The Case Reopened

Introduction

Lee Strobel presents himself as a skeptic who was won over by the evidence. He opens The Case for Christ by telling readers he once “considered myself an atheist” (p. 15)[1], and he describes the book as the work of a reporter who brought “the training I had received at Yale Law School as well as my experience as legal affairs editor of the Chicago Tribune” (p. 16)[1] to the question of who Jesus really was.

That promise has obvious appeal. Many believers are told that their faith cannot survive contact with history. Strobel offers them a reassuring answer: a hard-nosed journalist went looking for holes in the story of Jesus, questioned thirteen experts, and came away convinced. For doubters, the book offers something just as attractive. It invites them to sit in the jury box, weigh the evidence for themselves, and reach a verdict. The subtitle sums up the pitch: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus.

The problem is that the book is not the investigation it claims to be.

That conclusion does not depend on outside critics. It comes from Strobel’s own pages. Read closely, the book admits that its interviews were conducted long after his conversion, by a man who was already a committed Christian. It calls only witnesses for one side. It passes along claims it never checks. In one case it takes a statistic from two apologists and later credits it to a scholar who never said it in the interview. And when its evidence is examined on its own terms, much of it supports a narrower conclusion than the one the book draws.

This paper works through those problems in order. We will look at how the book frames itself, how it chooses its witnesses, and how it handles four major areas of evidence: the authorship and dating of the gospels, the manuscript record, the references to Jesus in non-Christian writers, and the case for the resurrection. Wherever possible, the evidence comes from The Case for Christ itself, with page numbers, so readers can check every claim against their own copy.

The goal is not to attack anyone’s faith. Christianity does not stand or fall on one popular book, and many of the scholars Strobel interviewed have done serious work. The goal is honesty about method. A book that asks readers to act as jurors owes them a fair trial. It should tell them who is asking the questions, let both sides testify, and keep the evidence separate from the closing argument. The Case for Christ does none of these things consistently.

This matters beyond one book. Readers who come away from it believing they watched a skeptic examine the evidence deserve to know if that impression is wrong, and they deserve a clearer picture of what a real investigation would require.

The Investigation That Wasn’t

Strobel opens the book with a story from his newspaper days, and it is worth taking seriously, because it sets the standard the rest of the book should be judged by.

The Reporter’s Own Lesson

As a young reporter, Strobel covered the case of James Dixon, a man accused of shooting a police sergeant. The evidence against Dixon looked overwhelming, and Dixon had even pleaded guilty. A tip from an informant led Strobel to dig deeper, and he found that a different explanation fit the facts better. Dixon was eventually cleared (pp. 9-14)[1].

Strobel draws two lessons from the case. The first is that “evidence can be aligned to point in more than one direction” (p. 14)[1]. The second is about himself: “One reason the evidence originally looked so convincing to me was because it fit my preconceptions at the time” (p. 14)[1]. He says the key questions were these: “Had the collection of evidence really been thorough? And which explanation best fit the totality of the facts?” (p. 14)[1]

These are good lessons. They are exactly the right questions to ask of any investigation, and they are the questions this paper will ask of The Case for Christ. Was the collection of evidence thorough? Were other explanations allowed to compete? And did the evidence look convincing because of what it showed, or because it fit the investigator’s preconceptions?

Framing Versus Timeline

Strobel dates the start of his search to his wife’s conversion: “Leslie stunned me in the autumn of 1979 by announcing that she had become a Christian” (p. 16)[1]. He gives the end date in the book’s conclusion: “The date was November 8, 1981. It was a Sunday” (p. 349)[1]. His official biography agrees that he “became a Christian in 1981”[2]. The book was published in 1998[1], about seventeen years later.

So who conducted the interviews in the book? Read carefully, the introduction gives the answer. Strobel writes that he is going to “retrace and expand upon the spiritual journey I took for nearly two years” and that readers will come along “as I interview thirteen leading scholars and authorities” (p. 17)[1]. The interviews are a retracing. They happened during the writing of the book, not during the search that changed his mind.

The very next paragraph, however, describes those interviews as a skeptic’s challenge. Strobel says he traveled the country “to challenge them with the objections I had when I was a skeptic, to force them to defend their positions with solid data and cogent arguments” (p. 17)[1]. Throughout the chapters he plays that part. He pushes back, raises objections, and describes himself as unconvinced until the expert answers. The reader is invited to experience the conversations as a live investigation with the outcome still in doubt.

