Where to go next — on the Christian faith itself, on the evidence, and on Islam, including books by Muslim scholars.
Thirty-five books, grouped by what you want from them. Nothing here is required reading and none of it
is affiliate-linked — each entry offers a Goodreads, Bookshop and WorldCat search so you can
find it at a library or a shop you like. The Islam shelf deliberately includes Muslim authors.
35 books
Beginning: what Christians actually believe
If you are new to this, or came to the site for the argument and stayed for the
question underneath it, start here. None of these assume any background.
Mere Christianity
C. S. Lewis, 1952
Broadcast talks given to wartime Britain, arguing from ordinary moral experience up to
the claims of Christ. Still the first book most people are handed, and still the best
one: the chapter on the "mad, bad or Lord" trilemma is quoted constantly, but the
patient sections on forgiveness and pride are the ones that stay with you.
Shorter and plainer than Lewis. Stott works through who Jesus claimed to be, what the
cross accomplished, and what following him involves, without a wasted paragraph.
Written for sceptical New Yorkers and shaped by decades of their questions. The first
half answers objections; the second makes the positive case. Notably good on suffering.
Written under the Third Reich by a pastor who was later executed for resisting it. His
attack on "cheap grace" is the necessary corrective to any faith that costs nothing.
Chesterton describes discovering that the faith he had been reasoning his way toward
had been there for nineteen centuries. Delightful, paradoxical, occasionally maddening.
Apologetics proper — the arguments for God, for the resurrection, and for taking
the Gospels as history.
The Case for Christ
Lee Strobel, 1998
A journalist interviews scholars about the historical Jesus. The interview format keeps
it moving, and it is a good map of what the specialists argue and where.
A homicide detective applies the methods of cold-case work to the Gospels: witness
reliability, corroboration, late testimony, and why differing accounts are often a sign
of authenticity rather than the reverse.
Short, careful, and quietly devastating. Williams uses undesigned coincidences,
first-century Palestinian naming patterns and local geography to argue the Gospels come
from people who knew the place.
The serious academic version of the same case: that the Gospels rest on named
eyewitness testimony rather than anonymous oral drift. Demanding, and worth the effort.
Eight hundred pages on what first-century Jews and pagans meant by resurrection, and
why the early Christian claim cannot be explained as an ordinary development of either.
Not about content but about conversation: how to ask questions, how to put the burden
of proof where it belongs, and how to stay in a discussion without taking it over.
The standard textbook on textual criticism, co-authored across the believing–sceptical
divide. If you want to know how manuscript dating and variant analysis actually work,
this is where to learn it.
The best-known popular case that scribal changes matter more than Christians admit.
Read it — you will meet its arguments constantly, and you should meet them from Ehrman
rather than from someone summarising him.
Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism
Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry (eds.), 2019
Evangelical scholars correcting the overstatements of their own side: manuscript counts,
dating claims, and the "we can reconstruct 99.5%" line. Unusually honest and useful.
Books by Muslims and by academic historians of Islam. Reading only Christian
accounts of Islam is the fastest route to arguing against something nobody
believes.
The Qur'an: A New Translation
M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, 2004
A clear, readable English Quran by a Cairo-trained scholar at SOAS. Start here rather
than with a polemical edition — read the book itself before reading about it.
Translation with extensive commentary drawn from classical Sunni, Shia and Sufi
exegetes. Invaluable for finding out what Muslim scholars have actually said about a
verse rather than guessing.
A Muslim academic on how Islamic tradition has handled its own difficult texts —
hadith criticism, abrogation, and interpretive change. Honest about problems from the
inside.
How the Quran engages biblical and para-biblical material, from a leading academic
Quran scholar. Directly relevant to the question of what the Injil refers to.
A historian of the early Islamic conquests argues that the earliest movement was
ecumenically monotheist before it defined itself against Judaism and Christianity.
Popular narrative history of late antiquity and the rise of Islam. Contested by
specialists in places, but a vivid account of the world the Quran emerged into.
Books written specifically for this exchange, including by former Muslims. Vary
considerably in tone — the first two are the ones to lend a friend.
No God but One: Allah or Jesus?
Nabeel Qureshi, 2016
The most careful book of its kind: side-by-side treatment of the sharia and the gospel,
the Trinity and tawhid, the crucifixion and Surah 4:157, by someone who held both
positions in turn and is fair to the one he left.
The memoir rather than the argument. Better than any manual at conveying what this
costs a family, and why patience matters more than a knockdown case.
Answers to about thirty common questions, written by an Egyptian-born scholar who is
careful to represent Muslim positions accurately before responding.
Not arguments. These are the books people return to for decades, and they answer
the question the argument only opens.
Confessions
Augustine of Hippo, 397
The first autobiography in the Western tradition, written as a prayer. Sixteen
centuries old and still uncomfortably accurate about wanting the wrong things.