Why Didn't This WORK?! | William Lane Craig vs. Ben Shapiro

Shapiro just heard the minimal facts of the resurrection from the foremost leading Christian intellectual and apologist.

What just happened? How can you dismiss all of this evidence? How could anyone? We got to understand something about people and about persuasion.

Beliefs are houses, and people are really comfortable inside their house. Why was

Shapiro not compelled to reject his own beliefs and recognize Jesus as Lord and Savior?

It's because he's too comfortable inside his own house. William Lane Craig, one of the greatest living

Christian apologists and intellectuals, makes an airtight case for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and Ben Shapiro shrugs his shoulders?

What went wrong? How can you deny the arguments when they're right in front of your face? I actually think

I have an explanation for this that I don't think you've ever heard before, and I believe what I'm about to tell you at the end of this video is going to level up your skills when it comes to engaging others for Jesus Christ.

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Logos link before. Okay, so about four years ago, Ben Shapiro invited William Lane Craig to join him for a

Sunday special. A lot of us in the church community, we got excited when we heard this, because we hoped that Dr.

Craig would provide Shapiro with a clear argument for the divinity of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead, and Dr.

Craig did not disappoint. The question as to which of these is true, I think stands or falls upon the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Who do you think Jesus of Nazareth was? Jesus claimed to be the decisive self -revelation of God, and I believe that we have good reasons to believe that those claims were true, and that therefore the

God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists. Okay, so let's let's get into that. Yes, let's.

So what is the proof that Jesus was who he says he is in the gospel? Well, first we need to establish who he thought he was.

When you look at the religio -historical context of the life and ministry of Jesus, I think you can show that among the historically authentic words of Jesus were claims that he thought he was the

Jewish Messiah, that he believed himself to be the Son of God in a unique sense that set him apart from Jewish kings and prophets, and finally that he thought that he was the

Son of Man predicted by the prophet Daniel, to whom God would give all dominion, power, and authority.

So he had this radical self -understanding of being Messiah, Son of God, and the

Son of Man, and at the trial scene before the Sanhedrin in Mark 15, all three of these titles come to a head when the high priest asks him, are you the

Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One, that is the Son of God? And Jesus says, I am, and then virtually quoting from Daniel, and you will see the

Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven and seated at the right hand of the power. And at that point the high priest rips his robes and says, you have heard the blasphemy, what more witnesses do we need?

And Mark says, they all condemned him. So this is just wonderful, but let me just point out, and we saw this in a previous video that I did on this channel, but a lot of Jews do not understand the

Son of Man and Daniel to be the Messiah figure, but they actually believe the Son of Man to be

Israel itself. So that may or may not be floating around in the back of Shapiro's mind as Dr.

Craig makes his case here, but in terms of debate, man, this is perfect. Dr. Craig started by laying a quick framework and then presenting his first contention, right, that Jesus believed himself to be the

Messiah, the Son of Man. I imagine the second contention is, you know, going to establish that he was truly dead, that he'd really died, and perhaps the third contention is going to be that he rose from the dead, thus proving that he was who he claimed to be.

I mean, this sort of tracks along the minimal facts of the resurrection. And that enabled them, since they didn't have the ability to carry out capital punishment, to deliver him over to the

Roman authorities by slandering him as a pretender to be king of the Jews and therefore a political figure who could be tried for treason and sedition and crucified.

So from the Jewish perspective, this narrative has some holes in sort of Jewish philosophy. The narrative begins with the idea that Jesus appears in front of the

Sanhedrin and then claims to be the Messiah. Well, there's nothing actual criminally in any of the tractates that say that if you declare yourself the

Messiah, this is actually a punishable offense. There are many Jews, including Bar Kokhba, who have declared themselves messianic figures.

The real gap here is that in the Gospels, Jesus' vision of himself as the Messiah is completely different from the prior vision of what the

Jewish Messiah is and is actually outside the scope of how Jews describe the Messiah or really have ever described the Messiah.

The Messiah in Judaism has always been a political figure who is destined to do certain things, restoring the kingdom of Israel, maintaining control of that kingdom, bringing more

Jews back to Israel. All of these things are considered sort of political things that the Messiah does, but the idea of the Messiah as embodiment of God is something that's foreign to Jewish religious philosophy going all the way back to the beginning.

