Chapter 1: Who killed Jesus Christ?
Who killed Jesus Christ? Give me a long weekend and I can disprove the resurrection. Dead people don't come back to life. That just doesn't happen. I was an atheist. I lived a very immoral, drunken, profane, narcissistic, self-destructive, in many ways, kind of life. My wife comes up to me one day and gives me the worst news any atheist husband could get.
She said, I've decided to become a Christian. And honestly, first word through my mind, divorce. And I used my journalism training, my legal training. It took me two years, unequivocally, that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof, which leaves absolutely no room for doubt.
Who is benefiting the most from seeing this divide taking place today, both theologically, politically, specifically on social media in America? Who benefits the most?
He certainly sparked something on these college campuses. He had the courage to go in. He lost his life because he did. I've been working with the FBI for the last couple of weeks because someone's trying to kill me because of the stands I take. And there was a credible threat on my life.
Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm supposed to take sweet victory. I know this life meant for me. Adam, what's your point? The future looks bright. A handshake is better than anything I ever signed, right here.
You are a 101? My son's right there.
I don't think I've ever said this before.
All right, Lee Strobel, great to have you here. Thank you. Wonderful to be here. We've been looking forward to having you for a long time.
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Chapter 2: What evidence convinced Lee Strobel of the resurrection?
I have an interesting story with you. Oh, yeah. Before we get into it, I think it's important for the audience to know, for those who don't, you've sold nearly 20 million copies of your books, 40-plus books. The big one being Case for Christ and Case for Church. There's a bunch of them. I know you have a new one that came out, Seeing the Supernatural, which we'll get into as well.
And it's funny because two weeks ago I had Scott Galloway on. I don't know if you know who he is. Professor Scott Galloway. You know, a very good voice on the liberal side. who talks about fatherhood, very successful business guy. And while we're talking, I said, so tell me about your relationship with God and faith. He said, look, I wish I had faith.
Chapter 3: How do social media and culture influence theological divides?
I don't. I said, well, look, normally when I talk to somebody who is either a super logical thinker and maybe their philosophy or maybe their math or maybe hardcore logic, I'll recommend two books to him, and I recommended those two books to him. I said, number one, you've got to read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which, by the way, Shadowlands, phenomenal.
I don't know if you've seen it or not. Great, Anthony Hopkins. I said, the second book you've got to read is Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. When I got out of the military, I was an atheist for 25 years of my life. I lived in Iran, so it's kind of tough to be a Christian when you're in Iran at war. Parents get a divorce.
And then I'm doing Bible study in Pasadena every other Friday night from 6 p.m. to 2 o'clock in the morning.
Wow.
And your stuff would come up all the time. And then that led me to studying the topics, and we're doing these Bible studies and all this stuff. Anyways. But now we are sitting down talking. I got a lot of questions for you. Yeah, that's encouraging. Yes, I got a lot of questions for you. But I want to start off with, today, a lot is going on in the world. We have the war going on.
You know, data that's coming out with what churches are growing, which ones are not. You know, there are challenges when you talk to somebody about introducing them to going back to church. They'll go back to a time where there was a massive crisis at a megachurch they were a part of, where there was a big falling out. And, man, I'll never trust a church again. I'll never trust a pastor again.
I experienced that myself as well. And I know... You were part of one, and the pastor you were part of was one I used to study his stuff very closely. He had very, very good content. We'll talk about that as well. But the opening question I want to start off with you. You write in the book, Case for Christ. Who killed Jesus Christ? You did.
I did. We did. We did. Ultimately, he died because he paid for the sins of humankind. He atoned for our sins. He paid the penalty we deserve for the sins that we've committed so that we could be given a free gift of forgiveness and eternal life. So when it comes right down to it, you and I are the ones who killed Jesus.
Yeah, and you know, it's interesting when you say that. If you're a Christian, that's the answer, right? Yeah. But if you're somebody that's not a Christian, say you're an atheist, say you're a, you know, if I'm talking to the 19, you know, I don't know, I think you gave your life to Christ was in 1980. I don't know what year it was. 1981. 1981, right, when you gave your life to Christ.
