The Skeptic's Reading List

If you are skeptical of Christianity, you have probably been handed a book at some point by a well-meaning Christian. Perhaps it was good. Perhaps it was thin, or preachy, or answered questions you were not asking. Either way, you may have concluded that the case for the faith is not very strong, or that Christians do not take hard questions seriously.

This paper is meant to change that. It is a reading list for people who want to examine the evidence for themselves, written by someone who once wanted to disprove it.

Why a reading list

The Bible does not ask to be believed without examination. It asks to be tested.

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

When Paul preached in Berea, Luke commends his hearers not for believing him at once but because they "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). And when a Roman governor told Paul that his learning had driven him mad, Paul answered that he spoke "the words of truth and soberness" (Acts 26:25), about events that were "not done in a corner" (Acts 26:26).

A faith that makes claims about history can be investigated like history. A faith that makes claims about the nature of the world can be weighed against what we know of the world. The books on this list are tools for that investigation.

How the books were chosen

Every book on this list meets four tests.

1. It is real and findable. Each title, author, year and publisher has been checked. Most are in print; several of the older ones are free online, and the link is given. 2. It deals with real objections. These books take on the strongest forms of the skeptic's questions, not straw men. 3. It is honest. The authors show their sources, admit what is uncertain and do not overstate their case. 4. It is sound, or its differences are flagged. Recommending a book is not endorsing every page of it, or everything its author has written elsewhere. Where an author's views on an important point differ from what this ministry teaches, the entry says so.

Some well-known books are missing on purpose. A few promote views this ministry does not hold, and a few come from ministries it does not recommend. You will not lose anything by starting with the books here.

A word about me

I was raised Roman Catholic but never really connected — I went through the motions, fell asleep in the pews, and faked being sick to skip Mass. Eventually I gave up and called myself an atheist. I decided to read the Bible for one reason: to disprove it, so I'd have an excuse to stop going to church for good. It did the opposite. I came to faith in 2022, and my wife came to faith a month later. The rest of the story is at kylelauriano.com/about.

I mention it because the book this list starts with is the Bible itself. Every other book here is a help to reading it.

How to use this list

You can read this paper straight through, or go where you need to:

• Part 1 begins with the Bible itself and the earliest witnesses to Jesus outside it.
• Part 2 gives ten books to begin with, if you read nothing else.
• Part 3 arranges further books by the question you are asking.
• Part 4 offers three reading plans: four weeks, twelve weeks, and a year.
• Part 5 is a short guide to reading critically, including reading the best critics of Christianity.

A note on Scripture: every verse in this paper is quoted from the King James Bible. You can read it free in the 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library.

This part matters because it is easy to read a great deal about Christianity without reading its foundational document. Many skeptics have read critics of the Bible and defenders of the Bible but never the Bible. Begin there.

Read the Bible as a document

You do not need to believe the Bible is God's word to read it fairly. Read it the way you would read any ancient source: asking who wrote it, when, for whom, and what it claims happened.

The Gospels invite this. Luke opens his with a statement of method:

“Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.” (Luke 1:1-4)

John closes his with a statement of purpose: "these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name" (John 20:31). Peter insists that the apostles "have not followed cunningly devised fables" but "were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16).

Those are claims. You can test them.

Where to begin reading

If you have never read the Bible, here is an order that works:

| Read | Why | |---|---| | The Gospel of Mark | The shortest Gospel; fast-moving; a good first picture of Jesus | | The Gospel of John | Written "that ye might believe"; the claims of Jesus about Himself | | 1 Corinthians 15 | Paul's list of witnesses to the resurrection, written within living memory | | Genesis 1–11 | Creation, the Fall, the Flood: the Bible's account of where we came from and what went wrong | | Romans 1–8 | The fullest explanation of the gospel in the New Testament | | Acts | What happened next: how the church began and spread |

The King James Bible is the translation quoted throughout this paper and the one this ministry recommends. You can read it free, in the original 1611 spelling or modern spelling, in the 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library. A KJV with Strong's Concordance lets you look up every word in its Hebrew or Greek original.¹ Where modern translations differ from the 1611 and the Received Text behind it, you can see every place at kylelauriano.com/library/changes.

