So in "The Case For The Real Jesus" Strobel interviews a Biblical scholar with the last name of Wallace who says certain things about some Biblical passages.
The scholar says the story of the woman caught in adultery was added into John's gospel by a later writer and cannot be trusted as far as details. Well, maybe Luke wrote the passage but was not inspired to put it in his gospel. John later got ahold of it and included it in his gospel, adding the specific details. John was one of Jesus' disciples, so he either would have been there or he could have asked other witnesses.
Wallace says that the detail of the sin being adultery is not verifiable. Logically, though, the sin the woman was caught in had to be adultery because that's the only capital offense that falls outside of one's body, that is, that involves multiple persons. One thing that I think is quite inferable from the passage is that the woman's accusers were all guilty as well.
Wallace says the verses at the end of Mark 16 weren't included in the original manuscripts, but were added later based on incidents from Acts. Well, who's being like atheists and putting the cart before the horse now, Strobel and Wallace? Also, where would the writer get the sign of drinking poison if it weren't originally in Mark's gospel? There is no example of that sign taking place in Acts.
Wallace says Mark 1 41 should read Jesus was moved with anger, not compassion, but this is utterly stupid and ridiculous on it's face, contextually speaking. This leper comes to Jesus and says that if it's Jesus' will, Jesus can make him clean. Jesus heals the leper and basically says that it is His will and the leper is clean. Why would Jesus be angry in that situation?
Most difficult, and, in the end, damningly on Wallace and Strobel's part, however, is the assertion that 1 John 5 7-8 is not actually part of the Bible. Wallace says the verses were taken from a homily in the eighth century, but less than an hour's research on the internet turns up that these verses were referred to and even directly quoted in the third, fourth and fifth centuries. For example, Cyprian alludes to these verses by including the words "these three are one" in one of his writings on the trinity, and he reportedly also quotes the passage directly in another one of his writings.
Wallace angrily laments the ignorance in the church today when referring to 1 John 5 7-8, but who is being willingly or unwillingly ignorant? Are Strobel and Wallace possibly not ignorant but deliberately misleading?
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