The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel Part 1

Subtitle: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus

(Book Review)

--“If my conclusions in the case for Christ is correct, your future and eternity hinge on how you respond to Christ”

            Lee Strobel, p. 271

Why I Read This Book

          As someone who has considered myself a skeptic for several years now, I suppose this book makes a strange edition to my reading list.  But I read this book for the same reason that (I suspect) most skeptics end up reading it—it was recommended to me by a believer.

            I had never heard of Lee Strobel before this book was recommended to me.  Of course that’s not saying much.  As someone who doesn’t read as much or as widely as I should, there are lots of things I haven’t heard of.  But it turns out that for some time now Lee Strobel has been making waves in certain circles because of his books and his accompanying conversion story.

            Lee Strobel’s story is that he is a former skeptic who one day decided to investigate the truth claims of Christianity.  During the course of his investigation, he found the evidence for the truth of Christianity so overwhelming that he converted.  What makes this story all the more impressive is Lee Strobel’s intellectual background: he has a law degree from Yale, and he worked for years as an investigative legal journalist for the Chicago Tribune.  In other words, he’s not some yokel whose opinion can be easily dismissed.  He’s someone who’s been trained by his profession to carefully examine rhetoric and documents, and then be able to determine the validity of the arguments. 

            The implication of all this (and the line with which this book is usually marketed) is that if a man as smart as Lee Strobel has examined all the evidence and thinks Christianity must be true, then there must be something to consider.

            Because I - have - been - reading, - and - reviewing - on this blog, a number of books that are skeptical about the claims of Christianity,  someone suggested to me that I should read Lee Strobel’s book before I wrote off Christianity completely.

            And for my part, I was intrigued enough by Lee Strobel’s background to want to hear what he had to say on the subject.

My Own Background and My Expectations Going into This Book

          Lest I exaggerate my own naivete, I should clarify that Lee Strobel is not my first encounter with Christian apologetics, nor with conversion stories.  The story of “skeptic-turned-believer” is, after all, common enough to be its own genre, and having grown up in the church, I had had plenty of previous exposure to both apologetics and conversion stories.

            Although most of the conversion stories I had heard in Church tended to be based more on emotional needs than rational logic, I did get some previous expose to intellectual conversion stories as well.  One of my Christian school teachers used to read to us from Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell (A)—another book by an author who had started out as a skeptic, but converted to Christianity after he examined the evidence.  (Actually it turns out that Lee Strobel references Josh McDowell’s work frequently in The Case for Christ.)  At Calvin College, we were assigned to read Surprised by Joy (W) by C.S. Lewis—another intellectual skeptic turned believer.

            Also, in my 22 years growing up in the Church, I had already been exposed to many of the traditional arguments that people often use to “prove” the truth of the Gospel stories.  It wasn’t that I was ignorant of what the usual arguments were, it was that they had stopped working for me. 

            And so, going into this book, I was somewhat skeptical that Lee Strobel would be able to tell me anything that I hadn’t heard before.

            And yet, for all that, I was still curious about what Lee Strobel had to say.  His arguments seem to have impressed a number of people, and he did have an impressive background.

            [Digression: In Christian circles, the “conversion story” has become its own genre, and many Christians think that this in itself is proof of Christianity— in their eyes the fact that anyone, ever, could convert from skepticism to belief proves that there must be something to Christianity.  However the truth is much more complex.  Against all the conversion stories common in Christian circles must be balanced an equally large number of stories of born-again Christians who lost their faith, or people who converted to religions other than Christianity.  If we were to take conversions as evidence of proof for their respective religions, we would get into a statistical numbers game about which faith has the most conversions every year, or the most believers.  It is a rubric which, by the way, Christianity would not emerge on top of.  Over the last hundred years, Atheism has grown much more than Christianity (W).  Islam is currently the fastest growing religion in the world--this includes population growth, but they also have more conversions than Christianity (W).  In the United States, as a whole Christianity loses more converts than it gains. Although 85.6 percent of American adults say they were raised as Christians, more than a fifth of that group (19.2 percent of all U.S. adults), no longer identify with Christianity. (LINK).  Ultimately, an argument for faith must be judged on its own merits, and not on the personal story of the person who makes it. 

            All that being said, although we still have to keep our skepticism about us, I think that when someone who was previously skeptical of religion decides to drop their skepticism and convert, it is worthwhile to listen to their reasons.  And for that reason I was curious to hear what Lee Strobel had to say.]

            When this book was recommended to me, I was initially unable to get my hands on a copy.  (In Southeast Asia, where I’m currently living, it can be hard to track down specific books.) So in the meantime, I tried to satisfy my curiosity about Lee Strobel by Googling him.  And what I found surprised me.

            From reading other people’s reviews of Lee Strobel’s book, I was able to surmise that he was basing most of his arguments for the truth of the Gospels off of the reliability of the eyewitness testimony of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

            Now, this is actually pretty extreme.  They don’t tell you this in Sunday School, but no serious scholar of the Bible believes that the Gospels were actually written by the apostles whose names they bear.  Not even my professors at Calvin College (a conservative Christian school) believed the Gospels were written by the apostles.  And they have some very good reasons for this—reasons which are hard to get around.

            In fact, I had been under the impression that it was pretty much impossible to argue for the apostolic authorship of the Gospels.  And I had even been going around telling people this in my various “coffee-house” conversations.

            So, one of two things was going on here: either I was mistaken, and there actually was a legitimate case for the apostolic authorship of the Gospels.  In which case I should find out what it was, so I don’t continue to make a fool out of myself.

            Or, Lee Strobel was arguing something that didn’t make any sense whatsoever, and was somehow still able to maintain a well-respected reputation in evangelic circles. 

           

            Which one was it?

           

            My curiosity was sufficiently piqued to the point that I was convinced this would be an interesting read either way.

Mini-Review

          If you don’t want to read the rest of my review, I’ll save you the suspense.  It is the latter.  Lee Strobel is arguing a case that just makes no sense whatsoever.  It’s an absolute train wreck of a book.

            This book is one of many books that exist solely for the Christian market, and it takes a very relaxed attitude towards things like logic, consistency, and factual reliability.  It’s marketed to an audience that values doctrinal purity over logical coherence, and the book doesn’t make any sense, because it’s not designed to make sense.

So What Happened?  How Could a Man as Smart as Lee Strobel Write Such a Terrible Book?

          Well, your guess is as good as mine really.  It’s possible his intellectual reputation was much exaggerated to begin with.  It’s possible (and there are hints of this in the conclusion) that he converted to Christianity for emotional reasons, and then (as many people do) he tried to twist the facts to meet a conclusion that he so desperately needed for emotional and psychological reasons.

