The Resurrection of Jesus Examined with Mike Licona

Revealed Apologetics

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today I have

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Dr. Michael Lycona on to discuss evidence for the resurrection, right? Believe it or not, the central feature of the

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Christian faith has evidence for it, okay? And so I really want this discussion to be useful for people who may not be aware of the evidence for the resurrection.

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And for those who are well -seasoned apologists, it is a good thing to review some of those evidences and to contextualize it with respect to where God has placed you in your walk.

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You know, maybe you're, you know, having lunch with an unbelieving friend or at the dinner table and you're speaking with family members and these issues come up.

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I'd like you guys to have some of this information at your fingertips, you know, as you review this video, pick up Dr.

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Michael Lycona's books to get more detail. So hopefully this discussion will be helpful to that end.

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I do wanna make a quick announcement. And again, I'm wearing a tie. Now this is very not normal for me.

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I'm usually wearing my super cool short -sleeved collared shirts. And you might be thinking

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I'm wearing a tie because we have a very special guest today. But actually I was rushing home from work. And I just happened to not have time to get changed into something more comfortable.

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But at any rate, that's why I look super formal. At any rate, later this week, I'm also gonna be having another guest on that is,

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I'm looking forward to that discussion. It's a woman who is a believer. She wrote an interesting article about how she came into apologetics that I think that discussion is gonna really be helpful and encouraging to folks.

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So looking forward to doing that. But let's jump right in. I want to invite

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Dr. Michael Lycona on the screen with me and he can share a little bit about himself, some more background information.

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I'm sure if you're into apologetics, you're gonna already know who Dr. Michael Lycona is. But let's invite him on right now.

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How's it going? What would you like me to call you? Dr. Lycona, Michael, Mike, Mikey? Mike's fine.

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Okay. All right, Mike, how are you doing? And why don't you share a little bit of some background information?

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I'm doing well, Eli, and thanks for having me on. So yeah, I'm, well, this

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July, God willing, I'll turn 60. And I became a Christian at the age of 10.

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So almost for half a century being a follower of Jesus. I got real serious about my faith when

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I went off to college. I went to a Christian university and just really grew in my faith.

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And when I went to grad school, I focused on New Testament studies.

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And right toward the end, I just started questioning my faith. It wasn't anything that I had learned in my graduate work.

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It was just a matter of reflecting and thinking, you know what, Christianity is all

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I've ever studied. And yep, I spend a lot of time in prayer and Bible study. And I sensed that I have this personal relationship with God, but then

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I reflected and thought, Mormons feel they've got a personal relationship with God.

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They talk about the burning of the bosom. That's evidence to that. You've got people of other religious beliefs that are in conflict with the

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Christian beliefs. And they believe they've got a relationship with God or the divine. And so how do I know that what

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I believe is true rather than I've just deceived myself and brainwashed myself into thinking this? And so I never had

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Gary Habermas for a course because I was in New Testament. He was in philosophy and apologetics, but one of my roommates was in the apologetics program.

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And he recommended that I go pay Gary Habermas a visit. So I did, and he pointed me to the resurrection of Jesus and the evidence for it.

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And that satisfied me from that moment. But after finishing my coursework in grad school and getting out in the real world and sharing my faith with others,

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I'd start to come across objections for which I wasn't prepared. And so back then there was no email.

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I'd call Gary and talk to him and wrestle through some things.

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And gosh, if it had not been for Gary, I may not be a Christian today because of apologetics and the evidence that he shared with me or led me to sources where I could learn some of the data.

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I'm a Christian. So I remained a Christian. So that's now,

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I never thought I would go on for a doctorate. I just wasn't interested in academic things, but my passion to find answers led me and I completed a

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PhD back in 2008. And I never thought

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I'd teach. I had no desire to teach, but God just leads in different ways.

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And now I'm a very happy faculty member at Houston Baptist University, where I think we've got one of, if not the finest master of arts programs in Christian apologetics and just wonderful.

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We've got William Lane Craig and Nancy Piercy and Mary Jo Sharpen, just so many on faculty in our programs.

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It's just, it's really cool. Michael Ward, the leading CS Lewis scholar in the world. I mean,

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I just could go through so many faculty members and our programs can be completed all in class or via distance learning.

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I've got students, right now I've got a student in New Zealand. In the previous class,

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I had it in New Zealand and Germany and I've had them all over the world and they just pipe in.

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It's just really convenient. Most of them are adults and involved in their profession.

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So it's really cool. I just love what I do. That plus our ministry, Risen Jesus, do a lot of traveling and not recent, of course, because of COVID, research and writing, speaking and debating and work on global reach through our videos and social media.

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Now, you've had the benefit of going to seminary. I've had the benefit of going to seminary.

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Not everyone's gonna be going to seminary. It can be very expensive. It can be very time consuming. What would you say to someone who doesn't have the money to go to seminary, but really wants to get into some of the details of the foundation of the faith, the evidence and just knowing all of the things that you study and the things that help build up your own personal faith, where would you point that person to?

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Well, of course they can get books, right? So if they wanna learn a lot about the resurrection and they wanna get deep into it, they could always buy my large book on the resurrection,

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The Resurrection of Jesus, A New Historiographical Approach. That's the book I use in our class.

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One of the textbooks I use for the philosophy of history and resurrection at Houston Baptist University.

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If they wanna learn about the gospels, or the New Testament literature, you can get some introductions to the

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New Testament. I've got a whole shelf of introductions to the

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New Testament. It sounds like just a basic book, but it's really not. It deals with a lot of critical issues, such as who wrote the

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New Testament literature? When was it written? To whom was it written? What was their sources? What's the main themes behind it?

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So it's a whole lot deeper than let's say a New Testament survey. Sure, sure. So there's a lot of different books that they can get and read.

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If they want a good intro to apologetics, they can get any of Lee Strobel's books.

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Those are fantastic. William Lane Craig's got a really great introductory book, On Guard.

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If they wanna go deeper, they can get his other book, Reasonable Faith. Really good one volume books that they can learn apologetics.

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And there are others. I'm just naming a few that just come right off the top of my head. I think some people go to YouTube, and we've got a lot of stuff on our

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YouTube channel. I had a guy recently comment, said that he feels like he's getting a pre -seminary education with some of the videos we've got on my channel.

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That's right. There's some really great stuff. I mean, YouTube's a funny thing. You can get solid biblical educational content, and then you can watch cat videos.

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I mean, it's a very interesting place, YouTube. But definitely, I mean, I'm big on audio learning.

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So I learn a lot from YouTube and things like that. But you mentioned a couple of books, especially your own.

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I think something that can be very intimidating to folks, especially young people, maybe like teenagers, kids, students in high school.

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It's like, well, I'm already reading a bunch of stuff. And when I look in the bookstore, or if I'm on Amazon, like these books look pretty thick.

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I mean, your book is not, it's not a thin line. It's not like a thin book, it's thick. Are these books meant to be read in chronological order?

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I mean, should the size of these books intimidate people who are interested? I mean, it depends who you are and how far you are into this.

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I mean, if you're just getting involved in apologetics, then no, I wouldn't. I mean, you could.

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I mean, I have a friend, Elizabeth Urbanovitz, who is, she's a full -time

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Christian apologist who writes curriculum, curricula for children. And she said my large book on the resurrection was the first apologetics book she read.

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She had the intellectual capacity to do that. And it worked well for her.

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And she got hooked on apologetics through it. But I'd say for most people, they're probably not as intellectually sharp as Elizabeth is.

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And so you could go with some more basic books like Strobel's books,

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The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator in Defense of Jesus.

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Or if you, those are easy reads, fairly easy reads, and they're entertaining too.

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Probably a next step would be William Lane Craig's book, On Guard. I mean, they're just, that's a really good, fairly, that's kind of like a basic to intermediate apologetics book.

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You know? And then - There's pictures. So people, you know, there's a picture book, you know.

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Yeah, if it's brand new, if you're brand new to apologetics, I wouldn't pick up Reasonable Faith. Right. That might be a little heavy for you.

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Sure, sure. Yeah. And what I like about On Guard and Lee Strobel's A Case for Christ is that they're not simply fact heavy.

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They have factual stuff. I mean, On Guard, yes. There's a lot of facts that are packed in there, but in between the chapters, there's these little personal stories there that kind of put some flesh, some real life flesh to the importance of what you're doing.