Witnesses outside the Bible

A common skeptical claim is that Jesus may never have existed. Almost no historians of the ancient world hold that view, in part because of witnesses outside the New Testament. Three are short and worth reading for yourself, in translation, free online.

Tacitus (c. 56–c. 120), the greatest Roman historian, describes in his Annals how Nero blamed the great fire of Rome in AD 64 on "a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians." He explains the name: "Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus."² Tacitus despised the Christians; he had no reason to invent their founder.

Pliny the Younger, Roman governor of Bithynia, wrote to the Emperor Trajan around 112 asking how to deal with Christians brought before him. Those he questioned told him that "they met on a stated day before it was light, and addressed a form of prayer to Christ, as to a divinity," and bound themselves by oath not to commit fraud, theft or adultery.³ Within a century of the crucifixion, Christians in Asia Minor were worshipping Christ as God.

Josephus (c. 37–c. 100), the Jewish historian, mentions Jesus twice in his Antiquities of the Jews: once in a longer passage about Jesus' life, death under Pilate and followers (18.3.3), and once in passing, when he records the death of "the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James" (20.9.1).⁴ Honesty requires a note: most scholars think the longer passage was added to by a later Christian copyist, though many believe Josephus wrote a shorter original about Jesus. The brief reference to James is generally accepted as genuine.

None of these writers was a Christian. Together they confirm that Jesus lived, that He was executed under Pontius Pilate, and that His followers very soon worshipped Him.

This part matters because a skeptic with limited time needs to know where to start. If you read only these ten, you will have met the strongest popular case for Christianity, written by people who include a journalist, a detective, an Oxford don, a mathematician and philosopher, and several former skeptics.

Each entry gives the book, the author, what the book does, how demanding it is, and where to start.

1. The Case for Christ — Lee Strobel

The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).

Strobel was an atheist and a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, with a Master of Studies in Law from Yale, when his wife became a Christian. He set out to investigate the claims of Christ, and became a Christian himself at twenty-nine.⁵ Years later he retraced the investigation by interviewing scholars: on whether the Gospels are eyewitness accounts, whether the manuscripts are reliable, what archaeology shows, and what happened at the tomb.

Level: easy; written for the general reader in a journalist's style. Start here if: you want a fast, readable overview of the historical case.

2. Mere Christianity — C. S. Lewis

Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952).

Lewis was an Oxford scholar and a former atheist. During the Second World War the BBC asked him to explain the Christian faith on the radio, and the talks became this book. It begins with the moral law that every person knows and fails to keep, argues from it to a Lawgiver, and then explains what Christians believe about Christ, sin and the new life.⁶ Its argument that Jesus' claims leave no room for calling Him merely a good teacher is one of the most famous passages in modern Christian writing.

Level: easy to moderate; short chapters, plain English. Start here if: you want to know whether Christianity makes sense as a whole.

3. Cold-Case Christianity — J. Warner Wallace

Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2013).

Wallace was a cold-case homicide detective in Southern California and an atheist until he was thirty-five. He became a Christian in 1996 after reading the Gospels as he would read witness statements. In this book he sets out ten principles of cold-case investigation and applies them to the New Testament: whether the witnesses were present, corroborated, accurate and unbiased.⁷

Level: easy; illustrated with real case examples. Start here if: you think like an investigator and want to know how to test eyewitness testimony.

4. Who Moved the Stone? — Frank Morison

Who Moved the Stone? (London: Faber & Faber, 1930). Text free at gospeltruth.net.

Frank Morison was the pen name of Albert Henry Ross, an English advertising man and writer. As a young man he held the Gospel miracles suspect and planned a short study of the last seven days of Jesus' life. The study turned into this book, whose first chapter is called "The Book That Refused to Be Written."⁸

Level: moderate; old-fashioned prose, careful argument. Start here if: you want to see a skeptic work through the passion and resurrection accounts himself.

5. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus — Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004).

Habermas has spent his career studying what scholars, including skeptical scholars, accept about the events after Jesus' death. This book builds the case for the resurrection on a small number of facts that are granted by most historians who study the subject, whatever their beliefs, and then weighs the alternative explanations one by one.⁹ It is designed to be used, with summaries and examples for conversation.

