The Case Against The Case For Christ - Robert M. Price

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Dr. Price Incinerates Lee Strobel's Book
By John W. Loftus VINE VOICE on May 18, 2010
Format: Paperback
This book incinerates Lee Strobel's book along with the evangelical apologists he interviews, including Craig L. Blomberg, Gregory Boyd, Ben Witherington III, D.A. Carson, William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, J.P. Moreland, and others. However, I doubt many of the people who read Strobel's book will read Price's book, not the least of which because understanding Price might demand a better understanding of the issues than the cream puff book Strobel wrote for the average person in the pew, but also because Price seems so disgusted with evangelical apologists at this point in his career he can't hide it.

But that doesn't bother Bob, since by now he knows they aren't listening anyway, like the proverbial Three Wise Monkeys, except that only the middle monkey is left who "hears no evil," which is the so-called "evil" coming from skeptics like him. It seems to me he's given up trying to reach across the divide, at least in this book anyway. He's made all of these arguments before ad nauseam and yet these apologists keep on down the road just like the Emperor who had no clothes on, willingly ignorant that they are naked. So why bother trying again? They haven't listened, really listened, to what he's repeatedly said before anyway.

Bob is preaching to the choir for the most part, or at least people willing to learn. But what a wonderful sermon it is! It'll make you laugh as well as think, which is what a good sermon ought to do. Too bad these apologists can only make us laugh--at themselves. Price makes the case against Strobel's case in such a convincing manner that these apologists must be willfully ignorant. Bob repeatedly makes the distinction between historians and apologists. A historian wants to know what happened. The apologist doesn't care what happened. He only wants to defend the Holy Book at all costs, even if it means he must sacrifice his intellect to do so.

That's exactly what readers of Strobel's book must do to accept it, for while Strobel acts like he's setting out to test the "claims of Christ," he does no such thing. Strobel is being disingenuous, Price tells us, because "his true intention becomes clear by the choice of people he interviewed: every one of them a conservative apologist!" So Strobel is not uncovering facts as a reporter would do. No, he's "soliciting opinions he already wants to promote. The irony is that, if anyone in Jesus' day had actually done what Strobel claims to be doing, seeking out informed authorities to interview, there would be no need for such exercises in apologetical futility." (p. 12)

While Bob devastates their arguments one by one, the humorous way he does so became of great interest to me as I read more and more of his book. Someone ought to come up with a collection of his wise and witty sayings.

I highly recommend this book for people on both sides who are interested in learning the truth. It's not for those who can only proof-text from the Bible as paid apologists for Campus Crusade for Christ. You cannot force a horse to drink even if you drag him to the water, so why bother dragging him there?


Price is clearly losing patience. And who can blame him?
By Greg VINE VOICE on June 25, 2010
Format: Paperback Amazon Verified Purchase
"Case Against" is at its best when critiquing the "case for Christ" put forward by various apologists, theologians, and faux historians, and demonstrating the many weaknesses and contradictions in their arguments. When trying to advance a hypothesis of his own, I don't find his arguments especially convincing (I'm thinking here of the frequent assertions that this or that element is a reworking of some element from prior mythology, for example). It's not that I find the hypothesis implausible, particularly, and even the most wild-eyed and fringe-riding statements Price makes are infinitely easier to accept than any "miracle" can be (that's not an insult...a miracle by definition should be the least likely thing to happen, or it doesn't qualify). It's just that--we can never know. Clearly something remarkable happened between roughly 4 BCE and 200 CE, in terms of personalities, religious development, literary achievement, philosophy, social movements, and the like. For all we can know, miracles and possessions and resurrections and angelic visitations were commonplace. For all we know, John the Baptist and Salome had a baby together. That's the thing. There is simply not very much that can be known from this period, whether of miracles or of straight-up biography, and while some inferences are more logical than others, we are left with enigmas and puzzles. Pretty much full stop.

Therein likes "Against's" keenest value. Because even if some of Price's ideas might make your eyes roll a little, the very fact that this discussion is possible, and the very fact that when all is said and done, it is Price's ideas that seem the more plausible, demonstrates unequivocally that if a god really wanted to communicated with humanity, the book that so many receive as holy was an exceptionally poor way of doing so.


Well-researched and scholarly
By The Librarian on September 18th 2011

I feel a bit odd writing a review of Robert Price's book. After all Robert Price's book is basically a review of Lee Strobel's book, so what I'm writing here is essentially a book review of a book review.

