The Dividing Line July 24, 2008

The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence. Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll-free across the United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Apologetic Methodology and the Need for Consistency

And welcome to The Dividing Line. On a Thursday afternoon, we continue with the program we started on Tuesday. I'm not sure that we're gonna get through it all of it today, but you know, we'll go ahead and take phone calls if there are some real pressing ones coming in.

But on Tuesday, we began looking at the subject of apologetic methodology and the fact that theology matters. In fact, theology is completely determinative if you seek to be consistent. And obviously, this is a lesson I learned.

I know as a young man, probably still as a 19-year-old young man, right before turning 20, I would guess. Well, normally, 19 does come. I was always good with math. Thanks, Rich. Appreciate that. No one else would have caught that but you.

Thank you very, very much. Really appreciate that assistance. Anyways, I remember the first time someone opposing the Christian faith forced me to recognize an inconsistency on my own part. I was a young man.

I was a Mormon missionary. And interestingly enough, it had to do with the nature of faith. And that's rather, you know, was sort of gave a picture of what was to come in a recognition of where I was inconsistent regarding what is, I now know today, is to be reformed theology.

But those who oppose the faith tend to force us to be consistent on these subjects. They identify our inconsistencies. And so if we are going to give a reason for the hope that is within us, then I suggest to you that we need to be consistent.

We need to be consistent between our theology and our apologetic method. Our theology must come first. And that must determine the apologetic methodology. And we are illustrating this through the process of listening to a debate that took place fairly recently at Midwest Baptist Theological Seminary between a future opponent of mine in debate, Dr. Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, author of such books dealing with, well, you know, the Orthodox corruption of scripture, misquoting Jesus, and the most recent one, on the popular level, God's problem.

Dr. Ehrman is considered one of the leading New Testament textual scholars in the United States. And then Mike Licona was representing the Christian faith, defending the resurrection. And we saw last time that there is a fundamental difference in the approach adopted by those who emphasize what I would allege, they would not call it this, but what I would allege to be, a man-centered theology focused upon the concept of the autonomous will of man, primarily more philosophical than biblical theology, over against Reformed theology, which I would identify as the theocentric, and shall we say bibliocentric, one that I believe has a much closer connection to the biblical text, and we started listening to that debate.

And so I'm going to continue with that. We are listening to Bart Ehrman's response to Mike Licona, and I'll be interacting with some of his statements, and then we'll be listening to Mike Licona going back and forth between the two.

So let's continue with that here on the program.

Bart Ehrman's Naturalistic Challenge to the Resurrection

And it isn't just Apollonius who is a candidate for resurrection from the dead. What about Heracles? What about Cleomedes? People from the Greco-Roman world who were allegedly seen by their followers after their death.

Are they all people who have been raised from the dead?

Now, I just mentioned in passing, here again is where we demonstrate that, and again, if you haven't heard the preceding program, you're going to be a little bit lost here. You might be able to plug in eventually, but I would suggest you listen to the preceding program first.

But if you allow, if you do not challenge the concept of an atheistic history, if you separate your argument from the authority of the underlying text, if you don't have the concept of prophecy, if you don't have the whole spectrum of things coming together, then this is the kind of response you're going to get.

And that is, well, look, if all you're saying is that there were people who thought Jesus had risen from the dead, they thought they had seen him, well, then you're going to have to believe a lot of people ended up rising from the dead.

Now, I already pointed out that one of the main problems here that he really wasn't challenged on was these are just individuals who, in the middle of the night, wake up and they see a glowing apparition of Jesus.

That's not the nature of the sightings of Jesus after the resurrection. Not only that, but there are groups, there are as many as 500 at one time who see Jesus and interact with Jesus. And some people who are even opposed to his message as in the Apostle Paul.

And so that's a little bit of a different context than Bart Ehrman is allowing for.

If Mike wants to base his argument solely on this one fact that he says is not based on biblical inerrancy, which by the way I didn't mention because I didn't think he did hold a biblical inerrancy. If he wants to hold this not on the basis.

Of biblical...

I would, I just, I noticed Rich saw the same thing I did. Can you imagine the looks in that room when that happened? Because, you know, to teach in the Southern Baptist Seminary, you have to sign the Baptist faith message.

And he will, I think in the very last question, affirm that he believes in inerrancy. But I don't think that he actually gets to it until the very last question of the debate. So you can just see, and I don't know if Ehrman did that on purpose, if he's aware of the situation among Southern Baptists to what, you know, the level of hand grenade he just tossed into the audience at that point.

