James White on NT History with an Atheist

It's fascinating to me how easily someone in one religion can find the fallacies and biases in another religion.

I think that what's fascinating...

You're razor sharp on your criticism of Islam here. Yeah.

But what I find fascinating, Jeff, is that you recognize that with other religions, but you don't do it with your own. Because I... That may be the case.

I'm just saying. And there's that confirmation bias coming up again.

Opening Questions About Bias and Confirmation Bias

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And just remember, I don't know is a perfectly good answer. So we are going to jump into a discussion earlier. There's no other of my co-hosts with me. But this is just for folks to remember a couple episodes back while Dr. Jason Lyle was on.

We had someone, a gentleman by the name of Jordan from Reason to Doubt podcast, and he came in and we had some discussion and he wanted to have a further discussion on the New Testament documents and the views of whether they're, well, I guess whether they were just copies of other pagan documents or whether they're really should be considered written by God.

So we decided we would have him come back in. We figured out time and now is the time. And with this, I decided to ask, because I know someone that's far better, though I love textual criticism, someone who's far better than me by far to come in, and that is Dr. James White.

So let me first bring in Dr. White. How are you doing, sir? I'm old. Are we allowed to announce what birthday you just recently had? Yeah, I just turned 60.

So we're pushing my bedtime here. So if I start yawning and nodding off toward the end, it's just the way it is. You know, they don't make Geritol anymore. So I was hoping by the time I got to this age that they'd have perfected that, but they don't even have it anymore.

So for folks that may not be familiar with who you are and the ministry that you're a part of, let folks, just if you could introduce yourself for folks.

I'm just a strange Scottish guy. I've had the opportunities over the years doing some pretty, pretty amazing things. Alpha and Omega Ministries will celebrate 40 years next year. I've been married for more than 40 years, got five grandkids, I've taught literally all over the world, currently professor of church history and apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

I've taught for the old Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, Greek, Hebrew, Systematic Theology, church history, that kind of stuff, all sorts of topics in apologetics. And I've done a few debates, 178 of them so far, and we just scheduled one for, I'll actually be doing two debates on my next road trip in February.

One's on gay marriage. Well, it's technically what is marriage with a very, very deconstructed, progressive type guy. And that'll be in Houston. And then doing a King James only, I'm actually going to take the positive and say the Legacy Standard Bible is superior to the King James version.

And why not? We haven't done one like that before. So, yeah, so done a few, done a few debates around the world. And that's probably what I'm best known for. But anyway.

Well, and one of those debates, which is a good plug in, is we'll be at the Open Air Theology Conference that you and I will both be speaking at, put on by Jeffrey Rice. So I'm anticipating lots of nice Bibles to peruse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've I've got I've got a few, Jeffrey Rice, you know, here's my my Tyndale Greek New Testament that Jeffrey did for me. And so maybe that'll come in handy this evening.

Who knows? Yeah, I will admit that on that trip, my wife is not coming, but my wallet is. I think that I think that's going to be helpful until I get home. And they also bring in Jordan from Reason to Doubt.

Jordan, welcome. Hi. Thanks for having me. Give you a chance to introduce yourself, though. I know that you some folks who were in the previous episode may know who you are, but we probably have new people listening now.

So let you introduce yourself.

Sure. My name is Jordan. I run a podcast named Reason to Doubt with my friend Jared, who's a former theologian. And I'm an engineer, just a eager amateur when it comes to history. But yeah, we publish every Thursday on topics of skepticism.

Now, I am wondering, just curious, Jordan, would you be willing to use my pronouns throughout the show? My pronouns are God exists.

If you'd like me to, my pronouns are he, him. I'll use whatever pronouns you prefer. That would be those are unusual, but I'm happy to use however you want to identify.

Well, actually, actually, I might the pronoun that I chose when this started, when this stuff came up, I know you and I had some discussion on this, you know, some of the on the last show, but with things like this.

But when in New York, I do a lot of open air evangelism and people would challenge folks with using the wrong pronoun. I have always said for now, I forget how many years now that I've had my phone programmed that my pronoun is your majesty.

And so when people tell me I have to use a different pronoun, I let them know my pronoun is your majesty. And they have to bow when they they say it. Well, the bowing part is. Well, no one's been willing to to acknowledge me by my pronoun, so I've said, OK, well, folks aren't going to recognize my pronoun.

I feel I don't need to, you know, recognize anyone else's.

That's like a pretty disingenuous way to use pronouns.

