Is the Bible TRUE? | Alex O'Connor vs. Dinesh D'Souza | Debate Teacher Reacts

The Debate Opening and the Charge of Inconsistency

Luke says that after the birth of Jesus, the family fled to Egypt. Matthew says that they went to the Jerusalem temple. Are they both correct or is one of them wrong?

Who the heck cares?

That's not the right response. Who the heck cares? That's not going to win folks to your side.

The Bible is a historical text and a scientific text when it needs to be and it's not one when you don't want it to be.

Wow, this is going very badly for D'Souza. And very well for O 'Connor. Skeptic Alex O 'Connor goes toe-to-toe with Christian Dinesh D'Souza. The debate is over whether or not the Bible is true. Who bested the other on the debate stage?

Who asked better questions and challenged their opponent more ferociously? We're about to find out. If you're new here, welcome to Wise Disciple. My name is Nate and I'm helping you become the effective Christian that you were meant to be.

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What Counts as Historical Narrative in the Bible

I'm happy to essentially take the things that I said in my opening statement and slot them in and apply them to the things that you just said right there. So you began by saying that the Bible is a strange book to ask these questions of because of its purpose.

I assume you'd agree with me that the Bible is a collection of books rather than a singular text with different authors, different intentions, and most importantly, different genres. So the first question I suppose I'd like to ask you is do you agree, for example, that at least some biblical texts are attempts at historical biography such as in the Gospels?

Of course, I would agree with that. But let me just qualify it this way.

Sure.

When we think of the Bible as revealed, the question now becomes, what do we mean? Did God write the book? Did God inspire the book and human beings wrote it? Did God show human beings events that they then described in their own words?

Okay, so the reason these things are important is it seems to me, to answer the question I raised earlier about in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the way I understand it is there's a perfect revelation shown to a gospel, to a Bible, to a Jewish scribe who sees it, so to speak, but writes it in his own words.

When I look at the book of Revelation, same thing.

And does it get anything wrong? Do those scribes get anything wrong?

It's quite possible that they, when you say get anything wrong, they are writing it in human terms. I mean, you know...

I mean the specifically mundane human things. I'm not talking about when the author of Genesis says that God created the heavens of the earth or talks about the spirit moving across the face of the water.

This is clearly mythological. This is clearly an attempt at mythological writing. That's fine. It would be silly to ask if that's true or not. But when somebody...

I don't think it is mythological writing at all. I think that it is simply... I mean, put it this way. If we were in the year 4000 BC, if we were John the Divine, and let's just say that God showed us in a vision the actual end of the world, right?

Apocalypse.

I wouldn't have gone to Revelation to hold that up and compare it to Genesis.

I...

That strategy is fraught with issues. So I'm trying to remain silent right now and just let everything unfold. I think things are interesting already. Let's just see how this plays out.

We would then write down the four horsemen of the apocalypse, death and famine and destruction. We're not engaging in myth-making at all. I'm actually writing what I see.

So you think there'll be a seven-headed demon?

Of course not. I'm saying that to me, what I'm seeing is so... Let's just say, for example, it is a cosmo... It is a thermonuclear explosion of a kind that the ancient Bible writer doesn't even know what it is, right?

And the consequence of it is death and destruction and famine. He's going to write it down the way he sees it.

But where's he going to get the seven-headed dragon and the prostitute from?

This is...

Well, he's going to get it from the Old Testament and he's going to incorporate Gematria in the specific numbers that he utilizes as a Jew in the first century would. So let me start off by saying, O 'Connor is leading with some excellent questions.

I watched both of their opening statements. I just get the sense that what O 'Connor is doing at this point is he's setting a garden path. So these are initial questions that are going to lead to a whopper later.

And D'Souza is trying very carefully not to get pinned.

Okay.

I mentioned, you know, I saw their opening statement. I don't know if I could use the phrase opening statement. It seems this exchange seems a little bit more loose, not as formal than what would be on, you know, in a tournament or something on the debate stage.

