Person of Interest with J. Warner Wallace

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Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide Biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org

Well, welcome to The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport. And this week, we are not joined by my co -host,

Bud. He's not here, but we have someone else that will be very informative, a friend of mine,

Jim Wallace, also known as J. Warner Wallace. I always like to ask you this, why don't you go by Jim Wallace?

That's your name. Well, because there's a Jim Wallace at Sojourners. So whenever I do radio, people would think he's very different than me.

He has a very, very different perspective. And some of the shows I would be on, they would say, well, you know, people think that you're him.

And when we introduce or say next week we're going to have, or next hour we're going to have, we get all these angry emails.

Like, why would you have this guy on your show? So they said, you need to change your name. Well, I was always using

J. Warner Wallace on search warrants anyway, because I used to want to hat tip my grandfather, whose name was

Warner. And so I would always put that on my professional stuff anyway. So I just said, okay, I'll just start using that name publicly, which

I really didn't want that to change. I was Jim Wallace, believe it or not, until somebody told me I could not be. I was actually

Greg Koppel. You cannot be Jim Wallace anymore. So that's what changed it. And so for folks who may not know you, you just gave a hat tip there of your background.

You mentioned doing warrants, signing warrants. You have, I think, 20 plus years doing some work outside of Christianity.

You've been on shows like Dateline and others. For folks who may not be familiar with you, what do you spend most of your career doing?

Well, I spent about 26 years doing cold—well, not all of those cold cases. A lot of it was toward the end, probably the last 12, 13 years or so.

And we had collateral duties before that when I was working homicides. And these are just unsolved murders. And our team originally started picking up the unsolved just to see if we could, you know, push it across the finish line a little bit.

And then, you know, at some point we got successful, so they just formed a permanent team. And that's where I sat for quite a bit of time, working these old cases.

And some of these ended up in books, which is, you know, kind of the approach that I took when I first—

I was about 35 when I first examined Christianity. I didn't know any other way to get in. I mean, I didn't know—this wasn't something I thought, well,

I'm going to take this particular approach. You know, I just—that's like, you know, if you were, I don't know, if you were an

English teacher, maybe you'd be focused on the way the Gospels are written grammatically. I don't know.

But from an investigator's perspective, that's the only thing I knew was, well, these are making claims about the past that seem to be sequential, like they're in chronology, as if these things actually happened.

And then you get the end of John's Gospel, he's making it sound like he actually saw this stuff. So in the end,

I thought, let's just test these as eyewitness accounts. That's how I actually got into the whole—I became interested.

Well, also, a pastor was clever and originally, you know, pitched Jesus in a way that I could catch him.

He said that Jesus was super smart, like the smartest man who had ever lived. And I just thought that was provocative.

You know, I wasn't sure what to make of that. Lots of people are smart, but I wanted to see what was so smart about him.

So I bought a Bible just sitting on my shelf back here that was the—a pew Bible that really was the gateway in to studying

Jesus. And that's really what developed over those years. That's why I'm writing about it still today. Yeah, I mean, for folks that don't know, you were pretty much against Christianity for years.

You were a police officer, which I do always find it interesting that if anyone called the

Los Angeles Police Department, they always found a Jim Wallace there for several decades. Yeah, because we were in a—I never tell people exactly what agency.

I used to never tell people because my chief would say, don't tell anybody where you're from. You're a Los Angeles county.

I don't think that—that chief was just not a believer and really did not want a believer out there as the face of the agency.

Isn't that interesting? You would think it would be just the opposite, right? Now, I bet you there's places in my world, though, where if you were to survey the department, that most would be

Christians. But here in Los Angeles County, that was never the case. It was never—I didn't know a lot of—I knew a couple.

They were older guys, older than me, maybe about 10 to 15 years or more time on the agency.

They were very much—not all of them came to faith early, but they could not tell you why it was true.

So they came to faith by way of an experience, which was a valid way to come to faith. I'm not against that idea.

But when I asked questions, it just seemed so unreasonable that I just was not interested. And the few people that would say they were publicly

Christians, you'd come in contact with were usually people you were taking to jail. And then you thought, hmm, yeah, this whole system seems like it's not very powerful and doesn't seem like it's reasonable.

And so I just stayed away from it. I only went to church because my wife was interested in going to church.

And I think I would have gone like my dad, where he still would go to church, even though he doesn't think it's true, but he thinks it's helpful.

He would much rather live in a Christian nation than in some other nation. And I think that's interesting.

Yeah, that's very interesting. He sees the power in it. And this is why this book I just wrote called Person of Interest really kind of tries to leverage that a little bit.

And I gave him a copy about two weeks ago. I don't know if he'll read it, but I mean, it's not as though he hasn't heard everything

I could say for the last 20 years. It just doesn't seem to move him. But and that's just the nature of it.

I always tell people, if you think that somehow this evidential approach that I take has some power beyond God's power, you're crazy.

It's all God top down. It's just a matter of what is it you are communicating about the gospel that God is then going to use to do what

God's going to do. And so for me, because he knew who I was, I think he knew that this is the gospel had to be kind of cloaked in this kind of an approach.

Yeah. Right. Where I could come in this way. And I thought that the same would be true for my dad. But a lot of people are resistant to the truth claims for reasons entirely different than evidential reasons.

You know, they've got volitional issues. They don't want it to be true. And God hasn't yet moved to to soften their hearts on this issue.

And that's why I always say that people don't have an evidence problem. They have a spiritual problem. That's right.

And so we can give them all the evidence in the world, and it doesn't matter. Now, your background as a police officer being, you know, really being against, not so much maybe against the gospel, but you weren't really a believer.

You approached it from your background as a cold case detective. And for folks that don't know your first book, really, that kind of was your approach, right?

To apply your background as a cold case detective, doing cold cases and looking at the gospels and saying,

OK, is this really is this a legitimate source? I mean, your expertise is knowing eyewitness testimony years after the fact.

That's exactly what the gospel accounts are. And you applied that to that. Yeah. And, you know, Andrew, part of it was because my family was divided between like, you know, almost everyone was not a believer.

Or if they were a believer, they certainly never talked about it. I never was part of their their faith, never part of their life.

Rather, I suspect that my grandmother on my mom's side, that entire part of her family was raised

Catholic, but never, never, ever. It was part of anything growing up, really.

My mom was kind of a cultural Catholic by the time she had me. And so it was the kind of thing you might do on Christmas or probably just Christmas.

I mean, it was not so it wasn't even on Easter, but you would go. I probably went a half a dozen times as a kid.

And it just seemed like something that was very insincere because it didn't feel like that.

My mom was living it. She didn't own a Bible. It wasn't a part of our conversations, not a part of our life.

So I just thought it was this fantasy that some people probably think of it more deeply than others.

I was not interested in it at all. But in the end, you know, a lot of it for me was

I had this division between people who weren't believers and I had a small pocket. My dad's second wife is was

Mormon, is Mormon. And so she raised my half brothers and sisters LDS. So when

I started to look at scripture for the first time, seriously, they right away presented me with the scripture for Mormonism.

And they took a view that was, hey, this is we believe these documents are foundationally true.

And so to be honest, in some ways, it was a very much a presuppositional view. And I just thought,

OK, I didn't know one for the other. So I got a book of Mormon. My sister gave it to me and I read through the

Book of Mormon. And I remember that the quad in Mormonism is that Old and New Testament, the King James, the

Book of Mormon, the Doctrines and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price. Well, I got a hold of a quad pretty quickly. And I just before I even finished the

Old Testament, I had read the Book of Mormon and halfway through the Doctrines and Covenants. And as I worked through it,

I realized that, you know, I just needed to know which of these two systems. Yeah, because, you know, if you've never read scripture and you've got a

King James Bible, it's going to sound a lot like the Book of Mormon. As a matter of fact, doctrinally, at the time that Joseph wrote the

Book of Mormon, some of his theological principles were pretty, you know, kind of like a denomination rather than as crazy as they got by the time he's in the stuff that's in the

Pearl of Great Price. So, you know, he changed, his doctrines changed over time. People don't know that. I mean, that's the important thing.

People don't know that. And I think Sandra Tanner worked on something where she said that basically the

Book of Mormon is closer to Christianity than it is Mormonism. It absolutely is.

And so if you don't know the difference, I mean, even sounds and of course, you know, it takes a bunch of Isaiah and he puts it just word for word in Book of Mormon.

So there's a lot of stuff. But if you're just a first in time investigator, like I'm not even sure I had read

Isaiah before I read Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. Right. Because I'm just like looking at it from the first first time.

So so I didn't know which was true. So how do you distinguish them between. So it's not just that the evidential approach led me to something true.

It also can kind of prevent you from falling into the lie. Because the first thing you're going to want to know is, well, how do

I what's the system by which we determine a witness is reliable? And if we apply it to the Book of Mormon really quick, it starts to deteriorate me really fast.

So it's not to me. I just knew, OK, I know I wasn't quite sure yet about Christianity, but I knew the

Book of Mormon was not true because it can't uphold the test. So I just knew to walk away from that.