            At times, however, it’s difficult to avoid being cynical while reading this book.  It’s hard not to think: “He must know that doesn’t make any sense, and yet he’s writing it anyway.”  Is Lee Strobel getting into Christian publishing for reasons other than pure idealism and love of the truth?  Is he just trying after money?  Or fame?  (That seems like a harsh accusation to make, I know, but, at the very least, you’ll grant me that it wouldn’t be the first time someone got into religious publishing for the money, right?)

            But, as I claim no private window into Lee Strobel’s soul, I’ll refrain from trying to infer what goes on in his private mind.  All I can do is examine the arguments of the book as they come.

            I’ll start out by making some general comments about the structure of the book.

General Comments

          The premise of this book is that it is supposed to trace Lee Strobel’s spiritual journey from skeptic to believer.  What makes this premise slightly awkward is that by his own account Lee Strobel converted in 1981, and this book was written in 1998.

            A lot had changed for Lee Strobel in the intervening years.  By the time he came to write this book, Lee Strobel was not only a believer, he had become a pastor at Willow Creek Community Church.  He had even previously published several Christian books before this one. (Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary (A) What Would Jesus Say (A) and Gods Outrageous Claims by Lee Strobel (A)) and he had started doing a series of presentations at his church about the evidence for Christ, when his wife suggested to him that he make a book out of these presentations.

            And so was born the idea for Lee Strobel to re-trace and re-construct his spiritual journey by interviewing a number of prominent Christian apologists.  Lee Strobel’s job is to “play” the skeptic, and try to ask the type of questions that a skeptic might ask.

            Despite his history as a one time skeptic, it’s been noted by just about every secular reviewer of this book that the Pastor Lee Strobel does a very poor job of playing the skeptic’s part.  He’ll occasionally pose some tough questions, but then he’ll just unquestioningly accept whatever gibberish the Christian apologists give him.

            In fact, many of the “proofs” that the Christian apologists give Lee Strobel only make sense if you start out from the assumption that Christianity is true, and then work backwards from there.  These types of arguments are very popular inside the Christian community, but lack all validity outside of it. In real life, a real skeptic would be constantly saying, “Yes, but you’re just assuming that’s true.  How do you know any of this for sure?”  Lee Strobel, the pretend skeptic, makes no such objections.

            With a set up like this, it’s not hard to see that the game is rigged from the beginning—a prominent pastor is interviewing Christian apologists about the evidence for the truth of the Gospels, and not surprisingly, they always come to the conclusion that all the evidence is on their side, and that the skeptics are always completely wrong. 

            Typical is this comment on page 126 from apologists Gregory Boyd:

            “…I’m glad we have such incredibly strong evidence to show us they [the claims of the Gospels] are true.  For me, it comes down to this: there’s no competition. The evidence for Jesus being who the disciples said he was—for having done the miracles that he did, for rising from the dead, for making the claims that he did—is light-years beyond my reasons for thinking that the left-wing scholarship of the Jesus Seminar is correct.”

            Imagine living in Lee Strobel’s world!  It must puzzle him and his apologist buddies that anyone, ever, in the history of the world could ever become a skeptic, considering their conviction that that all the evidence is always overwhelmingly for Christianity.  “Why do we even have the debate?” they must constantly wonder.  “With all the overwhelming evidence on our side, isn’t it strange that not everyone has converted by now?”

            As one Amazon reviewer put it 
I'm a Christian - this book is a joke.,

October 10, 2008

By 

Reviewer

This review is from: The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Paperback)

It's very simple - a proper, effective argument for Christ must defeat the arguments against Christ IN THEIR BEST LIGHT. Anybody can take the worst "straw man" arguments for a stance, and defeat them - and then pretend that that's the end to the debate (this is especially easy when everyone at the debate in this book is on the same side). To truly prove validity, you need to take the best and brightest of the arguments, and show why they're wrong. Otherwise, you've made a "case" for nothing at all (except maybe one's own intellectual weakness/dishonesty). 

 At best, this book is the intellectual equivalent to putting the Lakers on a basketball court vs. a junior high basketball team and saying that the Lakers winning the game is proof that they're the best team in the world. At worst, it's putting the Lakers on the court vs. the Lakers Cheerleaders who let them win, cheering them on each time they make a shot - and again, claiming that this proves their dominance.

            The chapters all follow the same format.  First, Lee Strobel will begin by citing an example of a legal case he witnessed from his days as a courtroom reporter, and then use this to frame an issue.  Then, Lee Strobel will lavishly praise the intellectual achievements of a Christian apologist with expertise on the subject.  Then Lee Strobel will pretend to take on the role of a skeptic, and ask questions to that apologist.

The Courtroom Anecdotes

            The constant reference back to Lee Strobel’s legal days has a duel purpose: first of all, it constantly reminds the reader of Lee Strobel’s background as someone who has a sharp legal mind.  Secondly, Lee Strobel will connect the court room anecdote to the evidence being presented for Christianity.  The implication is meant to be that the case being built for Christianity in this book would stand up to the scrutiny of any court.

            The assumption in all of these sections is that the reader is an idiot.  Or more charitably, that the reader is not paying attention.  Because the evidence that Lee Strobel actually does present would get thrown out of any court of law in the world (and given his own background, Lee Strobel must know this.)

            Take, for example, the first chapter on The Eyewitness Evidence.  Lee Strobel opens with a very dramatic story about a grisly execution-style murder in Chicago’s slums, and the bravery of a 17 year-old eye-witness who secured the conviction of the murderers with his eyewitness testimony. 

            It’s compelling stuff, and Lee Strobel uses this to pivot to how the eyewitness testimony of the Gospels should be just as compelling for us.  But the whole thing is meant as just one big bait-and-switch, because if you closely follow Lee Strobel’s arguments, it becomes very clear very quickly that he is not using the word “eyewitness” in the traditional way.  He’s talking about stories that have been handed down from several people until they finally get written down by the Gospel writers.  This is not eyewitness testimony.  In fact, if you want to get technical, this is the exact opposite of eyewitness testimony.  About halfway through the chapter, Lee Strobel starts using the word “indirect eyewitness testimony.”  But this is a term he’s just making up.  There’s no such thing as “indirect eyewitness testimony.”  There’s eyewitness testimony, and then there’s hearsay.  And hearsay would get thrown out of any court in the world.  And yet here’s Lee Strobel, a supposed expert in law, writing this book in which he’s equating direct eyewitness testimony with an oral tradition passed down from several people. 

Introducing the Christian Apologists

          After using the court room anecdote to frame the issue, Lee Strobel will introduce a Christian apologist with supposed expertise on the subject.

            Lee Strobel always begins by lavishly praising the academic achievements and the intellect of the Christian apologist he has chosen to interview.

