Pints With Aquinas - 201: Is the Resurrection Fact or Fable w/ Dr. Mike Licona

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

In this episode, I talk with New Testament scholar, Dr. Mike Licona about the reliability of the New Testament and why the resurrection is a fact of history. Check out Mike's website here: https://www.risenjesus.com/ and the article he mentioned, Are the Gospels “Historically Reliable"?: https://www.risenjesus.com/wp-content/uploads/religions-10-00148.pdf GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd Donate directly: https://donorbox.org/capturing-christ... This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/   SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd/   MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx    CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform 

G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. Hope you are doing well this beautiful Easter season. We have an amazing interview lined up for you today. I interview Dr. Michael Lacona, who is an American New Testament scholar, Christian apologist and author. He's Associate Professor in Theology at Houston Baptist University and the director of Risen Jesus, Inc. Lacona specializes in the resurrection of Jesus and in the literary analysis of the Gospels as Greco-Roman biographies. This was a fascinating discussion. We talk about the reliability of the New Testament. We talk about historical investigation in general. We talk about whether or not the resurrection is just some fable that Christians want to believe or whether there's really good reasons to think that it actually occurred. I throw a bunch of objections at the resurrection and have Dr. Mike Lacona respond that you're going to get a lot out of this. There's people in your life that you want to better explain the resurrection

to, why it is you're a Christian. This is going to help you tremendously. Hey, look, before we do that, though, I want to say thanks to a couple of sponsors. Now, the first is something that I've put together, and it's called Strive, strive21.com. It's a 21-day detox from porn course that I created. We've put a lot of money into this thing. It's incredibly well produced. Basically, for 21 days, you get short videos from me. I lead you from maybe where you video. There's a challenge you have to perform. And then you have to engage with the other men in this course. Right now, as you can see here, we have over 14,000 men in this course. So if you're a man who struggles with lust in any way, please right now go to strive21.com. Here's the best part. Not only is it 100% free, it's 100% anonymous as well. You don't have to pay a cent. There's no kind of trick. We don't want your credit card. We just want you to go through this course so that you can find freedom. So again, if you're a man, you struggle with lust anyway, go to strive21.com, strive21.com, and please tell your friends about it. As I say,

100% free. You can be as anonymous as you want. And the testimonies, go check out strive21.com, strive21.com, and please tell your friends about it. As I say, 100% free. You can be as anonymous as you want. And the testimonies, go check out strive21.com. Scroll down to here. Look at these testimonies from these other men. And we've got just tons of reviews from people, what the men are saying after they go through the course. It's been really great. Now is the time, surely, to take your struggles with pornography seriously and to begin to overcome them. Go to strive21.com to learn more. Dr. Michael Kona, good to have you on the show. Hey, thanks, Matt. Great to be here. Now, you wouldn't remember this, but I actually went to an evangelical church in Cumming to watch Gary Habermas give a talk about a year ago now or so. Was it over probably Labor Day?

Yeah, that's right. First Baptist Church in Cumming. That's right. Well, that's pretty neat. And so we actually came up and said a quick hello to you and Gary. It's really neat. I'm a Catholic. You're an evangelical.

Gary. It's really neat. I'm a Catholic, you're an evangelical. It's been really cool to see how, I don't know, at least from our angle, those in the church are being very blessed by evangelical apologists such as yourself, Dr. William Lane Craig, and others. Well, thanks, brother. I'm really glad you're doing what you're doing. Thanks. Well, for those who aren't aware of you, please introduce yourself. Tell us who you are, how you got interested in the New Testament, and specifically the resurrection. Well, my name is Gary Habermas, and no, my name is Mike Lacona. I'm 58 years old. I teach New Testament and Christian apologetics at Houston Baptist University. I've been there since 2012. Became a Christian at the age of 10. Guy came in. He was a Christian magician. Came into the Sunday school class and gave a gospel presentation.

