As I continue through the holiday season, I’m trying once more to read a handful of books about the Savior and the holiday we’ve set aside to celebrate Him. I recently finished books like Alistair Begg’s Christmas Playlist about the four songs found in Luke 1-2, and Ace Collins’ Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas, a book filled with 31 mini-biographies of authors and their carols. I enjoyed both of those recent reads, and found this next book on my list, The Case for Christmas, equally enjoyable.
Although I’ve never read Lee Strobel’s longer, wildly popular book from the ’90s, The Case for Christ, I’ve always known author as one of those prominent skeptics-turned-believer. His critical nature as an investigative journalist led him to investigate the claims of Jesus, both as the Jewish Messiah and as God, through a series of interviews with Bible scholars and converts. This shorter book on Christmas is but a massively edited version of that longer book—as are, I imagine, the other books in the series like The Case for Easter, The Case for a Creator, The Case for Faith. As such, I enjoyed it for its bite-size taste of his process and conclusions.
I must point out, however, that this tiny book is just that, a bite-sized taste of the real thing. You can’t come to this book expecting to get Strobel’s whole story or the entirety of his investigative process. If you expect anything more, then the book will comes across as canned and written by a Christian posing as an atheist asking easy questions of prominent scholars. He only shares the most relevant portions of his interviews, 3 carefully selected minutes out of multiple hours of interviews. It’s got to be read in that context, or else it seems like he’s pulling the wool over your eyes.
Specifically, Strobel includes in this book four chapters which include snippets of interviews with scholars only on those topics dealing with Christmas. These chapters and their scholars are as follows:
- The Eyewitness Evidence: Can the Biographies of Jesus Be Trusted? with Dr. Craig L. Blomberg
- The Scientific Evidence: Does Archaeology Confirm or Contract Jesus’ Biographies? with Dr. John McCray
- The Profile Evidence: Did Jesus Fulfill the Attributes of God? with a pastor who converted from Judaism (sorry, I already gave the book away and can’t recall his name)
- The Fingerprint Evidence: Did Jesus—and Jesus Alone—Match the Identity of the Messiah? with Dr. D.A. Carson
Each of the chapters, although short, delivers a series of objections that the scholars refute with reasonable evidence that should at least make a skeptic pause and think. The existence of God, after all, the only reasonable explanation for the existence of anything, and if God exists, and if God communicates with His Creation, it’s at least reasonable to consider that He did so through the provision of the Old Testament which foretells the incarnation and the New Testament which describes it.
Strobel does well to pique our interest with this book and to take us readers along for the ride, as if we’re investigative journalists ourselves uncovering the scoops. His process of writing is generally exciting, because he invites us into some real-life stories from his life of reporting on crimes in Chicago, stories which are meant to introduce us to the next chapter’s topic. This process doesn’t always land well, though, and one horrendous example provided what has to be the funniest chapter transition I’ve ever read, completely unintentional yet gruesomely funny.
He closes the first chapter in which he interviewed Craig L. Blomberg, PHD, about the reliability of the Gospel accounts, and he then transitions right into the second chapter about the evidence of archaeology. I’ll quote the final and first paragraphs of these two chapters so you can see the flow of thoughts that made me laugh:
Later I clicked my briefcase closed and stood to thank Blomberg. Our interview, reported in more detail in my book The Case for Christ, heightened my confidence in the overall reliability of the gospel accounts, including the Christmas story. Still, there were some vexing puzzles related to Jesus’ birth that only an archaeologist could answer—and that led me to the author of the book Archeology and the New testament. (36)
There was something surreal about my lunch with Dr. Jeffrey McDonald. There he was, casually munching on a tuna fish sandwich and potato chips in a conference room of a North Carolina courthouse, making upbeat comments and generally enjoying himself. In a nearby room, a dozen jurors were taking a break after hearing gruesome evidence that McDonald had brutally murdered his wife and two young daughters. (37)
Wait, what!? As it turns out, Dr. Jeffrey McDonald was not the archaeologist that Strobel was going to meet, but was instead a convicted murderer whose story he shared in this book to introduce the power of evidence in a court case. We don’t meet archaeologist John McCray, PHD, for another two pages, so man was that confusing! For a guy who’s given his life to writing and publishing, Strobel might want to invest a few extra hours in editing.
Overall this was a decent introduction to Strobel’s apologetic process, but it’s by no means to be taken as an exhaustive look at the historical reliability of Scripture and the events of the incarnation. For that you’d need something far longer, so maybe his other book The Case for Christ would be worth checking out!
©2023 E.T.
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