The Case for Christ

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The Case for Christ

The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (1998) is book by Christian apologist and former journalist Lee Strobel supporting the thesis that Jesus of Nazareth was the unique son of God. In it, he conducts a series of investigative interviews of Christian scholars and experts, whose replies refute many of the typical objections to Christianity. The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association awarded it the Gold Medallion Book Award.

1 Overview
2 Quotes
3 Challenging the verdict
4 See also
5 Publication data
6 External links

[edit] Overview

In the introduction, Strobel explains that for most of his life he had been an atheist. His wife's sudden announcement that she had become a Christian, and his subsequent desire to uncover the roots of what he considered to be pleasant changes in her personality motivated him to investigate Christianity. After a two year personal research project, he concluded that the evidence of history, science, philosophy, and psychology "point toward the unthinkable," and this resulted in his own conversion.

In the main text, Strobel methodically proceeds through fundamental historical, literary, and theological questions regarding Christianity, essentially retracing the steps he had taken in his personal research. However, whereas in his original investigation he primarily consulted books in order to find answers to his questions, his methodology in The Case for Christ is to directly probe thirteen interview subjects, all except one of whom have doctorates in fields germane to the questions: Craig Blomberg, Bruce Metzger, Edwin Yamauchi, John McCray, Gregory Boyd, Ben Witherington III, Gary Collins, D.A. Carson, Louis Lapides, Alexander Metherell, William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and J. P. Moreland. The interviews and Strobel's commentary provide answers—favorable to Christianity—to many questions, including the following:

Are the Gospels trustworthy, and have they been reliably preserved?
Does archaeological and independent literary evidence corroborate the Gospels?
Did Jesus believe he was the Son of God? If so, was he insane?
Does Jesus match the description of the Jewish Messiah? If so, does he do so uniquely?
Is it possible that Jesus survived his crucifixion?
Was Jesus' tomb found empty, and was Jesus actually seen alive afterward?

[edit] Quotes

People will die for religious beliefs if they sincerely believe them true, but people won't die for their religious beliefs if they know their beliefs are false. (p. 247, concerning Jesus' apostles).
In light of the convincing facts [and] evidence...the great irony was this: it would require much more faith to maintain my atheism than to trust in Jesus of Nazareth! (p. 265)

[edit] Challenging the verdict

In his book Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ" (ISBN 0968925901), Earl Doherty uses the same courtroom approach to dispute the conclusion that Lee Strobel makes. As an advocate of the school of thought that considers Jesus a mythical creation he concludes that "The Case for Christ" is flawed because no dissenting scholars were interviewed.

The common response to this conclusion, however, is that the author himself provides criticism and objective doubts during the interviews recorded in the book.^{[citation needed]}