Jesus Borrowed from Pagan Mythology?

Revealed Apologetics

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00:02

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala. And today we are going to be talking about Jesus mythology stuff, okay?

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Was Jesus borrowed from pagan mythology? Were various elements of the Bible borrowed from, you know, pagan myth?

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This is something that is not as popular as it used to be, but it's still floating around. And I think is an issue that is worth addressing.

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If you want a more in -depth look into the question of whether the idea of Jesus was borrowed from pagan mythology, definitely check out

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Michael Jones' YouTube channel, Inspiring Philosophy. He's got an entire playlist where he provides responses to these alleged parallels between Jesus and various pagan deities of the mystery religions.

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So you definitely want to check that out. Well, just a few things before we invite Michael on to join us.

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I will be having Dr. Phil Fernandez on, today is Wednesday, isn't it, right? On Thursday, he will be coming on at 10 p .m.

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with me. Dr. Phil Fernandez is a Christian apologist and we'll be discussing kind of general apologetic stuff, but it's definitely going to be an interesting discussion.

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So hopefully you guys can join in that discussion tomorrow at 10 p .m.

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Also, for folks who are interested in learning apologetics, I offer an online course in which

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I teach on my website, Revealed Apologetics. You can sign up for that if that interests you. And for those who recognize the importance that a good, solid theology is related to having a good, solid apologetic,

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I will be offering a systematic theology course that I'm currently working on. And when that's released, I'll let folks know you can sign up for that.

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And of course, that will be a wonderful course to take in conjunction with apologetics, since they're very much related.

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In Jude chapter one, verse three, we are told to earnestly contend for the faith once for all delivered.

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And so we are contending for the faith that has been delivered, the body of Christian truth.

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And so we need to know what that Christian truth is. And of course, that is something that very much strengthens our apologetic, all right?

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So folks can definitely sign up for that when that's out. So just giving all those little heads up.

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And without further ado, I'd like to invite Michael onto the screen with me. Michael, how are you doing?

02:29

Good, how are you doing? Thanks for having me. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I know you're super busy and, but I'm excited that, just a little busy, but I'm excited that you agreed to come on and discuss this topic, which you've probably discussed ad nauseum,

02:46

I'm sure. Is that the case? Have you talked about this topic beyond? Probably not at this point.

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I find it funny and a little bit of fun because it's such an easy one to address to the point where it's just like, okay, yeah, let's do it again.

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This will be like, practice round for a little more hard topic. Yeah, I'm actually glad you said that because a lot of skeptics who use this sort of argumentation assert it with such confidence.

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But it's really cool to hear that, if I were to ask Michael, does the Jesus was borrowed from pagan mythology objection or argument, does that make you lose sleep as a

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Christian? How would you respond to that? No, because I've read a lot of the scholarship on it, like from JZ Smith to Jan Bremer, Martin Hengel, you name it.

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I mean, very, very few scholars are convinced Jesus is borrowed from pagan mythology and they're very, very fringe ones.

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And a lot of them try to like downplay it. They won't say Jesus is borrowed from pagan mythology.

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He's like the Jewish version of like this dying and rising God motif from the ancient world, which is just nonsense and easy to address as well.

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Yeah, well, that's good to know for folks who are well -versed in these sorts of debates. Maybe that's not a big deal, but for those who are probably listening and you really deal with this sort of stuff and maybe on the internet or with interactions with friends, that should be encouraging that Christians who study these issues don't lose sleep over these sorts of objections.

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Christianity has been around for 2 ,000 years, at least as Christianity, labeled

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Christianity. Of course, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, but Christianity has been around for quite some time.

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And there has been a lot of interaction with objections and things like that. And Christianity has done a pretty darn good job in withstanding the various assaults throughout history.

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So, well, let's begin then. I wanna begin by reading a quote and then we'll just jump right into our discussion.

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The quote comes from a very, very scholarly source. Perhaps you'll be familiar with it.

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It comes from the movie Religulous that was put out by Bill Maher some years ago.

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We can laugh, but there have been some Christians who were shaken up from that sort of bad argument. So here's the quote here.

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Written in 1280 BC, the Egyptian Book of the Dead describes a god, Horus. Horus is the son of the god

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Osiris, born to a virgin mother. He was baptized in a river by Anup, the baptizer, who was later beheaded.

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Like Jesus, Horus was tempted while alone in the desert, healed the sick, the blind, cast out demons and walked on water.

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He raised Asar from the dead. Asar translates to Lazarus. Oh yeah, he also had 12 disciples.

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Yes, Horus was crucified first and after three days, two women announced Horus, the savior of humanity, had been resurrected.

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Okay, so there you go, Michael, you blind faith

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Christian. You are basically just worshiping Horus or some variation.

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How would you respond, not simply to that idea, but the interesting use of vocabulary?

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The quote there uses a lot of Christian sounding vocabulary. And that's usually what draws people, kind of pulls people aback.

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How would you address this issue of the apparent similarity of language with how folks use this sort of argument against Jesus?

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I ask for their source. You gotta be like, well, where are you getting this from? Like just because you heard this somewhere on the internet, that doesn't mean it actually shows up in Egyptian mythology.

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And I never get sources for this stuff. I'll get things like, well, it's on the walls of Kemet or something, it's in those inscriptions or it's in the book of the dead.

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You know, the Egyptian book of the dead is online. You can find a translation just by Googling it and you could go through and read it yourself.

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None of that is an Egyptian mythology. Sometimes all you have to do is ask for their source. And a lot of people bring up Horus or Serapis today or like Hebrew Israelites and they'll try to use it, you know, like everything comes from Africa or any kind of thing.

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And the way to respond to that sometimes is just to be like, well, what's your source? Where are you getting this from?

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Because there is no sources say Horus had 12 disciples or that he was crucified or rose from the dead or healed anyone like that.

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It's just based on late, sometimes from the 19th century writers who just were making things up whole cloth or sometimes 20th century authors.

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So where's your, what's the evidence? Where are you getting that from? Just because you found a claim. So Michael, real quick then.

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So when someone says, oh, he had 12 disciples, there are people who use this argument, they're literally making that up.

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There's not a source that they're drawing from or maybe they're drawing from secondary sources that are misinterpreting the original source.

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I mean, are people just literally making this up and saying, I think I'm gonna say he had 12 disciples just like Jesus. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this comes from like someone like Gerald Massey from the 19th century who just made a lot of this stuff up.

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He was like laughed out of a room by Egyptologists. Like it's like, there's nothing else to really say.

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It's when someone makes claims like that, they need to show the evidence it comes from. Like if you see in my videos,

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I'm always putting quotes. I'll give you like the book, the page numbers. You can go check it yourself. If it's like,

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I'm getting something from a follow about January, I'll give you the reference. I'm getting something from Tacitus, I'll give you the reference.

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A lot of the people just make those claims without sources. There's nothing other to do than say, well, you've not given me the evidence, so let's move on. So let's jump specifically then.

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So someone says, hey, the concept of Jesus was borrowed from Horace. And what are some things that you could respond more specifically instead of just saying, show me your source?

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And that's which obviously is a death knell to their position because if there's no source, then they're making it up. But what are some specific things that we can equip people with when they hear those sorts of things?

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Well, you gotta point out just how illogical this sounds on the surface. So you're telling me like pious

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Jews that were trying to separate themselves from paganism, decided to adapt pagan myths and incorporate them into their own beliefs.

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I'm sorry, like that just, that does not fit with the Jewish context from which Christianity emerged from.

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Then you gotta assume that this does not apply in other circumstances. And they don't want it to apply in other circumstances.

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So I've used this before. In Australia, there's a tribe called the Nui Nui tribe.

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And they had a story about where death came from, how death came into the world. The first man and woman were forbidden to go near a sacred tree that a divine being that manifested as a bat lived in.

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One day the woman was too close to the tree and the bat flew away and death came into the world. Clearly that's evidence they knew about Genesis and Adam and Eve and everything.

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And I've seen some younger creationists use that as evidence that they had knowledge of like Genesis.

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Well, you know, Aboriginal scholars, scholars that are experts in this religion just say, this is actually just a coincidence.

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Like Ezra Rowing, he says like, they both evolved out of their own like sex symbolism. Like this is just an independent tradition from Australia.

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There's no connection to Genesis. Sometimes there's just coincidences. Now that's a real, that's actually a real story.

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Like that's actually in his book. Yeah, it's a real story that they actually believed. And it's just a coincidence. So correlation doesn't necessarily mean there's a causal link there.

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Now, even if the horror stuff was true and it isn't, there's no evidence for it. That doesn't even demonstrate there's a causal link because correlation isn't causation.

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So they want to say the correlations in some of these instances, like maybe Osiris or Baal or Zalmoxis, Asclepius, those correlations are enough to draw a connection to Jesus.

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But they were going to reject a young earth creationist who might use that same argument. And a young earth creationist could do with other tribes.

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Like there's, you can find similarities to Genesis among Native American tribes. Sometimes, given the plethora of religions out there that have existed, you're going to have coincidences sometime.

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We humans don't like coincidences, but sometimes they exist. But I mean, again, it boils down to the fact that when it comes to something like Horus, there's just no evidence.

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Or when it comes to something like Osiris, when you dive into those alleged similarities, they're not really similarities.

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They're just vague generalizations. And in a sense, a skeptic is committing a logical fallacy known as a hasty generalization.

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So when they say, okay, he had 12 disciples. Hey, he was betrayed and he was killed and he was raised from the dead.

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The Christian is well within his rights to say, I have no reason to believe that's true. Show me the source.

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That's it, the end of argument, because there's no source that they can give that doesn't already come from a source that is misusing the material.

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Because you can quote books that say that, right? Don't do their homework for them. A lot of time, we as Christians, we wanna respond with like, well, let me go look and let me find the scholars that debunk this.

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Make them do their own work. Like don't do the work for them. They don't just make claims without evidence. Right, right, okay, very good.

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Now, okay, so when you say, well, pious Jews, why would pious Jews borrow from these pagan mythological deities, things like that?

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When we look at, for example, the ancient Mediterranean world, first century, you had a lot of religions that were syncretistic.

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And of course, Judaism was famous for, or infamous, I guess, in the ancient world for being exclusivistic.

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But what happens when someone says, well, wait a minute, there is historical evidence that Jews in certain situations were syncretistic.