I really don't know if he's aware of it.

But on this one idea that people later said they saw him alive afterwards, then what about these other people? Secondly, what about modern people who are seen after their death? It turns out there's an entire literature of studies done by experts, psychologists, social historians, parapsychologists, about people who have visions of loved ones after their death.

Why hasn't Mike investigated this information? As it turns out, it's a very common phenomenon for people to claim to have seen somebody that they were close to after their death. These occurrences are well documented.

Sometimes the person comes to a person through a wall or through a door and disappears suddenly. These people are not seen to be ghosts. They're seen to be real physical people who can be touched and held and experienced.

Sometimes these people are seen by multiple people at the same time. Maybe some of you even have had the experience of a loved one whom you were sure that you had some experience of after their death.

Does that mean that they were raised from the dead? Jesus' disciples claimed they saw him alive afterwards. So have many thousands of people, not just in American culture, but cross-culturally throughout the world.

This is extremely well documented. Well, were all those people raised from the dead? If this is the only piece of evidence you have for a resurrection and other people meet the same criterion, third, we have appearances of other religious figures that are well documented in the modern world.

In 1968 to 69, in Zeytun, Egypt, at the Coptic Church, where both Muslims and Christians were gathered, the Mother Mary appeared, Virgin Mary, the Blessed Virgin Mary herself. She appeared over a number of months between 1968 and 1969.

Believers and unbelievers claimed that they saw her. The total was over 10 ,000 people. And I imagine you've got larger.

Numbers for Lourdes and Fatima and Our Lady of Guadalupe and all the rest of this kind of stuff too. As I was listening to this, as I was writing, I remember thinking, and isn't it fascinating that the people who have these alleged visions, frequently there is no communication, frequently the person allegedly seen is just that a vision, there is no communication, there is no speech.

There certainly isn't anything like walking along a seashore or eating fish or doing any of these other things that are a part of the resurrection in regards to Christ. And what's more, and this is what's very interesting as well, is that those who actually do claim that Mary speaks, then they start writing down what Mary said, and what happens when that happens?

All of a sudden you get all sorts of contradictory stories as to what Mary was allegedly stating, which again is not what you get when you look at what the apostles stated. So a number of contradictions and differences, but there's no question about how many times do you hear people using all the Marian sightings as evidence of the truthfulness of Rome's claims about Mary.

...who claim that they saw her. Now, am I going to say that the Virgin Mary actually appeared to these 10 ,000 people? Well, if I follow Mike's criterion, I think I have to say that. Because we have 10 ,000 eyewitness accounts of people who claim they saw the Virgin Mary.

Do I personally think she appeared to them? No. But as a historian, can I prove it? What I think happened with the historical Jesus... Now listen in here. ...had an avid following among his disciples, who were convinced that he was somebody special.

Jesus proclaimed that God was going to intervene in history and overthrow the forces of evil and bring in a good kingdom on earth. Jesus believed that there were evil forces in the world, demons and sickness and sin and death, that this world was going to be controlled by the forces of evil, but that God wasn't going to allow it to go on forever.

That God was going to soon intervene and overthrow the forces of evil to bring in a good kingdom on earth. This kingdom was going to happen very soon, according to Jesus. In his first recorded words, Mark chapter 1 verse 15, Jesus said, The time has been fulfilled.

The kingdom... Repent and believe the good news. This is what scholars call an apocalyptic image. An apocalyptic image meaning an image of the end time that is soon to come. The time has been out of time allotted for life in this age, this evil age run by the forces of evil.

It's almost over though. Soon God is going to intervene and overthrow those forces of evil. The kingdom of God is at hand,.

Says Jesus. Now I just stopped just in passing to note how many times in teaching through the Synoptic Gospels, I have had to address the misapprehensions of the disciples in light of the traditions that were theirs concerning the nature of the Messiah and how many times Jesus corrected them.

Now realize again, once you deconstruct the Gospels themselves, then all Ahriman has to say is, well of course, that is their later understanding being projected back upon Jesus. But taking the text for what the texts say, it was clear from Jesus' own teaching that the nature of his kingdom was quite different than that which was expected by the disciples and by the Jews themselves that period of.

Time. As he says elsewhere to his disciples, Truly I tell you, some of you standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come in power. The disciples would see the kingdom of God come.

