Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Addendum 2: Why it’s ridiculous to even get into the debate about what the evidence says about the truth of Christianity

(Book Review)

See Part 1 General Comments

Part 2: An Overview of Lee Strobel’s Argument that the Gospels are Based on Eyewitness Evidence

Part 3: Even if the Gospels Were Based on Eyewitnesses Evidence, That Would Not, Ipso Facto, Mean That They Were 100% Reliable

Part 4: Even if Lee Strobel Were Able to Prove that the Church Tradition about the Gospels Was Correct, Most of the Gospel Stories Still Would Not Be Based on Eyewitness Testimony

Part 5: Why the Church Tradition on the Apostolic Authorship of the Gospels is Incorrect

Part 6: The Gospels Do Not Contain Any Internal Evidence that they were Written by the Apostles.

Part 7:  Problems with Church Tradition Concerning the Apostolic Authorship of the Gospels

Part 8: Linguistic, Literacy, Cultural, and Geographic Problems Which Indicate the Gospels Were Not Written by the Apostles

Part 9: The Synoptic Problem and the Q Hypothesis

Part 10:  The Problem of the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospels of John

Part 11: The Problems with Luke

Part 12: Does It Matter That the Gospels are Anonymous?

Part 13: Lee Strobel’s Argument that Church Tradition is True because Church Tradition Says It Is

Part 14: Lee Strobel’s Argument that Church Tradition Must Be True Because the Church Would Have No Reason To Lie

Part 15: Lee Strobel’s Attempt to Explain Why Matthew is Copying from John-Mark

Part 16: My Conclusion

Addendum 1: Lee Strobel and Problem of Hell

          As with the previous addendum, this is a relic from earlier drafts when I still had it in mind I was going to write a much more comprehensive rebuttal.  This was originally meant to preface the discussion, and contains my thoughts on why it is ridiculous to even get into the discussion of trying to prove Christianity from the evidence.

The Problem of Hell

          I remember the first moment when, as a teenager, it suddenly occurred to me that although my Church kept talking about the “good news of Christianity,” it was in fact a horrific view of the world I was being presented with.  According to what the Church preaches, the majority of the world’s population is destined to be tortured for all eternity in hell.  Call that what you will, it’s not “good news.”  Objectively speaking, it would be far better for the vast majority of people if the atheists were right, and there was no God, and consequently no hell.

            More than any other intellectual issue, the problem of hell caused me to lose my faith.

            Although some people like to laugh about it, I’m somewhat sympathetic to Pascal’s Wager which states that you might as well believe in God, because if there is a God then you go to heaven, and if there isn’t a God, it doesn’t really matter anyway.  If this truly worked, the insurance against Hell comes at a cheap enough price.

            The problem though is that Pascal’s Wager assumes a binary opposition between faith and disbelief.  In fact, since most of the world’s religion claim exclusivity, to believe in one is to reject the others.  When you become a Christian, you are rejecting Islam.  And then what happens when Mohammed comes down on the clouds instead of Jesus?

            Christopher Hitchens more correctly theorized that belief in religion is like Aladdin’s cave.  To escape from the cave, Aladdin was presented with a choice of multiple doors, one of which led to safety, and all the others led to certain death.

            Or, to quote Homer Simpson when he was explaining to his wife why he didn’t want to go to Church: “And what if we picked the wrong religion?  Why every week we’d just be making God madder and madder.”

            It is the problem of heaven and hell that makes everything Lee Strobel says so ridiculous.  If so much is at stake, is this the best evidence God has left us with?  Are we reduced to psychoanalyzing the trustworthiness of a group of fisherman in order to avoid being sent to hell for all eternity?  Why doesn’t God just appear and tell us what he wants us to believe?

Why It’s Absurd To Even Get Into This Debate

            The same questions asked about the Gospels can be asked about any other ancient document.  Did Homer really write The Iliad ?  How true are the events in The Iliad?

            But in the case of The Iliad, no one would argue that you could go to hell if you got the wrong answers to these questions, and it would be ridiculous to do so.

            Lee Strobel asks us to believe in the Gospels because the Gospels are authentic eyewitness testimony, and because the apostles proved their faith by dying for it, and no one would die for a lie.

            In response to this, a number of things can be said.  First of all, there are historical reliability problems with many of the early Christian traditions about the martyrdom of the apostles.  But even assuming that the tradition was historically reliable, we might note in passing that lots of people have died for a lie.  Joseph Smith died as a result of fabricating Mormonism (W), but probably not because he particularly wanted to.  Rather, at a certain point, the events he had set in motion got out of his control, and it became too late for him to back down and retract it.

            The 910 followers  of Jim Jones died for a lie (W), but they did it because they were deluded.

            It could also be that the disciples found it difficult to go back to being ordinary fisherman after they had experienced a level of fame and social recognition associated with ushering in the messianic age, and that they were quite happy to ride this wave as long as they could.  (Human beings are not always entirely rational creatures—historically, people have died for less.)

