Was Jesus Real?

By Tom Quiner

Lee Strobel was an atheist who came to believe in Jesus after spending two years trying to disprove His divinity.

Be sure to watch the video from my previous post where Mr. Strobel, a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune, talks about his surprising findings about Christ.

C.S. Lewis was another atheist who did not want to believe in Jesus.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS3thuSHUYg&feature=related]

His friend, J.R.R. Tolkien of Lord of the Rings fame, presented compelling arguments in defense of Christ that began to persuade Mr. Lewis to reconsider his atheism.  Mr. Lewis was further persuaded to believe in God, and eventually Jesus, after reading “The Everlasting Man” by G.K. Chesterton.

Lewis’ conversion was a reluctant one:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Mr. Lewis was transformed from an atheist into a theist and eventually into the most persuasive Christian apologist of the 20th century.

C.S. Lewis famously framed the debate on Jesus this way:  either he was lord, liar, or a lunatic.  There’s no middle ground.  He spent the rest of his life making the case for Christ.  It is a compelling case.

I put up a video in my previous post by comedienne Janeane Garafalo who dismissed Christianity as a myth.  I have listened to a little of Ms. Garafalo on TV.  I’ve read some C.S. Lewis.  Mr. Lewis comes across as the more intelligent of the two.  (Nothing against Ms. Garafalo, C.S. Lewis is smarter than most people I know!)  In fact, he was in agreement with Ms. Garafolo until he began to truly study and think … and eventually pray … about this Man who walked the earth two-thousand years named Jesus.

So why does a former atheist and crime reporter for the Chicago Tribune now believe Jesus and His claims are real? Because of the evidence.

Why did an atheistic Oxford literary academic change his mind and become one of the most influential Christians of the 20th century?  Because of the evidence.

There are two exciting paths to Jesus:  reason and revelation.  Stubborn men like Lee Strobel and C.S. Lewis were lead to Christ through the path of reason.  The upside of the journey is off the charts!