The clearest statement of what actually happened does not appear until the last chapter:

“My investigation into Jesus was similar to what you’ve just read, except that I primarily studied books and other historical research instead of personally interacting with scholars.” (p. 349)[1]

In other words, the conversations that fill more than three hundred pages are not the investigation Strobel actually carried out. They are a reconstruction, staged by a man who had already been a Christian for well over a decade.

Where the Format Came From

The acknowledgments fill in the rest. Strobel thanks Bill Hybels, “who allowed me to produce a series of presentations on this topic at Willow Creek Community Church,” and his wife, “who came up with the idea of translating that concept into a book” (Acknowledgments)[1]. The book began as a series of church presentations, which is to say, as an exercise in persuasion delivered by a pastor to a congregation.

There is nothing dishonest about a pastor making the case for his faith. Apologetics is an old and respectable tradition. And dramatizing a past journey is a legitimate way to write. The problem is the gap between what the book is and what it tells readers they are watching. A persuasive case, written by an advocate, is presented as an investigation, conducted by a skeptic. Readers who never reach page 349, or who read past that sentence without noticing it, come away with the wrong impression of where the book’s conclusions came from.

A Critic’s View

Religion critic David Fitzgerald goes further. In a 2019 interview with Valerie Tarico, he said: “Strobel has cultivated a thoroughly bogus image that he happily encourages readers to embrace.” He also said: “In reality, he was a lapsed Lutheran who became a pastor at a mega-church.”[4] Tarico summarizes his position as the view that “key parts of this story are distorted at best and fabricated at worst.”[4]

A Trial With One Side

The courtroom is the book’s central metaphor. Strobel asks readers to take “the role of a juror” (p. 17)[1], and each chapter is named after a category of courtroom evidence: eyewitness, documentary, corroborating, scientific, rebuttal, psychological, medical. The structure invites readers to assume that the process is fair. In a real trial, fairness has a specific meaning. Both sides call witnesses, and each side can cross-examine the other’s.

Thirteen Witnesses, One Verdict

The book’s thirteen experts come from institutions such as Denver Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, Wheaton College, Asbury Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and the Talbot School of Theology (chapter openings, pp. 21-329)[1]. Strobel describes them as scholars “who have impeccable academic credentials” (p. 17)[1], and in his acknowledgments he thanks them for “their humble and sincere faith” (Acknowledgments)[1].

Their credentials are real, and several of them are respected in their fields. That is not the issue. The issue is that every witness testifies for the same side. Not one of the thirteen believes the gospels are unreliable, that the resurrection did not happen, or that the case for Christianity is weaker than Strobel says. The jury hears thirteen witnesses for the prosecution and none for the defense.

How the Critics Are Introduced

The other side does appear in the book, but only as described by its opponents. The clearest example is the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who, as the book describes them, voted with colored beads on whether Jesus actually said what the gospels quote him as saying (p. 148)[1]. Strobel introduces the group himself, before any expert speaks, as “a self-selected group that represents a minuscule percentage of New Testament scholars but that generates coverage vastly out of proportion to the group’s influence” (p. 148)[1]. His expert, Gregory Boyd, then calls them “an extremely small number of radical-fringe scholars who are on the far, far left wing of New Testament thinking” (p. 152)[1].

Whatever one thinks of the Jesus Seminar, notice what has happened. The reader has been told what to think of the critics twice, by Strobel and by Boyd, and has not heard a single critic speak. In a courtroom, this would be like a prosecutor summarizing the defense’s argument, having his own witness call it fringe, and then resting his case.

Testimony Nobody Checked

The book’s handling of one specific claim shows how the method works in practice. Strobel raises a well-known problem with the gospel of Luke. Luke dates the census that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem to the time “when Quirinius was governing Syria and during the reign of Herod the Great,” yet, as Strobel himself puts it, “Herod died in 4 B.C., and Quirinius didn’t begin ruling Syria until A.D. 6” (p. 135)[1]. His expert, archaeologist John McRay, answers:

“An eminent archaeologist named Jerry Vardaman has done a great deal of work in this regard. He has found a coin with the name of Quirinius on it in very small writing, or what we call ‘micrographic’ letters.” (p. 136)[1]

Strobel’s reaction is revealing: “This sounded a bit speculative to me, but rather than bog down this conversation, I decided to mentally file this issue away for further analysis later” (p. 136)[1]. The claim goes into print anyway. Historian Richard Carrier, who examined Vardaman’s work in detail, reaches a blunt conclusion: “There is no Quirinius coin. McRay’s reference is to an unpublished paper”[3].

