Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? (With Dr. Kirk MacGregor)

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In this interview, we sift through the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

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All right, welcome to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Elias Ayala, and today
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I am super excited that we're going to have a real live scholar in the in the studio today to talk about a very very important topic, especially those who are interested in apologetics, right?
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The Bible tells us that we are to set apart Christ as Lord in our hearts, always being ready to give a reason for the hope that's in us, and one of the ways that we do that is we talk about the foundations of our faith, the evidentiary foundations of our faith.
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And yes, as a presuppositional apologetics, I believe in the use of evidence, and so I am very excited to have with me
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Dr. Kirk McGregor. Now before I kind of give the floor over to Dr. McGregor, I want to kind of just give some background about Dr.
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McGregor. He is a professor at McPherson College, okay? McPherson College.
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He is a historian of religion, a theologian, and a philosopher of religion, and he is an award -winning teacher.
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He was named the 2017 and 2018 Professor of the Year and received the 2017 and 18 non -tenured faculty teaching award at McPherson College.
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In addition, he was named the 2016 Outstanding Faculty of the Year at the College of Lake County before coming to McPherson.
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He also taught at James Madison University, Radford University, the University of Northern Iowa, and Western Illinois University and Quincy University.
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So he's been around, and yeah, yeah, he's written a few books as well.
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One that he is particularly well known for is a book on Louis de
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Molina, and so Dr. McGregor is an expert,
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I would say, on the topic of Molinism, and again, even though we disagree, he has helped me in understanding the perspective very much.
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And so that's perhaps, you know, later down the line we can have him talk about a little bit about Molinism if people are interested in that as well.
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So, but that is not the topic for today. I have Dr. McGregor here to discuss one of the central questions of Christianity, and that is the resurrection of Jesus.
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Did Jesus rise from the dead? And so today I welcome Dr. Kirk McGregor from McPherson College to discuss that very topic.
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So why don't you introduce yourself and maybe add some information that I haven't in my little introduction here.
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Well, thank you so much, Eli. It's a real pleasure being on the show today. The resurrection of Jesus has always been a topic that has interested me historically.
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It's really one of the first topics that I ever worked on in my academic days in philosophy and religion.
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So as an undergraduate, I took a very important class with Dr.
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Edwin Yamuchi. Edwin Yamuchi is now retired. He's an emeritus professor at Miami University in Ohio, and he's an eminent
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Christian historian, archaeologist, biblical scholar, and he has written in defense of the historicity of Jesus' resurrection.
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And so the project that I did for his class was a defense of Jesus' resurrection, which tries to look at the earliest evidence we have for that event.
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Now since that time I have written a few very important articles on this topic.
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In 2006, I wrote a piece in the Journal of the
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Evangelical Theological Society entitled 1 Corinthians 15, 3b to 6a and 7, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
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And I think that that particular source, 1 Corinthians 15, 3b to 6a and 7, is one of the two most important sources for Jesus' resurrection.
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And then I wrote an article more recently in the journal Scriptura in 2018 entitled
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The Ending of the Pre -Markan Passion Narrative. And I think the Pre -Markan Passion Narrative is the other most important piece of historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection.
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All right, and that's good that we be familiar with the sources and that they're very early and that's important when we're looking at whether, if we're asking the question whether a historical event occurred, we want to get back to the earliest sources.
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But of course, as you know, there's so much more involved than that. Why don't we define our terms first? What do we mean when we speak of evidence in general and historical evidence in particular?
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I mean, what makes something evidence? Yeah, evidence would be any form of testimony or any phenomenon that makes an event or makes the hypothesis of an event more probable than it would have been without it.
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So we could say that my having clean teeth today is evidence that I brushed my teeth because my having clean teeth counts in favor of the hypothesis that I brushed my teeth this morning.
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If I hadn't brushed my teeth this morning, you wouldn't expect for me to have clean teeth. And so in general, evidence for anything is really testimony, experimental discoveries, any type of data that would make some hypothesis more probable than it otherwise would have been.
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So now when we're talking about history, for example, so when we're looking at events that occurred in the past, what do we do with people who say, you know, well, there can't be really any conclusive evidence for events that have occurred in the past, especially if they occurred over 2 ,000 years ago.
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I mean, how can we really know about history? What would you say in response to people who are historical skeptics?
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I would say that the amount of time between the events taking place and now has nothing whatsoever to do with whether we can reconstruct the past.
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The issue is how good our sources of evidence are. In other words, the crucial time gap is not the time gap between the events and today.
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The crucial time gap is the distance between the event and the evidence for the event.
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And if that time gap is narrow and you take a look at various historical criteria of authenticity, which
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I'll talk about in just a minute, and it seems like an event well satisfies at least one of those criteria of authenticity, then it really doesn't matter whether or not a long time has passed since or a short time has passed since.
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So the evidence for JFK's assassination is just as good today as it was back in the 1960s.
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So the passage of time hasn't done anything to invalidate the evidence. Okay, so the common accusation that a lot of people say, well, it's happened so long ago.
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We can't really know for sure events that happened so long ago is really an irrelevant statement because the question is not it's not that the passage of time makes the evidence that we have bad.
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The evidence is just the evidence. Right. Exactly. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Very good.
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Now, okay. So what about this issue and this is common on the internet and there are people who state this with great confidence and it really shows their detachment from scholarship.
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What could we say to help people who are struggling with the mythicists, the people who say, well, there's no evidence for the fact that Jesus even existed.
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If there is evidence, it's so small that we can't really be conclusive with regards to the existence of a historical person,
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Jesus. Now, two things. Is that claim taken seriously in scholarship, whether believing or unbelieving?
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And two, what are some evidences that we could equip people with to demonstrate that that's really not an issue or a problem for Christianity?
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Yeah, well, it's not taken seriously by the vast majority and I'm talking over 99 .9
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% of critical biblical scholars. So by critical biblical scholars,
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I mean folks who attend the Society of Biblical Literature every year who are secular researchers on ancient
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Christian history or the history of religion or new testament. People who would attend the historical
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Jesus section of the Society of Biblical Literature. So far from the academy thinking that Jesus might be a myth, there is an entire section of this academic secular society devoted to trying to uncover more information about this historical figure,
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Jesus of Nazareth. So the evidence for Jesus is actually far greater than the evidence we have for the founder of any other major world religion.
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And it certainly is as good if not better than the evidence for Julius Caesar or the
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Emperor Nero or Pontius Pilate or anyone else. So if you're going to doubt that Jesus existed, you're going to basically have to again, like you said, deny all knowledge about the past.
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So when you look at the life of Jesus, I tend to like to start with the very earliest sources.
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So people tend to think that the earliest sources for the life of Jesus are the documents in the
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New Testament, and that's actually not the case. What is the case is that scholars using a technique known as form criticism and a related technique called tradition criticism are able to look at documents and to see if there are any forms in that document.
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Now a form is a technical term. A form is a memorizable oral tradition, which if you try to change it, then the form no longer makes sense.
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So imagine an oral tradition, which is very tightly controlled by parallelism and meter and rhyme scheme and repetition of words so that it would be easy to pass on from one person to the other.
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It would be completely the opposite of the child's game of telephone. And if you try to alter it in any way, then the form would no longer make sense.
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And really we're acquainted with this all the time whenever you listen to popular music. So whatever you think of, say,
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Katy Perry as an artist, the reason why I can listen to her songs maybe two or three times and have all of the words memorized is precisely because she is using exactly the same mnemonic devices as the ancients did in transmitting these forms, these memorizable oral traditions.