Related the gospel message to his tricks. So I got tricked into the kingdom. And didn't grow too much as a teen, but went to Liberty University, a Christian university. I was a music major. And just such a robust Christian environment. I just grew in my faith and decided to do a master's degree in New Testament studies so I could learn to study the New Testament in its original language, Greek. And I was loving it. But toward the end of my studies, I began to have doubts about the Christian faith.

Interesting. Yeah. And it wasn't anything that I'd actually learned in grad school. It was just reflecting and thinking, you know, this is the only thing I know. And I believe I've got this relationship with God. You know, I've been praying an hour to two hours a day. I'm in his words several hours a day, studying in Greek and loving it. And I feel an intimacy with God in a sense. But am I deluding myself? If I'd been born in Afghanistan, would I be a Muslim in India, Hindu in China and atheist?

You know, so is this stuff really true? And how would I know if it's true? My roommate introduced me to Gary Habermas, told me to go see him because he knew Gary was a student. And I did. And Gary was just so welcoming. And I don't know that I'd be a Christian today if Gary Habermas had not sat down with me and shared with me evidence for Christianity, primarily the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. And so it was that because it was the resurrection that convinced me. I became very interested in that. And I mean, there's more to the story, but that's the gist of it. Okay. What was your dissertation in? Your PhD, what did you? New Testament Studies is the PhD, and my dissertation focused on the philosophy of history and the resurrection of Jesus. So

learning how historians approach historical matters, the philosophy behind it, burden of proof, methodology, taking that and step by step applying that to the question, did Jesus rise from the dead? And that had not been done previously. So, I mean, of course, people had argued historically for the resurrection. I don't mean to insinuate that hadn't happened. And they'd even used some historical arguments. But up to that point, no one had really, in a very methodical way, spelled out a philosophy of history and articulated a strictly controlled historical method and dealt with all the relevant issues involved in that, and then proceeded to play out that method. And so that's what it was about.

So that was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work. And yeah, a lot of wrestling. Now, you no doubt had encountered Christian apologetics regarding the resurrection prior to your PhD. As you began to delve into it, and even now as you sit here today, would you say that you find yourself more convinced today, the more you've looked into it? Or do you find perhaps that there are just so many questions

to deal with that you can have a sort of probable amount of certainty, but maybe you're less certain than you were when you were a teenager? Yeah, I would say the latter. But I need to qualify that to explain it because that could sound bad as though... I love the honesty. Yeah, as though academic research causes doubts. And it actually didn't in my case. You know, some people go to the altar and get married and they are 100 percent certain that they are marrying. They're confident, 100 percent confident that they are marrying the right person. And then three years later, they're divorced. So they are confident, but it's not a justified confidence.

Right. It's not a matured kind of confidence. matured kind of confidence. So I would say, before I started doubting in grad school, I felt 100% certain, confident, that Jesus rose from the dead in Christianity is true. But it wasn't a mature kind of certainty. It's the kind that, you know, when I was confronted with some objections to the resurrection, then that certainty tanked, right? So because it wasn't built on evidence, it was built on a relationship, which I thought was pretty strong. But, you know, you're wrestling between the confidence that you have through reading Scripture and the testimony of the Holy Spirit in you, and then that's going against—you hear these objections, well, were the disciples lying, or were they hallucinating? And then some of those

things start to make sense to you, and it causes doubts. So, you know, I investigated all of that. And, you know, then what you find through historical investigation, if you're trying to look into a matter, there is no such thing as 100% certainty. You know, you are looking at, as you mentioned a moment ago, probability. So I would say that my confidence in the resurrection in terms of historically speaking, it's not as strong as it was before, but it's real. It's not as strong in terms of highest percentage, but it's actually stronger than it was. Because when I was, say, 100% certain, before I even started to look into this stuff, if someone brought up hallucinations, that 100% certainty might drop down to 50%.