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And that's true for anyone. I mean, people who watch my channel, we tend to come from more presuppositional perspective, but I think it's important to know some of these facts.

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And to use them in various contexts. I was just listening to a lecture by Greg, the late

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Greg Bonson. And he was talking about, you know, we don't just walk up to the believer and say, hey,

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Christianity is true by the impossibility of the contrary. Now, sometimes people have a question about the resurrection. Like, why think, why, are there good reasons to think that Jesus was raised from the dead?

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And it's appropriate to talk about those things. And so I think books like Reasonable Faith, if you want to delve that deep, or On Guard, or your book on the resurrection,

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I think are very helpful in kind of putting some content to the case we want to make, you know, depending on the context of our discussion.

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So I think that's very important. Now, I want to read something, and then that's going to launch into my first question, so to speak, of the point of what we're going to be talking about today.

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Now, I'm going to read a quote from C .S. Lewis in my best British accent possible. This could be totally cringy, or it can be a classic episode here, okay?

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All right, let me see here. So, quote, I'm trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him, that's

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Jesus. I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be

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God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who is merely a man and said the sort of things

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Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell.

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You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

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You can shut him up for a fool. You can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him

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Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

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He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. Okay, that's my best British accent.

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That's all you're getting at me. That's all you're getting at me, man. Okay, so we have the famous Lewis trilemma.

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Either Lord, lunatic, or liar. Actually, that is a false trichotomy because there's also legend.

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He couldn't get rid of it. Well, once you develop or you're able to show that Jesus did make claims to be the son of God, then that's when you've got your three.

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That's right, that's right. So I wanna jump into the, I'm looking in terms of, if I was a student in high school who's a

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Christian, I have a relationship with the Lord, I have some unbelieving friends that maybe I'm interacting with on some social media or whatever.

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We know, Mike, that in scholarship, it is not very controversial to say that Jesus existed.

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That's almost universally accepted, okay? However, a teenager, a teenage

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Christian, is more likely to come into contact with someone who says, we have no evidence that Jesus ever existed.

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So before we get into the evidence for the resurrection, how might a teenage Christian student, a young person, interact with some friends who says, well, we don't have evidence that Jesus even existed, so we can't even be sure if all this other stuff is true.

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How might you equip a young person who might come up against something like that? Well, the first thing

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I would do is I would point out that that is a fringe position that is taken by barely any scholars in the world today.

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In fact, you could count the number of scholars who question whether Jesus existed, bona fide scholars in the relevant field on both hands, out of those in the whole world.

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In fact, there are more credentialed scientists with PhD in one of the sciences who hold to a young earth that the earth is 15 ,000 years old or less.

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There are more credentialed scientists who hold that position far more than those historians, scholars who hold that Jesus never existed.

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That is how much a fringe position the Jesus myth is.

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Now, that doesn't mean it's wrong, of course, but it just means that it is an extreme fringe position.

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And none of the scholars who hold that are highly regarded.

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None of them are highly regarded scholars, okay? So that's one thing I would point out.

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A number of things, I would point them to various sources. So for example, just non -Christian sources,

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I would point to Josephus, the Jewish historian from the first century, Tacitus, the

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Roman historian, perhaps the greatest Roman historian. And he wrote at the very beginning of the second century,

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Lucian who wrote a Greek satirist who wrote in the middle of the second century.

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And Lucian was anti -Christian, Tacitus was anti -Christian. You've got

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Mara Barth Serapion probably writing somewhere in the latter part of the first century to sometime in the second century.

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It's hard to narrow it more than that. And Mara Barth Serapion was a prisoner and he was writing, and he mentions the execution of Jesus by the

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Jews. So you've got a number of non -Christian sources who mentioned it.

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In addition to all the Christian sources, some of who claim to be eyewitnesses.

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And if you're gonna discount the gospels because you can say the Christians, their authors were biased, well then are we gonna discount

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African -American historians who are writing on slavery in the US because they're biased?

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Are we gonna write again about, or write off Jewish historians who write on the Holocaust because they're biased and have an ax to grind?

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Well, of course not. So you're gonna look at this and we've got plenty of evidence for the existence of Jesus.

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Paul wasn't writing a gospel. He's writing letters of occasion. And he says he knows

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James, the brother of Jesus and has spoken with him. Well, it's really difficult to write about, to meet the brother of someone who never existed.

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You know? And Paul is living and visiting

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Jerusalem at the same time Jesus would have been there. How is it that you would have had this major mythical figure who was fighting against the

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Pharisees, the Sadducees, the high priests, in the very people that Paul knew, in the very city

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Paul would have been. And Paul never even knew that this was a mythical character. I mean, such a position is just absurd.

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And that's why hardly any scholars in the entire universe hold such a ridiculous, crazy position.

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Now, okay. So let's say the skeptic will say, fine,

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I know these writers mention someone named Jesus, but how do we know that Jesus is, he's not a mythical character that early

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Christians believed in. And so these secular historians are just recording what these people said about Jesus.

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So for all we know, it can still be legendary. It's just, this is what early Christians believe. And these authors are, these secular historians are just recording what early

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Christians believe. How would you respond to something like that? Well, I would say that such a scenario doesn't take into consideration the continuing role of the eyewitnesses.

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As Vincent Taylor pointed out nearly a century ago, he said, this would require that shortly after Jesus's death, the disciples were raptured into heaven and were never heard from again.

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But Paul's undisputed letters in the book of Acts discredit such a view. Because these talk about how the apostles, those who had followed

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Jesus, played a continuing role of being out there publicly, discussing the message and person of Jesus for several decades.

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And that takes us all the way up to the very doorstep of when the first gospel Mark was written. I point out that the evidence suggests that the traditional authorship of several of the gospels, at least, if not all of them, but at least several of them is correct.

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Just for example, take the gospel of Mark. The majority of critical scholars writing in English since 1965, think that the traditional authorship of Mark is correct.

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That Mark knew Peter, that he was reporting what Peter had said, and that he's writing somewhere between the years 50 and 70, more specifically between 65 and 70.

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If Mark is writing down what Peter said, that's pretty strong. Then you've got the majority of modern scholars.

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You know, with John, they reject the traditional authorship of John, namely that John was the son of Zebedee, who was the author.

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They reject that, the majority of critical scholars today, but they do think that whoever the author of John's gospel was, he used the disciple of Jesus and eyewitness as his primary source.

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So it's still pretty good. And then you've got Matthew and Luke who use Mark extensively.

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So even if you reject the traditional authorship of Matthew and Luke, which I don't, if you reject the traditional authorship of Matthew and Luke, they're using 90 % of Mark and they use him with great integrity.

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And so you got to look at the rest of the stories that aren't in Mark and figure they're probably using those with great integrity.

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And especially when we can compare how Matthew, some of these stories that appear in Matthew and in Luke, but are not in Mark, we see that they're very, very similar.

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So there's really no good reasons to think that the gospel authors are just inventing all of this stuff.

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Now, one more question on this issue, and then we'll jump into some of the evidence of the resurrection, because that's really where the meat is, since this is a fringe position, although a very popular one on the interwebs, okay?

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So let me see. Oh my goodness. I think I might've lost it. Okay. Ah, okay. So here's what I was gonna ask. So when you say

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Matthew wrote this and Mark wrote that, well, that assumes that Matthew and Mark are in fact the authors of those gospels.

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And so a somewhat informed skeptic, perhaps some teenager who's been on some atheist websites or Muslim website or whatever, they go, wait a minute, we don't really know who wrote the gospels.

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And so every time you say, well, Mark said this, and this is why we should think this is reasonable to believe A, B, or C, we don't even know who wrote these gospels.

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So how would you give some ammo for the Christian? Well, how could they respond to that sort of objection?

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Because many people just take for granted Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Yeah. Well, first I would discuss some of the evidence that, you probably don't have time to go through all four.

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So I would focus on one, Mark, the first gospel to be written probably. And we do have evidence that Mark wrote that gospel.

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For example, Papias, a man who wrote in the early second century is the first to report that Mark wrote what he remembered

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Peter saying. And Papias says that he got this information from, his language is a little ambiguous.

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He's either referring to the apostle John or an associate of the apostle

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John. And it would have been while John was still preaching. So whenever Papias wrote and scholars debate on the dates from the early to the mid second century, whenever Papias relayed this information, he received it in the latter part of the first century from either one of Jesus' disciples who had walked with him or someone who was an associate of that disciple.

