The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ (audiobook) by Lee Strobel




A Tour de Force

Published in 2007 by Zondervan
Read by the author, Lee Strobel
Duration: 10 hours, 45 minutes
Unabridged

Lee Strobel has written several "The Case for..." books. The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ explicitly counters the arguments from many different sources that question Jesus, the teachings about him and the integrity of the New Testament.

Critics argue that Strobel is not an expert on the things he writes about. I believe he would agree with that - at most he is a well-informed layman. But, Strobel did the best thing that one can do to create a rebuttal these arguments - he went out to the experts and questioned them (because, really, who is a qualified expert in all of these fields?). Strobel asks them the questions that the "anti-" crowd would ask (really a wide range, from Muslim teachers to Hollywood directors to college professors to former Christian clergy to internet bloggers).

Lee Strobel
The beauty of having these experts interviewed rather than just reading the books they may have written is that Strobel pushes them for clearer explanations and doesn't let them give answers that only sort of answer the questions. Strobel reads the book himself. This enables him to insert the inflections (outrage, sarcasm, sympathy, weariness and more) that were present in the original taped interviews. Of course, it would have been better to have the original recorded interviews, but the quality would not be as good as that of Strobel sitting in a recording studio and to try and re-create those interviews in a studio would be foolish - they would not have the same feel as the original interviews).

This was a most enjoyable audiobook. I learned a lot. I know my wife got tired of hearing me tell her what new thing I learned while driving to and from work. My only negative is that it is so hard to go back and find a particularly relevant piece of information in the audiobook format. In a book you can just insert a bookmark - in an audiobook the information is harder to go back and access.

Highly recommended.

 I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

 This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Case for the Real Jesus.

 Reviewed on February 6, 2010.

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