The Dividing Line July 24, 2008

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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. 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. 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 going to get through it all today, but 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, and 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 Lycona 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 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 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 Lycona, and I'll be interacting with some of his statements, and then we'll be listening to Mike Lycona going back and forth between the two.

So let's continue with that here on the program. And it isn't just Apollonius who is a candidate for resurrection from the dead.

What about Romulus? What about Heracles? What about Cleomedes?

What about all the other 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 aren't 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 it's 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 a 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 that. 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 -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, as a historian, 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? No. But here's what I think happened with the historical

Jesus. Now listen in here. Jesus 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 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 of God is at hand.

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 fulfilled, says

Jesus. In other words, there is a certain amount 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 in 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.

His disciples had hoped that he would be the one who would restore the kingdom to Israel.

And then he was killed. They loved him. What are they to think?

God was soon going to intervene on behalf of his righteous people. He would vindicate his righteous ones.

The disciples of Jesus came to believe that God did vindicate his righteous one,

Jesus. Just as so many thousands of people have since, his disciples after Jesus' death had visions of him.

They experienced him as still in their lives. 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, 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 world view.

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 would be 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 that 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, but they also had some 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 are 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.

Whereas 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. Well, who else did it? If you're not going to say

God raised Jesus from the dead, then as a historian, I want you to tell me who did raise

Jesus from the dead. As we said in the last program, you've got to grant that point.

The instant that Michael Iconis 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 again, 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, the least likely occurrence.

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?

Or that God raised him from the dead, 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 probabilities.

You can only deal with what most probably happened, not with what least probably happened.

If you're a Christian, you are welcome to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. But that is a theological belief that you have about something that God did.

It is not based on historical proof, because the historical proof cannot be adduced.

Thank you. 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. All right, let's go to the response then offered.

And you're probably going to have to crank this up just a little bit. 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 you're 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. He's 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? The 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 going to get anywhere. Prior to assessing any of the evidence, 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. We talked about the historical bedrock, those three facts.

And Barth 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, there's 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, 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.

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. Alright, 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.

And 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's 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,

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...

Yeah, and we'll see what Ehrman responds in a few minutes. He mentioned that, 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.

Um, 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 or a transformed corpse.

So, um... Now, that's one of the major differences. No question about it. 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, et cetera, et cetera. 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 ourselves 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. Let's say he does. And a couple physicians come up and work on him, and the paramedics come in after an hour.

They declare him dead. And at that point, Phil Roberts jumps up and says, Mark, 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 Barth'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've got a leg to stand on anymore once you make that journey.

Don't go there. There's no reason to do so. All right, let's listen to what

Bart Ehrman had to say in response. Just clarifications, and I think Mike would agree. These debates get increasingly difficult because what you're tempted to do is give a point -by -point refutation, and frankly, it's kind of boring to do it that way, but that's sort of what you're stuck with.

So it goes. Yeah, so let me answer just a few of his points. I am insisting that he doesn't have three facts.

He's got one fact, that there are people who claim to see Jesus alive afterwards.

He says that his first point, that Jesus was crucified, is necessary because if he wasn't crucified, he wouldn't be raised from the dead.

That's true. Yes, right, okay, fine. But it's not evident that he was raised from the dead.

We're not talking about just bedrock facts. If you want to talk just about bedrock facts, you could say things like, Jesus came from Galilee.

It's a bedrock fact. Does that have anything to do with the resurrection? No. Jesus' parents were named

Mary and Joseph. Bedrock fact. Does that have anything to do with the resurrection? No. I would disagree.

Not only is I think you, you know, sort of missing the point here, but the fact, if it sounds like he's accepting these as bedrock facts, things that can be known.

But where did he get them? He got them from the very same sources that he's earlier said are not reliable, the very things that historians can rely upon.

So, I don't see a consistency here. I see, you know, cherry picking in the text again.

Picking and choosing what you will or will not accept. And I think the fact that those texts place the resurrection in history in the very same way that they place the birth of Christ in history or Galilee in history, they don't make up some land no one's ever heard of before, are all quite relevant.

Jesus had brothers. One of them was named James. Bedrock fact. Anything to do with the resurrection? No. Jesus was crucified.

Bedrock fact. Anything to do with the resurrection? No. Yes, he had to die. We all have to die.

Again, missing the point. The only reason you're raising the issue of the resurrection is to establish that there was truly a death.

There's not just a swoon. And anybody who's dealt with the Muslims knows you have to establish these things and the wild lengths they'll go to to try to get around the reality of the crucifixion and the actual death of Christ.

And to argue that the difference with Romulus is that we don't have any account of his death, I think the alternative is to say that Romulus never died.

And none of us thinks that. So the reality is we do have accounts of Romulus and others being seen or disappearing from this earth and showing up in heaven after their death.

It was a very helpful point for him to clarify that his second and third facts, that Jesus' disciples claimed to see him alive afterwards and Paul saw him alive afterwards, are two different things because one, you have his friends and the other, you have his enemy.