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So that's pretty good. And you've got other evidence as well. I'm just saying

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Papias is your earliest one and it's unanimous. Nobody questions, everybody who commented on it and there were multiple people, they all agreed that Mark wrote down and he wrote what

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Peter had said, what he remembered Peter saying. Now, if you're gonna call into question, say the traditional authorship of Mark, you better be prepared to call on the traditional authorship of virtually every other piece of ancient literature.

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Plutarch is regarded as the greatest of all ancient biographers. He wrote on the heels of the gospel of John, late 90s, all the way up to around the year 120, perhaps just a couple of years after that.

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And the earliest and best source we have that attests to the authorship of Plutarch's lives, he wrote over 60 biographies, they're called lives, wrote over 60 of them of which 48 have survived.

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The earliest source attesting to that, the best source is what's called the Lampreus catalog and scholars don't know exactly when that was composed, but they think it was somewhere between 100 years to 200 years or even longer after Plutarch wrote.

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And it's falsely, falsely attributed to Plutarch's son and it contains literature that classicists believe are falsely attributed to Plutarch.

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So it's not an unimpeachable source and yet it's the best source.

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And according to the foremost expert in the world on Plutarch, he's not aware of a single classicist who questions whether Plutarch wrote those 48 biographies that have survived.

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So if you're gonna accept that for Plutarch, then why wouldn't you accept say the traditional authorship for the gospel of Mark for which we have far superior evidence?

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I could go on and talk about the authorship of Suetonius's lives of the 12

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Caesars or Sallust's histories, his war with Catiline, war with Ugartha, things like that.

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The traditional authorship of the gospels, the evidence for it is not unimpeachable, but it's still pretty good.

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Sure, I would imagine, and this is a good segue to talk about the main gist of what we wanna get to here, which is the resurrection.

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I would imagine that the reason why there's a double standard in that regard that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, well, we can't trust them, is not simply because they just wanna doubt the generic historical events, it's the issue of miracles.

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Okay, because Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is not just any old set of historical documents.

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They record things that are miraculous and they record things that, if true, have a huge impact upon our worldviews.

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So there's a lot on the line. And so we can see there one of the main reasons why people, even though there's evidence for these things, they tend to be much more suspect because of the implications of believing these things to be true.

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So let's move into the issue of the resurrection then. I mean - Hold on, so let me just say something about that.

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I agree with you wholeheartedly, Eli. So the thing is, what we should point out at that thing is the objection really isn't authorship then.

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Yes. The objection is you don't like miracles. You can't stomach miracles or you can't stomach the

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Christian worldview. So let's just be honest about that. It's not the issue of authorship. That's just window dressing.

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In many cases, not in all cases, but it's window dressing in the sense that it just gives the impression that you are interested in some of the historical facts.

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Well, we really need to think about these things. And sometimes that kind of, that attitude of, well, what about this?

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But have you considered, if it's not coming from a genuine place of honesty, oftentimes it is masking the deeper philosophical bias of you don't believe in miracles.

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And there's something like that. So, and you want to, and as an apologist, people want to recognize when a question is coming from a place of honesty and curiosity with respect to the facts and whether it's coming from a philosophical bias that's undergirding, you know, what's going on there.

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So, all right. So the resurrection of Jesus, okay. Come on,

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Michael. You're talking to me that you're trying to tell me you believe that a historical event occurred in which a man was dead and came back to life.

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Number one, how do we know that's even possible? And number two, how can you base your faith in this whole

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Christian story on a historical event? You know how, you know, foggy the past can be.

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I mean, surely it's not reasonable to think that we can know that Jesus raised from the dead by historical considerations.

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So why don't you lay it out? See, I'm your random friend that you happen to meet up with, right?

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We're at a coffee spot right now. And it says, listen, I don't know if it's even a reasonable thing to believe in the resurrection.

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I mean, you got to convince me, man. What's going on? What would you do? How would you approach me? Well, I'd say, first of all, you know, let's look at the data.

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If you're saying, you know, it's impossible for a person to come back from the dead, I would agree with you that it's impossible by natural causes.

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But if God exists and wanted to raise Jesus, well, then it's 100 % possible, probable that Jesus actually was raised from the dead.

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So I say, let's look at the evidence from as much as possible, a worldview neutral position.

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Neither a priori assuming God's existence or a priori excluding it.

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Let's just come to it looking at the knowable facts and let them speak for themselves as much as possible.

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Otherwise we invite our worldview to umpire rather than the data and the danger that is manifest.

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Bad philosophy corrupts good history. So let's look at a historical investigation while isolating any kind of presuppositions or metaphysical biases or positions we might have.

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So now I'd come to the data and say, well, what's the data that we have that is so strong?

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The data is so strong that it's accepted by virtually every scholar who studies the subject including, you know, skeptics.

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So it'd be a heterogeneous consensus of scholars, be it Christian, liberals or progressive theologians, atheists, agnostics,

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Jewish historians. Let's look and see what are they persuaded? What kind of evidence is so strong?

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The data is so strong that virtually all are persuaded by that we can agree on these things. And we'd say, all right, number one,

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Jesus died by crucifixion. Virtually everyone agrees on that. Number two, and I'm not going through the evidence for this right now.

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If you want to unpack, we can, but I'm just talking about what everybody seems to accept. But Jesus died by crucifixion.

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That shortly after his death, a number of his followers had experiences that they interpreted as appearances of the risen

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Jesus to them and it radically transformed their lives. Third, you've got the apostle

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Paul. He was Saul who was out persecuting the church. He was like a terrorist to the earliest

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Christians. He's persecuting the church, arresting Christians, sending them into prison and consenting to their executions for being

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Christians. And then he becomes one because he has an experience that he is persuaded.

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He interprets as an appearance of the risen Jesus to him. And it radically transforms his life as well from a persecutor of the church to one of its most able defenders.

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So now, how are you going to explain those? How are you going to explain it? Now, virtually 100 % of scholars grant them.

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And then if you want to go somewhere between 75 to 85%, they grant that these experiences were seen by groups in group settings.

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So now you've got to be able to explain these kinds of things. What was the nature of these experiences that led

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Christian and non -Christian friend and foe in individual and group settings to accept, to interpret, to sincerely believe that the risen

31:54

Jesus had appeared to them. And that's when you formulate hypotheses and then you compare those hypotheses for their ability to account for the knowable facts.

32:04

And when you do that, the resurrection hypothesis is the only one, the only explanation that can adequately account for all of those facts.

32:14

Okay, so what's, okay, let me give a little pushback then. So what happens when someone just says, well, you know, he's like, well, what best explains these facts?

32:23

If the unbeliever granted you these facts, you know, maybe there was an empty tomb, you know, throughout history, there have been empty tombs.

32:30

I mean, it's not impossible for a tomb to be empty. It's not impossible for people to claim to have witnessed someone, you know, they were dead and now they're alive.

32:41

But based upon what we do know about the world, why think that the conclusion or the best explanation is a resurrection?

32:49

I'm being devil's advocate. I don't see how that follows at all. For all we know, I can just be like, I don't know how it happened, but that doesn't mean your explanation as a

32:57

Christian is more likely because I've never seen anyone. I mean, have you ever seen someone be raised from the dead?

33:02

So I think you, Mr. Christian, you're jumping to conclusions too quickly. Yeah, that's what someone would say. I'd say, have you ever seen dinosaurs?

33:11

No. Well, why do you believe that they exist? Because we've got evidence for them. Have you ever seen the

33:16

Big Bang? No. Well, why do you believe the Big Bang occurred? Something came, everything came out of nothing. Well, because we've got evidence for it.

33:23

You've never experienced it though. Why do you believe that there are black holes? Black holes have never been seen.

33:29

Black holes are theoretical entities posited to explain observable phenomena. And they do a real good job of doing it.

33:36

The late John Polkinghorne, a Templeton laureate, says that no one has ever seen a black hole. They probably never will just due to the nature of what a black hole is.

33:45

So again, you've got these theoretical entities like black holes, subatomic particles like quarks, strings, gluons.

33:53

And these are theoretical entities posited to explain observable phenomena. With historical hypotheses, we posit the hypothesis is...

34:05

It's a hypothesis posited to explain data. So that's exactly what we're doing here.

34:12

You say, well, yeah, but these other things like black holes, they'll be natural entities.

34:18

We know that the natural exists. What about the supernatural? Well, I think we can know that supernatural things exist.