So in some ways it was kind of inoculate, inoculated me from from doing too much more time on that side.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny how we use our background. You use your background as an investigator, you know, with eyewitness testimony to examine, you know,

Book of Mormon, the Gospels. It was funny when I studied Mormonism, when I was working with a co -worker who was

Mormon trying to explain to me, like try to convince me, I'm a by background, I'm a software engineer.

So I write programs. Well, I actually wrote a program to calculate the birth rate and death rate and to really see whether the

Book of Mormon, because the thing is, if the Book of Mormon is right, right, it should be able to have a normal birth rate that's necessary for all the people that die in the wars that are in the

Book of Mormon. Now, in the 1800s, to have those many people die is not unusual, but it is unusual, you know, if you're saying in the first century.

And so I had calculated that the birth rate required for the death rate in the

Book of Mormon was like 12 to 15 times the normal percentage. It was like, this just isn't normal.

I know. So it was like, okay. So this is part of the stuff that makes a difference when you're starting to,

I mean, even just archaeologically, right? It was a thousand year period of time chronicled in the Book of Mormon from about 600

BC to about 400 AD. And while you would think there'd be some evidence that any of that, any of that, a single

Mormon name on some description somewhere. So you so I mean, it's when you say that also, as you start to listen to how people would justify.

This is why I'm very careful about how I will defend my Christian beliefs, because you start to see certain patterns and defense attorneys and what they say that I often will see.

And people who are religious on one to not one religion or another who will try to justify claims as well.

And I just don't want to I want to make sure that we're not doing that. I mean, because if that's the case, I'm not interested. But as I got more and more and also just I think that part of it and I and when

I wrote Cold Case Christianity, I just stayed inside the Gospels. And I, I wrote a longer version originally and my wife read it and she said, this is really boring.

So so when I wrote it, finally, for David C. Cook, the publisher, I tried to streamline a little bit to make it to move to make it read faster.

And so we ended up leaving a lot of stuff out and this has been hanging around. And when Zonnerman came to me and said, hey, would you.

They wanted something similar because I had not been with Zonnerman yet. And I said, well, I've already written that book, but I do have a different approach.

So whereas the book, whereas Cold Case kind of looks at everything inside the Gospels. I never really got a chance to explore what

I wanted to explore, which is outside the Gospels. In other words, if Jesus is who he said he was, what do you expect to be more than just this little tablet of information, the four

Gospels? Of course, there's a ton. There's a ton of impact that Jesus had. So what we did with this book is we said,

OK, look like you're working on no body murder. You don't even have a crime scene. You don't even have a body. He got rid of the body and he buried it someplace and they never found it.

So so, you know, there's not even a crime scene. No one even took a report. This is sad. But, you know, he reports that she had a fight last night and everyone believes it.

And then probably everyone who works a missing person case like that should come in and photograph the house. But, you know, you take them sometimes the guy.

Well, this case, the guy came to the department like two days later. So now he's at the front desk giving a report about his missing wife who he thought would come back a couple of days ago.

She hasn't come back. Well, that first person who takes a report is a service officer. It's not even a detective. That's just the guy working at the front desk.

He takes the report, puts it in the computer or puts it on paper in those days, and then he ships it back to records. Now, two days later, it's assigned to a detective.

We're now four days behind the murder. So by the time he gets it, he calls. Well, did she come back?

Because a lot of times they just come back and no, they didn't come back. Well, can you talk about this while I'm at work today? Can you come over tomorrow?

Sure. Now we're five days behind it. OK, so there's just no I mean, you got no crime scene. You got no body.

So how do you make this case, especially if it goes cold for 30 more? And which I've got a couple of those that went cold for 20 to 30 more years.

Well, you have to kind of demonstrate that on the day of the disappearance, if he was murdered, it's like a bomb went off. Every bomb has got a fuse.

And then afterwards, there's debris everywhere. There's fallout. You can tell people you can demonstrate what kind of bomb you have just from the fuse and the fallout.

And that's what we do in these no body murder cases. And I've done a couple of them. I think at least one's been on.

Yeah, one's been on dateline. So so these are cases that I'm pretty familiar with and nobody wants to file these cases.

No DA wants to file them because they're terrible cases. You got to prove, number one, that she's dead. Then you got to prove that he did it.

So so it's a twofold problem because you have no body. So so so so I thought, well, could the same

I took the same approach with Jesus. If you said, OK, I'm not going to acknowledge anything in the New Testament. I'm just going to stop.

I'm going to imagine a scenario in which every New Testament had been destroyed. If it seemed to me that if Jesus was who he said he was, that God would have there be more than just a

New Testament title wave of information. Now, granted, everything about Jesus that can be known is

New Testament dependent. That's not the issue, because in the end, all we're going to do is find evidence of other people who have already read the

New Testament who are going to be talking about it. OK, but that's the kind of thing you would expect, right? Like like when

Elvis died, people talked about Elvis. They still write a book a year. It's been 40 years. There's more books written about Elvis.

You'd be amazed at how many there are. So I looked at the entire catalog of Elvis books and I watched how the story morphs over time.

Well, that's what you would expect from the guy who was the biggest recording artist of his day. You know, until Michael Jackson came along, nobody sold more albums.

I think he's like the second richest dead celebrity in terms of album sales. OK, I mean, this guy has had a huge impact on the industry.

Well, wouldn't you expect that people would take the core story of Elvis and extrapolate from that all kinds of legends that will sell books?

Of course they did. But you can reconstruct the core story of Elvis from what everyone has in common on all these salacious books.

Well, something similar happens with Jesus, which you would expect. I mean, you would expect that Jesus is who he said he was.

He'd at least have the impact that Elvis had in history. And that's what we're trying to do with the person of interest to show that, yeah, you could reconstruct the story of Jesus from the amazing, oversized, really unparalleled impact that one person had on human history in lots of places that you might not expect it.

And that's what we're trying to do with the book is to show the kind of unexpected nooks and crannies. There's a lot of books out there.

I've got them sitting back here because I read them and cited them in the book that talk about the impact of Jesus. But none that I found would actually go back and look for the fingerprints.

So if you said, for example, he's had a huge impact on science, which he has. But no one I could find had given me a list of all of the fathers of scientific disciplines that were devout

Jesus followers. And that list is tremendous. I mean, there's no corner of science that hasn't had a discipline founded by a

Christian, either in antiquity all the way to quantum mechanics and computer sciences, computer languages. These are things that that Christians have been involved in.

And here's what's cool about it is those Christians also write about Jesus. So if you just had the writings of the science fathers, you could learn more about Jesus than you can from the writings of the church fathers.

Interesting. That's very, very interesting. Right. Because that means you'd have to destroy not only the New Testament, but the entire history of the

Antonine fathers and beyond. And the entire history of scientific thinkers, because the biggest and best ones historically wrote about Jesus to destroy all that work.

So that's the footprint that is so huge about Jesus. And I want to kind of show it, especially for young people who

I didn't learn this in Los Angeles County. Maybe others are. But I think everything

I don't think I've learned a single thing about Jesus of Nazareth in my entire education through, you know, through a master's degree.

Not a single thing. So it's important for us. And by the way, if you were to search and we tried this in terms of research assistants and we looked at books and online resources, there's a lot of universities that will make their online libraries available.

So you can actually just kind of search or sign in and you can search. But it's hard to find people who are writing about the

Christian identity of major scientists in history. As a matter of fact, most they will.

So I know I'm grossly underestimating the impact of Jesus, because a lot of these profiles about important scientists have had their religious identity scrubbed.

So I don't even know. You know, you have a sense where I know where he was born and what time he was born.

There's a good chance this dude is a Christian. But unless I can find explicitly someone writing about him being a

Christian, I'm not going to include him. So. So I know we've underestimated the number of scientists that are Christians in the book.

Yeah. And so the book you're referring to is your latest book, Person of Interest, which any book that's all about Jesus, I love just off the bat.

But for you, for folks who don't know, but before we get into the content, you have a different background as well that I think

I've seen more evidence in this book than any of your other books as an illustrator. Yeah.

Well, I asked, you know, my background was in design and in architecture. And then I became a detective or police officer for years.

While I was working patrol, they would just have me come out and draw the the murder scenes. So I was at a lot of murders when

I was just a patrol officer. And I was working gangs for a couple of years. I can remember I did a couple of murders while I was working gangs, not investigating, just drawing them or building the model afterwards for court.

So by the time I got assigned there, I think it was kind of a natural transition to start investigating them, because I was already been at the crime scenes.

So many other people knew me. So that's that's kind of how that worked. And I didn't really use the art side of it aside from drawing crime scenes until I started doing jury trials.

And then we knew that we can make these visual. And the first time we really robustly did that with media was probably around 98.

So we we started. So it's been about 24, 23 years ago. And we just started doing visual presentations.

So I asked and I always knew that if you could do a hundred closing arguments before you do the closing argument, you'll do a very good closing argument because you've worked out all the bugs.

And so I asked Arvin because I knew that I had I had been speaking about cold case for probably five or six years before I wrote the book.

And so I knew that all the visual material was already ready. But for this book, I knew that I needed a couple of years to build this visually.

And so they gave me two years to build the stage presentations and to give a few so I could see.

