Show Me the Wounds

Show Me the Wounds: Faith, Evidence, and the Honest Search for Truth

Thomas refused to believe until he could put his hand in the wounds. Paul was knocked to the ground by a blinding encounter. Even the disciples doubted on Easter morning and were convinced only by what Scripture calls "many convincing proofs." Yet somewhere along the way, Christians inherited a very different message - that needing evidence is a weakness of faith, perhaps even a failure of it.

In Show Me the Wounds, Timothy W. Putnam takes that contradiction seriously. Returning to what the New Testament actually says - beginning with the Greek word pistis, so often flattened into "blind belief" - he makes the case that the first generation of believers were never asked to believe without reason. They saw, they questioned, they struggled, and they came to faith because evidence was given to them.

Putnam writes as someone who spent a career following evidence wherever it led. A petrophysicist who worked across the world reading the record buried in rock, he brings the same patient, evidence-first discipline to Scripture that he once brought to the subsurface. The result is neither a defense of easy belief nor an argument for unbelief, but an honest reckoning with the gap between the proof offered to the first witnesses and the trust expected of everyone who came after them.

Along the way, the book reexamines the doubt of the disciples, the conversion of Paul, the forty days of the risen Christ, the meaning of "blessed are those who have not seen," the resurrection as Christianity's central and most testable claim, the long-debated tension between Paul and James, and how faith and evidence actually compare across the world's religions.

It is written for believers who have quietly wondered, for doubters who were told their questions were the problem, for those who have walked away from the faith, and for anyone who suspects that asking for evidence is not a spiritual failure - but the most honest way to seek the truth.