But definitely O 'Connor, it seems like he came ready to fight. And D'Souza was just off kilter in his opening statement. He seemed pretty left footed in his presentation. If I had to guess, he was not prepared to hear O 'Connor's opener and it probably threw him off.

Hey, this is like a human attempt to describe a nuclear reaction.

Yes, because when words and images fail, metaphor is the actual conduit to truth.

Now I'd understand if that were the case, if you said that perhaps after a nuclear blast, somebody describes it as, you know, the gods of fire descending upon man with their flaming sword or something like that, but like a prostitute and a seven headed dragon.

Well, first of all, I'm not saying it is a nuclear explosion. You're the problem.

It wasn't a prostitute. So, so notice the incredulity on O 'Connor's part. Um, well, unless he's referring to, uh, Revelation 13 and not 12. So I, that was unclear. Maybe he is talking about, uh, the, the prostitute there.

Um, but notice the incredulity just repeating, you know, the more incredible moments in, uh, oh, by the way, a very highly symbolic book, right? An apocalyptic piece of literature that was very Jewish in nature.

Nobody in the Christian church believes that the woman in Revelation 13, uh, the dragon that comes up out of the ocean in Revelation 12, the one who's being chased around an outer space, like this really is taking place in outer space that, that the pregnant woman is a real literal woman.

Uh, the, this beast is a real multi-headed dragon. We look at the rules of apocalyptic interpretation and we recognize what, uh, the author John is doing, but that's not the point. Anyway, incredulity is a very useful tool on the debate stage.

Christians do the same thing to atheists, by the way, when it's their turn to get cross-examined. So Conor is doing what he should be doing at this point.

The problem is we, we're, we're given this phantasmagorical future account, right? And it's, it is so wrenching and powerful that many people, for example, have tried to render it by art and it's not easy to do it, right?

It's not easy to do it because we have to stop and realize, first of all, that we're dealing not only with the limitations of, of perception, but the limitations of language. Let me give you a simple example.

Uh, I come to America from India. I have never eaten a mushroom.

Okay.

I ask you, Alex, what does a mushroom taste like?

Sure.

I would submit that you would be completely unable to render to me in words, however lengthy and ornate, what a mushroom actually tastes like.

That may be true, but, you know, I was asking, for example, about Jesus's presentation at the Temple of Jerusalem after his birth. This is not like trying to describe a mushroom or the end of the world.

No, no. Okay, so now let's talk about that.

Hold on a second. This is a historical event that's being recorded by one New Testament writer at the same time as another New Testament writer says that the family had traveled to Egypt. I don't think this is an attempted metaphor or allegory, as I would say of Genesis, whether you think that is or not.

I would say that in the case of the Gospels, we can agree that in at least some instances, this is a clear attempt at mundane history. This is not attempt at writing some kind of metaphor to explain a truth that's otherwise unknowable to the human mind.

It's a very straightforward attempt to record what actually happened and they contradict each other.

Okay, so there it is. So O 'Connor wants to know, by the way, he brought up in his opening statement, the sort of the birth narrative there, the things that happened directly after Jesus's birth in Matthew chapter two and the corresponding passage there in Luke.

O 'Connor wants to know why these apparent contradictions are there. So, and I think it's Luke chapter two, right? And so, I mean, at this point, I think we're going pretty fast. So I won't open up those passages, but just keep an eye on Matthew chapter two and Luke chapter two.

Just have your Bible open if you have it, you know, just for your own reference.

They contradict each other because they're written by four different people.

Sure.

So let me ask you this. If God were writing it, I'm quite sure.

Did D'Souza just say that they contradicted each other?

They happened and they contradict each other.

They contradict each other because they're written by four different people.

Sure.

So let me ask you this. If God were writing it, I'm quite sure he would have written it once. He wouldn't need four.

Sure.

So some of them are wrong then.

No.

Okay.

