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 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 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 mine. But it's Greg Kokel at Stand to 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 use Jay Warner 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 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.

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 or the way 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.

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.

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 wonder, how could that be if it was so great? 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.

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.

Or 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 mean, there are some things 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,

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.

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 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 and 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. 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. 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.

Well, 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 in a 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, I mean, 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 says it's 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?

Have you changed your story over time? And finally, is this 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.

Sure. 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, 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, 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 in 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 a point of argument, and 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 anyone commits a 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 working 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 motives 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 description in Doctrines and Covenants.

He also was supported by his church. Sort of 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. I mean, what's more probable? You know, and you know the quote where, you know, 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, 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. And 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, yeah, you say direct and indirect, which sounds, that makes sense.

But when people use in popular parlance, this 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 like you said, well, what's your presupposition? In the end, it's an objective definition.

Because hard evidence is slippery. It's gonna 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 yet 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 are 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. He says, I also saw Jesus. Well, why? 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, this 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.

Okay. 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.

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. Sure, sure. I'm just saying, 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 to 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. I mean, 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 the same evidence, a different scholar, a different expert, is gonna have a completely different inference from the exact same evidence.

So what 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. In one of these two explanations, it will be more reasonable based on the overall case.

Remember that each expert comes in, looks at one thing in microcosm, 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, you know, was it, 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. If you're gonna, if you wanna lie about Jesus, just wait till everyone knows the truth is dead.

Then you can say whatever you want. But if you're gonna lie earlier when people will be around to know that it's a lie, well, that makes it harder to do it.

I think also there is enough corroborative evidence to verify what the claims are, both internally and externally.

What I mean by that is that, remember, corroborative evidence doesn't give you everything, nor do I expect it to.

So if I had an eyewitness who said, yeah, this guy jumped the counter and did a bank robbery. I can go back and I can find his palm print on the counter.

Well, that would seem to imply that what the witness said is true. He said he got his hand on the counter and jumped the counter but this will not corroborate whether or not he was carrying a gun, what kind of clothing he was wearing, any of that.

So corroborative evidence is always by its nature touchpoint evidence. And so I'm looking for touchpoint corroborative evidence.

I think you've got some of that we can use. I talk about that in Cole case. The third thing is, has it changed over time?

And I think what you can do is you can ask yourself, who were the very first hearers? Are there any students of the eyewitnesses who we could poll to see if in fact they say the same thing about?

In other words, do we have any manuscript evidence to believe that the story of Jesus is changing over time?

If you had early first century, early second century manuscript evidence in which some disciple says, no, he was not born of a virgin.

He never rose from the grave. He's just a simple preaching rabbi in the first century. Well, then I think we've got reason to pause that perhaps that stuff was added later.

But if the earliest descriptions of Jesus are every bit as supernatural as the later descriptions of Jesus, well, then it's harder to argue at least that this is a story that's changed over time.

And then finally, we look at those three reasons why anyone would lie and ask ourself, did they gain anything from sex?

Did they get a bunch of girlfriends from this? Did they get rich from this? Or did they actually even have enough power to control the way they died?

Or to live a certain kind of life? If Paul ends up owning property as a property owner in Rome, I'm in a different position than I am if he dies while he's in custody in Rome.

Because I think one leads you in one direction and one approach leads you in another. And that's really all we can do to assess claims.

So in the end, if after doing all that, somebody said, well, is it possible that you could check all those boxes?

In other words, that it's adequately dated, that it's adequately confirmed or corroborated, that it's adequately tested over time, and that it's adequately tested for attestation in terms of the motives of the body, is it still possible they were lying?

Or it's not true, it didn't happen? I'm always gonna say yes, it's still possible. But it's not reasonable.

And that's why I would never render that verdict. Your standard, and by the way, this is a jury instruction, that anything and everything is possible, the judges will say it this way,

I can level a possible or imaginary doubt against anything you think you believe.

But this does not mean you should not have absolute confidence that something happened, just because I have the ability to level an imaginary or possible doubt.

That should not stop you from rendering a verdict. Now, you talked about adequate. Again, though, that seems to be based on one's presupposition.

So how do you navigate that? You talk about reasonableness, what's more reasonable? What's adequate?

We can check these boxes. Again, you have different levels of skepticism with respect to how we gauge those things.

How do you navigate those? Because I know we haven't gotten to the specific points of the facts of the historical

Jesus, but all of these kind of philosophical issues kind of undergird that whole discussion. Well, there's no doubt that these philosophical issues, this is why the first thing we do is select a jury over a four -dollar process, where we're asking these kinds of questions of jurors.

