Was Jesus a Myth? Part 2

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

Yep, I do. It's from his first apology? Yep, first apology chapters 21, 22, and it looks like also...

60, 64. Dan, have you read all of the first apology of Justin Martyr? No, I haven't read all of it.

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

Do you really feel that's what Justin Martyr was saying to those guys? Well, the words he used is we propound nothing different.

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

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.

I hope I understand. The concept of dying and rising saviors,

I gave a quote from Benninger who, upon examination, and he is a world -renowned scholar of teaching in Stockholm, upon examination of the ancient world, concluded that none of these dying and rising gods are associated with the vegetation cycle.

Not only that Yahweh was never a vegetation god, but that there was no connection whatsoever between the

Jesus story and these vegetative gods, polytheistic religions, et cetera, et cetera.

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

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. But that's true in all religions. But the

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Savior, that some of them, I mean, in all we did, we have followers who are willing to die for their hero, whether he was historical or purely legendary.

Thank you. Mr. Barker, you now have 15 minutes for rebuttal. Dan, do you want to talk?

No. No, just go like this. The first atheist martyr.

Well, I started rebutting, actually the last thing 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 New Testament was, it was fiction within a historical context.

We wanted the readers to know, oh yes, there was a Jerusalem. Yes, there was a Rome. Yes, there was a Herod. Yes, just like James Michener would say, yes, there was a

Stalin. Yes, there was a Hebrew. Yes, there was a Hawaii. But the stories within that historical framework, those stories are made up stories.

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

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

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.

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

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

And his name might have been Yeshua or Jesus. But when the gospels were written, they were not written as biographies.

When you read them, they're not biographies. They are theologically motivated. They take one little story. Almost all these biographies of big heroes in the past, like Hercules or Alexander the

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

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

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

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

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

For the record, I did not say that the naturalistic worldview rules out miracles.

In fact, if you read my book carefully, I go out of my way to say that miracles may have happened.

I say that very clearly. 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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

AD. So there's a nine -year gap in there. There was no year zero. There's a nine -year gap in there where Jesus had to have been born here or here and later.

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

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

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

Of course, we don't have time to go into all the references on all of that. I will agree with you that since my recent studying in this field, that I'm now going to take

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

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

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

She opposes 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. In fact, many denominations can't even be ordained.

She opposes all of those things. But I'm questioning the breadth of her scholarship, which is the main reason why

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.

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.

Mithraism. Actually, we don't know much at all about Zoroastrian Mithraism. It's a mistake to say that Mithraism came from Zoroastrianism because it may not have at all.

There is a Mithra named in Zoroastrian religion as a god. This sun god

I named. But that's all we know about it. It was the Romans, as James correctly 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.

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

Romans. We don't have any 1st century Aramaic sources. We don't have any actual historical records of what went on there.

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

Roman world, there are inscriptions of the slaying of the bull, showing the 12 signs of the zodiac, and showing 12 events in the life of Mithra as the

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

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

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

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

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

And there's debate among the churches. The early parishioners never even thought we should celebrate Christmas at all. So there is some connection with Mithraism.

But I admit that Mithraism is not the strongest argument to use to show the pagan precedence to Christianity.

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

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

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

Mars. I don't. Do any of you? But some people did. There were proclamations. There are documents that predate

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 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.

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

So, I, well, I've gone through rebutting the basic points that I thought

I needed rebutting during your opening statement. Wait, one more thing. Yes, Jesus, in many ways, was unique.

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

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

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

You can show Christian precedence to Mormonism. I'm sure nobody thinks that Mormon, Joseph Smith just dropped out of Noble and just suddenly, you know.

We all know it was a fraud. 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 precedence and so on, and building this new religion.

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

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

Moroni visited the hill Cumorah in Palmyra, New York, and gave these gold tablets to the

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

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

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

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

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

People have changed lives, and they're good people, and they have a sense of community, and they're moral, ethical people, right?

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

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

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.

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

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

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 mite, that story had already been said centuries before by the

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

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

Jewish rabbi Hillel. And it had been said earlier, of course, by others, not that Confucianism affected

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.

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

James a lot of ground. We can grant him some uniqueness within Christianity. But so what?

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

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

Mr. Barker. Well, if you believe that James Michener would die for not denying his own fiction, then most of what

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 gospel writers and those of the myth writers of the ancient world.

We have had it asserted that the gospels are historical fiction. We have not had it proved. Assertion is not the same as proof.