So let's, when you say they're wrong, let's consider Luke's gospel for a minute. Luke is a medical doctor. Luke is not present at the events being described. Luke is virtually in the position of Thucydides writing the Peloponnesian war.

Now Thucydides did fight in the war, but in most of the events described by Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war, he wasn't there.

Making them very unreliable, right?

No, on the contrary. It is in fact the most reliable account of the Peloponnesian war that historians have.

Let's not say that it is reliable though.

No, it is. What I'm trying to say is that when you're talking about historicity and you're talking about historicity now in the ancient world, you have to recognize that these people are not approaching it as modern historians.

Luke is going around interviewing people.

So let me ask this very, very straightforwardly then.

Okay.

Luke says that after the birth of Jesus, the family fled to Egypt. Matthew says that they went to the Jerusalem temple. Are they both correct or is one of them wrong?

Who the heck cares?

I mean, look.

Well, I do.

And so do probably the people who are listening to the debate about it.

Ooh, that's not the right response. Who the heck cares? That's not going to win folks to your side. Particularly when the debate is, it says, is the Bible true?

Okay.

So I actually said I wouldn't do this, but now I'm going to. So Jesus is born and then he is dedicated to the Lord.

Look at this.

So this is verse 21. And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. And when the time came for their purification, according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.

Look at verse 39. And when they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. And the child grew, became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon.

Him.

Okay.

So there's Luke's timeline of events. Jesus is born. He is circumcised. On the, at the end of eight days, he is presented to the Lord for purification, right? They're following the rites and rituals that the Jews would for any baby.

And then they, it says down here, they returned to Nazareth.

Okay.

Now here's Matthew's account.

Look at this.

Verse one. Now, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem saying, where is he who has been born king of the.

Jews?

For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him. When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled in all Jerusalem with him. Now look at verse eight. And he, Herod sent them to Bethlehem, sent the wise men to Bethlehem saying, go and search diligently for the child.

And when you have found him, bring me word that I too may come and worship him. After, now pay attention to verse nine. After listening to the king, they went on their way and behold the star that they had seen when it rose, went before them until it came to rest over the place where the child.

Was. Okay.

So it says that the wise men are sent to Bethlehem, but then they see the star and it appears to take them, uh, where Jesus is, by the way, it doesn't say where, uh, oh, also, by the way, it doesn't say how old Jesus is at this point.

All we know in verse one is that after Jesus was born.

Okay.

So, and then, uh, verse 12, it says that they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod. And so they departed, uh, for their own country. They left and returned to their own country quietly. And then verse 13.

Now, when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph now in a dream and said, rise, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him.

And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remain there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet out of Egypt. I called my son.

Okay.

After this, the next account that we have of Jesus as a child is when he's 12 years old and he's back in Jerusalem.

Okay.

So now we have the two accounts. The question is, is there a contradiction? Between these two accounts or not. Let's see how D'Souza responds.

Hosea and the Problem of Fulfillment

Let me say why. Let me say why. What you're, what you, what you care about is, is not only trivial, but indicates a kind of unwillingness to try to get what the text is trying to tell you.

Why. I don't think it's trivial. I think that the reason why Luke may have invented the flight to Egypt, but he tells us, Luke says, when he records the flight to Egypt, and then they return from Egypt, he says, this is so that we can fulfill the prophecy from Hosea chapter 11 out of Egypt.

I shall call my son. Now in Hosea, God is talking here about the nation of Israel, at least in this case, unlike the Matthew prophecy, the prophecy actually exists and we can interrogate it. It seems to me like what Luke is doing here is attempting to display Jesus as the fulfillment of the old Testament prophecy.

And in fact, he tells us that that's what he's doing. Therefore, if it is the case that Jesus didn't go to Egypt and didn't come out of Egypt on his return, then this would undermine Luke's attempts to identify Jesus as the Jewish Messiah fulfillment of the old Testament prophecy.

That's why I think it is.

And that's true. So either D'Souza needs to make the argument that the gospel is not a historical narrative, or he needs to prove that there is no contradiction. Those are really the only two options available to him at this point.

