Lee Strobel earned a law degree from Yale and was a crime reporter back in the 80s. Long story short his wife became a Christian and so he goes on a spiritual quest to see if there is anything to Christianity. Strobel sets the book up by saying he was going to use his hardnosed skeptic journalistic approach that he used on crime to get to the bottom of the evidence, historical or otherwise that supports Christianity. He proceeds to interview a lot of the leading evangelical theologians and historians asking them hard questions and recording their answers. As such this book is a good summary of the state of the art of Christian apologetics. Broken into 3 parts it starts by compiling the best arguments for the historicity and facticity of the gospels. This section sets out to prove the following:

  • The gospels were written by disciples or people they are named after
  • They were written very early after Jesus’s death
  • They have not substantially changed
  • The gospel accounts don’t contradict each other in any meaningful way
  • There were never significant candidate gospels that have not been included in our current cannon
  • There are corroborating historical documents that back up some of the events that are described in the gospel
  • Almost all archaeological evidence found to date reinforces the narratives put forward by the gospels. The second section looks at the historical Jesus and attempts to prove the following:
  • Jesus thought he was God
  • Jesus was in a fit mental state and was not crazy
  • Jesus fit the attributes of God (i.e. he was morally perfect, could forgive sins etc)
  • Jesus fulfilled the OT prophecies for the Messiah The third section focus on providing the best evidence that supported the resurrection. It sets out to prove:
  • Jesus actually died and there was no chance that he was mistaken for dead by the Romans.
  • Jesus’ grave was empty as a historical fact
  • Eye witness stories of seeing Jesus after resurrection
  • Various addendum proofs like the disciples dying for their beliefs and skeptics being convinced

On the whole this book was well written and very convincing. Especially when listening to one interview at a time. If you already believe or if you grew up in a Bible saturated environment the arguments and data seem quite compelling. It doesn’t take long reading into this book before you realize that you have been gently tricked though. The author claims to have been a cynical atheist who was out on a quest to pitch the hardball questions to the experts and not let them get away with anything. As the book unfolds, this doesn’t seem to be the case. He does ask some hard questions, but also some very stupid questions that he pretends are “hard”. A lot of questions feel formulated in such a way as to tee up the expert in a certain direction. This doesn’t mean that the book is bad more that it shouldn’t have been framed as a fair hearing. It should have instead been framed as an apologetic. One other thing I noticed is that there were several (if my memory serves) instances where the experts would contradict each other but in totally different contexts. For example, the claim that the Gospels were written by the people for whom they are named. This book was thought provoking and has made me dig into the other side of the arguments presented in this book. Getting unbiased history is difficult on its own, it might be impossible in this situation.