            Now, to be fair, some of these guys are actually pretty brilliant. (I have a passing familiarity with a handful of the apologists he interviews, and they’re smart guys—more on that below.)  However, the amount of high praise Lee Strobel gives all the apologists sometimes makes it feel like the reader is supposed to be impressed by the person, and not the argument.  Rather than just let their arguments stand or fall on their own strength, Lee Strobel has to be constantly praising all of his interview subjects, even moving on from a list of their academic achievements to more editorializing comments. For example, “Armed with razor-sharp arguments and historical evidence to back them up, he’s [Gary Habermas] not afraid to come out swinging” (p.226).  Or “Moreland’s highly organized mind works so systematically, so logically, that he seems to effortlessly construct his case in complete sentences and whole paragraphs, without wasted words or extraneous thoughts” (p. 245).

           

            My own pet suspicion is that a lot of Christians out there deal with the logical inconsistencies in their religion by projecting their faith onto someone else—something along the lines of: “Well, it doesn’t all make sense to me, but my pastor’s such a smart guy, and he believes in it, so there must be something to it.”

            Lee Strobel seems to have picked up on this psychological phenomenon, and is exploiting it to its fullest extent.  You are constantly made to feel as if all of these men are infinitely smarter than you’ll ever be, and that since they all believe in the truth of Christianity, you should just follow their lead rather than try to think it out for yourself.

            Then, once it’s established how incredibly smart all of these guys are, Lee Strobel can get away with having them make all sorts of pronouncements that they don’t even bother to back-up or defend.  A lot of the things they say in this book they don’t give any evidence for at all, but, hey, if guys this smart said it, it must be true!  One example from many is this comment from Lee Strobel’s interview with Dr. Edwin Yamauchi on page 90:  “I think the alternative explanations, which try to account for the spread of Christianity through sociological or psychological reasons are very weak.”  He shook his head. “Very weak.” Neither he nor Lee Strobel ever bother to explain what these alternative explanations are, or why they’re very weak.

            (I also suspect that there’s some mutual back-scratching going on here inside the Christian apologist community.  Given that this was the first in a long series of “The Case for…” books written by Lee Strobel that would follow the same format of “interviews-with-prominent-apologists,” some of this over the top praise is probably just Lee Strobel trying to keep every one on his contact list sweet so he can use them again for later projects.)

            Lee Strobel himself, although his name is on the title page, actually makes very few of the arguments that advance his thesis.  Rather his role is just to try to play the pretend skeptic, ask the questions, and write down the answers.  (This creates something of a stylistic awkwardness in reviewing the book, because when refuting the arguments, it’s sometimes difficult to know whether to attribute all the arguments to Lee Strobel, or try to go through and carefully attribute each argument to the appropriate apologist.  For stylistic reasons, I’m mostly going to attribute everything to Lee Strobel, as his name is on the cover, and as he agrees with everything the apologists tell him.)

The Interviews

            The role of the pretend skeptic is a little bit awkward for Strobel, because he can’t seem to make up his mind if he wants to play the role of adversary or collaborator in these interviews, and he’s constantly breaking character.  He’ll start out in adversarial mode (“Tell me this,” I said with an edge of challenge in my voice, “is it really possible to be an intelligent, critically thinking person and still believe that the four gospels were written by the people whose names have been attached to them?” (p. 22)), but then he’ll switch back to collaborator mode as the discussion goes on.  (“I smiled because I had been playing devil’s advocate by raising my objections.  I knew he [Moreland] was right.  In fact, this critical distinction was pivotal in my own spiritual journey [17 years earlier]” (p. 247)).

            At the end of every interview, Lee Strobel will usually do a wrap up in which he’ll praise how well the apologists has definitively proven their case.  For those of us readers who haven’t completely left our common sense at the door, the discrepancy between how poorly the apologist will argue their case, and the high praise Lee Strobel will dish out to them, is a bit jarring to read.  For example, after Craig Blomberg has finished making his case for the reliability of the eyewitness testimony of the Gospels, a case which made absolutely no sense, and in which just about every sentence contradicted the one before it, Lee Strobel gives this summary of the argument: “I’ll admit I was impressed by Blomberg. Informed and articulate, scholarly and convincing, he had constructed a strong case for the reliability of the gospels.  His evidence for their traditional authorship, his analysis of the extremely early date of fundamental beliefs about Jesus, his well-reasoned defense of the accuracy of the oral tradition, his thoughtful examination of apparent discrepancies—all of his testimony had established a solid foundation for me to build on” (p.52)

The Mass of Contradictory Arguments Contained in this Book

            It’s very difficult for me to try to refute Lee Strobel’s arguments for the simple reason that most of the time it’s very difficult to figure out what Lee Strobel is actually arguing.  He clearly wants to prove that Christianity is right, but he doesn’t seem overly concerned about which method he uses, and as a result he contradicts himself wildly. 

            He argues that the contradictions in the resurrection account prove that the story couldn’t have been fabricated, and he also argues that there are no contradictions in the resurrection account.

            He argues that the Gospels consist of direct eyewitness testimony, and also that the Gospels consist of material carefully transmitted by oral culture.

            He cites Church tradition saying that Matthew was the first Gospel written, and then on the very next page he claims Matthew was copying from Mark’s Gospel.

            When he wants to prove that something from the Gospel of Mark is historically reliable, he claims that Mark is the earliest Gospel.  When he wants to claim that something from Matthew has historical validity, he cites scholars who claim that Matthew is the earliest Gospel.

            When dealing with the fact that scholars date the Gospel of John to 90 A.D., Lee Strobel says that’s perfectly alright because it still would have been within the lifetime of many of the witnesses.  But when trying to explain away the fact that the Jewish historian Josephus never collaborates the Bible’s claim that Jesus appeared to a crowd of 500 after his resurrection, Lee Strobel argues that this is because in the ancient world people had short life-spans and local stories would have died out after 60 years.

            The whole thing is such a mass of contradicts, logical impossibilities, and fabrications that it’s difficult to imagine this is in anyway the work of someone who started out as a skeptic.  It instead reads as someone desperate to smooth over all the historical problems with the gospels, and not concerned about if the solution he uses to smooth over problem A contradicts another solution he uses elsewhere for problem B.

            It also makes it very hard for me as a skeptic to argue against it.  I mean, how do you argue against something that doesn’t even make coherent logical sense?

            Ah…But this book was never meant for me as a skeptic.  This book had an entirely different target audience.

The Target Audience

            This is a funny little book.  Lee Strobel often writes as if he’s addressing a skeptical audience, but the book only makes sense if you assume it’s targeted towards the Christian market.  How else to explain the number of “arguments” in this book that are already starting out from the assumption that the Gospels are true?