And I'm thinking as you're speaking that it's like a relationship between a young man and a young woman. He falls in love with her, he's very eager, very zealous, but it might not be the sort of mature love that he has for her 20 years into marriage, where he may not have those same feelings, but it's based on something more solid. That's right. Yeah. I mean, it's a good illustration there because analogy, because, you know, he likes this girl. He, he thinks she's beautiful, you know, he loves her personality and all of a sudden they're on a date and she burps and it's like, oh man, that all just goes, no, forget it now, man. Um, you know, and, or vice versa. But then you're married for 20 years and you might even get in a nasty fight, much worse than a burp, a silly old burp. Um, you get in a nasty fight, but you still love that person, and the relationship is stronger, much stronger

than that first date with the girl. Okay, but yet you would obviously say that, you know, the claim that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is far more probable than its negation. Oh, absolutely. You know, what historians do is they take the knowable facts, let's call it. OK, so you have this data and you come up with facts. So the data would be like in the case of the Titanic, let's say you've got eyewitness testimonies that the Titanic sank. eyewitness testimonies. You've got the lack of a ship. No one knows where the Titanic is. All that is evidence at that time to suggest that the Titanic sank. The Titanic sank is the fact. All right. So in the same way, what you do is you look at all the data, you come up with these certain facts. And, you know, even if you take some that virtually every scholar who studies the subject, including skeptics, if they agree on, you formulate hypotheses, and the hypothesis that can best explain those knowable facts is regarded as what

probably occurred. Yeah, this is good. I think we should spend just a little bit more time on this, the idea of the reliability of history. Obviously, a lot of people are skeptical about anything that they can't immediately experience. So could you just flesh that out a bit for us, for those who aren't really familiar with this language? How certain can we be of anything that's sort of happened in the past, the existence of Plato, for example, or as you said, the Titanic sinking? Yeah, well, some things are more certain than others, right? We have greater evidence that Jesus died by crucifixion and that he taught in parables than we have that he was born of a virgin. OK, so some things are just better attested than others.

And so, you know, we might think of a spectrum of historical certainty. I describe this in my my large book. So you met right in the middle is it's it's indeterminate. All right. So you can't say one way or another. There's no tip of the balance. And going down, you might say, OK, this is less probable, you know, and then more, more and more until you get to the bottom. And it's like it's certain that this did not happen. And then you can go the other direction and say, well, it's more probable than not. It's somewhat certain, quite certain, very certain, you know, absolute certainty.

And of course, you're never going to get there because even there are people today who deny the Holocaust and say it and you could come up I mean really you could really go to extremes and say you know our Matt are you certain that you really are as old as you think that you are rather than we all were created just five minutes ago with the food in our stomachs that we never ate memories and our brains of things that never happened it was just all created you know or even the fact that my parents may have lied about the year of my birth. Maybe I'm two years older than I think I am. I really have very little way of figuring that out. Perhaps they doctored up the birth certificates or something. That's right. And there's no way you don't want to cut up your bone to see how many rings around it.

You know, like I'd prefer not to. Yeah. So there's there's just no way that we can have absolute certainty about even our existence or to say, how do we know that our external perceptions are accurate rather than we're just a brain in a vat being stimulated by mad scientists to have those perceptions? You can't prove that's not true. So 100% certainty is just simply unattainable when it comes to these kinds of things. But some things are more certain than not, or some things are more certain than others. And so when it comes to these kinds of things. But some things are more certain than not, or some things are more certain than others. And so when it comes to the resurrection,

you know, we want to look and say, you know, at least is it more probable than not that it happened? But the way that you do that is you compare it with other hypotheses like hallucinations, fraud, metaphor, Jesus never died, you know, all these kinds of things. And you see which one best explains the knowable facts, and the resurrection does so by far. Yeah, and we should point out for those who might not be following us here that there's a certainty maybe that's given to us through the gift of faith and through the witness of the Holy Spirit, but what you and I are talking about is just history per se at this point. That's right. And you think about even with Paul, the Apostle Paul, and the disciples themselves. They actually saw the risen Jesus, right? But even that,

there is a degree of faith for them, because they could ask themselves, well, how do we know that he's really the Son of God, rather than an alien from a parallel universe who had to complete, in order to get his PhD, he had to come and live and deceive a bunch of people into thinking that he was God. You know, you couldn't disprove that. In Matthew 28, 17, it says, When they saw him, they worshipped him. This is after the resurrection. But some doubted. And you think, goodness gracious.