So even the idea that the Sanhedrin would be questioning him in those terms and would get from that, that what he means is,

I am God, which would be a much more punishable offense. Presumably that would be blasphemy. It's an oddity.

It's not an oddity, okay? So what Shapiro is doing is he's giving the typical pushback from, you know, the

Orthodox Jewish perspective, and that's to suggest that the Messiah is going to be some kind of, you know, military political figure.

By the way, the New Testament records this same exact reaction from people who interacted with Jesus in the first century.

They thought that he would do the same thing that Shapiro just proposed, but Shapiro also just said that the idea of the

Messiah, or I suppose any person, being the embodiment of God—so this is what we

Christians refer to as the Incarnation—that that is an oddity. No Jew going back to the beginning ever thought this way.

That's actually not the case. So there's a much deeper issue here. I don't want to divert too much, but you should look into a book called

The Two Powers in Heaven by Alan Segal. Segal was a rabbinic scholar, so not a

Christian, guys, and he noted that the ancient Israelites believed that there were essentially two

Yahwehs. So the ancient Israelites were still monotheists, but they believed that there were two

Yahwehs—one invisible one and one visible one. The visible Yahweh would take on the form of a human.

And this explains a lot of the unique passages in the Old Testament where you have, on the one hand, a visible messenger speaking on behalf of Yahweh, but at the same time also being referred to as Yahweh.

So the book is a very interesting read. Michael Heiser also has written about this, but the idea that, you know, this is foreign to Jews, this idea, it's incorrect.

And it wasn't even heretical in the early Jewish community until the first Jewish Jesus followers started saying, you know what, guys, this

Jesus is the visible Yahweh. At that point, Judaism pronounced the Two Powers concept a heresy, and that was around somewhere around the 2nd century

AD. So that's just a greater issue that will eventually be a diversion, but let's just keep going here.

I think you're absolutely right in saying that Jesus' understanding of the Messiah was radically different from the prevailing cultural understanding of the

Messiah among the chief priests and the common people, and he didn't meet their expectations. Indeed, that's what helped to get him crucified.

Being the Messiah, you're right, in and of itself isn't a blasphemous claim, but to claim to be the Son of God in a unique sense, and then especially the

Son of Man prophesied by Daniel, sitting at the right hand of the power, that is truly blasphemous and is sufficient for his condemnation.

Now the question, I think, that is raised by your interpretation, Ben, is this.

Why should we believe Jesus' reinterpretation of the

Messiah rather than the one that the chief priests and the people held? And I think the answer to that is his resurrection from the dead.

Jesus' resurrection from the dead is Yahweh's public and unequivocal vindication of the man whom the chief priests had rejected as a blasphemer.

It is the divine demonstration that these allegedly blasphemous claims are in fact true, that he was who he claimed to be, and that therefore

I follow Jesus in his conception of what it means to be the Messiah. Okay, so Dr.

Craig did not establish the death of Jesus, like I thought, you know, as part of the minimal facts there, but instead he went directly to the resurrection of Jesus, which is understandable.

I mean, you know, this is an informal conversation with Shapiro, and so now we have an argument for the divinity and the resurrection of Jesus, although there could be some more time spent on, you know, sort of providing the evidence for the resurrection, like the eyewitness testimony of various folks.

But anyway, let's see what happens next. So when it comes to the resurrection, why is resurrection proof of divinity? So Lazarus is resurrected. That was why

I wanted to emphasize the religio -historical context before we talked about the resurrection. A miracle taken in isolation is inherently ambiguous.

The proper interpretation of a miracle is going to be given by the religio -historical context in which it occurs.

And the resurrection of Jesus is not just the resurrection of any old body, it's the resurrection of the man who claimed to be

Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man, and who was crucified for those allegedly blasphemous claims.

If God has raised this man from the dead, then he has, I think, unequivocally and publicly vindicated those allegedly blasphemous claims.

So this is solid stuff, okay? Solid. Like, just wonderful, but unfortunately we're about to see

Shapiro dismiss the whole thing with a wave of the hand, and then we'll break it down and get into why that happened and what went wrong.

