Jesus: Myth or Messiah? (White vs Barker)

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Thank you for joining us at the first, hopefully annual, Believer's Reason conference here at Newberg Christian Church.

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My name is Ken Cook and I'll be moderating the first debate for you. So today, the thesis for our debate is the story of Jesus is cut from the same story as other ancient mythologies.

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Mr. Barker will be taking the affirmative and Dr. White will be taking the negative.

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James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.

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He's a professor having taught Greek, systematic theology, and various topics in the fields of apologetics.

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He is an author who contributed to more than 20 books, including The King James Only, Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom, and The God Who Justifies.

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He is an accomplished debater, engaging in more than 75 moderated debates. Please welcome

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Dr. James White. We also have with us

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Dan Barker, who is the co -president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the author of the recently published book,

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Godless. For your information, we have a coffee shop open in the back and there is also a table full of books for you to purchase from all of the authors who are speaking today.

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The format for the debate is in your program on the first side. Mr. Barker will be opening.

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If you have questions for the question and answer time, please turn them in at the book table and they will be sorted through.

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The only additional change to this schedule is that there will be a five minute break between Dr.

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White's closing and the audience questions. Thank you for your time. Mr. Barker, you may begin.

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Thank you, Ken. Thank you, James. Good to see you again. I can see James and I are in the same denomination.

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We both have Macs. And we are hoping to convert the rest of you by the end of today's, the rest of you troglodytes.

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We're still using that old system. And thank you, Newberg Christian, what is it? Newberg Christian Church.

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And thank you all for coming. And I was going to start off today by saying that I felt like Daniel in the lion's den.

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Because my name is Dan, but that's an old joke. But it turns out I was the only one in the back office.

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There's a whole lot of non -believers here as well as believers. And I think humanist support then.

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My brother, Daryl, and my dad down here came down from the Olympian area. He's got the hat on that says...

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What does your hat say? It says, out of the closet issues. And some others drove from away.

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So thank you so much for coming in. And I have to say that Ken and the staff here have been very warm and friendly and generous and welcoming.

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And it's a real pleasure to be in a group like this. I'm not an expert. You can start. I'm not an expert in ancient mythology.

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I'm a former preacher who is still preaching, I guess. And this field of ancient mythology is very deep and very wide.

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It's a fountain flowing deep and wide. But in my reading, I noticed that the experts in the field often disagree.

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The scholars of paganism as well as the scholars of Christianity are sometimes locked in fierce debates.

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And I think that is healthy. That's how we learn things. There are very few claims about ancient history that have a high level of certainty.

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Like all scientists, historians have to work with probabilities. We do have documents.

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We have monuments. But it is all interpretation. And just as with Christian theology, interpretations vary.

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I made up my own story, my own myth. Once upon a time, there were three little donkeys.

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One of the donkeys built his house out of paper. One of them built his house out of sticks. The other one built his house out of bricks.

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Then along came a big, bad elephant. And he huffed and he puffed. And he blew down the house of paper.

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And he got a match. And he burned down the house of sticks. But he couldn't break down the house of bricks.

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So he came back with a bulldozer. And he demolished the house of bricks. Well, I'll tell you the rest of the gruesome story.

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But what did I base my story on? The three little pigs.

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How did you know that? Did I mention the three little pigs? Did I copy the story exactly?

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How did you know it was the three little pigs? Because I'm appealing to your cultural knowledge when

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I write a story like that. Suppose a historian 2 ,000 years from now were to discover my story, not knowing about the three little pigs and the possible political symbolism of donkeys and elephants.

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How would that historian interpret my story? She might doubt that a donkey could build a house, just as some doubt that Balaam's ass could talk, or that there was actually a snake in the garden that could talk.

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But that's beside the point. She would want to know the purpose and the message of my story. And suppose she were to discover the three little pigs story when she said, aha,

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Dan Martin is a thief and plagiarized. Suppose she discovered, oh, donkeys and elephants.

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Suppose she realized, oh, back then, oh, OK, I can see what Dan was trying to say. She would understand that I wasn't plagiarizing.

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I wasn't stealing. She would understand that I was building on an earlier form in order to create my own work of art, my own story that I think is a better story.

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Maybe you disagree with that. There's a difference between imitation and emulation.

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A story like Christianity doesn't have to exactly parallel or mirror every little detail of the pre -existing pagan stories in order to be seen as a copy or emulation of the earlier myths.

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In fact, we expect it not to be identical. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a new religion.

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The new religion is trying to outdo the previous stories. So they have differences.

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All religions are unique. Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism is unique. Scientology, Islam, Rastafarianism, the

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Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is certainly a unique religion. Some of you here today?

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But the uniqueness is in the modern details.

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All of these religions evolved from earlier traditions, and that's especially true of Christianity.

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Last summer, Annie and I were in New York City and we went to see West Side Story. We loved that musical. The fact that West Side Story is a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet didn't detract from our enjoyment.

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Instead of the monarchies and the Capulets, we have the sharks and the jets. Instead of Romeo and Juliet, we have

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Tony and Maria. But it's the same story. The authors admitted it was the same story. They brought it up to date.

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The fact that many details are different, for example, Maria doesn't die in the end, doesn't mean it's not cut from the same tale.

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In fact, it's the differences that prove the point. It's the same with Christianity. In the first century, there was already a huge template, many model stories upon which previous myths had been built.

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There were dozens of ancient god -men who came down from heaven. They were born of a god and a human female, often a virgin.

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They performed heroic, miraculous deeds. They were persecuted. They died tragic deaths.

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They rose from the dead. Many of them ascended into heaven. But in the gospel story, the gospel version of that old tale, the god -man is not called

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Osiris or Dionysus or Attis or Adonis or Augustus or Romulus.

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His name is changed to Jesus. Different name, same story.

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In his book Born Divine, The Births of Jesus and Other Sons of God, Robert Miller documents many miraculous births.

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Hercules, the Athenians, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Apollonius of Tyana, Pythagoras.

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Let's just look at one of them, Caesar Augustus. In the first century BC, there was a resolution in the provincial assembly of Asia Minor in honor of Caesar Augustus.

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Look what it says. Whereas the providence, or whereas God, which has guided our whole existence and has shown such care and liberality and brought our life to the peak of perfection by giving to us

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Augustus Caesar, whom providence filled with virtue and for the welfare of mankind being sent to us to our descendants as a savior, sotir, has put an end to war and has set all things in order.

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Whereas God, having become visible, and whereas finding that the birthday of the god,

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Caesar Augustus, has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel concerning him, therefore let all reckon a new era, beginning from the day of his birth.

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Here he is. He's a savior. He brought peace on earth. He was a god who was made visible. And that phrase, beginning of the gospel, if you read the book of Mark, the first gospel, how does that gospel start?

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The beginning of the gospel of Jesus. Randall Helms in the book Gospel Fictions tells this story.

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In the first century of the common era, there appeared at the eastern end of the Mediterranean a remarkable religious leader who taught the worship of one true god.

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He declared that religion meant not the sacrifice of beasts, but the practice of charity, of piety, of the shunning of hatred and enmity.

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He was said to have worked miracles of goodness, casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead.

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His exemplary life led some of his followers to claim he was the son of God. He called himself the son of man.

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Accused of sedition against Rome, he was arrested. After his death, his disciples claimed he had risen from the dead.

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He appeared to them alive, and then he ascended up into heaven. Who was this teacher and wonder worker?

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His name was Apollonius of Tyana. Tyana was in Nazareth. And you can read the story. He died about the year 98

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AD, the next generation after Christianity. You can read about it in Fr. Stratis' Life of Apollonius.

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Here is a clear example of a pre -Christian story from which the Jesus story was cut.

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Romulus, the founder of Rome. Romulus was called the son of God. He was also called God, King, and Father.

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He was prophesied to be the builder of a great city. He descended from heaven, born of a virgin and the god

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Mars. He became a god incarnate in order to establish a kingdom on earth. He was murdered by the political elite.

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Romulus, when he died, darkness covered the earth at his death. The earth shook at his death. His body vanished.

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He appeared around the break of dawn to a disciple on a road to the city, revealing that he was resurrected.

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He would ascend back to heaven to rule from on high. Romulus' death and resurrection were celebrated in annual public ceremonies since before Christian times.

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And these documents predate the Christian documents. In her book, Miracles in Greco -Roman

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Antiquity, Wendy Potter documents many pre -Christian gods and heroes who heal. Hercules, Asclepius, Isis, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Pyrrhus, you can read the list.

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She documents exorcisms and exorcists. Gods and heroes who control nature, Aphrodite, Poseidon, the sons of Zeus, and Orpheus and so on.

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She even gives three examples of Dionysus changing water into wine. The Gospels were not created, ex nihilo.

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Christianity was not delivered by the stork. It had a parentage. Its most immediate parent was

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Judaism. But neither was Judaism delivered by the stork. It, too, had gone through a long history of evolution before the

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Christians came on the scene. In his book, The River of God, Greg Reilly describes how the early

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Israelites were not monotheistic. They did not have a body -soul dualism. They got that from the Greeks.

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Nor did they have a Satan. That came from Zoroastrians. As evidence, Reilly shows us the well -known contradiction in the

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Bible between 2 Samuel 24 -1 and 1 Chronicles 21 -1, both telling the same story about how

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David was pressured to take a census. In 2 Samuel, we read, and again, the anger of the

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Lord was kindled against Israel. And he moved David against them to say, go number Israel and Judah.

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But in 1 Chronicles, the same story says Satan stood up against Israel and provoked

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David to number Israel. So did the Lord make him do it? Or did the devil make him do it? The answer to this contradiction is pretty easy.

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Because it wasn't until the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BC that the Jews got the idea that God had a near -equal adversary who battles for the soul of humanity.

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While the Jews were in Babylon, Babylon was conquered by the Persian Cyrus the Great, by the way whom the Jews called their

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Messiah, because he allowed them to return home. When they got back home, they brought along with them a new religious idea, an evil

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Satan from the Zoroastrians. So now we see why the Bible contradicts itself. 2

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Samuel was written before the Babylonian captivity. 1 Chronicles was written after the

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Babylonian captivity. The Jewish God could be both good and evil, but after coming into contact with Zoroastrianism, the

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Jews now had someone else to blame. Christianity inherited its devil from Judaism, which we see was cut from the earlier pagan story.

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Dennis MacDonald, in his wonderful book, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, makes a strong cumulative case that the author of the first gospel patterned many of the

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Jesus stories, primarily after Judaism, but then after the Odyssey and the

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Iliad. I was surprised by this wonderful book, and you would love reading this book. Odysseus and Jesus, both were carpenters.

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MacDonald writes, Odysseus and Jesus both sailed the seas with associates who were inferior, who weakened when confronted with suffering.

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Both heroes returned home to find them infested with murderous rivals and devoured the houses of widows.

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Both opposed supernatural foes. They visit dead heroes. They prophesy their own returns in the third person.

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A wise woman anoints each protagonist. Both eat last suppers with their comrades before visiting Medes, from which both return alive.

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In both works, we find gods stilling the storms and walking on water, meals for thousands at the shore, monsters in caves.

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And of course, the Odyssey was many centuries before Christianity. Here's one example, the sleeping sailors.

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I wish I could show you all these examples, but this is amazing. Odysseus's crew boarded and sat down.

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In Mark 4, we have the story where Jesus boarded the boat and sat down to teach. On a floating island, Odysseus told stories to Aeolians.

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On a floating boat, Jesus told stories to crowds. After a month, he took his lead, boarded and sailed with 12 ships.

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When it was late, Jesus took his lead and sailed with other boats. Odysseus slept. Jesus slept at the stern.

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The greedy crew opened a sack of wind and created a storm. And there was a great gale of wind in the gospel.

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The crew groaned. The disciples were helpless and afraid. Odysseus awoke and gave up hope.

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But Jesus, Mark's improving the story, Jesus awoke and stilled the storm. Odysseus complained of his crew's folly.

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Jesus rebuked his disciples for lack of faith. Aeolius was the master of the winds. Jesus was the master of the seas.

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I wish I had time to read this whole parallel. This is incredible. The next chapter, Mark 5, about the demoniac of the

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Gerasenes, how point by point by point, even with the exact kinds of words and the phrasings, in terms of phrase, the cyclops and the demon who both lived in caves are compared.

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Obviously, Mark was familiar with Homer's work. The sons of thunder.

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In Mark chapter 3, we see where Jesus picked his disciples. He appointed the 12, Simon, to whom he gave the name

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Peter. You like to give nicknames, I guess. James, the son of Zebedee and the brother of James, to whom he gave the name

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Boanerges. You know what that word means? Boanerges? Well, he translates it for us. The sons of thunder.

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These two twins, these guys who have one name for two guys, and they always speak in one voice, James and John, are amazingly parallel to Homer's Castor and Polydeuces.

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Castor and Polydeuce were called the sons of Tinderus. James and John were the sons of Zebedee. They were also given another name.

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They were called the Dioscuri, the sons of Zeus. The Boanerges, the sons of Zebedee, were given the name

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Boanerges, sons of thunder. Of course, Zeus was the god of thunder. Mark is copying or emulating the story here.

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They were twin brothers who spoke with one voice. They were Argonauts, sailors, or fishermen and sailors.

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Castor died a violent death. James died a violent death. Not this James. Polydeuces could have lived forever.

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John was thought to live until the Parousia. Polydeuces asked Zeus if he and Castor could share a single immortality.

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Remember on the Transfiguration, the brothers asked if they could sit in Jesus' right hand and left hand?

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Zeus consented, but Jesus refused. Here's another amazing parallel, and if we want to come back and look at this, the deaths of Agamemnon and John the

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Baptist over a sexual affair and the killing during the party. This whole thing just goes point by point by point.

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A fascinating parallel here is that in the book of Mark, we have two stories of the feeding of the multitude. The first one's in Mark 6, the other one's in Mark 8.

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In the Odyssey, we also have two stories of the feeding of the multitude. Look at this first one. Telemachus and Athena sailed and disembarked.

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Jesus and his disciples sailed and disembarked. They found a great crowd on the shore. They found a great crowd on the shore.

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4 ,500 men. Well, Mark increases it to 5 ,000 men. Everyone sat down in companies, nine groups of 500 each.

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Well, Mark had to say, everyone sat down in companies, and he had to make it by ranks. He had to do the math differently, in the 150s.

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Peisistratus ordered the guests to sit. Jesus ordered the people to sit. Nestor sacrificed, and others prayed.

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Jesus offered thanks to God. They took the meat and divided the food. Jesus took the loaves and fish and divided them.

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Everyone ate and it was spilled in both stories. I have to skip the second feeding, but it's also quite similar and parallel to it.

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Now, MacDonald admits, and so do I, that any one of these hundreds of details might be accidental parallels, perhaps a similar way of telling similar stories.

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But since there are literally hundreds of details, usually in the same order, and dozens of similar stories, often with two parallel stories followed immediately by another two parallel stories in the same order, or close to the same order, the cumulative case for emulation becomes too strong for historians to ignore.

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Historians work in probabilities, and the likelihood that all of these coincidences are accidental becomes so tiny, it is virtually zero.

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Mark was emulating Homer. Now, the stories don't have to be exact to be seen as emulations.

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You know, Roman and Juliet, West Side Story, or The Odyssey, and Jesus, or those two stories. Pythagoras. Pythagoras was a

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Greek. He came up with the fish symbol. You take two circles and you put them together, it's hard to see there, and then the middle section becomes the sign of the fish, where those two symbols intersect.

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And Pythagoras worked out the ratio of the width to the height, which is the closest approximation they could get at that time, 165 to 153.

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Those became mystery numbers. They didn't reveal those mystery numbers. Pythagoras believed that the numbers were special and mysterious.

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There's a story, he called it the measure of the fish. There's a story that when Pythagoras was journeying, he met near the shore with some fishermen.

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They were drawing their nets heavily laden with fish from the deep, and he told them that he knew the exact number of fish that was in those nets.

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And he did tell them that, but he didn't tell the reader. In John 21, John, by the way, is the most Gnostic of all the

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Gospel writers, Peter, Thomas, and Daniel, the sons of Zebedee, were going fishing. They immediately entered a ship and they caught nothing.