            The fact that the book is purported to be for the skeptics is just the marketing gimmick.  The real purpose of this book is to milk the buying power of the believers themselves, who presumably get some satisfaction out of reading that there’s absolutely no intellectual problems with their faith, and that all the experts overwhelmingly validate their current world view.  And hopefully they’ll also buy copies to give to their skeptic friends.

            Although it flies somewhat beneath the radar, there is a huge market for Christian publishing.  And it is a very lucrative market.  The Left Behind series rivaled Harry Potter in US sales--total sales for Left Behind surpassed 65 million copies (W).  (And when you consider how badly Left Behind series is written, it makes that figure all the more impressive.)  Lee Strobel had already published for this market before (see books listed above), so presumably he had a good idea of how lucrative it could be when he sat down to write this book.

            And Lee Strobel and his publishers have since done very well off of this Christian market.  Lee Strobel had enough success with his best-selling The Case for Christ to encourage him to publish a whole series of follow-up books: 
The Case for a Creator,
The Case for the Real Jesus, 
The Case for Faith, 
The Case for Faith for Kids, 
The Case for Christ for Kids, 
A Case for a Creator For Kids, 
Off My Case For Kids, 
The Case for Christ Student Edition,
The Case for Faith Student Edition,
The Case for a Creator Student Edition 
The Case for the Real Jesus Student Edition
The Case for Christ/Case For Faith--Student Leader's Guide,
The Case for Christianity Answer Book, 
The Case for the Resurrection, 
Case for Faith/Case for Christ Compilation, 
The Case for Christ Study Bible,  
Cold Case for Christ,
The Case for Grace,
The Case for Easter, 
The Case for Christmas
The Case for Christ: with DVD A Six Session Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus 
The Case for Christ Visual Edition  
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

            Even if you assume the most spiritual of motives for the first couple books, it’s hard to look at this list and not think that in the course of cranking out book after book, at a certain point in this list marketing considerations began outweighing spiritual motivations.

            And if all that wasn’t enough, the Questions for Reflection or Group Study at the end of each section only make sense if you assume this book was designed to be talked about in small group study—He’s basically all but saying he’s going after the Sunday-School market here

            It might seem like I’m being overly cynical, and it probably is uncharitable to question an author’s motives in any situation.  And I wouldn’t go down this path unless I had to. But I have to.  The book doesn’t make sense until you realize it wasn’t written to convert the skeptic, but to cheer-on the faithful.  And then all of a sudden, everything makes perfect sense.

            Anyone approaching this book with a skeptical eye will be astounded at how quickly Lee Strobel steamrolls through any potential problem areas.  He raises a question, his Christian apologists answer it, and he moves onto the next question, whereas the skeptical reader will be constantly thinking: “Wait, that doesn’t prove anything!” or “But that explanation causes as many problems as it solves” or “Hold on! That doesn’t even make sense.”

            If you take a skeptical approach to any of the arguments being advanced in this book, then the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.

            A little bit further on in this review I’ll get around to examining Lee Strobel’s argument that the Gospels were actually written by the apostles.  As I’ll show in that section, it’s not a coherent argument at all— it’s just a mess of contradictions and leaps of logic.  It’s not believable that Lee Strobel ever intended this argument for a critical secular audience—he’d get laughed out of the room.  The only way the book makes sense is if you assume this argument is intended for an audience that’s not going to critically examine it.

            Also, a surprising amount of the book is based off of the assumption that you can use the Bible to prove the truth of the Bible.  How do you prove Jesus wasn’t psychologically deluded?  Well, the portrait in the Bible shows him as perfectly sane.  How do you prove Jesus resurrected from the dead?  Well, just look at all the people who are reported as seeing him in the Bible. 

            Another one of the most noticeable characteristics of this book is that it proposes multiple explanations for many historical difficulties.  This can work tolerably well as a defense of Christianity (it will give Christians a lot of ammunition to use against their annoying agnostic friends who are always going on about the problems in the Bible), but it can in no way function as any sort of “proof” of Christianity, because the minute you posit alternative explanations, you’re admitting you don’t know for sure.  And if you don’t know for sure, then other explanations are also possible.

            For example, one of the famous historical problems in the Bible is that according to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus was born when Herod the great was King.  According to Luke, Jesus was born during a census that took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria.  But Herod the Great died in 4 BC, and Quirinius didn’t become governor of Syria until 6 AD.

            Well, Lee Strobel and his Biblical apologist offer two ways out of this.  First of all, they claim the meaning of the original Greek text could be interpreted to mean that the census took place before Quirinius was governor of Syria.  Secondly, they say archaeologist Jerry Vardaman has uncovered some evidence that there may have been two people named Quirinius.

            Now, actually, as it happens both of these explanations are flawed.  (The first explanation involves going against the natural reading of the Greek text, the second explanation is a discovery that has been since discredited.)  But forget about that for a moment.  The larger point here is that once you posit two alternative explanations, you’re essentially admitting you don’t know which one is true.  And once you admit you don’t know, then you have to admit that another possibility is that Luke just made a mistake.  (I mean, it’s at least possible, right?)

            So in a normal logical discussion, you can’t prove certainty based off of uncertainty.

            But in Lee Strobel’s world, every argument always starts off from the assumption that the Gospels must be true, and then it doesn’t really much matter if you prove them true by method A, or prove them true by method B.

            But if you don’t already share the assumption that the Gospels are true to start with, do you see how quickly this whole argument falls apart?

            In the same way, Lee Strobel switches back and forth between multiple explanations of how the Gospels were recorded—either direct eye-witness testimony, or carefully preserved oral tradition.  Whichever it was doesn’t seem to be important to Lee Strobel as long as you start from the assumption that the Gospels are true however they got written down.  Lee Strobel offers 3 different explanations for why Matthew and Luke have contradicting genealogies of Jesus.  Et cetera.

            Then there’s also the fact that the book takes a very shallow view of the nature of skepticism.  The assumption throughout this book is that the only reasons anyone would ever be a skeptic of Christianity is either because they never bothered to do the research themselves (which, in Lee Strobel’s world, always overwhelmingly supports Christianity), or because they don’t want to change their wicked lifestyle.  As Lee Strobel writes about his own conversion story: “Frankly, I had wanted to believe that the deification of Jesus was the result of legendary development….That seemed safe and reassuring; after all, a roving apocalyptic preacher from the first century could make no demands on me.” (p. 264) This cynical view of skepticism is very popular inside the church.  (I had heard many variations on this theme growing up in the church.)  But it will immediately alienate any real-life skeptics who pick up the book.