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And so there are a multiplicity of memorizable oral traditions which go back to the 30s, actually go back to the time that Jesus actually did and said various things.
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So a scholar like Bart Ehrman, who certainly is not a Christian in any sense, he would recognize that there are many, many oral traditions which come directly from the lips of Jesus that date back to the 30s.
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And that's something that secular New Testament scholars would agree upon.
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So you first of all have that wide body of oral material, which is really our bedrock evidence because it is the very baseline.
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And then as you go up, and I'm going to assume here kind of latest possible dates, if you go up, then you think about the
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Gospel of Mark, which would be written between 65 and 70
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CE. If you think that there was an early version of the Gospel of Thomas that was written around 50
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CE, you have the Q document written around 50. And you also have other documents which scholars call
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M. This would be a document that Matthew would ultimately use in writing his
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Gospel and a document called L, which Luke ultimately used in writing his Gospel, as well as a document known as the
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Sign Source, which is kind of the best memorable deeds of Jesus. And all of these come before the fall of Jerusalem or during the time of the fall of Jerusalem.
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So all of these are 70 or before. This would put them in the very first generation.
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This is when people who saw Jesus and heard Jesus were still alive.
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And then you have in sort of your third layer of material things that use those earlier sources, like the
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Gospel of Matthew, which most scholars would date between 80 and 85, Gospel of Luke, which would be dated around the same time,
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Gospel of John between around 90 and 100. So just given that information, all one needs to ask is are any two of these sources independent of each other?
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One of the most important historical criteria of authenticity is multiple independent attestation.
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And that means that if you have two sources which are in a position to report accurate history and they're independent of each other, then you know beyond reasonable doubt that the event occurred.
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So the example I share with my students, if you had a newspaper reporter from the
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Boston Globe and a newspaper reporter from the Houston Chronicle who both flew up to the
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Rose Garden to hear President Trump give an address and they didn't know each other, they never contacted each other, and they both flew back to their respective cities and they both reported independently that Trump did or said something, then we would know beyond reasonable doubt that Trump said or did it.
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And we know in the case of the sources with regard to the life of Jesus that you know between 30 and 40 of these, if you're counting all of the different oral traditions, are independent of each other.
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And so you have multiple independent attestation for the life of Jesus fulfilled 30 to 40 times over.
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So to doubt Jesus' historicity is absolutely insane. And that's a quote you could take to the back.
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Yeah, and if you want to add anything to that, it's also interesting that sources outside of Christianity do report
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Jesus. So there are nine non -Christian extra biblical sources that I make sure to acquaint my students with who do talk about Jesus.
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Josephus has a couple of passages on Jesus. If you could just hold it right there, I do apologize for interrupting.
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I want to go to those outside sources, but I just want to clarify. So you're saying that the best things that we could appeal to for evidence or early witness of Christ is of course the
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New Testament, but you're saying that there are sources within the source of the New Testament.
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Correct. That can be derived out of the text that gives us a knowledge that this is based upon earlier testimony that goes further back to the text itself.
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Yes, absolutely right. Okay, and so it gets us very very close to the events to the lifetime of Jesus and things like that.
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Okay, so there's a source within the source and you would say one example of that would be 1 Corinthians chapter 15, right?
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Yes, absolutely. Okay, so 1 Corinthians 15 specifically verses 3b to 6a and 7.
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So scholars have taken a look at this formula and have been able to determine that verse 6b, most of whom are still alive, though some have died, that was
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Paul's parenthetical remark that he added when he wrote 1 Corinthians in around 55
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CE. But by careful analysis of the grammar as well as the style, the repetition of words, the mirrored parallelism, we know that there is an ancient creed that Paul passed on to the
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Corinthian congregation. And if you cross -reference 1 Corinthians 15 with Galatians 1, we know that he received this creed from Peter and James in the year 35, which is only five years after the event.
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Now if Paul received this creed, which we're going to talk about in a minute, from Peter and James in the year 35, then the creed has to have been formulated before that.
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So we're talking worst case scenario about a source that goes back five years after Jesus' death and probably goes back within say either weeks or months of Jesus' death.
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And this is a source which is eyewitness testimony. The persons whose names appear in this creed are the very individuals who drew up this creed.
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These were all members of the early Christian community in Jerusalem. So when you're reading this creed, it truly is a statement of eyewitnesses, and that's not my judgment.
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That is the judgment of the Jewish New Testament scholar Pinchas Lapid. So this creed,
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Paul prefaces it by saying, For I delivered to you as of first importance what
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I also received. And here the words delivered. Got my Greek New Testament here in front of me.
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So the word delivered, peridoka, and then received, perelebon.
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Those are technical rabbinic terms for passing on sacred tradition. So right out of the gate,
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Paul is admitting that this material is not his own, but that he received it from an earlier source.
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And by correlating this with Galatians, we know exactly when. So it's a six -line formula.
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It goes like this. Line one, That Christ died in behalf of our sins according to the scriptures.
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Line two, And that he was buried. Line three, And that he has been raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.
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Line four, And that he was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. Line five,
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Then he was seen by over 500 brothers and sisters at one time. Line six, Then he was seen by James, then by all the apostles.
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So if you look at this formula, what you have is eyewitness testimony, amazingly, from Cephas, that's the
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Aramaic name for Peter. The group of twelve, that would have been with Matthias as number twelve, because Judas was off the scene.
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A group of 500 believers at one time. James, the younger brother of Jesus, who had not been a follower of Jesus during his earthly career, and a larger group called all the apostles.
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Now when you look at this, some things stick out like a sore thumb. First, the creed uses several terms, which are not found anywhere else in Paul's writings.
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So we know that Paul is quoting from an earlier source. Examples of what are called hapax legomena, things that are found just here, they're not
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Pauline traits, they are indicating that Paul is quoting from an earlier source, would be the phrase, in behalf of our sins, the phrase according to the scriptures, the phrase, he has been raised, the phrase on the third day, and the phrase the twelve.
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Even more than that, you have a number of layers of parallelism. Notice that you have grammatically unnecessary features, unless you're trying to make it easy to memorize, then you would need the features.
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So you have four instances of that, hati, that, that, that, that.
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That he was, that he was buried, that he was, right, right, right. Okay. Followed by four instances of aita, then.
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So that isn't just by coincidence. Even more than that, there is a mirrored parallelism.
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In other words, if you look at those six lines of the creed and fold it in half, then the structure of the first half is the same as the structure of the second half.
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So the first line of the creed gives you a piece of information and then the grammatically unnecessary phrase according to the scriptures.
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Now, probably this was put in as a mnemonic device without necessarily any particular scriptures being in mind because early
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Christians had not yet found proof texts like Isaiah 53 or others to be able to attach any significance to Jesus' death.
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But they thought, well, they're in there somewhere. We just haven't found them. So that Christ died in behalf of our sins according to the scriptures.
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You don't need that grammatically. And that he was buried, line two, shorter line, line three, and that he has been raised on the third day according to the scriptures.
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So you'll see that there's a parallelism between lines one and three in that they end with a grammatically unnecessary phrase according to the scriptures.
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Now, do we have exactly the same tendency in lines four through six?
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The answer is yes. In line four, you have, and that he was seen by Cephas.
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And then you have, instead of saying, and that he was seen by Cephas and the twelve, that would be a more easy, that would be a smoother way of speaking.