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But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore and he said to them, cast the net on the right side of the ship and you'll find it.

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They cast and they were not able to draw it in for the multitude of fish. Simon Peter went up and drew the net to the land full of great fishes.

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How many fish were there that they caught? John tells us 153 fish.

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The measure of the fish. John is obviously putting mystery numbers in things that his readers of his day would have known.

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I also read some Christian authors, Jack Finnegan, I think he's an evangelical fundamentalist, a myth and mystery in the background of the

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Gospels. I also read Everett Ferguson's huge book, I have it here, on the background, the mythological background to Christianity.

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Ferguson is a strong believer, he strongly believes in the faith of Jesus, but on the last page of his book, he has this two -page section, the final payoff, what was unique in Christianity?

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We finally get to the end of this book, Romans, the Greeks, the Zoroastrians, the Canaanites, the Mesopotamians, the

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Egyptians, and so on. What was unique in Christianity? Ferguson cannot name one single thing after he surveys all this history.

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What he does is he says that Christian claims don't rest on its originality, or on its uniqueness.

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He says, in order for Christianity to be true, we have to pass from history to faith.

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Now it's not just modern scholars, but even early Christians. In the second century, there was a Christian apologist who had been a pagan believer, who converted to Christianity, Justin Martyr.

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And he was arguing with the pagans about, you should all convert to Christianity. You know why? Because it's no different. Look what he says.

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When we say also that the Word, which was the firstborn of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our

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Teacher, was crucified, and rose again, and ascended into Heaven, we propound nothing different from what you pagans believe regarding those whom you esteem to be the sons of Jupiter.

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Like Mercury, Jesus is the lowest. Like Perseus, He was born of a virgin. Like Asclepius, Jesus healed the sick.

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If early Christians claimed that the Jesus story was nothing different from paganism, who am

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I to disagree? Well, it is a pleasure to be with you this still morning,

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I guess. It's unusual to do debates in the morning, but I commend all of you for being here this morning for an exceptionally important discussion on the subject of Jesus and whether He was cut from the mythological cloth of other religions or, as Christians have believed, whether Jesus is, in fact, unique as the

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Son of God. Now, in my opening, I can only respond to what

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Dan himself has published before. I find it fascinating that almost none of the sources that Dan just used are used in his book,

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Godless. So in this first, I will be responding to his published work, then the rebuttal will go to what he has presented this morning.

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Can I respond to that? When you're in a scholarly debate and you publish a book, what you've published in the public realm is fair game.

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It is what you yourself have presented. Now, if you want to say, after I'm done here, I repudiate the book that's for sale in the back, that would be fine.

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But as a scholar... I don't see anything wrong with quoting your book,

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Dr. Barker, or Mr. Barker. Do you have an objection to him? I object because we're not debating my book today.

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We're debating... Mr. Barker, I have never engaged anyone in a debate who objected to their own published materials being what was cited.

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I would love if people would quote my books in my debates because that's what I have presented to people.

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I cannot believe that there would ever be an objection to my citation of your own book.

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I can't imagine... Did you address this subject in your book? Is there not an entire section on this subject?

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Yes, but you don't know that I may have changed my mind in the meantime on that, so it's unfair. I may have changed my mind about Meeker, for example.

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Is your book for sale in the back? Yes, it is, but we're not debating my book tonight. How can we have a debate?

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Let's debate the issues. Let's not debate my book. Let's debate the issues. I didn't make your book. Mr. Barker, I have, on the screen, quotations from you.

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I'm going to be dealing with the sources you used and the arguments that you've used. That is the form of scholarly debate.

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But we're not... I'm sorry, but we're not debating my book tonight. For the record,

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I think it's inappropriate. I didn't quote anything you wrote. I've stuck to the actual... That's the point. That's the problem.

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We need to deal with what someone has actually put into the public realm. Your book is for sale.

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I cannot believe on any possible academic or scholarly level... I've done more debates than you've done.

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This is the first time anyone has ever objected to the citation of their own published material, which is still in print.

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If you had pulled it out and repudiated it, that would be one thing. Are you going to do that? The moderator has already spoken.

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I think it's reasonable, Dan, to use a source that is available on the topic.

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Isn't it, in your mind? If there's something out there, whether it's quality or not...

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This is a presentation that I've put together and Dan has given his objection to quoting him.

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I'm sorry, but I do not see how you can have a meaningful dialogue on this subject if what the person himself has put into the public realm is not available.

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I would just like to say before I begin my time again and my presentation, that I would be honored if people would quote my books, especially when

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I address the specific topic of the debate. That shows that you have done your homework in listening to what the other person has to say and if I put something in print, if I change my mind,

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I'm going to let people know I'm going to pull it out of the print. I think that's just simply the way it needs to go.

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Can I make my presentation now? Thank you very much. Alright. We continue on.

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Dan has written in his book Godless, which is available in the back, so you can check the references. I'm now convinced that the

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Jesus story is a combination of myth and legend, mixed with a little bit of real history unrelated to Jesus.

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And he presented four arguments in his book on this foundation. He said that there is no external historical confirmation for the

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New Testament stories. Secondly, that the New Testament stories are internally contradictory.

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Third, and this is the main subject of our debate, that there are natural explanations for the origin of the

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Jesus legend. And finally, the miracle reports make the story unhistorical.

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That is, the presence of the supernatural in the gospel stories make it an unhistorical source. Now, I need to address each one of these arguments, but I want to focus primarily on number three.

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The first argument is that there is no external historical confirmation for the New Testament stories. Now, this requires an amazingly biased view of history itself.

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The New Testament Gospels, Acts, many of the Epistles are unlike such works as the

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Book of Mormon because the New Testament Gospels, Acts, and Epistles are filled with rich historical detail, both geographically and politically.

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That is, they give us information from the first century demonstrating that these writings came from that particular time period.

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At one point, Mr. Barker comments on manuscript rival 457, better known as P52, from John chapter 18, dated to A .D.

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100 to A .D. 125. And he makes reference to this and says that there is no way to verify from these few verses whether the rest of John or any of the remainder of the

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New Testament is reliable. The numbers are to the page references in the book, Godless. Now, let's think about this for just a moment.

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Surely, on the level of reliability as far as historic accuracy or honesty goes, no manuscript is even relevant to such an inquiry.

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However, what P52 does tell us is that John, as the Gospel of John, in the form in which we have it today, existed in the first decade of the second century, which puts its initial writing well into the first century.

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It likewise tells us that the manuscript tradition we have is, in fact, very reliable.

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The second argument that was presented is the New Testament stories are eternally contradictory.

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Now, Mr. Barker's work provides no interaction with serious scholarly works offering consistent, sound, exegetically insightful discussions of any of the alleged contradictions that he offers.

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Here are some examples provided from the book. On page 265, Dan writes, even

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Paul's supposed confirmation of the Resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15, 3 -8, contradicts the

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Gospels when it says that Jesus first was seen of Cephas, that is Peter, then of the Twelve.

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Notice the insertion of the word first into Dan's sentence. It is not a quote from the Bible. Paul did not say

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Peter was the first seen by Jesus. And there isn't the first logical reason why anyone would assume that a brief creedal summary was being given as an exhaustive list of all the appearances of Jesus after his

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Resurrection in chronological order. Paul's statement, coming as most critical scholars admit from within the first few years after Jesus' crucifixion, is still not better than the

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Gospel stories themselves, well known to all who would be reading Paul. So it is Dan who is creating, out of whole cloth, a contradiction that nowhere exists in any semi -reasonable reading of the text.

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This is a hallmark of much of what you see in the atheist writings on the Bible today. Dennis McKenzie is a special example of that.

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Here's another example. Barker notes Luke's mention of Quirinius as governor of Syria, yet he shows no familiarity with any of the scholarly discussion, the translation of prote, issues relating to our lack of knowledge of the political situation at the time, etc.

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The reality is that there are a number of perfectly fair, historically sound explanations for Luke's statements, none of which gets a fair hearing in the discussion that was provided.

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But the focus is upon the third argument. There are natural explanations for the origin of the

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Jesus legend. Now at this point Mr. Barker lists eight different natural explanations of the

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Jesus legend. I would say with the presentation he just made, that's now at least sixteen to twenty. It is important to point out that each of these explanations, and this would be true with what he added, is completely contradictory to the other seven.

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That is if any one is true, the other seven are false. Consider the consistency of this kind of argumentation.

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When you add in the other option, that is that Jesus existed and that the New Testament documents are more than sufficient to demonstrate this, that's a total of nine options, just in his book, all completely contradictory to the others, meaning any single one in Mr.

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Barker's offering has an eleven percent chance of being correct. And now with the presentation this morning, that number is about half of that.

32:13

Is that the kind of solid historical argumentation that can carry the day? Now a debate is not the proper context for the foundational discussion of how to do serious historical inquiry and thinking.

32:24

However, it must be stated that the vast majority of material flowing from Prometheus' books, the

32:29

Jesus Seminar of Agents and other proponents of either a Jesus mythology or a Gnostic Jesus theory comprises a mythology all unto itself.

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Through selective use of facts and horribly imbalanced application of context, an entire cottage industry has appeared over the past two decades, an industry that makes its living through anti -Christian propaganda, ignoring counter -evidence of volumes of sound historical scholarship standing in opposition to their conclusions.

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These writers pursue a single goal, the denial of the Christian message.

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Double standards abound as these writers draw parallels that are totally unfounded on any serious historical basis.

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We will unfortunately see many examples of this in our examination today. Now any fair examination of the

33:15

New Testament documents demonstrates the following. First of all, they are consistent with the context of Second Temple Judaism in the first part of the first century.

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Secondly, they demonstrate a clear first -hand knowledge of Judea and Galilee in the same period.

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And thirdly, they present a consistent testimony to the Jewish Messiah prophesied in the

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Tanakh, that is in the Old Testament scriptures. Now some of the naturalistic arguments listed by Mr.

33:44

Barber are barely worthy of note, such as the pre -Christian Joshua cult theory, which was ugly and substantiated, or the

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Old Testament parallels theory, which was likewise left utterly unsubstantiated. But the third possible source in Jesus' legend is very popular amongst atheists today.

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A compilation of various and divergent pagan mythologies, such as those of Acts, Dionysus, Osiris, and most importantly, the

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Persian religion of Mithraism. Now the number of reasons that has led serious critical scholarship to reject this kind of parallelomania is so great that we cannot even begin to list them all in 20 minutes of time.

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We can only summarize in general and give a few specifics in reference to Mithraism. First, these sources regularly use

34:33

Christian language to describe pagan beliefs, and then feign amazement at the resultant parallels.

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Witness, for example, the assertion that Dionysus was virgin -born. He was actually, in most versions of the story, sewn into Zeus' thigh and born from there after his mother was killed.

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That's not quite a virgin birth in the biblical sense. Or the common statement that Osiris experienced a baptism when, in fact, his coffin was thrown in the

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Nile. Or that Osiris was resurrected when, in fact, his dismembered body was put back together so he could become the zombified lord of the underworld.

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None of these pagan myths have any logical or meaningful connection to Christian beliefs about resurrection, the afterlife, baptism, or salvation.

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We must also note the fundamental difference between the monotheistic Judaism that forms the background of Christian belief and the polytheistic mythology of pagan beliefs.

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The Christian faith is based upon a firm assertion that the events of Jesus' life took place in history at a particular time and a particular place.

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Pagan mythology did not ground its stories in history at all. An extended citation providing alleged parallels to Mithraism is provided by Mr.

35:47

Barker on pages 270 and 271 of The Goddess, drawn from this work, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker.

35:57

Mr. Barker identifies Barbara Walker as a historian, when in reality, her only schooling, as far as I've been able to determine, is in journalism.

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The majority of her published works are on knitting. She is an atheist feminist, but as we are about to see, her willingness to distort historical facts and present historical fiction is simply astounding.

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A brief scan of other portions of this work reveal incredible errors of fact and representation, errors utterly beyond defense.

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The work is grossly anti -Christian, biased and, as a work of history, completely worthless.

36:29

Here are some examples of fallacious historical argumentation from Goddess by Dan Barker, even though in this first number, he's quoting from Barbara Walker.

36:37

Cool. Mithra was born on the 25th of December, which was finally taken over by Christians in the fourth century as the birthday of Christ.

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Now, the day of the birth of Christ is not a part of the Christian scriptures. The reality is that January 6th was discussed earlier than December 25th, and what is more,

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Mithraism coming into the Roman Empire in the second century arrives too late to be relevant to the formation of Christianity.

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This has been known and documented for nearly a century. What is more, there is much dispute as to who borrowed from who at this point, as there is reason to identify

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Christian discussion of December 25th prior to the earliest Mithraic references. What is more likely, that Mithraism borrowed from the rising

37:17

Christian religion, or that Christianity borrowed from the dying Mithraic religion? I would direct you to Roger Beckwith's fine discussion of the date of Christ's birth through a meaningful and poor historical insight that is free of the rhetoric that is so often found in internet discussions of this particular topic.

37:34

We continue. Before returning to heaven, Mithra celebrated a last supper with his twelve disciples who represented the twelve signs of the

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Zodiac. In memory of this, his worshippers partook of a sacramental meal of bread marked with a cross. This was one of seven

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Mithraic sacraments, the models of the Christians' seven sacraments. Now, Mithra did not have twelve disciples, note the purposeful reuse of Christian language.

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The signs of the Zodiac are hardly relevant to the name of the disciples from known cities in first century

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Israel. When was the Mithraic ceremony called a last supper by Mithraists themselves?

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We are not told. The meal common in almost all religions around the world was in memory of Mithra's slaying of the bull and would often be done on a table spread with the skin of such an animal.

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There was nothing regarding sacrifice, atonement, eternal life, or anything else relevant to the

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Christian faith. Remember, Christians were celebrating the supper a century before Mithraism came into Roman society and anyone suggesting such a parallel should be ready to prove that Mithraism was not only known in Jerusalem in the early first century but that people were practicing these things and it was popular enough to provide a basis for Christians borrowing their concepts.

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These were not called sacraments as far as anyone can see, nor have they found any foundation for the assertion that the bread was marked by a cross as irrelevant as that would be as primitive

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Christian celebrations did not have such items themselves. For the concept of seven sacraments developed in Roman Catholicism centuries and centuries later making this blatant example of parallelomania particularly useful in identifying bad, very bad, argumentation.

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The text continues to say, if the supper was called mis, Latin missa, English mass. Mithra's image was buried in a rock tomb.

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He was withdrawn from it and said to live again. The actual origination of the term mass comes from the

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Latin missa. Catechumens were dismissed from the worship at a particular point before the celebration of the supper and this led eventually to the use of the term

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Latin term mass for that which took place after Catechumens left. Mithraic scholarship knows nothing of a death or resurrection from Mithra and again

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Barker's source, Barbara Walker, is seen to be creating parallels where none exist in truth and reality.

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Continuing, like early Christianity, Mithraism was an ascetic anti -female religion. Its priesthood consisted of celibate men only, page 271.

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Mithraism was primarily attractive to those in the military and as such was ill -suited to provide a foundation for the creation of Christianity even if it had been prevalent in first century

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Palestine, which of course it was not. Further, it is simply absurd on its face to say early

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Christianity was an anti -female religion since it was Christianity that taught that there is neither male nor female but all are one in Christ Jesus.

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Further, the concept of celibate priesthood developed long after the New Testament period, once again demonstrating how historically untenable are the assertions that are being reproduced here.

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Then we're told the Christian notion of salvation was almost wholly a product of this Persian eschatology adopted by Semitic Aramites and some cultists like the

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Essenes and by Roman military men who thought the rigid discipline and vivid battle imagery of Mithraism appropriate for warriors.

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Such a statement expresses an astounding ignorance of the Christian notion of salvation, let alone the makeup of the early

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Christian movement, which is primarily made up not of Semitic Aramites and some cultists, let alone

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Roman soldiers, but slaves and lower class people in Roman society, and again at a time when

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Mithraism had yet to make its entrance into Roman society. To anyone with an even fair familiarity with the historical sources, this kind of argumentation would be humorous if it was not being presented as being serious by Margaret Walker.