            Nor is the book meant for people of other faiths.  The assumption throughout is that the choice is between Christianity and some sort of secular skepticism.  Therefore if the evidence leads to Christianity (and in Lee Strobel’s world, it always does) then that’s all there is to it.  You don’t even have to worry about the competing truth claims of other religions.  In Lee Strobel’s world, Christianity seems to be the only game in town, so even when the evidence doesn’t lead 100% to Christianity, but Christianity is just the “scenario which fits the facts most snugly”, then you should just throw in your lot with Christianity.  In the preface of the book, Lee Strobel instructs his readers that they must ask as a jury on the evidence: “You [will] be urged to thoughtfully consider the credibility of witnesses, carefully sift the testimony, and rigorously subject the evidence to your common sense and logic….Ultimately it’s the responsibility of jurors to reach a verdict. That doesn’t mean they have one-hundred percent certainty, because we can’t have absolute proof about anything in life.  In a trial, jurors are asked to weigh the evidence and come to the best possible conclusion.  In other words…which scenario fits the facts most snugly?” (p.15)

            But what is the Muslim to do, confronted with their own tradition—the tradition that the best evidence is that Mohammed had a revelation from God?  And if you went to 13 famous Muslim apologists (just like Lee Strobel went to 13 famous Christian apologists), how much do you want to bet they would have also slick answers already thought out for every apparent problem with the Muslim faith?  And then what are you going to do? 

Making Sense of the Contradictions

          As I’ve mentioned above, there are a lot of contradictions in this book Sometimes these contradictions will take the form of a multiple choice explanation.  But other times it gets a lot more bizarre.  Lee Strobel will be advancing one theory, and then suddenly start advancing another theory that completely contradicts the previous one.  There’s no explanation or transition or apologies or anything—he seems to be just hoping the reader won’t notice.

            There are a few cases where this is especially noticeable: the first is when talking about the Gospels as authentic eye-witness testimony.  Lee Strobel and his Christian apologist spend several pages defending the Church tradition that the Gospels were written by the apostles, and then, suddenly without any transition or anything, they begin talking about how the Gospels are perfectly preserved oral traditions.  Well, which is it?  If the Gospels are the eyewitness testimony of the apostles, then they can’t also be a collected oral tradition.

            Another strange little episode happens when Lee Strobel and his Christian apologist are talking about the differing resurrection accounts.  They argue that the differences in the resurrection accounts prove that the disciples weren’t colluding with each other, and that this proves the authenticity of the Gospels.  But then they go on to argue on the very next page that there are no contradictions in the resurrection account.

            What is going on here?

          Well, once you understand that this book is not written for skeptics, but for Christian audiences, then everything makes a lot more sense, including the various contradictions in the book.

            A lot of the contradictory arguments in this book are because Lee Strobel is writing for a conservative Christian audience, but within that audience he’s got a split between the fundamentalist Christians (who believe every word of the Bible has to be completely true) and the more realistic conservative Christians.  Lee Strobel’s trying to sell as many books as possible, so he’s trying to bend over backwards to keep the fundamentalists happy, but he’s also aware that half of his arguments are not going to wash with Christians who actually know their bible.  So he puts in both arguments at the same time, and hopes that this will keep both sides happy.

            I’ll give an example: in eighth grade, I had a Bible teacher who was, to put it mildly, not a liberal guy.  (He used to talk about how California was one day going to be destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah because of the homosexual population there!)  But to his credit, he knew his Bible backwards and forwards, and he knew that the 4 different resurrection stories from the 4 different Gospels contained too many contradictions to ever be synchronized into one account.  “Some fundamentalists have tried to devise ways to explain away all these contradictions,” he told us, “But it’s simply impossible to synchronize these accounts in any way that makes sense.”  Instead, he taught us the view that the four Gospels were based on four different eye-witness accounts, and the contradictions arise form the fact that eye-witnesses will sometimes get confused during dramatic events and give contradictory accounts afterwards.  And in fact, he went on to say, this just goes to prove that the Gospels are true, because if the disciples had been trying to sell a false story, they would have been sure to collaborate with each other before hand to make sure that all of their stories were in-synch with each other.

            This is an explanation that is very popular in circles which are conservatively Christian, but not quite fundamentalist.  (I believe it is a flawed explanation for a number of reasons, but I’ll have to save my long explanation for another post.  The point here is just that a large number of conservative Christians believe this.)

            Lee Strobel knows he’s got two groups of Christians he’s got to keep happy when he writes about the resurrection, so he advances both arguments at once.  First he talks about how the contradictions in the various stories prove the disciples weren’t colluding with each other, and then he goes on to argue that, properly understood, there’s no contradictions in the resurrection stories.

            I’m fairly sure the same thing is going on with his account of the authorship of the Gospels.  First he has this long convoluted argument about how the Gospels actually were written by the disciples, then he abruptly shifts gears and starts writing about how they were carefully preserved oral traditions.  He has to keep the fundamentalist happy by supporting Christian tradition, but he knows that there are a lot of conservative Christian scholars (my Calvin College professors were among them) who know that the evidence against apostolic authorship is too overwhelming.  So he just includes both arguments.

            And I suspect this is also why Lee Strobel repeatedly implies throughout the book that your eternity is at stake if you don’t agree with his conclusions, but stops short of actually saying unbelievers are going to hell.  Again, he knows he’s got sizeable Christian readership on both sides of the eternal damnation issue, and he’s got to keep them both happy.

The Christian Apologists Who Appear in Lee Strobel’s Book

          Lee Strobel has actually managed to gain access to some very impressive people for this book.  Some of these Christian apologists he interviews are famous enough that I even have a passing familiarity with them.

            Dr. Gregory Boyd, interviewed in chapter 6, wrote Letters From a Skeptic (A), which I read back in 2005 (before this book review project), and which I thought had some good points.

            Bruce Metzger, interviewed in chapter 3, was Bart Ehrman’s mentor at Princeton, and in all of his books that - I’ve - read, Bart Ehrman always has nothing but praise for him.

            Dr. Ben Witherington III, interviewed in chapter 7, is another colleague of Bart Ehrman, and I’ve read Ben Witherington’s critique of Ehrman (and linked to it off of this blog), and found it thoughtful and worthwhile.

            Dr. William Lane Craig has a quite a formidable intellect despite his extreme fundamentalist positions.  He’s an avid debater, and has never been beaten yet.  William Lane Craig debated Christopher Hitchens [youtube video here] is a classic, and if you read the commentary of the Internet-literati, it’s widely conceded by even the atheists that William Lane Craig pretty much wiped the floor with Hitchens.  (Hitchens is quite good on rhetoric, but unfortunately light on the hard facts, which you need to know going up against William Lane Craig).  The debate between William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman, however, is much more evenly matched.  [YOUTUBE VIDEO].  Bart Ehrman held his own against William Lane Craig, but didn’t defeat him entirely.

            It’s a pity that minds as brilliant as these are got put into a book as terrible as this one is.