But well, I like I try to get my wife to call me your majesty. Sometimes it actually works. So let's get into the discussion that we had. Now, you had for folks who who who may not have paid attention from the last episode when when Jason was on, you came in, there was some discussion you had with where you and your your co-host on your podcast are both two men that claim to have what you claimed.

And we discussed this last time, but you claimed that you were Christians that have walked away or deconstructed, deconverted from the faith. And for you, a big part of it was the the view you have on the New Testament.

You want to talk further about that.

So, sure. I mean, what. What led to my deconversion was the lack of evidence I perceived for God. And that is related. It started with, you know, I was the youngest creationist. And so being away from that by the scientific evidence.

But of course, it didn't end there.

Deconversion, Naturalism, and the New Testament

So what what what do you see as lacking with the New Testament?

Well, the New Testament is a collection of historical documents written in the first century, and while I think we can get good historical information from them, I don't think they are sufficient to justify a belief in the supernatural, and they aren't sufficient to justify believing their own supernatural claims.

And so unless you come to them basically already convinced of the case because you're Christian or whatever, I don't think—unless you come with that preconception, then I don't think the evidence is sufficient.

Well, it's interesting you say that, because I came from—personally, just me personally—I came from a position where I didn't believe in the New Testament. It was prophecy, looking at prophecies that convinced me that the New Testament had to have been written by God.

Being Jewish and having a view that Jesus Christ is Hitler's God, I wasn't looking for Christ. So is there some specific things that you would say, because you're making the claim that it's not it's not supernatural.

Right. What would you expect, I guess, let me ask it that way, what would you expect if there is something to be for supernatural?

In the New Testament specifically? Well, it's hard to say what I would expect. I can talk about what would convince me, I guess. I suppose if there were claims in there or pieces of information that would be impossible or implausible, at least, to arrive by natural means, like, I don't know, if we found some advanced rocket physics or something, you know, something like that.

Or, I don't know, basically an observation. My standard for believing in the supernatural is no different in the New Testament with any other kind of claim. I need it. I just go with whatever the most parsimonious explanation is for the evidence.

And so if the most parsimonious explanation for the evidence of the New Testament was the supernatural, then that's what I go with. But I don't think it is.

So would you accept, then, the Old Testament is supernatural?

No, I'm an atheist. I don't think I don't believe in anything supernatural.

And yet there's plenty of things that we know in the Old Testament from some of the oldest books that are scientifically true long before they were discovered in science. Such as? That would fit your, well, such as the evaporation of water into the sky, into air, and coming down in clouds in the form of rain.

That's described in scripture. That rainfall happens. So, I mean, that's sort of like the, you know, the scenario you gave.

So if you could quote a verse, I'd be happy to look at it. But typically the kind of things I hear when I hear these kind of claims are things like the stretching out of the heavens when it comes to the Big Bang, for example.

And the folks, I can't remember their name right now, the organization, they talk about kind of explaining the Bible with the lens of science. And so they'll point to the verse where God is stretching out the heavens as saying that's alluding to the Big Bang, which it certainly could fit.

But one wouldn't get the Big Bang from that terminology, if that makes sense. You can read it back into it. But it wouldn't uniquely get you there. And so it's not surprising to me that there are some phrases that we can feed modern understandings into, you know.

But that doesn't mean that they had some kind of access to supernatural information.

Okay, so I have to do some looking. It's somewhere in Job, after Job 38. Don't have the exact verse offhand. So let me ask this. You got into a discussion on some of your podcasts about where New Testament, you were, well, in one case, you were actually in one of your podcasts that you were on someone else's, you were actually debating that Jesus is a, was a physical, you know, did actually live.

So at least there was that. But your arguments that you had against the New Testament, you were basically comparing them saying there were some things you were saying that they just weren't, they were, we didn't have copies of them, originals, that we don't really know what was there.

You were comparing it to pagan, you know, some of the pagan documents. And that's where I thought you wanted to focus in on.

I thought we were going to be talking about the resurrection, but I'm happy to go whatever direction you want.

We can talk resurrection, yeah. I mean, you had said New Testament history. So go ahead. If you want to talk resurrection, that'd be even better.

Yeah. Basically, I do think that Jesus historically existed as a person. I think the evidence for Jesus' existence is quite good. And I actually spend a fair amount of time on my podcast recently, especially criticizing my fellow atheists who I think they made a big mistake by buying into Jesus' method.