            But whatever conclusion you end up with, to even consider the question you have to put yourself in the absurd position of having your eternal salvation dependent on your ability to successfully psychoanalyze a group of fisherman across a distance of 2,000 years. 

           The same problem occurs with the authorship of the Gospels.  Even assuming Lee Strobel was right on this, what a bizarre thing to have your salvation hinge on—how well you are able to follow the literary clues in the Gospels to deduce their authorship.

            And it becomes even more bizarre when you consider that you and I are able to conduct this investigation from an extremely privileged position with all the resources of the world’s libraries at our fingertips.  But that isn’t true for everyone.

            When the Christian missionaries go up to the Cambodian hill tribes and tell them that they are all going to hell unless they accept Jesus Christ (which, by the way, they are currently doing), how are the illiterate hill tribes supposed to evaluate the reliability of the Gospels?

            And when competing Muslim and Christian missionaries try to proselytize the same groups of hill tribes in Cambodia (as described in this NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE HERE), or the villages in West Papua (as described in this AGE ARTICLE HERE), and the Christians tell them they are going to Hell unless they believe in Christ, and the Muslims tell them they are going to Hell unless they believe in Mohammed, how are the hill tribes supposed to make a logical decision between the two groups?

            To accept that there is some sort of “right” answer necessary for salvation, even if this answer is arrived at through careful examination of the historical evidence, is ridiculous.

            Worse yet, it means that for hundreds of years the salvation of millions of Chinese was of no importance to God.

            As Thomas Paine said, if God truly had something he wanted to communicate to all of humanity, it is within his power to do so.  He didn’t need to wait 1,500 years until Christian missionaries reached Asia, he could simply have emblazoned on the moon, written in all languages, that “Jesus Christ is Lord.”

            [I once had a Chinese friend ask me why wasn’t Jesus placed in an area where the Chinese would have had more historical access to his teachings if it was so-all important for everyone to believe in him.  “Besides which,” he said, “if God did need to send a Messiah, China would have been the logical place to send him.  China was one of the most literate civilizations in the ancient world and kept meticulous historical records of everything.”]

Furthermore, to borrow more from Thomas Paine, Paine also points out that if God really wanted everyone to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the event should have been a public demonstration that was witnessed by all.  Instead, even according to the account in the Gospels, Jesus only appears to his followers in secret.  And so these select few men are then meant as a stand in for the entire world.  So in order to believe in the resurrection of Christ, we have to believe first in the integrity of the men who supposedly witnessed it, and secondly in the integrity of the men who wrote down their stories.  Lee Strobel defends both of these propositions, but notice how ridiculous the premise of the debate is before we even enter it.  Is this what our salvation is supposed to hinge on?  Our ability to determine, at two-thousand years distance, the reliability of the testimony of a handful of eyewitnesses?  Why didn't God just make a public demonstration that would have been available to all?

Well Then, What About Faith?

          If salvation by reason is ridiculous, then what about salvation by faith?  Trusting in faith is equally ridiculous, I believe.

          Salvation by reason involves trusting your head to get the right answer to save you from damnation.  Salvation by faith involves trusting your heart (or your gut) to save you from damnation.  But although the mechanisms for arriving at the correct answer are different, the concepts are equally ridiculous.  Both concepts assume that there’s a right answer and that you must arrive at. 

            Salvation by faith would be somewhat less problematic if all people of faith arrived at the same answer—that is, if everyone who trusted their religion to blind faith ended up being lead by God to become a Christian.  But obviously this isn’t the case.  And what’s really interesting is that if you talk to a Muslim, or a Mormon, they will describe their faith to you in exactly the same way that Christians do. 

            I don’t know how many of you have had the experience of talking to Mormon missionaries, but they’re a visible presence in many parts of Asia, and when they came to my door once in Japan, I thought I was going to talk sense into them.

            Now, Mormonism is a religion that makes absolutely no sense.  As Lee Strobel himself says:

            As authors John Ankerberg and John Weldon concluded in a book on the topic, “In other words, no Book of Mormon cities have ever been located, no Book or Mormon person, place , nation or name has ever been found, no Book or Mormon artifacts, no Book of Mormon scriptures, no Book of Mormon inscriptions… nothing which demonstrates the Book of Mormon is anything other than myth or invention has  ever been found. (Lee Strobel, p. 107)

            In fact, it’s even worse than that.  Linguistic and genetic evidence contradict the Mormon claim that Native Americans are descendents of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.  Advances in Egyptology over the years have since proved that the meaning of ancient Egyptian scrolls that Joseph Smith claimed to translate have no relationship to what Joseph Smith claimed.  There is the incident (made famous in South Park) in which the original translations of the book of Mormon were lost, and Joseph Smith was unable to duplicate them.  Et Cetera.

            I pointed all this out to the Mormon missionaries, and they listened to me politely, and for each objection I raised, they said they just encouraged me to pray to God about my doubts, and they were confident God would move in my heart and God would show me the truth if I asked for it.

            The next week they came back to my door and said that since their last conversation with me, they had prayed about all the things I had said, and they felt that God had responded by moving in their hearts and they felt that now their faith was stronger than ever.