And we'll often even test the jurors. We'll offer them a version of a circumstantial case and see if these folks can actually reach a reasonable verdict.

And one of the cases we'll do, I'll just give you this as an example, we will often show, for example, a room.

The story goes like this. I leave the house in the morning, everything's locked up. I've got my dog in the house. I lock everything up and I come home at night and the entire kitchen has been completely ransacked.

Now, there's money still on the counter that I left there. So nothing's been taken. And there's no signs of forced entry in the house anywhere.

There's not even any signs of anyone came in the house through the chimney. There is no chimney. There's no signs of forced entry. Nothing's been taken.

But the entire kitchen has been ransacked. When I turn the corner, I see my dog with that impish look on his face, sitting next to a broken bag of dog food.

Now, do I have good enough reason right there to call out the dog as the suspect in this?

Well, no, because the windows weren't open. The wind didn't come in here and blow. In other words, looking at all the alternatives for how you might explain this scene, the most reasonable imprints, based on nothing but circumstantial evidence, which is indirect evidence.

The other word we use for indirect is circumstantial. Okay. So all we have is indirect evidence. We have no eyewitness who saw this.

Yet nothing's been taken, no sign of forced entry. And nothing's been like, you know, no material possessions been targeted.

We just have a ran, the cupboards are open. Stuff's been pulled out of the cupboards. And by the way, all this activity is just counter down.

Nothing above the counter has been disturbed. So do we have enough, is it reasonable for us? Now you might say, well, do we have adequate?

Well, we simply will test it. We'll simply say, given that scenario, could you find the dog guilty?

Would you find the dog guilty if that was your dog? Sure. Now we ask that question because if someone says, well, no,

I would not find the dog guilty, there's still another way I could explain this. We will not put them on our panel. Yes.

So we'll test what we consider to be reasonable. But look, it all comes down to definitions. This is true for everything in all of life.

I mean, even if you're saying, hey, I wanna make a case that you ought to have a certain level of adequacy.

How do I know that you have an adequate starting point from which to make a case for adequacy? Yes. It's an unending loop.

And it affects both sides of our discussion on the defense team and on the prosecution team.

Really both sides of any discussion. So the same way that you would say you've got enough adequacy to know that what your view is true, we would say the same on our side.

Whatever you're using, we're using too. I think a little more could be said there, but that'll take us off now.

That's fine. That'll take us now. I'm more than happy to talk about it because you know me, I'm gonna put a foot in both of these waters depending on who

I'm talking to. As both as a juror, both as a suspect, both as a witness, and even as somebody I might talk to about God.

Yeah. Because in the end, I know, but I do know this, that whenever I talk to people who are really deeply entrenched in a

Mormon worldview, they don't have the ability to go the other way. Sure. This is really all we can do because there's no evidence to support their claims at all.

So we've got to get an entirely different approach. So that's why I say sometimes, look, if all we are is trying to find the tiebreaker in approaches, our ability to take the evidence and make a case for Christianity is a tiebreaker because a lot of other folks in different religious worldviews cannot do that because either the claims of the religious worldview are not, don't lend themselves to an evidential approach because maybe they're just like wisdom statements of a wise prophet.

How would you test those? There are no claims about an event in the past. They're just claims. But lucky for us,

Mormonism is a set of claims about a thousand year history from 600 BC to 400 AD that happened on the

North American continent. Very rich, robust histories, much like the Old Testament histories. So you could test these in the same way you could test claims in the

Old Testament. That's why I say that, look, I could take a presuppositional approach. So could they, but this is a tiebreaker for me because this is what kept me from Mormonism.

All right, well, again, I don't want to get too off on the methodological issue, but those questions do come up.

And so I do appreciate your taking that. I'm just showing you why for me that those questions are going to be raised on both sides. And I think if all we did was look at this as the tiebreaker approach that would separate two worldviews that rely highly on presuppositional approaches, then this is worth doing.

I guess many of my listeners - Because in the end, let's put it this way. If in the end I said to you as a Mormon, look, I believe that the book of Mormon is true and that's my starting point.

Sure. And I can't trust the scripture because everything that was true about what happened to Jesus was lost when the disciples died.

The plain and precious truths were lost only to be restored by Joseph. So I cannot trust anything from your scripture unless, of course,

Joseph tells me I can. So those things that are at least are affirmed by the book of Mormon, those are the parts of the... And of course, that's another debate when you talk to Mormons.

But my point is, if that's what their statement is going to be, well, then at some point you're going to say, well, wait, yeah, but here's why

I don't trust the book of Mormon. And suddenly everyone becomes an evidentialist.

