A really good book, an intelligent and close reading of the texts surrounding the Resurrection. I wonder if C.S. Lewis ever said anything about it; he and the author were both Brits writing about the same time and on similar journeys.
How could the motley crew of disciples — poor, persecuted, not well-connected, in leaderless disarray — have survived if they had not been right?
There was every incentive for the Christians’ enemies — the Jewish and Roman establishments — to produce the body of Jesus if they could have. And it would have been very odd for the Christians to have stolen the body and then lied about it.
The book emphasizes that James’s about-face is made plausible by the Resurrection.
The author takes the Gospel texts seriously but not, I think, as necessarily inerrant. Sometimes he’ll say that this text should be weighed more heavily than that text; also, he uses apocrypha. He likes Mark as the oldest and least embellished Gospel.
Lee Strobel liked this book, per Amazon.com. It’s also cited in Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (1995).