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I mean, you have depictions of Zeus in some Jewish artwork and things like that that have been discovered.

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And so it wasn't impossible that Jews can include in this syncretistic way, these other elements.

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How do we know Jesus' disciples or Jesus' earlier followers or followers, or I can't say followers, because Jesus is a myth.

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I guess people who are constructing all this, how do we know they weren't those sorts of Jews? How would you respond to that?

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Well, because there's just no evidence of that. For example, we can see syncretism, we can see ancient writers trying to merge like Belhadad with Zeus, or Zeus and Thor, or they're doing like Serapis, they're mixing

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Greek ideas into Egyptian mythology. We have evidence of that. We have no evidence of that when it comes to the founding of Christianity.

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It's all inferred from vague generalizations, very, very minute similarities, and you ignore this vast swathe of differences.

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There's just no textual evidence of a causal link there. So once again, they need to provide some sort of evidence that that actually happened, other than just mere hasty generalizations, like, oh,

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Jesus is the son of God. Romulus is the son of God. Therefore, like, come on, you need more than that. Right, now,

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I like what you said. You can't just make the assertion. So if someone says, for example, well, there were

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Jews who were syncretistic, that doesn't demonstrate, nor is it evidence for the specific case of the early

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Jewish followers of Jesus. So the existence of syncretistic Jews doesn't automatically say that the followers of Jesus were syncretistic

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Jews. Would that be correct? Right, and we don't really have a lot of evidence that they would do such a thing.

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Do they share similarities in terms of structural writing? Yeah, like the Gospels share similarities with Greco -Roman biographies.

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Luke, it's been argued that Luke is writing like a physician writes in that same sort of structure. Okay, just because there's similarities in that, that's just more part of the cultural river.

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That doesn't mean they were going, I really like this stuff about this Delmoxus. Let's throw a little bit of that in there and let's go down to Egypt and take some stuff from Osiris.

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I mean, that's, again, that's a leap in logic. You gotta give me more than just that.

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So like, let me give an example. Everyone knows, and you know, people who know Greek mythology know the story of Zeus. He turned himself into a swan and slept with the

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Spartan queen, Leta. That's proof that the Mayans stole mythology from the

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Greeks because in their mythology, one of the hero twins, one of the most famous deities in that culture, turns himself into a hummingbird and sleeps with the daughter of a mountain goddess.

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Therefore, you just can't have that kind of coincidence. Clearly the Mayans took the story of Zeus and Queen Leta and adapted it to their own mythology and their own needs.

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Just like the Christians took like these pagan myths and adapted them for their own needs. Like you can find similarities across a vast array of different religious ideas.

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Just because you can find this stuff doesn't mean there's actually a causal link there. And mythicists, a lot of these mythicists want to take these correlations and run wild with it, but they wouldn't apply it for like Mayan and Greek mythology because obviously that's absurd.

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Now, a lot of things that Christians use in response to, and not even just Christians, I guess scholars who are acquainted with this material will often accuse

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Jesus mythicists and people who use this sort of argumentation of parallelomania.

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Why don't you define what parallelomania is and why it's a problem in addressing this specific area of drawing these comparisons?

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Yeah, I like the term parallelomania because it's like - It's fun to say. Parallelomania, yeah. It's fun to say too.

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You can say it five times fast. Yeah, you're finding parallels wherever, you know, anywhere you look. Do you know if you say it five times in a row,

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Richard Carrier appears. I mean, it's kind of like a Bloody Mary sort of thing. Yeah, I remember reading his stuff on Pagan Deities and then

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I went and read one of his sources, Trigvane Mettinger, The Riddle of the Resurrection. And I was like, a lot of this stuff you're getting is not what

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Mettinger is saying. Like I even mentioned in my video on Baal. But yeah, parallelomania is this idea you just find parallels in anything.

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When it comes to the Bible, it's like the Jews could never had an original thought. Everything had to come from some Pagan tradition or author somewhere else.

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They had to get it from Berossus or Herodotus or Babylon. It's like, no matter where you look, there's gotta be some sort of similarity there.

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And it's like, guys, sometimes coincidences just happen. Like there's sometimes you're just gonna be overlapped just because humans have lived through so many stories or have come up with stories or have so many tales of their past.

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You're gonna find similarities. Like you can do that with like, in the modern world, there's a lot of similarities between Admiral Nelson, the

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British general and a Korean general named Admiral Yi. I mean, they're both famous generals who do one basically one more single handling kind of attitude.

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It's like, look, just because you can find similarities, that doesn't mean there's necessarily a connection and you gotta do more than just find similarities.

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So, yeah, I was thinking, well, why couldn't the Jews just get their idea of Jesus as the

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Messiah from the Old Testament? I mean, why does it have to be drawn from these other Pagan? I mean, it seems to be that that Jewish context was the main context of the early disciples.

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I don't see why. Yeah. So now, okay, so we have the Old Testament, okay?

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And we have a lot of these mystery religions in the first century going on. Does the, do the mystery religions predate the

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Old Testament data or any of it? So for someone says, well, look, they got all these similarities and someone says, well, wait a minute.

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We don't need those similarities because we have the Old Testament and Jesus, all the things that we say about Jesus can be drawn from the

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Old Testament. And some people might say, well, some of that material predates the Old Testament. How would you respond to something like that?

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Some of the similarities don't even predate the New Testament. So Jan Bremer, Glenn Bowersock, Martin Hengel, they'll make a lot of the similarities you see in the mystery cults.

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There were no mystery religions in the ancient world. A mystery cult was like a vitamin supplement to the Paganism or the

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Polytheism of the day. It was like a little something extra you could do. It's sort of like today, you can be like, you mean like in the

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Elks Club, for example, or you can be like a Mason. It's like, it's a supplement. Yeah, it's sort of like that.

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But like Martin Hengel says, on the contrary, we should reckon rather that there were strong Christian influence on the later evidence of mysteries from the third and fourth centuries

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AD. Jan Bremer says the same thing. Glenn Bowersock wrote a book, History is Fiction. He argued that during the

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Neroan persecution, after that, just after that, we see a lot of the mystery cults start taking Christian ideas and borrowing them.

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Like Dionysus doesn't turn water into wine until after that event. Well, so that's key,

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Michael. So that's key, Michael. So if someone does draw a genuine parallel, then it's easy to show that the genuine parallel is only genuine in its parallel nature because it is developed after the fact.

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And so because these Pagan religions or cults were by its nature syncretistic, it makes sense that they would borrow as opposed to, say,

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Christians borrowing from them. Well, take something like Zoroastrianism. I mean, some will say that Jesus is sort of like an amalgamation of Zoroaster or that the

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Jews during the Babylonian exile borrowed from the Zoroastrian religion. So there's a pretty big parallel they always are claiming.

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Sure. It's funny. I always make this, point this out. The Bible is always guilty until proven innocent.

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It's always the Bible that's the guilty one. Could it be that maybe the Zoroastrianist borrowed from the

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Judeo -Christian side? No, no, never. Never can be that. It can never be that. However, scholars will note that the

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Avesta, the original Avesta was probably lost. The history's burned at some point. And the Avesta we currently have was written down like the fourth century

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AD. And then it was changed and modified up to the ninth or 10th century AD. So scholars like Jimmy Rose and Michael Berger will argue that actually the

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Zend -Avesta was changing and modifying based on influence from Islam and Christianity.

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Because it was really being challenged as these religions grew. And so they put forth the argument that actually all these alleged similarities may have come from Christian influence.

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Now we have no way of actually knowing, or I mean, Christian and Islamic influence. But it's funny how the

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Bible's always the one that's guilty until proven innocent. If there's a similarity with Zoroastrianism, it's gotta be that the Bible borrowed.

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It cannot be that the Zoroastrian texts borrowed from Christians, even though the texts like the

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Avesta, they post -date Jesus. And we know they were changed and modified from the ones after that.

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It's funny that skeptics will, they can't trust the gospel so they were in a couple of decades after Jesus existed, but they can trust the

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Avesta written like millennia after like the battle of exile to accurately tell us what the

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Zoroastrian beliefs were during that period. It's like - It exposes an extreme bias against the

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Bible, which demonstrates that a lot of these skeptics are not as objective as they claim to be. Yeah, it's the

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Bible's always the one that's guilty until proven innocent. We can't judge it like we judge other ancient documents. And a lot of skeptics hate me or attack me when

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I say that, but I mean, I can find so many examples where that happens. Well, I suppose the only, one skeptic that you debated that I thought was the most unbiased was

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Aaron Raw, who has no presuppositions or biases. By the way,

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I just recently, you had a question of my aptitude as an apologist if I actually meant that.

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Well, he's not biased and we can test that. That's right. And you can test that.

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No, no, you have to say it with the, and you can test that. If anyone says they're not biased, they're either a computer or a bias liar.

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Yeah. There is a gentleman who has a YouTube channel called the

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Wise Disciple. He used to be a debate teacher and he did a review of your, I think your cross -examination with Aaron Raw.

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Yeah, I love that. And I thought he gave an excellent analysis there. So, all right. So in your opinion, what is the best and most, how can

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I say this? What is the best parallel that has been drawn where, okay, you're wrong, but I have to deal with this objection you're bringing up.

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What's the best and what's the worst? I would say the worst is Horace, obviously. I mean, that's just, he just makes stuff up out of thin air.

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And, you know, even like very like, like mysticists like Richard Carrier won't even acknowledge that's just nonsense.

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But the best, and this is like, this is not saying it's like, this is like a worthy challenge.

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It's the best by like, you know, it's like not, it's like saying like, you know, it's the best by like, you know, just comparison.

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Like it's been grading on a curve almost is Bale. And the reason why I say Bale is, is because there is cultural competition in the

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Bible. You know, Bale is a rider of the clouds and the biblical authors are like, you think your God rides the clouds. Actually, it's our

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God that's the cloud rider. Or you think your God's the most high. Actually, it's Yahweh that's the most high. It's really

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Mount Zion that is really, you know, the height of, you know, out there. And so there's that going on.

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Now in the Bale cycle, this Eugretic myth, parts of it are missing.

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And so there's a debate if Bale actually dies and comes back to life in it. There's this idea where Bale goes and he fights the

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God of death, Ma. He goes down to the underworld, fights him. But that part is missing. We don't know what happens.

