Book excerpt: The author Robert M. Sutherland is an accomplished Canadian criminal and civil trial lawyer with 34 years at the bar in five provinces, having had some notable successes, changing the law nationally and provincially at various points in time. He is philosophically a moderate realist and a natural law thinker, in the tradition of the three great Western thinkers: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and MortImer J. Adler and a former Canadian director of the Chicago-based think-tank “Mortimer J. Adler’s Centre for the Study of the Great Ideas”. He is an evangelical Christian and a member of the United Church of Canada. This is how he would format the testimonial evidence of the various gospel writers in the court of public opinion for the purpose of assessing their individual and collective credibility and reliability and ultimately their three basic historical claims: namely, (1) Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be divine. (2) He died for that claim. (3) He rose again from the dead to establish the truth of that claim. These are purely historical matters, knowable and provable on a balance of probabilities. And to assist the reader he has provided some helpful methodologies for understanding the nature of truth, the nature of the natural moral law and the nature of historical inquiry.