We had a lot of assertions made during the opening presentation that if we were to take the time to look carefully at them,

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

He said, Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile the count of 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 seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent

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

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.

It was pure, fraudulent, ridiculous fiction. But at the beginning of the book he said,

All references to historical documents are true. 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.

Is that what Luke's doing? You have to recognize that the writers are not saying this is historical fiction.

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

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.

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, 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

Dan to demonstrate existed at the time. He said, these aren't biographies. Actually, I know many scholars would say this fit perfectly in the realm of historical biographies of the day.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

It is gross misrepresentation of Justin Marvin. And I have read him, all of him, and I encourage you, just do it.

Don't listen to what I have to say. Go read it for yourself. You will discover that Justin Marvin argues the exact opposite.

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

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

Justin Marvin's statement to actually say. Take the time to read. I've read Justin Marvin. His dialogue with Trifold, his

Second Apology, things like that. 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.

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 Godless.

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

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, you need to move that down or something.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The terminology that was used by Dr. Dan Wallace and his co -authors reinventing

Jesus, and I don't believe that Dr. 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.

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.

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

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.

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

They must have been on the same cruise, right? No. Obviously not. Oh, the ship rocked so much

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

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?

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

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

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?

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

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

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

Or might somebody have somewhat of an astrogram?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The historical evidence is that the Christian message was derived from the first few decades of the first century.

That its first adherents were 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 purposes are.

But to assume, therefore, that there is any kind of dependence or the Mark is just sitting back and going, well,

I've got Homer. Ah, let's see, Mark chapter 5. Let's mix in some Dionysus, a little

Osiris, and I've just got to go back to Homer. I just like Homer so much.

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

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

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.

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

And so you as the audience have to judge. What are the motivations of the writers of the

Gospels? What sources do they use? Is it first century Judaism, the Old Testament that they cite constantly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm asking a question here, James. Yes. It's a format here. Right. I can demonstrate the relevance of it.

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

What was here before Adam and Eve? Humans or what? I do not believe there was anything before Adam and Eve.

There wasn't. So you're on record here saying that there was no human species on Earth? I believe that God created man, yes.

About 20 ,000 years ago. I'm sorry. I've said the same thing so many times

I'm becoming repetition. I have not given evidence. So the Egyptian civilizations and evidence from archeology and paleoanthropology of human existence on this planet long preceded that by at least 100 ,000 years.

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

The last what? 98 % of human history had all these myths and religions.

My Native American tribe was on this continent long before Jesus or even

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

God who cares so much about humanity finally decided that 2 ,000 years ago, just a blink of an eye ago, the human race was important enough to send his son to die for.

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

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.

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 foreordained that he would.

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 that prehistory before Christ was a part of what prepared the world for the ministry of Christ and the proclamation of the gospel.

So my ancestors who lived on this continent 12 ,000 years ago, all of them are in hell. There are sinners, any person who rebels against not only the revealable of God but the revelation that God places within their own hearts.

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

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 learning about Jesus.

Where did I say anything even 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.

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

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

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

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

God no person could have forgiveness of sin. Joseph Smith told the story about the angel

Moroni and the gold tablets and all that. Do you believe that story? No, I've examined the Book of Mormon very, very carefully, not only archaeologically but internally and discovered that not only has it been changed thousands of times in these original readings, which changed its message, but archaeologically it is completely fraudulent and in fact is based, as a number of Mormon scholars have recognized, upon books like The View of the

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

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.

So he was claiming to utilize a form of basic imaginative divination.

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

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

Didn't Joseph Smith make the claim that what he was writing was actually true? 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 New Testament and the use of seer stones that Joseph Smith had dug up and used to search for buried treasures.

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

That's not a fundamental difference, by the way. I'm sorry? 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

Jesus does, then I guess Jesus spit in the earth and got a lump of mud and he stuck it in somebody's eye.

There's mud in your eye, right? And he said that's just as magic. I'm just trying to clarify your point here.

No, you're not. I'm rebutting my point in opposition to the rules we discussed before. Yes or no, did 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. Did he think he was lying to people?

I don't have any idea Okay, well we do know that human beings have a tendency to create stories that they want to pass off as truth, that they're no way going to claim that they're writing historical fiction, right?

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

So what makes the first century gospel writing exempt from that proclivity? Well, as I pointed out very clearly, there are very old words demonstrating.