Well, I would - Okay, so how would you make a claim then against the book of Mormon from a non -evidential approach?

Yeah, well, first I'd like to make a distinction between the utilization of evidence and the utilization of evidentialism as a methodology.

I think those are distinct. So contrary to popular opinion, presuppositionalists are not against using evidences, we just use them within a presuppositional framework.

Now, when we're dealing with someone who's making a similar authoritative claim, the common criticism of presuppositionalism is that, look, they have their ultimate authority, you have your ultimate authority, and so now you're just kind of just asserting your ultimate authorities.

Well, the way that we do that as presuppositionalists without being evidentialist is that we do a internal worldview critique in which we hypothetically grant the truthfulness of their position and show that on its own basis, it doesn't work.

And that's gonna take a discussion of like what you just said, that's why I love what you do and what Greg does,

Greg Koukl does so well, is you ask those very important questions that bring out really, as Greg Bonson said, it gives you enough of the rope that you can use to hang them with on their own basis.

So I think there's an approach there that I think makes it distinct, but be that as it may, I see where you're coming from and I'm sure folks can appreciate both approaches there and we don't have to get too much into there.

I wanna make sure we focus so it benefits people who are asking the sorts of questions we're covering, but this is my favorite topic, methodology is definitely something

I love to talk about. I think it's the same difference between science and scientism, right? Yes. Is that I think if I take an approach where I think that this is the only way to do this and this is the authoritative way to do this and there's no other way to do this, like I said,

I think there's so many different ways of different kinds of bridges. Right. I think that some of these bridges are foundational.

Yeah. So there are some foundational claims we have to stand on and before we can make any other set of claims. Sure. And I get that too.

And that's one of the reasons why we have to examine where are the hearer, where the juror stands on those foundational issues.

Yeah. And it's hard to do that, by the way, when you're selecting a jury in a short period of time. Yeah, I agree. And I think another thing that plays into it is perhaps we might have some different theological differences that affect our apologetical methodology and stuff.

And so there's a lot more that goes into it. And of course, folks who have followed this channel, it's a in -house discussion, important one, but not the focus of our discussion here, but it's totally interesting and exciting topic.

Now, so let's unpack, because we're already 40 minutes in. Let's unpack. If someone were to say, hey,

I wanna know some of the historical data points that make it reasonable to believe that Jesus existed as a historical person.

What would be some of those points there? If you're - You know, I'd like to show you, but I'm not gonna be able to share a screen with you, but I'd like to show, so when

I typically do this - You can do that. There's a feature. Okay, let me see if I can grab. So let me just real quick grab a screenshot here.

Give me a second to open up. Yeah, take your time. I'll tell a joke. Yeah, no, it's just,

I'm gonna just take a look and see if I, here we go. Forgive me for not having this set up. I didn't know we were gonna go in this direction.

No worries, no worries. Okay, so here we go. Let's see. Sorry, sorry. How many times should

I say I'm sorry before? Okay, here we go. So when people ask me this question, like give me the data points, there are a number of data points, but they're broken into four categories.

Okay. And so I don't typically do this on social media only because it takes so long to unpack it. So let me just open up a screen and I'll get the, okay, so now

I'm gonna share this screen with you. So hang on. Yeah, if you're doing it right, it'll ask me if someone's trying to share something and if it gives me the option,

I can click on it. But if it doesn't, don't feel obligated. Let's see. Screen share, okay, got it.

Share the screen. Let's see if it gives it to me. Okay, here we go. Ta -da. Okay, so now I've shared this screen here of Jesus standing in the middle here.

Okay. There we go. All right, so part of the problem for me is that this is a case that's built on four legs that we stand on to test eyewitnesses.

Okay. The first leg of which, of course, is just was it written early enough? Now, I think that all of these events that occur in history actually are, there's silence in the biblical record about important events that you might think that will get mentioned, especially if, for example, in the book of Acts, Luke does not mention anything in this little, it's hard to see this diagram probably for most people, but this is how we build circumstantial cumulative cases in front of a jury.

So here what you have is you have the first of four legs. Were they written early enough?

Now, the book of Acts does not mention anything about the destruction of the temple, which seems odd given the fact that Luke is gonna describe the prediction of the destruction of the temple, right?

He just says that Jesus predicted this, yet he never shows its culmination.

You'd be kind of odd if you were writing a history, even if it doesn't involve the Twin Towers, but it takes place in New York around the time of the

Twin Towers, you might at least referentially talk about the Twin Towers, yet the destruction of the temple and the disease of Jerusalem are never mentioned, even though Jerusalem is a primary site in the book of Acts.