Absolutely. Very good point. It's a great point. So let's talk about this for a second. Are we going to say that when somebody converts from being an enemy to being a friend, that that is evidence of a miracle?

Again, I'm amazed at the level of argumentation here. I truly am.

Certainly you would expect from a person who is considered by many to be the greatest scholar in this area to at least understand what the argument here is.

This isn't by itself an argument for a miracle. The point is that the wishful thinking idea, the idea which he himself has presented, that Jesus' disciples had during his lifetime and his ministry built up all these desires and all these dreams about the establishment of the kingdom and so on and so forth, then

Jesus goes and gets himself crucified by driving the people out of the temple and so there's wishful thinking.

They experience Jesus. Isn't that what he just said actually happened? He's saying that these experiences were not historical, that Jesus really didn't rise from the dead, there wasn't an empty tomb, but it was because of the deep longings they had.

The point is Paul doesn't have those deep longings. Paul has the exact opposite of those deep longings, which means the last thing on the planet that Paul wants is to run into a risen

Jesus because that means all of his expectations are out the window and he's got to completely change where he's coming from.

And so that's the only point that's being made is it's not just the wishful thinking of friends, but here you have a sworn enemy who becomes converted and believes that Jesus rose from the dead and there has to be some kind of compelling evidence to explain this particular thing.

He doesn't want to go where the Muslims go. The Muslims go there and basically say well he was just a big fat liar and he was a corruptor and he just wanted religious power and authority over the people.

He doesn't want to do that because he knows that that really doesn't fit with the historical evidence and he doesn't have the overriding presupposition of Surah 4, verse 157 of the

Quran to push him in that direction. Let me give you an example.

A well -known example from the Middle Ages of one of the most famous Jews of the Middle Ages, Shabbatai Tzvi, who was thought to be the

Messiah by many Jews, who in fact thought of himself as the Messiah, but near the end of his life converted to Islam.

He joined his enemies. Does that show anything about the truth claims of Islam?

Does that show that Muslims are right and that Jews are wrong theologically because somebody converts from being an enemy to being a friend?

Paul did convert from being an enemy to being a friend. It's not unheard of.

In fact, it happens a lot. Mike might point to me as an example.

The other interesting thing in Mike's recent rebuttal was that it came out that there are other things lurking behind the scenes when it comes to what he considers to be historical evidence of the resurrection.

He didn't mention these things in his beginning speech and so I haven't referred to them in my rebuttal, which is in contrast, by the way, with Mike attacking my wishful thinking hypothesis that I haven't talked about because it's not the position

I'm taking. So his rebuttal of it is somewhat beside the point because it's not what

I'm arguing. I disagree. In the preceding section where he played

Ehrman where he says, this is what I think happened, that is the wishful thinking hypothesis. That is the longing for seeing

Jesus, etc., etc. He may want to call it something else. Whatever he wants to call it doesn't matter to me. But that is his hypothesis.

That is what he has said in preceding debates on this and I've never quite understood why folks would complain that you would listen to what they said before and make your presentation relevant to their actual position.

I've had a few folks over in debate who didn't like it when I did that either. Mike, on the other hand, appears to have a couple things lurking behind the scenes that he's seeing as evidence.

The two things that he's relying on are the reliability of our sources and the fact of an empty tomb.

This became clear in his rebuttal and I don't want him to deny it because I just heard him talk about them.

When I talked about Apollonius he said the difference is that with Apollonius we have late sources, they are not eyewitnesses, and they are biased.

That's what he said. Now, that's what I said about our sources for the resurrection of Jesus and he said it was irrelevant.

Now, it's either relevant or it's not relevant. If it's relevant, then you have to discount the

Gospels and if it's irrelevant, you cannot discount the sources for Apollonius. Or, you defend the

Gospels against the really bad argumentation that Bart Ehrman made and therefore you can properly then criticize the other sources and be consistent.

But, if you're just not willing to do it, if you're, and you know, I don't know the whole reasoning and thinking here, but I remember very clearly the last time

I listened to the Ehrman -Craig debate on this subject, it did drive me nuts that William Lane Craig was unwilling to engage in a defense of the

Biblical text, in a defense of the sources. And that seems to be the approach of this perspective is don't let them get you off onto that.

It's not getting off onto that. That's still a place you can meaningfully stand to make the

Christian claim. To make a sub -Christian claim about probabilities doesn't work.

It doesn't work to say Jesus rose from the dead, but we don't know who raised him. We don't know what the purposes are. But once you've accepted that, then

I'm going to slowly try to move you into a higher view of the sources and a higher understanding of the coming of Jesus or something like that.

I'm sorry, it just doesn't work. And I think you're hearing that if you're listening very carefully.

With respect to apparitions, he acknowledged that there are apparitions.

He has friends who have had apparitions. In other words, we know that apparitions are historical phenomena.

They are well established that people have visions of people who have already died.