That's an interesting verse. Now, and that has hung up some folks. But I've got an interesting take on that. And I describe it in my book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What I think is going on here, when you look at that verse, Matthew 28, 17, some believe, but others doubted. The Greek term that's used there for doubt is distazo, and it means to think two things. It's only used one other time in Matthew, and that's when Peter's walking on water, and then he sees the waves, and he begins to sink, and Jesus grabs him, and he says,

why did you doubt this Tadzo? Well, he's not totally doubting. He's thinking two things. He's got enough faith to be out there walking on the water, right? But then he looks at the waves and says, well, how can this be? And I think that's what's going on with the apostles. You have the parallel account in Luke 24, and Luke uses a different term. He uses the term apostas, unbelief. So they see Jesus before them, and it says, out of joy and amazement, they were apostas, unbelieving. So it's not like they've got arms crossed lips pressed nodding their heads and it's like no i don't think so no out of joy and amazement it's like a bottom of the ninth inning walk-off home run in game seven of the world series is is what it is they saw him dead

and that was the worst thing that they'd ever experienced in life. And now, just three days later, the best thing, they see him there. You know, and this came to life for me seven years ago when my mom died. And then a year later, my dad did. And it's like, you know, you miss them. And it's like, you'd like nothing more than to see them and to hug them. But what if when I'm just grieving over their deaths, they appeared before me and it's like out of joy and amazement, amazement, apestos, unbelief, unbelievable. Well, Matthew just uses a different term. unbelievable. Well, Matthew just uses a different term.

This Tadsel, they were doubting, they were thinking two things. It's like, wow, this is awesome, but how can this be? You know, I think that's what's going on there. Okay. All right. Well, let's talk about, before we get specifically into the resurrection, just the reliability of the New Testament documents in general. Because, of course, a story can be coherent and it can be false, I suppose. Do we have any good reason to think the New Testament documents are reliable? And what does that even mean? Yeah, well, that's a good question. What does it mean?

And that's not an easy question to answer, because we have to remember that the New Testament documents, and especially when we're talking about Jesus here, the Gospels, that they are ancient biographies. And the genre of writing ancient biography, ancient history, was a little bit different than what we have today. They weren't so concerned as we are to get the precise details, to report the details with precision. That wasn't their aim. The best historians and biographers wanted to communicate accurately what had happened, but they were more interested in, let's call it a portrait than a photograph. A photograph, like I'm seeing you, we're communicating on Skype. I can, you know, get an approximate age about you.

I hear your accent. I see some books behind you. So I see you're a lettered person. So I can know just a little bit about you with that. Okay. And see that you have a nice microphone. So you're kind of skilled with this stuff. that you have a nice microphone, so you're kind of skilled with this stuff. But a portrait of you is going to tell more because the artist is going to put some things in there and arrange

some things in order to communicate more about the person of who you are. At least that's how they did it for, for centuries. Um, it, you know, if a person had his hand on a book, he was a lettered person, you know. Maybe he was wearing a military uniform, which showed he was, but he might not have been wearing that military uniform at the time that the portrait was made. So you take all that kind of into consideration. Now, that's just a, you know, I could say that's a rough kind of explanation of the differences. So when we say about any ancient literature, is it historically reliable? We're basically asking, does that literature communicate an accurate gist or an essentially faithful representation of what occurred? All right.

So take, for example, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. All right. Almost all New Testament scholars today, including, you know, Catholic and evangelicals, conservatives other things that Jesus taught throughout his ministry, and he's pulled them all together in—not all of them, but a lot of them together—and he has artistically weaved this Sermon on the Mount together. So did Jesus actually say a certain thing at that time? Maybe not. But it's not to say he didn't say it during his ministry, during his lifetime. It's still given us an essentially faithful representation of Jesus. So that's what we're talking about. That's got to be understood up front. With that in mind, we can see, you know, we can unpack any of these if you want, but I would say, yes, the Gospels are historically reliable because they fulfill four criteria. Number one, they chose their sources judiciously.