Level: moderate. Start here if: you want to know exactly what historians grant and how to reason from it.

6. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? — F. F. Bruce

The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (London: Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1943; many later editions, including Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).

F. F. Bruce was one of the leading New Testament scholars of the twentieth century. This short book, first published during the Second World War, asks the questions a historian asks of any ancient text: when it was written, how well it was copied, whether its authors were in a position to know, and whether outside evidence confirms it.¹⁰

Level: moderate; short and clear. Note: like most modern scholars, Bruce worked from the Critical Text rather than the Received Text behind the King James. Where the two differ, see kylelauriano.com/library/changes. Start here if: you have heard that the New Testament was written long after the events or has been changed beyond recognition.

7. I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist — Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek

I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004).

The title is the argument: that atheism requires more faith than Christianity, because it must explain the beginning of the universe, the fine-tuning of its laws, the origin of life and the existence of moral law without a Creator. The book moves step by step from whether truth exists, to whether God exists, to whether the New Testament is reliable, to whether Jesus is God.¹¹

Level: easy to moderate; laid out like a course. Start here if: you want a single book that builds the whole case in order.

8. Orthodoxy — G. K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy (London: John Lane, 1908). Free at Project Gutenberg.

Chesterton was a journalist, novelist and controversialist who argued his way from the fashionable skepticism of his youth to Christian belief. Orthodoxy is not a book of evidence but a book of sense: it argues that Christianity explains the world, and human beings, better than its rivals. He describes himself as a man who set out to be original and found he had rediscovered the faith: "I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it."¹²

Level: moderate to challenging; witty, paradoxical, and dense. Note: Chesterton later became a Roman Catholic; Orthodoxy was written before that and defends the faith common to all Christians. Start here if: you suspect Christianity is dull, and enjoy being argued with.

9. Evidence That Demands a Verdict — Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell

Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2017). First published 1972.

Josh McDowell was, by his own account, an agnostic college student who set out to write a paper disproving Christianity and was persuaded instead. His notes became this book, a large reference work on the evidence for the Bible and the resurrection. In 2006 Christianity Today ranked it thirteenth among the fifty books published since the Second World War that most shaped evangelicals. The 2017 edition, revised with his son Sean, brings it up to date.¹³

Level: a reference book, not a read-through; look up the question you have. Start here if: you want the sources behind the claims, gathered in one place.

10. Pensées — Blaise Pascal

Pensées, translated by W. F. Trotter, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958). Free at Project Gutenberg.

Pascal was one of the great mathematicians and physicists of the seventeenth century. He died at thirty-nine before he could finish a book defending the Christian faith, and his notes for it were published after his death as the Pensées ("thoughts"). They are fragments, some a line long, about the greatness and misery of human beings, the limits of reason, and the claims of Christ. One of the best known: "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."¹⁴ Pascal did not mean that faith is irrational. He meant that reason is not the only way human beings know what is true.

Level: varies; fragments can be read in any order. Start here if: you are less troubled by evidence than by the question of why it matters.

This part matters because most skeptics are not skeptical about everything. They have one or two questions that stand in the way. Find yours below.

Does God exist?

• **C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity** (1952). Book One, "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe," is the argument from moral law in its most readable form. See Part 2.
• **William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008).** First published in 1994. A full course on the arguments for God's existence (from the beginning of the universe, from fine-tuning, from morality) and for the resurrection. Challenging but clear.¹⁵
• **Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: HarperOne, 2007). Flew was one of the leading atheist philosophers of the twentieth century. In 2004 he announced that the evidence of design had persuaded him that God exists. Note:** Flew became a deist, not a Christian; his God was a designer, not the God of the Bible. The book is valuable precisely because it shows how far the evidence of nature took a convinced atheist. Questions were later raised about how much of it Varghese wrote.¹⁶
• **John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, updated ed. (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2009).** An Oxford mathematician answers the claim that science has made God unnecessary. Lennox has debated Richard Dawkins in public, including on this book's question, "Has Science Buried God?", at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.¹⁷

Can I trust the Gospels?

