THE CASE FOR THE REAL JESUS
By Lee Strobel
Zondervan. 312 pages. £12.99
ISBN 978-0-310-24210-9
Lee Strobel was formerly an award-winning journalist with The Chicago Tribune, but since turning to Christ in 1981 he has produced a number of books on crucial issues relating to the Christian faith. This book, The Case for the Real Jesus, is the latest in a series all with titles beginning The Case for…
In recent years there have been a number of new attacks on the orthodox view of the person of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most well known would be that promulgated by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code which denied the deity of Christ and proposed that the view of Jesus given by the Gnostic Gospels (Thomas, etc.) was much nearer the truth than the description given in the New Testament.
The method of Strobel’s book is the same as that of others in the series. He travels to meet experts in various fields and, as a journalist, is prepared to ask them all the awkward questions. After giving the qualifications of his interviewee, the text then goes on to basically give us a verbatim report of the conversation.
Six challenges
This book covers six current challenges to Christianity. First, the claims concerning the Gnostic Gospels are dealt with. Whereas the canonical gospels are early, the evidence shows that the Gospel of Thomas is second century and the Gospel of Peter either third or fourth century and so lack credibility. The Secret Gospel of Mark is a hoax. The second deals with Bart Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus, which proposes that the New Testament has been so badly transmitted down to us that we cannot possibly rely on the text. But, as opposed to Ehrman’s sensationalist claims, we find that actually only about 1% of variant readings are ‘both meaningful, which means they affect the meaning of the text, and viable, which means they have a decent chance of going back to the original’.
Jews and Muslims
The third challenge concerns the resurrection. These chapters contain stunning rebuttals of the Qu’ran’s claims that Jesus did not actually die, and that Paul’s Damascus Road experience was purely psychological. In taking on the fourth challenge, that Christianity’s idea of a dying and rising god was merely plagiarised from the Greek mystery religions, Strobel goes to talk to the great Edwin Yamauchi.
The conversation is scintillating and we learn that this much-vaunted theory holds little or no water since these mystery religions all post-date Jesus! The fifth challenge comes from Jews who deny that Christ fulfils the prophecies of the Old Testament. ‘The Second Coming is never mentioned in the Old Testament and is just a Christian fiction made up to cover over the fact that Jesus has not brought world peace.’ Well, Michael L. Brown, a converted Jew and heavy-duty scholar, has quite an answer to this. Lastly, Strobel faces the challenge of why people can’t just pick and choose what they want to believe about Jesus with integrity.
It makes a great read and I think would be helpful for all thinking Christians.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church …