Cold-Case Detective on the Historical Jesus

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala. And if you're checking your watch, yes, we're starting a couple of minutes early. I hope that's okay. I'm sure everyone will be fine.

Well, I am super excited to have Jay Warner Wallace on with me today. And just before I kind of get into some things that are coming up, I'd like to just kind of read a little bit about Jay. If you're not sure about, you know, who he is, he's pretty well known, but just real quick, he is, I'm gonna read his information page here.

He's a Dateline featured cold case homicide detective. He is also a popular national speaker and best-selling author. He continues to consult on cold case investigations, which I did not know, while serving as a senior fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview.

He's also an adjunct professor of apologetics at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, and Southern Evangelical Seminary, and a faculty member at Summit Ministries. Jay became a Christian at the age of 35 after investigating the claims of the New Testament Gospels.

Using his skillset as a detective, he eventually earned a master's degree in theological studies from Gateway Seminary. So that's just kind of a thumbnail sketch about Jay, and I'm super excited to have him on.

You can check out his books. If you are, you know, folks who follow this channel, we tend to focus on presuppositionalism, but if you're looking for a great resource that really goes through some of the specific evidences for the resurrection and things like that, and the reliability of the New Testament, you might wanna check out Jay's books.

Some of his popular books are Cold Case Christianity, God's Crime Scene, and I think his most recent one is A Person of Interest. So you definitely could check those out, both in digital and audio. I think they're on Audible as well, which is pretty cool.

So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Jay on the screen with me. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Glad to be with you, Sven, I'm looking forward to it.

All right, well, we just met, it was like five minutes ago. Is it okay if I call you Jay?

Just call me Jim, call me Jim.

Jim, okay, there we go, Jim.

There's a Jim Wallace from Sojourners. It's a ministry in Washington, D .C. And if I'm doing radio, sometimes I'll say, oh, we're gonna have Jim Wallace up next. And that's why I had to change my, it's Greg Kokel at Standard Reason who first said, hey, you're gonna need to change your name if you're gonna do this very often.

So that's why I now have used Jay Wardner Wallace.

Okay, all right, sounds good.

Well, I'm super excited because I've had Greg Kokel on a while back. I've had Frank Turek on, and now I have you. And I'm super excited because I have benefited greatly from your videos and, of course, your book.

So why don't you tell folks a little bit more about yourself if I left anything out from your information page there?

Well, I became a Christian at the age of 35. And for me, like anything I did professionally, it was about making inferences from evidence. And so that's the way I came in. At the time, of course, you don't know as somebody new to the faith.

I wasn't raised around Christians. I didn't have any friends who were Christians. There was no Christians in my family. So I never even entered into a church to see what was going on in there, except for public events like a wedding or a funeral.

So for the most part, I'd never sat through. I'd sat through masses, but I never sat through a... And a lot of times, when you go to a wedding in a Catholic church, it's a mass. But I'd never sat through a Protestant or an evangelical church service.

So when I walked into that first time, it was really a first time. And the pastor was adept at throwing Jesus in a way that maybe somebody like me, who's just attending because my wife wanted to go, and she wasn't a Christian either, but I think she was definitely, obviously, more interested than I was.

I think she saw the value. And my dad is also a detective and an atheist, would have said that there is value in this false thing. That this useful delusion had value. And so I was willing to go for the same reasons my dad would have been willing to go if his wife wanted to go.

So that's how I ended up in church. And because I only had a skill set that really evaluates things under a certain kind of investigative template, that's how I would approach anything. If you're gonna ask me, which car should I buy next?

I would have taken a very kind of investigative approach into what car I should buy next. But if you're gonna ask me to believe something that is written on the pages of the New Testament, well, I'm gonna have to test it the way you would test a cold case, so that you would test any set of claims for which you no longer have access to either the witnesses who originally made the claims, or the report writers who wrote the claims of the witnesses.

That's a cold case. That's all my cold cases, a lot of them anyway, because both those two groups have died. So now you gotta figure out, well, how do I determine if any of this is true? That's just, it wasn't like I was trying to be clever.

Yeah, absolutely.

I just didn't have another skill set in place that would help me, and I thought that would.