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Instead of saying that, it said, and that he was seen by Cephas, then ita, so you have this word then, followed by a group of people in the date of case, in the
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Greek, toistodeca, that's by the twelfth. So that's grammatically unnecessary.
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All the creed would have had to say to communicate the same information is that, and that he was seen by Cephas and the twelfth.
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That's the most, that's the most straightforward way to do it. But instead it is, ita toistodeca, then, and then, group of people in the date of case.
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Then you have line five, um, then he was seen by over 500 brothers and sisters at one time.
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Then line six, then he was seen by James.
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Notice it doesn't say, then he was seen by James and by all the apostles. That's the easiest way to do it.
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It says, then he was seen by James. Then, again, the same word, ita, again, followed by a group of people in the date of case, all the apostles.
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And so you've got a mirrored parallelism in that lines one, two, and three of the creed, line one and line three, you've got a clause followed by a grammatically unnecessary phrase, shorter clause in between, lines four through six, exactly the same thing.
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Clause followed by grammatically unnecessary phrase in four and six, shorter one in five.
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There, yes. So, uh, so everything you're saying here is demonstrating that in first corinthians 15, this is, this is evidence of oral tradition that stands behind the text itself, just to give people context.
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Right, right. All right. And that, and that brings it, uh, earlier on. There is a question or maybe a comment someone has, maybe you could address, um, and, uh,
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I have it on the screen there. Uh, this person says, according to the scriptures, that phrase, they're not sure what you mean when you say that it's not necessary grammatically.
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And so how do you work into the, what I mean by that is if you were to try to communicate that Jesus died for our sins, you could just say that Jesus died for our sins.
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You wouldn't need according to the scriptures. Um, similarly, if you were trying to communicate that Jesus was resurrected on the third day, you could just say that, you wouldn't need according to the scriptures.
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So the fact that you have this clause according to the scriptures, especially when no particular scriptures were yet in mind, shows that even though they did believe that somehow that this was foreshadowed by the testimony of the
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Hebrew Bible, nevertheless, that they're using it more than anything else as a way to make sure that people keep this creed memorized.
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Okay. Now, okay. So I want to get to this issue of the closeness of the oral tradition to the events.
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I want to, I'm going to jump back there. But another common thing that people hear is, well, um, you can't use the
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Bible to prove the Bible, you know, get this in common, common, uh, discussions online and, and whatever.
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And of course, as a, as a presuppositionalist, I might have a different way of tackling that. But many people do ask the question, well, what sources outside of the
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Bible refers to Jesus and, and, and how, how can they enlighten the fact that what the
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Bible is recording with regards to Jesus and you have that early testimony? How do we, how do we take this extra biblical material and bring it together to provide a stronger case?
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Well, there are two things I would say. First of all, is that the whole reason why in the study of ancient history, you have what are called the criteria of authenticity.
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So I gave one earlier criterion of multiple independent attestation. There are about nine others,
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New Testament scholars typically use five of them frequently in their, in their research, like the criterion of dissimilarity, the criterion of embarrassment, the criterion of form criticism, the criterion of coherence.
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But what these criteria are designed to do is to filter out any potential bias of the source.
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So if you have these criteria, then it makes absolutely no difference whether or not the source is a
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Christian source or a non -Christian source, as long as the sources are independent.
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If you had two independent individuals who both came to believe in Jesus, it doesn't matter that they both came to believe in Jesus.
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That's sufficient evidence for the existence of Jesus and whatever facts that they would happen to agree upon.
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And the same goes for all of the other historical criteria as well. Now concerning using the
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Bible to prove the Bible, I think that's just ridiculous. People don't take into consideration that the
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Bible is really a library. So each of the documents in the
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Bible, not only can you get to the sources underlying them, which is really what
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I'm most interested in as a historian, but if you're looking at the sources within the
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New Testament, they have different levels of independence and interdependence among them, and scholars know exactly what these relationships of independence and interdependence are.
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And each of these documents originally circulated by itself in various communities, and these were not collected under two covers and called the
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New Testament until around the year 367 CE. So the New Testament is a library of all of these independent and interdependent works.
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It's very much like if you would go over to the library and look at the shelf on psychology, and you would find a number of works there that are independent and interdependent of each other.
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And somebody would say, well, you can't use the library to prove the library. That's just dumb, okay?
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So the fact of the matter is you've got these multiple sources here, and we know how to use them.
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We know how to filter out any potential bias, and therefore that settles the matter.
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Now, if anyone wants, it seems like the reason why people talk about non -Christian evidence is not really because it's in any way needed.
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It isn't. Once you've got those historical criteria, then you can automatically filter out the bias.
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But if you want non -Christian sources, then as I indicated, people like Josephus, who was a
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Jewish historian, who was born just after the time of Jesus, lived through the
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Jewish war, was actually a participant. Tacitus, who lived in the second half of the first century,
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Roman historian Suetonius, the early material from the
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Sanhedrin, so you have early Sanhedrin material, which give a very negative perspective on Jesus.
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A skeptic of early Christianity and cynic who mocked Jesus named
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Celsus, a guy by the name of Phlegon, who was a Greek freedman.
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So you have, and Maravar Serapion, who was a Samaritan historian, we tend to forget that Samaritans were interested in history too, even though people oftentimes give
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Samaritans a bad name, but in any event, we've got at least nine different, depending on how you count them, at least nine different non -Christian sources which date from the acceptable time to report accurate history, which are each independent of each other.
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So we have nine more independent sources here for the existence of Jesus. And the reason why
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I say at least nine is because it depends on how you figure the Gnostic works into this.
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We have a lot of Gnostic Gospels, you know, around 40. And some of these, in terms of their earliest forms, go back to the acceptable window.
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So you pretty much close the acceptable window about a hundred years after the event, around 130.
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But you've got the Gospel of Thomas by that time, at least in its earliest form. You've got the
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Gospel of Mary by that time, at least in its earliest form. It's disputable in terms of when you want to date the other
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Gnostic texts, but if you want to say that the Gnostics are real
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Christians, then they would get lumped into the Christian category. If you wanted to say that they're so different that they're not real
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Christians, then they get lumped into the non -Christian category. That's right. All right, very good. Now, I want to focus real quick on the issue of Josephus, because Josephus is brought up a lot, especially when we're talking about external sources for Jesus.
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I want to read the Josephus quote, and I want you to respond. Why is it not a good idea to use
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Josephus, or maybe it is a good idea to use Josephus' quote that's kind of infamous, because many people believe it to be an interpolation.
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So I'm going to just read it real quick. This is Josephus. About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man.
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For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.
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He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him, accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him.
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On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him, and the tribe of the
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Christians so called after him has still to this day not disappeared. Now, that is obvious that I can see why someone might not accept that as a viable source for Jesus.
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So what is the issue? Here's a question that I have before you even get to that. Are there any textual variants of this quote that say anything different than what we have here in Josephus?
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Yes. In other words, you're not reading from the updated critical edition of Josephus, which does not contain the passages in that testimony, which are obvious interpolations.
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So this was an issue of how much of Josephus we can trust before the year 1972.
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So before the year 1972, our earliest manuscripts of Josephus were medieval, like back in the 1200s and in the 1300s.
