The Case for Christmas: A Journalist Investigates the Identity of the Child in the Manger by Lee Strobel was a small pocketbook of 96 pages wherein the author examined the evidence to prove that Christ was the Messiah. He divided the book into four chapters, each devoted to a specific form of evidentiary analysis: eyewitness accounts; science and archaeology; the profile of Jesus to see if he fulfilled the attributes of God; and the “fingerprint” evidence to see if Jesus was the Messiah. For such a short book, Strobel could only scratch the surface of each, yet he used Biblical verses and historical events to document or extrapolate certain points. I particularly liked his investigation into the age of the Gospels, the Bible books Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Case for Christmas however was not the in-depth analysis of the Christmas story that I thought it would be (in spite of its length, but at 96 pages, how could it be), yet I got far more historical analysis out of what happened that night in Bethlehem than I did in Hidden Christmas: The Surprising Truth Behind the Birth of Christ.