• **F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?** (1943). See Part 2.
• **Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2007).** First published in 1987. A thorough scholarly treatment of the objections raised against the Gospels' accuracy, from miracles to apparent contradictions. Challenging.¹⁸
• **Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).** A Cambridge-educated scholar argues, from the names in the Gospels and the earliest testimony about how they were written, that they rest on the testimony of people who were there. Advanced.¹⁹
• **Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2018).** A short, accessible book by a New Testament scholar that tests the Gospels against what is known of first-century geography, names and customs. Easy.²⁰
• **J. Warner Wallace, Cold-Case Christianity** (2013). See Part 2.

Hasn't the Bible been changed?

This question has two parts: whether the Bible we have is what was first written, and which text to trust where the manuscripts differ. Most modern scholarship, including several of the books above, follows the Critical Text, built mainly on a small number of very old manuscripts. This ministry holds to the Received Text behind the King James Bible. Two older books make that case:

• **John William Burgon, The Revision Revised (London: John Murray, 1883).** Burgon, Dean of Chichester, wrote it in answer to the English Revised Version of 1881 and the Greek text behind it. Learned, combative and long; read it in parts.²¹
• **Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended (Des Moines: Christian Research Press, 1956).** Hills, who took a doctorate in New Testament textual criticism at Harvard, argues that the Received Text was providentially preserved. Moderate to challenging.²²

And the plainest tool of all: see every place the 1611 and the modern Critical Text part ways, verse by verse, at kylelauriano.com/library/changes, and judge for yourself what is at stake.

Did Jesus rise from the dead?

This is the question on which everything else depends. Paul said so himself: "if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17).

• **Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus** (2004). See Part 2.
• **Frank Morison, Who Moved the Stone?** (1930). See Part 2.
• **N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003). A very long, very detailed study of what Jews, pagans and the first Christians believed about resurrection, and why the Christian belief that Jesus rose bodily is best explained by its being true. For the determined reader. Note:** Wright's views on other subjects, especially Paul's teaching on justification, are disputed among evangelicals; this book is recommended for its history of resurrection belief.²³
• **Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ** (1998), the chapters on the tomb and the appearances. See Part 2.

Isn't the Old Testament myth?

• **K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).** Kenneth Kitchen was a British Egyptologist and one of the leading authorities on the ancient Near East. He tests the Old Testament's accounts, from the patriarchs to the kings, against the archaeological and written records of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Canaan, and finds them far better grounded than critics allow. Long and technical, but written with flair.²⁴

Hasn't science made God unnecessary?

This ministry reads Genesis as written: six real days, a real Adam and Eve, a real Fall, a global Flood. It makes no claim about the age of the earth. The books below are chosen with that in mind. You will often see Francis Collins's The Language of God recommended here; his conversion story is moving, but the book argues for theistic evolution, which this ministry does not hold.

• **John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker** (2009). See above.
• **Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperOne, 2009).** A Cambridge-trained philosopher of science argues that the information encoded in DNA points to a designing mind. Long but clear.²⁵
• **Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (New York: HarperOne, 2021). Meyer's case that the beginning of the universe, its fine-tuning and the information in living things together point to a personal Creator. Note:** Meyer works within mainstream dating of the universe; this ministry makes no claim on age either way.²⁶
• **John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961). The founding book of the modern creationist movement, arguing that the Flood of Genesis was global and that much of the geological record should be read in its light. Note:** it also argues for a young earth; read it to see how the case for a global Flood is made, and weigh it.²⁷
• **Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).** Not a Christian book. An atheist philosopher argues that materialism cannot explain consciousness, reason or value. Short and demanding; valuable because the author has no religious motive.²⁸
• Science and Faith, the companion paper on this site, sets out the history and the arguments in one place, with all its sources.

Why does God allow suffering?

• **C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940).** Lewis's careful, philosophical answer to the question he had once used against God: if God is good and almighty, why is there suffering? Moderate.²⁹
• **C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber & Faber, 1961).** Written after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, and first published under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk. Not an argument but a record: raw, honest, and finally hopeful. Read it if your question is not theoretical.³⁰
• **Corrie ten Boom, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, The Hiding Place (Washington Depot, CT: Chosen Books, 1971).** A Dutch watchmaker's family hides Jews from the Nazis, is betrayed, and is sent to the camps; Corrie's sister Betsie dies in Ravensbrück. The book is a testimony that God is present in the darkest places human beings can make. Easy to read; hard to forget.³¹

Isn't morality just evolution or culture?