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Then Mr. Barker himself writes, the name Mary is common to names given to mothers of other gods.

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The Syrian Myra, the Greek Maya, and the Hindu Maya all derive from the familiar Ma, for mother.

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Now, is this relevant to the name of Mary, wife of Joseph, mother of Jesus? Just a few years ago,

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Richard Baucom published a groundbreaking study that has sent shockwaves across the field of New Testament studies, entitled

41:39

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Apart from his argument that at least one of the Gospels is, in fact, eyewitness testimony, he likewise included a study of the most common names in Israel derived from archaeological digs in the centuries immediately prior to and after the time of Christ.

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And guess what the most common female name was? You guessed it, Mary. So, which is more likely, that the

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Gospels were reflecting the historical reality, or that there is some pagan mythology at play?

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Instead of this kind of parallelomania, we should listen carefully to sober scholarship on this topic, such as that provided by Gary Leese, who has written, after almost 100 years of unremitting labor, the conclusion appears inescapable that neither

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Mithraism nor Christianity prove to be an obvious and direct influence upon the other in the development and demise or survival of either religion.

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Their beliefs and practices are well accounted for by their most obvious origins, and there is no need to explain one in terms of the other.

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And so, if I were to take the time to examine each of the popularly promoted sources for Jesus, including the

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Osiris myth, or Greek stories like Addis or Dionysus, or those who promote Gnostic myths, et cetera, we would find the same kind of constant anachronism and factual misstatements that we have documented here regarding Mithraism.

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Indeed, as Osiris historian Trigvi Menager has put it in his conclusion of his work The Riddle of Resurrection, Dying and Rising Gods in the

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Ancient Near East, quote, the death of Jesus is presented in the sources as vicarious suffering, as an act of atonement for sins, but there is no evidence of the death or dying and rising of gods as vicarious suffering for sins.

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There is, as far as I'm aware, no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct, drawing on the myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world.

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The faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus retains its unique character in the history of religions, end quote.

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Like the fiction of Dan Brown's Vinci Code, those who ignore the fundamental realities of history, the vast chasm of difference between the historically grounded story of Jesus and Nazareth and the ahistorical mythology of Mithra or Osiris or Dionysus or Romulus can only offer us fantasies rather than the truth.

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There is only one logical context for the story of Jesus, the very one offered in the Bible, that of the

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Jewish people of the first century who, like Simeon and Anna in the Temple, look for the promised Messiah while rejecting and detesting the paganism of the world around them.

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Finally, argument number four, the miracle reports make the story unhistorical. This is truly the foundation of Dan's position, for in essence here again we have the overriding power of his naturalistic and materialistic worldview coming to the fore.

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His argument is simple. There is no supernatural realm, hence any source even referencing it must be, quote, unhistorical, end quote.

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This is circular reasoning begging the question, assuming the end of the debate before you have proven your point. I refer you to the debate between myself and Mr.

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Barber from late April of this year for further discussion of whether naturalistic materialism can provide a consistent ground for human thought and predication.

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For now, let me point you to a single miracle that is recorded in the Gospels to see if you would agree with Mr.

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Barber's position. In Luke chapter 17, verses 11 through 19, we have the healing of the ten lepers.

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It takes place on the border between Galilee and Samaria, which was a place of racial tension and arrogance.

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The Jews detested the Samaritans, the Samaritans returned the favor. The miracle is rooted in history.

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To even understand it, you have to know what was going on in first century Palestine. It is a purposeful miracle, speaking directly not of the need of men, but the situation in that day, a situation that changed only 40 years later.

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So this narrative had to come from that time period when people would have understood the context. The entire story lives and breathes the original historical context.

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It does not breathe the air of mythology in any way, shape, or form. And so we conclude there is no reason to look for a mythological foundation for Jesus.

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The historical realities of the Jewish people at the beginning of the first century, together with the

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Jewish scriptures and their prophetic witness, are more than sufficient foundation for the gospel stories.

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The story of Jesus is unique because he, as the incarnate one, was himself truly unique.

46:14

Thank you very much. Thank you,

46:29

Dr. White. Mr. Berger, you have 10 minutes for cross -examination.

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I'm going to take that. I'm going to say we take this first cross -ex really for informational purposes.

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So I don't remember, did you define the word pagan? No, I did not define the word pagan.

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Would you like me to? Well, as I was using it there, I was referring to religions that are primarily focused upon celebration of nature, fertility, the vegetation cycle, hence would have holidays specifically associated with spring, fall, those issues along those lines.

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Isn't it true the word pagan religious means non -Christian, any religion that's outside of Judeo -Christian, whatever their beliefs are?

47:33

I think that would be an anachronistic use of the term prior to Christianity, obviously. I would imagine a lot of Christians use it that way, but I was referring to its use in the history of religion studies.

47:43

So if there were any believers who were not basing their beliefs on natural, cyclical things, but they had some kind of spiritual knowledge about it, you would not call that a non -Christian, non -pagan religion?

47:56

What would it be then? You're talking about after the beginning of Christianity? No, before and during. Well, I wouldn't use the term

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Christian of anything prior to Christ. Obviously, that was Judaism, but there were obviously all sorts of religions that were focused upon the vegetation cycle, which was the means by which anyone stayed alive in those days.

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Had a good crop, you lived. Had a good crop, you might not make it. That would be a pagan religion because it's focused upon creation rather than non -creation.

48:26

So Pythagoras' worship of numbers would not be pagan then? Since the numbers are a part of creation itself, if you wanted to use that terminology,

48:38

I don't know if the term pagan is defined in the Bible, so it's not a hill I mentioned at the time. Well, in my reading, a pagan basically is anybody who's not a

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Christian, anybody who's outside the circle. And you don't consider pagan to be a bad word.

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It's not a pejorative, it's just a description. It's a descriptive term, sure. It can be used in that way.

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I mean, sometimes you look at somebody and say, you're pagan, but you aren't using that, not in a specific scholarly sense of that.

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Some of us would be proud of that. Well, that's another part of the debate. I'm sure you agree, you alluded to the fact that later

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Christians did borrow from paganism, especially after Constantine, when their church construction and their practices and their mass and their clergy and their vestments.

49:29

A lot of these things that the church did basically borrow from paganism, from Romans and from the

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Greeks. And you do admit that within the Christian church... I haven't finished the question yet, because that's preparing the question.

49:46

In that admission, I think you agree then, therefore, that some parts of the Christian church have exhibited the propensity then to borrow from outside sources to flavor their religion.

49:58

I would then ask you, what is it that makes the first century Christians exempt from that proclivity?

50:05

A couple of things. I don't agree with the first two complex foundational statements in the sense that medieval

50:12

Roman Catholicism, especially amongst established infant baptisms as a means of entering the church, brought all sorts of pagans in, and so you had assimilation of various eccentric pagan elements within medieval

50:26

Roman Catholicism. There is a vast difference between the practice of something 500 or 600 years after time of Christ and that of the apostles who are living in Judea prior to AD 70 and are living in a

50:40

Jewish context where paganism, the pagan religions of the day, are considered to be completely anathema, and hence to try to build a religion by borrowing from the very religions that the people you tend to reach find to be reprehensible and repulsive has never made any sense to me.

50:59

So that's how I answered the main question, that is, why is the first century precluded from what happened later on is you have a completely different context for the apostles than you have for fifth century medieval

51:18

Catholicism after the fall of the western portion of Rome. Isn't it true that all religions consider the others to be anathema in some way?

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No, not at all. In fact, a large number of the mystery religions of the days, in fact, that was one of the things the

51:32

Jews were so hanged for, was there's a tremendous amount of eclecticism in the mystery religions. If you were a follower of Dionysus, that didn't mean that someone who was a follower of Mithra was wrong.

51:41

So no, that would not be a case in any serious study of the history of religion at all if you were allowed to be a member of multiple of the mystery religions.

51:50

In the first century, I'm sure you agreed that whoever wrote those Gospels would have or should have been familiar with earlier stories of heroes and gods who had virgin births.

52:01

There were stories floating around at the time, right? Of gods and heroes who were born of a virgin. The primary sources that have been identified by scholarship of the

52:08

New Testament documents primarily come from the Jewish people themselves. The primary references would be found in what we would call the

52:16

Apocryphal works today, the New Testamental period, Maccabees, works like that.

52:22

Paul is aware of Greek philosophy and Greek philosophers and stories along those lines.

52:30

But there would be entire sections of especially Roman religion that would only be known by having a discussion with maybe soldiers that came in from Rome, even though the

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Roman cohorts in Palestine initially generally were not of the legion level.

52:49

They were not Italian, and hence I don't have knowledge of that. Someone like Dieter would have an extremely limited exposure to many of the sources that you were presenting here.

53:02

He lived in Galilee, and that's quite a cosmopolitan crossroads for a clash of many cultures, many religions were in existence.

53:10

Are you suggesting that the people who wrote the New Testament were ignorant of the story of Romulus and the stories of the previous...

53:16

You do agree there were pre -existing stories of virgin births, right? Whether the Christians knew of them or not. There are pre -existing stories of gods in human form impregnating women.

53:29

I am not aware of any story from monotheism where a child is conceived without the means of a physical god.

53:37

If you are, please let us know. Romulus was impregnated, the first virgin was impregnated by Mars.

53:44

It was this whatever kind of creature. And whatever happened to the virgin birth of Jesus, by the way, was there a historical witness to the virgin birth of Jesus?

53:54

To the virgin conception of Jesus? How could you have a historical witness? Exactly. How could you have a historical witness to Romulus, right?

54:02

Or to Caesar Augustus? There is no way you would know that historically. How about the people that were involved?

54:10

So at least this isn't the claim of a virgin birth, a non -historical claim. It's just a claim that somebody can't be verified.

54:17

Well, if you assert that history has to be naturalistic and ignore any activity of God in history, then certainly that's the conclusion.

54:29

Well, where's the historical nexus there? Where is the historical source or document or testimony of the fact that this virgin got impregnated by a ghost?

54:38

Where's that? Well, of course, it's not a ghost, it's a spirit, but Holy Ghost. Yeah, but as you know, that's not a proper translation of the

54:46

New Testament, but that would be due to the fact that the writer

54:51

Luke specifically makes reference to checking sources, doing interviews, and writing during the lifetime, having interviewed the people that he is writing the story about.

55:00

That's about as close as you can get to a original historical source, as I'm familiar with.

55:06

So he talked to somebody who saw Mary get pregnant? No, he talked to Mary. Oh, and Mary saw herself get pregnant by this spirit.

55:14

I think the line of question here is self -evidently presupposing a naturalistic worldview that's providing a foundation.

55:24

You bet. The naturalistic worldview is the only viable worldview, by the way. Is that a question? Do you believe that the

55:36

Egyptian sorcerers actually turned sticks into snakes? Yes. They did?

55:41

Yes. By what power? There is more than one supernatural power in the world.

55:47

So the devil? Yes. They actually perform. That's one of the evidences that your

55:52

Zoroastrian assertions are completely out of line with the Old Testament. I only made one

55:59

Zoroastrian assertion. Well, one's not. Cyrus the

56:05

Great, I should be cross -examining you. Do we still have time here? 46 seconds.

56:12

How long has the human race existed? I do not have any idea. That's not a part of my...

56:19

Unless you're an old man, he knows exactly what I'm talking about. Well, in your best guess, how old is the human race?

56:25

How long have we been here? I do not know. There's estimates anywhere from... If you're talking about from the time of Adam onward, there are various ways of working the genealogies.

56:38

It would go anywhere from 6 ,000 to 20 ,000 years. 6 ,000 to 20 ,000 years.

56:44

The human species? You're on record saying... No, no, I didn't say... The human race. I said from Adam.

56:49

However you determine who Adam was, there are people who would say that Adam is the first creature that is created.

56:56

There are other people that would say that Adam came at a point just saying from Adam onward, because that's the only biblical revelation.

57:04

Were there humans before Adam? Our time is up. There will be a five -minute break to stretch your legs and then we'll continue after that.

57:15

I'd like to offer just a brief reminder. If you have questions for the speakers for our question and answer period, please turn them in at the book table at the next break so that they can be sorted through.

57:28

Thank you very much. Also, each party will be receiving a copy of this debate that they will individually sell,

57:36

I assume, at their discretion. Dr.

57:44

White, you now have ten minutes for cross -examination. Thank you very much, Kevin.

57:50

Mr. Parker, you presented a number of slides wherein you presented alleged parallels.

58:02

All right, now I'll try that. You presented a number of slides where you presented alleged parallels between the

58:09

Gospel of Mark and Homer. Is it your position that the writer of Mark knew of the epics of Homer and that he constructed his gospel in such a way as to parallel those epics?

58:25

Two answers. Yes. I'm still not hearing it.

58:45

Anybody? Is it on mute? I see digits.

58:53

I tell you what, let's pray about it. See? See?

58:59

Nothing felt like prayer. There we go. Well, there's two parts to that answer.

59:12

Yes, the author of the first gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was familiar with Homer and the epics and the

59:19

Homeric hymns. Every educated writer of Greek in those days was familiar. Schoolchildren were familiar.

59:25

Homer, the Odyssey, the Iliad were used pretty much like tutorials to learn how to write.

59:31

The Romans copied and emulated Homer. The Greeks copied and emulated

59:36

Homer. Homer was sort of the Shakespeare of the day. And Mark, as I said earlier, patterned most of his gospel after the

59:45

Jewish scriptures, obviously. But he did take many stories, not all of them, but many of his actual supposed historical tales within the

59:54

Book of Mark and he emulated, just like I emulated The Three Little Pigs, he emulated

01:00:01

Homer. Although you can see that he tried to improve it. He tried to change it. He tried to say our faces have been even better now.

01:00:08

So, yes, it's to claim that you're exactly right. Much of the

01:00:13

Book of Mark was deliberately emulating Homer. You also said the

01:00:18

Christian story was clearly cut from the Romulus story. Is that what you said? I didn't say it was clearly cut from that story.

01:00:25

I'm saying that that story is part of the fabric from which the Jesus story was cut.

01:00:31

Romulus is one example of many examples of virgin -born sons of God who were saviors who were prophesied and persecuted and so on.

01:00:42

We can't connect the dots exactly between Mark, Matthew, and Luke and the story of Romulus, but we can show the fabric, the texture from which the culture of the day, the readers of his day would have known and understood.

01:00:56

Anybody who was anybody in those days, if you're going to create a new religion, you better have elements in it that have virgin births in it, and one or two childhood stories of how magnificent he was, and miracles and demons, and you've got to do stuff like that, instilling new ways, and you've got to show that your

01:01:12

God is really a real God, and that's how you do it. So in the first century in Palestine, amongst the Jews, the

01:01:19

Jews had access to all these myths, and Mark was purposely attempting to start a new religion amongst the

01:01:28

Jews by referring to those religions that the Jews detested. Not all the

01:01:34

Jews had access to all the myths, but any literate Jew who could compose something like the Book of Mark, which is quite a work of art, actually, when you think about it.

01:01:41

It's pretty amazing. Those types of Jews and Greek writers would have been familiar with Homer, and no, he had already believed.

01:01:49

In fact, I think it's possible that Mark already believed in Jesus and didn't just manufacture him, but what he was doing was in order to tell the story, he brought these earlier legends in, he brought these earlier epics in to say, look at it, he probably believed

01:02:05

Jesus was a real person, but look at it, he did this, he outdid Odysseus, he outdid Homer, he did better than Romulus, he was bringing these stories in.

01:02:13

He's writing historical fiction, creative work of art type of fiction, to tell a story to convince the readers of his day that our

01:02:20

God is part of the crowd, too. Our God is just as good as any of the others.

01:02:25

So he's getting monotheists who have been willing to die in opposition to these religions, to adopt a new religion by drawing from the religions that they detest.

01:02:38

Well, the only reasons we might think that these monotheists were willing to die for their religion is because of writers like Mark, who start to tell us those stories.

01:02:46

Because before Mark, we had no gospel of Jesus. No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I must have confused you.