Well, look.

And not trivial.

Right.

But I think that the….

Would you agree with that? I mean, do you think it's a completely trivial point?

If it's so trivial, then why is it included in the first place? The point, as you stated it before, is trivial. The point you're now raising is not trivial, but the point you're now raising is one in which you have three centuries of Jewish-Christian disputation about whether Jesus is the Messiah.

Okay?

And by and large, the disputation breaks down in this way. The Jews are the biblical literalists, and the Christians are the sort of metaphorical readers. And I say this because…. Let's take a very famous passage that bears on this very topic, where Jesus is talking about the destruction of the temple.

And the Jews go, you know, you said the temple would be destroyed. Now, interestingly, Jesus did say the temple would be destroyed. And the temple was, in fact, destroyed in 70 AD. In fact, 40 years after Jesus said that, the temple was, in fact, physically razed to the ground, and the Jews dispersed in a huge diaspora.

But my point is, Jesus doesn't reply to that. Jesus doesn't say, hey, listen, wait 40 years. Jesus says, no, you're misreading me completely. When I said the temple, I was actually speaking of the temple of my body.

He doesn't tell them that.

Well, but this is stated….

We're told that that's what he means.

We're told that's what he means. So, what I'm getting at is, here you have a case where you have an event, you have a Jewish literalist reading, and a Christian metaphorical reading. Another example, and you know, so would you say….

So, it's a metaphor. That's de Souza's position. It's a metaphor. This is not a historical account. If I were O 'Connor, I would be pressing for clarity on what de Souza just said, and asking whether or not Jesus' birth is also metaphorical in his view.

In other words, the moment that you introduce metaphor, then the question becomes, where are the boundaries for this metaphor? Like, what's literal and what's metaphorical?

Say then, the flight to Egypt is a metaphor? Is that what you're trying to say? In other words, I'm trying to understand what it is that you're doing here to actually answer the question that I'm asking you, which is about….

Because here's my theory. Here's an idea. The author of Luke invents the flight to Egypt in order to identify Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, meaning that when we read Luke, we should note that where it appears that he's making historical claims, we should note his willingness to twist history in order to fulfill a theological aim.

Well, you don't know if he's doing that.

And there you go. The moment that you say, what appears to be a historical narrative is actually a metaphor, this is where it leads. Okay, how much is passed off as historical narrative, but actually never happened?

O 'Connor is definitely giving de Souza a run for his money.

You're assuming that. This is your theory.

What I'm saying is that that's one thesis to explain the contradiction between Luke and Matthew. If you want to say that it's trivial, then fine, but we still have to explain how it comes about. And what I'm saying is one idea of how this comes about leads to us undermining our trustworthiness of Luke.

What I'm asking you for is your explanation that would not lead to us having to undermine our trust, the trustworthiness of Luke.

I don't have the ability to referee that passage. I'm not aware of this contradiction. I'll have to go back and look and see.

Sure, that's fine.

But what I am doing is I'm questioning your methodology and your kind of, what would I call it? You've got the Jews and the Christians arguing about events, and they're very complex events, and they're very powerfully meaningful events.

Let's take, for example, Abraham and Isaac are going up the mountain. And Isaac says to Abraham something to the effect of, where is the lamb for the sacrifice? And Abraham says to him, God will provide.

God will provide. Now, in a Jewish reading, this whole thing has got to be understood in terms of here's Abraham. He's willing to sacrifice his son. God says, stop. It's a tale of obedience. In the Christian reading, it's not that, or it's not only that.

The Christian reading is, Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. So when Isaac says, where is the lamb? And Abraham says, God will provide, it is a foreshadowing of a significant event in the New Testament.

Now, again, as I say, the Jews and the Christians argued this for three centuries and more.

Oh my goodness. This is not the Dinesh D'Souza who went up against Christopher Hitchens 20 years ago. This is not the Dinesh D'Souza who went up against Bart Ehrman and others in debates. I don't know if he's just caught unprepared, but clearly he's off guard and nervous on that stage.