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And that's a long time since Josephus lived. So at some point various Christian monks had gotten a hold of this text and had decided to put in phrases that no first century
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Jew who did not support Jesus as the Messiah would have said. For example, that he did miracles, that he was the
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Christ, he was the Messiah, that he appeared to them alive again on the third day as the prophets have foretold these and 10 ,000 other wonderful things concerning him.
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So the debate before 1972 was given the fact that the rest of the passage of Josephus reads like Josephus' style.
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If you look at the rest of Jewish antiquities and Wars of the
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Jews and his other works, then is it the case that you can just delete these lines and trust the rest of it?
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Or does this call the entire thing into question? And really scholarship was split about 50 -50 prior to 1972.
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And in 1972, the Israeli scholar Shlomo Hines at Hebrew University discovered a much earlier manuscript of Josephus.
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And the most earlier manuscript of Josephus does not contain any of those disputed passages.
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And we know that the earlier manuscript of Josephus was not preserved by Christian hands.
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It was actually, ironically, preserved by Muslim hands. So, that basically settled the issue.
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Real quick, and I do apologize. So, even though that text of Josephus has been tampered with, it is still a good source to use as a witness to the existence of Jesus, although not everything that Christians believe about Jesus.
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Right, right. In other words, the version of Josephus that you read from is probably
36:32
William Whiston's version or a similar version.
36:38
Paul Meyer has since come out with sort of the authoritative issue on Josephus.
36:44
And with the Meyer text, it doesn't contain any of those passages because that's just no longer, you know, our earliest source.
36:53
So it's kind of like if you read the King James version of the Bible, which contains certain interpolated passages, and you read, say, the
37:02
New Revised Standard of the Bible or the New International Version, which removes all of those interpolated passages.
37:09
So in terms of the critical edition of Josephus that scholars work with that doesn't contain any of those elements, but does contain everything else, that scholars all the way across the spectrum from someone like John Dominic Crossan, who certainly has no interest in promoting the historic
37:29
Christian faith, he relies wholeheartedly on the
37:34
Josephus passages as in the earliest texts. And on the other side, people like N .T.
37:42
Wright and really everywhere in between. So it's not a disputed issue anymore, except that I think that most people aren't aware of the advance in scholarship from the 1970s to today.
37:55
Yeah, and I think that's an issue with online apologetics.
38:01
I just had someone just sent me a message this morning, you know, about the problem of evil being a big issue, a logical problem.
38:12
And not many people, yeah, yeah, not many people are aware of the fact that it is no longer... Yeah, it's not considered a serious issue that there's a logical problem of evil.
38:22
That's why you have the probabilistic problem of evil or the emotional problem of evil. So again, so the internet skeptics types are still stuck in old old scholarship and are just not up to date, right?
38:38
And I think that's very important in regards to discussions on the historical Jesus and the resurrection and things like that.
38:44
We need to make sure that our information is updated. All right. Now, let's zero in now. So I'm an unbeliever.
38:51
You've invited me out to a cup of coffee, right? And for some reason we're in my office, right?
38:56
Okay, and I'm saying, hey, listen, how do you know Jesus rose from the dead? I mean, you're a Christian, you believe that this crazy miracle happened.
39:05
How would you begin a conversation with someone like me? I would say that even though the intrinsic probability of a person's resurrecting from the dead is low, nevertheless, when you look at the probability that Jesus resurrected from the dead, given the evidence, then that probability is actually quite high.
39:35
And it's astonishingly high, high enough so that the rational person ought to believe in it.
39:42
So I'm going to try to get technical here for a minute. If I can use this board behind me,
39:48
I thought this might come up. So I'm going to see how much I can write here. See if I move my hand here.
39:54
All right. So if you're trying to establish the probability of the resurrections, this just means the probability of the resurrection, given on the condition of the evidence, then that would be equal to the probability of the resurrection intrinsically, that's the intrinsic probability, times the probability that the evidence should be exactly the way it is if the resurrection occurred, divided by the same thing,
40:30
P of R times P of E given R, plus the probability that the resurrection did not happen, let's call that not
40:41
R, see I'm running out of room here, the probability of the evidence being what it is if the resurrection did not occur.
40:52
And so what you're saying here is that, yes, I agree with the skeptic that this probability right here, the probability that Jesus resurrected from the dead intrinsically is low, because the probability of anyone resurrecting from the dead is going to be low.
41:09
But this low probability can be completely offset if this factor right here is even lower, and this would be the probability that the evidence should be exactly the way it is, and yet the resurrection not have happened.
41:26
So what is the probability that the evidence is exactly the way it is, given that something other than the resurrection happened?
41:34
And if you can show that this approaches zero, then notice the structure of this equation.
41:41
It's like x over x plus y, and if you can show that y approaches zero, then this ultimately will go to x over x, doesn't matter what x is, how low it is, x over x would be one, which is absolute certainty.
41:58
And so the philosopher of religion, philosopher of religion at Oxford University, Richard Swinburne has written on this subject.
42:12
He's published a book with Oxford University Press called The Resurrection of God Incarnate, in which he uses this type of logic and says, how likely is it, how likely is the resurrection on the evidence?
42:26
And he computes it to be 97 percent, 0 .97. Are you referring, is what you're referring to here related to Bayesian probability theory?
42:34
Yeah, yeah, so what I've just given is basically a Bayes theorem defense of how
42:43
I would approach a non -believer, and the reason why I would do that is because a lot of people shy away from it because it's math and people have a math phobia, but the reason why
42:54
I tend to like it is because it's easier than going through, well, there are these historical tests that scholars use when looking at competing historical hypotheses, and there are such tests.
43:09
The philosopher of history, C .B .N. McCullough, has written a whole book on that called Justifying Historical Descriptions, where he lists between six and seven tests that scholars use when trying to determine what's the best explanation.
43:23
And you can, as William Lane Craig has done, try to use those tests to show that the best explanation is that Jesus resurrected from the dead, but you can also do it this way as well.
43:33
And there definitely, there needs to be the evidence considered with the background information of the existence of God. Right, right.
43:40
In other words, what exactly does your evidence include?
43:48
So what exactly is the background information of the world? So since, you're right, since the background information of the world is key, if I wanted to be more complex and more confusing,
44:01
I'll be a bit more complete. I would have said here E and B, and I would have said here the probability of the resurrection on the background information, and here
44:11
R and B, here R on B, here R and B, here not R on B, here not
44:17
R and B. But because most people tend to think that the background information of the world is just implicit in any probability that you give, unless you're sort of being pedantic, you normally don't write that out.
44:30
So, you're correct that ultimately the resurrection of Jesus is only improbable and actually impossible if there is no
44:42
God, if you've got some proof of atheism, but if you think that there are good reasons to believe in God, so I tend to think that a version of the ontological argument works,
44:53
I think that the Leibnizian cosmological argument works, that the Kalam cosmological argument works, that the teleological argument works, that the axiological argument works.
45:03
Unlike Bill Craig, I do believe in abstract objects, and I think the argument from abstract objects works, the argument from the applicability of mathematics works.
45:12
So if you've got good evidence for God's existence, then you know that this probability right here, the probability of R, however low you want to put it, is non -zero, and that's the key.
45:24
So as long as that's not zero, which it would be if you had a proof of atheism, then this type of logic of saying the probability of the resurrection is high is quite good.
45:34
So what I would want to do if I was trying to convince someone over a lengthy conversation is to sort of lay out the evidence and then to say, all right, let's take a look at what we know about the world, and I would definitely share one or more arguments for the existence of God as part of that, because without that, then you might just say, well, if God doesn't exist, then literally anything, no matter how crazy, is more probable than Jesus' resurrection.