34:24

There are things such as well -evidenced near -death experiences in which there is data that can be corroborated where a person while claiming to have an out -of -body experience while being clinically dead, get some information, obtain some information they could not, could not have otherwise known.

34:45

And it's only - Like what? So I wanted to unpack that a little bit. Because I can see - Sure. When we take a look at quarks, we take a look at black holes and these theoretical entities, it seems to me that people who use that think it's appropriate because they can produce predictions.

35:03

We can make predictions based upon these entities and actually come to knowledge about the physical world. Whereas some of these other things, it seems like I can posit something naturalistic and it could, in a way, explain it.

35:14

Maybe not better than, quote, the God hypothesis, but I mean, we don't know.

35:21

We don't know if God exists, they'll say, right? So how do you compare near -death experiences and the studies that go with that, compare that to, say, these hypothetical entities like black holes, quarks, and things like that?

35:32

It would seem as though people in the sciences, at least they'll say there's more predictability value than, say, some of these other explanations that we give that are more of a supernatural bent.

35:43

Well, like with the near -death experiences, there are certain things through the sciences, what we understand about the human body and the brain.

35:51

So there was this, I can't remember her name right off, but it's one of the most famous near -death experiences.

35:57

And the woman died a few years ago, but I'm friends with one of the cardiologists who actually, oh,

36:04

Pamela Reynolds is her name. Pamela Reynolds. And I'm friends with a cardiologist, retired cardiologist named

36:10

Michael Sabom, who lives here in the Atlanta area. And he actually interviewed Pamela Reynolds.

36:16

He went, and I think it was in Texas where this surgery occurred, if I remember correctly.

36:22

And it's irrelevant what state it was in, but he went and interviewed the surgeons involved.

36:27

And basically she had a very complex brain surgery in which they put her to sleep.

36:33

They stopped her heart intentionally. They drained the blood out of her heart.

36:41

They opened up her head to do brain surgery. They put like, what do you call those things?

36:49

You know, like earplugs in her so she couldn't hear things. And then they put headphones over her so that she could not hear things.

36:56

They did this to test to make sure that there was no ability in her senses, that she was truly brain dead.

37:03

So they're examining, they're keeping track of her through an EEG brain activity.

37:09

But through the hearing, they're piping in these sounds and they're seeing if it registers.

37:15

And no, it doesn't register. So she's got no brain activity. She cannot hear, okay?

37:20

It's not even possible for her to hear. She is clinically dead, no brain activity, no heart activity, flat

37:27

EEG, flat EKG. They do this complex brain surgery. After the surgery, she says that she floated out of her body and she watched them do the surgery.

37:38

She saw behind a curtain, a partition, what the tools were like that they were operating on her.

37:45

She wasn't able to describe them perfectly, but they were near perfect. And they were very unique tools that were designed specifically for the surgery.

37:53

She was able to recount conversations that happened and what one of the assistant surgeons said pertaining to her anatomy, jesting about her anatomy.

38:02

So these are things she could not possibly have known. And it just shocked these folks.

38:08

It seemed to suggest that she had an out -of -body experience while she was clinically dead.

38:13

That's one example. There are many examples like this. So suppose there is a spiritual dimension of reality, at least medically, scientifically speaking, there is a part of the person that survives death.

38:28

So suppose someone grants you that, then they can say something to the effect of, people who have near -death experiences have all sorts of experiences that seem to be inconsistent with the

38:42

Christian account. So you hear a skeptic say, if someone could have a near -death experience and experience Allah or visions of Muhammad or the

38:51

Virgin Mary, which seems to confirm Roman Catholic Church. They had this experience and Mary said, the

38:56

Roman Catholic Church is the true church. What do you do when someone says, fine, even if I were to grant you the possibility of those things, the information we're actually getting from those things seem to conflict and doesn't necessarily point in the direction of Christianity.

39:11

The first thing I'd point out is that I'm not trying to prove here that Christianity is true or anything.

39:17

I'm just merely pointing out a scientific fact that we can show through numerous empirical data that there is a portion of a person scientifically who can survive a death, that has survived death, at least for a minimal period of time, which shows that there is a dichotomy of the person.

39:36

The person can exist apart from the physical body. There's enough evidence to suggest that.

39:42

Second, I would say that a lot of these instances where they meet Jesus or they meet a

39:49

Hindu God or something, a lot of these cannot be corroborated. All right, the person was dead for all we knew.

39:55

There could have been some brain activity still going on. They could have been hallucinating or whatever. I don't know.

40:02

I'm not setting out to try to explain that. I'm trying to point out that there are some cases where we can actually corroborate the person was dead and that they received accurate information they could not have possibly known.

40:16

And this suggests a spiritual dimension of reality. I could point out also that there were veridical apparitions where an apparition, like a ghost kind of person or something, an apparition of a dead person appears to someone and imparts accurate information to that person they could not have possibly known.

40:36

We can look at some paranormal phenomena, things that I would interpret as demonic in nature.

40:42

Now, you may disagree with my interpretation because that's interpretation within a Christian worldview, but there are still paranormal phenomena that can best be explained by a theistic or some kind of a supernatural, spiritual dimension of reality.

40:59

And finally, you've got radically answered prayer. And some things, some answers to prayer are just so amazing that the best explanation is that God heard and answered that prayer.

41:12

So these things I would point out, if you're going to say, well, I don't believe God exists, I'm gonna look at some background knowledge.

41:18

I'm gonna point out some empirical data for a spiritual dimension of reality. And then if I want,

41:24

I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna give some arguments for God's existence, the argument for design, a cosmological argument, such as for a first cause of everything.

41:33

I like the moral argument for God's existence, even though it's a little difficult to, you know, you really can't establish the solid existence of moral absolutes.

41:44

We certainly live that way. And even atheists live that way. It's very difficult to explain, account for moral absolutes apart from a commander, a designer of the universe in whom morality is grounded.

42:00

So I'd be looking at some things like that. And with that kind of background knowledge, resurrection is not at all unlikely, especially if God wanted to raise

42:08

Jesus. All right, well, let's move on to some of the specific evidences for the resurrection then.

42:14

So we have a historical event called the resurrection. It's a cornerstone of the Christian faith. What is the actual evidence for the resurrection of Jesus?

42:25

You got a, you know, you got a couple of days we can discuss this. Let me just give you what

42:31

I think is the strongest, okay? Sure, sure, sure. But we don't want the weaker evidence, but there is a degree of evidence.

42:38

I mean, right, so - Let me give you what I think is the strongest. Sure, sure, sure, go for it. Paul. And why do

42:44

I think Paul? Because Paul's letters are the earliest literature, probably the earliest literature in our

42:52

New Testament. Paul's writing less than 20 years after Jesus' death.

42:58

And he mentions Jesus' resurrection. He claims in 1 Corinthians, which is written probably within 25 years of Jesus' death, less than 25 years of Jesus' death, he mentions that Jesus appeared to him.

43:13

Twice in that letter, he mentions that Jesus appeared to, the risen Jesus appeared to him. In one case in chapter 15 of 1

43:20

Corinthians, he's even appealing to some oral tradition from which he would have received from the

43:25

Jerusalem church, the probably, excuse me, a hiccup here, the Jerusalem apostles, and received it from them at an even earlier date, earlier than 20 years and from the alleged eyewitnesses.

43:37

So Paul was not a Christian at the time, that a follower of Jesus at the time that he had this experience, he interpreted as the risen

43:46

Jesus. So he doesn't have a bias for Jesus. His bias is exactly in the opposite direction.

43:55

He's out persecuting Christians. I mean, if you ever can imagine someone like Nancy Pelosi becoming a conservative pro -Trump person, that is nothing compared to the apostle

44:09

Paul becoming a Christian. That was a good one. You make a very relevant, very modern connection.

44:16

That's right. So Paul becomes a Christian. Paul says that in his letter to the church at Galatia, which was written very early, he says that three years after his conversion, he goes up to Jerusalem and he spends 15 days with Peter.

44:33

Now, what do you think they were discussing during that time? And he uses the term hysteresis.

44:39

So I think he's getting information, a history on Jesus. He's spending 15 days with Jesus' lead apostle.

44:48

Paul hadn't, I think there's a good chance Paul would have heard Jesus during Jesus' lifetime because Paul is in Jerusalem at the same time

44:58

Jesus was there. He may have been at Jesus' trial. We don't know one way or the other. But Paul would have known some about Jesus, some of what he taught, but he wants to get stuff firsthand from Peter.

