Lee Strobel

Before

Lee Strobel had built his life on hard evidence. As the award-winning legal-affairs editor of the Chicago Tribune, with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a master's in law from Yale, he made his living interrogating witnesses, weighing testimony, and demolishing weak arguments in print. He was also a committed, even smug, atheist. To him, belief in God was wishful thinking for people too frightened to face a cold, accidental universe; he had long ago filed Christianity under 'fairy tale' and moved on. His private life matched his worldview — heavy drinking, a quick temper, a self-centered drive that left his family bruised. Then his wife Leslie told him she had become a follower of Jesus. Strobel was alarmed and furious, certain she had been pulled into a cult that would smother the wife he loved and wreck their home. But over the following months he watched something he could not dismiss: Leslie grew gentler, steadier, more loving — not less. Her changed character was a piece of evidence he had not expected, and it unsettled him.

The Turning Point

So Strobel did the only thing he knew how to do: he opened an investigation. He would use every tool of journalism and law to expose Christianity as a fraud, free his wife from her delusion, and close the case for good. For nearly two years he poured his evenings and weekends into it, traveling to interview leading scholars and cross-examining the historical evidence for Jesus as if he were prosecuting a murder trial — the reliability and dating of the Gospels, the medical reality of crucifixion, the early creeds, and above all the resurrection. The trouble was that the facts kept testifying against him. The manuscript evidence was far stronger than he had assumed. He could not explain away the empty tomb, the hundreds who claimed to have seen the risen Christ, or the disciples who were tortured and killed for insisting on what they had witnessed — people will die for what they sincerely believe, but not for what they know to be a lie. Witness after witness, the case he had meant to destroy grew only more solid. On the afternoon of November 8, 1981, alone in his study, Strobel reviewed the mountain of evidence he had gathered and faced the verdict it had returned. In light of it all, he realized, remaining an atheist would require far more faith than becoming a Christian. The journalist who had set out to disprove the resurrection put down his pen and, that day, gave his life to Jesus Christ.

After

The change reached every corner of his life — his marriage healed, his drinking stopped, his ambition was redirected. Strobel eventually left journalism to become a teaching pastor at two of America's largest churches and a writer. He poured his two-year investigation into The Case for Christ, a book that has sold millions of copies, been made into a feature film, and grown into an entire library of 'Case for…' titles examining the evidence for faith, creation, and Christ. For decades he has done for others exactly what he once did for himself — inviting skeptics to stop assuming and start investigating — and has walked countless doubters across the very bridge he crossed in his study that November afternoon. The quiet faith of his wife, which he had feared would destroy his family, instead became the thing that saved it.

In Their Words

“In light of the avalanche of evidence that points so powerfully toward Christianity, I realized that to stay an atheist, I would have to believe far more than I would as a Christian.”— Lee Strobel