What's Your Favorite Apologetics Argument?

Wise Disciple

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What then is your favorite apologetic argument to use and why? Well, as I mentioned a few moments ago,

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I think dealing with this emerging culture that we're facing now is something I'm not particularly gifted to do, okay?

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I like the, you know, dealing with atheists is great because they're kind of in my intellectual mode, so to speak.

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And we speak the same language, though we come to different conclusions. So I don't know that what

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I'm going to offer is going to be an effective way of dealing with people.

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So I have my favorite, I'll tell you in a moment, but I just want people to keep in mind what you just identified as the argument for desire that Lewis himself develops in this.

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And I talk about this quite a bit in a piece I wrote called The Story of Reality.

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And I talk about that yearning, and this, of course, is not only something I've experienced, but Lewis talks about, and I'm a fan of Lewis's.

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So it may be that this argument from desire, this hunger that we have that's for something beyond what this world can give, that so influenced

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Lewis that will be maybe one of the better ways of reaching this particular slice of history for this generation, so to speak.

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But my favorite argument is the moral argument, okay? And the moral argument, contrary to relativism, of course, holds that there is objective morality, but you can't have objective morality unless God existed.

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So the simplest way to put it is if there is no God, there is no objective morality.

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But there is objective morality. Therefore, there is a God. There is a God. There is a

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God. There is a

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God.

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There is a God. There is a God. There is a God. There is a God. There is a

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God. There is a God. There is a God. There is a

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God. There is a

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God. There is a God. There is a God. There is a God. And that finishes with recreating the world that was broken by human evil, okay?

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So, I mean, it comes full circle there. What I like about this, and this is the way I put it in the story of reality, there's something that everybody knows, no matter when they lived or where they lived, and that is that there's something wrong with the world.

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And that's why the problem of evil is so frequently raised by objectors with regards to theism in general or Christianity in specific.

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Because they know something's wrong, okay? But you can't have something wrong if there are no rules.

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You can have rules broken if there are no rules to break. And so the observation that there's evil in the world, yeah, notice how they put it, evil in the world, not just things

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I don't like inside of me, but out there somewhere, people are doing things that they shouldn't be doing.

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You know, you can't break a speed limit if there is no speed limit, right? So in the

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Autobahn, you can't break the speed limit right there in Germany, right? Because there's no limit there, okay? But if there is a speed limit on a highway, it's only because there was an appropriate authority that places the limit there.

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You have to have a government. No government, no speed limits, no speed limits, no speeding, no broken laws.

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And in this case, no God, no laws governing humanity, therefore no broken laws, therefore no problem of evil.

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However, there is a problem of evil. Everybody knows that. Therefore, there must be broken laws.

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Therefore, there must be laws. Therefore, there must be a lawmaker. And essentially, that's the moral argument.

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And what I just explained really captures the essence of those two, that form that I gave a moment ago.

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If there is no God, then there is no morality, objective morality. People can still talk about what they like and don't like and call it good and bad, but let's face it, it's just their own preference.

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That's relativism. But if there is no

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God, there's no morality. But there is a morality. Problem of evil. Therefore, there must be a

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God. I love that argument. Yeah. It's just so great. It's so common. And any way a person argues against it makes them sound foolish.

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I mean, they just do. My goal isn't to make them seem foolish. It's just you're trying to deny what's absolutely obvious to everyone who's ever lived, for goodness sake.

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Yeah. We're just trying to make sense of it, what we all know. And the best explanation is God. Yeah. Now, that doesn't give you

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Jesus, but it's a good start. Right. Towards building a cumulative case. Yes, a cumulative case.

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Correct. Yeah. Well, then, is there one apologetic argument that you think is your absolute favorite?

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You use it a lot. What would that be? Yeah. Wow. You know, the thing about theodicy is it encompasses the whole of theology.

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And what I mean is it starts off with the fall of Satan, and it ends up with last things. We're going to live, the righteous are going to live with Jesus forever, and that eternity will dwarf our suffering to insignificance, and then the wicked will be, of course, in eternal torment, that he's going to fix it, that he's coming to fix all of this.

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But I guess my favorite thing is to appeal to eternity. I argue, based on the free will defense,

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I argue that we've been created with libertarian freedom, that we have libertarian freedom, and I'm sure you know what that means, but it means that you could do other than you do, that whatever you do, you actually had a choice to do other than you did.

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And I think, and here's the key for me, we're going to have libertarian free will in heaven, but not sin.