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

Well, how about Joseph Smith? That's not a question. So you're breaking your rules right and left.

I'm glad to break this rule. Okay, well I haven't seen it yet. But that is the resource that you have to go to.

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

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

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

I showed you 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke acts would be written in the beginning of the 7th decade around 60, 61, 62, somewhere around in the very same time period right before Nero then began taking these

Christians and tying them to stakes and using them to light his garden arrows. That would make it very, very early and within the lifetimes of those who were in fact eyewitnesses of the events.

You asked me for proof of a connection between pre -existing mythological stories and gospel stories.

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

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?

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

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

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

Yes, I've had it for years. Okay, well, he gives translations. He gives a report. Exactly. I can read the brief that he's translating and I see the fudging in the use of the text.

My point, though, is to ask you what would you accept as proof? If you're asking me to prove it, then tell me if I have proof.

What would you accept as proof? Your question is misrepresenting what I even asked you. I said if you're going to say that these authors utilized these sources and give us proof that they even had access to them that any of these religions were even prevalent in that particular context.

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

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

Thank you both. We will now take another brief five -minute break. Thank you,

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 face, and maybe this is what you mean, maybe,

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.

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

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 could be confused and influenced by so many competing religious ideas.

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.

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?

Well, what was your point there? Who was the scholar I quoted? I don't remember. You didn't quote anyone.

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

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.

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

Philo of Alexandria 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.

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

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

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

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

Except the word of God in the Old Testament is tabar, so they misunderstand tabar versus emera.

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

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.

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

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

Gnostics. And it's translated as emera in Hebrew. It's actually translated by tabar. And the

Gnostics come after Christianity, and Philo came after, well, the same century as Christianity.

So I was completely lost as to what the point was, because historically none of those things are true. Well, in any event, that word logos was used by Gnostics and others.

John started his gospel with that phrase, logos, the word God. And in our key, logos, the beginning, the beginning of the word.

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

And Gnostics, some scholars put Gnosticism way, way, way early. Way in the early part of the first century.

In fact, who are the guys who wrote the Jesus Mysteries? Not that that's a great book. I don't think that's a great book.

All right? Gandy and Freak. Yeah, exactly. And Beijing. Yeah, who claimed that, in fact, the very first Christian church was a

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.

So unlike what you say, demanding 100 % certainty of proof of 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.

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

You know, things like that happen. Especially when there's a mixture of languages. So what happens in Monty Python actually happened in history.

No. Jews couldn't understand the difference between a sheep and a worm. But you understand the difference between history and a joke.

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

So as long as someone puts out a book, like Barbara Walker puts out a book, then scholars disagree? Or do you recognize 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?

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

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.

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

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 it, was the citation from Barbara Walker.

Yeah. Since that time, I have lowered my confidence, I've told you this before, in Barbara Walker's primary scholarship.

Are you going to redo this session? I probably will, yeah. And honestly, I think anybody who has an improvement, in fact,

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

So there are corrections 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, or maybe

Darrell Bach's extensive excursus in his two -volume commentary on Luke that goes into the history of Quirinius?

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, 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 writing.

But you are going to college campuses and telling young people that these are valid reasons to reject Christian faith.

I am going on a college campus and telling college students that here is some evidence that you can add to the mix that might lower the probability that the

Christian faith is actually true. I'm not out there giving 100 % proof. There is no such a concept.

The thing is, there's 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. Good scholars, as you know, are often changing their positions in later books.

And I assume you do the same thing as you learn things. So, when you say,

I am now convinced that the Jesus story is a combination of myth and legend, is that an 80 % convinced or a 90 % convinced?

How do we even understand the word convinced? Well, it's more than 50 at least, or you wouldn't have the probability rounding off.

It's more than 50. And I think, just in my own armchair analysis, it's probably a 90 % convinced, which is pretty high.

And when you look at it the other way, though, a lot of Christians who don't deal with probabilities, they're dealing with what they think are fact.

They take any probability and say, aha, I can round it to 1. Most scholars are careful enough to hedge their bets, because Jesus may have existed.

And I admit that atheists and agnostics disagree on that. Mark may have believed in an actual historical

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

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?

Yeah, because the one that you add that he did exist is even a smaller percentage.

Do you see? Well, 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.

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 with a conclusion of the historicity of Jesus, which is just one of many hypotheses.

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.

But you're welcome to try to prove me wrong if you demand of yourself the same level of proof that you demand of me.