            Well, how can you logically argue with that?

            But the thing was, this was exactly the same type of language that I had heard growing up in the Church.  My Sunday School teachers had also taught me to pray to God about my doubts, and encouraged me to feel God moving in my heart.

            I’ve since heard Muslim friends describe their faith in the same terms.  They know their faith is true because they’ve felt God move in their hearts.

            Well, far be it from me to dispute what some people do or do not “feel” in their hearts about their faith.

            The only thing I can say is that against such testimony I’m left with little resources to determine whose feelings of faith are legitimate, and whose are delusional.  If you grant the power of faith to one religion, you must grant it to all who claim it.  And by the way, they all claim it.

            How ridiculous is it then to claim salvation is dependent on such a faith?

            I’m sure certain people feel that they really do have authentic faith, but this is not difficult to explain psychologically.  When my Mormon friends had doubts about their faith, they prayed to God to remove their doubts.  I think we know enough about psychological reinforcement to understand that if you want to believe something, and you tell yourself to believe something, and you pray to believe something, you will end up believing it no matter if there is a God working in your heart or not.

            The same is true for the Christian motto: “God I believe, help thou my unbelief.”  If you want to believe badly enough, your mind will fall in line eventually.

            This is all the more true when you are surrounded by people who believe the same thing, and who are constantly acting as a reinforcement on your faith.  This is why religion has always historically always been concentrated in geographic areas. 

Faith Versus Reason

          My own upbringing was that it was morally virtuous to rely on your faith even when it seemed to be contradicted by reason.  I remember listening to sermons in which the pastor criticized those who relied on their own intellect instead of their faith.  At school, I remember my Bible teacher talk in disparaging terms about his scholarly friends who lost their faith once they started encountering reliability problems with the Bible.

            The idea that faith was morally virtuous was ingrained in me for years.  Every time I felt that my reason was leading me away from my faith, I felt ashamed of myself for trusting in my reason instead of in my faith.  I never really questioned the whole things until I encountered people like Richard Dawkins  and Christopher Hitchens, who asked why it was considered a moral virtue to believe something without evidence.  They concluded it was no virtue at all, and I’ve eventually come to agree with them. 

            Religious leaders like to decry intellectuals who put too much faith in their reason.  It’s not hard to see the appeal of this—human reason is flawed, and intelligent people arrive at all sorts of different conclusions about religion.  But what to replace reason with?  Faith?  Faith is equally flawed, and across the world people who put their trust in faith arrive at all sorts of different conclusions about religion.  If I can’t trust my intellect to arrive at the correct decision, why should I then put blind trust in my feelings?

The Historical Reliability of the Bible and the Problem of Faith

          I’ve touched on this before in past reviews, but the interesting thing about modern Christianity is the huge gap between what Christian scholars know, and what normal people are told every week at Sunday School.

            Today’s Christian scholars and universities know full well about the historical problems with the Bible.  Even conservative protestant Christian colleges (like Calvin College) believe that there are serious historical problems with the Bible—the apostles didn’t write the Gospels, Paul didn’t write half the letters ascribed to him, Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, historical evidence does not support the story in Joshua, there’s no outside evidence for the Census in Luke….et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

            And yet, a lot of Christian scholars, knowing this full well, continue to believe in Christianity.

            This is the really interesting question.  How can people know that the Bible is unreliable, and still believe in Christianity?  And this is the question I’d be curious to hear the answer to. 

            Personally, I’m skeptical that the claims of Christianity can be rationalized given the historical problems with the Bible, but I have yet to hear a good Christian defense of this.  Maybe it’s out there somewhere.

            At any rate, given that the historical problems of the Bible are established as fact, this is the debate that people need to have going forward.

            Lee Strobel’s book, however, is attempting to move the debate backwards.  He’s arguing that there are no historical problems with the Bible.  And this is untrue.  Demonstrably untrue. 

            Lee Strobel not trying to advance the debate--he’s just trying to manipulate certain facts, and hide others, to throw sand in the eyes of his readers.  (And he’s assuming a reader who wants to be deceived on this.)

The historical problems with the Bible make the problem of faith all the more severe.  To paraphrase Thomas Paine slightly, if the Bible were the most perfect document ever created, it would still be difficult for us to believe in, because the possibility exists that someone could have written a falsehood, and because it would seem strange that God would entrust his revelations to only a handful of eyewitnesses when it was within his power to communicate it directly to all humanity, and even stranger that belief in this revelation, only communicated to a select few of humanity at a certain point in history, would be required for all people everywhere for all time to gain salvation.

However, when we find all the numerous problems with the Bible's accuracy--all the points where the Bible appears to contradict established history, all the scientific problems with Genesis, all the contradictions within the Gospels, all the apparent forgeries within the Bible,--if we consider all this, then how much more difficult does it become to believe in the Bible.  Why would God keep throwing up all these obstacles to our belief if our entire salvation was dependent on this belief?  Why wouldn't God make it be overwhelmingly evident to everyone that the Bible was perfect in every way if it contained his divine revelation?