46:04
But that's no longer the case if God exists. Okay. So if you have good reasons to believe in God, we can add that into our background information when evaluating the resurrection.
46:14
Yeah, yeah. All right. Now, what about people who say, okay, so we appealed to earlier that the source of the
46:21
New Testament as an early witness to Jesus goes back very close to the lifetime of the apostles and Jesus, but we also have this earlier oral tradition.
46:32
Yeah. What if you get someone who says, well, I mean, who cares? If we were to find, if I were to write some fantastic story, bury it in the sand, and someone were to find it later, and they dated the material back to the lifetime of when
46:44
I lived, that doesn't prove that it's true. How would you respond to something like that? Well, I would say that's why we have the historical criteria of authenticity, to see whether or not we can believe things beyond a reasonable doubt.
46:56
I mean, that's why they're there. So if you have, like, to give a hypothetical, you know, two documents in the ancient sands, both describing a fantastic event, but you were able to carefully look at those and show that they were written by people who didn't know each other, who were independent of each other, who could not have influenced each other in any way, then you would say, okay, we've got to take this seriously.
47:26
We might not like it, but we've got to take this seriously. It's multiply and independently attested. And similarly with your other criteria.
47:34
So I would say that the reason why we have the criteria of authenticity is to be able to say if something passes one or more of these, then it should be regarded as historical beyond reasonable doubt.
47:49
And even though we don't tend to think of it this way, it's the same criteria that are used one way or another in every jury trial.
47:57
So that's why I like to phrase it to my students in terms of reasonable doubt, because I also teach philosophy of law, and it's exactly the same type of procedure.
48:06
So if someone wanted to say, you know, well, if I told this thing, you know, how can anybody possibly believe in it?
48:17
Well, that's kind of the same argument that a corrupt defense attorney would make if they know they've got a guilty as sin client, but it's been a cold case and the person has gotten away with it for like 40 or 50 years.
48:29
So it just doesn't work. All right, so let's narrow down on some of the specific evidence. Now, it's ridiculous to believe that Jesus didn't exist.
48:37
The evidence is there, right? We have early sources. So how does one move then from reliable sources to a miracle occurred?
48:48
Well, you would first establish what facts the early evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt.
48:56
And so if you combine the information from the first Corinthians 15 creed with another early source known as the pre -mark and passion narrative, now just to say a word about that, because the pre -mark and passion narrative is just as important as the first Corinthians 15 creed.
49:13
It doesn't get as much press, but it's just as important. So here's the thing, you're reading
49:19
Mark in Greek, you come to Mark chapter 14, and you see all of these phrases that are just not very good
49:29
Greek. You're like, boy, this is just terrible Greek. What, you know, was Mark drinking when he wrote this?
49:35
I mean, what in the heck is going on? Because Mark's Greek style is fine up to that point. And then you have it interspersed with perfectly good
49:44
Greek. And then you've got this really bad Greek and it sort of goes on and on. So it's very easy to pick out these pieces of really bad
49:52
Greek and you're trying to figure out where did they come from? Why is it like this? Well, it reads very much like Mark is trying to translate into Greek something from another language that he might not be all that proficient in, or at least not all that proficient in translating.
50:11
So just like you would very easily be able to tell the difference between my prose and my trying to translate something from French into English, that would read a lot rougher.
50:23
But you could look at those rougher passages and say, hmm, that's a translation of something.
50:30
All of these things that are crazy and read badly, if they back translate into French and all of the linguistic conventions make sense, it's perfectly good
50:43
French, then you know it came from a French source. Similarly, you can ask, well, what ancient languages are there at Mark's disposal?
50:52
Well, you've got Latin, you've got Hebrew, and you've got Aramaic. It doesn't back translate into Latin well, it doesn't back translate into Hebrew well, but it back translates into Aramaic perfectly.
51:03
So we know that this pre -Markan passion narrative was originally formulated in Aramaic, which is even one step above what you've got in the first Corinthians 15 creed, which was formulated in Greek.
51:17
So you've got this Aramaic source and we know exactly where it was written, because you isolate it and you find that words like here refer to Jerusalem, and Galilee is always used as a horizon.
51:33
So it comes out of Jerusalem. And you then say, well, when? Well, one dead giveaway is that when it refers to Caiaphas, the high priest who presided over the
51:46
Jewish trial of Jesus, it refers to him simply as the high priest without ever calling him
51:52
Caiaphas, without calling him by name. Now, to illustrate why that's important, let's suppose we ran to the public library and you were reading a newspaper article that it never mentioned
52:05
Jimmy Carter's name, but it was clear by context that when it said the president, the president, the president, over and over, that it was referring to Jimmy Carter.
52:15
Well, you would immediately know when that newspaper was written, sometime between 1977 and 1981, when
52:23
Carter was president. In exactly the same way, this pre -Markan passion narrative had to have been formulated when
52:29
Caiaphas was high priest. And we know he was high priest from the years 18 to 37
52:35
CE, since Jesus died in 30. That means that the latest possible date for this pre -Markan passion narrative is only seven years removed from the event.
52:46
And the pre -Markan passion narrative backs up a lot of the things that the first Corinthians 15 creed says.
52:53
They both agree that Jesus was buried. We have the additional piece of information from the pre -Markan passion narrative that he was buried by Joseph of Arimathea.
53:02
The pre -Markan passion narrative affirms that women discovered Jesus' tomb empty. We have the implication of the empty tomb also in the first Corinthians 15 creed.
53:14
Now, you might not see that at first glance if you're reading it in English, because you might say the creed goes in line two from he was buried to he has been raised.
53:25
But the issue is this word, he has been raised, agigertai. And if you look up that verb, agigertai, what does it mean, to be quite wooden?
53:38
Well, according to Lou Anita's authoritative Greek English lexicon of the
53:44
New Testament based on semantic domains, and I'll quote it directly, it means to cause to stand up from a lying or reclining position with the implication of some degree of previous incapacity.
53:56
So if you're reading it literally, it's and that he was buried and that he was caused to stand up from a lying or reclining position with the implication of some degree of previous incapacity
54:08
And that verb can only be talking about a body being raised to a standing posture.
54:15
It can't be talking about something like a spiritual resurrection. So we know that therefore if you say he was buried and he was caused to stand up to a lying and reclining position that the tomb was empty.
54:28
We also know from another very early source, you can again do form criticism on the end of the
54:35
Gospel of Matthew. In the end of the Gospel of Matthew, we have this account of what the
54:41
Jewish religious leaders were saying in response to the proclamation that Jesus had resurrected.
54:47
And what they were saying is that the disciples had come and stolen away the body. Now the point is that in Matthew's version, you have a whole series of event and counter -event reflecting an ongoing period of followers of Jesus arguing against Jews who were not followers of Jesus.
55:13
And so you can peel back the layers of that onion and date the original oral tradition which simply affirmed that the
55:21
Sanhedrin's original proclamation back in the 30s when they were confronted with this is the disciples came and stole away the body and that assumes that the tomb was empty.
55:30
So we know from enemy testimony that there was an empty tomb.
55:36
We also have in 1 Corinthians 15 the eyewitness testimony of Peter, the 12, 500 at one time,
55:47
James, and a larger group of all the apostles that he was resurrected.