A journalist who suspects a source is speculating does not print the claim and move on. He makes a phone call. Strobel’s own Dixon lesson asks whether the collection of evidence was thorough. Here, by his own account, it was not.

The Gospels on Trial

If the gospels are reliable eyewitness accounts, much of the rest of the case follows. If they are not, the case is in trouble. The book’s first two chapters, both with New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg, set out to establish that they are. The interesting thing about these chapters is how much Blomberg concedes along the way.

Who Wrote Them

Blomberg opens with an honest admission: “strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous” (p. 26)[1]. None of the four gospels names its author in the text. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from later church tradition. The earliest witness Blomberg cites for that tradition is Papias, writing “in about A.D. 125” (p. 28)[1]. That is roughly a century after the events the gospels describe.

Blomberg argues that the traditional names are probably correct, partly because Mark and Luke were not among the twelve disciples, which would make them odd choices for anyone inventing an author (p. 27)[1]. That is a fair argument. But it is an argument about probability, built on tradition. It is not eyewitness testimony, and the book’s own expert admits as much in his first answer.

When They Were Written

On dating, Blomberg is equally candid: “The standard scholarly dating, even in very liberal circles, is Mark in the 70s, Matthew and Luke in the 80s, John in the 90s” (pp. 40-41)[1]. By those dates, the earliest gospel was written about forty years after the crucifixion.

Blomberg then argues for earlier dates. His key point is the ending of the book of Acts, which was written by the same author as Luke. Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome and never reports his death. From this, Blomberg concludes that “Acts cannot be dated any later than A.D. 62,” which would push Luke, and Mark before it, earlier still (p. 42)[1].

Blomberg may be right, and he is a serious scholar. But notice what the reader is given. The book states the mainstream view in one sentence, then devotes its attention to the minority argument against it. No scholar who holds the standard dating is ever asked to explain why. The juror is told the majority view exists and then hears only the rebuttal.

The Alexander Comparison

Blomberg also compares the gospels with the earliest surviving biographies of Alexander the Great, which were written by Arrian and Plutarch “more than four hundred years after Alexander’s death,” yet “historians consider them to be generally trustworthy” (p. 41)[1]. The point is that the gospels, written within decades, look good by comparison.

The comparison works only if the two cases are alike in the ways that matter. Historians do not trust Arrian and Plutarch on their word alone. They trust the parts that can be checked against other evidence, and they treat the extraordinary parts of ancient biographies with caution. The skeptic’s question about the gospels is not whether they are closer in time than Arrian. It is how much independent evidence supports their most extraordinary claims. That is exactly the question the next chapters are supposed to answer.

Copies Are Not Confirmation

The book’s third chapter features Bruce Metzger, whom the book calls a “world-class scholar” (p. 350)[1]. Textual criticism is the field that compares surviving handwritten copies of an ancient text to reconstruct, as closely as possible, what the original said. Metzger’s interview makes a genuine point. It also shows how the book stretches a genuine point beyond what it can carry.

Counting Manuscripts

Metzger walks Strobel through the numbers. He reports 5,664 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and “about 24,000 manuscripts in existence” when translations into other ancient languages are included (p. 81)[1]. By comparison, he says, Homer’s Iliad, the next best preserved work, survives in “fewer than 650 Greek manuscripts” (p. 78)[1].

These numbers are impressive, and they mean something real. With that many copies, scholars can be confident about what the New Testament authors originally wrote in the vast majority of passages.

But that is a different question from whether what they wrote is true. Think of a newspaper story printed in a million copies. The number of copies tells you, with near certainty, what the reporter wrote. It tells you nothing about whether the reporter got the story right. Manuscript evidence answers the first question. The book repeatedly treats it as if it answers the second.

The Variants Question

Strobel does raise the problem of variants, the differences between manuscripts that copyists introduced over the centuries: “I had seen estimates as high as two hundred thousand of them” (p. 84)[1]. Metzger replies that “the number sounds big, but it’s a bit misleading because of the way variants are counted,” since a single misspelling repeated across many copies is counted many times (p. 84)[1]. He adds: “I don’t know of any doctrine that is in jeopardy” (p. 84)[1].