45:11

And then Galatians 2, he says 14 years later, he returns to Jerusalem and there he meets with the pillars of the church,

45:19

Peter, James, and John to run the gospel message he'd been preaching past them to make sure that he's on message with what they're preaching.

45:27

And he says that they affirmed that what he was preaching is what they were preaching. And then later on, you've got disciples of the apostles,

45:34

Peter and John, who speak in a laudatory manner of Paul after Paul had died.

45:40

So this seems to suggest and confirm that Paul's preaching the same message they're preaching.

45:46

So you could throw out the gospels. I don't recommend you do that. You could throw out the gospels and just on Paul's letters alone, we can get back to what the

45:56

Jerusalem apostles who had walked with Jesus were teaching pertaining to his resurrection, Jesus' death and his resurrection.

46:04

And we're getting this from a guy who was a non -believer at the time of his experience of the risen Jesus. So, and it's early.

46:11

So, I mean, this is, and he dies. He's willing to suffer continuously. We know he was martyred for his gospel proclamation.

46:17

So he really believed this stuff. Paul was just an awesome source. Now I wanna talk a little bit about the earliness of Paul, but before,

46:26

I know to the audience, I look like Moses just after coming down from Mount Sinai, receiving the tablets, the lights shining.

46:34

I'm just gonna close my shade real quick, but I wanna talk a little bit about the earliness of Paul. One second,

46:39

I apologize. All right, look at that. The wonders of having your office in your home right next to the window.

46:46

There we go. Hopefully that's a little bit better. It was like, as you were getting more, it's like, and Paul, and my face started like lightening up.

46:54

So, okay. So now this is - Eli the zebra. And look,

47:00

I still, it's still, it's pretty bad. At any rate. So Paul is our earliest

47:05

New Testament source, especially when you look a little bit more behind his letter, especially first Corinthians chapter 15 goes even before Paul.

47:15

And there's evidence of that, internal evidence of that in the writings of Paul. But a lot of people think in terms of, well, wait a minute, all this evidence you're talking about, how can we be sure that that's accurate since there's been such a long time that has passed?

47:28

Why don't you speak a little bit to the importance of recognizing that the issue is not where we are now to the events, but where the evidence is to the events.

47:39

Why don't you expand on that a bit, if that makes sense. Okay. Well, they're still interviewing

47:46

World War II vets today and World War II ended, let's see. This is about 70, 76 years ago.

47:54

Yeah. And they're interviewing World War II vets today to get their eyewitness testimony on it.

48:00

They're interviewing Korean War vets. They're interviewing Vietnam War vets, right? We see documentaries.

48:07

They seem just like yesterday on the Gulf War that took place in 1990, the first Gulf War.

48:13

Oh my goodness, I remember that. 31 years ago. 31 years ago. Okay. Even the second

48:20

Gulf War we're talking about that started, what was that? Was it 2002 or 2003?

48:27

When did that happen? So we're looking nearly 20 years ago. Sure. But even with the first Gulf War, 1990, 31 years ago that that happened.

48:38

Stop saying 31 with such emphasis. I feel old. I know, man. I remember when it happened.

48:44

I remember when it happened. I remember watching CNN when it was fair.

48:51

When it was fair and not so leftist. And man, everybody was glued to their televisions watching it.

49:03

So what we're looking at, 9 -11. Yes. That was 20 years ago.

49:08

20 years ago. I remember when it happened yesterday. I feel really old now.

49:14

Okay. So now when's Paul writing? Well, Paul's writing 1 Corinthians no more than 25 years after Jesus's death.

49:25

And he says, I delivered to you what I also received. Okay. So let's just say

49:30

Paul's writing this in the year 55. Jesus died either in April of 33 or April 30.

49:37

I lean toward 33 slightly, but it could have been 30 and it's almost like 50 -50 between scholars today.

49:43

Let's just call it 30 and say it's 25 years later. All right. So now we're talking about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

49:54

You know, we remember that. You know, it depends what you mean by the word is, right? I mean, that's

50:00

Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky. That's the kind of separation, date separation at the very max we have between when

50:07

Jesus died and when 1 Corinthians was written. That's a good parallel. So from when it was written to when it happened is equivalent to where we are now and the

50:16

Monica Lewinsky scandal. That's right. Now, Paul says in 1

50:22

Corinthians 15, I delivered to you what I also received. All right. When did he deliver to them?

50:29

Well, most scholars think that he delivered it to them when he established the church in Corinth, which most scholars think was around the year 51.

50:37

So now we're talking about 21 years after Jesus, that he delivered this to them.

50:44

They received this statement about Jesus' death, burial, resurrection, and the appearances within, was it 21 years?

50:55

21 years after Jesus' death at the very most. 9 -11 was 20 years ago.

51:01

Okay. Now he says, I delivered to you what I had also received.

51:07

So if he delivered it to them in 51, he had to receive it before then. And he received it from people.

51:13

So now we're even earlier than 9 -11 and he received it from eyewitnesses. Now we don't know when he received it.

51:20

He could have received it at his conversion or shortly thereafter from Ananias, Ananias just a few days after his conversion experience, which would have been probably, we don't know, it could have been one to three years after Jesus' death.

51:36

But he received, he could have received it at a very early date. He could have received it when he went to Jerusalem three years after his conversion.

51:42

He could have received it 14 years later. He could have received it anytime during that period from Barnabas or Silas or Mark, John Mark, one of his traveling companions.

51:56

The thing is though, he would have known the gospel. He calls this the gospel message. And this gospel message, he knew, even if it weren't in this stylized format that he gives them in 1

52:08

Corinthians 15, three through seven, he still received the content of that.

52:14

He would have received it back at his conversion and he probably knew about it even before then. So that's how early it is.

52:20

It's really early. And we don't question anyone who claims to be an eyewitness of having watched the

52:28

Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky thing. We don't think about people who talk about the first Gulf Wars.

52:36

That's too far away. We don't question Vietnam vets, even though that was like 50 years ago.

52:43

And we certainly don't for 9 -11. So it's not too far away at all. Right.

52:49

Okay, now you've debated many a skeptic, okay?

52:56

Last debate I saw that you did was against the atheist Matt Dillahunty, okay?

53:02

So you are very familiar with the sort of extreme skepticism, right?

53:08

It's not the generic, like, just give me some good reasons. I have trouble with these. No, like if your head got cut off and it rolled off on the floor and then all of a sudden in front of a crowd of 5 ,000 people, your head rolled right back on and went right back on.

53:24

And you were like, oh my goodness, I'm alive after being decapitated. Would you believe then? Nope. This is the extreme kind of,

53:32

I remember watching that. I was just kind of like, okay, this is really crazy right now. I mean, the great lengths that people go to to kind of create a shell around them so that they're impervious to any of these considerations

53:46

I think is remarkable. But you've debated Matt Dillahunty. I've debated a few people.

53:53

There was one skeptic that is on YouTube. His name is Tom Jump. We had a great discussion on his channel and he takes similar kind of very, very skeptical sorts of arguments.

54:04

So with that said, how would you respond? Let's suppose someone grants you.

54:11

Let me grant you everything you just said with respect to the facts. So if I were to say, give me the facts.

54:17

What can we know about the historical Jesus, the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus and the apparent resurrection?

54:24

Let me grant you all that. So what? Weird things happen in the world. Maybe Jesus was raised from the dead and one day we'll be able to explain it.

54:33

But what does it prove that Jesus was raised from the dead? It doesn't logically follow that he was raised from the dead.

54:39

Therefore he's exactly who he said he was. And how would you respond to someone who's that ultimate skeptic in that regard?

54:47

I would say, sure, it could be that he was an alien from a parallel universe.

54:53

In order to get his PhD, he had to convince a whole group of people that he was the son of God and divine and so that he orchestrated this to happen.

55:04

I can't disprove that. This is his doctrinal studies. I can't disprove that.

55:10

There's a matter of faith. And look, it doesn't matter what worldview you hold, you're gonna hold it with a degree of faith.

55:20

Even if you are an atheist, you're gonna hold your atheistic worldview with a degree of faith.

55:26

Because now you gotta explain how this universe came into existence out of nothing and came into existence with the strong appearance of design and that life itself has the strong appearance of design.

55:41

Something that agnostic like Francis Crick, one of the two guys who discovered

55:46

DNA, he talked about how it appears like it would require almost a miracle for life to come out of non -life.