01:02:52

What I meant was, it's very clear that the Jewish people, from intertestamental sources prior to Mark, rejected these religions and found them to be reprehensible and repulsive.

01:03:06

So I'm referring to, Mark comes on the scene in that context, he's trying to create a new religion, and so he draws from the very sources that the people he's trying to convert find to be repulsive to create a new religion to attract.

01:03:18

Well, Christianity started somehow, and it was one of those bold moves, some kind of creative, bold move that those writers,

01:03:26

I don't know if Mark thought his gospel was going to become some bestseller like it is. He was writing the story his own way.

01:03:32

Later writers, Matthew and Luke, of course you know, patterned much of their gospels after Mark. So, I don't know if we can say that the author of Mark was thinking about Christianity the same way we are here today.

01:03:43

I'm a little confused at your presentation because it does seem that you have fundamentally changed some of your positions, so I need to ask a question here.

01:03:53

You said in your published work that there was no tribe of Christians during Josephus' time.

01:04:00

Christianity did not get off the ground until the second century. Have you abandoned that assertion? No, I haven't.

01:04:07

In the first century, the word Christian and Christianity, historically, was not really what you would call a tribe of Christians.

01:04:15

I think that was Suetonius, though. I read that in reference to Suetonius in the year 112, not Josephus. This is actually talking about Josephus.

01:04:25

So, but you do recognize that there were Christians in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

01:04:31

Yeah, they were Jewish Christians. They were Jews without their Messiah. In Rome as well?

01:04:37

I don't think in Rome, not that early, not at the time No, I don't think so.

01:04:44

I don't think there were a tribe of Christians in Rome that early in the first century. So who was Paul writing to around 51?

01:04:52

He might have been writing to some people, but certainly referencing that.

01:04:58

The thing about Rome isn't Josephus. The thing about Rome is that it's Suetonius, right? Suetonius, in his Twelve Seasons, was talking about how

01:05:04

Nero had to persecute the Christians because there was a tribe of Christians in Rome at the time. There hadn't been somebody to be persecuted.

01:05:11

You quoted Justin Martyr right at the end. Do you recall what the quotation is from? Yeah, I do.

01:05:17

It's from First Apology? Yeah, First Apology chapters 21, 22.

01:05:27

And it looks like also what was LX? 60. 64.

01:05:35

Dan, have you read all of the First Apology? No, I haven't read all of it. So you said, and I quoted this,

01:05:47

I read this, that Justin Martyr's argument is you should all convert to Christianity because it is all the same.

01:05:54

Do you really feel that's what Justin Martyr was saying those times? The words he used is we propound nothing different.

01:06:02

Those were Justin Martyr's words. Nothing different from what you believe. But you haven't read the rest of his argument.

01:06:07

You don't know what context that was. No, I haven't read all of Justin Martyr. But if you can enlighten us how the phrase nothing different means something different, let us know.

01:06:19

The concept of dying and rising saviors. I gave a quote from Benninger who upon examination, and he is a world -renowned scholar teaching in Stockholm, upon examination of the ancient world concluded that none of these dying and rising gods all associated with the vegetation cycle, not only

01:06:43

Yahweh was never a vegetation god, but that there was no connection whatsoever between the

01:06:50

Jesus story and these vegetative gods, all of these religions, et cetera, et cetera.

01:06:56

Do you agree with him or disagree with him? I agree that Christianity introduces some new elements of theology.

01:07:03

Otherwise, we wouldn't have Christianity. I think they were pretty creative in what they did. They were good at marketing as well, although a lot of them got killed for it.

01:07:12

But that's true in all religions. But the

01:07:18

New Testament makes these allusions to planting the seed in the ground, the seed must die and then it must be brought up again.

01:07:26

We do have allusions within the New Testament itself, but those people were also aware of vegetation cycles that Jesus himself would have to die and then rise again.

01:07:36

So, when you're writing historical fiction, you're using fiction, like James Michener, let's say, writes his books.

01:07:43

He puts a lot of good history in there, but then he elaborates on it. He's emulating, he's taking the history that those people would have known at the time and then making a new story on top of all that.

01:07:54

So, I'm not surprised that Christianity has some special different theology and uniqueness to it, but all religions can make that.

01:08:02

But would James Michener allow himself to be nailed to the cross for failing to deny his historical fiction?

01:08:10

I don't know, I'd have to ask him. He might. He might actually defend his fictional stories.

01:08:16

Well, you know, if any followers of Michener, years later, were to believe, actually, that he was the

01:08:23

Savior, that some of them, I mean, how many did you have followers who are willing to die for their hero, whether he was historical or purely legendary?

01:08:33

Thank you. Mr. Barger, you now have 15 minutes for rebuttal. No. No, just go like this.

01:08:55

The first atheist martyr. Well, I started rebutting, actually, the last thing

01:09:06

I said was rebutting what you had raised in your statement about external confirmation. And when we are, when someone is writing historical fiction, like the

01:09:16

New Testament was, it was fiction within a historical context. We wanted the readers to know, oh, yes, there was a

01:09:23

Jerusalem, yes, there was a Rome, yes, there was a Herod, just like James Michener would say, yes, there was a

01:09:29

Stalin, yes, there was a Hitler, yes, there was a Hawaii. But the stories within that historical framework, those stories are made -up stories.

01:09:38

Now, I'm putting aside for today's debate the notion of whether Jesus existed historically or not.

01:09:44

Skeptics and atheists are not in agreement on that. There are many who think that when Mark wrote his first gospel, there actually was another of many self -proclaimed first century

01:09:54

Christ figures who thought they were the one. There was a Judas the Christ. Josephus writes about that, and he gives more space to that Christ figure than if he wrote about Jesus, than he gives to Jesus.

01:10:05

There was an Egyptian Jew messiah. There was a man named Theudas the Christ. So there may have been a self -proclaimed

01:10:13

Jew who thought he was the messiah. And there have been many after that as well. And his name might have been

01:10:19

Yeshua or Yeshua. But when the gospels were written, they were not written as biographies.

01:10:28

They're not biographies. They are theologically motivated. Almost all these biographies of big heroes in the past, like Hercules or Alexander the

01:10:42

Great, they put in one or two childhood stories just to say, hey, we should have known. He was really special.

01:10:48

And of course, Mark does the same thing. He puts in a childhood story, and there's this idea that, well, Jesus should have been known, and he was prophesied.

01:10:54

But the stories that these gospel writers came up with were fictional stories based on history.

01:11:00

It should not surprise us in the New Testament to find actual history. It doesn't surprise us to find in Mishner actual history.

01:11:09

The characters and the stories are elaborations on that. Now, you misrepresented my position on natural explanations, and for the record,

01:11:20

I did not say that the naturalistic worldview rules out miracles. In fact, if you read my book carefully,

01:11:27

I go out of my way to say that miracles may have happened. I say that very clearly.

01:11:33

What the historical method does is it doesn't rule out miracles. History, being the weakest of all sciences, it's a legitimate science, and working with probabilities to a greater degree than other sciences, history, in order to work, has to make an assumption.

01:11:50

The assumption might be wrong, but historians have to make an assumption of natural regularity over time.

01:11:55

We have to assume that the laws of nature today worked the same as they did then. We have to assume that if somebody says an alien appeared to them in their backyard out of thin air, we have to assume that, well, that's probably very unlikely to have been true, right?

01:12:10

We make those assumptions. So, my point, I go out of my way to show in this point that history doesn't rule out miracles.

01:12:19

What it does is the assumption of natural regularity over time limits history to what it can actually know.

01:12:27

History is the wrong tool for examining miracles. Maybe miracles happened, but you need some other tool.

01:12:33

It would be like looking for extrasolar planets with a microscope. You're not going to see them because you're looking through this lens.

01:12:41

And history is that lens of a microscope that is so limited that you have to assume that the place of Shakespeare did not just magically appear on the table in front of him because somebody said so.

01:12:52

We assume regularity over time. That is not a naturalistic rejection of miracles, and that's always been my position.

01:12:59

As a sort of major casual position, I will say, yeah, miracles don't happen, but I could be wrong.

01:13:05

The burden of proof on showing that I'm wrong is on your shoulders, and you cannot use history as your tool of showing that the miracles happened or did not happen, because there are always other explanations, for example exaggeration, misinterpretation, lying, outright fraud.

01:13:28

Those explanations, however unlikely they might seem, are at least more likely than that the laws of nature were violated.

01:13:37

Kyrenius, by the way, you're wrong about Kyrenius. I studied a lot and have worked with Richard Carrier, probably.

01:13:44

This fellow, Richard Carrier, has written an exhaustive analysis of Kyrenius. The problem here is that Matthew reports that Jesus was born under King Herod, who died in the year 6

01:13:55

BC. Luke reports that Jesus was born under the census by Kyrenius who, excuse me,

01:14:02

Herod died in 4 BC. Kyrenius became governor of Syria in the year 6

01:14:07

AD. So there's a 9 -year gap in there. There was no year 0. There's a 9 -year gap in there where Jesus hadn't been born here or here later.

01:14:16

Kyrenius became governor of Syria in the year 6 AD. Before that, we know where he was.

01:14:22

We know what he was doing. In fact, Syria wasn't even a part of the empire. It didn't even need a census at the time, before 6

01:14:29

AD. So there's a contradiction in the New Testament about the dating of the birth of Jesus.

01:14:36

It's probably not time to go into all the references on all of that. I will agree with you that since my recent studying in this my amateur studying in this field that I am now going to take

01:14:55

Barbara Walker to a lower level of confidence than I used to before. I agree with that. I like her.

01:15:01

I know her. I've talked with her. I've met her. We've interviewed her on our national radio show and I think she's a wonderful person.

01:15:06

And you are right. Her real passion is feminism. She opposes the patriarchy of Christianity. She opposes

01:15:13

Paul who told women to keep silent in the church. Paul who said it is not good for a man to touch a woman. The Christian patriarchy where women are second class citizens.

01:15:22

In fact, many denominations came to be ordained. She opposes all of those things. But I'm questioning the breadth of her scholarship, which is the main reason why

01:15:32

I went to stronger evidences tonight than Barbara Walker. I don't want to belittle her because I know she's working with her own sources.

01:15:40

And that's why I thought it was a bit out of line for tonight's debate for you to introduce and try to rebut something that I did not raise during the debate itself.

01:15:51

Mithraism actually we don't know much at all about Zoroastrian Mithraism.

01:15:57

It's a mistake to say that Mithraism came from Zoroastrianism because it may not have at all. There is a

01:16:02

Mithra named in Zoroastrian religion as a god. This sun god I think.

01:16:08

But that's all we know about it. It was the Romans, as James Freckley pointed out, it was the Romans who took that, especially Roman sailors and soldiers, who took that and made a new religion out of an existing ancient practice.

01:16:19

And all we know about Mithraism comes through the lens of the Romans. By the way, that's true of Christianity. All we know about Christianity comes through the lens of the

01:16:28

Romans. We don't have any first century Aramaic sources. We don't have any actual historical records of what went on there.

01:16:34

We are looking at Christianity through the lens of a foreign government. But we do know that within the

01:16:40

Roman world, there are inscriptions of the slaying of the bull showing the twelve signs of the zodiac and showing twelve events in the life of Mithra as the

01:16:50

Romans viewed it, which is probably not what the Zoroastrians thought. And we do show that the birth of Mithra, that Mithra the

01:17:00

Romans believed, occurs in the same spot as the winter solstice. At that time in history, the winter solstice was

01:17:06

December the 25th. And then we see it moving across the top of the cave. We see these inscriptions. So that's a bit tenuous, but it does show a connection between the birth of Mithra as the

01:17:16

Romans thought of it and the date of December the 25th. And besides, you're right, it's beside the point because early

01:17:22

Christians didn't even celebrate Christmas. There's no command to celebrate Christmas. They didn't think it was on December the 25th anyway.

01:17:28

And there's debate among the churches. The early characters never even thought we should celebrate Christmas at all. So there is some connection with Mithraism, but I have meant that Mithraism is not the strongest argument to use to show the pagan precedence to Christianity.

01:17:42

Some of the other ones I gave tonight are much clearer, much stronger, much more relevant to the writers who wrote the

01:17:51

Gospels. So, in James' statement, he did agree that there were stories or myths of dying and rising gods.

01:18:01

I'm sure he doesn't believe they actually happened. I don't think James believed that Caesar Augustus was born of a virgin and the god

01:18:08

Mars. I don't. Do any of you? But some people did, and there were proclamations in our documents that predate

01:18:14

Christianity. But at least James is admitting that those stories were in existence, and the likelihood that an educated writer, like people who wrote in Greek, because most of the people were not literate, somebody like Mark and Matthew and Luke and John, the likelihood that they would have been familiar, especially in that part of the cosmopolitan part of the world, that crescent there where exchange of cultures was clashing and they were from all over the place, the likelihood they would have been familiar with those stories is extremely high.

01:18:44

It would be extremely blinkered to think that these Christians just suddenly sat down and were just writing in a back, ex nihilo.

01:18:50

So, I, well, I've gone through rebutting the basic points that I thought needed rebutting during your opening statement.

01:18:59

Wait, one more thing. Yes, Jesus, in many ways, was unique.

01:19:05

But so was my Three Little Donkeys story. It's unique. No one's ever had a story like that.

01:19:13

So is Mormonism unique? Mormonism, when you think about it, think about how

01:19:18

Mormonism has attracted so many people because of their special message. There's nothing like it. You can show the pagan precedents to Mormonism.

01:19:26

You can show Christian precedents to Mormonism. I'm sure nobody thinks that Mormon, Joseph Smith just dropped out of nowhere and just suddenly, you know, we all know it was a fraud.

01:19:36

We know it was phony. We know he was using the beliefs of the people of his time, dressing it up in the language that they would find acceptable, bringing in Christian precedents and so on, and building this new religion.

01:19:48

And, if it's true that where there's smoke, there's fire, well, look at the success of Mormonism.

01:19:54

Does the worldwide success and impressive growth of Mormonism, and they were willing to become martyrs for their faith, does that prove that the angel

01:20:03

Moroni visited the hill Camorra in Palmyra, New York, and gave these gold tablets to the nobodies?

01:20:09

Does that prove it? Of course not. We're all healthy in our skepticism about that story, unless there's a

01:20:15

Mormon here tonight. Is there today? I know there's some ex -Mormons here, so there's one in the front row there.

01:20:21

I just found out from Steve Benson, by the way, that there's actually an arrogant island called

01:20:26

Camorra, and you know what the capital of that island is? Moroni. And Joseph Smith would have known that at the time.

01:20:34

He was pulling the wool over people's eyes, right? Well, you know, Mormonism's unique. Yeah, yeah, great.

01:20:40

It's a wonder, you know, and people have changed lives, and they're good people, and they have a sense of humanity, and they're moral, ethical people, right?

01:20:47

But Joseph Smith did not talk to the angel Moroni in the hill Camorra. Jesus did not go up to a mountain and get transfigured and see these resurrected bodies of Elijah and Moses.

01:20:56

He didn't. Those things did not happen. You can claim they happened, but a healthy skepticism that I think all of us in this room have requires that we back up and say, wait a minute, am

01:21:07

I that gullible? These people that I don't know much about from the period of time when I'm not really sure how to interpret what they wrote?

01:21:15

I'm just going to take it as historical truth. The historical truth in the New Testament is background truth.

01:21:21

The story of Jesus himself, the actual stories of, in fact, many of the things that he said, which, you know, seek and ye shall find was said by the

01:21:31

Delphic oracles. There was a lot of these things you could find out by the Greeks a lot more. The story of the widow's might, that story had already been said centuries before by the

01:21:41

Delphic, by the woman who was supposedly inhaling those gasses and getting visions from God, upon which entire civilizations based their strategies.

01:21:49

That was a big deal back then to get these words. Other stories that had predated Christianity, that others actually had been said earlier, at least by the

01:21:59

Jewish Rabbi Hillel, and had been said earlier, of course, by others, not that Confucianism affected

01:22:04

Christianity, but Confucius came up with an even better way of saying it. Don't do unto others that which you would not have them do unto you.

