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

by Lee Strobel

“When you look at Mark’s theology, he loves to emphasize awe and fright and terror and worship in the presence of the divine.

Women’s testimony was regarded as so worthless that they weren’t even allowed to serve as legal witnesses in a Jewish court of law. “In light of this, it’s absolutely remarkable that the chief witnesses to the empty tomb are these women who were friends of Jesus.

Any later legendary account would have certainly portrayed male disciples as discovering the tomb—Peter or John, for example.

Cf. 1 Cor 15:3-7

we can tell from the language, grammar, and style that Mark got his empty tomb story—actually, his whole passion narrative—from an earlier source. In fact, there’s evidence it was written before A.D. 37, which is much too early for legend to have seriously corrupted

the unanimous testimony that the empty tomb was discovered by women argues for the authenticity of the story, because this would have been embarrassing for the disciples to admit and most certainly would have been covered up if this were a legend.

Indeed 1 Cor 15-3-7 maks no mention of the women

it doesn’t say Jesus appeared first to Peter. All it does is put Peter’s name first on the list. And since women were not considered competent as witnesses in first-century Jewish culture, it’s not surprising that they’re not mentioned here.

And what about James, who didn’t believe in Jesus, and Paul, who was a persecutor of Christians—how did they get talked into seeing something?

Spend a few minutes to look up some of the gospel appearances cited by Habermas. Do they have the ring of truth to you?

“When Jesus was crucified,” Moreland began, “his followers were discouraged and depressed. They no longer had confidence that Jesus had been sent by God, because they believed anyone crucified was accursed by God.

“Yes,” I agreed, “they were willing to die for their beliefs. But,” I added, “so have Muslims and Mormons and followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh. This may show that they were fanatical, but let’s face it: it doesn’t prove that what they believed is true.”

It had been put to me this way: People will die for their religious beliefs if they sincerely believe they’re true, but people won’t die for their religious beliefs if they know their beliefs are false.

“And someone easily could have had ulterior motives in following Muhammad, because in the early years Islam was spread largely by warfare. Followers of Muhammad gained political influence and power over the villages that were conquered and ‘converted’ to Islam by the sword.

“it’s not the simple fact that Paul changed his views. You have to explain how he had this particular change of belief that completely went against his upbringing; how he saw the risen Christ in a public event that was witnessed by others, even though they didn’t understand it; and how he performed miracles to back up his claim to being an apostle.”

“These days people are fluid in their faith,” I said. “They bounce back and forth between Christianity and New Age beliefs. They dabble in Buddhism, they mix and match and create their own spirituality. For them, making the kind of changes you mentioned wouldn’t seem like a big deal.”

We've come to view faith as yet another form of self expression

“What’s more, they were not doing this because they had come upon better ideas. They were very content with the old traditions. They gave them up because they had seen miracles that they could not explain and that forced them to see the world another way.”

if you were a Martian looking down on the first century, would you think Christianity or the Roman Empire would survive? You probably wouldn’t put money on a ragtag group of people whose primary message was that a crucified carpenter from an obscure village had triumphed over the grave.

today we name our children Peter and Paul and our dogs Caesar and Nero!

Can you think of anyone in history who has knowingly and willingly died for a lie?

Joseph and Hiram Smith

the early sacraments of Communion and baptism affirmed Jesus’ resurrection and deity.

“The time span necessary for significant accrual of legend concerning the events of the gospels would place us in the second century A.D., just the time in fact when the legendary apocryphal gospels were born. These are the legendary accounts sought by the critics.”

(and remember, no leader of any other major religion has even pretended to be God),

Christianity is unique. It’s based on the “done” plan—Jesus has done for us on the cross what we cannot do for ourselves: he has paid the death penalty that we deserve for our rebellion and wrongdoing, so we can become reconciled with God.

There were no lightning bolts, no audible replies, no tingly sensations. I know that some people feel a rush of emotion at such a moment; as for me, however, there was something else that was equally exhilarating: there was the rush of reason.

To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., I may not yet be the man I should be or the man, with Christ’s help, I someday will be—but thank God I’m not the man I used to be!

In fact, so radical was the difference in my life that a few months after I became a follower of Jesus, our five-year-old daughter Alison went up to my wife and said, “Mommy, I want God to do for me what he’s done for Daddy.”

In effect, she was saying, “If this is what God does to a human being, that’s what I want for me.”

You may even want to whisper a prayer to the God who you’re not sure exists, asking him to guide you to the truth about him.

“We ourselves—and not merely the truth claims—are at stake in the investigation.”