Hmm, well, excellent. Well, folks who are kind of trickling in, yeah, if you're just tuning in and you didn't know I was gonna have Jay on, it's funny. It's like a presuppositionalist and evidentialist walk into a bar, and this is the conversation they have.

Right, right, right.

So we're super excited.

Again, as I said, I very much appreciate what you've written and I think everyone could benefit from what you have to say. So let's jump right in. There were three main topics I wanted to cover with you today.

One being the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. Then maybe you can share your thoughts on the uniqueness of Jesus. What makes the claims of Jesus unique? And of course, going through that also entails some evidence with respect to what we should think about Jesus himself.

And of course, the pinnacle, the cherry on top, the historical evidence for the resurrection. So we can go in that order. We can just jump right in right away. So prove to me that Jesus existed. And before you do that, show me the tools you use to know anything in history and then kind of apply that to the person of Jesus.

Well, first of all, I never use the word proof. I'm gonna present some evidence. Proof is something that's in the mind of the hearer. So some jurors will listen to the exact same 10 weeks of evidence show from the prosecution and the defense and come to a different inference than other jurors on the jury.

And so you'll wonder, how could that be if it was so great? And because there's a lot more that goes into making a decision about the past than just the evidence. A lot of it is, as you know, what do we come into?

What are our presuppositional biases? And when we do a voir dire process in selecting jurors, we're trying to select the jurors that really won't have an obstacle, don't have a barrier that prevents them from being fair.

You know, if you're somebody, for example, who just hates the police, doesn't trust anything, if a police is talking, he's lying by definition, if that's your view, then probably a prosecutor's not gonna impanel you.

And at the same time, if you're somebody who thinks, hey, if you've already been charged and you get in a jumpsuit at the end of the defense's table, you're guilty. Before we even start, I already know you're guilty.

Well, then the defense team's not gonna allow you into that jury. So we're trying to get rid of biases and prejudices that begin to start. If you're somebody, for example, who thinks, I have to have every question answered before I can render a verdict, we're also not gonna impanel you on the jury because I've never been able to answer every question for a jury, you just can't.

I can't tell you, I can't get in the mind of the suspect, for example, and answer the why questions. So I just, I can't do it. So we have certain, we not just select a jury carefully, we explain to them the rules of evidence so that when it gets time to make a decision, they'll both have, hopefully lack the biases and have a good understanding of how evidences are assessed to render a verdict.

So what I would say when it comes to Christianity is that there are claims. I think we can make a case for God's existence just from the science of the universe around us, and I've written about that in God's crime scene, but that does not lead you to Christianity.

Christianity stands or falls on the claims of the New Testament, period. That is the best, most robust, most in-depth accounting of what Jesus said, did, and how he lived in those three years that he did public ministry.

So there's no other way you can infer anything from that. But the question then becomes, though, why should I believe anything there? The same way, look, the only group I had in my life that were not atheists, my dad's second wife, she became a Mormon about maybe a year after he married her, and I have six brothers and sisters, half-brothers and sisters, all raised LDS.

Now, not all of them are LDS today, but they were all raised that way, so I got exposed pretty quickly to Mormonism. So as I was examining the claims of Christianity, I started to think, well, is Mormonism true?

And my sister kind of saw that I was becoming interested in scripture, so I got a knock on the door, right? And it's Mormon missionaries, of course, so now I'm spending several weeks with Mormon missionaries.

And I read through the Book of Mormon and Doctrines and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price before I even finished the Old Testament. And I applied the same template that you apply to test the reliability of eyewitnesses to the Book of Mormon, the same one I wrote about in Cold Case Christianity, as I applied that template, those four areas of eyewitness reliability, I applied those to the gospel authors.

And that approach not only leads you to what's true, but it also can keep you from following what's false. And I knew pretty quickly, applying that template to the Book of Mormon, that it couldn't pass the tests.

So that's what, so I would say I became a Christian, and at the same time, I became a not Mormon. And what kept me from being a Mormon was, look, their views were in many ways, if you met a theological missionary, a Mormon missionary, they would often sound very presuppositional in their approach.

They cannot be evidential in their approach because the evidence doesn't work for them. But they have to take a different approach. And that's why I always thought, well, look, in the evidence to me, you could never make this case in front of a jury.

No.