01:22:12

So I think in rebuttal to James' opening statement, we can show that we can grant

01:22:18

James a lot of ground. We can grant him some uniquenesses within Christianity, but so what?

01:22:25

We can do that with all religions. I don't think we can grant him the high level of historical certainty or probability of certainty that he seems to think we should attach to the

01:22:35

New Testament, because it's his personal favorite religion. Thank you,

01:22:41

Mr. Barkley. Dr.

01:22:50

White, you now have 15 minutes. Well, if you believe that James Michener would die for not denying his own fiction, then most of what

01:23:00

I'm going to have to say to you isn't really going to be overly worthwhile. I think it is very obvious that there is a fundamental difference between the stories that are presented by the

01:23:11

Gospel writers and those of the myth writers of the ancient world. We have had it asserted that the

01:23:17

Gospels are historical fiction. We have not had proof. Assertion is not the same as proof. We had a lot of assertions made during the opening presentation that if we would take the time to look carefully at them,

01:23:28

I hope you did look carefully at them, and that you would review some of the things, especially some of the alleged Homeric parallels provided there.

01:23:35

I think if you'll go into the text, you will discover that just as Dan asserted the word first in 1

01:23:42

Corinthians 15, it wasn't there. You'll discover these individuals are translating the text so as to create the very parallels that they then go, look at this, it's right here in the text itself.

01:23:53

And they are ignoring the differences that exist. That's the problem. You have here the idea that monotheistic

01:24:00

Jews who had for centuries suffered under various rulers prior to the coming of Christ, and were always found to be reprehensible to people around them because of their monotheism, because of the fact that they rejected the pagan religions around them.

01:24:18

In fact, what were the prophets always going after them about but their failures in that very place?

01:24:25

The Baals, the Ashtoreth, which were fertility gods, the dying and rising god stuff.

01:24:31

Here, in the intertestamental period and up to the point of the time of Christ, that has become burned into their national self -identity.

01:24:40

And so what we're being asked to believe is that these writers, and it's amazing to me, I debate John Donovan Crossan, and these writers are ignorant men who are unlettered and know almost nothing.

01:24:50

Now we're being told, oh, they knew Homer, and they knew Roman religious history, and they knew this mythology, and they had,

01:24:58

I mean, these people knew more than almost any person today who doesn't have a degree in religious studies.

01:25:04

And they could draw from all of these different things. I still want to know, which one were they drawn from?

01:25:09

Was it the Romulus story? Was it the Homer story? Was it Dionysus? Was it Mithra? Was it Osiris?

01:25:15

Which one of these many contradictory stories, all coming from a completely different worldview, are they actually drawing from?

01:25:22

That's what I'd like to know. It's real easy to do the scattergun approach and say, well, they're drawing from this.

01:25:27

This is a scholarly debate. There's something that you should be asking each one of us.

01:25:33

Prove it. Don't just give me an assertion. Prove it. Prove that these individuals had resources like this.

01:25:41

Prove that this is what they're drawing from. Don't use very edited, highly edited translations where you leave stuff out just to create parallels.

01:25:50

I can do that with anything. I can find a book by Dennis McKenzie, and I can accuse him of plagiarism by doing the same thing to his text.

01:25:59

Why? Because they're talking about similar things. That doesn't mean that there was any dependence between the two at all.

01:26:05

Let me tell you what Luke said about his gospel. He started off in writing

01:26:10

Theophilus. He said, Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile the account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seems fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent

01:26:31

Theophilus, so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught. Now I ask you a simple question.

01:26:37

If that's historical fiction, then I don't know what historical fiction is. That's what was so scandalous about Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code is it was upside -down history.

01:26:47

It was just pure, fraudulent, ridiculous fiction. But at the beginning of the book, he said all references to historical documents are true.

01:26:56

Well, that was a bold -faced lie. It made him millions and millions of dollars, but it was a bold -faced lie, and people believed it.

01:27:03

Is that what lives today? You have to recognize that the writers are not saying this is historical fiction.

01:27:09

The writers are not saying, Oh, I'm just going to put some nice stories together for you to convince you that my

01:27:15

God does more miracles. As I pointed out, the very miracles found in the New Testament are not meant to demonstrate that in the first place.

01:27:23

And Mark, of all the writers, has the least interest in those types of things. And so, the fact of the matter is the texts that are being attacked here, and it is an attack to say that these are historical fiction when the writers never say anything like that.

01:27:39

They say the exact opposite. You're saying that they were lying, that they were creating something. In fact, an entire genre that I would challenge

01:27:47

Dan to demonstrate existed at the time. He said, these are biographies. Actually, I know many scholars that say this fit perfectly in the realm of historical biographies of the dead.

01:27:58

So, the text themselves, if you're not familiar with the text, then you might buy some of this.

01:28:03

The more familiar you are with the text, it makes absolutely no sense. In the same way, I would challenge every single one of you, go to ccel .org,

01:28:12

look up Justin's First Apology, read it for yourself. He said exactly the opposite. His argument at that point was, you are killing

01:28:20

Christians, but you're not killing these people who believe these things. But then he goes on to say, but what we believe is different because it's true.

01:28:31

And in fact, we don't have a God like your God, who commits parasite and is himself a one who commits parasite, and then is killed by someone else.

01:28:40

And your sons of God do all these things, and we don't do these things. He specifically draws the contrast.

01:28:45

It is gross misrepresentation of Justin Martyr. And I have read all of him, and I encourage you.

01:28:53

Just do it. Don't listen to what I have to say. Go read it for yourself. You will discover that Justin Martyr is the exact opposite.

01:29:00

What he's saying is, you Romans are being inconsistent to kill us Christians when you yourselves do these things.

01:29:07

He's not saying we're all saying the same thing, becoming Christian. Anything that Dan misinterpreted

01:29:13

Justin Martyr's statement to actually say. Take the time to read. I've read Justin Martyr. His dialogue with Triton, his second apology, things like that.

01:29:22

Take the time to find out for yourself. You'll discover it's a commonly misapplied text. He's not the only one who's done it, but it is found in a lot of atheist books, and its context is completely different.

01:29:33

So, just a couple of other things here. He said that I was wrong in my representation of him in regards to a citation from Goddess.

01:29:46

I was simply citing the book, and I will confess I continue to be in utter shock. It's the first time in almost 90 debates that I have debated someone in a scholarly debate where they have said it's absolutely unfair for me to quote them from their own book.

01:30:04

As I said at the beginning, I wish people would quote me from mine. That would mean that they actually took the time to find out what a person believes, and I am very appreciative of the fact that Dan says, you know what, maybe that long quotation from Barbara Walker needs to move that down or something.

01:30:23

I think that's a good thing, and I commend him for that. And I would hope that the next edition, this edition only came out a few years ago, as I recall.

01:30:31

Isn't it fairly recent? Two years ago, okay. What came out two years ago is fair game in a scholarly debate in regards to what a person is going to believe.

01:30:42

I find it fascinating that the entire presentation didn't draw from the same sources. And all that did was increase the number of self -contradictory sources.

01:30:53

Now we have at least 16 to 20 possible sources that these Galilean fishermen are trying from to create the story of Jesus, to convince monotheistic

01:31:04

Jews who aided all of this stuff to become Christians. Is that really a meaningful historical argument?

01:31:12

The terminology that was used by Dr. Dan Wallace and his co -authors in What Reinvents Jesus, and I don't believe that Dr.

01:31:21

Nash used that, but there's excellent work on this very subject of gospel degrees that would demonstrate the fraudulent use of parallels in historical research.

01:31:32

The term parallelomania I think was illustrated perfectly in those slides, where you have, for example, people got in boats, and people fell asleep in boats, and people got scared in storms in boats.

01:31:53

Well, yeah, that happened. Does that demonstrate a parallel?

01:32:00

I mean, if you go on the internet today, you'll find all sorts of people who will tell their stories about the last cruise they went on.

01:32:08

And guess what? There will be all sorts of absolutely identical language. There will be stuff like, oh, the food was great.

01:32:16

There will be stuff like, oh, the food was horrible. They must have been on the same cruise, right? No. Obviously not.

01:32:22

Oh, the ship rocked so much I got sick. Well, that's a common one. Does that mean they're all the same ship? No. This kind of parallelomania is utterly invalid from any logical or rational perspective.

01:32:35

The question you have to ask yourself, given the nature of the Gospels, and the context in which they were written, what is the background and source of the stories of Jesus?

01:32:47

Is it not Second Temple Judaism, Tannic Judaism, the Judaism of the Second Temple? Is it not the

01:32:53

Greek Septuagint? Is it not the prophecies of the Old Testament itself?

01:33:00

Is that not more than sufficient? Is that not what the sources themselves say? Then from whence comes this desire to come up with something else?

01:33:11

Especially since, as Dr. Nash has argued as far as critical scholarship is concerned, this parallelomania was put to bed 50 years ago.

01:33:24

It has been resurrected primarily through the Internet. Folks, the

01:33:29

Internet's a wonderful thing. I spend too much time on it myself. But when it comes to sober scholarship, it's not our best source.

01:33:39

And when I look at movies like the Zeitgeist movie, is that really a sober -sound source of information?

01:33:48

Or might somebody have somewhat of an astrographic

01:33:54

I think they have an astrographic. The New Testament documents do not present themselves as historical fiction.

01:34:02

The only reason that I believe Mr. Barker views it that way is what he himself said in his fourth argument in his own book.

01:34:11

And that is, since these documents include the miraculous, they are ahistorical. Now, he's expanded on that.

01:34:18

They're ahistorical. Well, how is that being used by Mr.

01:34:23

Barker? Well, they don't have the same historical value as something that would be written by a good naturalistic materialist because they didn't mirror it.

01:34:34

So God is locked out of his creation and if he does anything that actually impacts history, that's not historical.

01:34:42

Do you see the presuppositional nature of that argumentation? That was my whole point. It creates a presupposition.

01:34:49

We all have our presuppositions, but the naturalistic materialist has his presuppositions and may be so thoroughly wedged in them that he does not even recognize them when they cause circular argumentation as they do in this situation.

01:35:03

The historical evidence is that the Christian message was derived from the first few decades of the first century, that its first adherents were

01:35:13

Jews, that they were not seeking to, they did not intend to, they were not utilizing any kind of pagan mythology as the foundation of their presentation of Jesus.

01:35:26

It would have gone against everything they believed. It would have gone against everything of the people that are seeking to convert and bring into the

01:35:33

Christian faith. And any kind of parallelism is either falsely constructed or is based upon the reality that religions talk about similar things.

01:35:46

It is not a parallel demonstrating dependence or influence when you talk about death and if something happens after death, and the purpose of life, and how we should live our lives here.

01:36:00

Every religion is going to address those things in a greater or lesser way. Some religions didn't care about moral or ethical issues and so they didn't talk much about stuff like that.

01:36:09

Some didn't care much about the afterlife. They might not talk about much. But they're going to talk about creation. They're going to talk about where we came from and what our purpose is.

01:36:17

But to assume, therefore, that there is any kind of dependence or that Mark is just sitting back and going look at Homer.

01:36:25

Let's see, Mark chapter 5. Let's mix in some Dionysus, a little Osiris, and I just gotta go back to Homer.

01:36:34

I just like Homer so much. That's the perspective that's being presented. And I go, what evidence do you have of this?

01:36:43

The parallels don't work because they involve taking this sentence here and I'm going to use this word and so I'm going to use this word over here and try to make a connection here.

01:36:50

Do you see the thing about Augustus? Soter is a Greek word. It has a meaning in political discourse that is somewhat different than that in theological discourse.

01:37:01

But by translating them the same way, you can create a connection that actually has no weight to it at all.

01:37:10

And so you as the audience have to judge what the motivations of the writers of the

01:37:16

Gospels, what sources do they use? Is it 1st century Judaism, the Old Testament that they cite constantly?

01:37:24

What is the evidence to the contrary, outside of mere assertions? That is the question we need to deal with here.

01:37:43

Thank you, Dr. White. Mr. Barker, you now have 10 more minutes for cross -examination. Well, let's finish where we left off.

01:37:53

You probably know that modern science is convinced that Homo sapiens sapiens, the human species, is a 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 -year -old.

01:38:06

You know that, right? Yes. And yet the first human being, according to you, was how many years ago?

01:38:14

Again, as I said in the previous cross -examination, I don't have a specific date. It's somewhere between 6 ,000 to 20 ,000 years.

01:38:21

And before Adam, were there humans? No, not that I know of. What were they?

01:38:28

Again, I didn't know we had changed subject to creationism and evolution. I'd be happy to engage on DNA evidence.

01:38:35

What does this have to do with... Was that a question? I'm asking you a question. I'm asking what this has to do with subject change.

01:38:43

Yes. I can demonstrate the relevance of it. Please do.

01:38:49

Please do. So, before... But you didn't answer the question.

01:38:55

What was here before Adam, any humans? I do not believe there was anything before Adam.

01:39:01

There wasn't. So you're on record here, saying that there was no human species or...

01:39:06

I believe that God created man, yes. About 20 ,000 years ago. So...

01:39:12

I've said the same thing so many times I'm becoming repetition. I'm not giving So the Egyptian civilizations and evidence from archaeology and paleoanthropology of human existence on this planet long preceded that by at least 100 ,000 years.

01:39:28

Let's be generous and say it's only 100 ,000 years. So Jesus came 2 ,000 years ago, the last what?

01:39:36

98 % of human history had all these myths and religions. My Native American tribe was on this continent long before Jesus or even

01:39:45

Judaism. We were at least 12 ,000 years ago, long before that. So, all these myths and all these ideas that this

01:39:51

God who cares so much about humanity finally decided that 2 ,000 years ago just a blink of an eye ago that human race was not important enough to send his son to die for.

01:40:02

Yeah, that's exactly the argument that of course was presented by Christopher Hitchens, which I've responded to many times.

01:40:07

And of course, the Christian message is that God created Adam and Eve upright and that he revealed himself to them and that they rebelled against that revelation that was given to them and that the purpose that God has had ever since then, not only was he forming his people but he was demonstrating his just righteousness in the fact that man loves his sin and continues in his rebellion.

01:40:30

It was not just 2 ,000 years ago that God decided to quote -unquote do something about it. As you know, the Christian message is that Jesus came at the exact time that God ordained that he would.

01:40:39

And so it was not just oh, I think I'll do something about it now. I wasn't caring about this beforehand. The Christian message is that God has cared from the beginning and that all of that prehistory before Christ was a part of what prepared the world for the ministry of Christ and the proclamation of the gospel.

01:40:54

So my ancestors who lived on this continent 12 ,000 years ago, all of them are in hell. They were sinners.

01:41:00

Any person who rebels against not only the revealable of God but the revelation that God places within their own hearts.

01:41:08

I don't care which ancestor you have. If you strapped an MP3 tape recorder to them and judge them solely by the judgments they made of others every single one of them would be found guilty.

01:41:17

Not one of them even heard of Jesus. Not one of them had a chance. That doesn't have anything to do with what I just said. So you can be saved without knowing about Jesus.

01:41:24

Where did I say anything close to that? Well then are my ancestors all in hell? Yes or no? If they died as sinners outside of faith in God, yes.

01:41:31

So some of them could be in heaven? If God revealed himself to them, how would he do that?

01:41:37

Well, I thought it was 2 ,000 years ago. He took Philip up and transported him to proclaim to him the gospel.

01:41:46

There were all sorts of things in the Old Testament where God revealed himself. How did Melchizedek know there was one true

01:41:51

God? We're not told. But he did know there was one true God and he worshipped that one true God. But outside of faith in that one true

01:41:58

God, no person could ever get his assistance. Joseph Smith told a story about the names of Moroni and Golgotha and all that.

01:42:08

Do you believe that story? No, I've examined the Book of Mormon very, very carefully. Not only archaeologically, but internally

01:42:13

I've discovered that not only has it been changed thousands of times in the original readings, which changes its message.

01:42:19

Archaeologically, it is completely fraudulent. In fact, it is based, as a number of Mormon scholars have recognized, on books like The View of the

01:42:28

Hebrews that were published prior to the writing of the Book of Mormon. I agree with you, by the way. Did Joseph Smith say that he was writing historical fiction when he wrote it?

