If anyone had reason to be angry, it was Josh.
Josh was abused as a child and tells of the horrors he faced as a part of everyday life. He lived with that anger until college, where he made friends with a small group of Christians. In his book, Josh McDowell writes:
My new friends issued me a challenge I couldn’t believe. They challenged me, a pre-law student, to make a rigorous, intellectual examination of the claims of Jesus Christ: that he is God’s Son; that he inhabited a human body and lived among real men and women; that he died on the cross for the sins of humanity; that he was buried and was resurrected three days later; and that he is still alive and can change a person’s life even today.
I thought this challenge was a joke. These Christians were so dumb. How could something as flimsy as Christianity stand up to an intellectual examination? I scoffed at their challenge.
But they didn’t let up. They continued to challenge me day after day, and finally they backed me into the corner. I became so irritated at their insistence that I finally accepted their challenge—just to prove them wrong. I decided to write a book that would show them that Christianity was a joke—intellectually and historically. I left college for a period of months so that I could travel throughout the United States and Europe to gather evidence in libraries and museums to prove that Christianity is a sham.
At the end of my journey in Europe, I found myself sitting in a museum library in London, England. After several hours of research studying some out-of-print books, I leaned back in my chair, rubbed my eyes, and without remembering I was in a quiet library, I spoke out loud, “It’s true. It’s true! It’s really true!”
He wrestled with his research for months before he finally had to make a personal decision. If the resurrection of Jesus Christ was true, as he had come to be convinced, he had to either ignore the evidence or submit to Jesus as Lord.
1 McDowell, Josh; McDowell, Sean. Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World (p. xxvii). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.