            Sometimes I wonder a bit if all of these guys are entirely happy with the edit Lee Strobel gave them, because they come off sounding quite stupid in this book, and they’re not stupid in real life. 

            Another theory is that they all knew this book was intended for a Christian audience, and so they knew they could get away with certain assumptions that they couldn’t use when talking to secular audiences, and some of them perhaps got a bit lazy and left their “A-Game” at home.  I don’t know.

Why It’s Sometimes Worth Taking These Apologists With a Grain of Salt, Even Though They Are Incredibly Intelligent Guys

          It’s been pointed out by several people before me that there is no connection between how intelligent a person is and what there religious beliefs are.

            Indeed, if there were such a correlation, then all the intelligent and educated people would all agree on the correct religion.  And religious affiliation would be determined by intelligence level, and not geography.  And there would be the same percentage of Buddhists and Christians in every country.  And there would be no such thing as highly educated and intelligent Mormons.  (In fact there’s an astounding number of brilliant doctors, lawyers, and scholars who belong to the Mormon faith, which seem to prove that intelligence and religion have no connection.)

            In reality, religion appears to meet emotional and psychology needs that exist on a plane independent from intelligence. 

            In addition to whatever emotional and psychological needs religion is fulfilling for these guys, for most of them there is also the matter of job security.  William Lane Craig, for example, is absolutely brilliant, but he works at a college which requires him to believe, as a condition of employment, that every word in the Bible has to be accurate.   In other words, he can not afford to be a dispassionate scholar who looks at all the evidence and lets it lead him where it may.  He has to always go from the starting point that that everything in the Bible is true, and then work his logic backwards from there.  Brilliant logic, to be sure, but what makes a lot of it so impressive is his ability to spend enormous intellectual energy getting around the problems in the Bible instead of accepting the obvious.

            As brilliant as these guys are, a warning point for the reader should be any time you get the sense that they’re inventing these huge convoluted explanations instead of just accepting the apparent evidence in front of them.

            Lee Strobel, however, does a very good job of keeping these more convoluted explanations carefully hidden in the background.  Occasionally convoluted explanations will come to the surface (Craig Blomberg’s attempt to explain why Matthew is copying from Mark is a good example).  But the preferred strategy is for Lee Strobel to praise the knowledge and intellect of the apologist-de-jour so highly that they don’t have to explain anything they say— their credibility has been so built up that they can just make proclamations, and have the reader take them at their word.

            I’ll give a couple examples.  From page 100, apologist John MacRay proclaims, “Archaeology has not produced anything that is unequivocally a contradiction to the Bible.”  Now, that’s not exactly the truth.  In fact it’s pretty much a bold-faced lie.  Whole books are written on how much of the Bible appears to be contradicted by archaeology.  There are whole lists of contradictions, ranging from some more nit-picky details about what kings were at which battles, to huge sections of the Biblical narrative.  The whole narrative of the conquest of Canaan (basically all of Numbers and Joshua) has been completely contradicted by everything archaeologists have been able to find out about the period.  Archaeologists are sure that the Israelites actually emerged from within Canaan, which means not only is the conquest of Canaan narrative discredited, but that the preceding story of Moses and Exodus as well.  [There are numerous sources for this, but The Unauthorized Version by Robin Lane Fox, The Introduction to the Old Testament Yale Lectures by Christine Hayes,  and Bible Mysteries by the BBC all touch on the problem of archeology and the Bible]

           

            I suspect what John McRay should have said was, “We have put enormous time and energy into producing very convoluted explanations in order to get around all the instances in which archaeology appears to contradict the Bible.” But all of the actual convoluted explanations for these pronouncements are left safely out of the pages off the book.  The reader is simply meant to accept that John McRay is a brilliant guy, and if he thinks that there is not a single contradiction between archaeology and the Bible, then that’s proof enough in itself.

            Another example is all the twisted convoluted explanations fundamentalists have come up with to explain away all the contradictions in the resurrection account.  On pages 216-217, Lee Strobel and William Lane Craig talk about how all the contradictions “could be rather easily reconciled”.  They give a couple of examples of some of the explanations they would use to explain away some of the easier more superficial examples, and then they just tell the reader that these are typical examples of “how many of these discrepancies can be explained or minimized with some back-ground knowledge or by just thinking them through with an open mind.”  The real heavy duty explaining needed to get around the more serious contradictions is a can of worms best not opened here.

Some Other Statements that are of Questionable Accuracy

            I’m not going to try to do a complete list here of every time Lee Strobel and his apologist buddies take some liberties with the truth, but here are just a handful of quotations that caught my eye:

* The Old Testament paints a portrait of God by using such titles and descriptions as Alpha and Omega, Lord, Savior, King, Judge, Light, Rock, Redeemer, Shepherd, Creator, giver of life, forgiver of sin, and speaker with divine authority.  It’s interesting to note that in the New Testament each and every one is applied to Jesus (p. 169)

            God is referred to as Alpha and the Omega in the Old Testament?  Oh, no, no, no, no.

* “The general consensus of both liberal and conservative scholars is that Luke is very accurate as a historian” McRay replied.  “…archaeological discoveries are showing over and over again that Luke is accurate in what he has to say”  (p.97)

* “given the large portion of the New Testament written by him, it’s extremely significant that Luke has been established to be a scrupulously accurate historian, even in the smallest details.  One prominent archaeologist carefully examined references to thirty-two countries, fifty-four cities, and nine islands, finding not a single mistake. 

            Woah boy!  This is not true—at all.  I’m not going to get into this here, but you could make a long list here of all the areas where scholars have found mistakes in Luke’s geographical references.

The Logical Fallacies Contained in This Book

          As I read this book, I tried to make a list of all the logical fallacies which occurred repeatedly.

            At one point, it was my ambition to actually sit down and explain why these arguments were flawed.

            I’ve since decided against that (see below for “The Evolution of this Book Review”).  Anyone reading this book with a skeptical eye should be able to see why these arguments are flawed without my assistance.  Whereas the target audience for this book, the Christians that this book is meant to reassure, are not trying to find logical flaws in Lee Strobel’s arguments, and don’t really care that none of these arguments make sense

            So, instead of getting into long explanations about why these arguments are logical fallacies, I’m just going to list the more egregious logical fallacies that pop up in this book repeatedly:

Lee Strobel’s Logical Fallacy 1. The Gospels must be true because they are written down.

Lee Strobel’s Logical Fallacy 2: Anything that is written down must be true

3. The Church tradition must be true because church tradition says it is.

4. The Gospels must be true because they were written by Christians, and Christians wouldn’t lie.

5. The Gospels must be true because no contemporary witness ever bothered to write down a book proving that Jesus didn’t do all the miracles that were attributed to him.