01:42:37

No, Joseph Smith actually claimed that he was using the seer stone which he placed in his hat and covered his face in his hat and would then read the things out to one of his scribes.

01:42:49

So he was claiming to utilize a form of basically magical divination.

01:42:54

I know, that's stupid. That's how some of us feel about the magic stories in the

01:43:00

Bible. But my point is that you said the New Testament writers did not make the claim that they were writing historical fiction.

01:43:06

They were claiming they were writing something actually true. Didn't Joseph Smith make the claim that what he was writing was actually true?

01:43:12

Well, let me respond first to the gratuitous comment that you made. There is a fundamental foundational difference between what you call magical stories in the

01:43:21

New Testament and the use of seer stones that Joseph Smith had dug up and used to search for buried treasures.

01:43:26

So that is a disapplication of that. Mormonism is the first religion that I engaged in. I've been debating it with other scholars for a long time.

01:43:33

That's not a fundamental difference, by the way. That's not a fundamental difference. It is a foundational difference. If you can't tell the difference between magic as he was practicing it and in fact was brought before a magistrate for doing treasure seeking with that and what

01:43:50

Jesus does, then again, we're not on the same page. Jesus spit in the earth and got a lump of mud and he stuck it in somebody's eye.

01:43:55

Here's mud in your eye. That's just as magic. I'm just trying to clarify your point.

01:44:02

No, you're not. You're rebutting my point in opposition to the rules we discussed before. Yes or no, did

01:44:07

Joseph Smith claim that he was writing historical fiction or did he believe he was writing the truth? Actually, he claimed to be translating ancient records so it's none of the above.

01:44:15

Did he think he was lying to the people? I don't have any idea what Joseph Smith thought.

01:44:20

Okay, well we do know that human beings have a tendency to create stories that they want to pass on as truth that they're in no way going to claim that they're writing historical fiction, right?

01:44:30

We know that human beings have that tendency. It's happened in ancient mythology. It's happened in other religions. It happens today, right?

01:44:36

So what makes the first century goth poetic exempt from that proclivity? Well, as I pointed out very clearly, their very own words demonstrate.

01:44:46

Luke said, I have investigated this carefully so that you may know the exact truth of what you're being told.

01:44:52

Well, how so, Joseph Smith? That's not a question, sir. You're breaking your rules right and left.

01:44:57

I'm glad to break this rule. Okay, well, I guess the issue is real. But that is the resource that you have to go to.

01:45:06

The reality is that these texts are fundamentally foundationally different than that produced by Joseph Smith when he claims he's translating ancient

01:45:14

Egyptian hieroglyphics. That's not what Luke says. Luke says, I interviewed people.

01:45:20

Luke says, I examined these things. Joseph Smith says, I put a magic rock in a hat and I translated golden plates the ancient

01:45:26

Rome showed me on September 21st. There is a fundamental difference between the two. I can't make you accept that, but I think the audience sees the difference.

01:45:34

Luke said that he examined previous writings. Yes, he did. Which were possibly attempts to write gospels or something.

01:45:41

It's possible. So where are those sources? Why doesn't he tell us those sources? Where are those original, earlier sources?

01:45:48

Most folks would say that probably has to do with the gospel of Mark. But he does not say specifically writings.

01:45:54

He says others have taken to compiled account. That might be a written format. In most probability,

01:46:01

I believe Luke acts was a brief report. It was Luke's submission at Paul's trial before Caesar to demonstrate that the

01:46:11

Christians were not a threat to Caesar's rule. And if that's the case, then

01:46:17

Luke acts would be written in the beginning of the 7th decade around 60, 61, 62, somewhere around in the very same time period.

01:46:25

Right before Nero then began taking these Christians and tying them to stakes and using them to the like of gardeners.

01:46:32

That would make it very, very early and within the lifetimes of those who were in fact eyewitnesses. You asked me for proof of a connection between pre -existing mythological stories and the gospel stories.

01:46:46

And yet, I think you agree with me that history has to deal only in probabilities. Tell me what you would accept as proof.

01:46:53

Do you have proof that my Three Little Donkeys was based on the Three Little Pigs? Don't historians have to look and compare and do analysis?

01:47:02

Tell me what you would accept as a proof. And by the way, Homer's McDonald's book was not an internet thing.

01:47:08

This is a careful scholarly research. Look it up. I encourage you as James did to read this as well.

01:47:14

It's fascinating. Yeah, check the translations. You'll discover that it is mostly authentic. Have you read his book?

01:47:20

Yes, I have had it for years. Okay, well, he gives translations. He gives a report. Exactly. I can read the

01:47:25

Greek that he's translating and I see the budging in the use of the text. My point though is to ask you, what would you accept as proof?

01:47:35

If you're asking me to prove then tell me if I have proof. What would you accept as proof? Your question is precisely representing what

01:47:41

I even asked you. I said if you're going to say that these authors utilized these sources to give us proof that they even had access to that any of these religions were even prevalent in that particular context.

01:47:53

And so the question is based upon the false foundation. What would I accept as proof?

01:47:59

For what? For direct plagiarism of some of these things? Something more than biased translations that ignore the foundational differences between the two doctrines.

01:48:09

Thank you both. We will now take another brief five -minute break. We will continue at this point.

01:48:18

Dr. White, you have ten minutes for cross -examination with Mr. Burke. Thank you,

01:48:25

Ken. A few questions here. I'm somewhat hesitant to ask given the source, but Dan, on page 271, and you've said this a couple times in the debate, so maybe this is what you mean.

01:48:43

Maybe you'll clarify. I don't know. You said the phrases word of God and lamb of God are probably connected due to a misunderstanding of words that are similar in different languages.

01:48:52

The Greek word logos, which means word, was used originally by the Gnostics and is translated as emera in Hebrew.

01:49:00

The word emera in Aramaic means lamb, and it's easy to see how some Jews living at the intersection of so many cultures and languages can be confused and influenced by so many competing religious ideas.

01:49:10

That last concept is something you've brought up at least two or three times so far. I'm very confused, however, as to what your point here was.

01:49:18

Were you saying that the Jews were dependent upon the Gnostics for the concept of the logos, and that they didn't know the difference between word and lamb in their own language?

01:49:32

What was your point there? Who was the scholar I quoted? You didn't have to quote anyone.

01:49:38

You had just finished your citation of Barber Walker, and there is no citation whatsoever.

01:49:45

Well, the New Testament was written in Greek, which was not the language that people were speaking, so the Greek logos would be the word word, basically.

01:49:54

And regardless of the fact that word logos had a Gnostic history to it, you know,

01:50:02

Alexander and all those people, and all those Gnostics were using it. The point was very simple. When you have a mixture of people and cultures in an area, and that part of the world really was a mixture.

01:50:13

They were not isolated. Jerusalem was kind of off to the side, but up in Galilee it's basically different languages, different people,

01:50:20

Semitic languages that are similar to each other. The word emera in Hebrew, which means word, is one word for word, and then this other word for sheep or lamb, which is very similar.

01:50:32

You can see how there would be a confusion. Oh, what did you say he was? He was the Lamb of God or the

01:50:38

Word of God. So you can see a connection there. I don't think that's a you know, you can't prove anything with history, but you can give examples that show a probability to some level that, or at least the opportunity for confusion among words that look and sound the same.

01:50:56

Except the word of God will attest to the divar, so they misunderstand the divar versus emera.

01:51:05

In fact, it's a different word for sheep in Hebrew, so you're combining two different languages and not using the standard term, but that would confuse them, so they didn't know the difference between lamb and word.

01:51:17

Yeah, because somebody in Aramaic or another language would translate from Hebrew into their language and they would use the word that sounds like sheep, and then when it came back again to Christians or to others who were looking at that, you can see the potential for misunderstanding.

01:51:35

You said there that the Gnostics were the first ones that they used, originally used by the Gnostics. How far back do you think the

01:51:41

Gnostics go? What did I say? The Greek word logos, which means word, was used originally by the

01:51:46

Gnostics. It is translated as emera in Hebrew. It's actually translated by divar. And the

01:51:52

Gnostics come after Christianity, and Philo came after, well, say the century is

01:51:57

Christianity, so I was completely lost as to what the point was, because historically none of those things are true.

01:52:03

Well, in any event, that word logos was used by Gnostics and others. John started his gospel with that phrase, logos, the word

01:52:11

God. And in our key, you know, logos, the beginning, the beginning was the word.

01:52:17

So it's showing that there is this salad, this mixture of things.

01:52:24

Some scholars put Gnosticism way, way, way early, way in the early part of the first century. In fact, who were the guys who wrote the

01:52:31

Jesus Mysteries? Not that that's a great book. I don't think that's a great book, all right? Gany and Freak. Yeah, exactly.

01:52:36

And Bajor. Yeah, who claimed that, in fact, the very first Christian church was a

01:52:43

Gnostic church. Now, I don't know all the basis of that, but we do know that scholars and experts are disagreeing with each other about these things.

01:52:50

So, unlike what you say, demanding 100 % certainty of proof or things, what we can do is throw out enough evidence to show that, hey, look, just like today, people confuse and get mixed up and they create new ideas and ideas are swapping around and there's misunderstandings.

01:53:05

Like in that movie, The Life of Brian. Did he say less about the cheese makers?

01:53:11

You know, things like that happen, especially within a mixture of languages. So, what happens in Monty Python actually happens in history.

01:53:20

You just couldn't understand the difference between sheep and worms. But you understand the difference between history and a joke.

01:53:25

Well, yeah. I do. So, when these, you say all these scholars disagree.

01:53:39

So, as long as someone puts out a book, like Barbara Walker puts out a book, then scholars disagree? Or do you recognize that there are people who put out books that really don't have any historical value, whatsoever, but are, in fact, simply promoting a unique idiosyncratic perspective?

01:53:55

That does happen, and it happens with Christians. It happens with, you know, everybody. In fact, before tonight's, before today's debate,

01:54:03

I was careful to check with people like Richard Carrier about some of these sources and Richard Carrier cautioned me, don't use that source.

01:54:11

You can use freaky and candy, but be careful. And there are scholars who know, true scholars who know, that some of these probabilities are higher than others.

01:54:21

We don't have actual facts, right? So, you didn't talk to him two years ago? Because your longest discussion of this in the book, which is why it was completely fair to represent, was the citation of the

01:54:33

Bible. Yeah, since that time, I have lowered my confidence, as I've put it before, in Barbara Walker's primary scholarship.

01:54:43

So, are you going to redo this section? I probably will, yeah. And honestly, I think anybody who hasn't approved it, in fact,

01:54:50

I found some other mistakes in my book, I didn't bring them up. Because when you're proofreading, sometimes that happens.

01:54:57

So, there are questions that have to be made, and that's why there are second editions. When you said that you did interact with the information about Quirinius, did you interact with Harold Homer's work on Quirinius?

01:55:09

Or maybe Daryl Bach's extensive excursus in his two -volume commentary on Luke that goes into the history of Quirinius?

01:55:17

Because I did not see any of that in the book. No, that was just a side point in the book. Because my book is not a scholarly book.

01:55:24

It's my personal testimony. And some of the reasons, I admitted at the outset that I'm not an expert in ancient mythology, but I am handing, like a lot of us do in our popular writing, handing what we consider, at the time, to be some resources for our writings.

01:55:39

But you are going to college campuses and telling young people that these are valid reasons to reject the Christian faith.

01:55:45

I am going on college campuses and telling college students that here is some evidence that you can add to the mix that might lower the probability that the

01:55:53

Christian faith is actually true. I'm not out there giving 100 % proof. There is no such a concept.

01:55:58

The thing is this 100 % proof that you seem to be asking for. But when we throw all these things into the mix, some of them are stronger than others, some of them we have to be careful about, some of them need to be checked.

01:56:08

Good scholars, as you know, are often changing their positions in later books.

01:56:14

And I'm sure we do the same thing as you learn things. So, when you say

01:56:20

I am now convinced that the Jesus story is a combination of myth and legend, is that an 80 % convinced or a 90 % convinced?

01:56:29

How do we understand we're convinced? Well, it's more than 50 at least. We wouldn't have the probability rounding off, right?

01:56:36

It's more than 50. And I think, just in my own armchair analysis, it's probably a 90 % convinced, which is pretty high.

01:56:44

And when you look at it the other way, a lot of Christians who don't deal with probabilities, they're dealing with what they think are fact.

01:56:50

They take any probability and say, aha, I can round it to one. Most scholars are careful enough to hedge their bets, because Jesus may have existed.

01:56:59

And I admit it. Atheists and agnostics disagree on that. Mark may have believed in an actual historical

01:57:06

Jesus. He may not have. But in any event, when you take a cumulative case of all these issues, some stronger than others, some with a higher probability than others, and you put them all together, in my mind, it is more reasonable not to believe in a historical

01:57:20

Jesus than it is to believe in it. So, when you put together 20 different cases, each of which contradicts the other, that increases the probability that Jesus didn't exist when they contradict each other.

01:57:33

Yeah, because the one that you add that he did exist is even a smaller percentage, you see?

01:57:40

But I'm not arguing that they all have to be true. Put them all on the same level, even though they all contradict each other. Well, I'm not arguing that they all have to be true.

01:57:46

What I'm saying is, as long as there do exist viable, naturalistic explanations to some level of probability or other, as long as those have not been ruled out conclusively, then it is irresponsible to judge in the conclusion of the historicity of Jesus, which is just one of many hypotheses.

01:58:03

It's more reasonable, at least to be agnostic about it, and in my case, I think it's higher than 50 % that Jesus did not exist.

01:58:10

But you're welcome to try to prove me wrong if you demanded yourself the same level of proof that you demanded me.

01:58:27

Mr. Barker, do you know how...

01:58:32

Well, this is perfect, because I went for my closing statement here. It seems to me that James has raised the bar of proof to an impossible level.

01:58:43

He demands that we skeptics have to prove and connect the dots exact, that Mark actually was reading

01:58:49

Homer, and he said, aha, he's demanding that level of proof from us. You'll never get it.

01:58:55

In history, you will never, ever get anything near that level of proof. Even with Abraham Lincoln, we don't have 100%.

01:59:01

We have a very high level of proof, but with Abraham Lincoln, we have many multiple sources of actual documents and letters he wrote and that.

01:59:08

But no historian would say Abraham Lincoln existed with 100 % proof. We would say it's a 99 .98

01:59:15

% probability. It doesn't go with that. In fact, all sciences are like that. So I think James wants to have his cake and eat it, too.

01:59:22

When it comes to examining the truth values of Christianity, he rounds it off. He takes the gospel writers as if, well, let's take them at their word.

01:59:31

He doesn't do that with Joseph Smith, but he does that with Luke. Why? Because he's a

01:59:37

Christian, and he likes the message of the gospel. So let's round off Luke and say, see, Luke was an honest historian.

01:59:43

He had no reason to admit that he was writing or fudging history. He didn't quote, of course, those earlier compilations that he was referring to.

01:59:54

His whole double standard here is not fair for a debate.

02:00:00

If we skeptics have to be dismissed because we can't prove anything, then we're all dismissed. Christianity cannot prove a thing.

02:00:10

Look at this. This is the church. This is the steeple. Open the door, and...

02:00:17

Okay, so what's wrong with that picture? That's, of course, not approved. What is it?

02:00:23

Did you see the paganism in that? The steeple. The steeple is not a Christian symbol.

02:00:29

The steeple comes from pagan ideas. The Egyptian obelisks and others reaching up to God.

02:00:36

Humans reaching up to God. And, in fact, some of those steeples and spires were phallic symbols, to pierce the heavens so that it would rain to impregnate the earth.

02:00:44

There's no steeple in the New Testament. And I think James would even agree. Steeples are not necessary for Christianity.

02:00:50

I think he would support me on that. It's just a later thing that happened. It was sort of a custom. And yet a steeple on a church building is a pagan symbol.

02:00:59

I'm pretty sure James agrees with me that later Christianity, at least from Constantine on, was in the habit of borrowing from paganism.