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And in the myth, the Bale myth is confusing. Like at one point they find Bale's body at the edge of the world.

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But then the God of death, Ma, says he swallowed Bale whole. So it's like, well, what happened to Bale? Well, there's a debate if Bale actually dies in that.

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And there's just not enough evidence to make a solid conclusion, but I don't think he does. There's like a later like Arabic inscription that says, that I mentioned in my video, where it doesn't say, says

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Bale has not died, he has just been cut off. And Bale's a storm God. He's not a sun God, despite what, you know, crazy fringe conspiracies there say, he's a storm

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God. And he's got a lot of similarities to like Hittite storm gods that don't die, they just disappear.

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They come back, you know, it's like the storms, like the rainy season comes back and goes away. They don't die in the

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Hittite myth, they just sort of disappear for a while. And the Bale cycle never says Bale was resurrected. It just says

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Bale's alive, he's alive, oh my gosh. So like the other gods like Ale and Anut may have been confused and thought he was dead, but he was just hiding somewhere, we don't know.

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Bale cycle's been, it's fragmented, so we're missing all these sections. But because it's got,

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Bale is mentioned in the Bible, there's cultic competition. That's gonna be the closest because that's, you know, that's the closest to what the biblical authors would have been aware of.

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I guess the nature of that competition is going to, it's gonna draw out various similarities, just like the nature of the case.

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But when you start to look, but I mean, the connected that Jesus is just a long stretch at best, I mean, by the time you get to the

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New Testament, Bale's not even in picture anymore. I mean, like, there's like vague mention, you're like, you know,

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Bale's above is sort of like a variation. I forget the exact connection to that, but it's some sort of, it means like Lord of the underworld somehow.

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But I mean, at that point, Bale's just not even in picture anymore. They're more worried about, you know, the influence of Rome and the

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Greco -Roman influence. I mean, Bale was more of a problem during like the Iron Age period. So for like so much of Jewish authors to say, you know, we're just gonna make our own version of Bale and say that he was a man on earth that was crucified and died is, it's just absurd nonsense.

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You're drawing way too much on vague generalizations and not enough on differences, but you know, it's like with all the pagan deities, there's just no connection there.

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Now, I remember interacting with a skeptic online back in the day before all this

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YouTube stuff. And they said something to the effect of, you know, why don't you go home and worship your

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God, Jesus instead of Jesus, of course. But he was dead serious.

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You know, I kind of continued on the discussion and he was convinced that Jesus is just made up from Zeus.

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How would you speak to something as sin? And I asked that question on purpose because it was part of my second question.

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What's the best argument they use? What's the worst? That's pretty bad. How would you address something as bad as that?

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I mean, it's like, what are you talking about? Like, I mean, that's not how you even say

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Jesus in Greek. It's like, just because there's a connection in Spanish, like a couple of thousand years later.

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He's trying to relate to me. He's trying to relate to me. I'm Puerto Rican. He was trying to make that connection. Yeah, it's like, there's no similarities between Zeus and Jesus.

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I mean, Jesus becomes a human, dies, resurrects. Jesus, or Zeus just can't keep it in his pants.

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That's all of Greek mythology in a nutshell. That's very accurate. Zeus cannot keep it in his pants.

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That's a very... That's all of Greek mythology in a nutshell. Okay, so, all right.

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So a lot of informed skept... Now, I'm gonna use that language sparingly because if you are informed, then you will know that these are bad arguments.

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However, you do have some smart people who still find these arguments convincing.

28:11

What are some of the sources they use? I mean, not all of them are just shooting from the hip.

28:17

You know what I'm saying? If we can kind of throw a bone to some of these guys, they're not shooting from the hip. They are getting their information from some sources.

28:24

What are some of the sources that people use when constructing these sort of arguments and parallels and things like that?

28:31

Well, there are various sources. What a lot of them will try to say, the more sophisticated skeptics, will not be like the Jesus was directly borrowed from paganism.

28:39

They'll be like, there was a motif in the ancient world, like a dying and rising motif. Like every culture had a dying and rising god based on like...

28:45

It wasn't so much they were copying one another. It's like they saw the same cycle of the sun. And so they had a deity based on that.

28:51

The sun seems metaphorically dies in the winter and comes back to life in the summer or the agricultural cycles.

28:58

Yeah, and those exist and there are deities that surround those types of cycles. The problem is that there's just, that's not at all the gospels.

29:06

Christianity is not related to that whatsoever. You really got to bend things in the gospel to make that fit to the way that just most, like 99 .9

29:13

% of scholars just reject outright. But so a lot of the more sophisticated scholars will try to do something like that. And they'll look at deities like maybe like Inanna or it's like I mentioned

29:23

Baal, or then they'll do something like maybe like Melquart, who is a Tyrian deity. Sometimes he's like synthesized with Hercules and they'll do things like that.

29:32

They'll try Asclepius as well, who's not one of those deities, but you know, he's a healing deity, so Jesus healed. So they try to connect that as well.

29:39

So it depends. They tried to build like these grand ideas that there's this dying and rising motif in the ancient world and every culture had to have one.

29:47

So the Jews just had to have one as well. And when you start, and so when you start to get into the details of it, the argument really starts to break down and you start to question some assumptions and there are correlations and the arguments just start to break down quite easily.

29:59

Why don't you explain for us, because I think one of the key differences between a lot of these mystery cults and not even the mystery cults, just like even the worship of Zeus and some of the

30:10

Greek Pantheon, the Roman Pantheon, something that is uniquely, is unique about the

30:16

Christian faith is that it's very much rooted in history, which unlike a lot of these other religious perspectives, these mythologies and things like that.

30:24

I just wanna read real quick for folks. I mean, when you read mythology and you read the gospels, there is no similarity that's relevant and worth talking about.

30:34

I just wanna read Luke chapter three, verses one through three, so people can get an idea that the author of Luke really sees himself writing history.

30:43

So let's take a look real quick. Luke chapter three, verse one through three. Now in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being

30:51

Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip, Tetrarch of Iteria and the region of Trachonitis and Lysanias, Tetrarch of Abilene.

31:00

While Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.

31:06

And he went into all the region around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

31:12

I mean, that short little paragraph looks like it's terribly concerned about the historical details of what's going on.

31:21

Why don't you speak to that? How, I mean, I just gave one example. How does the Bible uniquely differ with respect?

31:28

I mean, what about these other mythic cults and things like that? I mean, don't they take place in a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?

31:38

Why don't you speak to the ambiguity of the context of those myths in comparison to the context of the

31:45

New Testament? Yeah, a lot of them do. A lot of them, they're not trying to base themselves in history. I mean, some of them might say, this ancient king or something whatnot, but there's no way to like date that sort of thing.

31:54

And the biblical authors are very much concerned with dating things. And especially Luke, he's phenomenal when it comes to that.

32:00

But even if you go back as far as like Genesis 2, I mean, they really want you to know where Eden was in its geographical location.

32:07

These are the rivers. This is what the land was like. I mean, it was out east. And so we can identify that today, or at least what we think most likely was that place.

32:15

So they're very much concerned with making sure that this is based upon in history. A lot of these mystery cults were not doing that.

32:22

Like the descent of Inanna, it's based on like vegetation cycles or with regards to fertility. It's not supposed to take place on our plane of like space -time.

32:30

It's not supposed to take, you know, Inanna didn't go down to the underworld in 3 ,600

32:35

BC and came back up, you know, six months later. Like that's not what they're doing. They're trying to parallel certain things.

32:42

Like the Baal cycle yet again is trying to parallel, you know, crop cycles and whatnot. It's not trying to base it in history.

32:48

And so, you know, this is why most scholars reject the mythicist position because clearly they are talking about a historical time when

32:53

Jesus actually did certain things or they believe he did certain things or walked the earth. So again, there's just no comparison here.

33:01

Christianity does not start out like a mystery cult. It starts out with an historical basis or at least trying to.

33:07

Now they may try to say like, well, look at something like, you know, Philostratus' life of Apollonius. Apollonius was like this apparent

33:13

Greek sage who did like these types of wonders. But Craig Keener notes in his book, Christobiography, that there is no evidence that a biography of, oh,

33:22

I'm sorry, a work of fiction was written in the lifetime of eyewitnesses. So Apollonius' life, the tale by Philostratus was written like over a century after this guy allegedly lived.

33:33

You could write works of fiction about these people after the eyewitnesses would have passed away. So you're not gonna write biographies about this historical person while the eyewitnesses were still alive.

33:42

We don't have any examples of that. And if the gospels are, they're the exception to the rule. So the gospels don't fit with this idea that there are works of fiction because they're written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses.

33:52

Biographies, fictional biographies were not written within the lifetime of actual eyewitnesses. And Keener does a really good job pointing this out.

33:59

Okay, very good. Now, if we were to say, for example, hey, the New Testament and the stories of Jesus, they're very much rooted in history and we quote

34:07

Luke chapter three, or we quote Luke chapter one, where he talks about writing an account of the things that has happened among us.

34:17

You do have people who say, well, wait a second, okay. Just because someone mentions historical information doesn't mean the story is true.

34:25

I mean, you could write a fictional story that takes place in New York, like Spider -Man. You hear the

34:30

Spider -Man sort of deal. So Spider -Man, Peter Parker lives in Queens.

34:36

Queens is a real place. Spider -Man saves people. He's our friendly neighborhood Spider -Man saving lives all across New York.

34:45

So that doesn't prove your point, Mr. Christian. How would you respond to something like that? Yeah, well,

34:51

I mean, we don't have actual historians mentioning that there really was a Peter Parker. Like we have

34:56

Tacitus or Josephus or Suetonius mentioning there was an historical Jesus, the work is called

35:02

Christos. So now you gotta explain why these historians are mentioning him as an historical person and why the biographies are being written about him within the lifetime of eyewitnesses and why

35:11

Paul also thinks he was an historical person. He was actually born of a woman, descended from King David in his own words, and had a brother named

35:19

James. And so it just seems incredibly ad hoc to then explain all that away.

35:26

You know, businesses come up with explanations for that, but, and I'm not saying their explanations are necessarily wrong, I'm saying they're ad hoc.

35:31

It's a much simpler explanation to say, well, the reason why they're all writing about him as if he was an historical person is because he wasn't a historical person.