Well, this is perfect, because I wrote for my closing statement here. It seems to me that James has raised the bar of proof to an impossible level.

He demands that we skeptics have to prove and connect the dots exactly, that Mark actually was reading

Homer and he said, aha, he's demanding that level of proof from us. You'll never get it.

In history, you will never, ever get anything near that level of proof. Even with Abraham Lincoln, we don't have 100%.

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.

But no historian would say Abraham Lincoln existed with 100 % proof. We would say it's a 99 .99

% probability, and let's go with that. In fact, all scientists are like that. So I think James wants to have his cake and eat it too.

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. He doesn't do that with Joseph Smith, but he does that with Luke.

Why? Because he's a Christian and he likes the message of the Gospel. So let's round off Luke and say, see,

Luke was an honest historian. 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. His whole double standard here is not fair for a debate.

If we skeptics have to be dismissed because we can't prove anything, then we're all dismissed.

Christianity cannot prove a thing. Look at this. This is the church.

This is the steeple. Open the door and... Okay, so what's wrong with that picture?

That's, of course, not proved. What is it? Did you see the paganism in that?

The steeple. The steeple is not a Christian symbol. The steeple comes from pagan ideas.

The Egyptian obelisks and others reaching up to God. In fact, some of those steeples and spires were phallic symbols to pierce the heavens so that it would rain to impregnate the earth.

There's no steeple in the New Testament. I think James would even agree steeples are not necessary for Christianity.

I think he would support me on that. It's just a later thing that happened that was sort of a custom. Yet a steeple on a church building is a pagan symbol.

I'm pretty sure James agrees with me that later Christianity, at least from Constantine on, was in the habit of borrowing from paganism.

The whole idea of the clergy. The whole idea of these clerical vestments. The whole idea that we should wear a coat and a tie when we're in the house of God.

All these things... In fact, I just read George Barna and Frank Miola's book,

Pagan Christianity. These are devout Christians. George Barna is I guess evangelical.

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.

A lot of the stuff the early Christian church that existed didn't have any of this stuff. At least we have to admit that Christianity at some level has borrowed from paganism in many different ways.

My question then is what makes the first century believers exempt from that proclivity to borrow?

Were they somehow a new breed of people who had faults? Were they somehow suddenly just out of nowhere, suddenly they just got the truth in a vacuum?

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?

Is that impossible? Of course not. Especially the ones who were educated enough to write books like Luke.

Especially like Mark, the first gospel. Mark was written earliest, as you all know, and Matthew and Luke patterned to a large degree their gospels upon Mark.

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.

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.

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 Yahweh.

There was a lot more I could have said. I could have given more examples. Further you go in McDonald's book on the parallels in the storytelling, they're not exact.

McDonald admits that some of these are stronger than others and some of these are weaker than others. Just like my Three Little Donkeys story isn't an exact parallel, but you see it.

Or Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story. I could have talked about this Isis cult.

A direct first person account of an initiation in an Isis cult in which the congregant undergoes a simulated death and resurrection involving baptism by water.

He calls this being born again which grants eternal salvation. This was an emulation, not a copy of Osiris who definitely was an incarnated

God. He judges the dead and so on. We can find all sorts of these parallels floating around at the time.

Christianity may have had a unique story. The Flying Spaghetti Monster has a unique story.

Christians might think it's so special that somebody died for our sins. By the way, that word Soter is important.

Modern Greeks say Soter, but the scholars say Soter. The Savior. Because when

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

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.

I think that is a very strong clue. It's not a direct proof that connects the dots.

I think James is right to so quickly dismiss all of these amazing parallels that we see.

We know there were many pre -Christian Christ figures. By the way, Christ is not a name. Even in the 2nd century references to Christ, they don't refer to Jesus.

Suetonius didn't refer to Jesus. Tacitus did not refer to Jesus. A lot of these later supposed evidence for Christianity don't name

Jesus. They name this Christ figure. There may have been Christians in Rome, but that doesn't mean they were followers of Jesus.

There were other people who were Christ followers. There were other self -proclaimed Jewish messiahs who were the anointed ones, the

Christs. 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.

We know there were births that were prophesied before then. We know there were miracles and healings and exorcisms done by people before the

Christian story. We know that there's three stories, at least, of Dionysus changing water into wine.

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.

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.