02:01:07

The whole idea of the clergy. The whole idea of his clerical vestments. The whole idea that we should wear a coat and tie when we're in the house of God.

02:01:13

All these things that come back. I just read George Barnard Franciola's book,

02:01:19

Pagan Christianity. These are devout Christians. George Barnard is a I guess evangelical.

02:01:26

I disagree with his theology, but I respect his honesty. Showing how at least the modern church, much of what we do when we do church, comes from paganism.

02:01:35

A lot of the stuff that early Christian church existed didn't have any of this stuff. So at least we have to admit that Christianity at some level has borrowed from paganism in many different ways.

02:01:47

And my question then is what makes the first century believers exempt from that proclivity to borrow, right?

02:01:54

Were they somehow a new breed of people who had no faults? Were they somehow suddenly just out of nowhere suddenly they just got the truth in a vacuum?

02:02:04

Is it imaginable that they did not know any of the Greek or Egyptian or Canaanite or Mesopotamian or Persian ideas that were floating around at the time?

02:02:13

Is that impossible? Of course not. Especially the ones who were educated enough to write books like Luke, especially like Mark the first gospel.

02:02:21

Mark was written earliest as you all know and Matthew and Luke patterned to a large degree their gospels upon Mark.

02:02:28

I agree with you about Dan Brown. I do remember reading in the preface or the front page that he admitted to certain facts but he said the rest of it is fictional.

02:02:39

I guess you go back and read the book. It was a good read but really it was a bad. In fact, this whole thing about Jehovah I thought was laughable.

02:02:45

Did you read that thing about how the word Jehovah came from... Jehovah is not even a word in the Bible. It's just a mistake because it misplaced vowels that were put in the consonants between Java.

02:02:55

There was a lot more I could have said. I could have given more examples and as further you go in MacDonald's book on the parallels in the storytelling they're not exact and MacDonald admits that some of these are stronger than others and some of these are weaker than others just like my

02:03:10

Three Little Donkeys story isn't an exact parallel but you see it or Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story.

02:03:17

I could have talked about this ISIS cult a direct first person account of an initiation in an

02:03:24

ISIS cult in which the congregant undergoes a simulated death and resurrection involving baptism by water and he calls this race, he calls it being born again which grants eternal salvation and this was an emulation not a copy of Osiris who definitely was an incarnated

02:03:40

God he judges the dead and so on. We can find all sorts of these parallels floating around at the time.

02:03:47

Christianity may have had a unique story the flying spaghetti monster has a unique story

02:03:55

Christians might think it's so special that somebody died for our sins. By the way that word sotir is important modern

02:04:01

Greeks say sotir but the scholars say soter the savior because when

02:04:07

Mark wrote his gospel he said this is the beginning of the gospel just like with Augustus this is the beginning of the gospel of Augustus who was a savior savior can mean many different things it can be an earthly savior like Cyrus was called the messiah because he was an earthly savior of the

02:04:23

Jews who were looking for an earthly kingdom. In any event to see that same word used in a different context admittedly it's a different context but you still see the same wording and the same phraseology

02:04:34

I think that is a very strong clue. It's not a direct proof that connects the dots but I think

02:04:40

James is right to so quickly dismiss all of these amazing parallels that we see we know there were many pre -Christian

02:04:51

Christ figures and by the way Christ is not a name and even in the 2nd century references to Christ they don't refer to Jesus.

02:04:57

Teutonius didn't refer to Jesus. Tacitus did not refer to Jesus a lot of these later supposed evidence for Christianity don't name

02:05:05

Jesus, they name this Christ figure and there may have been Christians in Rome but that doesn't mean they were followers of Jesus there were other people who were

02:05:12

Christ followers there were other self -proclaimed Jewish messiahs who were the anointed ones, the

02:05:18

Christ so the mere mention of a Christ isn't necessarily a mention of a historical Jesus we know there were virgin births or divine births.

02:05:26

We know there were births that were prophesied before then. We know there were miracles and healings and exorcisms done by people before the

02:05:32

Christian story. We know that there's three stories at least of Dionysus changing water into wine.

02:05:38

In one case it was a spring of water that suddenly changed into a spring of wine many of them were put to death and came back to life.

02:05:46

Many of these people were called sons of God. Many of them were called the associate of the savior. Some of them brought peace on earth.

02:05:52

What does the Pax Romana? It's a peace on earth but of course you know it's a military peace and even in the Bible the word peace in the

02:05:59

Old Testament was a subjugating kind of peace. There will be peace when all my enemies are either killed or turned into slaves that's the kind of peace they're talking about.

02:06:06

So there's little doubt in my mind, although I can't give you a 100 % probability on it and nobody can and no

02:06:14

Christian can give you a 100 % historical probability of the truth of Christianity there's little doubt in my mind that Christians today are worshipping a pagan god.

02:06:26

And there's nothing wrong with pagan the word pagan is just you know the pre -existing myths in that.

02:06:33

There's no doubt in my mind what Christians think is so special, well it has some specialness. West side story is special.

02:06:39

Nobody thinks that Juliet broke into I feel pretty, I feel pretty back in Shakespeare.

02:06:44

Nobody thinks that actually happened because it's a modernization of Shakespeare's work and so there are some stories about Jesus that wow they're special, they're different, isn't that amazing?

02:06:53

But all religions can say that. We skeptics, we humanists, we atheists, we agnostics, we agree with you believers.

02:07:03

We reject the truth of Osiris. We don't believe that Augustus was born of a virgin.

02:07:10

We don't think that Romulus was prophesied to create a kingdom on earth. We reject all those things.

02:07:15

We think those are exaggerations and wishful story writing by the people who wanted to elevate their particular point of view.

02:07:21

We reject all these gods, the Dionysuses and the Attuses and the Tomuses and you name them.

02:07:28

The Ahriman devil fighting against the Ahura Mazda Zoroastrians which inspired the

02:07:33

Jews to have this sacred figure, which by the way he didn't comment on that tonight. We reject all those gods, all those beliefs, just as you do.

02:07:44

You all agree with us. You're skeptical too, aren't you? You're skeptical that those were actually true stories.

02:07:49

The difference between you and me is that I believe in one less god than you do.

02:07:56

You know, for Christianity it smells fishy. It smells funny to me.

02:08:02

It looks like it was cut from the same fabric. It has its differences but in my mind there is little doubt that Christianity was cut or emulated basically from previous ancient mythology.

02:08:29

Dr. White, you now have 10 minutes for your closing remarks. There is a fundamental difference between the

02:08:37

Christian who believes in a greater god that gives to us meaning and purpose that makes us in his image and the idea that, well, we just believe in one less god than you do.

02:08:49

While Dan has used that argument many, many times, I likewise have demonstrated the fact that on a philosophical and truthful level it is a very bad argument.

02:08:58

It's not a matter of just believing in one less god. It is believing in a universe that has no design and no direction and ultimately resulting, as we noted in our last debate, that we are all nothing more than cosmic broccoli.

02:09:13

So that last argument I think really needs to be put to rest. We are told that Christians today are worshipping a pagan god.

02:09:21

Monotheists. Parastro -ex nihilo. Creation out of nothing and into nothing. No cyclical vegetative cycle.

02:09:29

That's a pagan god. Oh no, I just developed into that. What has been the evidence that has been given to us?

02:09:35

We've had a lot of assertions but what has been the evidence that has been given to us? We're told that I'm demanding too high a level of proof.

02:09:42

So when someone takes the affirmative in a debate and says that Jesus was a myth and I ask okay, you're saying that these writers were using these sources.

02:09:53

Could you at least demonstrate that those sources have some consistency to what the writer is attempting to accomplish?

02:10:00

I mean he's trying to get monotheistic Jews to believe in this Jesus and so you're telling me that he's using pagan stories to do that.

02:10:07

I find that absurd. Why is that not absurd? Is that too high a level of proof to ask?

02:10:16

When people draw the Mithra example shouldn't you be able to prove that Mithraism was known in Israel at that time?

02:10:24

Osiris, Isis was just presented to us. The very religion that the Jews hated the most of all the

02:10:29

Egyptian religions. Oh, they would use those as the parallels to draw these things in to bring you in. I'm sorry, that's not history and that's not rational thought.

02:10:38

There's a prejudice involved here, a deep prejudice involved here. Who has the prejudice? He accuses me of using double standards about Joseph Smith.

02:10:48

I have studied Joseph Smith's writings in depth and you cannot look at Luke and find the book of Abraham.

02:11:00

The book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price that Joseph Smith claimed was actually written by the hand of Abraham himself upon a pirate.

02:11:07

It is actually from the Egyptian book of the dead. The pirate was found.

02:11:12

We've translated it. We know what they are. He never got a word right. Well, he did translate the word the in about 43 different English words and the was in there.

02:11:19

So I guess he didn't give them that much proof. But we have examined the evidence and Joseph Smith was not a prophet.

02:11:26

He claimed to be translating these things. He had the gift and power of God. He could not do so. There is no parallel to Luke.

02:11:33

Luke is not writing historical fiction. It wasn't even a genre he would have been familiar with. His own words tell us what he's doing and then if you seriously examine his own works you'll find that Luke is an incredible historian.

02:11:48

People wondered for many, many years, why does Luke keep using different Greek words for rulers and even lower level people in government as he narrates

02:11:58

Paul's movement through Asia Minor. We now have found out why.

02:12:04

Every place we can test, we can find archaeological evidence, inscriptions, manuscripts or whatever,

02:12:10

Luke was exactly right in knowing that in one area for example in Phoenix we have a sheriff.

02:12:19

It is Arizona after all. There are a lot of places that don't have sheriffs. They only have police officers, things like that.

02:12:25

Luke would have said the sheriff. He knew what those areas were. We can't do that with the

02:12:30

Book of Mormon because we've never found the Zarahemla. It didn't exist. Double standards?

02:12:36

No. One of us has studied Mormonism in depth and is being consistent in the application of the scholarly examples that we apply.

02:12:46

So we just had presented to us Barton's book, by the way I'd just like to refer a quote to you, I just want to review for the

02:12:52

CRI Journal, called Why We Love the Church. It has a nice little chapter reviewing that particular book.

02:12:57

Much more balanced and much more fair. I would recommend it's reading to you. I don't have it up here to show to you.

02:13:04

We're told that these writers are borrowing all this stuff and yet what is the most probable?

02:13:11

They quote from the Greek Septuagint. They know about the traditions of the elders. They're speaking to Jews.

02:13:17

They're presenting a monotheistic religion that rejects paganism. The pagans allow for all sorts of multiple beliefs.

02:13:24

You can believe in this god or that god if it's okay with them. They're trying to reach these people who hate that paganism but they're going to draw the very essence of their stories from that which is detestable to the people they're trying to reach.

02:13:38

That's what we've been asking today. And I've been told that I've been asking for too high a level of evidence to ask for some proof of this.

02:13:45

I think it's very, very clear what the problem is here. We heard about the flying spaghetti monster.

02:13:52

I would like to suggest to you that anyone with parrot stockings at that point, and that's all you're doing, in using this phraseology lacks any serious attitude toward the actual discussion of the existence of God.

02:14:03

If you cannot or are unwilling, morally unwilling, to recognize the vast difference between a presentation of the concept of an almighty being who is not dependent upon his creation, who is eternal and without time, is the source of all things, including the source of ethics and morality as the debate later on will focus upon, sure.

02:14:28

If you can't see a difference between that and the historical evidence of that being and what he's done in history and the flying spaghetti monster, then you have not yet even begun to engage the debate.

02:14:40

And I would highly suggest that you might want to do so simply on a matter of being truthful. If you claim to be rationalist, then think reasonably.

02:14:48

The use of that, Richard Dawkins, is rarely rational when it comes to being fair in regards to the

02:14:54

Christian faith. We are told there may have been Christians in Rome who were not followers of Jesus.

02:15:00

I want you to think about that one for just a moment. What does that require you to do?

02:15:06

That some of these previous, quote unquote, messiahs in Israel had developed such a following that those followers had gone to Rome and that that then becomes the source of this

02:15:23

Christ figure. And that in the midst of you having in the text of the

02:15:29

New Testament letters clearly demonstrating they're written in the fourth and fifth decades, including going to Rome, that talk about Jesus.

02:15:40

So you have, I mean, critical scholarship recognizes Paul existed. They recognized he believed in this

02:15:46

Jesus person. He wrote to the church in Rome at that very same time. You have that level of documentation and yet we just heard it said, well, there might have been

02:15:55

Christians in Rome, but we don't really believe in Jesus. Where is the historical soundness of that kind of argumentation?

02:16:05

I would never use that kind of argumentation against someone's position. Why is it being used now?

02:16:11

Think about this. You are the judges of this way. There's no one sitting here who's going to render judgment.

02:16:17

Only you. Is that a sound argument? We just heard

02:16:23

Daniel equivocate. Oh, there are lots of virgin births or divine births.

02:16:29

That's not the same thing. And a God in a physical body having union with a woman is not a virgin birth.

02:16:41

What were the purposes of these virgin births? In every single instance, it was the male God getting his gratification.

02:16:50

That was not the purpose of the virgin birth. That was not the application of the virgin birth.

02:16:56

There is no logical, no reasonable person who understands the

02:17:02

Christian message from the very beginning and understands the biblical nature of the Christian message. Whatever look at this other thing, oh, look at that!

02:17:07

Parallel! That requires you to completely ignore the context of each.

02:17:15

The fundamental differences in world view of theology and purpose between them.

02:17:23

Once you start doing that, all bets are off. You can find a parallel name. You can find a parallel name.

02:17:29

And that's what we just heard. Is that despite pointing this out, much of what

02:17:35

Dan just finished doing was giving us further examples of parallelomania. Isis, Osiris, totally different than God in the

02:17:44

Old Testament, detested by the Jews, but hey, maybe they drew from history. Parallelomania, it's not how you do history.

02:17:54

The message of Jesus was a message that the authors of those books were willing to die for.

02:18:02

You don't die for a swordfish. They believed what they said. The sources that they drew from?

02:18:10

Luke told us. I interviewed people. I checked it out. What do they most often go from?

02:18:16

The Old Testament. That is the source of the story of Jesus. That's why he remains unique to this day.

02:18:24

Thank you for a brief break to just prepare for the question and answer.

02:18:42

Thank you for all the questions and answers that we've received. We're going to start with a question from Mr.

02:18:49

Barker since Mr. White closed first. First question for you,

02:18:56

Mr. Barker, is this. Collectively, we have hundreds of flood myths from different people groups from all over the world.

02:19:04

Using your logic, what is the probability the flood of Noah actually happened?

02:19:13

If the flood of Noah was worldwide, the probability is 0 .00001

02:19:21

that that flood actually happened. If the flood of Noah is an exaggeration of the local flood, which did happen all over the world in many cases, and there are even flood myths within my

02:19:33

Native American ancestry, and of course that was their whole world. When my granddad was a little boy working in the

02:19:39

Oklahoma Indian Territory, he called that the country. That was the whole world. So a localized flood to a lot of these people was a worldwide flood.

02:19:47

It was their world being flooded, right? So, the fact that there are so many similar and even previous to the

02:19:57

Old Testament, the Gilgamesh epic and all those things, flood myths around the world, doesn't prove the truth of the

02:20:05

Noah story. What it proves is the ubiquity of floods around our planet. Thank you.

02:20:12

Dr. Wright, do you have seconds to respond to that? Well, I found it interesting that if you would refer to the

02:20:19

American Indian recollection of this, that that would be just of a local flood in a particular area.

02:20:25

I think the point of the question was that there is a collective memory of a cataclysmic event, and I think the argument of the question was, and the question is people may have arguments, is that if it is a matter of taking all these things together, that if you're going to be consistent that you would have to say, well, something definitely happened back then.

02:20:43

It wasn't just simply in one area. It impacted pretty much all of ancient history at that particular point in time.

02:20:51

From a Christian perspective, you can look into the Gilgamesh and things like that, and you can see that as an echo of what is provided in the inspired scripture as to the actual narrative of the events that took place.

02:21:04

Thank you. To Mr. White. Dr. White, I apologize. Is it your position that the willingness to die for a belief lends a specific validity to that belief?