But one of the counterclaims to some of this is that the Gospels are written significantly after Jesus lives. Even the earliest Gospels written, what, 70

CE? Somewhere 40 years after Jesus is crucified. So what's to say,

I mean, that like most historical events, there is some play in the joints here? So that this would be the historical argument against the exact veracity of the

Gospel revelations, for example. Now I think it's important to understand, Ben, that in order for a historical document to be reliable, it isn't required that it be inerrant.

Contemporaneous, of course. So what I would argue is that underlying the inference to the

Resurrection of Jesus are three great independently established facts. Ah, so we're gonna get the evidence for the

Resurrection after all. Which are supported by the historical evidence, and which surprisingly,

I did my doctoral work on this in Germany, are recognized as such by the majority of New Testament scholars today who studied the historical

Jesus. And these facts would be that after his crucifixion and burial by a member of the

Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea, the Jesus tomb was discovered empty on the first day of the week by a group of his female followers.

Secondly would be that various individuals and groups of people then witnessed appearances of Jesus alive.

And finally, number three would be that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised

Jesus from the dead, despite having every predisposition to the contrary. The vast majority of scholars have come to accept as convincing the evidence in support of those three facts.

Not assuming biblical inerrancy or inspiration, but treating the Gospels as ordinary historical documents.

You can show, for example, that the fact of the discovery of the empty tomb is attested by at least six independent sources in the

New Testament, some of which are extraordinarily early. You hear all this, right?

And you go, wow, like, how can you dismiss all of this evidence?

How could anyone? I mean, it's pretty compelling, and has been for so many of us who have looked into this, including myself.

No scholar denies that individuals and groups saw postmortem appearances of Jesus. The only question is whether you should or could dismiss them as hallucinatory.

And again, nobody denies that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead.

So these three facts are pretty firmly established, and the only question is, then, how do you best explain them? And down through history, attempts have been made to explain these facts without recourse to the resurrection, like the conspiracy theory, the apparent death theory, the hallucination theory, and so forth.

And I would argue that none of these naturalistic theories meets the criteria for being the best historical explanation of the facts.

None of them is as good an explanation as the one that the original disciples gave, that God raised

Jesus from the dead. And if that's right, then I think we have good grounds, indeed we're almost compelled to revise our typical understanding of who the

Messiah was supposed to be. So C .S. Lewis famously said that a man like Jesus, who made the claims of himself that he did, and who did what he did, is either a lunatic, on par with somebody who claimed that they are a poached egg, or he's a liar, or he's

Lord. Those are our options when determining who Jesus really is, and I think it's clear, based on the evidence, that Jesus was not a lunatic or a liar.

He is the Lord. But Shapiro does not respond this way. Watch this. We can have a historical argument back and forth, obviously, and I think that there are arguments that you can make,

I think there are arguments that I can make. I honestly find them relatively uninteresting, is the truth, simply because I'm not sure that we're going to come to any sort of consensus on them.

What went wrong, guys? Shapiro just heard the minimal facts of the Resurrection from the foremost leading

Christian intellectual and apologist. What just happened? Actually, I'm curious, like, let me know in the comments, like, what do you think really happened?

What's your theory? Let me know in the comments. But here's what I think. I'm gonna tell you what I think. Hey, real quick,

I'm so grateful that you're watching. If I've earned the right to get your sub, I'd love it if you would just click the like and subscribe button.

It would really help me to get the video out to more and more people. I really do appreciate you. So here's what we get.

We got to back up for a moment, and we got to understand something about people and about persuasion, okay?

Because essentially, that's what Dr. Craig is doing on behalf of the Lord and by the power of the

Holy Spirit. He's persuading. He's trying to persuade Ben Shapiro to change his mind, right?

But you got to understand, then, something about persuasion and about people. So it's not just about, you know, even explaining

Shapiro's response, but everybody's potential response, including ourselves, by the way, okay? So here's what we need to understand.

When someone makes a decision, when someone is sent to a belief, their emotions are all wrapped up in the process, okay?

People tend to think that they're very logical. They're very rational. Even those who are predisposed to, you know, using the left part of the brain or however that breaks down,

I always screw that up. But yeah, they, you know, even those kinds of people, and there are people

I know in my life that pride themselves on this. The problem is, it's just not true. We are heavily influenced by our emotions.