Also, the death of Peter and Paul, Paul is still alive at the end of the book of Acts.

These are spectacular, allegedly spectacular deaths. You would think that he might mention them since he mentions the death of James, the brother of John.

Okay, I'm sorry, there's almost no reason to mention the death of James, the brother of John in 44 AD. It's not like Stephen, at least with Stephen, you can say

I'm mentioning Stephen's death because the dispersion takes place after that. Well, you can't say this for John, for James, the brother of John, rather.

And so also, you don't have the death of James, the brother of Jesus mentioned. That happens around 61 in Jerusalem, the largest congregation at the time.

You don't see anything about this mentioned in scripture. One of the most reasonable inferences for the silence on the death of James or the death of Peter, the death of Paul, the death of Barnabas, the death of, or the destruction of the temple and the disease of Jerusalem is that if they haven't happened yet, you might not mention them.

And there's good internal evidence to support that because Paul's gonna quote the gospel of Luke twice.

He's gonna quote it in a letter to Timothy. He quotes it in a letter to the church in Corinth. So you have an early sighting of Luke's gospel and it makes sense given the timeline.

So I simply walk back on the timeline and I think you've got an early dating. Before we go any further on this, let me just say that people will ask me, well, look, even if it's written 20 years after the fact, why wouldn't they write it right away, number one?

And number two, why would you think that any truth could make it 20 years before it makes it onto papyrus? Sure.

Well, a couple of things about that. Not every memory is created equal and we have to say this in criminal trials. What was that?

Not every what? Not every memory is created equal. And we say that a lot in criminal trials because we will often find a witness who didn't say anything for 30 years and then they come out and they think they remembered something from 30 years ago and you're going, really?

Well, it turns out if you're just somebody, murders are unusual events and not everyone watches 100 murders.

And if you've only seen one, it's probably gonna stick out in your mind. If you've been fishing every day, you may not remember any particular day of fishing, but if you're on the water one day and a dude walks up to you on the water, you're probably gonna remember that day.

So I think that's part of the key. The part of the key is that these memories were unique. Number two,

I've given the same talk hundreds of times in the last 10 years to the point there, if you were to even compare the wave file, the audio files, the peaks and valleys of the audio file on the same talk given 10 years ago and if I just gave it today, you would see that even, like this is really true of Frank Turek also and of Greg, that even as I watch us do all these talks over and over and over again because we hang out with each other, that even the timing of how we deliver the lines is pretty much the same.

Sure. You could edit our talks literally from different backgrounds and locations and they would sound like they're all one talk.

Anyway, my point is, it's because you're giving the same kind of thing over and over and over again and there's every good reason to believe in the book of Acts that the people who were talking about Jesus talked about him thousands and thousands of times until finally they wrote it down.

If I was to write down right now my talk and you compare what I wrote down today to the first time

I gave the talk on a YouTube video 10 years ago, you'd be shocked at the word for word.

You say it all the time. I see the value in that though. There's some great value and I know folks who listen to apologetics debates,

I mean, you'll listen to someone like William Lane Craig who has the same darn opening statement but the value of that is it's the same darn opening statement.

It's ironclad in the way that he presents it and that kind of allows you to keep the strength of what you're doing.

There's no wiggle space for you to miss. That's true and it's not like I was trying to have an opening statement that would be ironclad.

I just happened to go through this sequence over and over and over and over again until finally it's never changed.

It's not like it evolved either. If you compare the first time I gave the talk publicly to the last time, you'll see there's not a lot of evolution in it.

My whole point though is that this is how significant claims that are made repeatedly over time publicly get ingrained and can make it downstream 10, 15, 20 years before they get recorded.

Now, why wouldn't you do it? It seems to me that the authors of the New Testament were under this impression that Jesus was coming again soon and there would be no need to write this down because everyone's gonna get out of here alive.

And when people start not getting out alive, the death of John, of James rather, the brother of John in 44, you start to see the appearance of Scripture.

I think once they realized that they weren't gonna be around because they were dying, then

I think you start to see Scripture being written down and there's a gap and that's why I think there's a gap. Also, we don't know how long the gap is.

No one really knows how long the gap is from events. We do know you can trace back the claims of 1

Corinthians 15 and Gary Habermas has done a good job of doing this to within three years of the actual events.

So this idea that Paul has an experience with Jesus on the road to Damascus that he confers with other believers and all of this is then recorded in Galatians, it's recorded in 1

Corinthians and you can trace that back and create a timeline, that's helpful. But my whole point is, in order to make this claim that it passes the first test, you're gonna have to make it cumulatively on the basis of indirect evidence, which is all of my cases.