6. If you have two written sources, and one is relatively older than the other, than that proves that the older source must be true.

7. Legends can only develop after a certain amount of time has passed, so anything written down within a few years of the event must be true.

8. Whenever Christian theology contradicts logic, we should assume that the problem is with our puny human brains and not with the Christian theology.

9. If you have one source claiming that 500 people witnessed something, than that is equivalent to having the actual eyewitness testimony of those 500 people, even if you have no other collaborating evidence.

10. The burden of proof is on skeptics to prove that something didn’t happen, rather than on believers to prove that something did happen

11.  If we were skeptical about all ancient documents then all of ancient history would be called into question.  Since we accept ancient historical documents when they record history, then we should also be just as accepting of ancient documents when they record supernatural events.

12.  If a document claims that several people witnessed a certain event, then you can claim that you have eyewitness evidence, which in turn can be used to prove the truth of the document from which these claims come from.  (Or in other words—It’s acceptable to use the stories contained within the Bible as proof of the Bible’s accuracy.)

13. If you have a religious figure who claims to be God, and you want to examine the sanity of that religious figure, then the best thing to do is to examine the portraits of that religious figure that were written by his followers.  If his followers portray him as being perfectly sane, then that must be proof that he was perfectly sane in real life.

14. Anything written in any corner of the Roman Empire was read by everyone everywhere (everyone in the ancient Roman Empire was apparently literate and multi-lingual in Lee Strobel’s world), so the (Greek speaking) Gospel writers would never have been able to get away with writing down anything that wasn’t 100% true, or they would have been criticized by the actual (Aramaic speaking) eyewitnesses.

15. Nothing that was untrue ever got written down without someone else writing a rebuttal of it.  So if you have a document that claims fantastic supernatural things happened, but you don’t have any other documents explicitly saying these things didn’t happen, then you have no choice but to accept the truth of the document claiming the supernatural.

16. Anything written by eyewitnesses is always 100 percent reliable.

17. Anything preserved by oral tradition and then later written down by anonymous scribes is also always 100 percent reliable.

18. If someone can give you accurate geographical references about a particular area, then you should believe whatever they say about any supernatural events that took place in that particular area.

Other Annoyances—Lee Strobel Cites Historical Fiction As If It Were Scholarly Research

           

            So in a post I did a while back on my favorite historical fiction books, I mentioned that as a young Christian I had enjoyed the Christian historical fiction books of Paul Maier  The Flames of Rome, and Pontius Pilate.  And in fact, I still have fond memories of them.  (Assuming you accept Paul Maier’s world view, they’re good novels that attempt to blend Christian traditions with larger Roman history.) 

            But you can imagine my jaw dropping when I read Lee Strobel trying to pass these books off as serious scholarship!

            Now, if you want to try to be fair about this, you could argue it’s border-line legitimate.  Maybe.  Because Paul Maier is a serious scholar in his own right, and Lee Strobel and his Christian apologist Edwin Yamauchi are not quoting from the fiction part of the book, but from the footnotes in the back where Paul Maier tries to explain and justify some of the narrative choices he made in the fictional parts.

            But still, a work of historical fiction, even if written by a scholar, is subject to a much less rigorous peer review process than an actual scholarly work, and consequently should be quoted with a bit of a grain of salt.  Lee Strobel should not have tried to pass this book off as work of scholarship.  He should have told the readers he was quoting from a work of historical fiction, and the fact that he and Edwin Yamauchi try to pass off historical fiction as scholarly research is a measure of the contempt for which they hold their readers.

So…If This Book Is Really so Terrible, Then How Do You Explain Its Incredible Popularity In Christian Circles?

          This book was first published in 1998, and believe it or not, in the intervening 16 years, I’m not the first person who noticed all the huge problems with this book, or the first skeptic who noticed the book is just filled with low hanging fruit for anyone who cares to try to refute it.  There are several lengthy rebuttals to this book already on-line—for example HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE (and many more).  There’s also another whole book solely devoted to refuting this book: The Case Against The Case For Christ: A New Testament Scholar Refutes the Reverend Lee Strobel by Robert M. Price (A)

          I’ve not read Robert Price‘s book yet, but it’s somewhat surprising that a bona fide academic scholar would actually waste his time attempting to respond to Lee Strobel.  I mean, do the logical fallacies I’ve listed above really even merit a response?  (Of course now that I’m several thousand words into my own review of this book, I suppose I’m in no position to criticize.  But I’m not a serious academic.) 

            It’s not remarkable that Atheists should have a field day picking holes in Lee Strobel’s book.  What’s remarkable is that Lee Strobel’s book should be so incredibly popular with Christians. 

            The book has been a bestseller with Christians, running through multiple prints and various editions (student version, young readers version--see list above).  Off of the success of this book, Lee Strobel has launched a whole series of “The Case for…” books, currently totaling over 20 at my count.

            The Case for Christ has been praised by Christian academics and philosophers.

           

            The Amazon.com page for this book is particularly revealing [LINK HERE].  There’s a few skeptics who are grumbling about how this book makes absolutely no sense and how they can’t understand how people could rate it 5 stars, but that’s in the face of the overwhelming majority of reviewers who are rating this book with 5 stars (637 at last count) and praising it highly with their comments.

            Read the comments of the skeptics (the 1 star reviewers [LINK]) and compare them with the Christians (the 5 star reviewers [LINK]) and it’s hard to believe that these two groups are reading the same book.

            In one sense, I suppose there not reading the same book.

            What’s going on is a classic case of Confirmation Bias (W).  Psychology has shown that when we read something that we agree with, we tend to uncritically accept most of the things in it.  We don’t try to look for the holes or problems in the arguments, and consequently we don’t find them.  Whereas for a skeptic like me, who is approaching this book with an eye to test and evaluate everything in it, the problems just leap off the page at me.

            Lee Strobel knows which audience he’s writing for, and he knows which audience he’s not writing for, and boy oh boy does he ever take advantage of the fact that he knows he’s writing for an audience that is not going to challenge anything he says.

How This Book Only Works if You Don’t Challenge Anything Lee Strobel Says

          It’s tempting to say that Lee Strobel is being intellectually dishonest with this book, and he definitely is, but he’s misleading people who want to be misled.  So it probably doesn’t do a lot of good for me as a skeptic to rant and rave about how dishonest this book is.  Lee Strobel knows exactly who his audience is, he’s made plenty of money off this book already, and both he and his target audience are very happy with the results. 

            But it’s worth noting, just for the record, that in order for this book to work, the reader has not realize any of the logical fallacies stated above.  The reader also has to not realize any of the various contradictions in the book.

            In order for this book to work, the reader has to be completely ignorant of any Biblical scholarship.  The reader also has to accept everything from this book on faith, and not double check any of it with another source. 