35:38

That's just a simple explanation at the end of the day. And so that doesn't really compare to like Spider -Man because yeah, you got biographies or tales of Spider -Man, but you don't have historians like Tacitus mentioning him on top of that as if he was a real person or someone like Paul saying, yeah,

35:55

I met the actual brother of this guy. Okay. That's funny.

36:00

See, these sorts of discussions we end up having to talk about Spider -Man and a bunch of fictional characters just so we can make these points and draw these parallels.

36:08

I think it's interesting. All right, real quick, I just wanna let folks know if you have any questions for Michael, we will be taking questions at the back end of this episode.

36:16

So if you can preface your question with the word question or the letter Q, so I can differentiate it from the comments in the comment threads that I have to scroll through quite tediously.

36:27

So hopefully you'll have patience with me as I go through that. Also, if you are enjoying this discussion and you have been enjoying

36:32

Revealed Apologetics interviews in the past, I would greatly appreciate if you do me a solid and subscribe and hit the notification bell for future upcoming videos and teachings and things like that.

36:42

All right, Michael, why don't you go a little bit into the history of the development throughout history of the specific emphasis that Christianity has borrowed from pagan mythology and things like that.

36:54

I know it is typically associated with the history of religion school of thought. Perhaps you can speak to that.

37:01

When did this school of thought develop? How much sway did it hold in its heyday?

37:06

And why are people rejecting that school of thought that kind of brought forth this sort of line of reasoning?

37:13

I mean, I think it really started getting popular around the end of the 18th century is like when it really started to grow.

37:20

And then of course, throughout the 19th century, you had people like Gerald Massey, for example, and then, I forget, I think there was a guy named

37:26

Bruno as well, I can't remember his first name though. But yeah, that's sort of like when it started to grow.

37:32

And it was an interesting time. We started to discover, that's when archeology was also starting to get going.

37:38

So we started to discover ancient Babylon, we started to discover ancient Egypt, and people started running wild with very little information they had.

37:45

So there was just trying to sort of, people were trying to look and reclaim the past. And also it's just human nature in a lot of ways.

37:52

We don't wanna think things happen on their own. Everything's gotta come from somewhere. Around the same time, we see a lot of people claiming that Christmas and Easter had pagan origins, which is again, nonsense.

38:02

And so people had to be like, there's no, the tree, the Christmas tree had to come from somewhere. It just couldn't be a

38:07

European folk tradition that happened in the 14 or 1500s. It had to come from something, because there's always gotta be some connection somewhere.

38:17

Coincidences just don't happen. But I mean, that really is what we see with a lot of the Jesus mysticism. It just, they started running wild with these similarities and scholars have just debunked them to the point now where it's just a fringe view at this point.

38:29

Sure. All right, very good. So let's take the two pronged approach that's popular on the internet.

38:36

Number one, while Jesus mythicists is running rampant on the internet, what is the current state of Jesus mythicism and the idea that Jesus never existed and the idea that the very notion of Jesus borrowed from pagan mythology?

38:52

Where do those two positions, although we didn't address the first one, but I just was thrown in there for kicks. Where did those two positions stand within the realm of scholarship?

39:01

Do scholars take this very seriously at all? No, I think Richard Carrier is supposed to like eight scholars might be mysticists or sympathetic to that.

39:08

Maybe there's a little bit more. I don't remember exactly because I didn't jot it down.

39:14

I think I saw him say it on Facebook sometime. But I mean, that's where the state of mythicism is.

39:20

And it's just a ridiculous position because it's just so ad hoc. You got to explain away what

39:25

Paul meant here. And then he's got to explain away what Paul meant here. And it's just so much simpler to explain all these passages and Paul and Tacitus and Josephus.

39:33

There was an historical person named Jesus. Let's move on. And just deal with it. Wait, let me interrupt.

39:38

I do apologize as I just popped in my head. Do you think that one of the reasons why many are so open to the whole

39:46

Jesus mythicism or the Jesus being borrowed from pagan mythology is because that alleviates having to deal with the specific facts that most historians do agree about Jesus because there's such a strong case for say the resurrection.

39:59

Do you think that that's motivated by that perhaps? I think it can be kind of depending on the skeptic.

40:05

You know, just get rid of Jesus, you get rid of all the problems. So he's not a historical person. You don't have to worry about if he was buried or not. So that can be a motivation.

40:11

I know, for example, Tim O 'Neill, who's an atheist, said that a lot of these mysticists are fundamentalists. And so then they just become fundamentalist atheists in the opposite direction kind of thing.

40:20

So you have that kind of issue. With regards to your second question, the state of Jesus being borrowed from pagan mythology, that's just not a topic in scholarship.

40:28

Even the mysticists are not directly saying that. They're trying to say maybe Jesus was like adapted from this general motif or maybe the

40:36

Jews just wanted their own, were trying to explain solar cycles or crop cycles in their own language.

40:43

I think Robert Price has said, he's not saying that these pagan deities were borrowing each other.

40:48

It's just that they all knew agriculture and they all came up with an agriculture deity. And because they all have the same base, there's gonna be similarities there.

40:55

Or they all saw the same cycle of the sun and so they became deities. And so there's gonna be similarities there.

41:01

The problem is, and so, I mean, scholars agree there are similarities in agricultural deities or solar deities and whatnot.

41:08

But the problem is Jesus doesn't fit either of those motifs. I mean, even

41:16

Trygve Mettinger, who is one of Carrier's sources in a great book, Riddle of Resurrection, he argues some of these deities were actually resurrected or were dying and rising deities, not resurrected in the

41:26

Jewish sense. But in the final chapter, like the epilogue, he just notes that there's no similarities here with Christianity.

41:32

These are completely different beasts that are happening here. So if you were to take,

41:39

I do apologize. If you were to take the idea of resurrection, so people try to draw the parallels to the resurrection, would you say that the resurrection of Jesus, so the

41:47

Jewish conception of the bodily resurrection, the Christian conception of the bodily resurrection is unique in the ancient world?

41:55

So that when people say, hey, look, there's a parallel resurrection over here, would you say that Christianity is actually unique in its specific view of resurrection?

42:03

And so while many of these folks will use the language of resurrection, there isn't any true parallel.

42:09

Would that be correct? Yeah, I mean, take Osiris. When the Egyptian works speak of resurrection, they don't mean it like he's gonna return to like a bodily form and an immortal body.

42:17

It's like, you know, it's him transitioning to the underworld. It means something different in Egyptian mythology.

42:24

The resurrection, as we understand, is very distinctly Judeo -Christian, has a distinct meaning in Judeo -Christian thought.

42:30

It means to return to life in a glorified body, a human body. So like, if you're a deity who's never been human, you by definition cannot be resurrected in the

42:38

Jewish sense. End of story. It does not mean resuscitated, just to come back to life and you're gonna die again in 40 or 50 years.

42:44

It's a very specific meaning that you only find within Jewish culture. And what skeptics do is they really gotta like stretch certain myths and pagan to make it sound like it's resurrection.

42:54

Like they'll do it with like Asclepius and Asclepius is never resurrected. That's just nonsense. Sure. I remember I grew up in church and grew up in a

43:02

Spanish speaking church. So I most of the time didn't understand what was going on. And I'd be reading my

43:07

Bible. And I remember reading something where in scripture, Jesus is called the first fruit of the resurrection. And I always thought that that was weird because I'm like, well, wait a minute, how is he the first fruit of the resurrection?

43:18

Other people have been raised from the dead. You know, Elijah raised a kid from the dead.

43:23

You have some resurrections in the New Testament. And then I realized what you just said is that Jesus being the first fruit of the resurrection implies that he is the first to be raised from the dead with a glorified body, which is the

43:38

Jewish concept of resurrection, what we are all waiting for at the end of all things.

43:43

So yes, it is this very bodily existence. I like how N .T. Wright says it, that we don't believe in life after death.

43:50

We believe in life after life after death to kind of differentiate from our disembodied state upon death and our bodily state upon resurrection.

44:00

So I always thought that that is very unique and you don't really see that in a lot of these other positions. Would I be correct there?

44:06

Yeah, you don't. I mean, when like, you know, like Hercules may be spoken of like coming back to life at some point, but it's like, it's like resuscitation in Greek mythology.

44:17

And the Tyrian Hercules, we're not even sure if he's resurrected. Like the language is like awakening. And so like Mark Smith has argued that he's, there's just not enough evidence to talk if he's being resurrected.

44:28

Same with like Melchart. Again, they're interesting topics, but we just don't have enough evidence to make the inference.

44:35

And even if we did, it's very, very unlikely. They're talking about the Jewish concept. Again, it's either like a deity coming back to life in that spiritual sense, whatever that means.

44:45

Probably more similar to what we see with like Tammuz or it's like a resuscitation.

44:51

Like in some Greek myth, there is like a person who dies and they come back to life, but they're not glorified. They're gonna die again one day.

44:57

They just get a second chance to live a couple more years. Sure. All right. Very good. Now, real briefly, what are some apparent parallels that folks use with respect to the

45:07

Old Testament? So we have people who think that Jesus is borrowed from these mystery religions and things like that.

45:16

But what about Genesis seems to be borrowed from these other pagan societies you have references to the

45:25

Enuma Elish and things like that. How would you respond to something like that? Yeah, I mean, like Enuma Elish, for example, it's nothing like Genesis.

45:33

It's about the exaltation of Marduk and people wanna cherry pick similarities out there. Some will try to use the

45:38

Epic of Gilgamesh because Gilgamesh swims to the bottom of the ocean, finds a plant that will rejuvenate his body.

45:44

It does not grant him immortality. It will rejuvenate his body. So they say that it sounds like Genesis three with like the tree of life, but then a serpent steals it from Gilgamesh while he's taking a nap.

45:56

Problem, Jeffrey Tigay will know, it may not even be a serpent. The actual like word is like ground line, which could actually mean like a lizard, like a chameleon of some sort.

46:05

Like in scripture you're talking about? No, I'm talking in scripture. Okay, I was about to say, I was like, okay, go ahead. There may not even be a serpent in Gilgamesh.

46:12

Some say it is, some say it's like a sort of lizard. But, you know, this is just vague similarities.

46:19

First of all, the plant is at the bottom of the ocean. It only rejuvenates the body.

46:25

The serpent steals it from him. In Genesis, there are two trees and the snake talks to them and they're eating from one and then

46:30

God cuts off access to the other one. I mean, you really got to stretch these things. To me, it's far more likely that like with the

46:37

Nuyi Nui tribe, there's just similarities just by coincidence. That if you ignore the differences, you can come up with all sorts of things you want.