What does the Pax Romana? It's a peace on earth, but of course you know it's a military peace. Even in the Bible, the word peace in the

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 we're talking about. There's little doubt in my mind, although I can't give you a 100 % probability on it, and nobody can, and no

Christian can give you a 100 % historical probability of the truth of Christianity. There's little doubt in my mind that Christians today are worshiping a pagan

God. There's nothing wrong with pagan. The word pagan is just the pre -existing myths of that.

There's no doubt in my mind that what Christians think is so special, well it has some specialness. West Side Story is special.

Nobody thinks that Juliet broke into, I feel pretty, I feel pretty, back in Shakespeare.

Nobody thinks that actually happened because it's a modernization of Shakespeare's work. And so there are some stories about Jesus that, whoa, they're special.

They're different. Isn't that amazing? But all religions can say that. We skeptics, we humanists, we atheists, we agnostics, we we agree with you believers.

We reject the truth of Osiris. We don't believe in it, that Augustus was born of a virgin.

We don't think that Romulus was prophesied to create a kingdom on earth. We reject all those things.

We think those are exaggerations and wishful story writing by the people who wanted to elevate their particular point of view.

We reject all those gods, the Dionysuses and the Attuses and the Tammuses and you name them, the

Aragon devil fighting against the Ahura Mazda Zoroastrians, which inspired the

Jews to have the sacred figure, which by the way, he didn't comment on that tonight, but we reject all those gods, all those beliefs, just as you do.

You all you agree with us. You're skeptical too, aren't you? You're skeptical that those were actually true stories.

The difference between you and me is that I believe in one less god than you do.

You know, for Christianity, it smells fishy. It smells funny to me.

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.

There is a fundamental difference between the 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.

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.

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 multiple meaning resulting, as we noted in our last debate, that we are all nothing more than cosmic broccoli.

So that last argument, I think, really needs to be put to rest. We were told that Christians today are worshiping a pagan god.

Monotheists. Horatio ex nihilo. Creation out of nothing and into nothing. No cyclical vegetative cycle.

That's a pagan god. Oh no, I just developed into that. What has been the evidence that has been given to us?

We've had a lot of assertions. What has been the evidence that has been given to us? We were told that I'm demanding too high a level of proof.

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.

Could you at least demonstrate that those sources have some consistency to what the writer is attempting to accomplish?

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.

I find that absurd. Why is that not absurd? Is that too high a level of proof to ask?

When people draw the Mithra example, shouldn't you be able to prove that Mithraism was known in Israel at that time?

Osiris. Isis was just presented to us. The very religions that the Jews hated the most of all the

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. 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. I have studied

Joseph Smith's writings in depth, and you cannot look at Luke and find the book of Abraham.

The book of Abraham, in the Pearl of Great Price, that Joseph Smith claimed was actually written by the hand of Abraham himself on papyri.

It is actually from the Egyptian book of breathings, the Egyptian book of the dead. The papyri were found.

We've translated them. We know what they are. He never got a word right. Well, he did translate the word thud with about 43 different English words.

So I guess he would give him that one. But we have examined the evidence, and Joseph Smith was not a prophet.

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.

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 will seriously examine his own works, you'll find that Luke is an incredible historian.

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

Paul's movement through Asia Minor? We now have found out why.

Every place we can test, where we can find archaeological evidence, inscriptions, manuscripts, or whatever,

Luke was exactly right in knowing that in one area, for example, in Phoenix, we have a sheriff.

It is Arizona, after all. There are a lot of places that don't have sheriffs. They only have police officers and things like that.

Luke would have said, the sheriff. He knew what those areas were. We can't do that with the

Book of Mormon because we've never found the Zarahemla. It didn't exist. Double standards?

No. One of us has studied Mormonism in depth and is being consistent in the application of the scholarly examples that we apply.

We just had presented to us Barnett's book. By the way, I'd just like to refer a book to you. I just wrote a review for it in the

CRI Journal called Why We Love the Church. It has an excellent chapter refuting that particular book.

Much more balanced and much more fair. I would recommend its reading to you. I don't have it up here to show to you.

We are told that these writers are borrowing all this stuff. And yet, what is the most probable?

They quote from the Greek Septuagint. They know about the traditions of the elders. They're speaking to Jews.

They're presenting a monotheistic religion that rejects paganism. The pagans allowed for all sorts of multiple beliefs.

You can believe in this god or that god. It was 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.

That's what we've been asked to do 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.

I think it's very, very clear what the problem is here. We heard about the flying spaghetti monster.