And that's why I failed to follow. But I do, and I just was pulling it out this morning. I just put it back on the shelf in my quad that I still refer to it a lot because a lot of the stuff that you learn theologically, you can learn even best by measuring it against and comparing it to the heresy.

So anyway, so I would say there's a template in how we know what, all we can say about the old, there's a historical account that's written in the New Testament. The only question is, is it true?

Yeah.

Now you said, just to give us a little framework here, because folks who watch this show have some background in apologetic method. You said, demonstrating the existence of God. Do you take a more two-step classical approach where you go existence of God and then kind of Christian evidences culminating the resurrection?

Is that the route you take?

Well, no, not really. If the resurrection occurred, it's game over. Everything that proves the existence of God. So I always think you can start there. But for me, as a committed atheist, I had to deconstruct some walls that I had built between myself and the gospel.

And so a lot of what that was was, well, look, for example, and here's how this all worked for me. I was reading through the gospels and the gospels actually passed the test with the exception of the fact they include miraculous events.

Now, what is the

I was very committed as a naturalist. I thought, look, that part can't be true. Whatever is true about Jesus, there are these additional things that cannot be true about Jesus because they violate my sensibilities as a naturalist.

Okay.

So then I had to ask myself the question, well, why do I hold to these natural inclinations when I was also a Big Bang cosmologist? I believe that Big Bang cosmology was true. I would have agreed with the fact that all space, time, and matter, everything in the universe came into existence from nothing.

But that means I'm already outside of what we call natural when I'm looking for the first cause.

Right.

So for me, it was a matter of having to really stop and think then as I encountered the miracle claims on the pages of the New Testament, did I have warrant to reject them as unreasonable? And that's, for me, what started my having to investigate, like, are the claims of naturalism more reasonable than the claims of supernaturalism, extranaturalism?

And I had to go that route in order to deconstruct that wall I had built.

Sure, sure.

So it's not a matter of my, I won't start with somebody who, look, in the end, you're asking me why I'm a Christian. So, if somebody's asking me that. So I'm gonna start with the confidence I have in the New Testament accounts.

Okay.

More than likely. But again, usually when I'm talking to someone about God, I'm asking way more, like, you know, Greg Kokel, and I do too, he's probably my closest friend in apologetics. And I'll tell you that, you know, I'm a question asker.

This is every, if you look at my interviews, you'll see that it's a lot of listening.

Yeah, yeah.

Because I don't know what next question to ask. And I don't really, by the way, when people speak, they give away their positions in depth.

That's true.

So a lot of it is me listening very well and being able to connect a lot of dots before I ever ask a single question. So if I'm talking to somebody sitting next to me, I gotta spend time listening to them unpack everything so I can decide where to go.

All right, very good.

The New Testament as Eyewitness Testimony

Now, you said that Christianity passes the test. Now, what is that test? Is there like an objective criteria, like a list of check one, check two, check three, that if the New Testament passed the test or any historical document passed that test, then we can consider it historical, a historical fact, if you will.

But what's the test itself? You can go through that for us.

Well, look, the writers of the New Testament are making claims that a series of events in a particular sequence, at a particular time in history, in a particular location on the planet occurred as they did.

Well, that kind of claim is the nature of eyewitness accounts. And you'll have Luke saying, I'm not an eyewitness. He slips into first person in the book of Acts, and he's with Paul. And that's where he met the people who knew Jesus.

And that's why he says in the first chapter of Luke that he is taking an account, an account of all those who were servants and eyewitnesses of the word, eyewitnesses and servants of the word. So that is really how he's recording it.

And history tells us that both Irenaeus, Papias, Clement of Alexandria, all say that Mark is writing for Peter while he's in Rome. So if you infer that, you can throw out Mark if you don't think that's reliable, but you have no reason to believe that Matthew and John weren't eyewitnesses.

And John even says this in his letters. He even says this at the end of the Gospel of John. So you have at least, forget about the traditional attestations. If you don't believe that it was really John who wrote the Gospel of John, it's somebody who says he was there in his writing as though he's there.

I don't even care if it's John the Apostle. I just need to know, is it a reliable eyewitness account? That's all I need to know. Let's say it's John the farmer who lives three doors down. Don't care. Again, remember, I didn't come into this with a theological notion of inerrancy or of divine inspiration.