46:46

But really, you know, they're stretching things. They're finding this. They'll do the same with something like Enki and Ninhursag.

46:54

There's this tale of like these deities, like Enki and Ninhursag, where the water goddess puts these plants up from this sacred land called

47:02

Dilmun and Enki eats them. So she curses him, but then she feels bad.

47:08

So she heals his rib and she becomes known as the Lady of the Rib. Well, that sounds like Genesis 2. Well, no,

47:15

I mean, again, you're stretching things. I mean, even Jeffrey Teague will say things like, the differences are also significant.

47:21

Most noticeable is the far more natural configuration of the narrative of Genesis 2 .3 in contrast to the fantastic and supernatural nature of the other accounts like Enki and Ninhursag.

47:32

And like R .K. Harrison will note that it may not even be the Lady of the Rib. The text may be referring to the lady who makes alive.

47:40

And again, it's not like Eve being taken from the side of Adam. Not even a rib is in the actual original

47:45

Hebrew. It's this lady just may heal this rib of some sort. But so again, stretching things beyond belief.

47:53

In an upcoming video, I'm gonna tackle that as well as something called the Tale of Adapa, where again, Trygve Madinger is just sort of like tore that connection apart.

48:01

All right, well, let's pivot back to the New Testament. Let's take the last few moments here before we get into Q &A.

48:08

You're not out of the hot seat. People have questions, but I wanna get time for those questions since we got a couple here.

48:16

But let's take a moment to lift up Jesus a little bit. We talked about these apparent parallels, which obviously have no evidential basis.

48:25

There's all sorts of problems with it. And it's not even held to this position, not even held to by the majority of scholarship, unbelieving scholarship for that matter.

48:35

Why don't you talk a little bit about the uniqueness of Jesus? In what way is

48:41

Jesus unique from all these, what I would call shallow attempts to draw these parallels?

48:47

What stands out to you about Jesus, both in the scholarly sense and feel free to even go in the experiential sense because folks who are believers, we know we worship a risen

48:58

Lord, that he's alive. So why don't you speak to that if you can? Yeah, so we're gonna get a little bit of theology here, but I mean, for one thing,

49:07

Jesus is the only one who comes to earth in human form, not as a King, not as some glorified warrior, but as like a pauper basically from Galilee, Nazareth, not really anything really great.

49:20

Lives a poor life, despite what Kenneth Copeland might say, and dies, yeah, yeah.

49:28

Well played, well played. Well, that troubles me, Michael, because I think

49:33

Kenneth Copeland is a fine theologian. How could you say such a thing? Well, I'm leaving then. I'm just kidding.

49:40

Yeah. All right, go for it. I mean, Jesus, there is no religion where the

49:46

God of the universe comes and dies for our sins and suffers the consequence, a shameful, humiliating death in such that way.

49:54

Again, the resurrection is mostly in its ancient cultural context about shame and the loss of Jesus's honor, and he's willing to take that on for us.

50:01

He takes upon our shame. And that's a very important aspect that we kind of overlook in our modern culture that's not based on honor and shame.

50:08

But so he takes that shame upon us, dies, resurrects, so that all can come into that sort of thing.

50:15

It's not so much this idea of like this, the deity is doing it for maybe himself or whatnot.

50:22

He's doing it because he wants to bring people into the kingdom in such a way that is, you don't see in other sorts of other religions.

50:30

The creator himself has come down and has saved us. And you're not gonna get that with any sort of other religion, even in something like Islam.

50:37

The creator is so far above that. How could he care about us like that? But in Christianity, God wants, loves us so much, he comes down to live among us, lives the life we should have lived, dies to death we should have died, all in an effort to save us.

50:49

And there's something just so beautiful about that, even if you don't believe it, even Bart Ehrman. I mentioned a quote from Bart Ehrman in my video

50:57

I did called the Lost Message of the Bible, where Bart Ehrman is just sort of like enthralled by how beautiful this is.

51:02

You have God coming down, being born in a manger, and taking on the evil of the world on himself.

51:09

It's just an absolute beautiful thing. And perhaps maybe you could speak to just existentially, how has that,

51:16

I mean, we can talk about in the scholarly sense and in the historical sense and just the theological sense, but how has the truth of who

51:24

Jesus is, he's the risen king, he's sitting at the right hand of the father.

51:30

We are waiting in hope for his return, the resurrection of the dead, all these things. And that one day we will see

51:36

Jesus face -to -face, our Lord and savior, our friend. Existentially, how have those truths impacted your life kind of on a day -to -day basis?

51:47

I mean, that's a good question. It takes for me a while to really get into that. Okay. I mean, so I don't know how much

51:55

I can really say on it without giving a sermon. Dude, just share a little. I understand,

52:00

I mean, it's a big question because I mean, God affects us in every aspect of who we are. Why don't you take maybe two or three main things that you've been greatly impacted because of your relationship with Jesus?

52:13

Well, I think the main reason is I wanna try my best to live for him and to do what would bring honor to him.

52:19

So I had a conundrum a couple of months ago where I took down my Exodus documentary because I was convinced I was wrong. Now I could have been stubborn and prideful and kept it up and fought for it.

52:28

I mean, I had a whole response ready to go to defend that. But at the end of the day, I thought, am

52:35

I really crucified with Christ if I do not swallow my pride on this? And at some point you gotta accept that it's not about how

52:43

I look, it's about how Christ is gonna look. And I had to do the right thing regardless of how I thought it was gonna make me feel about how horrible it made me feel.

52:51

But so I wanna try my best to live like that and live that out as much as I can because if Christ can go through all that shame for me,

52:57

I can go through some shame for him. And that's the way we should be living our life. Speaking of all this honor, shame,

53:02

I will have a video on honor and shame in the ancient world, probably in September. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about the crucifixion and some cultural things we're missing with that.

53:10

Like why Jesus is not answering people and whatnot. Okay. Well, thank you so much for that. I think you did an excellent job.

53:16

Of course, this is a big topic even though it's easily dispatched with some facts and some logical argumentation and criticisms of many of the claims that are put forth against the

53:27

Christian position from these forms of argumentation. But I think right now,

53:32

I do wanna spend the rest of the time going through some of the questions. Now, you did wanna address a specific question, but real quick,

53:39

I want to - I mean, we can do the Super Chats, but we should do Super Chats first, yeah. First of all, I wanna thank you.

53:46

Thank you, Jesus, okay, for your $5 Super Chat. I greatly appreciate

53:51

Super Chats and I do appreciate the support. So thank you so much for that. But thank you,

53:57

Jesus asked the question, does Inspiring Philosophy know that they found the Book of Jasher? Did you know that?

54:03

Yeah, this is a running theme. Yeah, this is a running theme right now because on Twitter, I got a message. I actually got a couple of messages here where people were claiming

54:09

I should consider the Book of Jasher found. And I was just like, I'm gonna do a video on this. So I'm actually working with my brother -in -law writing a script to take care of that,

54:17

David Wilber. And so, yeah, this is just another running theme. So there will be a book, there will be a video on the Book of Jasher this

54:23

August where we show the modern forgeries aren't forgeries. Stop pretending that it's actually been found.

54:29

See, I think people should be afraid of arguing against you because one thing, if I were an unbeliever, I would fear is this response.

54:36

Oh yeah, well, I'm gonna make a video about that. How about that, Michael? Well, I'm coming out with a 10 -part series.

54:42

So you just wait. I'm probably gonna do a series on the documentary hypothesis next year. So that should be fun as well.

54:47

Awesome, very good, awesome. And I don't know how to pronounce this. Is it

54:53

Biber? Biber. Biber. I'm gonna go with Biber. Okay, Biber. Maybe it's Biber, I don't know. Thank you so much for your super chat,

55:00

Biber or Biber. I apologize for mispronouncing that. The question here is, it's a longer text.

55:05

So please notice the following post for completeness on Dr. Carrier who uses Ascension of Isaiah and constructs a really, and that's it,

55:14

I don't have. I have the rest. And constructs a really adventurous claim about Jesus being crucified by demons in space and then suddenly explains the text as incomplete and late.

55:24

And that's why he doesn't use. I noticed the statement is one of his interviews. I got a little confused.

55:30

So yeah, he uses this text called the Ascension of Isaiah where it talks about Jesus coming down from different layers of heaven, eventually getting on the firmament, which would be like above us, the sky, and then coming down.

55:40

The problem is, even as like Tim O 'Neill's done in his responses, the Ascension of Isaiah says Jesus came to earth.

55:46

And Carrier admits in his book that this does mention a brief sojourn to earth. Okay, well then guess what?

55:52

Jesus isn't crucified in space if he's actually coming to earth. And I don't know of any scholars that agree with Carrier that it just mentions

56:00

Jesus being in space. He's like the only one who says that. And it's also kind of ironic to me because the

56:06

Ascension of Isaiah may date to 90 AD, maybe. And very, very few scholars date it that early.

56:13

But you have gospels that come out before that talking about Jesus being on earth. Why is that one reliable for what the early Christians believe and not

56:19

Mark, Luke, Matthew, which would have come before that, obviously, and probably John as well.

56:25

So we can trust the Ascension of Isaiah that that's the earliest belief of Christians, but we can't trust these other gospels that came before it.

56:31

And Paul as well, who talks about Jesus being a real historical person. But I mean, yeah, I don't, I mean, the

56:36

Ascension of Isaiah is, I remember reading a couple of papers on that years ago, but it does not mention that, it does mention

56:43

Jesus comes to earth. And he seemed like - What I do find that when you read a lot of these other literature, in comparison to the

56:50

Bible, the quality is even different. You know, the quality of the

56:55

New Testament and the Old Testament, there's just a quality about the literature there that is, you know, these other pieces of literature seem very shallow.

57:03

That doesn't mean the Bible's true, just because I just noticed that there's a, there is a stark difference. They're not on the same literary par in my estimation.

57:13

All right, well, thank you for that, Michael. Here is another question. Christmas trees are obviously pagan and Christians still use it.

57:19

Why? I get this all the time, by the way. You know, this is in, it happens at the back of the churches after church when people are drinking coffee.