Yeah. And a lot of what I built, which I thought was going to be so powerful visually, I just don't use because it's

I did it once. And I know it's it drags. It's too slow. It's it's not compelling.

It's true. It's all good. It's all informative, but it wasn't compelling in a stage presentation. I wanted a book that would be compelling and a quick read.

So that's why there's over 400 illustrations in the book. Those are really just kind of the stage presentation illustrations that I've turned in the line.

So you can you can print them in a book or otherwise they're full color and they don't no one can afford to print.

Also, I like the idea if you're on a blank white page. So as I the interior composition of the book, the layout is important to me.

Like, I feel like every book is like a piece of art. The whole book is a piece of art, how it opens.

I wanted to I told the publisher, I don't want to single it. There's not a list on the page like the list of the science fathers.

I want every page when you open it randomly to have at least one illustration or a side box or an icon for some graphic element on every single page.

Because I knew that we're in a generation that is visual and that some people will will skip over the images because they really want the text.

But a lot of young people are reading image to image. So I wanted it to be like a graphic novel in a sense where you can just kind of quickly and it reads fast because it's, you know, it's 30 percent images.

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny you say that because I actually was going to ask you. I had noticed that and I didn't realize it was on purpose.

I just thought you had so many, you know, either illustrations. The other thing that's really I really like about it is you have on not not every page, but a lot of the pages you you're putting.

Basically, here's what what the opposition would say. Here's here's. And, you know, I'm just trying to look for the objection.

Why are you trying to get the first century into? Yeah, no, I agree. And I think that's part of it.

But, you know, you know, Andrew, I don't even feel the same way I do. Like we there's there's a genre of apologetics books and so many will do so many similar things.

I'm always afraid I still want to do the same thing everyone else has already done because there's better books out there. Who wants to write?

There's already a better version exists. You know, so so people will say, oh, is your book like Case for Christ? Well, not really.

If you look at Lee, Lee's a journalist, so he's always interviewing people. So it's a collection of interviews, whereas I will do some interviews.

But for the most part, I don't trust experts. OK, and I don't trust myself as an expert. So what I have to do basically is

I want to get back to what is the thing the expert is talking about? Like what is the base fact or evidence that because if it happens in jury trials, honestly, is that we bring up an expert to talk about this

DNA? And sure enough, our guys, a county employee, because it cost us zero to get him is we have no budget.

It's all in the county dime. We're the prosecutor. So we can't hire the best expert we have to basically use.

And we can occasionally. But for the most part, we're trying to do it on the cheap. Whereas the defense team, they got money, they're going to hire the same guy you have, but 15 times better.

You know, he's the national expert. He's going to be able to say, yeah, I taught this other guy at the county here.

I taught five years ago. OK, so now you're looking like an idiot. Right. So but but in the end, we tell jurors, hey, experts just offer inferences.

Doesn't mean the inference is true. That's right. You get to go back to the evidence and use your common sense to be able to determine which of these two experts is making more sense.

So what I try to do in this book is just get back to what are the facts? You know, here's the data. Here's what you find.

If you look at all the. For example, we talk about the fuse that leads up to Jesus's appearance and then the fallout afterwards.

And one aspect of that fallout is literature. But I wanted to know, like how many voices exist in antiquity who have spoken something about Jesus?

Some of those will be manuscript writers, but some of those voices are just recorded on manuscripts. We don't know anything about Celsus except that origin speaks a lot in responding to Celsus.

So we hear Celsus's voice on the pages of origins work. So there's a voice, even though the author is a

Christian author. Well, if you go through history like that, you're going to discover that there are way, way more non -Christian voices between the

Greeks and Persians and Romans and Egyptians and Jews and all the non -canonical authors. Then there are

Christian voices who say something about Jesus. And so you can now reconstruct a story. OK, so let's take out the church fathers.

Now, what would we learn if we just had the non -Christian voices? And I have one chapter that just summarizes.

And then here's the other thing, too. We knew we had about 250 pages we could work with. And so then we knew we had about 50 pages we can put in the endnotes.

The problem was we had over 300 pages of endnotes. So we had to kick off the other 270 pages to a

PDF file because I knew if I put that stuff in, like who's going to read that? It's going to be so boring.

I mean, it has to move faster. So there's lots of footnotes. But some of these, if you want to know, well, who are those 400 science fathers that you mentioned in the list?

You know, well, you have to go to the footnotes to get that in the PDF file because there's just no way to put that in there. People have said, why didn't you put that in there?

Because it would have been about 30 continuous pages of lists. Who reads 30 pages of lists?

Nobody. So I just wanted to get that data to you, but I don't want to deliver it in the pages of the book. That just means paying for printing of pages that no one's going to read because it's powerful to have all those names.

But what are people going to do? They're going to do what they typically do when they come to the genealogies in the Bible, right?

Just flip over that. That's right. They're going to flip on. That's exactly what they're going to do. But it is a quick -moving book.

Between the illustrations you have in the side notes where you give the objections, and that,

I think, as an apologetic book, it's really good. Here's all the content, and each one of them, here's the objective, here's a quick answer.

That is really helpful just for folks who want to go, hey, I've had this objection. Anyone who's been following your podcast or your blog articles,

I think a lot of this has been in works much more than two years, because I've been hearing this from you for a long time.

And you really do present, and I think because of your background, you present this different than others do.

You're coming at it from an investigative detective type of mindset. You're bringing that in, and I think that is why you always refer to your original book,

Cold Case Christianity, being a cold case detective.

You talk about being a case maker, saying, okay, let's make a case for this. That's what a detective is going to do when you go to court.

So I think your overall approach to the way you write, I think, all of your books is very different.

It's unique. I agree with you. I have some great books that have never been published. I have a great book on evangelism.

I got 192 pages written, and it'll probably never be in print. Why? There's other books that are just as good.

I actually told Greg Koukl once that basically between Greg Koukl's book,

Tactics, and Jason Lyle's book, the ultimate, I'm trying to remember the title now, it's the ultimate something for creation.

I forget the title, but Jason Lyle has a book basically talking about, he's talking presuppositional politics.

Greg Koukl's book on Tactics really helps you how to ask good questions.

And I looked at those two and said, between those two and anything from Ray Comfort, because basically all his books are the same, just read those books.

Who needs to write another book? I totally get it. Basically, those sum up exactly everything that I had written in my book, so I'm like, why bother?

Here you go. Just read these. And your book is different that way. I've had publishers come to me and say, hey, would you write a book where you're doing a daily devotional or something?

They're out there. I mean, there are. Lee Strobel did one with Mark Middleberg. It's an apologetics daily devotional.

Also, my concern, too, is that, well, this is just my selfishness, is that I want to do something creative because that's why

I do any of this, right? Is that I missed the creative aspect of art and architecture.

And for a lot of years before I was working cold cases, I wasn't able to scratch that itch the way

I wanted to. I mean, I started a police band, a musical band. For years, we had that.

That was hilarious. Anyway, but the idea was we're just trying to scratch an itch that I didn't think that I was getting working patrol and working gangs or whatever it was.

And so how do you be creative? So if someone pitches a project that is informative, but I don't have a creative angle.

I'm not going to enjoy doing it. It's just going to feel like a homework assignment. It's not going to feel like, oh, every day

I get up and I can create something new. So when I'm looking at it,

I know the problem with creative ideas is that creativity requires you to take a risk of tanking it because you could.

You know, you could when you see people who are like musician or musical artists and they have an album out.

Right. Well, I'll give you an example. Do you remember the old band Boston? So Boston came on the scene.

They were MIT engineers. They had a song called More Than a Feeling. That was a huge hit. Right. That first album, they had spent like eight years writing music and they pitched their first album.

Well, then, of course, it was a huge hit. They wanted album number two. Well, album number two ends up sounding pretty much exactly like album number one.

By album number three, they were done. They could not turn creative corners. But look at someone like David Bowie.

Look at his career. Compare Young Americans all the way to Hunky Dory or to the first album,

Ziggy Stardust. Compare those albums, Fred. I mean, there's like this guy was constantly pushing envelopes.

Now, some of those were really not good. Some were better than others. Right. So you have to be willing to take a risk if you're creative and stretch a genre.

So I knew when we did this book that I was going to, in some ways, try to stretch the genre.

What I'm trying to do is to get the church that doesn't give a lick about whether this is even true. Yeah. It doesn't even have any idea how to express it to others, how to defend it to others, how to make a case for it to others.

If you're running a Christian apologetics niche, even if you're running a Christian evangelism niche, that's not selling to the church at all.

People don't want to read those books. I mean, you could say, well, yeah, some will. We have a tribe of people who listen to our podcast who will, of course, buy those books.

But the church at large would rather buy Crazy Love or some other book that's really about how I can have – how will it affect my life tomorrow?

How can I be better at X, Y, or Z? How can I experience God in some way that's more experiential?

These are the kinds of books that sell more. Even Christian fiction sells at a much higher rate than other Christian nonfiction books.

So how do we take a nonfiction category and try to be creative with it to capture what would otherwise be the fiction audience that needs to know that this is defendable in a way that is –

So here's my concern for young people, is that you have a saved

Christian that lacks the confidence to be able to resist the cultural onslaught.

