Review of "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel

I had this book given to me by a recess lady at Middle School over a decade ago, and until becoming baptized into Catholic Christianity in April of this year (the recess lady was a fundamentalist Protestant, denying the importance of baptism and claiming to read the Bible completely literally -I don’t know what she would think of me now), I believe I had only read about a quarter to a third of it. Between April and mid-July of this year, I had read the book in its entirety.

The main issue with the book is that it isn’t very good. It is exactly as you would expect an experienced investigative reporter to interview scholars (all friendly -this is a case for Christ, coming 15 years’ after Strobel’s conversion) as to the evidence for Christianity. The best characteristic of the book is that Strobel lets the scholars speak for themselves -the second best that he usually presses hard questions. The main problem with this book is that dubious answers are often left unchallenged (e.g., the microscopic coin lettering mentioned in the interview with John McRay). My favorite part of the book was “The Medical Evidence” (interviewing Alexander Metherell) and least favorite “The Evidence of the Missing Body” (interviewing William Lane Craig).

The main issue with the book is a logical leap: even assuming Jesus rose from the dead, this does not on its own prove him to be God. And even at demonstrating the evidence for the resurrection, the book doesn’t really attack the common atheist New Testament scholar’s idea of a gradual legendary concretion around the original empty tomb account, today near universally believed to have been written by Mark (without the doubtful endings after the 16:8) -note that I, in contradiction to the weight of U.S. scholarship, think Matthew is more likely to be the first gospel. The most parsimonious atheist account (assuming a historical crucified Jesus and that the disciples’ visions were of the same form as those of Paul) -that some tomb robbers other than the apostles stole the body - is not even mentioned (though, as the book makes clear in “The Psychological Evidence”, the atheist would have to account for the appearance of Jesus to 500 at the same time mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15:6 -something very difficult for an atheist to explain without understanding the world as Will and JavaScript Canvas).

Perhaps the strongest case in this book is its most blatant one -that one can be smart (fourteen experts are interviewed) and still be a person of faith.

Rating: three out of five stars