I'm arguing that Jesus' followers had visions like the visions his friends have had. Except that he himself explicitly made a distinction between the kinds of apparitions that his friends have had and the apparitions of the apostles, which were not apparitions, but encounters with the risen

Christ, which needed to be, I would admit, needed to be a little bit more strongly emphasized.

But again, Mike was lucky to get anything out given the state of his voice.

And so we can probably just let that slide by. But, Airman is missing that point. These are historically documented.

They can be historically documented because they're events that transpire. What about resurrections?

Are they events that transpire? We don't know. They would be miracles. He points out, though, that with these apparitions, nobody goes to check to see if the tomb is empty.

This is my point. The empty tomb is lurking behind his apologetic. Well, duh.

I mean, I didn't know that was actually up for argumentation.

But, yeah, that's... If we're going to talk about the resurrection, the empty tomb is sort of important.

But maybe what he's talking about here is, well, but I don't want to go into that because that requires me to go to the

Gospels. I don't want to use the Gospels, etc., etc. If that's the case, well, then it might be a valid argument. But, yeah, that's definitely part of the

Christian apologetic. It's the empty tomb that, at the end of the day, convinces him about the apparitions.

But you'll notice he hasn't marshaled any evidence for the empty tomb. He's simply asserting that if people had apparitions, they would have gone to check the tomb.

This is where historians have some things to say. As it turns out, historians know what happened to crucified people in the

Roman Empire. They generally were not allowed to be buried in family tombs.

Generally, that would be the case. And if all we've got are historical probabilities rather than sources that are meaningful and accurate, then

I don't know what you can say. But is it not Mark, for example, who records for us

Joseph of Arimathea going to Pilate and asking for the body of Jesus? And that Joseph is in a position to do so.

Joseph is known to Pilate. Then you have Pilate going, he's dead already? And, of course, we know

Muslims go, oh, look, that's a, oh, how could he say that? But then you have a centurion going, ascertaining and witnessing to, verifying, certifying the death of Jesus.

Very, very important. And upon that certification, then the granting of the body to Jesus.

All of that's right there. But it's in the sources. And if you've already said,

I'm not really going to defend the sources. I'm just going to go with this probability argument. Well, then, again, you're not really in a position to say much more.

In most instances, they were thrown in common graves where their bodies deteriorated and disintegrated within days.

So if he wants to talk about the empty tomb, then we will have some more things to talk about.

But if he doesn't want to talk about the empty tomb, then his statement about apparitions is no longer applicable, if you see what

I mean. Mike has pointed out that historians need to consider their bias.

Let's talk about biases for a minute. Mike is a believing, conservative, evangelical

Christian who believes in his heart of hearts that Jesus was physically raised from the dead.

Now, listen very carefully here. Because, well, that just biases one thing.

But what we're really talking about here are the presuppositions of the worldview that we hold.

And he's going to be arguing here, he's going to be using the reverse of the Paul argument.

Now, let's see if he's consistent in doing it. He approaches his historical study with that as his firmly held belief.

I, too, once believed that. And I approached my study of the

New Testament with the same belief. The result of my scholarship led me to renounce my former beliefs.

And I have to say, I left the evangelical fold kicking and screaming. I did not go easily.

You know, I don't have a lot of time to develop this, but reading God's problem and noting that there's a different definition of evangelical here.

He's using it much more broadly than I think is warranted. Because according to his own story in God's problem, there was a period of time when you wouldn't have described him as an evangelical, as much more into a liberal denomination.

So I'm not sure how to put all this stuff together. But he's still basically saying, look, I was convinced by my scholarship that these things are not true.

That is a clear anti -Pauline, the backwards trip of Paul, claim on Ehrman's part.

I wanted to hold on to my faith. I tried to hold on to my faith. I did everything I could to hold on to my faith.

But I got to a point where I realized that the historical evidence did not support my faith.

Actually, in God's problem, what he says was it wasn't historical evidence, it wasn't textual issues, it was the problem of suffering that caused him to convert.

Not a collapse as a result of scholarship and study of these particular issues.

I did not go with my personal bias. Quite the contrary,

I ended up changing my mind despite my bias. So it won't do to say that I'm biased against the

Resurrection because for the majority of my adult life I believed in the Resurrection and wanted to believe in the

Resurrection and tried to believe in the Resurrection. Mike, on the other hand, has wanted to believe in the

Resurrection and he does believe in the Resurrection. The problem is Dr. Ehrman doesn't seem to want to recognize the nature of his current presuppositions and the religious nature of the worldview that is still his.

That really becomes the problem, I think, that we have here. I'm sort of wondering how it's going to come up in our own debate when we're talking about the role of inspiration, the supernatural element, because it's part of the debate thesis and his worldview does not allow for the idea of inspiration to begin with.

So that is going to be, I think, rather problematic and rather interesting to deal with. I want to deal with at least one or two of the questions from the audience.

So we'll pick that up on Tuesday and I want to deal with the one specific one that specifically was asked but did not get answered.

And that's what we'll do on The Dividing Line on Tuesday. Thanks for being with us today. We'll see you on Tuesday, Lord willing.