I want us to – if you know, and the first book talks about this, if you know your vest will stop bullets, you are far more likely to stand in it calmly in a gunfight because you've already seen it stop bullets in the range.

Now, you may be wearing the vest and never seen it that it could stop bullets, and you may still have some blind trust in the vest because someone told you about it.

But until you see it stop bullets – and people, by the way, who've been in shootings where they have survived it with their vest on, oh, these folks have a firsthand experience of what the vest can do.

Now they are calm in other – they have more confidence. I was just talking to an officer in North Carolina because I do a lot of work with police officers, and he was telling me about how after being involved in a shooting, he got dispatched to a school where a kid with an

AR -15 was barricaded in a bathroom. And as he's getting on the way there, he realized that the vest he was wearing would not stop that round, and he had no ballistic helmet.

And he felt like, I just had a certain amount of trepidation that I was under -equipped, and I knew that I was probably going to be the first guy on scene, and it was probably going to be about five minutes before I got back up.

But I knew that I was outgunned, and I didn't have like a ceramic plate and carrier which would have stopped the

AR -15 round. I didn't have a ballistic helmet. I just felt like I was under – and so he did his job.

He did what he was called to do because we're all called to do it. But he – I thought to myself, well, we should probably start a

GoFundMe or something just to get officers this equipment so they would – because agencies can't afford to get up to them sometimes in smaller agencies.

But again, it was that he – if he had had the equipment he needed – that's what we're trying to do with the claims of Christianity for young people.

Again, God is going to make the move. God is going to flip the switch. But what I want you to know is

I want you to have confidence that this thing can stop bullets so that when your friends are dogging you about sexuality, gender identity, sanctity of life, marriage, any number of issues now that the world has rejected the teaching of Jesus, well, you just have to know that you've got to stand tall with this.

This is true and you have to be faithful rather than popular. And so that's the call

I think to all these books. Hopefully, if people read them, it can make a change. Yeah, and with all your books and folks, if you're listening, you're hearing – when

Jim writes, all these stories come out as well. His background, his experience as a police officer, it makes it a good, quick read.

It makes it interesting, which is something different. So we're talking about Person of Interest, a recent book written by Jim Wallace, J.

Warner Wallace, who we're speaking with. Let's just real quick go for our sponsor who helps us put this show on, and that is

MyPillow. Folks, if you want a good night's sleep, those who are regular listeners, you know that I love my

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So we appreciate that. And so let's get to the content of your book,

Jim. As I said in the beginning, this book is all about Christ, which when I first got a hold of it,

I was like, I love any book that's all about Christ. But you approach it, as you've already alluded to, differently.

You have spent years looking at different ways of making arguments.

And I think that's one of the things I appreciate of the ministry that God has with you, is you come about things differently than most apologists do.

And that's one of the reasons I think that you're, someone like you, and you're not alone. There's other people that do that with their unique backgrounds.

I mean, you mentioned your friend Lee Strobel. He's a journalist. He approaches it that way. But when you have someone that is doing something that's a little different, that's helpful.

It's extremely helpful, because when you're sitting and talking with an atheist, and they've already heard all the arguments from any of the mainstream apologists who they've been listening to, they have the arguments.

I mean, when I studied world religions and I wanted to make arguments against, say, for example,

Jehovah Witnesses, I got a copy of their book, Reasoning the Scriptures. Why? That told me everything of how they're going to make an argument, right?

So now I don't use any of those arguments that they have in that book. Why? They're prepped for that. I want them thinking.

So I'm going to ask them something differently. And that's really what your books do. This book especially, it's a different way of looking at things and a different way of approaching it.

And that is refreshing. It's good because it's like, okay, that's another tool to put in the toolbox, where I can say, okay, if someone comes to me with, now

I have some ways of looking at it. You provided some different ways the world looks at Christ.

So I wanted to look at some of these. You talk about the, I'm just going to go through the different chapters. You have

Jesus in chapter 2 as the average ancient.

Because this one and the copycat were the ones I just found kind of interesting. And I've heard you talk about these for years.

So let's talk about that. What is the view that people have of it? It's just average ancient.

Yeah, there's a sense in which people recognize some similarities between the story of Jesus and other deities that have been worshipped by ancient people groups.

And how many times have you heard this now in the last, really, I'd say probably the last 20 years has been the biggest rise of people who are kind of the

Jesus mythers who would say, and there's an entire kind of cottage industry of authors and speakers that are out there on the atheist side who would say, yeah,

Jesus has just been copied. He's not even a real historical person. He's just a myth in the long line of dying and rising saviors that populated antiquity.

He should be given no more credence than Osiris or Horus or Mithras or any of these others that they would say are really, and they would make parallels.

So they'll tell us, let me describe for you, Osiris, let me describe for you Mithras. And they'll make these long, elaborate descriptions of these other gods that seem like, my goodness, they're describing

Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, if you really do the research, you'll recognize that they're not telling you the truth about their descriptions.

But they do recognize something that I recognize, which is there are overarching similarities, very broad similarities.

So I thought, let's make a list. So let's just ignore Jesus for a second. Let's just go back to all the ancient mythologies.

Let's include things like Quetzalcoatl on the South American continent. Let's get it all over the world.

Let's take a look. Because if you examine like deities from the Americas, you'll find that the similarities are there, too.

And these similarities are just broad, overarching. They reflect the expectations that any thoughtful person would have about God if he's thinking or she's thinking about God.

Even if you just imagine, well, how do you know? Because this is something we discovered in the data, and I include this in that chapter.

There's been studies done now by mostly atheists, Ivy League schools across the globe, where they're looking at, you know, what is the default position of young people when it comes to theism?

It turns out atheism is not and agnosticism is not the default position. I've done a number of studies on this now.

The default position of infants and young people is they look at a world that appears to be designed and they infer a designer.

This is why the vast majority of people on planet Earth believe in some kind of higher power. This is true today.

It was true in antiquity. So you think, oh, well, atheism is on the rise. Well, it might be, but not really.

That's not when you look at the global situation. Don't get caught up in America in 2021. Look at the global situation in 2021.

And if you look at that, you'll see that atheism is the very vast, a tiny percentage of overall humans on planet

Earth. Well, these people like us, we have certain expectations. You know, for example, if you think there's a

God, well, you probably think that God can do supernatural things. Well, that's one of those expectations, the 15 I identified.

You probably think if there's a God who's supernatural, he would come into the world in a supernatural way. Well, there's another one of those expectations.

Well, these mythologies share some of these, not all of them. The 15 that I identified,

I could have just identified 10. But I wanted to, I mean, we read through the first time and we found a handful, you know, like eight or nine.

And all of us say, yeah, I'm seeing this, I'm seeing this. And then somebody would say, well, I saw three of these, though. And I'm like, oh, we should go back and make sure we didn't overlook anything because maybe there's more.

We just didn't read it deep enough. So we went back and read it a second time and then a third time. And then we end up with 15. So those 15 are similarities between the ancients from Attis to Heracles to, you know,

Cyrus or whatever it is. So we compare those 15. No one's got more than about 10.

And they're always a different 10. And no one's got less than about six. So that's the group we picked. Now, interestingly,

Jesus shows up in history at a time when the vast majority of these mythologies are still being worshipped by some people groups somewhere on the planet.

So he's in the overlap because not every one of these religions continues very long into the common era.

But but there's an overlap there where the vast, I think all but one or two that I could find were all being worshipped simultaneously.

And in the middle of that appears Jesus of Nazareth possessing not six of the attributes or 10 of the attributes, but he's the only one who possesses all 15 of the attributes.

That's interesting to me. In other words, it's like Paul says when he's on Mars Hill, you people are super religious and you believe in a lot of gods.

But it turns out there is a God over here I'm going to tell you about named Jesus. And now what's interesting is

Paul saying what C .S. Lewis says about myth. He uses Lewis use the word myth to mean simply a narrative about origins and deity and the role that God plays in our lives.

Right. Not myth as like a falsehood or a lie or a fictional narrative.

No, he's using the word myth as to mean the stories about deity. And what Lewis said was that the ancients wrote myths about gods from the minds of their own poets, whereas Jesus is

God's myth grounded in what we call real things. Now, what is interesting, what

Paul says is he says, you all are very religious. You even have a tomb to the unknown God here. It's all very interesting.

But over here, we know that Jesus is God because we saw him rise from the grave. Yeah. And what he's basically saying is you're.

And by the way, if you look at the ancient mythologies of Osiris and all this, they are not written as eyewitness accounts that some early group of people actually saw this

God. They're written as narratives, as stories, as fables. So what Paul is saying is, hey, you've got your myths written from the minds of your poets.

But over here, we've got a true being who we observed with our eyes.

That's very different kind of claim. So that's why Lewis would say that that's grounded in real things.

These are grounded in fictional thoughts from the minds of poets. So that's the difference. And why would

God do that? Because any time the expected meets the expectations of the expector, you get a really good result.

Yeah, this is this is why if you show up looking like a bomb and when you're supposed to be a cop and I've done that, we're going undercover.

If you show up looking like I'm a police officer, can you tell me what happened? They're looking at you like that's not my expectations, what a police officer should look like.

