Reflections on Lee Strobel’s The Case For Christ

2003-04-26

I was gripped by the introduction by this book. From the very beginning, I knew I would be held by this book to the very end. It was interesting to see this thorough investigation of a skeptic lawyer/journalist. It is definitely a good book to recommend to people of this sort.

The format of the book was standard in each chapter. First, he opened with a modern court case or event that was related to the aspect of his investigation he was about to describe. Then he would write about his interview with an esteemed scholar who was an expert in whatever part of the cause of Christ he was wrestling with. There were many big names that he interviewed, and they were from all over the country. The depth of the investigation was very touching even though most of the things were familiar to me. Seeing these things being shared with Strobel was awesome: all the bibliology, theology, language and other courses that I have had a chance to take were used to help a skeptical man come to know Jesus as Lord and Savior.

The book was divided into three parts. The first part dealt primarily with the biblical record, especially the New Testament: the authors as eyewitnesses, the preservation, the accuracy, archaeology, and other things of this nature. This is the source in which we know anything about God, and is an important foundation to the rest of the investigation. The second part dealt with the person of Jesus. Is Jesus truly God? Is He who He claimed to be? Strobel dealt with apparent discrepancies that one could possibly conceive. The last part dealt with the resurrection. Was Jesus truly dead when His body was taken down from the cross? It was of course to be the most important part of the gospel message, and that which caused the message to be spread by the eyewitnesses of this event.

In the first part, Strobel dealt with the texts of the New Testament, and there was a lot of focus on the gospels. In what way were they different? Are they really reliable? Though they were written years after the resurrection, the message was pretty reasonable, because other ancient literature was written well after its time. The number of documents that agree is significant as well. There were literally thousands of ancient manuscripts of the New Testament found over a large geographic area. Some were the Greek text, but there was also texts in the Syriac, Coptic, and the Latin Vulgate, among others. That is good testimony to its accuracy, considering other ancient texts, considering the Iliad was a distant second with only 600+ manuscripts, many of which were fragmentary. The archaeology was consistent with the New Testament as well. There is testimony of the extremely unknown hamlet Nazareth, port towns and tetrarchs, all which is testified by archaeology. This is amazing in itself.

The second part of the book dealt with the person of Christ. Is He truly God, the Son of God, the Son of Man? How can He be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent? There were times where He was not everywhere, and He did not have power, and there were times where He did not know the future, or so it seemed. But finding that by looking at the text with good hermeneutics, that Jesus was everything that He claimed He was. Knowing the culture and language gave Strobel a bigger picture of what the Bible has to say about Jesus’ deity. The number one reason why Carson believes from the text of Jesus’ deity is His ability to forgive people for sins that were not against Him, comparing David’s sin against Bathsheba and Uriah were really against God alone in Psalm 51. That is pretty amazing, and I had never thought of Jesus’ deity in this way before.

The third part of the book dealt with the resurrection in great detail. The first chapter began with attention to what the resurrection looked like, from the sweating of blood, from the beating, to the road to Golgotha, to the crucifixion, to His death. A physician was interviewed, and he stated there was no way that Jesus could have been alive after He went through all that He did. Strobel gave Metherell all the ‘what ifs’ that he could, but the physician could not say that there was any way that Jesus could have survived all of that. For some strange extraordinary reason that He might have, He would not have been able to leave the tomb walking around considering the holes in His feet, and He would not have had the energy to move considering the loss of blood that He experienced. As if this were not enough, Strobel found in another interview that the resurrection had turned thousands of the Jewish people in Palestine to forsake their lives under the Mosaic Law to a new life in Jesus. Insignificant men sacrificed their lives for what they had seen. Paul and James the Lord’s brother completely turned from their former ways of despising Christ and His message, to becoming avid followers of Him.

The evidence Strobel found was extensive. After seeing his wife’s life changed, he knew there was something to all of this, but he was not sure of what. This is an encouragement to me as one who is about to go out into ministry. There was an element of intellect there that helped form Strobel’s mind and heart for Jesus, but the real evidence is what he saw in how people’s lives changed: be it the lives of first century Jews, his wife, or the scholars who were enthusiastic for the cause of Jesus.