That is a reasonable answer as far as it goes, and it comes from someone with real authority on the subject. The problem lies in what the book does next.

The Borrowed Statistic

Immediately after Metzger’s answer, Strobel introduces a striking number. It does not come from Metzger. It comes from two apologists: “scholars Norman Geisler and William Nix conclude” that the New Testament has survived in “a form that is 99.5 percent pure” (p. 85)[1].

Two hundred and sixty-five pages later, when Strobel summarizes the evidence in his conclusion, that number has changed hands (p. 350)[1]. Compare the two passages side by side:

Comparing pages 85 and 350 shows that the book gives its most quoted statistic the authority of a scholar who did not supply it in the interview. Readers who remember the summary will remember a figure from a world-class textual critic. They will not remember that it came from two apologists. For a book that sells itself on careful handling of testimony, this is a serious lapse. In a courtroom, attributing one witness’s statement to another, more credible witness would not survive cross-examination.

The Thin Outside Record

If Jesus did what the gospels say, one might expect writers outside the Christian movement to have noticed. The book’s fourth chapter, with historian Edwin Yamauchi, examines the references to Jesus in non-Christian sources. These sources are real and valuable. The question is what they actually establish.

Josephus

The most discussed passage comes from the Jewish historian Josephus, who completed his Antiquities “in about A.D. 93,” according to Yamauchi (p. 102)[1]. In the standard Whiston translation it begins, “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man”[5].

To his credit, Yamauchi does not claim the passage is untouched. He says scholars broadly consider it authentic, “although there may be some interpolations” (p. 104)[1]. An interpolation is a phrase inserted into a text by a later copyist. Yamauchi identifies three that were likely added by Christian scribes: the line questioning whether Jesus should be called a man, the statement “He was the Christ,” and the claim that Jesus “appeared to them restored to life” on the third day. His conclusion: “So these three elements seem to have been interpolations” (pp. 104-105)[1].

Remove those three lines, as the book’s own expert does, and what remains is a brief notice that a wise man and teacher named Jesus had followers and was crucified under Pilate. Nothing in the remaining text speaks to miracles, divinity or resurrection. The parts of the passage that would have supported those claims are the parts Yamauchi says were not written by Josephus.

Tacitus and Pliny

The Roman historian Tacitus, writing “in A.D. 115” according to Yamauchi (p. 107)[1], records that “Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus”[6]. Pliny the Younger, who served as governor of Bithynia (p. 109)[1], reported that the Christians he questioned “were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god”[7].

What They Actually Establish

Taken together, these sources confirm three things: a movement existed, its founder was executed under Pontius Pilate, and his followers worshipped him. Yamauchi rightly calls Tacitus “an unsympathetic witness to the success and spread of Christianity” (p. 108)[1].

That description is accurate, and it shows the limit of the evidence. Tacitus was writing some eighty-five years after a crucifixion that Blomberg dates to about A.D. 30 (p. 44)[1]. He was reporting on Christians and what they believed. Pliny was reporting what Christians did at their meetings. Neither man claims to have investigated whether the Christians’ beliefs were true, and neither had any way of doing so.

The chapter is titled “The Corroborating Evidence.” What it corroborates is the existence of the early church and the execution of its founder. Those are facts that few would dispute. They are not the facts in dispute.

The Resurrection Argument

The last part of the book makes the case for the resurrection, the claim on which the whole argument rests. Here too, the strongest evidence the book offers turns out to support a more modest conclusion than the one it draws.

An Early Creed

The centerpiece is a short creed that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15. It lists those to whom the risen Jesus “appeared”: Cephas, the twelve, “more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time,” James, and all the apostles[8]. Blomberg argues that Paul received this creed within a few years of the crucifixion, and he concludes:

“A good case can be made for saying that Christian belief in the Resurrection, though not yet written down, can be dated to within two years of that very event.” (p. 44)[1]

Read that sentence carefully. What can be dated early is belief in the resurrection. That is a significant finding, and it answers one popular objection, that the resurrection story was a legend that grew up generations later. But an early date for a belief does not tell us what caused the belief. People in every era have sincerely believed things within days of the events that prompted them. The speed of a belief is evidence of its sincerity. It is not evidence of its accuracy.