I don't think it's well supported by the evidence. So I'm happy to go with whatever the evidence tells me. But I think the point with paganism, it's not that I think that the New Testament authors copied pagans when they were writing their scripture or anything like that.

It's just that pagan sources also make miracle claims. It's not uncommon for sources in antiquity to put miracles on the lips of many, many people. And so the mere fact that a claim was made about a miracle doesn't set the New Testament apart.

And so I'd need more than that there was a claim made by several people or even believed by several people because ancient people believed in miracles. And that goes for the resurrection just as much as it goes for healing lepers or feeding the 5 ,000 or whatever miracle you choose to pick.

So, James, let me ask you, do we have any historical evidence for the resurrection?

Prophecy, Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Historical Setting of the Gospels

Well, I've just been listening to the setup, to the discussion, and it sounds like what I'm hearing is I need naturalistic evidence of the supernatural. So I need some kind of... I'm just really wondering about the epistemology of all of this and whether there can even be any evidence given that would meet the criteria that is being laid out.

So when you say, well, I just don't see any reason to believe the supernatural claims of the New Testament, I would not view the New Testament alone. The New Testament writers didn't view it that way.

So the first thing that Jesus does after the resurrection is speak to the disciples. And in fact, he rebukes them for having been slow to believe the prophecies, the fact that from Moses through all of the prophets, they spoke of Jesus.

That's the first thing he says to them. So you look at the preaching of the early church, and again, it's focused upon what we know. There isn't any question about the fact that what you have in Daniel, what you have in Isaiah, what you have in Jeremiah are written hundreds of years prior to the birth of Christ.

We now, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, have clear documentation of those documents existing prior to Christ. So the idea that they were written afterwards to sort of fill in, you know, we'll write the prophecies to fit what happened or something along those lines, that's common as it once was, has now gone by the wayside with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other earlier documents along those lines.

So we have, this is a, I grabbed the wrong one there, but this is, yes, it's two books, but we believe it's one revelation. And so the fulfillment, which you were talking about, Andrew, in your own conversion, the fulfillment of the prophecies from, even if you go with Deutero-Isaiah or something like that, that are hundreds of years prior to the time of Christ, the idea of bringing these things together in some fashion requires you to allege that the New Testament writers are making all of the fulfillment up.

And the problem is that the story of the New Testament and the way that it's written, it, well, I think it's fascinating. I don't know if any of you remember the, what year was it? I actually wrote a book about it.

There it is. Back in, and...

You know, you're getting old there, James, when you're having to look for the titles of your own books.

This was 2007. That's why. Okay. Back in 2007, you had the Talpiot tomb story, the story that the guy that did Avatar was involved with it. And the whole idea of, they had found Jesus' family tomb and bone boxes and they tied it together with Gnostic mythology and all the rest of this stuff and announced it on Good Morning America and all this kind of stuff.

I wrote that little book in response to it in about 17 days, as I recall. And in the process of that, one of the things that I was really struck by was if the New Testament authors were trying to make this stuff up, and I did listen to some webcasts that was being said, was that, well, yeah, the prophecy stuff, you just, you ransack the Old Testament, you come up with something here, you come up with something there, then you write the New Testament as fulfilling these things.

The problem with that kind of theory and that kind of thinking is the nature of the New Testament books. It was fascinating to look at the, the patronyms, for example, that have been cataloged by the Israeli authorities, the names that people used at that time and how it tracks perfectly with what you have in the Gospels.

Someone living over in Rome trying to write this stuff up wouldn't have known that. They wouldn't have known how many porticos in Solomon's temple and the portico there in the temple. And they wouldn't have known about what the pool of Siloam looked like.

They wouldn't have any of that kind of information, which flows so easily. But then they certainly wouldn't have known the most common names used amongst the Jewish people that time. And yet, because of the research that has been done and the cataloging of these things, you can't dig anywhere in Israel.

When I was there in 2018, when I visited the synagogue that Jesus would have clearly taught in, in Migdal, they were building a hotel and they ran into the synagogue where they're building a hotel. So they had to build the hotel above and over it and leave it there.

That's what they have to do in Israel all the time. So they've been collecting all of this information and must be the most boring stuff on the planet to do. But once you have it all entered into the computers and stuff like that, lo and behold, the frequency of names and the kinds of names that you have in the four Gospels, not the Gnostic Gospels, not anything that comes in the second century, but the four Gospels that come from Israel in the middle of the first century happen to match perfectly with what we've found archaeologically as the common names of that time.