And he's not addressing O 'Connor in the way that he could be. A better response would be O 'Connor. Before I answer these questions, where specifically do you see these contradictions? O 'Connor started to explain this a bit in his opening statements, but then didn't really walk that through.

Which, by the way, that's a clarification question. And also, why does your reading of the text, O 'Connor, force both accounts, Matthew and Luke, to take place at the exact same time? That's a question designed to identify O 'Connor's interpretive framework, because clearly his interpretive framework leads to a contradiction that many biblical scholars and theologians over the centuries do not see.

But that's not what D'Souza is saying at all. Actually, let's just see how he finishes here.

I'm not even trying to adjudicate who's right, but I'm saying you're waltzing in coming with neither of these two assumptions. In fact, I assume you think that the Old Testament is as mythological as the new.

No, no, no.

And I guess what I'm saying is that people who read the Bible to understand what the Bible is trying to say and what we can learn from it, do what the Jewish rabbis did and do what theologians like Augustine and Anselm and so many others have done.

They don't really do what you're doing, which is saying, hey, Luke must have talked to a guy who thought it happened over here. But in fact, you know, this guy says the roof was thatched, but another guy says they let the guy in through the roof who had to be healed.

Contradiction. And I'm like, is this your way of trying to say the Bible is not true?

Yes, it is. Yes, it's precisely what I'm doing. The Old Testament is not fully mythological. I think Genesis is mythological. I think that Exodus makes more of an attempt at history, but has mythological undertones.

I think that the military conquests I mentioned in my opening statements are attempts at describing literal historical events. I think Psalms are poetry. I think that Job is mythology. I don't think a man called Job actually existed.

And so there are lots of different genres here. The reason I'm asking about the contradictions in the gospel, and I understand if you don't want to talk about the specific example of Egypt and Jerusalem, fine, whatever.

Maybe you can send me an email about it later or something. That's fine. But the reason I bring it up is to say that there are lots of these. And in each case, if we try to look at why they might be contradicting each other, the reasons I think we're given tell us that the historicity of this text should be in dispute.

For example, I mentioned the date of Jesus' death. The synoptic gospels specifically place this after the Passover meal. They have the Last Supper as the Passover meal. John uniquely sets it before the Passover because he has the theological purpose of wanting to depict Jesus as the Passover lamb.

Now, this is a contradiction if the gospels are supposed to be historical accounts of what happened to Jesus, which I imagine if we were having a debate about whether Christianity were true, about whether the God of the Bible existed, you might put forward, say, an argument for the resurrection of Jesus.

You might say, well, we have good historical evidence to think that Jesus arose from the.

Dead.

And you might point to the story of the crucifixion and the disciples seeing him after he died. This is a common thread. The problem is that if we're treating it as historical in an area like that, then we have to engage with it as a historical text.

The Bible, Archaeology, and the Burden of Proof

So two things here. One, this isn't a formal debate, okay? Because this isn't what formal cross-examination should look like. Cross-examination does not allow for speeches on the part of the opponent asking questions.

It just requires questions. And stylistically, those questions should be more yes or no questions so that the debater can then get up and explain how his opponent has revealed himself to be wrong in the rebuttal and closing statement segments of the debate.

So that's the first thing. The second thing is O 'Connor is laying a framework for the debate, you know? DeSouza was doing that a bit too. But he's talking about how the audience should be thinking through this debate and judging it for themselves.

And guess what? In terms of his framework, he's not wrong. His framework is reasonable. And one that a Christian can adopt now are the contradictions that he's proposing as contradictions, actual contradictions?

No.

But the framework itself, though, and the way that the audience should be thinking through this is actually a good one. And that's what I mean. The Christian is probably going to reject O 'Connor's interpretations and obviously his sort of philosophical presuppositions, but there's nothing else really to critique about.

This.