I don't have a single case that I made by way of direct evidence because if it was a case where there was an eyewitness, it would have been solved 30 years ago.

I'm working cold cases. I'm working the cases that were lame to begin with. And that means I've gotta build my cases entirely on indirect evidence, cumulative cases, they kind of look like this as you see on the screen.

Okay, so that's the first piece. The first piece is, is it early enough? The second piece though is, and so I think this is a reasonable inference given this evidence.

The second piece is verification and there's a number of ways to verify from internal evidence and external evidence.

And I talk about a lot of these, but you know, archeology is the most obvious to most people. Titus Kennedy's got a new book out that talks about the archeological evidence that connects the

New Testament to the ground on which the New Testament occurred. So there's lots of work that's been done in this regard.

I'll tell you this, for example, you cannot use any archeological, remember the Mormon claims involve 1 ,000 years in locations that are identified by name with players identified by name using coin systems identified by name, tools, weapons, and even animals and plants for which we have no archeological support at all.

Not a single name has ever been uncovered on any piece of rock on the North American continent. So I don't expect, everything's touchpoint,

I don't expect you to be able to confirm every claim of history, whether secular history or biblical history, by way of archeology.

You simply will not be able to do it because number one, a lot of things get destroyed. A lot of things have been dug up or not even located yet.

And if they have been dug up, they haven't been categorized yet to even belonging to a certain particular period of time. And even if they have, they haven't been closely examined.

So we are really looking at touchpoint, what has been called a discipline of fractions when it comes to archeological evidence.

But the fact that there's nothing, nothing to support any claim of the Book of Mormon, to me, is suspicious.

This cannot be said for the claims of the New Testament. As a matter of fact, a lot of the claims that Luke makes in the Book of Acts were highly doubted by a lot of scholars in archeology in the last 125 years.

So we've been able to uncover things now that demonstrate that those claims, those words that were used by Luke, actually are words that were used in the same region where Luke said they were being used in the

Book of Acts. So you have that. You also have, of course, remember, when we're talking about, well, why aren't there other contemporary non -Christian sources for Jesus?

Part of the problem with that is that if you're looking for somebody who was a non -Christian or a non -believer who then writes an account of Jesus, there is one.

It's pretty robust. Because remember that Peter, he was with John the Baptist. John was with John the

Baptist, right? I mean, the people that even Luke were probably interviewing were with John the Baptist.

They were all disciples of John. And then when John sees Jesus, his cousin, he says, there's the

Lamb of God. So people who were eagerly anticipating a Messiah could be said to have imagined this or could be said to be not reliable.

They all end up following Jesus. You can't trust what they say about Jesus. But this is not the case for a guy named

Levi who nobody even wanted as part of the group, who's not looking for a Messiah.

There's no reason to believe, there's no evidence to suggest that Levi gives a lick about any of this. He's working as a tax collector.

Yet if you see this stuff for three years, sorry, on the backside of it, now you're a believer. I don't know if you could see this.

I wish there was a Gospel of Judas, somebody who betrayed Jesus, because I guarantee you it would say everything the other

Gospels say. But the problem you have with someone who says, yeah, you can't trust a Christian source for any information about Jesus, is that it automatically assumes the

Christian source can't be trusted. Right. In a way that's not fair. You gotta test the source.

And these are the ways that we test the source. The fact that the writers actually happen to know something about the geography of the area around Jerusalem, when in fact the non -canonical

Gospels that are written mostly in North Africa have no idea of the geography. They're silent about the geography of that area.

They don't know, they weren't there. They are also silent about the names used, because they don't know the names.

The names for men and women in Judaism in North Africa in the first century were different than the names for males and females who were

Jews in the area around Jerusalem. The Bible happens to get those names correct. But this is one way to test internally and externally.

And so I've talked about a lot of these, but now we're, okay, so we're at 20 minutes, let's quickly, we've got about 10 minutes left.

Okay, so quickly, we're making another case here on plank number two, leg number two. Leg number three, it just goes back to whether or not we can trust this has changed over time.

And what I try to do is show that in every criminal trial, we have to show the progress of that piece of evidence picked up at the crime scene.

And so who picked it up? What did they say about it? Did they take a picture of it? Who'd they give it to? What does that next person say he received from the first person?

Does he take a picture of it when he delivers it to the crime lab? What do they say about that piece of evidence? They take a report also, make a report on what they received.