And so these are the individuals then that then go out and they are saying, look, here's the prophecies. These are the, here's from the Psalter, here's from Isaiah, here's from et cetera, et cetera, and they were written hundreds and hundreds of years beforehand.

And no one disputed that they were written hundreds and hundreds of years beforehand. And so you have fulfilled prophecy from documents that are contemporaneous with the events themselves. It is interesting.

I noticed in one of the webcasts I listened to when you put the Gospels toward the end of the first century. And I was, I love asking people to do that, you know, why, why do you do that? What's, what's your evidence of that?

And when you dig far enough, what you discover is, well, you know, Jesus talks about the destruction of Jerusalem. There can't be prophecy. So it had to have been written after the destruction of Jerusalem.

And yet that was one of the clearest arguments, the early church of the, of the fact that Jesus was truly a prophet.

So before you prophesy, before we get into the dating of the Gospels, I just want to make sure I'm tracking your argument so far. It sounds like what you said was the authors of the New Testament used the correct frequency of names.

So the names they use about matches up with what the names would have likely been at the time. And because, because they did that, they are reliable sources for the prophetic portions.

Is that your logic? Because they, because they did that, they are not written someplace outside of Israel. So in other words, they are contemporaneous, they are geographically contemporaneous and chronologically contemporaneous with the actual events of the New Testament.

So there are very popular books out there. I've forgotten the author of one. It's getting older now. I'm trying to say that the Gospel of Mark, for example, was written in Rome and was a specific attempt to parallel some type of pagan writing and so on and so forth.

None of that, none of that fits the actual reality of the text of Mark. And this is evidence that no one, we did not have this data until the past two decades at the most when the antiquities authorities in Israel start publishing this data and putting together the computer databases that have all these bone boxes and the names and all the rest of the stuff that comes along with it.

So the point is that these sources, that the New Testament documents are contemporaneous and they are geographically connected to the area in which these events took place. And they are written by the people who then go out into the world and begin to proclaim that these events are given meaning by the fact that they are a fulfillment of what had been written hundreds of years before they came along.

So it's not appropriate to just look at the New Testament and disconnect it from the Old Testament because they didn't do that.

So I would agree that you don't have to look at the New Testament in a bubble. For instance, if I were persuaded in supernatural causation in the here and now because of a miracle or whatever, if for some reason I was persuaded of that, then that would certainly change my prior when it comes to supernatural things happening in the Bible.

If I already am convinced that this worldview is correct and that the Christian God, or at least gods in some sense, can do things, then that makes the supernatural events in the New Testament far more plausible, right?

That's fine. That hasn't happened yet. I don't rule out the possibility that it could, but it hasn't.

So you're saying that miracles would have to be as prevalent today as they were at the time of the New Testament to believe in them?

No, I'm saying that I'm happy to bring in other evidence and to interpret the New Testament in light of that new evidence. So if new evidence were found, if I were given evidence that convinced me that miracles do in fact happen, or they are in fact like a thing that happens, whether in the past or now, perhaps by a miracle happening now, I don't know.

Then, because I already have that belief that miracles can happen, that makes the miracles happen in the New Testament more likely in my estimation, because I don't have to go from, I don't have evidence sufficient to believe in miracles to believing in this specific miracle, if that makes sense.

If I'm convinced that miracles are a thing that happens, it's less of a jump. And so I agree with the kind of broad point that you don't have to just look at the New Testament. However, I don't think that the fact that they use names, even if they did write them in Israel, I mean, I don't see how that gets you to these being reliable records of prophecy to the extent that that prophecy should persuade me that the events occurred as written.

Well, all I'm establishing is that these are works of antiquity, contemporaneous, time wise, and geographically with the events they record. They're not written in fulfillment of some parallel claim by some pagan someplace in Rome, et cetera, et cetera.

And that those authors then are the ones who are claiming the fulfillment of the prophecies from hundreds of years earlier, which again has now been established. I mean, when you think about it, 150 years ago, none of that background material that I just presented.

So the Qumran scrolls just recently, what, about 18 months, 24 months ago, the X-ray revelation of the Leviticus scroll, it was fossilized. They couldn't unroll it and they found a way to X-ray it and identify the ink pigments and literally digitally unroll the scroll, which cannot be done physically, but they've digitally unrolled it and they can read it.

And it is identical to the text of Leviticus in the Masoretic tradition from a thousand years later, just like the Isaiah scroll was identical as well. So we didn't have any of that. The oldest manuscripts we had of any of those works were from 900 years after Christ.