So they're not going to give you much time. So you end up starting with your badge and your I .D. Well, really, really, I'm a police officer because you're not meeting their expectations.

So it takes a little while to work, to gain their confidence, to tell you what they're thinking. Is this even like it's a fake

I .D.? There's no way this guy's a cop. There's the problem. So Jesus ends up meeting the expectations of the expectors in a way that the story just explodes.

As soon as Jesus arrives, you see that they think of the growth with with Jesus because it's the ancient nature of, say,

Egyptian Osiris worship. Let's say you can't really track like I know at this point there were zero worshippers of Osiris.

And then within six weeks, there's this many. And then within six months, there's this many. Within 60 decades or 60 years, rather, six decades, there's this many.

Well, we're watching the growth of Christianity in real time in the first century.

Right. Like we can you can say that 30 A .D. There's no there's no Christianity by 130

A .D. You have a pretty thriving community. And by 330 A .D. is the religion of the empire.

What accounts for that explosive growth? Well, a lot of it is that he comes in the fullness of time.

The fuse is set in such a way that when the bomb explodes, the culture is ready for it.

The spiritual seekers are ready for it. The Jewish prophecies are already predicted it. And it just takes off like wildfire.

Yeah, I mean, I remember the movie Zeitgeist, which was a movie that a lot of people when you talk about the copycats of all these other gods.

Look, he's no different than Mithra or any of these others. And I did an episode once on the

Apologetics Live show years ago where we evaluated that movie, which is based off a book.

Here was the thing I found really interesting. The one thing that they had in that movie where so many people use this to try to say, well,

Jesus is just like the ancient deities of old, all the Egyptians. The one thing I found really interesting that they all had in common, supposedly, was all of them were born on December 25th, and all of them were called the

Son of God. Those were two elements in that movie that they had with all of them. And I always laugh at that.

I remember on the street recently in South Philly evangelizing, and someone brought me in because this guy's talking about all these

Egyptian gods. And this guy didn't know how to make an argument against it. And so I come over. He invited me into the conversation so that I could help with answering it.

And I said, well, you notice that they all have that in common. The guy goes, yeah. I said, and do you realize that Jesus wasn't born on December 25th?

And he went, what? Yeah, he was probably born in like April, sometime in the spring. And did you know that Son of God, S -O -N, and Son of God, S -U -N, only works in English, not in Egyptian?

So that wouldn't work with Mithra. And this guy was just like, mouth open. Because they hear these arguments.

It's like, well, that must be true. And it's kind of sad, but it doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to debunk some of these things.

Yeah, sometimes this means, like, would you chase down the claim? Again, we talk about this, right? Like, experts make inferences.

But you don't even know, unless you go back to the evidence from which they're making an inference, if the inference is reasonable.

I wrote a book called God's Crime Scene, looking at just the evidence for God in the universe. And what am

I using? I'm using the exact same evidence that the atheists use to draw a separate inference.

I think the better inference from the same exact evidence is theism. But it's not like I'm using different evidence.

It's not like I'm going to ignore all the evidence. No, I'm using the same evidence. The problem is that people will lie about the evidence.

And you see this in jury trials all the time, where you have to stop them, right? So, what will happen is, you know, we have the responsibility of closing arguments, and so does the defense.

But we get a rebuttal that the defense doesn't get, because we have the burden of having to—he's innocent. They'll prove him guilty, so we have that extra burden.

So, what we'll do is the defense team will almost always throw the—they'll narrate it in such a way that they kind of change the nature of the evidence, right?

Because that's what works for them. And we have to kind of go back and remind them, hey, they can say it that way, but you already know what the facts are.

Don't forget, the argument, my argument, his argument, that's not evidence. The only thing that's evidence is the evidence.

The arguments are not evidence. That's why, for example, you don't get a script of what we said in closing arguments.

It doesn't go back with you in jury deliberations. You don't get the PowerPoint. That doesn't go back with you in jury deliberations. That's not evidence.

That's just argument. So, in the end, I want you to return to evidence. And it turns out, if you look at the evidence for Mithras, look at the evidence for Osiris, none of these things they claim are actually true, except for the broad nature of them.

Yes, they enter the world. They can defeat death. Well, why wouldn't you think that your God could? Duh, right?

Like, if your God is God, he can probably defeat everything, right? He's all -powerful. You know, he's the creator of all things.

That's just what we think about when we think about God. Even higher powers today that are imagined amongst the secularists or amongst people who are not secular but maybe have some kind of broad view of God, they still embody usually those 15 attributes.

You know, they're thinking about that those seem reasonable, even to folks who just believe in a higher power. So, why would that surprise you?

But it turns out that Jesus meets the expectations. By the way, he also meets the expectations. I showed in that same chapter the expectations of the types that appear in the

Judaic history. You know, he's very similar in type. Again, only if you look at the broad outline of Moses, the broad outline of Jonah, the broad outline of Joseph.

You can draw, you can cherry -pick facts from Moses' life, from Joseph's life, from Jonah's life to make him sound just like Jesus.

But that is interesting. This is why, you know, oftentimes Jesus will parallel himself as Jonah was in the belly of the whale, so will

I be in the tomb. These kinds of things are, he's trying to leverage the fact that even the expectations of the

Jews in the history of the Jews is reflected in the person of Jesus in a way that should make him.

Now, again, does this mean, though, and we saw it, right? It's not like Jews suddenly said, oh, yeah,

I think these parallels convince us. No, and it's not true that every pagan decided that they would switch over to Christianity.

There are, God has given us more than enough evidence to demonstrate that it is true.

Yet, of course, more than enough reason to reject it. Why would that be the case?

Because really, I think what he's looking for is a sincere response from us, right? Even though I'm a compatibilist when it comes to free agency,

I'm not sure where you land on that. I believe you can do anything that can be done. I believe you do anything that you want to do.

And where God operates at the level of wants and desires, he changed my wants and desires.

And so he may change somebody who's reading this book. So, again, I never think that as an evidentialist, even

I don't think that I somehow my clever arguments have the power. Yeah. It's just that we're going to say something.

It seems to me that God could easily come to all of us without a single word ever having to be spoken just to ignite our faith.

He could. Yeah. But for some reason, he involves those of us as evangelists to share some piece of information.

The only question is, like, which piece of information are you going to share? Sometimes it depends on who you're talking to. Yeah, and it's important for, especially for my audience, my audience would be more presuppositional.

And you and I know each other. I know you a little. So when people say, oh, you're an evidentialist, yeah, you do make evidential arguments.

But as we've searched at the beginning of this show, you've made clear it's

God who does the work. And I think a lot of people make a mistake sometimes of thinking, oh, well, because I think there may be some, there are some actually, there may be.

There are some people who think they can convince someone into the kingdom. You're not that guy.

No, no. And I just know from my own personal experience, I mean, look, I knew this was the route. And if you had asked me back then when

I wasn't going to be as thoughtful theologically about how the whole process took place, you know,

I mean, I would tell you that. So what is it that brought me in? Well, it was a study of the evidence that God used like a presentation of the gospel, because it was ultimately a presentation of the gospel.

In other words, when I got to Romans and Corinthians, I knew already that the Bible was reliable.

And then what Paul said about my fallen nature and need for a savior and the fact that I've been rejecting

God all this time, I actually said, oh, that's so true. Yeah. I was willing to read into those chapters because I had already done the work in the gospels that now kind of opened up the script.

In other words, sometimes all we're doing here is removing the barriers. That's right. So that you can hear the gospel, because I would never have listened to the gospel unless you first help me remove the barriers that I had constructed.

They were just all my own prideful barriers. You know, this is, you know, that whole attitude that sometimes you have when you're the person who gets called to the scene every time to sort this out.

Like you're the person, I called you here so you would take control. Well, that ends up raising up a whole generation of folks who think they can take control of everything, including their theological life, you know.

So for me, I just needed to kind of knock those barriers down that I had built. And this process helped me to knock them down.

And in the end, it's the gospel, the gospel, the gospel, the gospel. And I hope no one reads a book about apologetics that isn't helping them to get ready to share the gospel.

Well, that's what Titus says, right? These are to shut the mouth of the ignorant, right, so that the gospel can go.

And that's really the goal of apologetics, I believe, is just shutting the mouth of the ignorant so that the gospel can go forth.

If you're doing apologetics and the gospel's not in there, then you might as well just join the debate club.

And I'll tell you something, I've been guilty of that. So I have been guilty. I look back and I think, you know,

I guess, again, it's my own. And I shouldn't feel this way, I guess, but my own aversion.

So as a nonbeliever, if you would have tried to approach me with the gospel, I would have shut you down.

And so I'm always thinking about, well, how can I get you to a place where you're now ready to hear, even if it's not from me?

But I realized looking back at that, that I'm what am I doing here? In the end,

I don't want people, I want people to think that I'm reasonable enough to just make the case and not think like the whole thing is goal oriented.

Like I just did all of this so I could preach the gospel to you. Well, that's why we're doing all of this.

But like, for example, if you ever seen like Christian movies, it feels like every time you watch a Christian movie, the whole thing, whatever it does, just going to end up, everything's going to turn out great at the end.