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Chapter 4: What role do church scandals play in the faith of believers?
How do I know this is true? So if Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, as I mentioned earlier, he did clearly, how do I know he proved it by returning from the dead? What is the evidence historically that Jesus really returned from the dead? Because if that is true, then he is who he claimed to be, and I ought to put my chips in that pot, right? I ought to go all in in Christianity.
And what was that moment for you? Because, you know, if you don't mind sharing your own testimony, because your wife came to you and you guys have been together since you were 18, 19 years old. I think it's good for the audience to hear from you.
Yeah. I mean, I met my wife when we were 14 and got married at 19 and 20. And I was an atheist. I lived a very immoral, drunken, profane, narcissistic life. self-destructive in many ways kind of life. I was successful, went to Yale Law School, was legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, won major awards for investigative reporting.
So people would look at that and think, oh man, this guy's got it together. They didn't see the other side. I was literally drunk in the snow in an alley on Saturday night. And my wife comes up to me one day and gives me the worst news any atheist husband could get. She said, I've decided to become a Christian. And honestly, first word through my mind, divorce.
I was going to, oh yeah, I was going to, I didn't want to be married to a Christian. Were both of you guys married? You were atheists, both of you. No, she was agnostic. Okay. She didn't know what to believe. She's kind of spiritual neutral.
She meets a neighbor who is a Christian nurse, shares Jesus with her, brings her to church, and she checks things out herself and comes and gives me the news that she's become a Christian. And I thought, well, what's going to happen? She's going to turn into some holier-than-thou person who's going to look down on me and my drinking, and she wouldn't like my friends anymore.
And it's just going to be trouble. How are we going to make decisions about how we spend our money and how we spend our time? We're going to have this divide in our marriage. So I thought, I'm just going to walk out. But then I thought, wait a minute. What if I could rescue her from this cult that she's gotten involved in? How would I do that? How would I do that? Oh, I know.
All I got to do is disprove the resurrection of Jesus. Because Jesus clearly, as I said earlier, made messianic divine claims about himself. And the resurrection proved, supposedly, that he is who he claimed to be. So I thought, you know what? Give me a long weekend, and I can disprove the resurrection. Dead people don't come back to life. That just doesn't happen.
So I thought, you know, I'm trained in this stuff. I can investigate the evidence. So I started to do that. And I used my journalism training, my legal training. It took me two years to delve into the minutiae of the historical data concerning the death and resurrection of Jesus until November the 8th of 1981. And I said to myself, you know, I've been doing this two years. The evidence is in.
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Chapter 5: What evidence led Lee Strobel to become a Christian?
He was an atheist in England and became a Christian after he investigated the evidence for the resurrection. And I read that book. There was a famous guy who made Harvard Law School what it is, which is the second greatest law school after Yale. But back in the 1800s, who investigated faith and became a believer and wrote a wonderful book on the reliability of the Gospels.
There's a lot of great stuff out there. Did Josh McDowell write a book called Tolerance? No, he wrote a book called The Evidence That Demands a Verdict and More Than a Carpenter on a real popular level. Great guy, still alive. And Sean, as I say, his son is doing great work. He has a wonderful podcast that he does. So he's carrying on. There's some wonderful. There's a bunch of them.
One of them, Wayne Cordero.
One day my pastor brings me in.
Oh, Wayne's a great guy. I used to speak at his church.
Yeah, Wayne from Hawaii.
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Chapter 6: How does Lee Strobel view the decline of Christianity globally?
Yes, my pastor brings me in. He says, I want to have breakfast with you, Pastor Dudley Rutherford. I don't know if you know who he is. He's in LA, big church, 20 plus thousand members. And he introduces me to one of Wayne's book called Leading on Empty. I think it's called Leading on Empty. It says what men go through when they're in their 40s,
You know, it's kind of like, man, I'm carrying the weight. I'm doing this. I'm doing that. You kind of need to go in to re-energize yourself for the next phase because sometimes at that age, if you go through that phase by yourself, you could do something dumb. You could do something, you know.