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Well, how's that possible? Well, in my book, Why Does God Allow Evil, I give seven reasons, seven things.

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I'll go through them and get to the real point in just one, but in heaven, there will be no world, you won't be one click from porn, no flesh, you won't have a body that's like you have now.

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There will be no devil. He and his minions will be in hell, that's my fourth point.

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Hell then will be, and here's a key point, hell will be an eternal reminder to free creatures of the horror of rebellion.

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What an education that'll be to free creatures forever. And then, I didn't bring a pen,

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I wish I had, but I'll often say to audiences, I'll say, would you like to see me jab this pen into my eye?

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And everybody's like, what? And I said, well, I could, I could just jab it right in there, and audiences are like, what's he doing?

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I said, but you know, I'm not going to jab this pen into my eye. I said, you know why I'm not going to jab this pen into my eye?

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Because that would be a stupid thing to do. And I'm too smart for that. Yeah. But we don't give pens to babies, why not?

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Because they jab it right in their eye. Yeah. And same with, you know, J .P.

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Moreland, who tends to be more delicate than I, his thing is, how many of you would like to go outside right now and chow down on a steaming pile of dog poop?

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Yeah. And you know, there's not going to be any takers. Nobody's going to go, yeah, yeah. Let me get my spoon.

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Let's go chow down on a steaming pile of dog poop. Nobody's going to do that. But you don't let babies, crawly babies out next to steaming piles of dog poop because they crawl right into it.

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Yeah. And so what I submit to you, what I submit to everybody is what God's doing in here is he's revealing to us the horror of rebellion against him.

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The horror. How does he fix? How does he allow free beings, free creatures to go on throughout eternity and not sin?

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Well, one of the ways he does it is by allowing, let's, okay, let's see how you, how you do out there.

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It's the old, you know, sometimes with parents, you know, you'll tell your kid, no, no, no, no, no. And finally, because, you know, it's not really that bad for them, but, you know, they're not going to like it.

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You go, okay, go knock yourself out. Just see how you like it, you know, because I'm tired of it.

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You know, but, but, uh, and I think that what's going on here is God has, the Lord has said, I'm going to allow everybody to be as free as there.

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There's a, there was a group called two live crew back in the day and, and they had a album entitled,

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I think it was entitled as nasty as we want to be. Yeah. And that album, by the way, was really nasty.

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Yeah. Uh, but, uh, what the Lord is allowing and planet earth is he's allowing people to be as nasty as they want to be.

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This and what we're finding out is they're very, very bad people that without, without the grace of goodness of Christ, without the regeneration of the

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Holy spirit, nobody ever does anything good. Calvin and Arminius both agreed with that, by the way, people will say to me, uh, well, uh, yeah, but, but what about, um, people that didn't get all the education they needed?

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I mean, they, let's suppose they died when they were very young or maybe even they died at infants. And part of the thing I like to say is, you know, uh, there's 7 billion people alive today and there's, there's the estimate depending on how you do them, about 7 billion people alive before this.

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If you add that together, 14 billion people, if every person was judged for 10 minutes, that's 266 ,000 years.

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Uh, if people are judged sequentially for 10 minutes, it's 266 ,000 years.

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I had a student when I first said that in class years ago, say, you don't know how long the judgment is going to be.

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I said, yeah, I know that I'm, I'm, this is a thought experiment for crying out loud. I don't know how long it's going to be.

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I don't know how it's going to work. I'm just saying that the judgment is going to be quite an education. And I don't think people realize that, that the judgment is going to be, see, in other words, the judgment will continue our education from what we are going through now.

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Yeah. And, uh, I think when that's done and you know, the verse that says he, and he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

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I think that's after the judgment. That's not just when you arrived in heaven and okay, we're going to start the judgment now.

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I think that's after we, after the judgment is completed, that's when he's going to wipe away every tear from our eyes.

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My wife, Jeannie told me that and I thought, that's good. I like that. So in terms of arguments, it would be more of a cumulative.

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Well, it's cumulative about free will with a real, the biggest thing is the focus on eternity.

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Yeah. That the Lord, I argue that the Lord really does want us to set us free in his kingdom where we will be able to do what as Dallas would put,

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I love this. He says, God wants to set you free in his kingdom to do what you want to do. And I think that's real.

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I thought that was really profound. Uh, you know, and I think that's correct. God wants to set us free in his kingdom to do what we want to do.

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But before he can do that, we need to learn that the rebellion is really bad.