God was going to intervene. He was going to vindicate his righteous ones. And who was more righteous than Jesus? Jesus went to Jerusalem the last week of his life, entered into the temple, overturned tables in the temple, upset the ruling authorities who decided to have him arrested and taken out of the way.

They subjected him to crucifixion, a form of death that was reserved for the lowest of the low. He would be the one who would restore the king's people. He would vindicate his righteous ones. The disciples of Jesus came to believe that God did vindicate his righteous one, Jesus.

The people have sinned. His disciples after Jesus' death. Now let me just stop for just a moment. You know,.

This sounds, I understand, you know, a lot of people repeat the exact same kind of argumentation. And they say, see, you know, they just, these visions were based upon the enduring nature of Jesus' teachings and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

And you just stop and you go, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. You're, you, again, as Muslims do, you're cherry picking the text. You're choosing those elements of the text that will fit into, in this case, your naturalistic worldview.

And then you are throwing out anything else that conflicts with your particular theory. Jesus had told the disciples this was coming. Well, we just have to dismiss that. That must be a later edition or whatever else you want to do with that.

Jesus had told them, in fact, in one text it said they were withheld from understanding. They were kept from understanding Jesus' repeated proclamation to them that he was going to Jerusalem. He was going to be betrayed.

He was going to be crucified. He was going to rise again the third day. So this is there. The disciples are not expecting the kind of kingdom that Jesus is establishing. So basically what we're being told here is, though they had one expectation somehow, very quickly, not decades and decades down the road.

Now, he may want to do that. He may want to push this as far down as possible so you've got all sorts of time for reflection and development and evolution and all the rest of this stuff. But the idea is that very quickly the disciples are proclaiming that Jesus has risen from the dead during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses.

Ehrman has already said, I didn't play his portion, but he's already said, none of these gospels are written by eyewitnesses. None of these gospels saw the ministry of Jesus. All of Jesus' followers were illiterate.

How exactly he knows that, I'm really not certain. But there are certain things that certain scholars just state with such, you know, they do it so often it becomes a fact to them. All of Jesus' followers were illiterate.

Therefore, they couldn't have written these things. These are written by later generations, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you have these individuals who have one expectation. Very, very quickly, during the lifetime of eyewitnesses proclaiming a message that could be so easily falsified.

And they do so in language that makes it very, very plain that they're not talking about just seeing visions of a disembodied ghost or anything else. They are talking about a resurrection from the dead.

And that resurrection from the dead is not the common Jewish understanding of resurrection. At the end times, look at Mary and Martha. They understand there's a resurrection but the idea of it happening, anyone raising before the general resurrection makes no sense to them at all.

And so they come up with a conclusion that is totally against their expectations. Is that what we are seriously supposed to believe is actually going on here? Well, once you approach the text from a naturalistic perspective, it's all you've got.

That's what you have to say. That's where you have to go. And that's what Bart Ehrman has.

They remembered his words.

Kind of experience of him. A real tangible experience of him where they could feel him and touch him and talk to him. Just as widows today sometimes experience their dead husbands.

No, not just as widows today. A widow today can experience her dead husband while her children around her and they don't experience it. You don't have situations where the apostles are sitting around and four out of the eleven see Jesus and the others are going, boy, I wish I could.

That's not the nature of these encounters with Jesus. That's just not the case. And you say, well, of course, they just made that up to start a religion or something like that. Yeah, they made it up so they could die, so they could live their lives running from place to place, being persecuted and everything else.

Again, it really becomes an act of desperation to get around the nature of the evidence that's being discussed here.

Or as children today experience their dead parents. They had experiences of Jesus. Experiences that happened multiple times throughout history and still down to today. On the basis of their experiences they believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

What would be more natural? They saw.

Him. They talked to him. This was not their expectation however. It is amazing to hear, well, what would be more natural? This would not fit with their expectations. He's not taking that into consideration at all.

Just as people.

Do today. Historians cannot prove that Jesus was raised from the dead. And I should point out that I think Mike is being a little bit slippery when he says that it's possible to say that Jesus was raised from the dead but that maybe God didn't do it.

If God raised Jesus from the dead, then who did raise Jesus from the dead?

As we said in the last program, you've got to grant that point. The instant that Mike Licona said, well, we can leave that question unanswered. We don't have to go to the theological conclusion for that point.