02:21:16

When the issue which we were discussing was the concept of historical fiction, yes. I think if someone walked up to Dan Brown and put a gun to his head and said,

02:21:25

Dan Brown, admit that what you wrote in the Da Vinci Code was a bunch of fiction, and that it is not in fact truthful,

02:21:32

Dan Brown's going to say, are you kidding? Of course. As is Mitchener or anybody else.

02:21:38

The point is that the idea of the Gospels being this kind of historical fiction does not fit the texts themselves.

02:21:48

It does not fit the authors. It does not fit the text that we have and possess today. It does not fit the context in which they were written.

02:21:55

It does not fit the purposes for which they were written. And so in that specific context, a willingness, an unwillingness to say, this is fiction.

02:22:07

I'm lying to you. I'm drawing from all these different religious sources. I know more about world religions than people in the

02:22:16

West do in the modern times after graduating from college. Even though I'm a fisherman in Galilee.

02:22:22

I know all this stuff and I'm drawing from all this stuff and I'm going to go to my death saying what I said was true.

02:22:29

Yeah, I think in that context, it's very relevant. It's not a matter of making it truthful.

02:22:35

It's a matter of demonstrating that the authors themselves did not view their works the way they're being presented today.

02:22:40

We don't know who the author of Mark was. We don't know how that author died. We have some second century stories of how some of the later followers of Christianity died, not corroborated by history.

02:22:56

One of the strongest testaments, I think, to the willingness of somebody to die for a belief that they think is true even if the original authors didn't is 9 -11.

02:23:07

They were willing to put their lives on the line. They probably were smiling and singing to Allah when they did this good deed.

02:23:15

They gave their lives willingly for the goodness of their God. That's crazy. We all think that is nuts. We all think that is dangerous.

02:23:21

You can't use martyrdom as a proof of the validity of the intentions of the minds of the authors of the original documents.

02:23:29

Now, you tell me how Mark died or even who he was and how we know that with any level of probability at all.

02:23:36

So, martyrdom is a proof of faith and devotion, but it's not a historical proof of the fact of the document upon which that faith is based.

02:23:47

Thank you, Mr. Barker. Question for you.

02:23:55

Richard Dawkins purports that an improbable chain of events led to the creation of life.

02:24:03

Based on your comments today on the science of history, if history is based on an examination of probabilities, then can the improbability of life or the universe point to the existence of God?

02:24:16

It could, you know, if there's a God. But I think that misconstrues Dawkins. I think when you look at the improbability of anything happening at one step, it's extremely tiny.

02:24:28

Dawkins is right. But if you add those up over a long, long, long period of time, you know, the evolution of the eye, for example, there was no point back then where they said, oh, look, a change happened.

02:24:40

Oh, look, there was no way you're going to notice a change happening in evolution. So over a very long period of time, these probabilities don't multiply, they add up.

02:24:49

If you multiply probabilities, of course, you're going to get less and less and less. So it's a misconstrual to think of probabilities in that term.

02:24:56

What's the probability that I pick the right number between 1 and 100?

02:25:01

Pretty low, right? But what if I get a million chances? Pretty high. So probabilities can be extremely low, and yet with the repetition of over a long period of time, you can see that, in fact, it would be a true miracle if I did not pick the right number.

02:25:17

It would be a true miracle if these probabilities did not, over the past period of time, change and improve.

02:25:24

In fact, some evolution goes backwards. Some evolution goes to extinction. A lot of it is, 99 % of it is a failure.

02:25:30

Nobody's directing it. But for those of us who survive, we are the benefits of those laws of probability.

02:25:36

And I think it's because we don't have an intuitive concept in our own brains about the law of large numbers.

02:25:42

We evolve kind of with small, we can think in hundreds of thousands or so, but the large numbers to us don't seem intuitive, so it seems improbable.

02:25:50

When actually, Darwin shows it would be inclined to resolve the problem. Dr. Wright?

02:25:56

The problem is that the neodermal mutational evolutionary model that Richard Dawkins promotes has been severely undercut over the past 15 years, especially the genome project has demonstrated that it is not by one small change that change takes place.

02:26:15

In fact, for many things, you have entire gene complexes that have to change. We've discovered that, for example, you can have a change in a base pair that will not affect anything whatsoever.

02:26:26

Sometimes it'll take 10 or 15 changes to change a single gene action.

02:26:33

And so what you really have is a system that is moving forward on its own inertia at that time.

02:26:39

There is so much solid reason to reject what Richard Dawkins has to say.

02:26:44

I read his book Fresh Out of College and detected those things even then. It's amazing how long that kind of stuff keeps going on.

02:26:52

But we are talking about myths today. They take a while to die. Thank you, Dr. Wright.

02:27:01

Good to be here. Dr. Wright, why is it that naturalism is not a valid option interpreting history on whether or not the

02:27:11

Jesus story is cut from other ancient mythologies? What I said was that Mr. Barker, as a naturalist materialist, is very wedded to his worldview and that in the fourth argument that he presented on that page in Godless, that in essence it seemed to me that he was dismissing the

02:27:32

Christian sources as having historical value because of the element of supernaturalism that is in them.

02:27:38

He has attempted to clarify that, which I appreciate, but the fact remains that the vast majority of atheists, even though we possess a body of documents that we know come from the first century, that we know come from the very context in which

02:27:55

Christianity came, they are the last things that we look to for the answers as to what the origin and source of this entire story and this movement was.

02:28:03

And so it is very obvious that there is an overriding presuppositional worldview in operation here that says, this is the way things are.

02:28:12

Dan even said, well, do you know what makes any sense? Well, I would just invite you to, I believe we even have some of the

02:28:17

DVDs out there in the foyer, to watch the debate between Dan and I from the

02:28:25

University of Illinois and see for yourself, judge for yourself whether that actually is something that is consistent or not.

02:28:34

But it was an application specifically of the argument that was being made at that country. Thank you,

02:28:39

Dr. Martin. A metaphysical naturalism, whether I have it or not, or perhaps even just a methodological naturalism, is irrelevant to whether history itself is a valid tool for examining violations of natural regularity.

02:28:56

I was careful in my book to point out and to repeat today that if miracles happen, we can't rule them out.

02:29:02

Maybe there are some things we just don't yet understand, you know. Savages in the Amazon might think, I shouldn't call them savages, sorry, because they are very ethical, good people, but they might see one of our

02:29:12

TVs and say, that's a miracle, not knowing what's going on. So yeah, we might be surprised today to say, oh, somebody can talk on water.

02:29:19

Oh, actually a virgin can conceive without any DNA from a human body, you know. And by the way,

02:29:25

I was not equivocating by saying virgin versus divine births, because some of those divine births were from women who were not virgins.

02:29:31

They were married women who got impregnated by a god. I was not trying to say there was a difference there. So, oh, our time's up?

02:29:37

All right. Dan, given that you believe that Mark was copying

02:29:45

Homer and others, why is it that people of that time period didn't recognize this and accept it as historical fiction?

02:29:55

Well, Mark was not copying Homer. He was emulating Homer, in the same way that West Side Story is not copying

02:30:03

Romeo and Juliet, right? It's taking a previous idea or a cluster of ideas and working with them to create a new work of art.

02:30:11

The author of Mark was educated. His Greek was kind of crude and rustic,

02:30:16

I understand. I'm not a Greek expert. I can barely translate the

02:30:22

New Testament from Greek using a lexicon, but I don't pretend to be in authority on that. But at least I do read that Mark's Greek was, on the one hand, kind of crude, but on the other hand, quite brilliant in the way he was telling this story.

02:30:32

It really was a beautiful work of art that he was putting together. I don't think Mark was expecting that all of the readers would have known, aha, he's copying

02:30:42

Homer. He probably expected that educated readers would know that. He probably expected that other people who were trained as writers in the

02:30:49

Greek, who were literate, would probably see that. Just like I assumed that he would see the Three Little Pigs.

02:30:55

I knew the culture that we lived in. But I don't think that was important to him.

02:31:00

I think he was just using the template of the day for him to say, look, our God is at least as good, and sometimes even better, than your

02:31:08

God. Dr. Wayne? On page 272 of Godless, Dan says, the

02:31:17

Jesus Mysteries was the original of Jesus the pagan god, makes a compelling case that the original

02:31:24

Christians were indeed Gnostics, and the story of Jesus was invented by Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria as a mystery play, patterned after the

02:31:31

Osiris -Dionysus mystery cult, and was not to be taken literally. Which is it?

02:31:38

Which is it? Well, he's patterning himself after Homer. Well, actually, he's borrowing from Romulus.

02:31:46

Actually, it's Osiris -Dionysus, and it's the Gnostics, even though the vast majority of scholarship sees them coming after Christianity, and they are the ones who are changed, but Christianity not the other way.

02:31:57

Which one is it? They're all contradictory. And why are these being embraced in light of the obvious fact that we have a clear, non -contradictory, doesn't take special pleading to know the background of the

02:32:11

New Testament in 2 Timothy? Thank you. Dr.

02:32:18

White, even if we were to agree that the Jesus story was not deliberately copied from other naturalistic religions, why can we not conclude that the authors subconsciously were influenced by these stories and writings that they may have perhaps not read but heard?

02:32:36

Well, again, what would be the stories that these people heard when they were growing up?

02:32:43

Paul, you could at least argue Paul in Tarsus would have had at least some exposure to paganism, though as an observant Jew he would have hated it and wouldn't have done that voluntarily.

02:32:55

But the other writers, where are you going to get this idea that in the observant Jewish homes of Galilee or Judea that the stories that the young people were hearing wasn't the

02:33:07

Maccabees, it wasn't the prophets, it was the Hades, or Isis, and that somehow when they heard those, instead of finding those to be repulsive, they're attracted to them so they include them, not just one person but multiple writers.

02:33:24

I find that to be an amazingly long stretch that exists solely in the face of, again, clear, understandable, consistent evidence in regards to what the background of the

02:33:41

Jesus story is that has not been challenged. We've had no challenge that the background of the

02:33:47

Jesus story is first century Palestine, Tanniach Judaism, the Greek Septuagint, the prophets, the writings of the

02:33:53

Old Testament, and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, there's no challenge to that because there can't be any challenge to that.

02:34:01

It's a historical reality. Thank you. We do have direct, clear evidence that James is wrong about this from the

02:34:09

Old Testament. The Jews indeed were in the habit of following after what they called false gods.

02:34:16

They embraced paganism. They knew it. In fact, much of the Old Testament is dedicated to combating that exact tendency within the

02:34:23

Jewish people to be attracted to these Baals and the gods of Canaan and the

02:34:29

Shamash from the Mesopotamians and on and on. Those people had that tendency. Does it surprise you that some

02:34:35

Jews in the first century would still have that proclivity, that what you might call a weakness of mind, what others might call an openness of morality.

02:34:43

Your argument about it being such a despised thing doesn't hold water when you see in your very scriptures that those very people who went to those very temples in Judaism were actually quite familiar with and exposed to and eager to embrace those other pagan gods.

02:35:00

Thank you. Two more questions, one for each speaker. Mr. Berger, given that there are similarities, why does that necessitate or prove that Christ or the

02:35:16

New Testament was not accurate in what it purported to be? Well, again, it was that word proofing, right?

02:35:23

And I think James agrees with me that history is a matter of probabilities.

02:35:29

I think he does, and our difference is that his probabilities are high in his mind on the

02:35:35

Christian evidences and mine are low, but still nobody has any proof of any of this stuff.

02:35:41

We do have documents, we can read documents, but how do you interpret those documents? That's not proof.

02:35:47

In fact, the interpretation of those documents is exactly why there are so many different Christian denominations. Each one of them proving to you with the same

02:35:54

Septuagint, the same New Testament, reading it, splitting off into different interpretations, some of them killing each other over those different interpretations.

02:36:03

So it's not that clear, James. I mean, if you're coming from within your particular theology, it's obvious to see everything else out there as pagan and wrong, right?

02:36:11

But all groups do that. Every Christian denomination can open the Bible, and they can say, look, our theology is the right one.

02:36:18

Here's what it says. We can prove it. But all the others are wrong. So there's this sort of... I've been accused of having a bias.

02:36:24

I think James and other believers here today have a sort of a cheerleading bias, because you've opened up...

02:36:31

You've opened all these culturalities up to a certainty in your mind. Now, let's cheer rah -rah -rah for my faith when...

02:36:38

Yeah, well, I'm not opposed to rah -rah -rah. I think we should rah -rah for atheism.

02:36:43

I think it's... and humanism are eminently superior to Christianity, and I'm on record cheerleading for that position as well, and I admire you

02:36:51

Christians who rah -rah -rah for your faith. Thank you. I would simply invite you to look at the debates we have done with individuals who represent these alleged other positions that are just as capable as Orthodox Christianity as defending itself in the text of Scripture and find out whether that's true.

02:37:09

It just blatantly is not. I was just said to have just completely missed the message of the

02:37:15

Old Testament. Evidently, Dan didn't listen to me earlier in the debate when I pointed out that while the prophets and the prophets of old had indeed had to constantly deal with the people of Israel going after the

02:37:27

Asherah and the Baal, that by the time of Tanniatic Judaism, that detestation of paganism is a part of the documents we know were produced by those people, and that that detestation of those religions is easily documented by anyone who is familiar with Mishnah.

02:37:45

Brandon Mishnah? Mishnah? Gamara? Look at the sources yourself and you will discover that that is the case.

02:37:54

Thank you. And for our final question, Dr. White, can you use anything outside of the

02:38:06

Bible to support your assertion that God is not a mythology? Furthermore, is it possible that the writers of the

02:38:13

New Testament lied as you contend that Joseph Smith did when writing the Book of Mormon? A couple of things.

02:38:20

We have multiple authors writing multiple times to multiple audiences. They would have to somehow, and this is where all the conspiracy theories come in, they would have to somehow conspire together to come up with the message that they are presenting.

02:38:33

Over the course of numbers of decades, I don't have anybody finding out about it, Joseph Smith was writing in a very short period of time, and we can actually demonstrate that he messed up at one point.

02:38:44

He took a certain number of pages and somebody lost them and re -quoted the book, translated it, and it ended up coming out differently. But there is no parallel once again between multiple writers in multiple places, writing multiple audiences, and Joseph Smith claiming to use a magic cedar stone to translate the

02:38:59

Book of Mormon or his power as a prophet and a seer revelator to translate the Book of Abraham or whatever else it might be.

02:39:05

The first part of the question, I really don't understand. I'm not saying God is not a mythology.

02:39:10

I'm not sure what the question is asking. Do I use anything outside of the Bible? Well, I obviously believe all of creation testifies consistently to the message of Jesus Christ and the message of God as a creator.

02:39:22

All of creation testifies to that, and that's why I see the Christian worldview as being so consistent. But I don't make the creation superior to God's own revelation found in Scripture.

02:39:34

Jesus didn't do that. I attempt to be consistent following after his example and the example of the apostles who always placed the revelation found in Scripture first and foremost over against our experience of anything else.

02:39:46

Let's see what James just did. He rounded things up again to one. The question was, is it possible that the

02:39:52

New Testament writers were liars? As an honest scholar, if you are such, you have to admit, yes, it is possible.

02:40:00

You don't believe it because of your research, but yes, it is possible that they were liars. In fact, they make exaggerations and mistakes.

02:40:08

John said these things are written that you might believe. He was admitting that there was rhetorical purpose behind his writings.

02:40:14

He said there are so many things that Jesus did that it would be impossible for all the books in the world to contain them.

02:40:21

That's wrong. That's an exaggeration. That's a lie. I have some biographies of George Gerstner that take up this much of my space on my shelf, but it's impossible that Jesus would have lived a 33 -year -old life in such that it's impossible that all the books in the world could not contain it.

02:40:37

That's an exaggeration. When you read the New Testament, you don't see sober historical reporting. You see cheerleading for your

02:40:43

Messiah. John admits these things are written that you might believe.

02:40:49

So he's writing religious rhetoric. The Gospels, based on ancient mythology, are basically

02:40:56

Christian messianic rhetoric. We should not take that seriously. Thank you. Thank you all for attending the debate tonight.