Holy Week calls us to pause, to look beyond the ordinary, and to seek answers to the questions that have shaped human history: who was Jesus Christ? What does reason tell us about God? In Guatemala, where the streets fill with carpets and the air with incense, two books illuminate these mysteries with rigor and depth, making them ideal readings for Holy Week.
The first is The Case for Christ (1998) by Lee Strobel. The work recounts the journey of a skeptical journalist and convinced atheist who decides to refute his wife’s Christian faith and “rescue” her from what he considered an irrational belief. To do so, he embarks on a journalistic investigation lasting two years, interviewing thirteen experts in different scientific disciplines. However, the historical, textual, and circumstantial evidence he encounters leads him to question his own atheism. With the pace of a thriller, Strobel builds an investigation into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that challenges the deepest convictions.
In his account, he tells us about Dr. Craig Blomberg, an expert on the reliability of the New Testament, who states that the Gospels, written between 70 and 90 A.D., are based on eyewitness testimony, unlike biographies such as those of Alexander the Great, written 400 years later. The creed of 1 Corinthians 15, dated 2–5 years after the crucifixion, proclaims the resurrection from a very early stage: “…for we affirm that God raised Christ.” In other words, it was not a later invention created over time.
Dr. Bruce Metzger, one of the leading authorities in textual criticism, explains that more than 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, including a fragment of the Gospel of John dated around 125 A.D. To this are added early translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and Ethiopic, bringing the total to more than 24,000 manuscripts with astonishing agreement, superior to that of any other known religious text. In addition to the internal evidence of the Gospels, Dr. Edwin Yamauchi, historian of antiquity, draws on extra-biblical sources such as Flavius Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger, whose writings confirm the historical existence of Jesus as early as the first century.
Dr. John McRay, archaeologist, confirms various historical aspects found in the Gospels, such as Jesus’ route through the Decapolis region, the existence of Nazareth in the first century A.D., the possibility that there were two governors named Quirinius in Syria, or the presence of Lysanias as tetrarch of Abilene around 27 A.D. Meanwhile, Dr. Alexander Metherell, physician, provides evidence from the field of medicine: he explains phenomena such as hematidrosis — a condition in which a person, under extreme stress, sweats blood due to ruptured capillaries in the sweat glands — and hypovolemic shock, characterized by tachycardia, low blood pressure, anuria, and intense thirst, symptoms consistent with the crucifixion accounts. Finally, Drs. William Lane Craig, philosopher, and Gary Habermas, historian, argue in favor of the historicity of the empty tomb and Jesus’ appearances, based on widely documented early testimonies.
Dr. Louis Lapides, a Jewish theologian converted to Christianity, calculates that the probability of someone fulfilling all the messianic prophecies is one in one hundred billion trillion. The theologians Ben Witherington III and D.A. Carson delve into Jesus’ claim to divinity, analyzing his use of the term “Abba” — an intimate way of referring to God as Father — his unique way of teaching by introducing his words with the formula “Truly I say to you,” and his self-definition as the “Son of Man.” Meanwhile, Dr. Gary Collins, psychologist, dismisses with clinical arguments any indication of mental disorder in Jesus, while philosopher J.P. Moreland highlights how the early rise of the Church — despite brutal Roman repression — constitutes powerful testimony to the transformative impact of the resurrection. Faced with this accumulation of evidence, the book leaves an unavoidable question: can someone rationally deny the divinity of Christ?
In New Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God (2023), José Carlos González-Hurtado argues that current scientific advances suggest intelligent design in the universe, challenging both believers and atheists to look beyond chance. The author presents numerous cases of scientists who, far from dismissing God, cite Him as a reasonable hypothesis. One of the most revealing examples is that of Dr. Fred Hoyle, renowned astronomer, who became skeptical of the idea of chance after discovering that the universal constants are fine-tuned with a precision of one in 10^120, making life possible. For him, it was as if someone had “tampered with the dice.” Similarly, theoretical physicist Frank Tipler and materials engineer Walter Bradley explain this fine-tuning as a phenomenon whose probabilities are practically impossible. In the field of biology, Dr. Francis Collins — geneticist and director of the Human Genome Project — abandoned atheism after decoding human DNA: three billion perfectly coded letters suggesting intentional design rather than mere coincidence.
Dr. Werner Heisenberg, physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics, broke with materialist determinism by formulating the uncertainty principle, thus opening the possibility of human freedom within the universe. Mathematician David Hilbert, meanwhile, illustrates with his famous Infinite Hotel paradox the logical impossibility of a universe without a beginning. From philosophy, Dr. Richard Swinburne, professor emeritus at Oxford, argues that the multiverse hypothesis — the existence of a “trillion universes” — is far less reasonable than the existence of a single God as the first cause. From the Big Bang to the complexity of the genome, this book masterfully intertwines science and faith. Ultimately, it is an invitation to contemplate the sky during Holy Week and ask ourselves: could it be that science, far from distancing us, is actually bringing us closer to the Creator?
These reading recommendations are an invitation to explore the mystery of life through reason, evidence, and the search for meaning. I close, then, by wishing everyone — believers or not — a Holy Week of rest and reflection, in which we may turn our gaze toward the virtue of the citizen and the profound meaning of our existence. May this time allow us to renew our purpose and walk with greater clarity toward a fuller, more conscious, and more just life with ourselves and with others. So may it be.