I simply came into it as here's an account. How do I test it? Because I'll tell you, I got all kinds of eyewitnesses for, I mean, thousands of eyewitnesses over 30 years of doing this. And they never agree, number one.

And number two, I don't trust them. Because even if they are telling you the truth, they're gonna get attacked in court. So I'm gonna start off as the first attacker. And then if they pass me, they'll pass the guy in court.

So my first assumption is this is all garbage until I test it to see if it's true. So the test is based on a 13 question outline that we have in the California jury instructions. And these come into four categories.

Were you really there to see what you said you saw? Can you be corroborated in some way? Have you been accurate and honest or have you changed your story over time? And finally, do you possess a bias that would cause you to lie to me?

Well, jurors are asked to consider those things when they're listening to eyewitnesses on the stand. So I simply said, okay, if I took that same approach with these eyewitnesses, would they pass the test?

And that's really what I talk about in cold cases, is just those four large categories. How do you test them? And again, I'm not looking for perfection. I get it that when we talk about inerrancy and divine inspiration, that's where we start thinking about and I'm not suggesting that there isn't, that there are some errors in scripture.

That's not my suggestion at all. But I will tell you as a jury instruction that a witness can be wrong and yet still be considered reliable. Because the question is, why is she wrong? Or why is he wrong?

Especially when you have really quick observations at the point of a murder. Man, there's a lot of emotionalism that occurs at the point of a murder. And that can sometimes keep you from seeing certain things or cause you to focus on one element of the thing and exclusion of the others.

And so if I'm a defense attorney, I'm gonna ask you about the things that you probably weren't paying attention to because I wanna show that you don't know. So I can show you're not reliable, but then the judge will say to the jury, but remember that everyone sees things differently and that you might have a reason why they didn't notice that or even got it wrong.

And the fact that you got a detail wrong does not mean that you are then to be considered unreliable in total. So even if that was the case for point of argument, I don't think that's the case at all with the gospel authors but my point is, that's one of those rules that helps you to assess whether something is true or not.

So the role of eyewitnesses is really important. If someone, like you said, you don't care if it's John the farmer, but regardless, if it's John the apostle, John the farmer, how do we know that when someone says, I was there to witness an event that that is in fact the case because we know that people can lie.

You also get the skeptical argument that within a religious context, people are prone to lie for all sorts of reasons. Even if we don't know what those reasons are,.

What's more likely? But see, we do know what those reasons are because there's only three reasons why anyone lies. They're the same for three reasons why you wanna commit some murder, a theft, a burglary.

Any misdeed you've ever committed, any sin you've ever committed is only caused by one of three reasons. I discovered these work in homicides, but it's also in 1 John 2, verse 15. So you got it there as well, but I just didn't know anything about scripture.

And it really comes down to three things. It's sex, money, and the pursuit of power. The pursuit of power is actually a huge subset. These mass shootings we're seeing, I just released an article on our sister website, which is called The Thin Blue Life.

Our coldcasechristianity .com website is really Christianity through a detective's lens. The Thin Blue Life is law enforcement through a Christian lens. It's just the opposite. So I just write for police officers there.

And we already know what caused these mass shootings. We've had several now. We've had one in Southern California. We've had one in Buffalo. We've had them, if you'll go on some website, you can see that we have mass shootings probably every other day or so.

But what causes them? They're those three things. And most of the time, it's in the pursuit of power.

And you said that's an umbrella, right?

It's an umbrella, so yeah. Because it's about authority, power, and respect. If I feel disrespected, that causes, but in between gangs, if you disrespect me, I might shoot you. Well, what's that about?

It's the pursuit of power. When I walk into a business and I shoot 30 people who are a different color than me, that's about power. That's about me thinking that my race is more important than yours. When I'm a drug addict and I'm stealing from my parents and getting high every day, that's me thinking that my desire, my pleasure, is more important than my parents' inconvenience.

It's a power issue. So a lot of things fall into that third category, right? People will say, well, what about vengeance? Well, what are you vengeful about?

Sure.

One of those three things. Well, what about jealousy? What are you jealous about? It's gonna be one of those three things. So in the end, it all rolls back down. He'll do what John calls the temptations, the pride of the pursuit of self.