Paul’s Own Appearance

The same creed raises a question the book never seriously takes up. The list ends with Paul himself: “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me”[8]. Paul’s experience came after all the others, and he counts it in exactly the same way as the appearances to Peter and the apostles.

That matters, because it tells us something about what the word “appeared” meant to the people using it. If Paul’s experience belongs in the same category as the others, then the list by itself cannot tell us whether the earlier appearances were physical encounters, visions, or something else. The book’s witnesses treat the list as if it settles the matter. It does not.

The “five hundred” deserve a closer look as well. The creed gives no names, no place and no account of what any of them saw. It is a claim, preserved in a letter, that such witnesses existed. It is not their testimony. In a courtroom, a statement that five hundred unnamed people saw something would be called hearsay.

The Empty Tomb Accounts

On the empty tomb, William Lane Craig argues that the gospel accounts share a reliable core. He concedes that they differ on “the names of the women, the exact time of the morning, the number of the angels, and so forth,” and adds: “Those kinds of secondary discrepancies wouldn’t bother a historian” (p. 289)[1].

Perhaps not. But the book chose the courtroom as its standard, and in a courtroom, witnesses who disagree about who was present, when it happened and what they saw would face hard questions. Here the disagreements are noted and set aside by a witness for the same side, and no one is asked to explain them.

None of this proves that the resurrection did not happen. That is not the claim of this paper. The claim is narrower. The book’s case depends on accepting its witnesses’ readings of the evidence, and no witness with a different reading is ever allowed to speak.

What a Real Investigation Would Look Like

The remedy is simple, and it would cost the book nothing but some certainty. Strobel’s own Dixon lesson points the way. A real investigation of the evidence for Jesus would:

1. Disclose the timeline up front. State on the first page that the author has been a Christian since 1981 and that the interviews were conducted for the book (p. 349)[1].
2. Interview critics instead of describing them. Each chapter could put the same questions to a specialist who reaches the opposite conclusion and let readers weigh the two answers side by side.
3. Check claims before printing them. The Vardaman coin was flagged as “speculative” by the author himself and published anyway (p. 136)[1].
4. Quote witnesses accurately. A statistic from Geisler and Nix should not become Metzger’s testimony in the summary (pp. 85, 350)[1].
5. Separate what the sources show from what the case needs. The outside sources establish that the church existed. The creed in 1 Corinthians 15 establishes early belief. Neither establishes a miracle, and readers should be told the difference.

None of these steps would prevent an author from concluding that Christianity is true. They would only ensure that readers reach their own verdict with the whole case in front of them.

Readers who want to hear the other side at book length can start with Robert M. Price’s The Case Against The Case for Christ[9] and Earl Doherty’s Challenging the Verdict[10]. Both are book-length responses to Strobel.

Conclusion

Lee Strobel learned an important lesson as a young reporter. Evidence can be made to point in more than one direction, and it looks most convincing when it fits what we already believe (p. 14)[1]. The Case for Christ presents itself as the work of a man who learned that lesson and applied it to the biggest question of his life.

On the evidence of its own pages, the book does not apply that lesson to itself.

Throughout this paper, we have traced a consistent pattern. The interviews that make up the book were conducted long after the author’s conversion, a fact the book admits on page 349. Every witness testifies for the same side, and the critics appear only through their opponents’ descriptions. A claim the author found speculative was printed without being checked. The book’s most quoted manuscript statistic is credited in the conclusion to a scholar who did not supply it in the interview. And the evidence itself, examined closely, supports narrower conclusions than the ones the book draws. The outside sources confirm that Christians existed. The early creed confirms that they believed. Neither confirms the miracle at the center of the faith.

What remains, once the framing is set aside, is a set of conservative arguments about the New Testament. Some of them are serious. All of them are contested by scholars the book never lets speak. Those arguments deserve to be judged on their merits, alongside the strongest replies to them.

Strobel asks his readers to act as jurors. That is a fair request. A juror who takes it seriously should ask the questions Strobel himself asked in the Dixon case. Was the collection of evidence thorough? Which explanation best fits all of the facts? And does the case look convincing because of what it shows, or because of what we already believed?

Readers deserve to hear the whole case.

Scripture References

All passages are linked in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE).

• 1 Corinthians 15:3-8: the early creed of resurrection appearances
• Luke 2:1-2: the census under Quirinius
• Acts 28:30-31: the open ending of Acts