whilst having a large amount of followers doesn't mean what a public figure does is always good or true, someone's popularity shows that there's something about this person that people are drawn to, want to become more like and that they have a powerful message that shapes the culture around them. This, Jim argues, is why Jesus matters in a world that rejects the Bible.
His life affects the very fabric of society - even if we don't follow or believe his teachings ourselves.
This is something we need to sit up and listen to because if Jesus is central to everything we value in society, then in Jim's mind, it follows that we need to further investigate the claim that Jesus may truly be God in the flesh. And if that's true, this would mean Jesus has to be at the centre of our lives too.
If, like me, you had no background in who Jesus is, Person of Interest is a fantastic overview of how his influence affects every day things you didn't even know!
Before I read this book, I knew there were a few scientists who followed Jesus but I didn't realise how many scientific discoveries were birthed out of that belief. Jim lists the hundreds of new theories that he believes wouldn't have come about if Jesus wasn't the catalyst behind the investigation.
To name a few, the fathers of galactic astronomy, big bang cosmology, bacteriology, x-rays, the electrical battery and computer science all founded and led the sciences. This matters because a lot of people think that Jesus hindered scientific discoveries but the reality is much more eye-opening, it is surprising to think that a lot of what we know today about physics, chemistry and biology wouldn't have advanced as quickly if Jesus had not been at the centre of the scientific revolution.
Jim writes,
"That's right, men and women who founded the disciplines of physics and chemistry, biology and cosmology, evolutionary genetics and quantum mechanics also believed that Jesus performed miracles and rose from the grave. They were certain that the supernatural author of the laws they had studied had the power to intervene in the natural world and that he had done so in the person of interest known as Jesus of Nazareth.
As George Ellis, an astrophysicist who collaborated on the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems, once wrote, "God's nature is revealed most perfectly in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded in the New Testament of the Bible, who was sent by God to reveal the divine nature, summarised in 'God is Love'.
Jesus matters to the history of science. At some point, I found myself asking, "If I trust scientists as much as I claim, why am I unwilling to take seriously what the world's foremost scientists have to say about Jesus?"
There's also a fascinating chapter on how Jesus impacted education. It turns out that the top 15 universities in the world including Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Harvard and Princeton were all founded upon the teachings of Jesus.
Even if you destroyed all the Bibles in the world, you could find out the story of Jesus' life through the images on university chapels and halls. What's the point that Jim tries to make? It's that making Jesus and his principles the centre of learning, advanced education throughout the world. Millions of people would not know how to read, write, develop human rights and set up the laws of our justice system without attending kindergartens and colleges that were founded on Jesus' teachings.
Jim is also trained in architectural design so I like how he draws all these illustrations of his findings!
This is what makes Person of Interest even more unique and a great communication tool for all types of people. Each picture is like an atlas where you can see the scale of the point he makes. He zooms in with one drawing and then pans out so you can see the bigger picture. That's what makes the book so appealing to visual learners like myself and those who also love narrative and facts - they're all connected into one book in a way that the message stays with you long after you put the book down.
A highlight of the book is a series of illustrations picturing every artist and art era that points back to Jesus. I was amazed to learn that Jesus had such an inescapable impact on the world of arts and architecture. So much so, that most well-known artistic creations, techniques and stories central to the development of art history, would not have been the same unless Jesus existed.
''If Mark's gospel, along with every episode it described, was destroyed, it could be reconstructed from the earliest art (most originating from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, and all well before the Renaissance period).
Every important detail about the life and ministry of Jesus - as described in the gospel of Mark - has also been painted or sculpted by inspired artists in the earliest centuries of the Common Era.
This is also true of the other gospels. Artists looked to every chapter of every gospel for inspiration.
Even if all the New Testament manuscripts were gone, the story of Jesus would remain, unless of course, you were willing and able to destroy two thousand years of art.
That's what it would take to erase the evidence of Jesus' life and ministry. That's how much Jesus has mattered to artists."
One of the strongest chapters in Person of Interest is about how Jesus fulfills every expectation and longing in all the major world religions.
''His influence on spiritual seekers and religious thinkers is so overwhelming that every major world religion either mentions or merges him into their theological system. From the scriptures of non-Christian religions and their leaders' statements, the life of Jesus could be reconstructed, even without access to the New Testament.''
Jim's analysis of comparative religion makes a strong case that Jesus is a Person of Interest even outside of Christianity. From Buddha to Deepak Chopra, no-one can deny that Jesus holds a unique position as a religious figure who did more to influence other religions than they have influenced Jesus.
Whilst there are lots of strong evidences that connect Person of Interest's fuse, I think there are some weak chapters that weaken his argument. Jim tries to make a case on how Jesus had to arrive at the particular time in history that he did because of certain factors in history and technology. He calls it 'the red zone'. I didn't find this convincing because you had to make a lot of presuppositions to lead to that point. I think you could equally make a case for any time in history to be the best one for Jesus to arrive at.
For example, many skeptics could rightfully say, 'wouldn't the 21st century be the best time for Jesus to be born into? We have cameras to capture more visual evidence of miracles and could use computers to translate his words quicker than writing what Jesus said by hand?'
I think Jim tries too hard to make Jesus the centre of history in this respect when it is unnecessary. I think he could have just left the evidences of the cultural fallout rather than being too specific on Jesus having to be born at a particular time. When Jim also goes into detail about the book of Daniel and the prophetic dates, I felt this was going too much into the kind of case you'd find in a Watchtower magazine, whilst fulfilled prophecy is a very powerful evidence for the Bible being a supernatural book, I think Jim relies too much on the presuppositions of a prophecy that isn't completely agreed on by most mainstream scholars.
Person of Interest would be a stronger book without any appeal to the Hebrew Bible, but if Jim had to choose evidence from Jewish texts, I think there are many stronger case for prophecies about Jesus found in Isaiah, Zechariah and the Psalms that he could have focused on instead of the weaker case in Daniel that requires a lot of assumptions about dates.
Overall, from beginning to end, Person of Interest is a gripping book that helps you explore the evidence for Jesus through the eyes of a cold-case detective. Its unique and visual approach is nothing like you'll ever read this year! Whilst the jump from popularity to truth claim could be a stretch for many skeptical readers, I think Jim provides a compelling case that in the crime scene of life, Jesus is an unavoidable figure whose impact on our lives today can't be explained away through a simple naturalistic explanation, he truly is the Person of Interest at the centre of world history and what it means to be human.
