My perspective on this book is that he's preaching to the choir
(me, as a Christian). Most of his general arguments I heard (more likely
read) and agreed with over the 60+ years of my adulthood, a substantial
number of them in an Apologetics class I took in seminary the year after
I finished (undergraduate) college at Berkeley. I went there to find out
what I believed, and maybe for God to call me to be a preacher. I learned
Greek and I really ate up the Apologetics class, but mostly I learned that
I'm not preacher material. That was fifteen years before Strobel became
a Christian, 32 years before he wrote this book. The author bio on the
last page makes him out to be a "teaching pastor" at a mega-church outside
of Chicago, formerly a journalist with a focus on court cases.
The book starts out as if it is chronicalling Strobel's personal quest to determine if Jesus Christ is worth following, but he only goes to interview big-name Christian apologists. It may reflect some of the questions he had answered when he was making his own personal faith journey 17 or 18 years earlier, but the last chapter is an altar call. The guy is a full-fledged pastor when he wrote it. He devotes 14 chapters to his interviews with 13 Christian experts (Blomberg got two chapters). If he wanted to be perfectly fair, he would have gone and interviewed famous atheists also, but he did not. He quoted them while speaking to the Christians, perhaps edited out any flubbed answers (we don't know, he didn't say), but it was not a "fair" hearing.
I'm not faulting him, I believe the Christian answers and not the atheist non-explanations. Each Christian expert goes into more detail than I ever knew -- the whole 14th chapter on "Circumstantial Evidence" I had never even thought about -- so if I were ever to take on an atheist as I have in the distant past, I might just point him (or her: there are a very few female atheists, but they would be disinclined to engage with me) to this book. Or not, it comes across as very one-sided. It does present clear and compelling answers to all the atheistic criticisms I have ever heard, plus some I may not have heard.
It's a good book, but it offers nothing to me personally. I don't know what I could say in offering it to an atheist doing his own search, it's a Christian perspective written by a pastor. A well-informed pastor, but he still ended it with an altar call. Maybe that's OK but it's off-putting.
It was a library book. I'll take it back tomorrow.
Tom Pittman
2025 September 24