           

            Interestingly enough, another qualification for this book to work is that the reader must never look up any of the Bible passages Lee Strobel references. 

            You would think a book written for Christians would at least accurately portray the Bible passages, but they seem to be counting on the fact that none of their target audience is actually going to look up any of their Biblical references.  It’s interesting how many of the Bible passages Lee Strobel and his apologists buddies cite actually, if you take the time to look them up, mean the exact opposite of what they say it means.  Examples are numerous, but I’ll give one of many here:

            When dealing with the fact that both Luke and Matthew give conflicting genealogies of Jesus, apologist Craig Blomberg says that one explanation for this discrepancy is “that Matthew reflects Joseph’s lineage, because most of his opening chapter is told from Joseph’s perspective and Joseph, as the adoptive father, would have been the legal ancestor through whom Jesus’ royal lineage would have been traced.  These are themes that are important for Matthew.  Luke, then, would have traced the genealogy through Mary’s lineage. And since both are from the ancestry of David, once you get that far back the lines converge.” (p. 47)

            Now, in order for this explanation to work, Lee Strobel’s target audience has to think, “Well, that explains it nicely then.  I wonder why the skeptics made such a big deal about this in the first place when the answer was so simple.”  And then never look up the passages to check if Lee Strobel is telling them the truth or not.

            If you actually look up Luke’s genealogy, however, Luke makes it quite clear he’s giving the genealogy of Joseph.  The genealogy beings in Luke 3:23 “When Jesus began his work, he was about thirty years old. He was the son, so people thought, of Joseph, who was the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, the son of….”

            The Gospel writer clearly states that he is giving the genealogy of Joseph, and then even goes out of his way to remind the reader that Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s biological father, but that the Gospel writer is going to give Joseph’s genealogy anyway, because people thought he was Jesus’s father.

            Now, who knows, maybe somewhere out there in Christian apologetics, there exists some tortured logic explanation for how the Gospel of Luke is really giving the genealogy of Mary even though the Gospel writer goes out of his way to clarify that he’s talking about Joseph.  Or maybe Lee Strobel and his friends are just making stuff up.  I don't know.  But either way, there's no attempt to explain this in Lee Strobel’s book, because Lee Strobel knows no one in his target audience of Christian evangelicals is going to bother opening up their bible to see if he's actually being telling the truth about what it says.

The Evolution of this Book Review  (Or: A Discussion on Whether or Not to Waste Time Attempting to Refute Lee Strobel, when Lee Strobel Clearly Doesn’t Care Whether He’s Making Sense or Not.)

          Judged solely on the criterion of readable prose, Lee Strobel is not a bad writer.  The book is breezy, conversational in tone, and could quite easily be finished in a couple of days.

            So it’s not a hard little book to read through.  The difficulty comes for those of us who have this compulsion to review everything we read on line.  (Since 2006,I’ve made a project of reviewing all the books I read on this blog, so by virtue of reading this book I was committed to reviewing it.)  This book has sat on my shelf for over a year now, and over that time this book review has gone through various phases.

            Given that Lee Strobel doesn’t even bother making logical sense, and that this book was written specifically for people who could be relied upon to turn their brains off when they picked it up, is it actually worth my time to write a refutation of it?

            Many of the skeptical reviews of this book that I’ve read have just washed their hands of the book rather than attempting to actually refute it.  Something along the lines of: “Well, this book obviously was not intended to be read by skeptics like me, so I’m not going to waste my time trying to argue with it.”

            I’m tempted to do the same.  And yet, given how popular this book is in Christian circles, part of me does feel like it might be worth while to attempt a “walk-through” of the book, to demonstrate to people why it actually doesn’t make any sense, and why the arguments it uses actually contradict each other.

            To us skeptics, it seems self-evident that this book is complete nonsense, but the success this book has had in evangelical circles indicates that it is not self-evident to everyone.  In order to establish a dialogue between skeptics and believers, some work apparently needs to be done pointing out what appears obvious.

            Many people have already refuted this book (see the list above).  Many of them are quite good, but for my money, no online review has yet systematically gone through all the absurdities in this book.  It seemed like a niche waiting to be filled.

            For a while, I thought I would be that blogger who finally filled that niche and systematically went through all the contradictions, logical fallacies, and factual errors in The Case for Christ.

            And then reality set in, and I realized that I didn’t have the time to devote to this project, and that it would be a pretty pointless project anyway.  (It seems a waste to spend all my time systematically debunking a book that is 16 years old now, and only ever existed in the first place for an audience that didn’t care whether it made sense or not.)

            My next plan was much more limited in scope.  I would choose just 4 areas that were important to me, and limit my analysis to Lee Strobel’s handling of just these areas. I decided to only write about “The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony,” “The Legend Hypothesis,” “The Problem of Hell” and “Why Would the Disciples Die for a Lie?”  (The first 3 topics were areas of interest of mine, the last one was something Lee Strobel and his Christian apologists harped on quite a bit, so I thought it deserved a response.)

            Despite the fact that Lee Strobel’s book is not worth taking seriously, I believed the issues themselves were worth a serious examination.  Religion is, after all, the ultimate philosophical issue, and our view on religion theoretically affects every other aspect of our lives.  For this reason, I wanted to lay out as clearly as I could my thoughts on each of these 4 areas.  I thought I would use Lee Strobel’s handling of each subject as a jumping off point from which to explore them deeper.

            But this plan too got dropped in the end.

            I still believe all four of these issues are important, and they may still well merit a separate blog post at some point in the future.  But if I ever do go back and talk about these issues, I will talk about them on their own terms, without having to try to tie them back to Lee Strobel’s analysis.  On all of these issues, Lee Strobel’s thoughts are just a mass of contradictions, and it seemed a waste of time to have to write several pages trying to sort out all of Lee Strobel’s contradictory messages before I could get around to a more serious examination of the issue.

            So, in the end, I’ve decided to just limit myself to one issue.  I’m only going to talk about “The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony.”  And that’s it.  I’ll demonstrate why Lee Strobel’s arguments on “The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony” make absolutely no sense, and once I’ve established how ludicrously bad the logic of this book is on just one issue, I’ll wash my hands of the rest of it. 

            (Even though I’ve just limited myself to one issue, I’m arguably still giving this book more of my time than it deserves, but I just can’t help myself.  I feel like if I accuse this book of being complete nonsense, I have to at least take the trouble to show that it’s complete nonsense.)

How I’m Going to Structure This Review

            In order to make this thing readable, I’m going to break this review into several parts:

Part 1: Current Post

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 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

Addendum 2: Why it’s ridiculous to even get into the debate about what the evidence says about the truth of Christianity

In the next post: An Overview of Lee Strobel’s Argument that the Gospels are Based on Eyewitness Evidence