And that was also a big book. Hi, I'm Lee Strobel. atheist turned Christian, author of several books, including The Case for Christ and Seeing the Supernatural. You might have questions about faith, about how we know that Jesus is who we claim to be, and that there really is a realm beyond what we can see and touch and put in a test tube. So I'd love to chat with you about that.
Just go to Manect, and then we can connect and talk about these matters of faith that are so important to our lives.
Chapter 7: What role does Lee Strobel believe the media plays in shaping public perception of Christianity?
But when it comes on to C.S. Lewis, for him to be the—he was more from the philosopher's side, right, that he went there. Chronicles of Narnia, he's written a lot of things that you would think. But he did talk about those three things, the argument that kind of got me. What role did that play where he says Jesus is either, what is it, the liar, the lunatic, or the Lord, right?
I would add a fourth one, a legend. He could have been a legend.
I like that because you said that earlier. Yes, yes.
And that's a popular objection these days. Oh, it was legendary.
Over time, it gets bigger and bigger.
And he was eight feet tall. Yeah, right, right. So, yeah, is he a liar? Well, could have been. Could have been. Is he a legend? Or is he Lord or a lunatic? Could he have been crazy? I interviewed a psychologist about Jesus. Could he have been crazy? And he set me straight on that. What did he say?
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Chapter 8: What transformative stories does Lee Strobel share about faith and redemption?
He said, first of all, the teachings of Jesus. You ever read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5? The Beatitudes, the most brilliant insights into human nature. These are not the words of a crazy guy. And besides which, the way in which we document his identity of being the Son of God is through the resurrection, and that's irrelevant.
His mental health is not relevant at the time of that. But... So, yeah, you go through those options and you see that Jesus is who he claimed to be. That was my conclusion. It was not something I was seeking. I wanted to rescue my wife from this cult. But you know what? I'm from the old school of journalism. I can't speak about contemporary journalism.
Back in my day, I got a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, which was the first and I believe the best journalism school. And we were taught to try to tell both sides and be objective as possible. When I was an atheist at the Chicago Tribune, I was very pro-abortion.
I, as an atheist, I helped arrange an abortion for a young woman I knew as a friend at the University of Missouri who got pregnant. And she came to me and said, Lee, what do I do? I'm pregnant. I said, don't worry about it. Abortion is legal in New York. I'll take care of it. We'll get the money together. I'll set it up. So no babies in your way. You get rid of it. Wow. Yeah. But you know what?
Even though at that time I was very pro-abortion, I covered a lot of court cases involving the abortion issue. It goes Supreme Court back and forth through those years. If you read any of my articles, you would not know where I stood. Because I was taught you tell both sides. You quote both sides. You present both arguments. That's my role as a journalist.
Today, you get a lot of people, you say, why are you going into journalism? I want to change the world. No, that's not your job to change the world. Your job is to tell the truth, is to tell both sides, report what's going on accurately. Who does that today? Who does that today? Who do you go to? Like, is there any source you go to? You know what I do?
I try to go to multiple sources, figuring I'm going to kind of reach a mean that'll, you know. So I like the Wall Street Journal. They're pretty good. Me too. It's my number one. Yeah, that's me, my number one. I bounce back and forth on television between CNN and Fox News. I'll listen a little here and a little there and try to catch something.
I subscribe to the Washington Post and the New York Times, not because I trust them, but because I want to know what they're saying. I don't trust them. I don't trust them anymore. They have become advocates. They've become people who are trying to promote a cause. And that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in somebody telling me what is going on. Give me both sides. Tell me the truth.
Yeah, it's tough. I mean, listen, today it's not easy to sit there and, you know, see who to trust, what they're going to be saying. It's such a great time for propaganda and confusion. You know how they say the fog of war? It's like the fog of everything today.
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