So they use good judgment in the choice of sources. Who's they? What's that? Who's they? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the authors. OK. OK. So they chose their sources judiciously. They chose their sources judiciously. Number two is they use those sources responsibly. So it's not like they're going around just making up things or, you know, it's agreed on widely by New Testament scholars that Matthew and Luke used Mark as their primary source and supplemented it. So we can compare how Matthew and Luke use Mark. And yes, they adapt him,

they will edit him at times, sometimes they'll improve his grammar, they'll add some details, or move things around in order to make a theological point. But they don't really invent, they don't distort him, okay? So they stay very close to their sources, closer than other ancient historians typically do with their sources. And so they use their sources responsibly. Third, we can verify numerous items in the Gospels as being true. And number four, there are only a very few items in the Gospels that have a reasonable chance of being false. And so you

put all those things together and you'd say, yeah, they are historically reliable documents, as we define historically reliable. Could you dig in just briefly to three and four? Okay, so three would be that we can verify numerous things. Okay, so for example, historians, that we can verify numerous things. Okay. So for example, historians, whether they're looking at whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon or, you know, what happened at the Senate hearings in December of 50 BC, right before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, you look at the various sources and you say, in order to figure these things out, what actually happened, we're looking for early sources. We're looking for sources that are, if not written by the eyewitnesses, they are rooted in eyewitness testimony. We are looking for multiple independent sources. So we'd like to hear not only from Cicero, we'd like to hear if Caesar

has anything to say about these meanings. if Antony had to say anything, you know, things like this. We want multiple independent sources. If there's some unsympathetic sources, we'd like to hear from them as well. The more of these kinds of things that we have, the more confidence we can have. So when we come to the Gospels, there are things about Jesus, there are numerous things that we can verify about Him. Okay, I just want to take a pause and say a big thanks to our second sponsor, and that second sponsor is, hello, H-A-L-L-O-W, a Catholic meditation app to help you find peace and grow in your spiritual journey. This is absolutely amazing. Look at how sophisticated this is. I don't know about you, but I'm so tired of things that are Catholic, but they're not very good. This is really amazing. My wife and I have been using

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And let's get back to this discussion with Dr. Mike Lacona. So when we come to the Gospels, there are things about Jesus. There are numerous things that we can verify about him. Scholars disagree on a lot of things, but there's widespread agreement that Mark and John are independent of one another. So you've got that. Mark, the majority of today's New Testament scholars do think that Mark's primary source was recollections of what Peter had told him. So we have Mark rooted in eyewitness testimony. told him. So we have Mark rooted in eyewitness testimony. When it comes to the Gospel of John,

most contemporary New Testament scholars do not think that John, the son of Zebedee, wrote it. I do, I'm in the minority, but most do not. However, the majority of New Testament scholars do think that the author of John's Gospel used one of Jesus' disciples as his primary source for that Gospel. And so again, if John the son of Zebedee did not write it, it's still rooted in eyewitness testimony. And we could talk about Matthew and Luke too, but just that, you've got multiple independent sources rooted in eyewitness testimony. Mark is written between 20 and 40 years after Jesus, which is quite early by ancient standards. You've got John that's written probably around 60 to 70 years after, 60 to 65 years after Jesus, still pretty good. I mean, we're 75 years removed from World War II,

and we're still interviewing World War II vets. No problem. They were there. You know, they're still alive. We can talk with them. John's written 60 to 65 years later and rooted in eyewitness testimony. You've got some things from unsympathetic sources like Tacitus, Josephus, Lucian, Marbar, Serapion, that talk about his death and some other things. So there are numerous things that we can know about Jesus through these kind of sources and using historical method. And then fourthly, you said that there were some things that may have been wrong. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, I've done some work with Plutarch over the years. Plutarch is considered the greatest historian in antiquity, greatest biographer in antiquity.