At any rate, here it goes:

It's actually quite a good and well researched book; however it takes longer to read through it than the average 258 page book because of Price's writing style. You see when Lee Strobel wrote his book, "The Case for Christ" it was a feel good book that was short on facts and long on fluff. It was easy to digest because there wasn't much there for your brain to do. It was rather a lot like watching a Saturday morning cartoon.

Reading Robert Price's book is a lot more like sitting in a university classroom and listening to a lecture by a highly respected university professor. Every page is filled with well researched facts and scholarly detail. Robert Price quite obviously put A LOT of work into writing this book. He takes every feel-good talking point that Strobel's Christian apologists used in "The Case for Christ" and he uses careful research, analysis and cold hard facts to tear the Christian talking points to shreds.
An excellent example of this is on pages 127-128:

"McRay is like the Hebrews enslaved by Pharaoh, only he is enslaved to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. If the Hebrews had to make bricks without straw, McRay is grasping at straws without straw. This ancient decree is much too weak a reed to pull him out of the quicksand. Can he really not see the difference between what Gaius Vibius Maximus commands and what Luke describes? In the one case, tax-payers who are currently staying elsewhere must return to their homes, their official addresses, for enrollment; otherwise the IRS would have to go looking for them. But in the second case, Luke posits that the Roman government might, for some unguessable reason, direct their subjects to sign up for tax collection where they do not live, but where their remote ancestors lived a full millennium before!

Even if we felt we could swallow a camel of such volume, there are gnats aplenty at which we could strain. For one thing, the census Luke posits (2:1), levied at the command of Caesar Augustus, is unknown to any historian of the period. This is exceedingly strange, given the meticulous documentation of the era. (Moses of Chorene says this census had been carried out in his homeland of Armenia, but he wrote in the sixth century CE and was a Christian, perhaps trying to harmonize the biblical account by reference to some local census, much as apologists for Noah's Flood try to connect it with geological 'evidence' of local flooding in the same region.)

Matthew and Luke both place Jesus' birth in the reign of Herod the Great, a client king of Rome. His was a satellite state of the Roman Empire, like Poland or Czechoslovakia before the break-up of the Soviet Bloc. At this time Palestine was not yet officially a Roman province, so it could not have been included in any taxation of the empire proper. After the inept Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, was deposed, Judea did become a part of Rome, ruled by the Roman governor of the province of Syria. The governor Quirnius did conduct a census as Luke says (Luke 2:2). But this census was carried out in 6 CE, a full decade later than Luke supposes here and no one had to return to their ancestral homes. Neither Quirnius nor anyone else governed Judea as a Roman territory while Herod the Great still lived. But there were Roman governors of Syria, which did not yet include Judea.

The apologist Sir William Ramsey tried to get rid of this contradiction by gratuitously positing a previous term of Syria for Quirnius on an earlier occasion. What led him to think this? Not much (other than a desire to vindicate Biblical accuracy, that is). All Ramsey discovered was an inscription saying Quirnius had been honored for his aid in a military victory, and Ramsey gratuitously guessed that Quirnius' reward had been a previous tenure as governor of Syria. Besides there's no room for it. We know who occupied the post in Herod's time, and it was not Quirnius. As Tertullian tells us this post was occupied successively by two men, Sentius Saturnius (4-3 BCE) and Quinctillius Varus (2-1 BCE).

Luke also knew quite well (Acts 5:37) that when Quirinius did tax Jews, in 6 CE, it was an unprecedented outrage among Jews, who responded by rebellion at the instigation of Judas the Gaulonite, issuing in thousands of crucifixions all over the Galilean hills. This shows that Roman taxation of Jews could not be taken for granted a decade earlier, no matter who we imagine conducting it."

Robert Price's entire book is like this. He doesn't just shoot one or two holes in the claims of the Christian apologists, he uses facts, logic and deductive reasoning to shoot HUNDREDS of holes in the claims of people like Blomberg and McRay until finally Lee Strobel's book lies in tatters at our feet.

Unfortunately, those who can most profit from exposure to this book are the ones least likely to read it.


About the Author

Robert M. Price was reared a fundamentalist and became president of a chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and for a time was an apologist of the sort he refuted in Beyond born Again, Deconstructing Jesus, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, and Jesus Is Dead. He holds a PhD in Systematic Theology and a second PhD in New Testament from Drew University. He has served as Professor of Religion at Mount Olive College in North Carolina and is a member of The Jesus Seminar and The Jesus Project.

Product Details
Paperback: 300 pages
Publisher: American Atheist Press (February 15th 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1578840058
ISBN-13: 978-1578840052