As I was writing this, I heard it again. I'm like, oh, no, they didn't say that, did he? I believe that's what they call a spoon feed. That was a spoon feed. Hey, slam this one home. Clearly, if Jesus is raised from the dead, he is raised by divine power.

And what you do is you challenge the idea, and this is where again, theology matters and approach matters. This is where Mike doesn't challenge him and that is his concept of atheistic history. History that does not allow for God to be active within it.

That's where the problem exists.

And that's what needs to be challenged. And if you're going to say God did it then you're making a theological statement, not a historical statement.

There's the dichotomy right there. No, you're making a historical statement that allows the existence of God. You are not simply presupposing atheistic history. That's where the challenge has to be made.

It's a statement about God and God's activities. It's a statement about a miracle. Which is more likely? That the followers of Jesus who loved him had visionary experiences of him after his death? Visionary experiences that are documented thousands of times.

A unique miracle that would have happened only once.

Well, notice, again, completely ignoring the nature of the visions of Jesus and the whole nine yards this is the essence of the argument from his perspective. And that is you want to make this a naturalistic argument.

You've already separated God out from history. And until you challenge that, there's no way to challenge this argument. But once you've challenged that presupposition, then the argument itself is not overly compelling.

Which is more historically.

Probable. If you're a historian, you can only deal with what you are welcome to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. But that is a theological belief that you have on historical proof because the historical proof cannot be adduced.

So, if you're a Christian, just admit you believe in mythology. Don't say it's actually true. He knows the nature of the Christian claim. He knows the Christian claim is that, of course, this happened in time and history.

But what he's trying to do is to force you to realize that all you have is a mythological belief. It is not an actual historical belief at all. Alright, let's go to the response then offered, and you're probably going to have to crank this up just a little bit,.

Mike Licona's Historical Defense of the Resurrection

By Mike Lycone. Thank you. Again, I said tonight we would take a journey down history highway and stop at four checkpoints. So, I'd like, again, to review or revisit those four checkpoints in light of what Professor Erman has just said.

In terms of the first checkpoint, the definition of history, nothing further was said here. Horizons, nothing further at the second. On to the third. He did say, again at the very end, he said that historians can only deal with what most probably occurred.

And I agree with that. But I would say that that is just half true because the point that he's trying to make well, it's the wrong half. It doesn't coincide with, let me put it this way, I agree with him that historians must choose the most probable explanation, but where we disagree is that miracles must be.

The least probable explanation. Now that's sort of a challenge to the presuppositional nature of an atheistic history that precludes there being any evidence of God actually being active in history. Sort of.

It could be much more clearly stated if you step back and approach this presuppositionally which is difficult to do given the nature of the apologetic methodology. But that's, in essence, what's being said.

I agree that they must be least.

Probable by natural causes. But no one ever claimed that Jesus rose by natural causes. The claim is that God raised Jesus from the dead.

Okay, we just said that God raised Jesus from the dead, but before we said that we could leave that part off. And see, that's where the inconsistency comes in. You need to have a consistent Christian epistemology that recognizes that in Jesus Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

You can't step off that foundation and pretend that you have neutral ground with the rebel against God because that's what he is, is a rebel against God. And there is no neutral ground. Every fact that is a fact is the fact that it is because God designed.

It that way. And if God existed and wanted to raise Jesus, there's no reason why this shouldn't be the most probable explanation. The difficulty for historians is we can't know whether God wanted to raise Jesus.

And so we have to leave this in terms of prior probability to be settled by which hypothesis fulfills the criteria best of explanatory scope, power, etc. This is how we determine probability and not according to these theological speculations that Barth has to import into his history.

Now isn't that odd to hear the Christian saying, now the Christian is right at one point. These are theological presuppositions on Ehrman's part. That's right. That's why I engage in presuppositional apologetics.

Because his world view is absolutely theological. Just because it denies God can do anything doesn't change the fact that he's making theological claims in the process. But when you want to avoid yourself being a presuppositionalist and you're pointing out the other guy's presuppositions it's fair game to point out yours.

And to put them on the table. And to then have to deal with the reality that neither one of you are actually standing on neutral ground. And so what is the point of contact? Point of contact is they're all made in the image of God, etc. etc.

We talked about that last time. But it is odd to hear the Christian saying, don't bring in theological presuppositions to this. Because we're talking about a theological historical event. And as long as you don't challenge the separation of those two you're not gonna get anywhere.