Everyone's going to be resolved. Someone's going to pray. Someone's going to receive Christ in the movie. I mean, this is like it's like every movie, right?

And we kind of look at that and think, well, that's not the way life is. Life is more complicated than that. It takes more steps for a lot of people.

Like, why can't we just have a little tension retained in the end of this, right? Because that's how life is. Like not everything has a rainbow at the end.

You know, we're all celebrating and dancing in a circle. And so I always wrote books that I thought were like, you know,

I want to get you to that point where you're right before the circle in the rainbow. But I wanted to just kind of pave the way.

But now that I'm older, supposedly at 60 now, I'm looking back at that and thinking, man, I should have been more clear in every one of these.

I should have been more clear. So again, it's like I look at Lewis's work and I'm thinking, you know, was he always, he always explained the gospel, even though.

And so I'm just looking back and thinking I could have probably done that better. Well, I mean, because God keeps sanctifying us, right?

I mean, that's, you know, that's the thing. We keep getting more and more like Christ. So yeah, anything we've done in the past is like,

I mean, I've wanted to re -preach sermons years ago because it's like, oh,

I could have done that so much better. Actually, I think I get done with a sermon on Sunday. I think

I could, like, as soon as I get done, I'm like, I could have done that better. When we first were writing articles, like when

I want to allow like my son, Jimmy, and I was probably does about 60 percent of our content. And I know he's like me.

He will look back at these things. I'm just posting him. You know, he's going to look back at these things two years from now and go,

I want to rewrite that. Yep. Yep. That's just the nature of our progress as thinkers, as Christians, as Christ followers.

The advantage with the Internet, though, is that we can actually go and update that.

Yes. Believe me, I've done that a number of times and I still feel like I need to go back and rewrite half the stuff online.

But, you know, hopefully we have grace and I think we do have grace as a community. But the non -believing community probably doesn't have that kind of grace.

Yeah. And I think that's the thing that you're really doing. And this book, I think is, with all your books actually, are very encouraging to the believers.

Right? And the goal of it, I think, for the unbelievers is, as you said, just remove some of those barriers.

Okay, here you make these arguments. But there's other ways of viewing it.

I don't know if you ever went to the Creation Museum. They used to have, when you first went in the Creation Museum, they would have basically a room you walk in and there's like a fossil there.

And there's two people looking at the fossil and they have them talking. One's a Christian, one's an atheist.

They're looking at the same evidence, but they're both interpreting it very differently. One's looking at the evidence and saying, this is evidence, you know, of a young earth.

The other one's looking at it and saying, this is evidence of an old earth. They're looking at the same exact fossil, right? And the whole point of it is to say, the evidence doesn't change.

That's right. It's the interpretation that changes. That's right.

And I thought the same thing because this is what Bart Ehrman separates Bart Ehrman from Bruce Metzger. Yeah.

Two people who work together and wrote one book together and one is out and one is in. They're looking at the exact same biblical evidence.

It's not like this manuscript evidence changed for Bart. Bruce was aware of all that evidence too.

He just interprets it differently. That's right. Yeah. And that's the whole thing is that I think when we're in a culture and we're more and more in this culture, that you have people that they're hearing the same false narratives over and over about Christianity.

They don't hear what Christianity actually believes. I know this because I talk to them on the streets when

I go out and evangelize. And they really believe the false narrative. Yeah. And when you start giving them the truth, there's a point where they deny what the

Bible actually says, even if they read it because they have their false narrative.

I remember opening the scriptures and I had someone I was talking about prophecies.

And I opened Isaiah 53 without mentioning where it was, when it was. I just read it. And I said, who's this speaking of?

He goes, Jesus Christ. I said, are you sure? He said, absolutely. I said, how can you be so sure?

And he's making an argument for it. And I'm like, but that's 750 years before Jesus. That's Isaiah.

Now, here's the thing. This is someone who is Jewish. Now, he was more of a liberal Jew, but he's

Jewish. And he never heard that. And so the whole time it's like, no, that's not true.

That doesn't happen. And yet it's like, well, here, you just proved that you know absolutely this is

Jesus. How do you know that? Yeah, I think that's a really smart way to do it, right?

Because what you're trying to do is—and I think you're absolutely right. I work with attorneys in the DA's office, many of whom would say they're

Jewish and even would celebrate. To some extent, the holy days, but they don't really ever read the

Old Testament. They aren't really religious Jews. They're more cultural. And so I think this is probably true for a lot of—sadly, for a lot of believers in every single category.

This is true, we know, for a lot of Christians. And sometimes we're writing books like this just for cultural Christians to kind of wake up and realize what is in your own scripture.

Would you be excited about reading your own scripture, right? Because especially in the South, and I'm from Los Angeles, so here it's not a dominant worldview.

So those who hold it probably have thought about it because they're in a world that's kind of denying it and putting pressure on them.

So we probably have thought about, like, why would we be in this small subset of our county? Yeah. Why would we be that?

Now, if you're in the South, this is like something everyone—I noticed, for example, when you're working with Mormons in Salt Lake City, that there's a culture, a business culture, a familial culture, just a culture in general that embraces a belief in Mormonism.

And even if you're a guy who really doesn't even convince that it's true, but it would behoove you to go through the steps because it'll benefit you in your marriage, it'll benefit you socially, it'll benefit you even professionally if you are part of that culture.

Well, the same has been true in the South for a largely dominantly Christian culture. But, like, if you asked these folks—so, for example, whenever you role -play as an atheist, which

Sean McDowell and Brett Kunkel and I do occasionally, to kind of help them see what they don't know, you will find that they are really unprepared to defend anything.

And they get angry. Oh, yeah. And they know that you are—like, I've seen Sean do this a couple times where he'll have to stop.

He'll put—you know, you want to do something to make sure, okay, when I have the jacket on, I'm an atheist. When I take the jacket off, I'm me. So you'll put the jacket on, and within about 15 minutes, they're, like, mad at you.

Like, okay, take the jacket off. I'm still me, guys. Don't—relax, okay? Put the jacket back on.

And so you keep going. And it's because they just really have never thought seriously—by the way, if you're in Dallas, you can probably defend why you think

Dak Prescott should play this week even though he's got a calf strain, okay? In other words, there is stuff that you're prepared to defend.

Yeah. It's just not Christianity. The thing that ought to matter the most. A lot of these folks, if you're a believer and you were raised that way in the

South, would you identify yourself a cowboy fan first or as a Christian first? Well, it turns out you're better able to describe the offensive line on the

Cowboys than you are the Twelve Apostles. Well, okay, there's a problem there, right? And we all are—I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else.

Trust me. I'm distracted. And I know I'm distracted. Well, maybe not for me for the Dallas Cowboys because folks on my show know.

I actually—so this is a true story. I was witnessing on a plane out to Dallas the whole time talking to this guy, you know, just having no big deal, right?

Get off the plane, you know, where they had limo drivers hold up the signs for people's names. So he walks over to a limo driver and immediately people are asking to take his picture.

I'm like, oh, okay, he must be someone. So I go over, you know, I go to the baggage claim. I'm sitting there, baggage claim.

I see he's coming by. A couple more people want to get his picture. So he walks over to me to get his bags. I'm like, I go, so Tony, I got to ask, so who are you?

And, like, obviously you're somebody that everyone should know. And I clearly have no clue. And the limo driver goes, you don't know who this is?

I'm like, Tony? And he's like, he's the quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. And I'm like, okay.

That's so funny. I had no idea who he was. Now you got me curious. How did he respond to you when you witnessed him?

Was he receptive or not? You know, it was a good conversation. He just—he was listening. And I, you know,

I'm thinking like he's receptive. He actually walked away and I gave him—I had a CD with a gospel presentation on it that, you know,

I give to people. And I gave it to him and I actually gave one to the limo driver. And I'm like, I just said, you know, give a listen to that.

And he actually thanked me. He was like, that was one of the best conversations I've had in a long time. At first I was like, oh, because it was about Christ.

Until afterwards when I told some friends about it and I realized, like, he was some big deal that I realized he probably was just glad that someone didn't have any idea who he was and just talking with him.

Let me tell you, I think the same thing. I mean, I started talking a lot about celebrity after Robbie Zachariah's thing broke.

And I just—I'm so averse right now to that aspect of what we have to do.

Yeah. But look, you know, this is true, right? We do podcasts. We do all these things. We're on all these different platforms. Many of them are visual.

It's you. They're going to see what you look like. And so there's a level of celebrity even amongst small niche communities like apologetics.

Oh, yeah. And we have to really—I'm at the point right now where I'm ready to write another book and then step away altogether because I feel like that's the ugliest side of what we have to do in a social media, which

I call social marketing. I mean, we're all marketing. That's all we're doing on social media. And we're marketing something, even if you're just marketing you and your life and your family and your girlfriend or whatever it is you're marketing.

Trust me, we are pretending to be something we aren't for the purpose of gaining attention for some reason, and nobody writes a book they want no one to read.

Nobody writes a podcast, records a podcast they hope nobody will listen to. I mean, the way we get it listened to is that we work on social media to make it known that we're out here, right?