• **C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1943).** Three short lectures arguing that there is an objective moral law, recognised across civilisations, and that a culture which teaches its children otherwise will produce "men without chests." Moderate.³²
• **Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little, Brown, 2019).** Not an apologetics book. A popular historian of the ancient world traces how the Christian revolution changed the West's deepest moral assumptions, about the weak, the poor, the equal worth of every person, so thoroughly that even modern unbelievers take them for granted. Holland has written that it took him a long time to realise that his own morals are not Greek or Roman but Christian.³³

Aren't all religions the same?

• **Nabeel Qureshi, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014).** Qureshi, raised in a devout Ahmadi Muslim family, tells how years of debate with a Christian friend about the historical claims of both faiths led him to Christ. Part memoir, part argument. Easy to moderate.³⁴
• **Nabeel Qureshi, No God but One: Allah or Jesus? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016).** A direct comparison of the two faiths' central claims and the evidence for them. Moderate.³⁵

The Lord Jesus did not present Himself as one way among many: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). That claim is either true or false. These books help you test it.

What about the church's history and its hypocrites?

• **Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).** A sociologist asks how a small, despised movement became the faith of the Roman Empire, and finds part of the answer in how Christians cared for the sick in plagues, valued women and children, and loved their neighbours. Moderate.³⁶
• **Tom Holland, Dominion** (2019). See above.

The Bible itself is frank about hypocrisy. The Lord Jesus reserved His sharpest words for religious hypocrites (Matthew 23), and Paul said plainly, "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Christianity does not claim that Christians are good. It claims that Christ is.

Stories of people who changed their minds

• **Augustine, Confessions** (c. 397), translated by E. B. Pusey; free at Project Gutenberg. The first great Christian autobiography: a brilliant, restless young man's long road to Christ.³⁷
• **C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955).** How an Oxford atheist became, in his words, "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."³⁸
• **Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Pittsburgh: Crown & Covenant, 2012).** A tenured professor of English and lesbian activist comes to faith through a pastor's letter and his family's dinner table.³⁹
• Former Atheists, the companion paper on this site, gathers these and other documented stories, including guests of The King Is Coming Show.

One guest on my own podcast fits this shelf exactly.

Michael Ray Lewis told his story on The King Is Coming Show (TKIC #48): an atheist who mocked Christians, until, in his telling, one question undid him. Watch it in his own words: youtube.com/watch?v=Rd-RdSqeQDk

Michael's account of what happened to him, shared as his testimony — weigh it for yourself.

This part matters because good intentions do not finish books. A plan does. Choose the one that fits the time you honestly have. Each pairs a book with Scripture, because the point of the books is to help you read the Bible fairly.

Four weeks: the essentials

| Week | Book | Bible | |---|---|---| | 1 | Strobel, The Case for Christ | The Gospel of Mark | | 2 | Lewis, Mere Christianity | The Gospel of John, chapters 1–10 | | 3 | Wallace, Cold-Case Christianity | John 11–21 | | 4 | Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus | 1 Corinthians 15; Acts 1–4 |

At the end of four weeks you will have read two Gospels and the earliest account of the resurrection witnesses, and met the core historical case for Christianity.

Twelve weeks: the full case

| Week | Book | Bible | |---|---|---| | 1 | Strobel, The Case for Christ | Mark | | 2 | Lewis, Mere Christianity | Genesis 1–11 | | 3 | Geisler and Turek, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, first half | Psalm 19; Romans 1 | | 4 | Geisler and Turek, second half | John 1–7 | | 5 | Bruce, The New Testament Documents | Luke 1–12 | | 6 | Wallace, Cold-Case Christianity | Luke 13–24 | | 7 | Morison, Who Moved the Stone? | John 18–21 | | 8 | Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus | 1 Corinthians 15; Acts 1–9 | | 9 | Lennox, God's Undertaker | Job 38–42 | | 10 | Lewis, The Problem of Pain | Romans 5–8 | | 11 | Qureshi, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus | Hebrews 1–4 | | 12 | Lewis, Surprised by Joy | Acts 22 and 26; Philippians 3 |

One year: the serious investigator

For the reader who wants to go deep, read one book a month, in this order, and read the whole Bible alongside it. A reading plan through the Bible in a year is available on this site.