55:55

You've got Carl, I'm sorry, Richard Dawkins, who says that the universe and life itself has the strong appearance of design.

56:04

Of course, he doesn't accept it, but that it was designed by God or any kind of a designer, but he at least acknowledges that it has the strong appearance of design.

56:13

So atheists have to explain, you're gonna have to accept some things by faith. So you got Jesus who comes on to the scene.

56:20

He claims to have a special relationship with God who had chosen him to usher in his kingdom. He taught in parables.

56:29

He performed deeds that astonished crowds and that both he and his followers claimed were divine miracles and exorcisms.

56:38

These are, those three things are facts that are granted by virtually every scholar who studies the subject, including atheist agnostics and Jewish historians of Jesus.

56:47

Sure. Then I could go further and say, I do think we also have good evidence that Jesus predicted his death and subsequent imminent resurrection that he claimed to be

56:57

God's uniquely divine son. I think we could do that. So we've got this context in which

57:04

Jesus is making these claims and then he rises from the dead. I think even though you could posit and say, well, maybe he was a demon, maybe he was an alien from a parallel universe doing his

57:16

PhD project, you're gonna believe by faith, no matter what you believe, atheism,

57:24

Christian, whatever, a ridiculous thing like the alien thing. I'm just gonna choose to go with Jesus and what he claimed.

57:32

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's where I'm putting my faith. Okay. As I said before, you have done a lot of debates and I think someone you debated multiple times, maybe you can tell me how many times you debated him, was

57:47

Dr. Bart Ehrman. Six times, I believe. Six times. That's a lot of times to debate somebody.

57:56

Now, the reason why I'm bringing Dr. Ehrman in the discussion for a moment here and then we'll start taking some questions.

58:01

We have a couple of questions here. And if anyone still has any questions, they can send them in and we'll address them in just a few moments.

58:07

But how does the work of Dr. Ehrman interface with the challenges that Christians face when trying to defend the resurrection?

58:19

So I wanna defend the resurrection, but then I have a couple of friends who read a bunch of Bart Ehrman books. How does that make my job a little bit more difficult?

58:27

And why should I be aware of what Dr. Ehrman's objections are against the

58:33

Bible and things like that? Now, you don't have to go through a whole history of textual criticism, but just generally speaking, why don't you briefly just summarize who

58:41

Dr. Ehrman is for people who have no idea and why his work is relevant to this discussion from a

58:47

Christian perspective? Bart Ehrman is a former

58:53

Christian who gave up his faith years ago. He was disturbed by, first he was disturbed by discrepancies among the gospels.

59:04

And so he gave up biblical inerrancy. And then he was really disturbed by the problem of pain, evil, and suffering.

59:13

And he concluded that the Christian, the Judeo -Christian God could not exist because of that.

59:20

And so he considers himself, some days he calls himself an agnostic, some days he calls himself an atheist.

59:29

I like Bart Ehrman. We've become friends through our six debates. I like him quite a bit and I consider him a friend.

59:39

So he's dangerous because - Yeah. He's like, listen,

59:48

Bart's a great guy. We're friends. He's dangerous, so you need to watch your back. Just love that transition, that was great.

59:56

Hey, there's a difference between the person and their beliefs. I mean, we can have great respect for people, but then consider their beliefs very dangerous.

01:00:07

I just thought that escalated very quickly the way it did. Well, you know, I'm friends with a few of the people

01:00:14

I've debated in the past. Bir Ali, probably the leading Muslim debater in the world. I consider him to be a friend.

01:00:19

We get along really well. He's Larry Shapiro. I've debated him twice. He's an atheist philosophy professor at University of Wisconsin at Madison.

01:00:28

Of all the people I've debated, I probably consider him my closest friend.

01:00:34

I really like Larry a lot. I trust him. I think he's just a great guy.

01:00:41

But Ehrman is dangerous because he is really skilled at putting forth his arguments rhetorically.

01:00:54

So he's a decent, he's a good scholar, and he puts forth his arguments in a very persuasive way.

01:01:03

And that's what makes Bart dangerous. So it's a bad thing,

01:01:11

I guess you could say in a sense, that Bart's out there, that people can read his books and that his books are so popular.

01:01:19

In fact, he's probably the most influential, skeptical New Testament scholar in North America, perhaps even in the world, the most influential that is.

01:01:28

Okay, I don't think his arguments are the best, but I think he's the most influential because of the way he writes and his persuasiveness.

01:01:35

His books are bestsellers. But there's a positive to this, and that is all you have to do is read his books and understand his arguments and be able to answer them, and you'll be prepared to answer a whole lot of objections because he gives the same ones.

01:01:51

The Gospels, we can't believe them because they're anonymous. We have no idea who wrote them. Well, that one's easily answered.

01:01:57

You can't believe them because they're biased. That one's easy to answer. Oh, there's contradictions in the

01:02:03

Gospels. That one's easy to answer. Well, the Gospels are written too long after the events they purport.

01:02:08

That one's easy to answer. Well, you know, historians have to choose the most probable explanation.

01:02:17

A miracle by its very definition is the least probable explanation. Therefore, a historian can never choose a miracle.

01:02:23

That's easy to answer. So all you have to do is look at all, find out what his objections are, his arguments are, and learn how to answer them.

01:02:32

And then you'll be prepared to answer a whole lot of your sophisticated skeptics out there because they're gonna use his material.

01:02:39

Sure, that's right. And it's interesting to see that the people who use his material, they range from a wide variety of people, from atheist skeptics, agnostics, to Muslim apologists, who quote

01:02:50

Martin Ehrman sometimes as like a Christian scholar who even says the evidence is problematic.

01:02:56

I'm like, well, read it at a time out. So his work is very important to be familiar with so that we can anticipate some of these objections.

01:03:04

All right, well, we're at the top of the hour here. Let's scroll through a bit and see if we can get a couple of questions in and then we'll wrap things up.

01:03:12

I've been really enjoying this conversation. I hope you have been as well. Yeah, it's been good, Eli. Good, all right, great stuff.

01:03:18

So let's scroll through here. We had a couple. Okay, so this is a nice basic question for someone who's just interested in the sort of objections that come up.

01:03:28

In your opinion, what is the most common argument you see against the resurrection and how do you respond to that common argument?

01:03:35

Well, I'd say the most common argument would be hallucinations. You know, that probably, the disciple is just hallucinated or, you know, sometimes they call them visions.

01:03:47

Sure. If it's a sophisticated skeptic, they'll call it altered state of consciousness and ASC. It's all the same thing though.

01:03:53

So the way I respond to it is I point out a few things. Number one is that, well, first of all,

01:04:00

I would, you know, talk about what a hallucination is. It is a false sensory perception.

01:04:05

You are perceiving something with the natural senses that isn't really there. So visual hallucination, you think you're seeing something that's not there.

01:04:12

An auditory hallucination, you think you're hearing something that's not there. There are six main ways to hallucinate.

01:04:18

Smell, taste, feel, like when you're set, you first got your mobile phone and you had it on vibrate and you thought you got a text message, but you didn't.

01:04:29

That's a tactile hallucination. Or when you dream you're falling off a building or a cliff and you wake up, that is called a kinesthetic hallucination.

01:04:38

You have a sense of motion. So almost all hallucinations are in a single mode.

01:04:46

So you might have a visual hallucination, but you don't hear something at the same time. The only people who experience hallucinations in multiple modes are those who are high on drugs and schizophrenics, okay?

01:04:57

This is what it's been shown. Now, with that in mind, I would say a couple of things, three things.

01:05:04

Number one, when we look at the reports, the earliest reports, like in 1 Corinthians 15, he appeared to all of the apostles.

01:05:12

He appeared to the 12. So you're talking about 100%. Whereas the literature informs us in the professional mental health literature, studies have been done over a century, suggests that only 7 % of those in the highest category to receive hallucinations, adults bereaving the loss of a loved one, only 7 % of them have a visual hallucination.

01:05:39

And yet you've got 100 % of the disciples, he appeared, appeared, it's visual, to the 12.

01:05:46

He appeared to all of the apostles. Second, you've got group appearances. Since hallucinations are false sensory perceptions in the mind of an individual, they are not collective, they're not contagious.

01:05:58

They're like dreams. So I couldn't wake up my wife in the middle of the night and say, honey, I'm having a dream, I'm in Maui. Go back to sleep, join me in my dream and let's have a free vacation.