We advertise. We even have advertisers, right? We do these things because we know, and we have usually good intentions when we start.

We'll say, yeah, I'm building this audience so I can preach the gospel. At some point, though, everyone

I'm watching, I'm like, really? Yeah. It seems like now you're preaching the gospel to build an audience.

And so we have to be careful. And I see the same temptations, right? I mean,

I got a chance to be on a movie. After that movie was over, I thought, okay, so where's this headed next? Yeah. Well, thank

God. It never headed anywhere next. It stopped right there. And that was probably a good thing, right?

Because it doesn't need. First of all, I don't want to be all over the country and away from my family, away from my wife.

So I love the fact that we're able to do this from our office. Yeah. I love that. Oh, my goodness. If I could not travel at all,

I would not travel at all. This may sound really bad, but I actually was kind of glad with COVID because all my speaking events, all my travel ended, right?

And I got to be home with my wife. It was like, wow. I know. It sounds terrible to say that. I remember one time

I was listening to, I was in Charlotte at the Billy Graham Museum there, the library.

And if you walk through, there's a little kind of display museum. It's relatively small, but it's neat. And in there, there was an interview.

I think it was Greta Van Cesperen, who has always been a good friend of that family. And I think it was her interviewing Billy Graham.

He's probably in his 70s. And she said, would you do anything different? And he said, you know,

I would pray more. I would travel less. I would have done less events. And I thought,

OK, so every time Billy Graham does an event, it's a harvest. It's a crusade. So every time you do an event, you are actually bringing people into the kingdom or you're preaching the gospel to people, right?

So you're saying you would rather preach the gospel less and pray more, stay home more. And I thought,

OK, so thank you, Billy, for saying that, because if Billy Graham can say that after years of doing it, that's wise counsel for the rest of us who, in the end, may have ignored or neglected something really important to do what we thought

God had called us to do. Most missionaries, historically, as you study their family life, it's a train wreck.

And I don't want to be that. I don't want to neglect. I'm not called to love my books and my ministry and my podcast and all this nonsense the way that Christ loves the church.

I'm called to love Susie that way. That's right. So I have to prioritize. And so that should rein in the celebrity nonsense.

But sometimes it doesn't, because I'm on a book promotion right now, right? Well, the key thing there is the word promotion.

That's where the danger is. There's no danger in the book. The danger is in the promotion. And so I have to kind of remember that as I move forward.

And this isn't really related to the book that we're talking about, but this is a very important thing because we do get that.

I was on a cruise. How many people are on the cruise ship? And I just walked in to go get something to drink, you know, to go get a

Coke, and someone recognized me from my book. They had read my book. They knew who

I was as soon as I walked in. And I told my wife, I'm just going to go get a Coke and I'll come right back. I'm there talking for 45 minutes because they're asking me questions about the book.

But I had really—I actually try to stay away from some of that at times.

Like there was—they were filming for a movie, American Gospel. And one of the guys I speak with, you'll see him,

Anthony Svestro, he's in the film. They were filming when we were doing some open air, and you see him there.

Because of what you're talking about, I actually waited until the film crew was gone before I started open airing.

They wanted me to get up, and I'm like, I don't want to preach the gospel. If they're filming for a movie like that,

I just know my own nature. I would be like—I would be positive. Presence in the performance.

Exactly. I would not be preaching the gospel for the gospel. It's like when I go out to Shepherd's Conference every year, you know, we usually go—Anthony and I go a week early or a couple days early.

We go the Saturday before Shepherd's Conference because we like to go and do Evangelism with Ray Comfort. Well, we do that beforehand, and there's a reason

I do it beforehand and not after. Because I know that afterwards—and I had this happen where Ray's there, and all these guys from Shepherd's Conference stay on that Saturday, and they come to watch

Ray. And then Ray one time was like, hey, Andrew, can you get up? So he brings me up after. Well, then all these people wanted to talk to me, not because of me.

Right. Because Ray knows who I am, or I know who Ray—and I realize how seductive

Pride is. And so I've tried, and I can't say I'm perfect at it because there's times where Pride is going to—we all have issues of Pride.

And there's going to be issues where that pops up. But I try to like avoid the situations as best

I can because I know my personality. I know how I am, and I don't want to give in to that.

And it is a difficult thing. It is. Sometimes your pride, though, can help you fight the pride. Here's what I mean.

So as I got older and older and older and older, I don't like aging.

I'm arrogant enough to not like the fact that I'm old. And so I look at my son, who's like the younger version of me, and I'm like, yeah,

I'm ready to get out of this altogether and just let him take it because he looks better than me. He can reach a number.

And that's just pride and arrogance also of a different form. But I think it's been helpful for me because now I look at videos and I'm like, oh, my goodness,

I still feel like I'm 40, but I don't look like I'm 40 anymore. And I don't like that. Right. So again, it's just I'm trying to allow that also.

There's a time after which you think you're something. Really? Do you still think you're something? And at some point, is it time not to?

You know, I'm watching a special last night. It was a Steve Martin and Martin Short comedy from 2018.

It's a stand -up thing. And I think it's called A Night You Will Forget. Something like this.

Right. And I'm watching the two of them now, and they're older. And Steve Martin still seems pretty vital in his 70s.

But I'm thinking, wow, is there a point at which you no longer I mean, if I'm 20 years out of the job and my son does the job very differently, he's writing warrants for different kinds of things.

There's a digital age where he's running warrants for social media platforms. And you can learn so much more about people's movement and their interests from social media.

I mean, there's a whole other way of investigating people that he's more familiar with than me. You know, when

I started, we didn't even have cell phones. We had pagers in the back of quarters. Okay.

You had to find a pay phone to call you back. And so this has changed. You know, my dad, when he got a call, it would be on top of a pole.

There would be a light downtown. The light would go on. You'd run back to the pole and get the phone and go, what's the call? And then go do the call on foot.

Okay. Seriously, this is 1961. So, I mean, things change. And at some point,

I'm ready to allow the next generation to take on the banner and do it.

I don't need to be on the stage at 80 pretending I'm still something. At some point, you need to hand over the reins to somebody who's younger.

And I think about all that stuff all the time. And I talk about it even publicly as much as I can.

Because I think that every one of us who's listening to this podcast has the opportunity to do something to stop being a content consumer and start being a content creator at every age.

But at some point, it doesn't have to be another million -dollar apologist. I always say it's a million one -dollar apologist.

And I've never seen myself as anything other than another one -dollar apologist. That's the idea.

We each come in with some weird experience that God has given us, and we speak to that lens. You're a software engineer. There's people

I know who, for example, are architects and engineers. They run ministries that have the word architect or engineer in their ministry because that's how they're going to look at things.

How do you build systems? How does the building of a system tell you how we build this worldview? It's dependent on prior constructions, prior assemblies that get you to this place.

This is the outcome if you start with that beginning. Well, this is the kind of stuff they talk about all the time. Well, good for them. They are talking and throwing content through their worldview.

And that's what we're trying to do. Even like a book like Person of Interest, really it just kind of takes—that's why I take an investigative approach, because that's just those stuff that I was doing as a cop.

Yeah. And, you know, I know we don't have—I mean, there's a lot more that I want to talk about with this.

But I wanted to go through just for folks to see what's in this book. I want to go through some of the objections just to read them so people see some of the things that you are going to answer in here.

And this just gives you an—for those listening, maybe this is an objection you've heard and you didn't hear a good answer.

Then pick up the book Person of Interest by J. Warren Wallace. But, you know, I'm going to just flip through.

So, objection. There's no real—and I like realism quotes. There's no real evidence for God or Jesus.

I've heard that objection plenty of times. Objection. Why didn't Jesus come later in history?

I'm just flipping through because you don't have the objections on every page. I should have just written them all down.

But objection. Christians were never really persecuted. I've heard that argument before.

Jesus is a copycat Savior. We talked about that one earlier. And that's a big one.

Objection. If God is all -powerful, why doesn't he stop evil? That's a big one.

Objection. Wasn't the virgin conception of Jesus copied by pagan myth? Objection.

Why would God require a sacrifice? These are just a foretaste of what you're going to get in the book

Person of Interest. It's a book that I think—you say as a subtitle, why

Jesus still matters in the world that rejects the Bible. But the reality is

Jesus changed time, right? I was supposed to do a debate with a rabbi,

Tovia Singer. When he found out I was willing to debate him, he heard that somehow.

He actually created a banner and posted it with my picture and his picture when I agreed to debate him.

And he said, you know, people were waiting for the debate. I had a guy call me that was a follower of his, but he said he was a pastor.

He used to be a pastor. And I found out later he became Jewish and follows Tovia. So I think that he was like—I almost think that this guy was—he called saying, hey,

I want to help you with your arguments. Yeah. But I think what it was is he was really a plant to find out what my arguments are going to be, and that's why this debate probably never happened.

But one of the things I was going to make the point of is, you know, you say that Jesus doesn't have much—the whole world has been changed by him.

Even our time is changed by him. Yeah, and that's why we wanted to do a book like this, right? Because, yeah, this is called the first century when it's not the first century.

It's not the first century humans lived in. It's not the first century humans wrote about. But it does—we call it the first century because something remarkable happened.

