Late to the Party (as usual)

Lee Strobel wrote a bestseller in 1998 that was all the rave of the evangelical world for several years and I'm just now getting around to reading it. The Case for Christ. Yeah, I know. Thing is, I've always been the non-comformist and, as such, I just can't bring myself to jump on the fad-wagons of American evangelicalism at the time that they come rolling by. So, to my loss, I am only just now picking up this wonderful book.

I got the itch to read it after blogging on the Ben Stein movie (we will get back to that in a day or two) and after making my last book purchase. Christian apologetics as well as the arguments of theism vs. atheism have become my latest interest so naturally I should go ahead and read this Lee Strobel offering, especially since I already own it. (I think I picked it up very, very cheap a couple of years ago). Thus far I have found it a joy--very readable, informative, a page-turner. A lot of the information I knew already from my own studies--I own and have read material written by some of the scholars whom Strobel interviews--but Strobel puts it all together and always seems to be able to include a little more than I had known before.

I'm 134 pages in and I think I will be done with it (even on my busy schedule) within a week or so. Besides highly recommending it I wanted to pass along this little anecdote from Strobel's interview with Bruce Metzger, simply because I found it irresistibly funny.

In introducing us to Metzger, Strobel writes:

And he hasn't lost his sense of humor. He showed me a tin cannister he inherited as chairman of the Revised Standard Version Bible Committee. He opened the lid to reveal the ashes of an RSV Bible that had been torched in a 1952 bonfire during a protest by a fundamentalist preacher.

"It seems he didn't like it when the committee changed 'fellows' of the King James Version to 'comrades' in Hebrews 1:9," Metzger exclaimed with a chuckle. "He accused them of being communists!"

A gem.