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Uh, and, and so, and I think that thus eternal torment is one of the things to God's where we can, and I think, you know, um, the rich man of Lazarus, I think there's,

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I don't think there's probably not a parable. Uh, in my book, I give several reasons for that.

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One of them is if it is a parable, it's the only one that used a proper name in of any parable to Jesus doesn't identify it as a parable.

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Three parables are comparing things, everyday things. This is actually about heaven.

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I mean, excuse me about the afterlife. It's not about everyday things. Uh, I could go on, but I don't think it's a parable, but if that's the case,

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I wouldn't be surprised if in eternity to come, if we could look in on the lost and go,

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Ooh, uh, that's not good. And see them making the excuses. And, and, uh, I think

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Sue, I think Lewis too. I don't think that they'll have a chance to come to heaven as in C .S. Lewis's great divorce.

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Right. Uh, but I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't, weren't able to look in on them and go, that's bad.

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And I, you know, and think about the rich man and, and Hades, um, he was making excuses.

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Yes. Sly, very subtle. He says, go, you need to have somebody be raised from the dead and go warn my brothers.

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Yeah. Which is a very subtle way of saying, you didn't give me enough evidence. That's right. That's what he's doing.

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You didn't give me, which interesting about apologetics, right? You didn't give me enough evidence. That's right. And I think also, uh,

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Abraham's response to him through via Jesus, but in, you know, saying these words, he says, they have

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Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them. In other words, in Jesus considered opinion, the fact that Moses and the prophets had gotten so much, right.

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And that Israel was where it was today, that that's enough evidence. We now look back, you and I, and everybody else is looking back to a similar event.

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Matter of fact, uh, not that far distance. We're a little farther off.

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I think than in Jesus, Dave from Moses and the prophets is depending on who you talk to 12 or 1400

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BC, you know, we're now 2000 AD, but we're looking back to evidence basically of 2000 years ago.

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Right. And in Jesus considered opinion, that's enough evidence. What is your favorite apologetic argument?

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And this doesn't have to be, you know, for the existence of God, it can be some sort of doctrine.

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Uh, the, the case for Jesus rising from the grave. What's your favorite apologetic argument to step through with somebody and why is that?

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I suppose it would be the Kalam cosmological argument, which is the argument that I did my doctoral work on at the university of Birmingham and which has kind of become my signature argument.

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Um, and then a close second, the evidence are the argument for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, which was the subject of my doctoral thesis at the university of Munich in Germany.

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So both of those are dear to my heart. So all of us know you very well for the first one, you mentioned the

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Kalam cosmological argument. Um, if you could go into, uh, the other one a little bit, the, the evidence for the resurrection, um, what kind of things do you strike you as the best points in that?

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And, uh, what are maybe some weaker ones? Take us through that a little bit. Well, I tried to summarize the evidence for the resurrection as I understood it, uh, after doing my research at Munich.

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And it seemed to me that the evidence for the resurrection could be summed up under three broad facts.

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One would be discovery of Jesus' empty tomb by a group of his female followers on the first day of the week after Jesus' crucifixion.

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The second fact would be the post -mortem appearances of Jesus. Individuals and groups of people.

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And the third fact would be that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised

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Jesus from the dead despite every predisposition of the contrary.

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And what really surprised me, Gene, was the realization that these three facts were not merely the property of evangelical scholars or conservative, uh, critics.

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These represent the wide majority of critics' views of the historical

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Jesus today. The wide majority of historical Jesus scholars affirm all three of those facts.

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And so the evidential base for the inference to Jesus' resurrection,

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I think, is remarkably firm. I think that's a good point you raise, that this is not just a

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Christian scholarly view, this is the view of the majority of scholars, that these, the discovery of the tomb, the post -mortem appearances, and then the sudden change in the disciples is something that many scholars accept.

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I know for a lot of nonbelievers, they will look at the Bible and say, well, that's a biased source.

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And of course it says that Jesus rose from the dead and things like this. But it's important to note out that the

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Bible is a piece of literature. It's an ancient text. And when examined in the same way as other ancient texts, it comes out very, very strong for the resurrection.

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Isn't that right? Yes, and it's more than that. It's a collection of ancient texts that was only cobbled together hundreds of years later.

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Originally, you had all of these separate letters and biographies and so forth, all testifying to this historical person,

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Jesus of Nazareth. And of course, modern critical scholars are aware of the possibility of bias and have to take that into account.

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And these three facts that I mentioned are firmly established on the basis of historical scholarship, despite any tainting that might be the result of Christian bias.