55:53
And so from that you can say that we know that different individuals and groups sincerely believed that they saw
56:03
Jesus alive after his death. Now we won't stack the deck by saying that they did, but it's very clear that that's what they sincerely believed.
56:11
And if you add to that certain independent layers of the gospel tradition such as the gospel of Mark, that's one independent layer, an early version of the gospel of Thomas, the
56:25
M material, the L material, the signs material, that gives five more pieces of independent testimony that that various people and groups really did believe that they saw
56:40
Jesus alive after his death. And then finally that we know what the early
56:45
Christian proclamation was. Many of the early sermons in the book of Acts are in memorizable form and you can date them right back to the beginning of the
56:54
Christian movement. And it was based on this proclamation that Jesus had not just come back to life the way
57:00
Lazarus did, and not the proclamation that Jesus had been bodily assumed into heaven the way, say,
57:08
Enoch and Elijah were, and the way that intertestamental literature believed that some recently deceased persons could, but that Jesus resurrected from the dead, which is very unusual.
57:20
That's a very non -Jewish way of thinking because in Judaism, the resurrection of the dead, this means where your body comes out of the tomb, not just to resume the normal earthly life, but it's glorious, powerful, supernatural, free from all defects, fit to inhabit the world to come, the transformed universe, the so -called new heavens and new earth.
57:42
And nowhere in Judaism, do you have any idea that any isolated individual can be resurrected from the dead?
57:52
You do have people coming back to the earthly life, resuscitations or revivifications.
57:57
I always get mad when people say, like, the resurrection of Lazarus. I'm like, uh, his body wasn't fit to inhabit the new heavens and the new earth.
58:05
He died again. That's not a resurrection. That has nothing to do with it. So, you don't have anywhere in Jewish literature the idea of anyone being resurrected from the dead until the end of the age.
58:19
Right. You have people being raised from the dead. Yes, but not resurrected. Exactly.
58:25
In that theological sense of incorruptibility, right? Correct. Now, we would say that the writers of the
58:32
New Testament were using sources that were earlier than the New Testament. But I want to clarify for people, we're not saying that the sources that the
58:42
New Testaments were using, the New Testament writers were using, were themselves inspired, right? When we talk about the inspiration of Scripture, we're talking about the text that the apostles wrote for us that God has preserved in the
58:55
New Testament, not sources that New Testament writers may or may not appeal to. Well, that's correct.
59:02
But for the historian, that's simply irrelevant. I mean, who cares whether or not, you know, later people would go on to say that certain texts were inspired by God.
59:13
We're here trying to look at what's our earliest evidence. We're trying to approach this problem exactly the same way that we would any other historical problem.
59:22
And so, when I'm dealing with my students and teaching, say, my historical Jesus class here at McPherson College, which
59:28
I do every fall, the issue of biblical inspiration, that never even enters the equation.
59:34
Mm -hmm. All right. So, when we have certain historical facts that can be established,
59:40
I guess the next logical question would be, what is the best explanation for that? Right, right, right.
59:45
And so, what have some of the explanations that non -Christians have given with regards?
59:51
Because most non -Christian scholars would accept these facts, many of them, right? And so, they would then require an explanation.
59:59
What have been some of the popular explanations of these facts? What have they been? And why does the resurrection answer or explain the facts best?
01:00:09
Yeah. Well, there really is no widespread alternative explanation in the scholarly literature today.
01:00:19
Usually, you'll find vague statements like, we don't know what happened, or here is where history ends and faith begins, or something to that effect.
01:00:32
Gert Ludemann has been one of the bold few to try to put forward an alternative explanation.
01:00:40
And he's given rise to the mental vision hypothesis.
01:00:46
He doesn't like it when people call it the hallucination hypothesis, because hallucination has a negative ring to people's minds.
01:00:53
But he does mean the same thing as a psychologist when you talk about hallucinations.
01:00:58
He's talking about an internal vision, so that these disciples had internal visions.
01:01:06
So, in his book on the resurrection, published in 1995, he says that the first event was to Peter, that Peter had this internal vision, let's call it.
01:01:22
So, this is not something that God caused. This is completely within his own psychology, within his own brain.
01:01:28
You know, he has this vision of Jesus, you know, resurrected from the dead, and he then tells the other apostles about this, and it's kind of like wildfire.
01:01:39
It catches on, and it's like a chain reaction until there's so much enthusiasm in the movement that you can have 500 or more people all having the same experience.
01:01:50
So, Lüdemann recognizes that the 500, you can't say that didn't happen, because we know, five years removed at worst, that these people were claiming.
01:02:00
We've got their eyewitness testimony to this. And so, you've got to come up with some kind of theory to try to explain it away.
01:02:08
Now, in more popular literature, you'll find hypotheses like the disciples stole the body, or that the disciples went to the wrong tomb, or that there was some massive conspiracy of some sort.
01:02:24
Those types of explanations aren't really taken seriously. For one, they contradict the facts that we know to be.
01:02:34
So, if you were trying to say that, you know, you've got to explain that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea, you've got to explain that the empty tomb, you've got to explain that various people and groups believe they saw him alive, and you've got to explain that they came up with this idea of Jesus' resurrection from the dead.
01:02:54
Most of the popular alternative theories winds up denying one or more of these facts.
01:03:00
Now, the hallucination theory doesn't deny any of these, but it does require an additional hypothesis,
01:03:07
I must say, to try to explain the empty tomb. You've got to conjoin that with something like women went to the wrong tomb, or Jesus' body was moved by some unknown entity, and you'd have to do that.
01:03:22
I would say that the main problems with the hallucination hypothesis is, first of all, what it psychologically suggests is just wild.
01:03:35
Hallucinations, as projections of the mind, are individual occurrences very much like dreams.
01:03:43
And so in the casebooks, you can't find any parallel where one person has a hallucination and it spreads like this contagion, sort of like this, you know, coronavirus hallucination, and ultimately, you know, it infects 500 at the same time.
01:03:59
You don't have anything like that in the psychological casebooks. The only way you can try to make that stick is by cobbling together different elements of the casebooks of various unrelated hallucinations and trying to glue them all together and just say this is what happened in the case of Jesus.
01:04:17
Secondly, if hallucinations are projections of the mind, they won't contain anything that's not already in the mind.
01:04:23
So suppose that Peter did have a hallucination of Jesus alive after his death.
01:04:29
What would he have hallucinated? Well, he would have hallucinated one of two things. He would have hallucinated that Jesus came back to life in exactly the same way that Lazarus came back to life.
01:04:39
That Jesus came back to the earthly life. It's not what he believed. That's the problem.
01:04:45
He also could have hallucinated that Jesus had been translated into heaven.
01:04:50
Because as I say, the intertestamental literature, especially the Dead Sea Scrolls, say that recently deceased persons can be bodily assumed by God into heaven and from heaven they can appear to people.
01:05:03
So an excellent example would be the Testament of Job, a commentary on Job. We all know how in the book of Job, where Job's children are feasting in the house and the house falls in on them and they die.
01:05:14
Well, in the Testament of Job, the workers come to clear away the rubble and all the children's bodies are gone.
01:05:22
And then Job's wife sees her children alive again.
01:05:28
Now, what does she conclude? Does she say they've been resurrected from the dead? No, she says they have been translated bodily by God into heaven, paradise, or Abraham's bosom, from which they are appearing to me.
01:05:42
So if Peter had been hallucinating, he would have hallucinated either Jesus has come back to the earthly life or that Jesus has been bodily assumed into heaven and it's from there that he's appearing.
