The Case for Christ - What Would It Take for You to Actually Look at the Evidence?
He Went Looking for Evidence Against God. He Found the Opposite.
He wasn't looking for God. He was looking for a way to prove his wife wrong.
It was 1980, and Leslie Strobel had started going to church. Her husband — a legal editor at the Chicago Tribune, Yale-trained, sharp as a blade — watched the change in her and felt something close to alarm. She was becoming, he thought, dangerously naive. Someone had to investigate this.
So he did.
Lee had spent his career chasing stories that didn't add up. He knew how to find the crack in a testimony, the inconsistency in a witness account, the moment a narrative collapsed under pressure. He applied all of it to the claims of Christianity — not to find truth, but to dismantle it.
He interviewed historians. Archaeologists. Physicians. Psychiatrists. Scholars from Cambridge, Princeton, Brandeis. He asked the questions no one in a church pew ever dared ask out loud: Were the gospel accounts written close enough to the events to be reliable? Is there evidence for Jesus outside the Bible? Is there any rational reason — any at all — to believe a man came back from the dead?
He expected the whole thing to fall apart.
It didn't.
The deeper he dug, the more unsettled he became. The manuscript evidence for the New Testament was, as one scholar told him, almost embarrassing compared to other ancient texts we accept without question. The eyewitness accounts were dated far too early for legend to have taken hold. The disciples — who had everything to lose and nothing to gain — died proclaiming the same story.
He kept waiting for the crack. It never came.
What came instead was something he hadn't prepared for: the slow, terrifying possibility that it might all be true.
"To continue in atheism," he would later write, "I would need to believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information. I simply didn't have that much faith."
There's a question underneath that sentence that has a way of staying with you long after you've put it down. Not what do you believe — but have you ever actually looked?
I picked this up thinking it was for skeptics. I didn't expect it to shake loose things I thought I'd already settled.
The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.
If you'd like to read it:👉 You can check out the book here if you’d like (affiliate link).
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I Thought It Was My Faith. It Never Was. — Basic Christianity
Have You Ever Wanted to Believe But Just… Couldn't? — The Reason for God
You Already Know Right from Wrong. Have You Ever Asked Why? — Mere Christianity