57:27

Man, you know, wondering if I should put up a tree this year. I've actually heard those conversations. Is the

57:32

Christmas tree pagan? If not, why not? No, there's no evidence it goes back to paganism.

57:38

The Christmas tree basically comes out in Europe. Not, like, around maybe the 1500s.

57:46

I think the first mention of it is like, I'm like talking about heights of it around 1500s. I can't remember the exact.

57:53

It's in this book. I don't remember. I don't have time to go through it right now, but I do remember going through this book and hearing everything.

57:59

And they talk about that. But yeah, it comes around the 1500s and whatnot. And it's basically most likely adapted from paradise trees.

58:07

So the feast day of Adam and Eve, or the day to celebrate Adam and Eve is on December 24th. And in medieval times, they often did it with like a play and they'd use a paradise tree.

58:17

Well, in Europe on December 24th, the only trees that are gonna be blooming are pine trees or fir trees. So they'd gather a fir tree and they decorate it with whatever fruit or bread they had.

58:27

And then of course, after they could gather around on Christmas Eve and eat the fruit and whatnot. So it just sort of morphed, most likely.

58:33

It's not proven, but it's most likely more from paradise trees. That's where they come from. So Christmas trees are all good.

58:39

Christians shouldn't have a problem. Okay, very good. No problem. Cause where else will you offer your pagan gifts?

58:47

I mean, it has to be under a tree. We need somewhere to put the gifts.

58:52

All right. Redefine Living asks the question, I've heard a correlation between Samson and Hercules.

58:58

What do you think of that correlation? I don't think there's a correlation there. I think again, it's just finding, it's a parallel mania there.

59:04

You find similarities and you run wild with it. I've not looked too much into it, I will admit.

59:10

But again, I just, two strong men in different cultures is bound to happen. There are strong men in all sorts of cultures.

59:16

Again, we need more. We need like a causal link. We need some author saying, you know, like maybe like Pinder or Herodotus saying like, yeah, we took this legend from the

59:25

Jews and we made Hercules from it. It just seems a little ridiculous. Okay. Pine Creek says, well, it's not really a question, but we have a couple from him.

59:33

So perhaps we could address some of those. I know you wanted to address one. Yeah, let's do it. But the biblical authors are concerned with dating things, but didn't seem to be concerned telling the reader when their works were written or from where.

59:46

Yeah, so did a lot of other ancient authors. So what? That doesn't mean anything. That's just arguing from silence.

59:54

There you go. We're done. Okay. That's all it is. I mean, who cares? Well, he follows up here.

01:00:00

He says, weren't the gospels written when anyone who walked and talked with Jesus were mostly dead? They would have had to have lived past 70 years old to verify the gospels, for example.

01:00:12

As far as I'm aware, I don't think scholars even make that argument. I think even if you, what is his name?

01:00:19

I mean, Pappius talks about still living eyewitnesses being around. Even if you reject that, it's not unlikely that there still would have been eyewitnesses by the time

01:00:26

Mark was writing, for example. I mean, you know, they don't have to be, you could have, Jesus had younger followers as well.

01:00:34

They don't have to be super old. It's not like all his followers were old men. So I don't understand that. They have to be, otherwise

01:00:39

I can't use that argument. Right. They have to be super old. It doesn't seem logical to suggest that.

01:00:45

Now this idea is like, well, you know, the modern, the ancient, like life expectancy was roughly 40 years.

01:00:51

Not necessarily. If you lived to a certain age, you were basically gonna live to like 70 or this,

01:00:57

I mean, even some, like I think Amortex talked about, people living to 80 or 90 or whatnot, which was, it was just that some people died young or died in birth that, you know, that the average would lower itself to 40.

01:01:09

But I mean, if you lived to 40, you're basically gonna keep living unless you die in war or something or disease. But I mean, like, no,

01:01:14

I mean, the natural life expectancy of a human is still gonna be 70 in ancient times. So, I mean, if you met

01:01:20

Jesus when you were like 20, you know, you still got like 50 or 60 years to go. So you could go, so just had 50 to 50.

01:01:26

If you eat your Wheaties and you're somewhat healthy, then yeah, you got some mileage. If you had 50 years to 30 AD, you got 80

01:01:32

AD and you get about the time Luke and Matthew are writing by even the majority opinion when those gospels were written.

01:01:38

Sure, sure, absolutely. Trinity Radio, I assume that's Braxton Hunter, who is a mutual friend of ours.

01:01:45

Are you friends with Braxton? I'm sure you're friends with Braxton, right? I don't know who that guy is. Braxton Hunter, yeah, he's this little known apologist.

01:01:52

He's shaved his head, tries to look like James White. I can't look at him because I can't look at him in the eye because the shine from the head is too much.

01:01:59

Yeah, that's why, yeah. It's like this light above me and that's what it's like. Yes, but if Braxton was here, that light would violently reflect off his head and perhaps destroy my eyes.

01:02:12

So thank you for not being bald. He asked the question, is that guy, that guy that critiqued

01:02:18

IP going to agree to a discussion with him? I would assume he's talking about Dr. Jason Lyle. I did reach out to Dr.

01:02:25

Lyle. Yeah, and I thought that was a fun discussion.

01:02:31

I do greatly respect Dr. Lyle and I do think he defends the Young Earth position well, but I would have liked to see an interaction with both views.

01:02:40

Unfortunately, Dr. Lyle is very busy and debates do require prep time.

01:02:46

And so I don't want to assume what's on someone's plate. I will schedule six months, a year out.

01:02:52

I don't care how much time he needs, let's do it. Like some of his objections, I could, oh, they're so easy.

01:02:58

I could just go like that Genesis 17 one was, man. Okay, all right, all right.

01:03:03

I would love, I mean, I would love to see it. Unfortunately, it didn't work out. So I do apologize. I tried to work my magic, but my magic doesn't always work.

01:03:12

All right, so let's see here. Someone is asking Lattler. I'm not gonna try to pronounce the last name.

01:03:20

What do you think of the Enuma Elish? Yeah, the Enuma Elish, it's like this tale about the, it's like a

01:03:25

Babylonian almost creation myth is about Marduk defeating like the god Tiamat using her body to make the sky and the earth and all this stuff.

01:03:34

And it's a very interesting tale. I don't, I'd agree with someone like David Samiru. There's just no connection there to Genesis.

01:03:40

It's very vague. People want to try to make a connection with like home and Tiamat, but Tiamat's a feminine, home is a masculine word.

01:03:49

And so again, it's just cherry picking out similarities and running wild with it. Most scholars, as far as I've seen, don't see any strong connections there.

01:03:57

So yeah, maybe I should do a video on that eventually. I just, to me, I'm always like, are we serious? Like this too? Like, come on guys.

01:04:04

Have you read it? It's out there, man. All right. 305

01:04:10

Thief asks, what do you think about before marriage? I would assume they're going, they want to insert sex in there.

01:04:19

They probably were too shy to. What do you think about before marriage?

01:04:24

Well, I thought about many things before marriage. What do you think about, let's just assume that's what they were saying.

01:04:30

So what do you think about sex before marriage? What's your theological belief on it? I know you got something special to say on this as other topics.

01:04:36

And it's fine, it's not related, but why don't you share your thoughts, your theological and biblical convictions on sex before marriage?

01:04:44

So before the year, I'm going to do a couple of videos on virtue ethics and why I think the New Testament teaches a form of virtue ethics.

01:04:50

So the question you should be asking is, does this act flow from a virtuous character? So I think, so I would agree with GM with Elizabeth Anscombe, we're asking the wrong questions here.

01:04:59

Not what is right and wrong, but what is to live a good life? What is to actually live a virtuous life?

01:05:05

So that's the question you need to be asking. And so maybe I should defer to those videos because I think we need to define more in terms of ethics before we get into that.

01:05:14

I would say, yeah, in most cases it's going to be wrong, but because I'm a virtue ethicist, we don't like saying that necessarily it has to be universally wrong.

01:05:24

Rape is obviously universally wrong because it could never flow from a virtuous character. But something more like this, I would say most likely in all circumstances, it would be wrong.

01:05:33

But because I'm a virtue ethicist, we don't like to talk in those terms. And maybe when I do those videos, it'll be able to explain more why we don't like talking in these terms.

01:05:41

Yeah, I guess I'd be curious as to what scenario would be appropriate to have - Sexual and union. Yeah, I guess in my own conviction,

01:05:49

I would say don't do the thingy without the ringy. So that's my theological conviction. We'll leave it there. I would say it'd be very hard to find a scenario where it would be virtuous.

01:05:58

Okay, all right. Pine Creek strikes again. He says, if the Christian admits that Jesus can be found in the

01:06:03

Old Testament, couldn't Moses, Elijah, and Elisha be found in the New Testament? Well, I mean, they are the transfiguration, for example.

01:06:11

Yeah, that's it. What is the context of this question? I don't understand what he's getting at. Of course, they're talked about in the

01:06:16

New Testament. I mean, I just did a video. It was Jesus borrowed from the

01:06:22

Old Testament, where I explained they found parallels in the Old Testament to Jesus on purpose. I mean, but that's what a lot of ancient authors did.

01:06:28

They would look back to ancient texts and try to parallel it with current events they saw. I don't see that as a problem.

01:06:34

Yeah, that's interesting there. That was a shout out from my dad. God bless you, everyone. I just figured giving my dad a quick shout out.

01:06:40

My dad, George. Thank you very much. Let's see here. How are you doing, Mike?

01:06:45

You're okay? We can keep going? Yeah, I can go for about another 20, 30 minutes or something. Okay, well, it might not even be that long.

01:06:51

Let's see. It depends on how many questions are coming in. So Pine Creek, I'm just going in order. So that's why it looks like they're the same.

01:06:57

So Pine Creek's got a couple of them. I'm just trying to go in order. So I will get to other questions. Oh, here we go.

01:07:02

This question, yeah. Yeah, my video just addressed, yeah. Okay, so - Yeah, my video just addressed this, you know.

01:07:08

Isn't it reasonable to say that a historical Jesus existed, but the Christ was developed using the

01:07:14

Old Testament as a template? Again, that's an odd question, obviously.

01:07:20

Well, I did this in my video. I did this in my video where I said, well, it's this idea that maybe Jesus was an historical person, but all this stuff about him resurrecting, that was just taken by Christian authors reading passages in the

01:07:31

Old Testament and trying to rework this fiction about Jesus. And so, first of all, again, no fictional works exist within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of the person that Craig Keener points us out.

