The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of The Evidence for Jesus

Over the past year I sought out the best and most popular books for and against Christianity and set out to see which would tip the spiritual scale for me. I've been a lifelong christian who finally found the courage to face the equally lifelong doubts and questions I'd always had but quieted with 'faith'. Lee Strobel's "Case For Christ" was a fantastic read that condenses the top challenges surrounding Christ and the New Testament, posing them to the top experts in the respective fields. His background as a reporter gave him a great advantage in being able to understand, word and deliver pertinent questions to the experts (all of them world class in their profession). I also enjoyed how he interjected the various stories of legal cases he worked and how they fit perfectly into the issue at hand and how evidence or lack of can sometimes be misleading. The great thing about the book is that he touches on the critical questions most people have about Jesus and if we can trust the New Testament accounts, delivering them with pin-point accuracy to the experts and does a great job in capturing the essence of the responses. The downside is because he covers so much ground, he cannot go into deep details or really hash out some answers - so it sometimes feel like we are left with only a piece of the steak and scoop of potatoes rather than an entire satisfying meal. However, Strobel ends each chapter with links to other resources - and encourages readers to delve further in their research and come to their own 'verdict' on the matter. He is a former atheist who saw the evidence for Christ was convincing and decided to become a christian. Overall, it is a fantastic read. And Strobel's "bull-dog" approach to getting to the crux of the matter is something I enjoyed a lot. He did not treat any of the experts with kid gloves or dance around the issues - he went straight for the kill and most of the time I found the experts rose to the challenge. I couldn't put this book down in some parts and when I did, couldn't wait to get back to reading it. Very well done, I highly recommend.

Mr Strobel, this is a good book vitiated, I fear, by one issue that merits, in my view, your anxious consideration.You assert that Jesus claimed to be God. On the contrary, Jesus constantly referred to God as his father, indicating that Jesus is the son of God--no more and no less. Dr Carson's convoluted attempt to effectively interpret Jesus's unequivocal and unambiguous statement "for the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28) as "the Father is NOT greater than I" amounts, I am afraid, to risible sophistry; God has no equal.Moreover, Jesus and God are "one" only in the sense that they are of one accord as demonstrated by Jesus's request addressed to God that his disciples "may be one as we are one" (John 17:11, 22). Now, if Jesus is God incarnate, who precisely was he praying to in John 17? Self-evidently, there would be no need for Jesus to pray to God if he is himself God.Note also in Luke 22:42 that Jesus says "yet not my will, but yours be done", indicating that God's will takes precedence over that of Jesus and that God is indeed greater than Christ. Therefore, God and His son, Jesus, are self-evidently two wholly separate, discrete beings, as further demonstrated in 1 Corinthians 11:3, which states "the head of Christ is God". See also 1 Corinthians 15:27-28, 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Mark 10:18. After all, how can God sit at his own right hand (Psalm 110:1, acts 2:34)? Additionally, Colossians 1:15 states "[Jesus is] the firstborn over all creation." This means Jesus was created by God and therefore had a beginning whereas God has no beginning (Psalm 90:2).While the historical perspective given by theologians such as Dr Carson are sometimes useful, sight must not be lost of the fact that the scriptures were written by ordinary people for ordinary people, and theologians are not infallible. After all, I suspect we have them to thank for the inquisition and the sell of "indulgencies", among other iniquities, by the Church of Rome.In conclusion, the son of God cannot simultaneously be God; this is an affront to commonsense. Thankfully, Jesus does not himself, at any stage in the scriptures, require us to make this insuperable leap in imagination; He, as far as I am aware, does not anywhere claim to be god. Therefore, the trinitarian doctrine, adhered to by some (particularly papists) is fataly flawed: there is no such thing as a trinity of equals in the scriptures.Separately, it’s my view at present that, although it is inspired by God, the Bible is not entirely free from error since its writers were fallible human beings. For example, in Romans 13:3, NIV, Paul states that “For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong.” In my view this statement is just as false today as it undoubtedly was in Paul’s times; certainly, the victim’s of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge or those of Hitler’s third Reich would take vehement exception to it. Are we to understand that these tyrants were instituted by God and that, moreover, their victims brought their fate on themselves? See Proverbs 29:2, NIV.

Good reading

I, like a lot of people, had questions that needed answered. This book accomplished that and the author did a great job telling not only the story but laying out the evidence. While a few questions remain, the author points you to great sources in which you may find those answers. I'm blessed to have had the experience of reading this great, illuminating source of info regarding making the case for Christ.

If Lee Strobel was ever an atheist, it certainly doesn't show in this book. As other critical reviewers have suggested, he constructs here what amounts to an easily-vanquished stalking horse of straw -- not a substantive argument of real skepticism. After cherry picking easy fly balls and grounders from what could have been much more challenging intellectual terrain, the author uncritically consults ONLY professional advocates and apologists for Christianity, and then repeats their arguments. He -- and they -- accept the words of the synoptic gospels "verbatum" as accurately reflecting the preaching, message, and claims of Jesus of Nazareth. In reality, the modern New Testament cannot be regarded as accurate in this sense.Strobel glosses over (or perhaps outright attempts to erase) centuries of biblical revision that have substantially changed any modern interpretation of what Jesus believed or said. The counter-case in biblical scholarship can be found in "Paul and Jesus -- How the Apostle Transformed Christianity" by historian James D. Tabor. Also useful is Paul Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus -- The Story Behind Who changed the Bible and Why." Both reveal the substantial drift which has occurred in traditional beliefs about Jesus.Modern interpretations of Jesus' preaching rest almost entirely upon the writing of Paul and his disciples, begun several years after Jesus' crucifixion and death. Given the humble origins of the Disciples, it was perhaps inevitable that few of them would write their own gospels. They couldn't, being illiterate. Paul, however, was an educated and literate man. He profoundly distrusted Jesus' original disciples -- including Jesus' brother James -- and condemned their views of Jesus as heresy. Instead, Paul trusted the superiority of his own revelations from dreams in which he claimed that the spirit of Jesus came to him with the "real" message of Jesus ministry. He claimed to have been BORN for the purpose of preaching these revelations as the "true" gospel of Jesus. In modern terms, the Apostle might be said to have suffered from delusions of grandeur.As evidenced by the widely divergent views of the hidden Dead Sea Scrolls, Paul's followers ruthlessly suppressed any views of Jesus beliefs that ran contrary to their own. Thus what we read in modern Bibles is the record created by people who never met Jesus or his disciples, or heard them preach -- the victors in a deep doctrinal battle for supremacy in the early church. History is written by the victors. And perhaps the most charitable summary of "The Case for Christ" is that propaganda is very often written by the newly converted.