These are things that are pretty common to all of us. So what I can do then is, if you're thinking that the disciples are lying, well, they're only lying for one of three reasons. If they're lying based on a bias or a motive, there's only three motives for lies.

So what are they getting out of it? Joseph Smith, it turns out, had all, now it doesn't mean you're, by the way, it does not mean you're a liar if you possess the motive because a lot of us possess a reason to do something, but we constrain ourselves from doing it, okay?

Sure, absolutely.

But Joseph Smith, for example, he had sex. He was married how many times? He had a ton of wives from a wide range of women. And Emma, his first wife, was not happy about that, but he wrote that in a scripture in Doctrines and Covenants.

He also was supported by his church. As from a power perspective, he ran for president. He basically led one of the largest group of militia on the North American continent, really the next, I think, number two to the United States Army.

So all of those elements were there of sex, money, and power but I don't see them there for the disciples. And it's easy for one person to be motivated by one of those three, but to argue that a group is similarly motivated, it means you have to show that each one of these is similarly motivated.

So what are they getting out of it? Now, I think what someone like a barterman would say is that Paul is getting power or that the authors are getting power. But honestly, Paul had power. He was taught by one of the most religious and best regarded rabbis of his time, a Pharisee of Pharisees, somebody who had enough power to draw papers to execute Christians.

And if you're suggesting that one day he decides to jump in with this much smaller group only to suffer what he suffered for the next three decades, I mean, it's possible, but it's not reasonable. And that's not one of those rules we talk about is that anything is possible, but not everything is reasonable.

That's why the standard of proof is not beyond a possible doubt. It's beyond a reasonable doubt because anything is possible. So if you said to me, isn't it possible that they lied? Yes, it's not reasonable, but it's possible because anything is possible.

Wouldn't you have different standards of what's reasonable though, right? What's reasonable is gonna be based on your presuppositions as well. So if someone says, even if I were to think of some very improbable thing, some people might say, well, that's more reasonable than saying a miracle happened.

I mean, just think in terms of probability. What's more probable? And you know the quote where, what's more probable that nature should go out of order, out of its course, or that someone should tell a lie?

I might not know the details of that lie. I might know it's one of the three motives, but what's more probable? So how would you interact with someone who's really taken that skeptical?

Well, but I'm only an evidential about this because I think Jesus is an evidentialist. That's the only reason why I take an evidential approach. I think that over and over again, Jesus demonstrates his evidential nature.

It's only two forms of evidence that we use in any criminal trial. It's direct evidence and indirect evidence. There's no such thing as hard evidence. Hard evidence is not a category. There's no hard evidence for anything because hard evidence is not a category.

There's either direct evidence for it or indirect evidence for any claim about anything ever.

What do people mean when they use hard evidence then? That's a good distinction. But when someone says, you say direct and indirect, which sounds, that makes sense. But when people use in popular parlance, it's hard evidence.

What do they mean by that?

They mean it's evidence that they would accept.

Honestly.

They mean, oh, that's some hard evidence. Well, then you said, well, what's your presupposition? In the end, it's an objective definition because hard evidence is slippery. It's going to be based on the mind of the evaluator.

But direct evidence is simply eyewitness testimony. Something you have direct connection to. So an eyewitness, you can directly interview to see what they said. The other option is like a video where you can actually directly see what the video records.

So the eye of the witness or the eye of the camera allows you direct access. But indirect evidence is everything else. DNA is indirect evidence.

Sure.

The only thing that counts as direct evidence is eyewitness accounts. This is why when Jesus repeatedly in the gospel of John in chapters 10, 11, 14, he's talking about, hey, look, believe what I've said.

Believe there are, the father is a witness. John the Baptist, I'm a greater witness than John the Baptist though. And if you don't believe what I'm telling you, at least believe on the evidence of these miracles.

He's saying there's direct evidence, but there's also indirect evidence.

Okay.

When he commissions John or I'm sorry, Thomas, and he says, Thomas, blessed are those who have not been able to do this yet believe the very next sentence, the very next verse in verse 30 of that chapter 29, he says, blessed are those who believe you haven't seen.

Verse 30, he says that they continue to show them many signs.

Why?