Why? Because God did not create computers, friends. He created feeling creatures. That means that we are the intersection of both intellect and emotion, and that's how

God designed us to be. Jonathan Hyde is an American social psychologist and professor at NYU, and he characterizes decision -making like this.

He says, imagine that there is a gigantic elephant and a rider riding around on top of it.

In the illustration, most people will look at that and think, the rider is our emotions, and the elephant is our intellect.

Jonathan Hyde says the opposite is actually the case. The elephant is our emotions, and the rider is our rational side, and the elephant is just going wherever it pleases, and the rider is just along for the ride in many cases.

What does that mean? It means that beliefs are houses, ladies and gentlemen. That's what we need to understand, especially when we engage other people.

Beliefs are houses, and people are really comfortable inside their house. So, you know, to try to engage someone and to try to change someone's mind is like trying to ask somebody to move out of their favorite house.

They're not gonna go without a fight. Why? Well, because they're very comfortable inside their house, you know?

Their house works for them, right? The couch is set up nice and comfy, you know? The TV is just the right size screen, you know?

The refrigerator is filled with all their favorite food and drinks, right? So, to walk up to someone and just start talking at them, even if you provide unassailable truth, is like standing outside a person's favorite house with a bullhorn and trying to yell at them that they need to move.

Why would they want to move? They're perfectly happy where they are. If, instead, you enter into a person's house, you seek to enter into that house with them, and you start looking around and asking questions about it, questions that are designed to reveal the cracks in the home, in other words, the errors and insufficiency in their beliefs, maybe this person will start to realize that their house actually sucks, that it actually does not give them what they originally believed it did.

Maybe they'll realize that their house is not what they thought it was, and some of them will want to move. So, what

I'm saying to you is not actually anything new, you know? We are heavily influenced by our emotions, okay?

But even the Greeks understood that persuasion tracks along a certain path, and it means, at the end of the day, for you, who wants to get out there and engage people, just like William Lane Craig, it means that persuading someone to change their mind trades on emotional components, because human decision -making trades on emotional components.

So, I actually teach this. I teach a course on this. I call it First State Evangelism, and it tracks along the proper order of persuasion.

I'm not sure if you knew that there was a proper order, okay? But it's been a game -changer for those who have gone through the training, and they have learned it and used it in their lives.

I'm actually preparing to give another training on this over on my Patreon, so stay tuned for that announcement, and we'll make it happen again soon.

But here's the bottom line, okay? Why didn't this work? Why was

Shapiro not compelled to reject his own beliefs and recognize Jesus as Lord and Savior?

It's because he's too comfortable inside his own house. And so, the takeaway for you now is when you get out there and engage others for Jesus Christ, don't start talking at them and trying to give them compelling reasons to reject their own beliefs and become

Christian, at least not in the first five to ten minutes of meeting somebody. No, instead, ask them about their beliefs.

Gently cross -examine their own worldview and provide challenges through leading questions that help them to see that their beliefs are insufficient, that they are inadequate to explain reality the way it really is.

And you'll find that to be a way more productive conversation, you'll find that that is the case more often than not.

I promise you. Now, don't hear what I'm not saying. Dr. Craig did not do anything wrong.

He was invited on a show, right? And he's just sitting there, and Shapiro asked him the question, okay?

So he was answering the question that Shapiro asked, okay? So I'm not coming down on Dr. Craig at all.

I'm just—I'm looking at this, and I'm recognizing that there is a teachable moment for those of us who, you know, we're not sitting on television shows, we're not doing podcasts, but instead we're just seeking to go and engage those people that are in our everyday circle of influence.

There is a better way, friends. It's a better way to go about it, where you'll actually see people change their minds right in front of you by the power of the

Holy Spirit. All right, well, now it's your turn to sound off, okay? What did you think about this particular exchange between Ben Shapiro and William Lane Craig?

Let me know in the comments below. By the way, let's pray for Shapiro. He's doing such great work in so many other ways, and wouldn't it just be amazing if he finally recognized

Jesus as his Messiah? I think so. So let's not forget to pray for him. Hey, if you made it this far, you need to join my

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The link for the Patreon is below. Hey, I'm gonna go away, but I'm gonna return soon with more videos. In the meantime,