1. Lewis, Mere Christianity 2. Strobel, The Case for Christ 3. Bruce, The New Testament Documents 4. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels 5. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses 6. Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus 7. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God 8. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament 9. Craig, Reasonable Faith 10. Lennox, God's Undertaker, with Meyer, Signature in the Cell 11. Burgon, The Revision Revised, or Hills, The King James Version Defended 12. Augustine, Confessions, with Pascal, Pensées

This part matters because how you read decides what you get from a book. A skeptic can read any book on this list looking only for the flaw, and find one. An honest investigator reads differently.

Read actively

Keep a notebook. For each chapter, write down the claim the author is making, the evidence he gives, and your own objection. Then ask whether the author answers it, here or later. Check his footnotes. If he quotes an ancient source, look it up; many are free online, and several are linked in this paper.

Read the other side

An honest investigator reads the best case against his conclusion, not only the case for it. The Bible commends this:

“He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him.” (Proverbs 18:17)

If you want to read a classic statement of the skeptic's case, start with **Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian**, a lecture he gave on 6 March 1927 at Battersea Town Hall in London, published as a pamphlet the same year and reprinted many times since.⁴⁰ It is short, clear, and characteristic of the case many people still make. Then read it alongside Lewis or Geisler and Turek, and ask which side answers the other.

A Christian has nothing to fear from this. If Christianity is true, honest investigation will not overturn it. If it is false, you deserve to know.

Notice the difference between evidence and conclusion

Every book on this list, and every book against Christianity, mixes evidence with argument. Learn to tell them apart. That a tomb was found empty is a claim of evidence. That the disciples stole the body, or that God raised Jesus from it, are conclusions. Weigh the evidence first, then ask which conclusion explains it best.

Be honest about your will

Pascal and Lewis both noticed that our reasons for unbelief are not always intellectual. Ask yourself honestly: if the evidence turned out to point to Christ, is there anything I would not want to give up? Lewis described the night he gave in as the approach of One "whom I so earnestly desired not to meet."⁴¹ The Lord Jesus said that willingness comes before certainty:

“If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.” (John 7:17)

Read with the Bible open

The books on this list are helps, not substitutes. The skeptics who changed their minds, from Augustine to Wallace, were persuaded at the last by the text itself. "The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple" (Psalm 119:130).

Pray, even if you are not sure anyone is listening

You do not have to be certain God exists to ask Him to show you. My own prayer was: "Jesus, if you are real, show me — and I'll serve you." The promise is there for anyone who takes it:

“And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13)

Know when to stop reading

The Preacher had a word for the endless reader: "of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh" (Ecclesiastes 12:12). There will always be another book. At some point the evidence is in, and the question is no longer what you know but what you will do with it. The Lord's call was never "read more"; it was “Come unto me” (Matthew 11:28).

This paper began with a challenge from Scripture: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). It has offered the tools: the Bible itself and the earliest witnesses outside it; ten books to begin with; further books arranged by question; three plans; and some advice on reading honestly.

The books are checked and the sources are real. But no book can make the decision for you. The people who wrote many of them, Lewis, Strobel, Wallace, McDowell, Morison, Qureshi, Butterfield, did not believe because they read a book. They believed because the books sent them back to the evidence, and the evidence sent them to Christ.

An invitation

If you are a skeptic, I would ask you to start where I did, with the Bible itself, and then pick one book from Part 2. Read it with an open mind and a notebook. Ask the hard questions. And if, at the end, you find yourself wondering whether it might be true, do what the Lord invites every honest seeker to do: come.

The gospel is simple. Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again the third day (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). He calls for "repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 20:21). And He promised, "him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out" (John 6:37).

The 1611 Reader is free at kylelauriano.com/library. Start with Mark.

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)