01:07:44

And he goes through a large survey. Second, if you want to believe this, it becomes quite an ad hoc thesis or an ad hoc hypothesis.

01:07:53

Because as I do in my video, I point out like, you got to say, they started in like second

01:07:59

Kings and they moved back to first Kings, Exodus. And then they moved to like Isaiah and they moved to like the Odyssey. And it's like pattern here.

01:08:05

They're just, what do you want us to believe? That like some, like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were just flipping through randomly through old scriptures and going, and we're going to take that.

01:08:13

Or what do they have, a dartboard? And then we'll take some of that. And then we'll take some of that. Typically, if you're going to build a myth, you're going to follow some sort of pattern.

01:08:21

You're going to follow something. Like the Gospel of Thomas is very likely following the Haitian's diatestry.

01:08:26

He's following that order to sort of construct this Gospel of Thomas. When you, through the

01:08:32

Old Testament parallels, it's just chaos. It's far more like, as I pointed out in my recent video

01:08:41

I did in May, that they witnessed things they saw and they said, well, what can we find in the past to parallel this to?

01:08:47

That their template was the life and ministry of Jesus. And then they look for Old Testament parallels to match, to make the story more interesting.

01:08:56

That's far more likely given the chaos you would have to do to make this work a fiction. And it just doesn't fit with the cultural context as I've noted.

01:09:03

So there's that issue there. So yeah, I have a whole video on this. It's like, was Jesus plagiarized from Old Testament?

01:09:10

Forget the exact name. Now I forget the exact name of my own video, of course. Well, I just think, I mean, Jesus, I mean, the whole point of the

01:09:15

New Testament is to demonstrate that Jesus was in fact fulfilling Old Testament scripture and prophecy.

01:09:21

I mean, he was, you know, as it was written. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, Jesus is a historical character.

01:09:28

From the Old Testament. And yeah, so I addressed that in like 16 minute video. Yeah. Why does it have to be stolen?

01:09:34

Why isn't he, why can't we say it's more reasonable to believe that he in fact does fulfill the Old Testament? And that's why you have the obvious parallel.

01:09:41

If anyone, if the Christ were to come, he'd have to fulfill those standards that have come before anyway. So I don't see.

01:09:47

Well, that's one thing I know in the video. Like, it's like Jesus did things on purpose to show he was the fulfillment of the scriptures.

01:09:53

To show he was what the scriptures were talking about. So he mimicked something Elijah did. I mean, what do these guys have to think?

01:10:00

That Jesus, to show that he's a historical person, can mimic anything in the Old Testament? Like he just can't? He's doing certain things to show, look, you saw these things, but now look,

01:10:10

I am even greater than that. I'm going to do things even greater. And so he's paralleling in certain ways. You can do those type of things.

01:10:16

Like it's like ancient, it's like generals will sometimes repeat things that they learned from ancient generals. This is why we have things like Fabian tactics.

01:10:23

It doesn't mean modern generals were works of fiction because they used Fabian tactics. Very good.

01:10:30

Now this is the last one from Pine Creek. And the only reason why I'm asking it is it was a specific one you wanted to address. So that was the last -

01:10:35

Oh, I said it really quick in the chat, yeah. Yeah, that's the last one from Doug. Merry Christmas, Doug.

01:10:41

Christmas has come early. We've addressed a bunch of your questions. And by the way, I very much appreciate them. So I'm not brushing you aside at all.

01:10:47

So just wanted to say that. So he says that the theme of rising and dying gods does indeed exist by the first century.

01:10:55

One, gods were believed to exist. And two, gods died or went away in some way. And three, gods came back in some way.

01:11:01

How would you answer that? Gee, okay. Well, yeah. We can clearly show that every sun deity must be somehow like a copy of everyone else's.

01:11:13

That's what he's getting at. I mean like this is so general. Yeah, gods went away and sometimes God came back. Sometimes God died in some ways and then sometimes they came back.

01:11:22

I mean, I talked about this in my entire series about how they come back. It's not like the Jewish resurrection concept.

01:11:28

I mean, this is just such a hasty generalization here. What are we trying to say with this? So there's a theme of dying rising gods.

01:11:35

Well, some, maybe. Melquart, maybe. Baal, maybe, but less likely than Melquart given the

01:11:40

Arabian inscription we have found. Adonis definitely just dies and doesn't resurrect.

01:11:46

There's no evidence of that. Tammuz dies, but we don't know how he comes back. It's not really coming back to life.

01:11:52

Mark Smith talks about this in his works. I mean, but it's like, look at how vague these are and their connections and whatnot.

01:12:00

We can do the same thing again with like I did earlier with Mayan mythology and Greek mythology or with aboriginal mythology in Genesis.

01:12:08

Are we saying there's a connection here because you can find, again, you can make anything mash if you just find these generalizations and ignore the vast differences.

01:12:16

The burden is on them to show there's actually a theme here. There's actually some sort of like copying or some sort of like motif that's running through the ancient world.

01:12:24

Notice they have a vague generalizations. And even the scholars like Trygve Menager are not convinced there's some sort of like connection here.

01:12:31

Like Baal is not a version of Osiris. Like Osiris is not a version of Zalmoxis.

01:12:37

Like these are different things in these individual cultures. So there's not like there's a running theme like James Frazier noted of these dying and rising motifs.

01:12:46

That's been addressed for numerous scholars since then that shows that these are not like, it's not like the

01:12:52

Canaanites were like, you know, the Mesopotamians have like an Inanna or a Tammuz. We need a version of that for ours or whatnot.

01:12:58

It's a little weird. It's just that Adonis meant something different than what Tammuz meant in their specific cultures.

01:13:05

Jesus meant something entirely different. I mean, the syncretism comes later with like Adonis or like Tammuz where like the cultures are trying to say, well, you know, like maybe there's some similarities because we can work together kind of thing.

01:13:16

But the way they came about, I don't think scholars even say there was like, everyone just had to have a dying and rising God. Like that's just definitely not what was happening.

01:13:24

Sure. Thank you. Redefine Living asks, I heard evolution originated in pagan mythology.

01:13:29

How is that compatible with biblical creation? No. Again, that sounds very much like what we see with Pine Creek or some of these other,

01:13:41

I mean, Pine Creek's not a mythicist, but what mythicists are doing. You see maybe similarities to evolution in pagan mythology and you assume it came from that.

01:13:48

That's basically what a lot of these pagan parallel arguments are like.

01:13:54

It's like, it's kind of like this. It's really just not that good. I mean, evolution came about from 19th century studies looking at fossils and different aspects of species that they were encountering.

01:14:08

And they made this inference to a theory of evolution. That Darwin did not read like pagan mythology and go, aha, like it's not what happened.

01:14:16

So this very sounds very much like the same kind of argument Pine Creek was just giving. Just if it looks, both sides are saying that the other argument looks bad, they should make both sides consider how good these arguments are.

01:14:27

Right. And if you don't hold to evolution or you think it's inconsistent with the Bible, your arguments need to be better.

01:14:33

Now I'm not saying for this person, because this person is just asking an honest question, but there are people who say, hey, I don't believe in evolution.

01:14:39

And so, they'll use very bad arguments against evolution. I'm not an evolutionist.

01:14:44

I'm not a theistic evolutionist. Michael and I would differ on that topic, but I can't argue against his view with bad arguments.

01:14:51

So you want to make sure you formulate your argument, argue it, have evidence to back it up and have an interesting dialogue discussion at that point.

01:14:59

I do like this. I might use this parallel against the pagan God parallels. Cause this is a pretty good one. I'll have to look more into this cause

01:15:04

I could use it to show how ridiculous those pagan parallel arguments are. Okay, there we go.

01:15:11

So, Lattler asks, any book recommendations? Why don't you give three books that are really good for people to get some more information?

01:15:18

I do have one myself. Yeah. On this topic specifically? Yeah, on this topic of the

01:15:24

Jesus mythology sort of stuff. And while you give a list, I'm going to see if I could. So, I mean -

01:15:30

Are you familiar with Nash's work? Dr. Nash, he has got a Hellenistic - Yeah, yeah, I think

01:15:35

I am. I think I have his name here. Yeah, Ronald Nash. Yeah, yeah. Was the New Testament. He doesn't have a,

01:15:40

I think a book or a paper was the New Testament influenced by pagan religions. Yeah, I think I have it.

01:15:46

I think I read that in preparation for my debate with David Fitzgerald, like two or three years ago or something, which was a great debate, by the way.

01:15:55

But some books to check out - Go ahead, go ahead, I'm sorry. Yeah, some books to check out. Jan Bremmer's, Initiation to the

01:16:00

Mysteries of the Ancient World. Very good understanding of what these mystery cults were like and why they're not really connected to Christianity.

01:16:08

He talks a little bit about that, but he's more focused on mystery cults. Drudgery Divine by Jonathan Smith is good.

01:16:15

Martin Hengel, The Son of God is good. Glenn Bowersock, Fiction is History. Very good as well.

01:16:21

Daniel Pate, I think, has a chapter in the Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity. Gary Lee's Mithraism and Christianity, Borrowing and Transformations.

01:16:29

Arthur Nock, Essays in Religion and the Ancient World, Volume Two. I think he's got a specific essay in there that I remember checking out a while ago.

01:16:38

Again, Ronald Nash, Was the New Testament Influenced by Pagan Religions is good. So that's also pretty good stuff.

01:16:45

I was trying to remember if the book Dave Allison mentions this, but I can't remember it off the top of my head. But he mentions how like the verses that these pagan, these parallel guys say is similar to pagan cultures, actually more similar to Qumran stuff.

01:17:01

So stuff in the New Testament is more similar to what we see at Qumran than it is to the mystery cults. But I can't remember that off the top of my head right now.

01:17:08

Okay. I'd like to say a quick thank you for the $10 super chat from ToTheMountainIGo.

01:17:15

Thank you so much for your $10 super chat. Greatly appreciated. The question is, are there mythicists who address the core of Jesus and his theological teachings instead of surface life attributes?

01:17:26

If so, how? If not, what methods do they use to avoid Jesus' teaching? You understand the question?

01:17:32

Not really, I'm a little confused. So they're asking, are there mythicists who try to focus on what

01:17:40

Jesus actually taught and draw those pagan parallels more so than just surface facts about his life?

