A quest for the real truth surrounding a very big story indeed

The Case for Christ--Student Edition, The by Lee Strobel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars




Lee Strobel investigates.

As someone who came to faith and then to journalism, the opposite way round from Lee Strobel, his story has always intrigued me. It is the true story of how an award-winning investigative journalist, the one-time legal editor of The Chicago Tribune, sets out to use his ‘particular set of skills’ to disprove the newfound Christian faith of his wife Leslie who stuns him with her announcement. "I rolled my eyes and braced for the worst,” he says, “feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch scam. I thought she was going to turn into some sexually repressed prude… and spend all her time serving the poor in skid row somewhere.” His story is now a 2017 released film starring Faye Dunaway, known to an older generation for her roles in ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ and ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, and Mike Vogel in the role of the reporter on a quest for the real truth surrounding a very big story indeed.

In the book Strobel sorts through the evidence of the case for or against Christ that he uncovers over the subsequent year and nine months. He begins with whether Jesus, himself, really thought he was God looking at such ‘blasphemous’ statements as: ’I and the Father are one’ in John 10. He moves on to the quantity of Old Testament prophecy Jesus manages to fulfil, like Zechariah 9:9, asking if Jesus was just trying to add to his Messiah credentials when he said to the disciples, ‘Go fetch me a donkey’. But then he asks how he could arrange the place of his birth, predicted by the prophet Micah in chapter 5:2. He finds too the ‘129 hours of eyewitness testimony saying Jesus came back to life’ that addresses the question: How do we know for sure whether the Resurrection happened?

He examines the external corroboration of biblical accounts through historians like Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny and the Talmud, and also through archaeology citing Sir William Ramsey of Oxford University who concluded that Luke was one of the most accurate historians who had ever written. He reads through ‘words that work when put into practice again and again in the areas of finance, stress and character qualities’ that lead him to ask if it is possible that the Bible really is God’s inspired word. He discovers the ‘final confirming proof’ of encounters with Jesus today, citing philosophy professor J P Moreland: “It’s the ongoing encounter with the resurrected Christ that happens all over the world, in every culture, to people from all kinds of backgrounds and personalities. They will all tell you… Jesus Christ has changed them.”

The book presents intelligent evidence for consideration, and this student edition has a light and accessible treatment. It sits alongside other key works of modern popular apologetics such as Frank Morrison’s ‘Who Moved the Stone?’ Josh McDowell’s ‘Evidence That Demands a Verdict’ and J Warner Wallace’s ‘God's Crime Scene’. In times of such social division, where groups can dismiss Christ on account of their perceptions or experiences of his followers, this book offers a good way back to foundations, to Jesus himself, and to the crucial question of what to make of the Bethlehem babe.

In the end, Lee Strobel tells his wife of his conclusion: he can no longer swim upstream against the evidence. “Instead, I was going in the same direction as the facts seemed to be flowing,” he says. She starts crying and in language befitting any Chicago news room says: "You hard hearted son-of-a-*, I've been telling you this for two years…" Touché.




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