That is exactly what you'd expect if Jesus is who he said he was. And so that's really the goal here.

It's not that all of these things, like literature, art, music, and education, and science, and even other world religions that mention

Jesus, that had Tip and Ramanika actually reconstruct the story of Jesus from all of those areas of culture. But it's not that those, you know, that Jesus matters because he's had an influence.

It's that he had an influence because he matters. That's right. It's just the opposite. So that's what we're trying to do here. And, again, it's not like this is a book.

This is a piece of a larger cumulative case, right? This is a piece of a—in other words, if Jesus is who he said he was, you would expect some huge outcome.

Yeah, you'd expect that more universities would be founded by Christ followers than all the other groups combined.

Well, that's true. You'd expect that more scientists would win awards and make more discoveries and found more disciplines than all the other groups combined.

And that's true. You'd expect that more literature would be written about Jesus than any other historical character in the history of historical figures.

And that's true. You'd expect that he'd inspire more art, more music, have more impact on the progress of art, even the different genres of art, that he'd appear in every genre of art in every country in the world.

And that's true. You'd expect all the stuff that we see. And from that, the fingerprints of Jesus are so robust that you can reconstruct the story of Jesus from art, from literature, from music, from education, from science, and even from the world religions that are non -Christian.

Everyone hat tips Jesus. He's in Buddhism. The leaders of Buddhism will recognize

Jesus as somebody who probably is on his way to a Buddhahood, right? He's an enlightened teacher. Hindus recognize him.

He's in the scriptures of the Ahmadi Muslims, of the Muslims, of the Baha 'is.

And, by the way, all along, Jesus never includes anyone else will come out of the mouth of Jesus.

He's the only way. He's the truth, the light, the only way to the Father, according to Jesus. Yet everybody else says, oh, yeah, there's room for Jesus over here, too.

There's no room for Buddha over here. There's no room for Baha 'u'llah over here. There's no room for Muhammad over here.

I'm the only way. That difference makes him a unique suspect in the catalog of religious suspects.

And that's what typically happens when we get to a unique suspect in a body that's broken into eight suspects, and one stands out uniquely.

He's probably your guy. And that's what we're doing here, too. So, folks, I encourage you, this is a good book to get ahold of.

Person of Interest, J. Warner Wallace. Go get a copy of it. Jim, you know, you and I actually did work on a book together.

And folks may not know that, but you and I were both, I was approached by someone you know,

Eric Johnson from Mormon Research Ministry. And he had an idea of a book of, he knows that I do a lot of evangelism.

He said, I want to write a book of the different way that different people evangelize to Mormons. And I knew your background.

I said, you really need to get Jim Wallace in on it. He's like, oh, I know Jim. So Jim got in it. It's a smart approach.

It's a great book. People should get it if they're working with Mormons, for sure. So there's, I think, like 24 of us that were authors on it.

And you and I were the two. He was going to do this self -published thing, and you and I were the ones that were like, because he says,

I said this. And then he said, when he talked to you, you said the same thing. Like, no, you got to do this bigger. And we added more authors.

Twenty -four different authors, all taking a different approach to evangelize Mormons specifically.

But the neat thing is, most of our approaches, your approach, my approach, you know, you're making a case.

I'm taking the open air. I wanted to do biblical reliability.

They gave that to Matt Slick, because we can only get one chapter. And they gave me open air evangelism. That's so important, though.

That's what I love about the book. The book, you'll find something in that book, if you're working with Mormons, that you can say, yeah, you know, I can do that.

Maybe I can't do this, but I can do that. And that's what's so great about the book, is it comes out of so many different, it's not just about theological underpinnings.

A lot of it is very practical, like your chapter. It's a very practical book. That's a book that I think everyone should get if they've got

Mormons in their family. Even more than more, I say, I know people that have picked up ideas just on witnessing to other groups.

Yeah, good point. There was, I forget who wrote the book, or the chapter, where they go to temples and they hand out newspapers that are about temple openings.

And I had someone that said, you know, they grabbed that from there, and they're not going to Mormon temples. What they did was they went to sporting events and created a newspaper for the sports team, giving some of the history and all that, and then giving the gospel in there.

And people are always taking it. They're like, oh, people take this far more than a gospel tract. And yet, it is a gospel tract.

It costs more to print, but it's getting into more hands. And they got that idea from a book,

Witnessing to Mormons. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, because all that stuff in there is all transferable to any group you're trying to reach.

Yeah, absolutely. So that book is Sharing the Good News with Mormons. It's available at strivingforeternity .org

in our store. Go get it. Go get it. It's good. It's a thing where every chapter,

I mean, I didn't get to read your chapter until the book was done. None of us really read. You can read, each chapter is about six pages.

You can read any of them in any order because they're all separate in that way. And it really is a fun book.

It teaches about Mormonism too, but really a lot of ideas in evangelism. So, Jim, if folks want to get more information, they want to listen to your podcast, they want to read your blogs, they want to find out more about your books, where can we send people to?

Well, our ministry website is coldcasechristianity .com. But for this book, we've got personofinterestbook .com.

And here's why I mention that, because what we're doing, anyone who buys the book, I want to get the materials in your hands that you can then use to teach the material to others.

So, I've got a 525 slide PowerPoint presentation, which is all from the illustrations in the book.

It's all animated. It's ready to go. You can click right through it. It parallels the book. We're giving that away.

We just want you to buy the book and we'll give you the PowerPoint. We have 90 Bible inserts that summarize the facts in the book that you can stick in your

Bible so you can have them when you're talking to people. A bunch of videos that show how we've been teaching it to others so that you can teach it to others.

And our hope is that you'll be able to use this to knock down some barriers that people have with others.

So, that's at personofinterestbook .com. Now, all that extra material costs extra, right?

Yeah, it's like zero. Wait, what? The idea here is how do you deliver it? So, I had to deliver it on something called

Files Anywhere. So, yeah, it'll take you a couple of hours to download it, but it's hopefully worth getting. Folks, just hear the heart of Jim.

I know this from you. You don't do this for the money. That's why the book gets out there and helps people to read it, but the materials you have there is to help people take this and now teach it to others is important.

Yeah, so I have a pension, and you're right about that. And so, for me, I always think that I'm a compatibilist when it comes to financial freedom, too.

So, in other words, my financial freedom is not the ability to buy anything. It's the ability to buy anything you want, and I don't really want anything.

So, I have financial freedom right now, right? So, as long as you don't want anything, everything is good.

Like, what am I going to do different? I really want another opportunity to be creative because stuff never really did it for me.

What does it for me is the idea that I could do something creative. So, I hope this book is creative and people will enjoy it that way.

So, folks, go out, get Person of Interest by J. Warner Wallace at personofinterestbook .com.

Get a copy today. Folks, we have a couple copies we're going to be giving away. The publisher sent us some copies to give away, and so here's how you can get those.

We're going to say that anyone who writes a review, we're interested in getting some reviews, and if you write a review, we will pick one.

By the time we record this, we're going to have a couple other episodes recorded. So, it'll be a couple of episodes before we announce, but if you want to write a review, the way to do that is go to lovethepodcast .com

slash rap report. That's rap with two Ps. So, lovethepodcast .com

slash rap report. You can leave a review there. That way, whatever podcast show, you know, whatever app you're using, well, this is the one place you can go to write a review.

Reviews help us not to get more downloads. It doesn't help us get more listens. It helps us because, well, we sit behind a camera.

Right now, Jim and I are seeing each other, and that's about it. We don't hear from you guys. So, it's really helpful for us as people that are creating the content here to know what you think.

Do you like it? Do you not like it? Did you learn something? Those things are really helpful for us. It does absolutely nothing for ratings.

It does nothing for rankings. I know all these podcasters are like, oh, write a review. It helps us in ranking. No, it doesn't.

I know the Rap Report, at least in the United States, in the religion category, we are in the top 100 podcast. You writing a review will do absolutely nothing for that.

But you know what it'll do? It will encourage my heart to know what you think. So, lovethepodcast .com

slash rap report. Write us a review there. Let us know what you think of this episode. Mention the episode.

That will get you entered into the different copies we have to give away. We'll announce who that is, and then we'll do that on a later show.

So, that kind of forces you to keep listening. But if you found this to be helpful, if you found this to be something that encouraged you, would you kindly share it with someone else?

Because there might be someone else that needs the same encouragement. That just might be something, a way that you can help someone else without even really recognizing it.

So, Jim, thanks for coming on. I look forward to your next book. And I would like to say that please don't make that your last.

You know? I appreciate you saying that, brother. Thanks so much. I'm so glad we got a chance to do this because I haven't seen you in a while.

I'm glad to see you. Yeah, well, seeing me may not be a good thing, though. No, no. Listen, I already talked about that.

So, I'm getting the better end of the deal than you. No, no, no. See, but the thing is that your hair's gone all white.

I just have the white streak down the middle making me look like a skunk. I'm waiting for all white at this point because the skunk look just doesn't help.

I understand. I get it. I get it. All right, man. Thanks. I appreciate it. All right, folks. Thanks for listening.

Hope you guys enjoyed this. And remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.

See you next week. This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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