01:06:07

You can't do that. She might dream she's in Maui, but we're not having the same dream. We're not communicating with one another in the same exact ways.

01:06:15

So you've got three group appearances, even within this early oral tradition in Paul.

01:06:21

He appeared to the 12, he appeared to more than 500. He appeared to all of the apostles. So you got the percentage of percipients is too high.

01:06:29

You've got group appearances, and then you've got Paul. Paul was not grieving Jesus' death.

01:06:36

Jesus, in Paul's view, was a false prophet and a failed Messiah. So Jesus would have been the last person in the universe that Paul would have wanted to see or expected to see.

01:06:45

I could go on and give more reasons, but those are three right there reasons why we should reject hallucination hypothesis.

01:06:52

Hmm. All right, very good. This is a statement here. Maybe you could speak to it. Caldoun Swice was a, well -

01:06:59

Oh, I know him. I think he's still teaching apologetics. Maybe, maybe not. He was my professor when

01:07:04

I was doing Liberty Online. And he's a super great guy. He says - I like Caldoun. Yeah, he's a great guy.

01:07:10

He says, rejection of miracles is based on a naturalistic bias, but we must recognize that we have a theistic bias too.

01:07:17

So recognizing that we all have this bug is the first step towards a robust, honest discussion. And he mentioned that that's a great, a great point.

01:07:24

Now, my question for you is, and we won't get into some of the methodological issues because I know those who listen to my channel, you know, you guys know that I'm a presuppositionalist.

01:07:35

So there's always a big hullabaloo about the possibility of neutrality and all that other sort of stuff.

01:07:40

But just asking from your perspective, based upon your understanding, how do you remove as much as possible your theistic bias from considering, you know, the historical data, okay?

01:07:55

Now, again, you feel free to answer from your perspective. I may have a different answer, but that's fine. I want people to hear kind of where you're coming from in that respect.

01:08:03

Well, it's difficult. And Caldoun is absolutely correct that we all have our biases. Atheists have a naturalistic bias.

01:08:10

You know, as Christians, we have a theistic bias. So what I did, I set up six steps that I took to manage and minimize the negative impact that my bias could bring on an investigation.

01:08:23

So we're not gonna be able to get rid of our bias totally, but I think we can minimize it if we're really serious about doing it, which most aren't.

01:08:33

Most don't even recognize they have a bias or think that it's a dangerous thing to bring into investigation.

01:08:39

Hardly anyone even tries to work with it, but we can do it at first. I don't remember all six at the moment, but you have to first recognize that you have a bias for one thing.

01:08:50

Another thing you can do is you can make your method public. So I do that in my book on the resurrection, my big book on the resurrection.

01:08:58

I say, here's my method. My philosophy of history is just I'm a critical realist. Here's why

01:09:03

I'm a critical realist. I believe the past can be known to a certain extent, and here's how we come to know it.

01:09:11

There are certain criteria such as explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, less ad hoc.

01:09:18

The hypothesis that best fulfills these criteria based on the knowable facts should be regarded as what probably occurred.

01:09:26

We can never know something with absolute certainty. We can never know, historically speaking, we can never know something exhaustively either, historically speaking.

01:09:34

So we're looking for reasonable certainty to get an essentially faithful representation of what occurred.

01:09:40

So I make that public and then I submit my method. I submit my results, my investigation to unsympathetic experts because they don't have the same kind of biases that I have.

01:09:54

They're biased in the opposite direction and they're gonna look at it. They've got their own ax to grind, but they're going to be more inclined to see weaknesses and holes in my argument that I don't see.

01:10:06

Now, I don't have to accept all of their criticisms because again, they have their own biases. But if I'm truly after truth, if I am sincerely authentically after truth rather than just affirming my own worldview, then

01:10:21

I'm going to take their objections, their criticisms into serious consideration to see where I might be wrong.

01:10:28

And then I'm going to assess that. So that's where we go. I think we can minimize our bias. I can say that during my investigation,

01:10:36

I believe that there were times when I was on the fence that I could have gone one way or the other and that's where I wanted to be.

01:10:46

I did find that if I did not make a concerted effort to remain there, that I would go default back to my own position.

01:10:55

And when I say this one way or the other, on the fence, I believed that I could remain a

01:11:06

Christian if the evidence did not decisively point to the resurrection. If it just left it like indeterminate, not one way or the other,

01:11:15

I could remain a Christian. I'd be disappointed that the evidence wasn't any stronger, but I was open to that.

01:11:20

But if the evidence pointed away from the resurrection of Jesus, then I couldn't remain a

01:11:26

Christian. So that's where I was coming from. That's why historical method was important to me.

01:11:31

And that's why it was important for me to work toward minimizing my bias while my investigation proceeded.

01:11:40

Sure. Now there's a question here. I'm not going to put it up only because it's a specific kind of question that might get us off track, but it is an apologetic methodological question.

01:11:50

And so without getting into too much detail, they're asking you basically what you think of a particular school, but we don't wanna start an unnecessary methodological debate here.

01:11:59

So I'm just gonna ask you so that maybe people aren't familiar with, what apologetic method do you typically associate yourself with?

01:12:09

Well, I guess I fall on the same line as Gary Habermas. I am an evidentialist. I'm not a classical apologist because, but look,

01:12:18

I'm fine with classical apologetics where you start off with arguments for God's existence. And then you go into person of Jesus, you go to resurrection, you go from there, then you go to the reliability of the

01:12:29

Bible. I'm fine with that, but for practical purposes, who's gonna sit through and listen to all of that?

01:12:38

I think if you got resurrection, you've got God's existence and Jesus and Christianity.

01:12:44

So I like resurrection in that sense. So I consider myself to be an evidentialist, but look, as we said offline,

01:12:54

Eli, I'm fine with presuppositionalists. If they wanna go that way, that's fine.

01:13:00

I don't find it persuasive. It would not have appealed to me. I can say that if I had been a skeptic,

01:13:06

I'm just not wired that way. Now, my dad, it would have appealed to him. He had very little use for apologetics.

01:13:13

In fact, no use for apologetics. He was a strong, very strong into reformed theology, strong diehard

01:13:23

Calvinist. So for him, if the Holy Spirit tells you when he rejuvenates you and you get saved, you don't need any evidence.

01:13:32

It's all the Holy Spirit's doing. And I would say, well, dad, regardless of that, I'm not rejecting it.

01:13:37

I'm just saying that the Holy Spirit can use evidence for those of us who are wired in such a way.

01:13:43

And I needed that evidence. So just as there are different love languages, if a person, you have a spouse who's really feels love through words of affirmation or through gift giving, if you're trying to show love through physical affection, it's not going to communicate love to them.

01:14:03

And so in the same way, there are different apologetic methodologies and we're not all gonna appeal to the same person, same kind of people.

01:14:15

So if you're a presuppositionalist, man, God bless you. Keep doing what you're doing and let

01:14:21

God use you in that way. For me, I like evidentialism and God's using me in that sense.

01:14:28

Okay, thank you very much for that. Dr. Swice asked another question here. He says, that's an amazing experience she had with respect to the woman who had the near -death experience.

01:14:36

He says, would you please give, if you're able to, a medical reference for this near -death experience in the show notes?

01:14:42

I mean, you don't have to, but if you wanna like message me and I can share it or whatever. Well, I'll just say right off, there's a book.

01:14:48

I wonder if it's right behind me. Probably take me a couple of minutes to find it.

01:14:54

There's a book by Michael Saboam and I forgot the title of it.

01:15:00

It's like, I think light is in the title.

01:15:06

Michael Saboam, S -A -B -O -M, is a retired cardiologist. He's really looked into these NDEs and he mentions it in his book and he'll provide some, well,

01:15:19

I mean, since he interviewed Pamela Reynolds, he's a firsthand, he is a reference, but he'd also referenced some other things,

01:15:28

I'm sure, in the medical literature. You can probably also, I'm sure her testimony, she's dead now, but I think

01:15:37

I recalled seeing a video of her talking about it herself. So just go to YouTube, type in Pamela Reynolds NDE and see what you can find.

01:15:46

You can probably find some of this stuff online. All right, thank you so much for that. This is the final question and this is from Tanner.

01:15:54

He asks, why should an atheist consider miracles as valid historical inferences? An atheist doesn't have a worldview that provides an existential backdrop that considers miracles valid inferences.