Because they're blessed because of your eyewitness testimony, Thomas. I've selected all of you as eyewitnesses so that you can tell the world. As a matter of fact, when Matthias replaces Judas in the upper room, Peter says, it's gotta be somebody who's seen Jesus from the baptism to the resurrection.

What does he need? Direct evidence. That's an evidential approach. When John comes and says, hey, his disciples were sent to Jesus. And he says, John wants to know, are you the one? What's his response?

He could have had a very different response. He could have said, you just need to trust, pray more. You know this. Instead, he works miracles in front of John's disciples. And he says, right at that moment, it says, he worked miracles in front of John's disciples.

He said, go back and tell John what you just saw. That's an evidentialist. And he does this over and over again. Why does Paul, why does he have to tell us as to one, I also saw Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15.

So he says, I also saw Jesus. Why do I care if you saw Jesus? Because that's what authenticated his message. He was an eyewitness like everybody else. So it turns out this eyewitness is direct evidence link.

And by the way, testimony in the book of Acts is never, well, let me share with you how my life has changed. It's always, let me show you how the Old Testament predicts the coming of the Messiah. And let me show you how with our own eyes, we saw this connection between the Old Testament predictions and what Jesus said, did, and how he rose from the grave.

That's basically eyewitness testimony on, so that's why I took that approach. When I first read the scripture, I was like, well, okay, at least this dude is coming out from my world because this is how, and by the way, we all do this all the time.

We are innate case makers. Even if you're saying, hey, we ought not be making a case for this, you're gonna make a case for why we ought not make the case.

Sure.

So this is our innate kind of DNA. And I think that God knows that, and he approaches us in the same way. So I think in the end, now I'm also somebody though, who will make both sides crazy, because I think that there are times when you have to, look, when we start selecting a jury, what are we doing?

We're looking at their presuppositional biases. I mean, there are times when you have to take one approach or the other to cross a bridge that you have to cross in order to go where you wanna go. And so I am open to whatever bridge you're gonna use, but I don't think any bridge is out of bounds.

I don't.

I'm not somebody who would say, no, it's gotta be done this way. I'm just saying, well, let's don't burn down all the bridges, but one. Let's leave them all in place, and then we're gonna get where we need to go.

Okay.

All right, well, let's go from there then and go into some of the specific evidences for the historical Jesus. So how would you begin to build a case for the historical fact of the existence of Jesus?

We hear people say, he probably existed, but we're not even sure. Where does scholarship stand on the existence of Jesus, and how far is that from what we usually hear from our YouTube atheist friends?

Yeah, well, Lee Strobel interviews a lot of scholars because he's a journalist. Okay, I'm not interested in what the scholars think. I wanna know what are the scholars looking at, because here's what happens.

We get experts in trial, and I'll bring in experts who will look at the DNA evidence and try to explain to the jury why the DNA evidence actually points to this defendant. Well, they'll hire a better scholar with better pedigree.

I'm using probably the county guy because we have no budget and it's free. They're gonna hire somebody based on the income of their defendant, and they're gonna come in and in the same evidence, a different scholar, a different expert is gonna have a completely different inference from the exact same evidence.

So we try to tell jurors is, hey, remember, it's good to hear all the different views, but in the end, you have access to the evidence yourself, and you can use this thing, what do we call it? Common sense to actually investigate the evidence yourself, and one of these two explanations will be more reasonable based on the overall case.

Remember that each expert comes in, looks at one thing in microcosm and ignores the rest of the connectivity, and then, of course, makes a claim. So I think for me, I'm interested in what all the scholars say on both sides, but in the end, it's gonna come down to, well, okay, if we're both making claims about whether or not we can trust Josephus, okay, what is it exactly we have in terms of manuscript evidence to Josephus?

Let me see where it is, let me see where it's located in the world, let me see where it pops up in history, and then let me make my own inference based on all the stuff I'm hearing. So that's kind of where I come from.

So for me, I think we have good reason to believe, number one, that it's early enough to have been written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. So the first question is, were they really there to read what they, to see what they said they saw?

I think that we can cross that bridge. I don't believe this was written after the life of the eyewitnesses. I think that the best evidence points to an early writing prior to the destruction of the temple.

In 70, actually prior to the death of James. In 61, I think we've got good reason to believe these are all written there. And that doesn't prove it's true, but it is one of those aspects that makes it harder to lie.