Brian Bird is the the screenwriter and co-producer of The Case for Christ.
If you know the book, "The Case for Christ," Lee Strobel did a deep diving into the evidence for Christianity when he did his investigation. The challenge in adapting a book like "The Case for Christ," is that it would work much better as a PBS series, but I knew the book and Lee Strobel’s true story. When I went into this project I believed the framework of a love story had to be deeply involved in the storytelling along with Lee's big city journalism career. He was a Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist for the Chicago Tribune, so I knew there was a lot at stake dramatically in his personal love story with Leslie, but also with his work at the Chicago Tribune. He got nominated for a Pulitzer in 1980 for another big story he was pursuing at the same time he was doing this deep investigation into solving the biggest mystery in the universe, which is the mystery of whether or not the Resurrection happened and the mystery of Christianity. There was plenty of story to tell, so we had to make sure we could prove the case within a 2 hour movie.
In the book there's 13 world class experts on the evidence for Christianity. We couldn't do 13 experts in a movie so we broke that down to about 5. I pursued three crucial streams of evidence, one is the case for the eyewitnesses who saw the risen Jesus after the crucifixion. There are nine ancient sources with meaningful and reliable evidence for the eyewitnesses who saw Jesus after the crucifixion. If you had a court case where you had 500 eyewitnesses it's a slam dunk. It would be a slum dunk with 2 witnesses, so the fact that there is veracity for those witnesses is an avalanche of evidence.
The are two other streams I pursued, the second was the evidence for the actually crucifixion. There was no hoax to fake the death of Jesus, which would explain the empty tomb and the idea that five hundred witnesses saw him after the crucifixion. Modern medical science proved Jesus died on the cross by the accounts in history not just in the Bible but in other ancient sources of what happened to him. There's no evidence of anyone ever surviving a Roman execution so that was a very cinematic stream of research we tackled.
The third was the reliability of the manuscript stream, there is no other collection of ancient writing like the New Testament that has more surviving copies, there's powerful evidence for the case of Christianity which Lee discovered in his search to debunk Christianity. He was a hardcore atheist who was trying to save his wife from the cult he thought she joined when she became a Christian, that's why he did this deep investigation, but at the end of that investigation he discovered it would take more faith to remain an atheist than believe in Jesus.