01:05:55
Not the contradiction of Jewish thinking that he's been resurrected from the dead. Right, and it's good that you said the contradiction of Jewish thinking.
01:06:02
It's not the contradiction of biblical thinking because Jesus' resurrection actually is a fulfillment of the true meaning of what scripture was pointing to.
01:06:11
I think that's very important because a lot of people had preconceived notions of what Messiah was supposed to be.
01:06:17
And they thought that this is how the scriptures, the Old Testament scriptures were to be understood. And so here comes
01:06:23
Jesus saying things and doing things that run contrary to their popular conception of what Messiah was supposed to be.
01:06:29
But of course Jesus surprises them and but you know, he's vindicated by the resurrection, right?
01:06:34
Okay. Very good. So in essence, the hallucinatory theory that seeks to explain the facts of Jesus don't work because they don't best explain the facts and they run contrary to what a first century
01:06:51
Jew would have hallucinated. Yeah, it doesn't. So in the fourth fact, it doesn't explain how they came to believe in Jesus' resurrection because resurrection would not be something that was already in the mind.
01:07:05
You also have the psychological craziness of trying to say that there could be this kind of chain reaction.
01:07:13
Normally when you look at hallucinations, they occur to people who are either on drugs or sleep deprived or something like that.
01:07:21
They are in a very suggestible frame of mind. You don't have people who were despondent, who were severely shaken, who believed that this person that they had been following for three and a half years as the
01:07:33
Messiah had been shown up basically to be a messianic pretender. Because you're right, they anticipated up to the end that Jesus would be the victorious political
01:07:44
Messiah who would ultimately kill off the Romans and make Israel an independent nation once again, just like Judas Maccabeus did.
01:07:52
And so when Jesus didn't do that, then people would have said, well, we've backed the wrong course.
01:07:58
And N .T. Wright has made that point remarkably well. He's taken a look at various messianic movements.
01:08:05
Messianic movements were really a dime a dozen during Jesus' day. We know of at least 12 people who claim to be the
01:08:14
Messiah prior to Jesus, the political Messiah, in the 100 years prior, and we know of at least 12 in the 100 years after Jesus.
01:08:22
And what happens when their Messiah gets crucified? They do one of two things. They either find a new
01:08:28
Messiah to continue the movement or they abandon the movement. There's never any indication that they go on to say that their crucified
01:08:38
Messiah really was resurrected from the dead. All right. Now, what is an interesting question to kind of think in terms of stuff that I hear, people.
01:08:47
I've heard some people say that for any miracle claim, and of course when we're talking about the resurrection, we're talking about a miracle.
01:08:54
I mean, this is an amazing miracle. But when we speak of a miracle claim, there could be some unknown law of nature that could equally explain any supposed miracle.
01:09:08
So you have these people who are skeptics with regards to miracles. Like you couldn't know something was the act of a divine being, but that there could be some unknown natural law that could explain what we perceive to be a miracle.
01:09:22
And so any claim to a miracle doesn't demonstrate that it's God. There could be some unknown natural law that explains it.
01:09:29
How would you respond to someone? It's interesting. I think it falls flat, but what would you have to say to something like that?
01:09:36
Well, I would say you would need the laws of nature then to have been formed with certain what are called in Latin ceteris paribus conditions.
01:09:45
These are all things being equal conditions. So you've got a law of nature that says all things being equal, this is what's going to happen.
01:09:52
Unless you have some form of intervention. Now, if you say that Jesus did resurrect from the dead, but that Jesus naturally resurrected from the dead, and that the laws of nature were written in such a way as to ensure that Jesus resurrected from the dead, then the obvious question becomes, well, who writes those laws of nature?
01:10:20
And you're right back to square one with God. So whether you want to say that God non -miraculously resurrected
01:10:28
Jesus from the dead, which seems bizarre, or you want to say that God miraculously resurrected
01:10:33
Jesus from the dead, you've still got Jesus resurrected from the dead by God one way or the other. So the only way you would have those kind of really weird tampered with laws is if those laws were specifically designed to give rise to the resurrection of Jesus, and that cries out for a designer of the laws, namely
01:10:53
God. Okay, so you still need to get to the whole God question when considering laws of nature and things like that.
01:11:01
I get that. I'm trying to think of in terms of some weird objections to the resurrection that I've heard.
01:11:07
So you have the issue of miracles. Some people think that the concept of miracles is incoherent or it's not enough to kind of draw the conclusion that God is the reason for the miracles.
01:11:22
What would you say to someone who says something to the effect that the idea that Jesus was raised from the dead was just something that developed over time?
01:11:33
To answer that question, would you appeal to some of that early testimony that we spoke at at the beginning? Yeah, absolutely
01:11:39
I would. I would say that we know from the first Corinthians 15 creed that the belief that Jesus had resurrected from the dead was the initial proclamation of the early
01:11:49
Christian community in Jerusalem. And there are several other ancient traditions also dateable back to the 30s where you've got the sermons of these early
01:11:58
Christian leaders and they all proclaim that well, David, you think
01:12:04
David's a great guy. We know where he's buried. His tomb's right over there. But Jesus has been resurrected from the dead.
01:12:11
His body was not subject to corruptibility the way David's was. And so we know that this was the initial proclamation of the early
01:12:21
Christians. So I don't think that anyone, I don't know of anyone who would deny that the early
01:12:29
Christians actually proclaimed that Jesus had resurrected from the dead. I don't know of any scholar who's tried to make that argument.
01:12:36
What role, what significance do you think, because people make this claim. So for example, we have within popular apologetics, people usually defend the resurrection by appealing to the willingness of the apostles to go to their deaths for this belief.
01:12:52
And you often hear people say, well many people will die for what they believe. That doesn't demonstrate that because the apostles died that therefore what they were proclaiming was true.
01:13:01
How would you respond to that? Well, I would say first of all, that wasn't part of the case that I laid out at all.
01:13:08
I never even brought up the idea of people's willingness to die for it. I think that's a secondary development.
01:13:16
So when I deal with this in my historical Jesus class, that's not even something to talk about. But I would say secondly, that there have been some good historical studies of the lives of the apostles.
01:13:28
Obviously a lot was written about the apostles after their deaths. And so it takes a good critical historian using those criteria of authenticity to sort out what we can know about these people from what we can't, what we can know beyond reasonable doubt.
01:13:42
And we can know beyond reasonable doubt that of the sort of 12, with Matthias included, that nine of them did go to their deaths on the conviction that Jesus had resurrected from the dead.
01:13:58
Now, you're correct that people die for lies all the time. But no one will die for something that they themselves know to be a lie.
01:14:08
So if these people say had stolen the body, they had like, you know, gotten the body out of the tomb and you know, which doesn't explain why they would then come to themselves believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, but or why they would then have visions of him, but nevertheless, if they were themselves the people who stole the body, they wouldn't go to their deaths for something that they themselves knew to be a lie.
01:14:36
So I would say the grain of truth here is that yeah, people do die for lies all the time. But no one dies for something that they have firsthand knowledge is a lie.
01:14:46
And in this case, you have nine different individuals who did die for if they knew was a lie, then they would have died for that.
01:14:56
That just doesn't work. So I've also heard this in various places people say, and I think they're quoting someone, maybe
01:15:03
Thomas Paine, I'm not sure, where he says that what is more, maybe Hume, what is more likely that someone should tell a lie or that a man be raised from the dead?