I would like to suggest to you that anyone who parrots documents 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.

If you cannot or are unwilling, morally unwilling, to recognize the vast difference between the 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,

I'm sure. 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.

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.

The use of that, like Richard Dawkins, is rarely rational when it comes to being fair in regards to the

Christian faith. We are told there may have been Christians in Rome who were not followers of Jesus.

I want you to think about that one for just a moment. What does that require you to do? 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

Christ figure. And that, in the midst of you having, in the text of the

New Testament, letters clearly demonstrating they're written in the 4th and 5th decades, including going to Rome, that talk about Jesus.

So you have, I mean, critical scholarship recognizes Paul existed. They recognize he believed in this

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

Christians in Rome, but we don't really believe in Jesus. Where is the historical soundness of that kind of argumentation?

I would never use that kind of argumentation against someone's position. Why is it being used now?

Think about this. You are the judges of this debate. There's no one sitting here who's going to render judgment.

Only you. Is that a sound argument? We just heard

Daniel equivocate. Oh, there are lots of virgin births, or divine births.

That's not the same thing. And a god in a physical body having union with a woman is not a virgin birth.

What were the purposes of these virgin births? In every single instance, it was the male god getting his gratification.

That was not the purpose of the virgin birth. That was not the application of the virgin birth.

There is no logical, no reasonable person who understands the

Christian message from the very beginning and understands its biblical nature would ever look at this and say, oh, look at that!

Parallel! That requires you to completely ignore the context of each.

The fundamental differences in worldview of theology and purpose between those.

Once you start doing that, all bets are off. You can find a parallel name. You can find a parallel text.

And that's what we just heard. Despite pointing this out, much of what

Dan just finished doing was giving us further examples of parallelomania. Isis, Osiris.

Totally different than God in the Old Testament. Detested by the Jews, but hey, maybe they drew from this too.

Parallelomania is not how you do history. The message of Jesus was a message that the authors of those books were willing to die for.

You don't die for a swordfish. They believed what they said. The sources that they drew from?

Luke told us. I interviewed you. I checked it out. What do they most often quote from?

The Old Testament. That is the source of the story of Jesus. That's why he remains unique to this day.

Very brief break. Thank you for all the questions and answers that we've received.

We're going to start with a question from Mr. Barker since Mr. White closed first.

First question for you, Mr. Barker, is this. Collectively, we have hundreds of flood myths from different people groups from all over the world.

Using your logic, what is the probability that the flood of Noah actually happened?

If the flood of Noah was worldwide, the probability is .0001

that that flood actually happened. If the flood of Noah is an exaggeration of a local flood, which did happen all over the world in many cases, there are even flood myths within my

Native American ancestors. Of course, that was their whole world. When my granddad was a little boy working in Oklahoma, Indian Territory, he called that the country.

That was the whole world. A localized flood to a lot of these people was a worldwide flood. It was their world being flooded.

The fact that there are so many similar and even previous to the

Old Testament, the Gilgamesh epic and all those things, flood myths around the world doesn't prove the truth of the

Noah story. What it proves is the ubiquity of floods around our planet. I found it interesting that if you would refer to the

American Indian recollection of this, that that would be just of a local flood in a particular area.

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 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.

It wasn't just simply in one area. It impacted pretty much all of ancient history at that particular point in time.

From a Christian perspective, you'd look into the Gilgamesh and things like that and you would see that as an echo of what is provided in inspired scripture as to the actual narrative of the events that took place at that time.

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?

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,

Dan Brown, admit that what you wrote in Da Vinci Code was a bunch of fiction and that it is not in fact truthful,

Dan Brown's going to say, are you kidding? Of course, as is Michener or anybody else.

The point is that the idea of the Gospels being this kind of historical fiction does not fit the texts themselves.

It does not fit the authors. It does not fit the texts that we have and possess today. It does not fit the context in which they were written.

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.

I'm lying to you. I'm drawing from all these different religious sources. I know more about world religions than people in the

West do in the modern times after graduating from college. Even though I'm a fisherman in Galilee, 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. Yeah, I think in that context it's very relevant.

It's not a matter of making it truthful. It's a matter of demonstrating that the authors themselves did not view their works the way they're being presented today.

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. 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.

They were willing to put their lives on the line. They probably were smiling and singing to Allah when they did this good deed.

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.

You can't use martyrdom as a proof of the validity of the intentions of the minds of the authors of the original documents.

