Edwin M. Yamauchi

Yamauchi was featured in the widely read Christian apologetic work The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. He has given presentations on the Easter story to such universities as Cornell, Yale, and Princeton. He has also appeared in various television documentaries concerning the life of Christ. Based on an interview, there is a biographical article in The Grains of Rice: Cincinnati Chapter Japanese American Citizens League, September 2001.

In the 1970s he was a prominent critic of the late Morton Smith's interpretation of an apocryphal text known as the Secret Gospel of Mark. Yamauchi revisited the corpus of Smith's writings on the topics of the lost gospels and Jesus as a magician-healer in his lengthy essay on magic and miracles (1986). Yamauchi faulted Smith's work on several points. One problem Yamauchi found was Smith's anachronistic use of third, fourth and fifth century AD Greek magical papyri sources in his reinterpretation of Christ as a magus-magician. He argued that Smith's "penchant for parallels with the life of Apollonius by Philostratus" was "historically anachronistic".

Though he was raised as a Buddhist, Yamauchi was educated at Iolani, an Episcopal school. He was first exposed to evangelicalism in 1952, after being invited to attend Kalihi Union Church by a classmate. In his senior high school year Yamauchi studied at a rural school and worked at a missionary farm known as the Christian Youth Center. He is a founding member of the Oxford Bible Fellowship church in Oxford, Ohio. He was a supporter of the Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship throughout his career, and particularly at the campus of Miami University. He has contributed popular articles to periodicals such as the Christianity Today magazine on the resurrection of Christ and in response to controversial claims made about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Edwin Masao Yamauchi (born 1937 in Hilo, Hawaii) is a Japanese-American historian, (Protestant) Christian apologist, editor and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of History at Miami University, where he taught from 1969 until 2005. He is married to Kimie Yamauchi (née Honda).