And so much of the skeptical writing arose during the time period where we didn't have pre-Christian evidence of the Old Testament writings and hence the prophecies. We certainly did not have the evidence we have of the names that were used in Jerusalem in the first century and the parallel that has with the New Testament documents.

So the idea of skepticism has been around a long time, but the evidence that I was just giving just simply as the foundation for going, these are historically reliable documents, we didn't have that. And so there were lots of people that said, well, I mean, just read Thomas Paine.

He just dismisses all of it out of hand. And to be honest with you, as long as a person wants to find a reason to dismiss out of hand, they will. It won't matter how much more information comes up. It doesn't matter to a lot of atheists today that we've only had access to the papyri of the New Testament for 100 years.

And yet that has moved our knowledge of the New Testament back in some instances to within 50 years of the writings of the originals, which is far earlier than any other work of Antiquity. In fact, Bart Ehrman admitted when I debated him in 2009 that we have far earlier attestation for the text of New Testament than for any other work of Antiquity.

That's a quote directly from him.

So when you say contemporaneous, chronologically, what do you mean?

Like, when do you think the Gospels were written? Pliny, Suetonius, any of the first century, early second century, Latin writers, Greek historians, whatever. That's what Ehrman was talking about when you're talking about that time period.

Normally, it's maybe 100 BC to 100 AD, fudge factor a little bit on each side. But that would be the documents considered to be contemporaneous. Our average earliest documents, earliest copies we have of those documents written at that time is 500 to 900 years after the originals.

P52 is a fragment of John chapter 18, which can be dated as early as 125.

Okay, so by contemporary, you mean their first century?

Or a little bit wider than that. But yeah, that same general time period, yes.

But Jordan, if I could step in, because I don't want you to miss what James was saying regarding the Isaiah scroll, for example, with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, many of the more liberal theologians argued that with both the Book of Daniel and Isaiah, two books that have very specific prophecy, people argued there was up to three Isaiahs and several Daniels.

In other words, the idea being that they could not have known the detail I mean, Daniel mentions Greece and Rome by name, right? You have specific names of people that weren't even going to be alive in scripture.

And the argument was, which kind of was the argument you were making on some of the podcasts he sent us, right? Is that people were, after the fact, trying to say, well, this was prophecy, but it was done after the fact, predating it.

And that's the importance of what James is saying with the Isaiah scroll, because what that does is predate a thousand years earlier to the earliest copy we had of Isaiah. Not one word changed. And now, since we can date it before some of those events happened, you can't say it was written after the fact, because we had something prior to it.

Okay, perhaps I don't remember what I may have said in some other episodes. So just to be clear, when I think of that, when I think of the writings being written to the prophecy, I don't mean the prophecy being rewritten to match the events that occurred.

I mean that we have accounts written by people who had the prophecies in their hands. And so you at least can't rule out the possibility that they were written with the understanding of the prophecies that they needed to fulfill.

I don't even necessarily mean that the writers lied in any sense, because I accept that the writers of the New Testament believe that Jesus was the Messiah. And so if they believe that Jesus was the Messiah and the Messiah had to be from Bethlehem, well, then Jesus was from Bethlehem.

I don't think they were lying. That doesn't mean that they had special access to some actual fact, but you know.

But if he wasn't from Bethlehem, that's still a lie.

So it's only when I say a lie, I mean they would have to be intentionally saying a falsehood. They could be honestly mistaken, for example. And so I'm not saying that there was a conspiracy or something like that, is the point I'm trying to make.

I guess my question would be, how do you get around the fact that the miracles, the prophecies that we're talking about, you're saying, okay, in New Testament, you have these prophecies, so they're writing to make it look like he fulfilled those prophecies.

However, like even we're talking Isaiah, how do you explain prophecies in Isaiah, Daniel, and elsewhere that are so specific and they end up in history? We look back at it in history and see Cyrus, who's named.

And long before he was even a thought by his parents, how do you explain that? And I hope you're not going to do a Matt Delahunty and say time machine, which is what his argument was. Yeah, he actually said that.

Matt Delahunty said, we can't exclude time travel.

Yeah. So to the best of my knowledge, I'm not a scholar, so I'm happy to be corrected, but I don't know of a copy of Daniel with the prophecies in Daniel that are extremely specific from prior to the time when the prophecies take place, like the Cyrus thing.

