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The law firm has also discovered a pattern of intimate SMS and email relationships with women. Examining her electronic devices, they found the phone numbers of over 200 massage therapists and over 200 selfies, some of them nude, of much younger women. Mr. Zacharias has also used the nonprofit ministry to financially support some of his long-term therapists. The report also reveals that he owned two apartments in Bangkok, where he spent 256 days between 2010 and 2014. One of his massage therapists stayed in the other apartment.
Mr. Zacharias said in 2017 that in 45 years of marriage, “I have never engaged in any inappropriate behavior of any kind.”
The report deals a terrible blow to the reputation of a man who for decades was a widely admired evangelical leader. Born in Chennai, India, and possessing impressive academic credentials, he had a reputation among many evangelicals as a worldly and handsome intellectual. The motto of his ministry is “Help the thinker to believe.” Help the believer to think.
Mr. Zacharias specialized in apologetics, a tradition that focuses on logical appeals to the truth of the Christian faith, and on equipping evangelicals to engage non-believers in conversations about the faith.
“People on the benches of evangelical churches, when they think of a Christian intellectual, they would have thought of Ravi Zacharias,” said John Fea, historian at the Evangelical College of the Messiah. “He had an immense influence on how grassroots American evangelicals thought about how to defend their faith.”
He also built RZIM, which at the time of his death employed over 100 full-time lecturers around the world. The ministry appealed to Christian donors who saw Zacharias as the rare evangelist who could reach atheists and intellectuals in the academy, corporate boards and other elite spaces. As his health failed last spring, public tributes poured in from high profile fans including football and baseball player Tim Tebow and Christian rap player Lecrae.
It turned out that Mr. Zacharias’ academic reputation was based in part on exaggerations. Although he often calls himself a “professor” or “researcher” at the University of Oxford, for example, he has little honorary affiliation with a Christian university. He had also inflated his relationship with the University of Cambridge. And although he used the title “Dr. Zacharias ”in many contexts, including in his 2006 memoir,“ Walking From East to West, ”his only doctorates were honorary, as RZIM conceded in 2017.
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