When we do look at the explanatory scope, power, etc. we do find that the resurrection is the most probable explanation if we look at it purely according to how well it fulfills those criteria rather than the theological and philosophical ideas that go along with it.

Now at our fourth checkpoint we looked at applying method and we talked about the historical bedrock on those three facts and Barthes says that these are not rock solid facts but remember these are things that he admitted to in his opening statement.

I'm sorry, in his writings. He admits that Jesus' death by crucifixion is one of the most certain facts of history. He admits that it is a historical fact that some of Jesus' followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead and that Paul, he says, Paul there is no doubt that Paul believed that he saw Jesus' real but glorified body raised from the dead.

So it's his transformed physicality of the body that is raised from the dead. So he believes on these three facts right here and counts them as facts. He says well you can't have or just because you don't have, just because you have a crucifixion these were common it doesn't mean a resurrection.

I never said it did but you can't have a resurrection without a death now can you? And so that's why I said Jesus' death by crucifixion. Yeah that makes sense. In terms of the appearances to the disciples and the appearance to Paul the reason I distinguish them is because not only was it his friends who believed that he rose from the dead but also a sworn enemy.

Someone who would be the equivalent of a modern Osama bin Laden. I mean imagine Osama bin Laden he comes out and appears before his group some day and you hear all these gunshots and yelling and he comes out and he says brothers I'm here to tell you I was in a cave the other day and I was praying with my colleagues and a loud voice bellowed throughout the cave and a bright light came in the cave and said Osama Osama why are you persecuting me?

He said well who are you Lord? And he said I am Jesus whom you are persecuting and so forth and I'm here to tell you today Muslim brothers and sisters that Jesus is Lord and we need to follow him and they pelt him with stones.

That's the big difference between the disciples believing and Paul believing. Now Professor Ehrman makes an issue out of the parallels but I don't think that these are very effective. For example he mentions Apollonius of Tiana.

Now listen carefully because again here's where the approach is going to differ. My approach would not give up the ground of the sources of the proclamation of the resurrection. In other words I cannot abandon the idea that God has spoken with clarity in scripture and that therefore the nature of this evidence differs fundamentally from atheistic history.

Now listen to the critique that I would agree with but I think I'm more consistent in agreeing with this. I would agree in what he says about Apollonius of Tiana and so on and so forth but is he consistent because Ehrman is going to focus.

On this? What we need to do is we need to compare the sources like are there early sources, multiple sources, eyewitness sources, embarrassing sources, are there any plausible naturalistic explanations and when we look at Apollonius of Tiana versus Jesus we see that Apollonius fails in every single one of these categories whereas Jesus passes.

The earliest account that we have 125 years after the death of Apollonius. We don't have multiple sources. We only have the one source. Yes there were others but we don't have them and we could add more sources about Jesus if we're going to go that way.

Eyewitnesses we don't have that with Apollonius. Embarrassing. No because Philostratus his only biographer was very pro-Apollonius. In fact there are reasons to suspect that this was perhaps propaganda meant to answer the Christian view so there are plausible naturalistic explanations but the thing with Jesus resurrection passes in every one of these.

Categories regarding Romulus. So basically he very very quickly a little bit too quickly I think throws out various assertions regarding the sources the dating of the sources, the reliability of the sources which again sounds very much like what Bart Ehrman did about the Gospels.

Now if you had defended the Gospels against Bart Ehrman's allegations and I realize I've talked to some of the folks that engage these topics and on that side of the divide and basically what they say is well look you know I want to avoid getting into having to defend the text on that level.

I don't get anywhere that way. We get off the topic and so I'm just not going to do it. Well I don't know if you can get away with not doing it because this ends up being the kind of response and we'll see when Ehrman responds in a few minutes.

Well we're not even certain of his death that's not mentioned in the historical records so that's why death is important. We do at least have an apparition of the dead and this is something that Professor Ehrman mentioned and he said well Mike just hasn't studied the literature on this and I have in fact I noticed the book Resurrecting Jesus by Dale Allison.

I wrote the review for a review of biblical literature on that book and in fact hosted a panel discussion at AAR and EPS this past fall where Professor Allison gave a paper on his studies about apparitions from the dead and it was responded by Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, and Stephen Davis.

I think apparitions of the dead actually occur. I have no problems with that. I have a friend in Virginia Beach named Pat Ferguson who's told me an amazing corroborated account of an apparition of the dead.