This goes on and on until it finally gets to trial. And this is called the chain of custody is showing what happens to the piece of evidence and does it change over time.

And if you've got a gap in the chain of custody, you've got good reason to believe something could have happened, right? Or, but if the first image of that piece of evidence or the first supplemental report describes it as we now have it in trial, then you're good.

Because the earliest record shows that this is what it looked like. Same thing happens here. We can trace the chain of custody on these claims about Jesus from the eyewitnesses through their students to the students of the students to the students of the students of the students and keep on doing that through time to see if any description of Jesus is evolving.

And we can do this through a number of eyewitnesses and in a number of different geographies around the

Roman Empire. So you can trace it, for example, through John, which is happening in Ephesus area,

Asia. You can do it through Peter, who is gonna be in North Africa.

You can do it through Paul in Rome. These are different locations within the empire. You can trace the story and see if in these different locations, do they happen to say the same thing repeatedly over time?

And you're not gonna find a manuscript evidence that shows an evolution. Now, you can suppose it, you can argue for it, but you're never gonna be able to have, but that's not evidentially based.

The evidence for this, for manuscript evidence is pretty clear that the story of Jesus is born of a virgin, worked miracles, all the stuff that would bother you as a naturalist, born of a virgin, worked miracles, rose from the grave.

Those are the things that really are sticking points, even for people in the movement that call themselves scholars would reject.

Well, those are the earliest claims about Jesus and they don't change over time. So that's the fourth dimension of this.

And then finally, what causes people to lie? Well, there are three things that cause people to lie.

I just don't see those three things. Although I see them in other worldviews, I don't see them on the part of the disciples. Look, you and I could claim something, we would die for what we believe as Christians.

And if you and I claimed that we would die for what we believe as Christians, that would have no evidential value because lots of people die for what they don't know is a lie.

But this is the group that would actually know if this is a lie. This is the eyewitness group.

So their willingness to die for the claim is different than our willingness to die for the claim after the fact. So I think in the end, this is kind of the way you take four lines of evidence.

Of course, it takes a long time to build those. And then they all point to the same reasonable inference. And that's how I get there.

All right, that's excellent. Now, I wanna, unfortunately, we won't have time to hit those other points and that's okay if folks are saying, hey, but how do we know

Jesus rose from the dead? I got a bunch of other videos. I have Dr. Gary Habermas. He came on. We had an excellent discussion on the resurrection.

So there's just so much information out there. So I was wondering, Jay, if it's okay, since I only have you for like, what is it?

Eight more minutes? If we can take some questions from the comments and then we'll wrap things up. And I'm sure

I'll say this at the back end, but I just wanna thank you again for giving me your time. I know you're really busy. I'm glad you do it.

I appreciate it. Yeah, glad you do it. All right, so let's go through these rather quickly. We'll kind of see how many we can get through here.

Speed round, speed round of questions. All right, let's go. So Alyssa Scott says, Jim, because the Bible is the word of God, would it be considered direct evidence or indirect evidence from your perspective?

Okay, so remember that from a court perspective, you have to have access to the eyewitness to cross -examine them.

And everyone has the right to cross -examine their accuser, to face their accuser, to be able to question their accuser.

And so everything else is hearsay. So if someone, if I said, hey, my brother told me that he did it.

Well, I'm not, you can't question my brother through me. I gotta have your brother come in here. This is hearsay.

You're telling me what he said. I need to have him come and testify. So that standard is a standard that we hold in criminal trials, because we'd rather send a thousand murderers free than falsely convict one who's not a murderer, right?

We wanna benefit the accused. So we have that standard. This standard is not reasonable for doing history though, because you would never then be able to know anything with certainty beyond the lifetime of like your grandparents.

Well, what did your great -great -grandparents say or do? Don't know. They're not here to tell you. Well, yeah, but my grandparents told me.

Can't trust them. It's hearsay. Doesn't work for history. It only works in criminal trials because we have an unusually high standard to protect the rights of those who have been accused.

So the claims of eyewitnesses in the gospels are direct evidence. But the question then becomes, how do we know they're reliable?

We build that indirectly. Okay. Follow me? So we're doing a little bit of both here. We're looking at the claims of direct eyewitnesses, but we are evaluating them using a process of evaluating and assembling indirect evidence.

So what you saw on that chart, that's all the indirect evidence for the reliability of the direct claims. Gotcha. Excellent.

All right. The Sire asks, has your job as a detective changed or had any influence on your theological views?