Now you tell me how Mark died or even who he was and how we know that with any level of probability at all.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Parker. Question for you.

Richard Dawkins purports that an improbable chain of events led to the creation of life.

In your comments today on the science of history, 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?

It could, you know, if there's a God. But I think that misconstrues Dawkins. I think when you look at the improbability of everything happening at one step, it's extremely tiny.

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.

Oh look, there was no way you're going to notice a change happening in evolution. So over very long periods of time, these probabilities don't multiply, they add up.

If you multiply probabilities, of course you're going to get less and less and less. So it's a misconstrued think of probabilities in that term.

What's the probability that I'll, you know, pick the right number between one and a hundred?

Pretty low, right? But what if I get a million chances? Pretty high. So probabilities can be extremely low, and yet with the repetition 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.

It would be a true miracle if these probabilities did not over the past period of time change and improve.

In fact, some evolution goes backwards. Some evolution goes to extinction. A lot of it is, 99 % of it is a failure.

Nobody's directing it. But for those of us who survive, we are the benefits of those laws of probability.

And I think it's because we don't have an intuitive concept in our own brains about the law of large numbers.

We evolved kind of with smaller, we can think in hundreds of thousands or so, but the large numbers to us don't seem intuitive, so it seems improbable.

When actually Dawkins shows that we can climb, it sounds improbable. Dr. White?

The problem is that the neoderminium micromutational 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.

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.

Sometimes it will take 10 or 15 changes to change a single gene action.

And so, what you really have is a system that is moving forward on its own inertia at that time.

There is so much solid reason to reject what Richard Dawkins has to say.

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, but we are talking about myths today.

They take a while to die. Thank you, Dr. White. Dr. White, why is it that naturalism is not a valid option in interpreting history on whether or not the

Jesus story is cut from other ancient mythologies? What I said was that Mr. Barker, as a naturalist and 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

Christian sources as having historical value because of the element of supernaturalism that is in them.

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

Christianity came, they are the last things we look to for the answers as to what the origin and source of this entire story and this movement was.

And so it is very obvious that there is an overriding presuppositional worldview in operation here that says, this is the way things are.

Dan even said, well, do I want to make any sense? Well, I would just invite you to, I believe you have some of the

DVDs out there in the foyer, to watch the debate between Dan and I from the

University of Illinois and see for yourself, judge for yourself whether that actually is something that is consistent or not.

But it was an application specifically of the argument that was being made at that juncture. 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.

I was careful in my book to point out and to repeat today that if miracles happen, we can't rule them out, maybe there are some things we just don't yet understand.

Savages in the Amazon might think I should call them savages, sorry, because they are very ethical, good people.

But they might see one of our 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 walk on water.

Oh, actually a virgin can conceive without any DNA from a human body. And by the way,

I was not equivocating by saying virgin versus divine births, because some of those divine births were from women who were not virgins.

They were married women who got impregnated by a god. I was not trying to say there was a difference there. Dan, given that you believe that Mark was copying

Homer and others, why is it that people of that time period didn't recognize this and accept it as historical fiction?

Well, Mark was not copying Homer. He was emulating Homer in the same way that the

West Side Story is not copying Romeo and Juliet. It's taking a previous idea or a cluster of ideas and working with them to create a new work of art.

Homer, the author of Mark, was educated. His Greek was kind of crude and rustic,

I understand. I'm not a Greek expert. I can barely translate the

New Testament from Greek using a lexicon, but I don't pretend to be an 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.

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

Homer. He probably expected that educated readers would know that. He probably expected that other people who were trained as writers in Greek, who were literate, would probably see that.

Just like I assumed that you could see the three little pigs. I knew the culture that we lived in. But I don't think that was important to him.

I think he was just using the template of the day for him to say, look, our God is at least as good, if not, and sometimes even better, than your

God. Dr. Wayne? On page 272 of Godless, Dan says, the

Jesus mysteries was the original Jesus, the pagan God, makes a compelling case that the original

Christians were indeed Gnostics, and the story of Jesus was invented by Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria as a mystery play, patterned after the

Osiris -Dionysus mystery cults, and was not to be taken literally. Which isn't.

Which isn't. Well, he's patterning himself after Homer. Well, actually, he's borrowing from Romulus.

Actually, it's Osiris -Dionysus, and it's the Gnostics, even though most scholars, the vast majority of scholarship sees them coming after Christianity and they're the ones that are changed by Christianity, not the other way around.