01:17:46

Like he was a teacher, he was that sort of stuff. Yeah, David Fitzgerald does it in his books. I know

01:17:52

Robert Price does as well, Richard Carrier does. So yeah, they do look, they'll look at like the Last Supper connections.

01:17:59

They'll look at certain things he may have taught and said. So yeah, there are some that do that. Again, the arguments are not very convincing.

01:18:05

You see my debate with David Fitzgerald where we talked a little bit about that. And there is stuff like, for example, where is it?

01:18:14

I think like Herman Ritterbos addresses some of that, say with Gerson Manick, Jack Winkler, Gunter Wagner addresses some of these against the mysticists as well.

01:18:25

So it's not all like, so those are some authors that would address that these are not really coming from the mystery cults and whatnot.

01:18:31

Dale Allison yet again does it, but I can't remember, I can't remember the name of that book, dang it. That's the worst, yeah.

01:18:38

I do feel the pain in that. I hate when it slips my mind. I'd like to give thanks also to Jamie Russell for the $3 super chat.

01:18:45

Jamie writes, John C. Peckham, The Odyssey of Love, an A+. I don't know if that's a book that's related to this.

01:18:52

I'm not sure. Jamie also asked the question, can idealism be falsified?

01:18:58

Not the topic of our discussion, but if you'd like to briefly address that, that's fine. I mean, metaphysically, no.

01:19:04

In terms of scientific evidence that would support it, yeah, you could falsify that. Oh, wait,

01:19:10

I may have found, Dale Allison, okay, Jesus of Nazareth, millenary and prophet. So that's the name of the book by Dale Allison where he addresses this kind of stuff and points out, about page 140, 150, somewhere around there, he addresses a lot of this and points out this is more similar to Qumran than mystery cults.

01:19:29

Okay. All right, thank you. Brian Sphere says, love both your brothers. Thank you very much.

01:19:35

It would be cool to see both of you team up to debate a couple of skeptics. Any chance of that happening? Probably not.

01:19:41

I don't like to do team debates, honestly. It's just not my thing. Yeah, they're weird. Well, I don't even have time to do regular debates, but team up debates are always awkward.

01:19:51

Yeah, maybe if it was in person, like if I could do a team debate in person, I would, but I'm the computer that's got delay and I just,

01:19:57

I don't know. Right, and I think you hold your own very well by yourself. And, you know,

01:20:03

I think that wouldn't be a good idea. But anyway, let's see here. We're gonna have to go back because the

01:20:08

Super Chats, I had to go. So let's take just a few more and then I'll let you go. You've been so gracious with your time.

01:20:15

I do appreciate it. Let's move back up here. Okay. Okay, so question by Daniel.

01:20:28

How would Michael respond to the idea that Jesus being a mythic construct is quite implausible.

01:20:33

However, given our background evidence, it's still more plausible than the resurrected Messiah. So I guess it's more plausible for there to be mythic borrowing than an actual resurrection.

01:20:45

I would say, no, there isn't. Like, honestly, I'm a Christian. I mean, when people say like, like use the

01:20:51

David Hume argument, it's more probable that the apostles or someone lied about the resurrection. I would say, no, that's the whole argument from the resurrection is that it's not.

01:20:59

It's more probable that Jesus really did rise from the dead. And that comes in when you get into the evidence and the specifics and what could likely happen to explain this and how ad hoc it gets.

01:21:09

What a lot of these objections stem from is a quality issue, not a quantity issue. What I mean by that is they'll say like, well, miracles are always improbable.

01:21:17

The quality of a miracle should have a higher standard than a naturalistic explanation. And my response to that often is that's hard to measure.

01:21:26

What do we, how do we know when something should be measured by a higher standard? If you're coming to the table with presuppositions like naturalist presuppositions, you're going to say that, but we want to put those aside and try to judge it as best we can without these presuppositions.

01:21:39

So the criteria of having the least ad hoc is about quantity. It's about the least amount of assumptions or explanations or whatnot.

01:21:47

And by far, the resurrection meets that. The only reason it doesn't for some skeptics because they assume a miracle is always going to be more improbable.

01:21:53

That's a qualitative issue. And so I think we need to come from an agnostic perspective when we look at the resurrection and go, okay, well, what is going to be the best explanation?

01:22:03

This can be the least ad hoc, the most plausible. It's got an explanatory scope, explanatory power. But if we come to the assumption that miracles are the least probable, to quote

01:22:11

Bart Ehrman, then of course you're going to come up with the idea that anything else is more probable. And so, yeah,

01:22:17

I just sort of reject that outright because I want to be an agnostic when I approach the resurrection, judge the

01:22:23

Gospels and the New Testament works like I would with any other ancient document and see what the best explanation is by that standard.

01:22:31

And again, when I compare it with other models, the resurrection is always the least ad hoc and the most plausible.

01:22:37

So that's why I would say it's still the best explanation. All right, thank you.

01:22:43

We'll go to one more question for you, but I want to address this one real quick. So it's completely unrelated, but I want to dispatch this one because it has real life consequences here.

01:22:51

So a 305 thief, he says, reveals apologetics. Here's a scenario. What if you love your girlfriend and trust her enough to the point where you feel like it's safe to do it, have sex before marriage, only in this one context and others, blah, blah, blah.

01:23:02

Don't do it. You trust your girlfriend, get married. Within the covenant of marriage, it's not an issue of whether it's safe or whether you trust her.

01:23:08

It's an issue of being faithful to the word of God and honoring the covenant of marriage. So - I think people are,

01:23:14

I think this stems, I think the problem with this thinking is that it stems from the wrong questions being asked because we have the wrong mentality.

01:23:22

It's like, sex is so important that I need to have it. It's like, I really need that intimate connection. And Paul outright rejects that.

01:23:29

He's like, if you're single, just stay single. We grew up in Disney culture. You got to have a great romance. You got to have, you got to be part of a wonderful relationship or your life isn't going to have meaning.

01:23:38

And the gospel rejects that notion that that's secondary. Stop thinking that somehow it's got to be so important that there's got to be exceptions.

01:23:45

The gospel's response is going to be, these are not as important as you think they are. You grew up in Disney culture where you think romance is utterly important.

01:23:53

You don't need it. Think about those things as secondary. And when you start thinking about it in that context, you're going to push sex aside and go, well,

01:23:59

I don't need it. It should be reserved to marriage. It should be treated as something sacred. I like that.

01:24:04

And so there's a lot more I could say on that, but I don't have time. All right, very good. And should we break out in a Disney song there?

01:24:10

That was a good, I like that. Disney, that's right, you're right. We do grow up in that context and we kind of focus on that element.

01:24:16

I have the last question. And again, I just want to thank you so much. I think you did an excellent job and I've greatly enjoyed this discussion.

01:24:23

And it's a simple question, easily dispatched with some good Christian theology, but why don't you address it?

01:24:29

I mean, it's kind of related. You have demigods all throughout Greek mythology and various religions during the ancient period.

01:24:36

Was Jesus a demigod? If not, why? Why don't you explain also what we believe about Jesus? This also explains why

01:24:43

Jesus is not like pagan deities or could be like them, because he's not a demigod. He's not a Demilus or anything like that.

01:24:50

Or I'm trying to think of the other one. Can't think of it right now. Yeah, he, in the

01:24:55

New Testament, he's very much claimed to be Yahweh, like John 8, 58. It's very much set in Paul's example where he uses

01:25:02

Old Testament passages talking about Jesus. Looked as if he was

01:25:09

Yahweh. The calming of the sea is very much him demonstrating that he is Yahweh, because only Yahweh has the power over the sea and whatnot.

01:25:18

Epictetus, where he's gone through a lot of the passages in Morrow. He's really much using Old Testament passages to be

01:25:24

Yahweh and showing how there is Jesus. So yeah, no, Jesus is definitely Yahweh. He's not a demigod.

01:25:30

And there's a reason why he's not connected or like pagan deities, because he's very much just a creator deity who became human.

01:25:37

Hmm. And would you say also that a demigod is this idea that he's half man, half

01:25:42

God? And that's actually not quite what Christians believe, as we believe that Jesus is truly man and truly

01:25:48

God. He's not kind of 50 -50. He's kind of, if we can kind of use in precise language, he's kind of a 100 -100.

01:25:55

He's everything a man is and everything that deities. We believe that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, both human and divine.

01:26:03

So I think that's an important theological point there. All right. Well, you are getting a little choppy.

01:26:08

This might be a good time to stop. You're freezing up on my screen just a little bit, but I can hear you okay. But -

01:26:15

Yeah, sometimes the internet, I live it up. Sometimes my neighborhood is low. I'm in the poor neighborhood.

01:26:21

So I feel like - Michael lives in the ghetto. Michael lives in the ghetto.

01:26:28

Story is one time I was reading like, I think Facebook comments, and someone said, you're only an apologist for, and has a gunshot on the road or something.

01:26:35

I'm like, yeah. They ain't living 72nd Street. That's right. It'd be funny.

01:26:41

He's like, you're only doing this for the money. It's like, no, man. And then someone's breaking into your house and stealing your television in the background.

01:26:48

Yeah. So I read this. My chair falling apart back there. That's right. That's a poor person's chair.

01:26:56

That's a poor person's chair. That's why you need to support Michael. He needs money. Look at that chair. Michael, I've enjoyed this very much.

01:27:05

And I do appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to address this topic. And keep doing what you're doing.

01:27:12

I know that you're putting a lot of content. And as I say all the time, I know even from my perspective, having a different apologetic bent than you do,

01:27:19

I think that God is using all of us to be useful to the kingdom, to offer information for people to think about and grapple with, with the ultimate goal of a glorifying

01:27:29

Christ and defending the truth of the gospel. So I very much appreciate the work you're doing. Yeah, I appreciate you as well, man.

01:27:35

All right. Well, thank you so much for listening guys. Again, if you have not subscribed to Revealed Apologetics, please do so.

01:27:41

And of course, if you haven't subscribed to Inspiring Philosophy, wow, you're a living proof of total depression. Go there and -

01:27:47

I'll tell all my followers to subscribe to Revealed Apologetics. That way you should get the boost you need. Okay, there you go.

01:27:53

Thank you very much. Well, keep up the good work, man. And thanks again. And thank you everyone for listening. And that's all for this episode.