That's an interesting question. Well, so for me, I realized that a lot of how we fall and how we share the case is built on what theological underpinnings we have about how people are saved, about how

God acts, about the sovereignty of God and the free agency of man. So for me, I knew that when I was behind the curve as a guy becoming a

Christian at 35, I felt like I had a lot of learning to do. So I was at a church that would, I was on staff after a few years at that church, just trying to learn, trying to get involved, working in children's ministry.

You don't need to know a lot in children's ministry to at least get involved, okay? So I was working in children's ministry, but they were willing to put me through or help me to attend.

And so the first half I did while I was on staff there, spent seven years getting my master's in theology from Golden Gate Baptist Theological.

So I think in the end, that what's true in scripture has to decide what is true about God, not my experience.

Now, I can say I take a kind of investigative experience where I try to piece together larger circumstantial cases.

But in the end, I don't know if that's really the only way that my investigative experience is gonna help me discover, because there's some things are revealed, especially through the book of scripture, that I cannot assess through natural revelation as an investigator.

I have to first trust that the scripture is telling me the truth, and that's why I tested it. And once I've determined that,

I've got to surrender to whatever scripture teaches me. Okay, thank you for that. Alyssa has another question.

Jim, will you come back to discuss methodology? Well, you're more than welcome if you ever wanted to. Of course, of course, yes.

And again, we're gonna find that although I'm gonna give you an evidential perspective on things, that for the most part, we're gonna agree on a lot, and we're gonna disagree on a lot.

I mean, I think I kind of ride the middle. I mean, I think it's like the difference between science and scientism is that I'm an evidentialist in the sense that I use evidence to come to conclusions, to come to inferences.

But I'm not so committed to any one of these views. I think God has given us all of these. And I just think when we divide over these non -essentials, that's where I get.

Well, let's put it this way. As a non -Christian, even today, what I discover is that what's most off -putting about Christianity is the way that Christians treat each other.

I agree. And social media has only exacerbated it, right? Because to be honest, we're not even kind to each other on social media.

Yeah. Well, we're the underdog, right? I mean, I have got just as many Christians muted on social media as I have angry, profane atheists blocked, right?

Because it's either one or the other, and I don't wanna be unkind to a brother. Sure. I'm not gonna block you, but at the same time,

I'm embarrassed. No. Like, I just wanna go, I'm just gonna go silent on those conversations.

You know, so. Gotcha. And Liv Luke says, so when you said to Jim that there's a difference between evidentialism and evidence, doesn't that go the other way, presuppositionalism, presuppositions?

Yeah, I think you as an evidentialist, and you could speak to this, you would say, yeah, we have presuppositions. And me as a presuppositionalist,

I would say, yeah, we can use evidence. I think there's a - Yeah, I think we agree. I think you and I, I think where we are is we're like in two different circles of influence, and we have an overlap.

And a lot of the time, you and I are living in the overlap, so I have no problem. What I get frustrated with is when, well,

I can't live in that overlap. As a matter of fact, you're not even a Christian if you're in that overlap. Right. And what I see sometimes is both sides saying that to the other.

And that's where I'm like, okay, I think in the end, there's a certain manner of arrogance. If I told you that presuppositionalism strategy is failed and false, and you told me as a presuppositionalist that evidentialism is failed and false.

And look, lots of us do that on both sides. At some point, I think we're gonna get in front of God, and he's gonna say, well, you know.

He's like, I was the reformed epistemologist. I'm gonna reveal something to you that's gonna make both of you crazy.

So I think in the end, I'm more inclined to let God sort that out. Okay. Alyssa asks, and we'll just this question and one more, and then we'll close it off.

Thank you so much. She asks, Jim, do you believe that God created in a literal six days?

Okay, so I've been on both sides of this issue throughout my, I kind of go back and forth, which doesn't make anyone happy. Here's what

I'll say to you. Okay. Our team is a five -man team with a sergeant. I've got a number of cases where I can make a case to a jury that this guy did the case.

This guy's the murderer. But we've always asked this question. You know, what's that blood smear on the crime scene?

Like, I have a theory about how he killed her and the sequence of events. And my partners have different theories about how he, we've sometimes got our suspect to take a plea deal.

So he won't get executed. He'll just get life in prison. But in order to get that deal, he has to confess to us how he did it.

And we do that because we want to test our theories. Every time we do that, and he finally tells us how he killed her, we're all wrong.

We all think that we, but you know, to be honest, none of us are knucklehead killers, so we don't think like knucklehead killers.

So we have our theories and they're all wrong. But it turns out, I don't have to demonstrate that to a jury anyway. I don't even talk about how he did it.

I just make a case that he did it. And that's all I'm obligated to do. I may not know exactly how he did it, but I can show that he did it.