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, of the

New Testament, in 2 Timothy? Thank you. Dr.

Wayne, 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?

Well, again, what would be the stories that these people heard when they were growing up?

Paul, you can 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.

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

Maccabees, it wasn't the prophets, it was the Hadeses, 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. 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

Jesus story is that has not been challenged. We've had no challenge that the background of the

Jesus story is 1st century Palestine, Tanaitic Judaism, the Greek Septuagint, the prophets, the writings of the

Old Testament, and the Pharisees and the Sadducees. There's no challenge to that, because there can't be any challenge to that.

It's a historical reality. Thank you. We do have direct, clear evidence that James is wrong about this from the

Old Testament. The Jews indeed were in the habit of following after what they called false gods.

They embraced paganism. They knew it. In fact, much of the Old Testament is dedicated to combating that exact tendency within the

Jewish people to be attracted to these Baals and the gods of Canaan and the

Shamash from the Mesopotamians and on and on. Those people had that tendency. Does it surprise you that some

Jews in the 1st century would still have that proclivity, that what you might call a weakness of mind, what others might call an openness of morality?

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.

Thank you. Two more questions, one for your speaker. Mr. Berger, given that there are similarities, why does that necessitate or prove that Christ or the

New Testament was not accurate in what it reported? Well, again, it was that word proof again, right?

I think James agrees with me that history is a matter of probabilities. I think he does.

Our difference is that his probabilities are high in his mind on the Christian evidences and mine are low.

But still, nobody has any proof of any of this stuff. We do have documents, we can read documents, but how do you interpret those documents?

That's not proof. 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

Septuagint, the same New Testament, reading it, splitting off into different interpretations, some of them killing each other over those different interpretations.

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?

But all groups do that. Every Christian denomination can open the Bible and they can say, look, our theology is the right one.

Here's what it says. We can prove that all the others are wrong. So there's this sort of, I've been accused of having a bias.

I think James and other believers here today have this sort of a cheerleading bias because you've already brought it, you've wrapped it up, you've wrapped up these probabilities up to a certainty in your mind.

And now let's cheer rah -rah -rah for my faith. Yeah, well, I'm not opposed to rah -rah -rah.

I think we should rah -rah for atheism. 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 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, because blatantly it's not.

I was just said to have just completely missed the message of the 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

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 the

Mishnah. Do you know the Mishnah? Mishnah? Gamara? Talmud? I don't believe anyone knows. Okay. Look at the sources yourself, you will discover that that is the case.

Thank you. And for our final question, Dr. White, can you use anything outside of the

Bible to support your assertion that God is not a mythology? Furthermore, is it possible that the writers of the

New Testament lied as you contend that Joseph Smith did when writing the Book of Mormon? A couple of things.

We have multiple authors writing multiple times to multiple audiences. They would have to somehow, and this is where all the conspiracy theories come up, they would have to somehow conspire together to come up with the message that they are presenting over the course of numbers of decades on 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.

He took a certain number of pages and somebody had lost them and had to re -quote a book translator 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 the magic seer stone to translate the

Book of Mormon or his power as a prophet and seer revelator to translate the Book of Abraham, whatever else it might be.

The first part of the question I really don't understand. I'm not saying God is not a mythology.

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.

All of creation testifies to that and that's why I see the Christian world view as being so consistent.

But I don't make the creation superior to God's own revelation found in Scripture.

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 of God in Scripture first and foremost over against our experience of anything else.

And I get what James just did. He rounded things up again to one. The question was, is it possible that the

New Testament writers were liars? As an honest scholar, if you are such, you have to admit yes, it is possible.

You don't believe it because of your research, but yes, it is possible that they were liars. In fact, they made exaggerations and mistakes.

John said these things are written that you might believe. He was admitting that there was rhetorical purpose behind his writings.

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.

That's wrong. That's an exaggeration. That's a lie. I have some biographies of George Gershwin to 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.

That's an exaggeration. When you read the New Testament, you don't see sober historical reporting. You see cheerleading for your

Messiah. John admits these things are written that you might believe.

He's writing religious rhetoric. The Gospels based on ancient mythology are basically

Christian messianic rhetoric. We should not take that seriously.

Thank you. Thank you all for attending the debate tonight. I briefly have a drawing.

I have a copy of Dr. White's recently updated The Potter's Freedom. I'll just have him select the winner.

Ken Lucas Thank you all once again.