01:15:13
Yeah, well, that's that that is based on Hume and that's the reason why
01:15:18
I brought up Bayes' theorem right at the outset because Hume, the major problem that Hume made against miracles is nicely laid out by the philosopher of science
01:15:30
John Ehrman. Now Ehrman is is not a theist, but he wrote a book called Hume's Abject Failure, where he says even though he doesn't himself believe in miracles, he thinks that Hume's argument against miracles that you just quoted is in his words an abject failure.
01:15:46
And the reason why he says that is because that Hume didn't know how to calculate the probability of something like a miracle taking place because the laws of probability theory had not yet been discovered in his day.
01:16:02
And so the only thing that Hume took into consideration was this probability right here, like the probability of the resurrection, the intrinsic probability of the resurrection.
01:16:14
And he was saying that this intrinsic probability is so low then obviously something coming up with a lie is far more plausible.
01:16:25
But what he failed to consider was this crucial probability, the probability of the evidence being the way it is on the resurrection hypothesis, and even more important, this one, the probability that the evidence should be exactly as it is if the resurrection did not take place.
01:16:45
And so if you look at that probability that the evidence should be exactly the way it is if the resurrection did not take place, as I say, if that probability is sufficiently low then it goes to off balance whatever type of, you know, non -zero probability that you would assign to the resurrection in terms of its intrinsic probability.
01:17:07
So it's that Hume didn't have the tools to be able to say, well, given all of the evidence that we have, nor did
01:17:14
Hume have the tools to know all of the evidence we had. I mean, scientific biblical criticism comes out of the 19th century.
01:17:24
That's where scholars first began working on historical method, was in Germany, and this was not something that Hume had available.
01:17:32
So Hume didn't know the evidence there and he didn't have the right mathematical tools to be able to figure out whether you could ever establish the historicity of a miracle.
01:17:44
So really, those people who like to cite Hume, I would advise them to read John Ehrman and say, well, give
01:17:50
Hume another, you know, look and see if you really take him seriously. Okay, very good. Now, this is my last question for you, and I think it's a good question to kind of separate two issues that I think will become obvious to you.
01:18:03
If I were to ask you, how do you know that Christianity is true? You, personally, how would you answer that question?
01:18:11
Well, I think that I know it in two ways, that I would say
01:18:17
I'm justified in knowing it, and I'm saying I'm warranted in knowing it. So epistemologists, theorists of knowledge, will typically define knowledge as either justified true belief, where justified means and somehow is borne out by the evidence, and you've got to define justification, if you've studied this in any detail, in a way...
01:18:45
Gettier, you've got the Gettier issues. Yeah, the so -called Gettier examples. So either justified true belief or warranted true belief, and warranted true belief means it's a true belief that arises from one of your cognitive faculties.
01:19:02
One of your cognitive faculties is in circumstances where it's working in the way that it ought to, and a belief automatically arises, and in the absence of any defeater or disproof of that, we're rationally entrusted.
01:19:17
So I would say for myself, I know that Jesus resurrected from the dead, I know that God exists, and if you know those two things, then you know that Christianity is true, based on the evidence that I have good grounds for believing this, so I'm justified in believing it, and I've also personally experienced
01:19:36
God throughout my life, and so there are times every day, in fact, when
01:19:42
I can say, you know, that I know Jesus is here with me, and that belief occurs to me just as naturally, as does my belief in the external world, and my belief in the reality of the past.
01:19:55
And so it seems like that that belief is formed by a cognitive faculty, which Plantinga, quoting
01:20:02
Calvin, called the Sensu Stiphanitatis, that this belief forms naturally in the mind, and unless you've got a proof that Jesus did not resurrect from the dead, or a proof of atheism, then you're just as rational to believe that as you are to believe in the external world.
01:20:18
So I would say that for me, I feel like I have two, I'm doubly grounded in my affirmation that Jesus resurrected from the dead,
01:20:29
I'm both justified and warranted. So you would say, and for kind of in lay language, and not that what you just expressed is clear, but we would say then that the primary way, and I think this is important for people to recognize, the primary way in which we know that Christianity is true is by the inner witness of the
01:20:49
Holy Spirit. Well, that's what Bill Craig would say. I'm not sure that I agree with that. I'm leaving it completely open as to the primary way.
01:20:57
The reason why I wouldn't quite want to go that far is because I think people are different.
01:21:04
People's psychology are different. People's way of viewing the world are different. And so I certainly have known people, and if I were to look at myself,
01:21:13
I would say I first and foremost came to know that Christianity was true based on the evidence. And then the experience came later.
01:21:22
So if I'm doing sort of a critical autobiographical look on myself, I would say, well, the primary way
01:21:27
I know is the evidence. But Craig doesn't think that way. Neither do
01:21:33
I. I would take issue with that, but that's okay. I'm just asking you. So, okay, that's no problem.
01:21:40
All right. Well, there's a lot for people to kind of digest here, and I very much appreciate this conversation.
01:21:48
I think knowing some of the background of the evidence for the resurrection, it's not just merely something, you know, you just say, oh, yeah, we just got to believe that because I really want it to be true or something like that.
01:22:00
There's definitely material and content here that we could appeal to and kind of interact with the skeptic and the unbeliever and things like that.
01:22:08
So that's very, very helpful. And to that, I'm very, very grateful. Is there any final words you'd like to say before we close off this episode?
01:22:16
Well, I think that we've seen that a rational person who is acquainted with all of the evidence can competently believe that Jesus did resurrect from the dead, and then that raises the issue.
01:22:28
Well, what are you going to do with Jesus? And it really puts people in sort of this existential choice where are you really going to affirm the meaning of your life by devoting your life to Jesus, or are you going to pretend that you don't know about this evidence and go on living the way you are?
01:22:46
So I think that the reason why establishing the historicity of the resurrection is more significant than establishing, say, the historicity of the parting of the
01:22:56
Red Sea, if you could do such a thing, is because it places in front of you an existential choice, and that is what are you going to do with Jesus?
01:23:04
All right. Well, thank you so much, Dr. McGregor. I really appreciate you taking the time out to do this episode. I think we've clocked in around an hour and 20 some odd minutes.
01:23:13
And so there's a lot of content for people to chew on, and hopefully this will inspire further study.
01:23:19
Would you like to mention anything in regards to some other books that you've written that you might want to let people know about, or any projects that you're currently working on?
01:23:28
Well, I am currently working on a couple of book projects.
01:23:34
I'm working on a book on the Gospel of John, which I've submitted what
01:23:39
I hope is the final version to the publisher, but the publisher may want various revisions to be made.
01:23:45
So that hopefully should be my next book project. My contemporary theology book which came out in 2019.
01:23:53
Very good book. Very good book. It's right there. My book on Luis de Molina.
01:23:59
So all of those books are available. So if you go to www .kirkmcgregor .org
01:24:05
and you click on the biography, you can see a listing of the books that are available, as well as you can click on the links and find out how to purchase them.
01:24:16
All right. Well, thank you so much, Dr. McGregor. Again, guys, if you have any questions about the Resurrection or about anything related to apologetics, more specifically presuppositional apologetics, you could email me at revealedapologetics at gmail .com.
01:24:29
If you haven't already, I'd greatly appreciate it if you subscribe to the YouTube channel as well as the podcast on iTunes and other platforms.
01:24:35
Once again, thank you very much, Dr. McGregor, for your time. And for everyone else, take care and God bless.