And that's where I sit. And in the end, if he confesses, we'll know how he did it. Same thing is true here for God.

I don't know exactly, sometimes I can't answer every question about how he did it, but I've got more than enough evidence to demonstrate that he did it.

And I think when we finally get home and we ask, that's one of the first questions I'm going to ask God, what was that sequence like?

Full form, six literal days. I mean, there's like so many different ways that historically

Christians have parsed this out. I think that there's a lot of good books out there. 10 Days That Changed the World, I think is a good book that kind of talks about that.

Or Seven Days That Changed the World, sorry. There's a book that talks about that. I think it's got 10 or seven in different ways.

Not all memories are created equal. That's right. So, and that's John Lennox.

That's John Lennox's book. So anyway, the point is, I think there are ways to parse this out. I think when we get in front of God, the difference, the gap between my mind and the criminal's mind is not near as far apart as the gap between my mind and the mind of God.

So I think when we get there, we're all going to be right and wrong in different aspects of what we believe. So I'm, at this point, prepared not to tell people where I fall on this.

I've got friends on both sides. And I just, all this does by, I can tell you when I wrote God's Crime Scene, the young earth group of friends complained.

And then the old earth complained that I made the young earth look too reasonable. So to walk a straddled line against what

I think is a non -essential. Sure. I think is hard because you just end up irritating everybody. But in the end, again, like every case,

I can demonstrate that God did it, precisely how God did it is a question I'll save for later.

Right. Awesome. Now, last question and we'll wrap things up. And I think this is a good question because you talk a little, a lot about the historical aspects and I'm sure you could have gone into extra biblical evidence for Jesus as well.

So that early period is very important. So here's a question with respect to Roman Catholicism. Have you ever looked into the evidence of the papacy?

And do you have any thoughts on that? Because there are some arguments there that they appealed to kind of that early period in the church. This is a big question.

You don't have to go into crazy detail. How do you approach that? So there's a chapter of the next book, Person of Interest, where I talk about all the literature and I don't examine that line of evidence, the evidence for the papacy.

I don't do that in that book. But what I do talk about is all of the non -biblical literature that's written before the

Council of Nicaea. The reason why I stop there is I'm thinking, okay, look, this is that period of time when Christianity is under attack, when

Christians are on the run for the most part, depending on which emperor is in charge, there's one level of persecution or intolerance or another.

So that's a period in which I could see there being some divergency, right? Things are still hidden. There's not a central authority, which is controlling the thoughts of all

Christians or at least trying to make dictates about what is theologically true. So you have the most robust diversity in the church is all pre -Nicaea.

So the Antonicene fathers, plus all of the non -canonical gospels, plus all of the non -Christian voices found on ancient manuscripts before the fourth century,

I've assembled all of that to see what do we know about Jesus from that. Now, I think it's possible to consider what the church fathers have to say prior to Nicaea, prior to Constantine making this their religion, prior to the

Edict of Thessalonica. So if you look at this prior, you get a view of who Jesus is.

And we as Christians who are not part of the Catholic tradition, we stand on that history as well.

I have a tendency then to stop right there because I think there are several tenants, several beliefs, several pillar beliefs of Catholicism that I just don't think are supported by scripture.

And I'm only looking at like, what is the evidence from scripture that I should believe any particular thing? And that's why there's a lot of stuff that you and I probably could talk forever about because we're gonna be making the case from the same data points, right?

That case is gonna come from scripture. So that's awesome. And I can be persuaded once the case is made from the scripture.

But that's all I'm looking at. The authority I am trusting is the authority of scripture. And I do not allow another authority like a leader or even a religious leader to change how

I read the scripture. So I have to go back to that. So I think that, no, I don't have a case for or against the papacy, but I do think we can use the church fathers that Catholicism then claims.

Clement of Rome, he may have been one of the first bishops. Is it Linus? Is it Clement? Who was the first?

So you can look at that stuff that's part of the lineage that they would look at also, and you can use them.

I just stop at the Council of Nicaea because I wanna stop before there's this central authority for Christendom.

And that's what I'm looking at those data points. Yeah, excellent. Well, folks, I'm speaking with Jay Warner Wallace, author of Person of Interest, Cold Case Christianity and God's Crime Scene.

Jay, I would like to thank you so much for giving me your time. This has been a lot of fun and I hope you have an awesome day.

I know you're jumping right into something else right after this. So thank you so much. Love to have you back on to talk about Methodology.

I certainly will. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. And thank you folks for listening in. Until next time, that's all for this episode.