THE CASE for CHRISTMAS: A JOURNALIST INVESTIGATES the IDENTITY of the CHILD in the MANGER (Kindle e-book) by Lee Strobel

A Lightweight Version of The Case for Christ

Published in 2009 by Zondervan

I picked The Case for Christmas up for free on Amazon.com as a Kindle e-book. For a freebie, this is a solid introduction to Lee Strobel and his style. But, if you purchase this book as a stand-alone book at the regular price of $1.99 it has issues.

Issue #1. This book is a essentially an edited, truncated version of Lee Strobel's signature book, The Case for Christ. Now, I like The Case for Christ because it is very thorough and includes a lot of detailed arguments as to why Jesus is not who the Church claims he is and then proceeds to counter them. The Case for Christmas is almost exactly 1/3 of the length of The Case for Christ and the editing hurts.

Issue #2. Regularly priced at $1.99, this kindle e-book is 2/3 the price of the original source text it comes from. Right now, you can buy The Case for Christ for $2.99. Spend the extra dollar and get the much more complete, much better book.

A mosaic from the Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople

Issue #3. The title. If I had known that this book was a mere re-tooling of The Case for Christ I would not have gotten it, even if I did get it for free. I own The Case for Christ in paper format. I assumed, because of the title, that The Case for Christmas would be a look at the Christmas story itself featuring interviews with experts on the birth of Christ. Instead, this is a re-working of an existing work that people may buy even though they already own the larger book that it is derived from. If the publisher is playing this game, it is a cheap, greedy move.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5 because what is here is good stuff. Please, get the original book instead.

Find The Case for Christ here on Amazon.com: The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus

The Case for Christmas can be found here: The Case for Christmas: A Journalist Investigates the Identity of the Child in the Manger 

  Reviewed on December 31, 2014.

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

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.