01:16:05

So I guess he's talking about that worldview issue. If we interpret things in light of our worldview and the worldview is just kind of our ultimate context, that's kind of preventing him from seeing or interpreting the data as a miracle.

01:16:21

So how would you address someone with kind of that worldview bias issue going on there? I'd say if you really are interested in understanding reality, and I'm not saying this in a condescending way, but if you're really interested in, and as I think we all are, in understanding reality, look at some of the data, investigate the data on miracles.

01:16:44

Look at things like well -evidenced near -death experiences. There's a book Gary Habermas referred me to and it's, oh.

01:16:56

You don't have this all memorized now, just kidding. No, I used to know the name, but it's a book.

01:17:02

I mentioned, look, if they go to online to my, if they go on to my

01:17:10

YouTube channel, look up my debate with Matthew McCormick and look at my opening statement.

01:17:15

I mentioned this book. It's something about the soul, okay? And it documents a couple of hundred near -death experiences that have some medical corroboration.

01:17:26

Some are more, far more interesting than others and some are better evidence than others, but it's really, really some cool stuff.

01:17:36

So I would look at that. I would point to some well -evidenced near -death experiences.

01:17:42

I also talk about a veridical apparition that a friend of mine had, and she gave me firsthand testimony on it.

01:17:50

And I mentioned that there were, she was awakened one night and she actually saw this face looking at her, it's illuminated face of a friend of hers she hadn't seen in like three years and it scared her.

01:18:06

And then she saw like a demon behind this face and she was just petrified and she was like blinking.

01:18:15

She was biting her tongue. She was pinching herself thinking she's dreaming or hallucinating. And then finally she closed her eyes and she prayed the

01:18:22

Lord's prayer. She opened her eyes and it was gone. And she looked over the clock. It was like 2 .30 in the morning. And she found out a day later that that person whose face friend she had seen at 2 .30

01:18:34

in the morning had died at 2 .30 in the morning. So you've got some stuff like that.

01:18:41

Dale Allison talks about these veridical apparitions in his 2005 book,

01:18:47

Resurrecting Jesus and in his brand new book out, I think it's called Arguing Resurrect.

01:18:52

I don't know what the new book is called. You can look at it. Allison is, he's not by any means an evangelical.

01:19:01

He believes Jesus was raised from the dead but he's not as solid on the facts as I would be comfortable with.

01:19:08

But he does a really excellent job in this book. And he talks about veridical apparitions of which he and family members are firsthand eyewitnesses.

01:19:17

So some things like that, I would present some of this stuff. This is empirical data. Have them look into it that supports a spiritual dimension of reality.

01:19:26

There are testimonies from antiquity up to the present day of miracles. You can see a lot of these reported by Craig Keener in his two volume set on miracles.

01:19:37

Very interesting. I was fibbing. There was one more question here. Hopefully you don't mind because I think folks might find it interesting but it's from Daniel.

01:19:46

He asks, what should we think on the Shroud of Turin? And I know a lot of people are interested in that. There's so much kind of myth mixed with facts going on and around about the

01:19:56

Shroud of Turin. What are your thoughts on it? And I guess he's asking, when are the next tests going to be done on it?

01:20:02

If you even are privy to that. Maybe you're, apparently you're on the Shroud of Turin test faculty.

01:20:09

That'd be cool. But I don't know when the next tests are gonna be done or if they're gonna be done.

01:20:15

I think that probably will be sometime in the future. I think the Catholic church has talked about allowing some more tests to be done, but I'm not sure that.

01:20:25

What do I think about it? I haven't personally studied it in detail, but I've read on it.

01:20:32

Gary Habermas is one of the foremost authorities and he and I have talked about it on numerous occasions.

01:20:38

And he's pretty convinced that it's the authentic burial cloth of Jesus. He gives several reasons for it.

01:20:43

So kind of hearing his arguments and then reading some of the arguments against it. I'm convinced that it is the burial cloth of Jesus.

01:20:54

The only thing that really calls it into question was the 1988 carbon -14 testing.

01:20:59

But there've been several challenges, serious challenges to it. I remember here watching a video in the 1990s in which the guy who, the physicist who invented carbon -14 testing, who is an atheist by the way, acknowledged that although he believed the carbon -14 testing done on the shroud was accurate, he said, there's no way to really know because the technology that it would need to clean the polymer off the shroud of Turin that had developed over the years, that we didn't possess it even in the 1990s, much less 1998 when they did the testing.

01:21:36

So he says it could be wrong. That's one thing. Another thing was around 2003, there was a journal article that came out where a chemist, it was published in a chemistry, a prominent chemistry academic journal.

01:21:53

The chemist took some leftover from that carbon -14 testing that had not been destroyed by that testing and he ran some other chemical testing on it and he was able to show that what they did the carbon -14 testing on was not a part of the original shroud of Turin.

01:22:09

And these were weaves that were put into it later on in order to repair the shroud.

01:22:19

So that introduced serious doubt into the legitimacy of the 1988

01:22:27

C14 testing. Even more recently in a book that was published last November that David Beck and I co -edited, it's a festschrift for Gary Habermas.

01:22:39

Title was Raised on the Third Day. So you can purchase that now. It's not that expensive at all.

01:22:45

It's on Amazon right now. What's that? It's on Amazon right now. Oh, yeah. And we have two scholars in there who write on the shroud of Turin and respond to some of the objections.

01:22:58

One in particular you'll find, I mean, both are interesting, but one in particular is quite fascinating and that's the one written by Barry Schwartz.

01:23:06

The reason it's so fascinating is because Schwartz is a Jew. He's Jewish who was the official photographer of the

01:23:16

Shroud of Turin. He's the one that made all these high -definition, these great photographs of the

01:23:21

Shroud of Turin that were taking during the Shroud of Turin research project in 1978,

01:23:27

I believe it was. He is not a Christian and yet Schwartz thinks that the

01:23:36

Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus and could very well suggest his resurrection from the dead.

01:23:43

What Schwartz does in his contribution, he has a scathing critique of the carbon -14 testing that occurred in 1988.

01:23:55

Excuse me for a sec. That's okay. Take your time. In my opinion, he 100 % debunks -

01:24:05

If you need another drink, don't worry about it. You're completely fine. You wanna clear your throat real quick.

01:24:10

I think he debunks the carbon -14 testing rebuttal to the authenticity of the

01:24:17

Shroud. It is an unbelievable criticism of that and I think it should end any appeals to the carbon -14 testing of 1988 as a rebuttal or as proof to say that the

01:24:31

Shroud is a forgery. Hmm. Well, thank you so much for that question, Daniel. I always thought that I'd never really looked into that topic in any depth and I always found it to be very interesting.

01:24:41

So thank you so much for unpacking that. I definitely have now bookmarked that book.

01:24:47

So I'll definitely check that out. So Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to come on.

01:24:52

I know you're very busy and I really appreciate your time and everything you had to say. My pleasure,

01:24:58

Eli. Great questions, great interview. I mean, you asked great questions and so did your viewers.

01:25:05

So thanks a lot. Oh, I appreciate that. Well, everyone who's listening in, if you guys wanna give this another listen at some time, this will also be put on the podcast as well.

01:25:14

So just go to iTunes, Revealed Apologetics. Also for those who are interested in learning apologetics, of course, from a presuppositional perspective,

01:25:23

I know there are different views out there, but I do offer an online course in which I teach presuppositional apologetics.

01:25:29

You can sign up for that on my website, revealedapologetics .com. What is your website so that folks can get in contact with you or the content that you put out?

01:25:40

What was your website again? My website is risenjesus .com. And I invite people also to go to our

01:25:47

YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and type in Mike Licona. You'll see my channel up. We have a little over 200 videos.

01:25:56

And if you speak Spanish, we just started one called Mike Licona en Espanol. And that just has 1 ,000 subscribers.

01:26:03

And so yeah, join that. That's awesome. Well, I'm Puerto Rican and I speak no Spanish. So we're not gonna get into that.

01:26:10

My dad was from Honduras and I don't really speak Spanish either. So it was like from the, if you remember

01:26:16

Rudolph the Red -Nosed Reindeer cartoon, we're from the Isle of Misfit Toys, right? We're Latinos who can't speak

01:26:22

Spanish. Wait, so you're Latino, man? That's, I totally didn't know that. 50%. That's awesome.

01:26:29

That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, everyone, for listening. And thank you so much, Dr. Licona. This was a very enjoyable discussion.