The Case for Christ - Book Review

Campus for Christ, a club on campus here at UW, frequently hands out packages with free books by Christian apologists. These free books include The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, and The Case for a Creator all by Lee Strobel. I've collected all of them and am now making my way through them. I plan to post reviews of each of them as I read them.

The first of them, The Case for Christ, argues that there is historical evidence that Christ existed and was the son of God. Quite frankly, the book is excessively dull and there isn't much in it that I feel the need to review in detail (for reasons which will become apparent).

In each chapter of the book, an expert is interviewed, with Strobel posing questions and arguments which challenge the idea that Jesus was the son of God. Each chapter has a question for a subtitle, for example chapter 5: "Does Archeology Confirm or Contradict Jesus' Biographies?" You can guess what the answer given to each of the questions is going to be just based on the author of the book. Since most of the claims rely entirely upon appeals to authority, you won't get much more out of reading the chapter than you would if asking for a one word answer to the questions.

Of course, appeal to authority can be necessary on many subjects, and this just happens to be one of those subjects, so the book shouldn't be criticized for relying on authorities. However, it can be criticized severely on the choice of authorities. Not a single person skeptical of the claim that Jesus is the son of God is interviewed in this book. For comparison, look at (the admittedly biased) Bullshit!'s episode on the Bible, in which the Bible is claimed to be bullshit. In this 30 minute (minus commercials) show, Penn and Teller not only interview Shermer as their skeptic, but also a Christian biblical scholar (i.e. someone who does not agree with the conclusion of the show). Bullshit! is able to do it, so why didn't Strobel? One can only conclude that the book is biased to the extreme. I'm sure there are scholars (like Bart Ehrman) who would certainly disagree with many things in that book, and so I don't see any reason to take a certain biased sampling of scholars seriously.

One of the arguments which comes up several time in the book is that the New Testament was written at a time when many eyewitnesses of the event would still be around, thus if it contained any errors, someone would have pointed it out. I am certainly not a historian and don't know what methods are acceptable in a historical analysis, but this seems to me an extremely poor argument. These books were written at a time before mass communication - even if eyewitnesses did disagree with the written accounts and even tried correcting them, it would be pretty damn hard after the writings spread beyond their immediate area. Not to mention that even eyewitnesses might believe the event happened differently than it actually did, due psychological phenomena like false memories.

One damning point of the book is in the twelth chapter, the interview with William Craig. Craig is quoted as saying, "...the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead doesn't contradict science or any known facts of experience. All it requires is the hypothesis that God exists" page 300. While I agree that magic isn't too unlikely when you believe in a magic generator (a god) who has a particular queer fancy to fulfill a particular set of prophecies, this is much like saying it is likely little gremlins stole my keys because I can't find my keys, and I believe there to be key-eating gremlins. It comes down to requiring belief in a Judeo-Christian god to even get Craig's argument off the ground.

Overall, I don't think I could recommend this book to anyone. This isn't because I just disagree with it - I would and have recommended books which I disagree a great deal with. It's just because this particular book is boring and I really don't think many people would gain anything from reading it.