The Doctor with no Doctorates and the Scholar with no Scholarly Work For nearly four decades, he has systematically deceived his followers, his donors, his publishers, and the world about the very matter that makes him so special, his scholarly qualifications. Thompson not to tell her husband about the relationship.īut Indiscretions of that sort can quickly be damage-controlled by a tearful confession or, at worst, a little jail time. Most explosively, in his court filing he does not deny the allegation that he threatened suicide in an email so as to persuade Ms. Zacharias admits receiving nude and sexually suggestive photographs from Lori Anne Thompson and not reporting their relationship to his Governance Council until things went sour and she threatened legal action. On July 31 of 2017 he filed a federal lawsuit against a married Canadian woman with whom he recently had an online relationship. Not that Ravi Zacharias is squeaky clean in the boy/girl department.
And what surfaced is far worse than the usual sex or money scandals that embarrass so many professional men of God. Ravi Zacharias, it turned out, has been less than honest about a great many things.
Zacharias himself had known full well that the dating of Daniel was controversial. Daniel had “predicted” something that had already happened. In this case, the overwhelming scholarly consensus is that Daniel was written after Alexander’s time. The Hal Lindseys of the world cash their checks before anybody has the time to scrutinize their theories. That’s just the way extravagant prophetic claims work. I should know by now that, for every 30 seconds it takes a Christian apologist to make a “fulfilled prophecy” claim, it takes a few hours of tedious research to see that it is probably bogus. Would Ravi Zacharias force me to adjust my atheist worldview? The argument was compelling in large part because it came from a man whose academic credentials were as good as anybody’s. “Centuries before to be so specific in prophecy” could only be evidence of “the supernatural” in the Book of Daniel, he thundered. Zacharias waving his arms and talking about the Seleucids and the Ptolemaics as he stood before that University of Illinois student audience. Christians worldwide hail him as God’s answer to the secularist cancer that has infested the academy. Zacharias presents his impeccable academic credentials in a way that starkly differentiates him from ordinary circuit-riding preachers, and he makes sure we know that he’s got the resumé to go with the suit, littering his lectures, writings and publicity materials with references to famous universities with which he claims to be professionally connected. His CitizenAudit entry shows his ministry bringing in $25 million yearly. He gets millions of YouTube hits, packs auditoriums, and has a growing portfolio of self-named ministries with offices around the world. The late evangelist and lawyer Chuck Colson called him “the great apologist of our time.” His weekly radio show plays on over 2,000 outlets worldwide, he has written over 25 books, many of them bestsellers. Ravi Zacharias is famous for his ability to pull off arguments like this. the prophet Daniel predicted with stunning precision the rise and fall of Alexander the Great two centuries later.ĭr. This man demonstrated convincingly that in the 6th century B.C.E. I found a video lecture by a Cambridge and Oxford scholar whose credentials included several doctorate degrees and a stint at Cambridge studying quantum physics. It was the summer of 2015 and, as is sometimes my practice, I was searching the Internet for smart Christian apologists who might ruffle my atheist paradigm. Ravi Zacharias in The Real Face of Atheism “Ravi Zacharias is perhaps the best-known Christian apologist of our day.”