So anyway, O 'Connor definitely has advantage at this point. DeSouza should really be calling out the interpretive issues that O 'Connor has so that he can acquit himself in front of the audience because he's just not doing a great job up there.

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Now, format, we've agreed to do a flip where you've been asking me questions. Now, let me ask you something.

If you've got something to ask.

Let me turn around and ask you questions in a sort of what I think is a more fundamental mode because it gets to what the Bible really is.

Let's hear it.

Do you think that the universe had a beginning?

I don't know. I would suspect yes.

You suspect yes.

Sure.

How did the writers of the book of Genesis know that?

I have no idea. I mean, if I'm going to be a guest, if I'm going to be cynical about this, if they did guess it would be 50 -50 guess. And I also think that if we had time, would it be a 50 -50 guess?

Yeah, because it might even be worse than that for you. Because if we had some kind of scientific popular hypothesis, because of course, the Big Bang might not have been the beginning of everything. Who knows, right?

But like whatever the popular scientific hypothesis is, if it were pointing to an infinite universe, for example, as Einstein thought we lived in, then I'm sure that people would open Genesis. They would say that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and say that the earth just means the earth itself, right?

Like, I think it would be equally easily interpretable on either account.

All right.

So one of my professors at Dartmouth was Robert Jastrow, the head of the Mount Wilson Laboratory, one of the great astronomers of the 20th century.

Sure.

So Jastrow writes in his book, God and the Astronomer is that for 250 years, modern science has been attempting to discover whether the universe had a beginning. And you can think of these scientists as ascending a very tall mountain in which there are many pathways.

And for many years, with the steady state hypothesis and so on, there were beliefs that the universe was eternal. It never had a beginning. In fact, that was the prevailing point of view. And then Jastrow argues it's almost as if we reach the top of the mountain.

So when it's your turn to ask questions of your opponent on the debate stage, you should ask some questions. I know, I know this is more this way, more informal. But the whole point of cross-examination or Socratic dialogue, if you will, is so that you can hang your opponent with his own words, essentially.

But when you get up there and start making speeches during cross, that's a waste of an opportunity. Hopefully a question is coming soon.

And there was a bunch of Hebrew prophets or theologians sitting there wouldn't have been there from the beginning. So I'm describing now a skeptic, a true skeptic and a true scientist describing the scientific shock that attends to a discovery that, and I think it is out of the spirit of that discovery for you to go, oh, yeah, I mean, it could have been this.

It's like tossing a coin. It isn't like tossing a coin. This is a question that's been argued for two centuries and only resolved in the last several decades and resolved decisively in one side and the other.

And the fact that you're not willing to just straight out say, yeah, it is actually an astounding fact that we now know.

No, no, no. I mean, look, the scientific method has also revealed to us that the earth was formed about four and a half billion years ago. That is much later than the sun. The gospel, the Old Testament account, the Hebrew Bible account tells us that it was the other way around.

So got that bit wrong.

All right.

So, so, so, so we're, yes, the Bible is not, sometimes it gets things wrong. You know, the Bible is not a science. It's not listing out a sign.

Well, now hold on a second. You can't now move the goalposts, especially if you're still going to, especially if you're still going to miss the, the, the, the, the issue.

Well, well, no, the issue of the, of the origin of the universe is extremely critical.

You just told me that Genesis predicted or knew about or somehow knew about the scientific hypothesis of the origin of the universe. Then when I pointed out another scientific observation that doesn't accord with Genesis, you tell me that Genesis isn't a scientific text to begin with.

Well, if you, if you read, if you read Genesis, it is making a astounding claim, which pertains to God. Obviously, God created the heavens and the earth.

Is it making a scientific claim or not? Is it telling us how the universe scientifically formed or not?

It's not telling us how the universe scientifically formed, because if it did, they would be outlining the history of the Big Bang.

Then what's the relevance of bringing this up in the first place?

Because, because it is stating a conclusion, not a process. It's not telling you how the universe was formed. It's not telling you about...