Just the other day I was talking to my friend Bill Johnson down in Atlanta, Georgia who had an apparition of the dead just last week and he's had them before and some of these are corroborated.

Um,.

Okay, I'm left going. The exact purpose of raising that right now seems to be sort of countermanded by the argumentation that Ehrman has been presenting, I'd be interested in knowing something more about these alleged apparitions, but I'm not really certain of the role it plays right now.

I do believe in these, but in no case did these people go back and check the person's.

Tomb.

They don't think that it's a bodily resurrected of a transformed corpse.

That's one of the major differences, no question about it, is the empty tomb and the assertions in regards to the physicality of the resurrection, the continuity of connection between the body that died and the body that has been raised up that you see in 1 Corinthians 15, etc.

Those are all valid things to be emphasizing at that point.

I do believe that sometimes you have these apparitions of the dead, I don't have problems with that. In terms of the Virgin Mary in 1968 -69, I haven't really looked into this, I must confess. So I can't really comment on this.

If there were 10 ,000 or plus eyewitnesses to this, I would just say that if I were to look into it, I would have to weigh the hypotheses. I'm not Catholic, so my bias to begin with would be to say that there must be a naturalistic explanation.

But as a historian, I would have to be open to this. I would have to weigh hypotheses and be open to a phenomena going on. Could I prove that it's the Virgin Mary?

No.

Could I prove that this was perhaps a supernatural event? Well, maybe, maybe I'd have to be open to that as a historian if there were no plausible naturalistic explanations and if this happened in a context that was charged with religious significance, which I'd be happy to unpack if Professor Ehrman would like me to.

Regarding the weighing of hypotheses, he brought up the wishful taking hypothesis and he stated what he thought happened, but he didn't defend it. And it's easy to just state, I could say Jesus rose from the dead, but unless I give evidence for it, it falls on deaf ears.

So I'm still waiting to hear Professor Ehrman's explanation for that. Again, it lacks explanatory scope, power, and may possess an ad hoc component. Regarding the, he says, if God didn't do it with the resurrection, who did?

Well, as historians, as I mentioned in my first rebuttal, we may have to leave that as a question mark, but that doesn't justify us saying that Jesus didn't rise from the dead just because we can't stomach the possibility that maybe a God did it.

I think that's doing history backward and we have to divorce ourself of our theological and philosophical presuppositions for the most part in terms of our beliefs about God when we are doing a historical investigation.

There you go, there is the fundamental difference between us. You have to divorce yourself from your theological and philosophical presuppositions and I say you can't. And I say the conflict here is on that level and if you do not recognize that and challenge that, you've got your particular personal opinion, your particular, well, I'm going to read history this way, I'm going to accept these facts this way, and I've got my probabilities versus the other guy's probabilities, and all you're left with is probabilities.

You're not left with the apostolic preaching of the resurrection of Christ. This takes us back to the beginning, the difference between an apologetic methodology that says the preponderance of the evidence points to the greater probability of the existence of a God versus without the Christian God you can't even explain the terms probability or existence or anything else.

Totally different approaches, totally different levels of proclamation and while we, you know, again can be thankful for anybody who tries to stand up and speak for Christ, the question always is who is being consistent with the apostolic example and with the testimony of scripture itself.

Let me just give a real quick analogy. Let's say that during his next rebuttal, Mark drops dead. I hope that doesn't happen, we'll say he does. And a couple physicians come up and work on him and the paramedics come in after an hour and they declare him dead.

And at that point, Phil Roberts jumps up and says, Bart, God did this in order to show you that your journey from Christianity to agnosticism was wrong headed. Now in the name of Jesus, get up and walk.

And at that moment, he opens his eyes and stands up. Well, maybe he would say, whoa, whatever happened, I don't understand what happened there, but it wasn't a miracle because we can't know that. And I would say, no, I think it was a miracle.

Maybe we can't say anything about the God who did that as historians, but we could say that a miracle has happened here. So in conclusion, I think I'd just say that I think my case, that historians can prove that Jesus rose from the dead still stands and Bart's contentions to the contrary continue to fail under critical scrutiny.

Now again, there is a statement. As historians, we can't say anything about the God. Well, again, they both have the same presupposition, that you can separate history and theology. You can't, from a Christian perspective, say anything about the theological elements of God's activities in history.

And that's where I say, no, no, no, no, no. Can't go there with you, not following you there. And once you get there, I don't think you got a leg to stand on anymore. Once you make that journey, don't go there.