If there is a manuscript that names Cyrus as like the emperor of Persia before Cyrus was born, great, but then let me know, I guess. But I'm just looking for the most plausible explanation, right? And so if you say, here's a prophecy from 2000 BCE, and here's a book written in the first century CE, and this book in the first century has prophecy fulfillment from the 2000, like I can either believe that it was a supernatural event, that it was like a divine fulfillment of prophecy, or I can believe that some humans wrote some words that matched words that were written before.

But the second one seems way more parsimonious, right? Like I don't have to bring in a god or deity or anything. I can just like humans doing what humans do. That's all I need.

There is one problem with your theory, though. And it's common for people who don't study the transmission of texts over time. But what you just posited was an interruption and a recension of the text specifically of Isaiah.

You mentioned Daniel as well, but the Cyrus thing is in Isaiah. I was just going off what Andrew said. Yeah, the problem is once you start editing and inserting things, you end up with multiple streams of transmission with contradictory materials.

So let me give you an example from the Old Testament, which is a little bit difficult to do because we're talking about the Old Testament. We're talking about ancient, ancient, ancient material. And we have very few historical works that have come down to us from that far back that we can actually even talk about textual transmission.

But we can, for example, with Jeremiah. Jeremiah himself tells us that at one point, the king took his prophecies and tore them up with a knife. And what's interesting is the Isaiah scroll that was mentioned earlier from Qumran goes from 100 B .C. to 900 A .D., and there isn't any change in the transmission of the text over that time period.

But Jeremiah has a very different textual history because it records the fact that it had a different textual history. And so if you look at the Greek Septuagint rendering of Jeremiah, it's a third shorter than the Masoretic text because we're told there was an interruption, that the king destroyed one of the original scrolls of the prophecy.

And so the point is there was a disruption in Jeremiah, and we see that. But you're positing a disruption in Isaiah. We see nothing. I don't think I am. And so you said you fundamentally asserted that the name of Cyrus was backtracked and put back into after the days of Cyrus into the text of Isaiah.

Sorry, that's not what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say is it seems more plausible to me that it was entirely written after that point, or the part of it that includes that prophecy would be written after that point.

That seems to me to be on its face more plausible than some divine prediction.

So the naturalist presupposition is there can't be prophecy. So therefore, the entire story of Isaiah, which is before Cyrus, has to be transported after Cyrus. So it's not that Cyrus's name was put in, but that everything before chapter 39 is a lie.

I'm not saying that prophecy is a priori impossible, but I'm saying that if I'm looking for the most parsimonious explanation, humans doing things that we know humans do is always going to be more parsimonious than some supernatural thing.

Right, so there can be no evidence of supernatural.

Well, there could be. It would just need to be such that positing human traits, things that we know humans do all the time is not more likely.

Jordan, do you accept that supernatural things could happen?

I'm open to being persuaded that supernatural things could happen. I don't believe the supernatural actually exists, but I'm happy to update my knowledge in light of new evidence.

When you say you're open to being persuaded, but by what evidence? So let's go back to Isaiah now. You go back to Isaiah who gives us, again, contemporary information, historical information about what's going on 700 years before Christ.

And again, we over the past century and a half have over and over again established the accuracy of place names, terminology used in regards to, for example, political leaders, things like that. Isaiah is found to be accurate when there's evidence to look at.

And so you have that, and yet the parsimonious explanation when you have prophetic fulfillment in Jesus is either this was written after the events like Cyrus, or when we get into the fulfillment material in the New Testament, well, the New Testament writers had these and therefore, well, we need to be honest as to what you're saying.

They made up the Jesus story to fulfill the prophecies they had before them.

I don't want to apply deception because again, I don't know that they were being deceptive, but I don't think that you can rule out that they wrote their narrative with the prophecies in mind such that the prophecies would be fulfilled in their narrative.

Yeah, but you're... How could you roll that out? Perhaps that's a better question.

I guess where I'm trying to understand is, and maybe we're talking past each other, because you're talking about prophecies in the fulfillment of them, and it sounds like both James and I are talking about some prophecies when they were written, future.

So you have prophecies in Scripture. As I mentioned, Daniel, I think four times, if I'm not mistaken, maybe three, mentions Greece by name, a kingdom that at the time of Daniel's writing, Greece wasn't a nation.

I mean, there was an area, but it wasn't the kingdom that was described. And yet, it describes exactly what ends up happening in history in the next several empires that happen right after Daniel.