I'm sorry. And, you know, there are a lot of differences in the way Plutarch tells the same account in his different biographies. Like Caesar's assassination is told in four different biographies. The Catilinarian conspiracy, I think, is told in seven of his different biographies. So and there are differences involved. And, you know, you can compare what Plutarch says with what other ancient historians say. And there are occasions when it appears that Plutarch has some things wrong. We can't prove that they're wrong.

There might be some sort of a compositional device behind that, a reason he changed it. Maybe some of the other sources are all wrong. Maybe there's something—history can be a lot more complicated. There's a lot more to history than a lot of times we realize what's going on behind the events. Things that could seem contradictory really aren't, after all. So I'm hesitant to say, when it comes to the Gospels that we know that there are for certain errors in them. But I think we can say that there are, in my opinion, when we take compositional devices into account. What do you mean by compositional devices?

Like sometimes they would compress and narrate events as though they occurred over a shorter period of time, or they would displace events from a certain chronological context and transplant it to another. For example, Jesus cleansing the temple occurred on Monday, but Matthew backs it up to Sunday and conflates it with the first temple visit of Jesus. So Mark says he went in on Palm Sunday, the triumphalal entry he goes and he just looks around and he leaves and Then Monday he comes back and he cleanses the temple, but Matthew says Palm Sunday. He goes in Walks into the temple and cleanses it so he can flates those two events He transplants the temple cleansing to Sunday and the same thing with the fig tree Mark has in two stages. He curses the tree on Monday, he sees it withered on Tuesday. In Matthew, he curses it on Monday and immediately it withers and dies. So that's what I would call a compositional device. Got you. So these apparent errors or things that contradict each other may

just be that apparent. Yes, they're intentional. It's the same kind of stuff you and I and every one of us, almost every one of us do in our everyday ordinary conversations. We don't think anything of it. We don't consider it to be an error. So once you eliminate what, you know, those things like that are probably due to compositional devices, or even some things that can be harmonized, although I don't like to press harmonization. I think there might be just a handful, four or five differences in the Gospels that are

reasonable candidates for errors. Things such as how Judas died. That would be one. That's a very difficult one. That's probably the most difficult one along with the infancy narratives. Tell us why, for those who aren't aware, the two descriptions of how Judas died and why it's difficult to reconcile them. Well, Matthew says that Judas hanged himself, but Acts says that he fell headlong and his gut burst open, you know, and, and, and, you know, so that doesn't seem to be compatible. Now, some have tried to say, well, the, he hung himself, the rope broke or the branch broke and he fell and Hey, that's possible. Um, but fair enough, but that really sounds like a strained. Yeah. Tempt. Because, you know, if the rope breaks, are you going to fall headlong?

Well, you know, it was right over a kind of a cliff and the rope broke and he hit land first with his butt and it caused him to fall forward and tumble down the hill. That's possible. Hey, that is possible. Right. It seems rather ad hoc. It does. Yeah. And I don't want to say it didn't happen because strange things do happen.

And that may be the case. But it may be the case that it's an error. But either way, these discrepancies or apparent discrepancies are few and don't affect the main narrative of what the Gospels are trying to share. That's exactly right. There are very few. Like I said, there might be just a handful of them like that, maybe not even a full handful. And you're right, they're all in the peripheral details. They don't change the essential story. Then I suppose another way to figure out whether or not a particular set of documents are reliable is obviously these things are copied and sent around to different parts of the world. If you were to go back and gather some of the original copies of the Gospels or fragments of the Gospels over the first, say, 500 years and then compare and contrast them with each other,

this should show whether or not there had been any serious embellishments or changes in the Gospels, yeah? Yeah, yeah. And do we know anything about that? Well, I would suspect, Matt, based on what we have, I don't think that there are— you know, we can get back to a text. Even Bart Ehrman, the skeptical New Testament scholar, would say that we can get back to a text which is very, very, you know, pure to what the original said. How do you know that?

How can you figure that out? Well, because we've got so many manuscripts. You know, we've got over 5,000. We've probably got about 5,500 unique, you know, manuscripts. Okay, some, the official count right now is fifty eight hundred and forty three, I think. But Dan Wallace has said a lot of those have been counted twice by accident. So there's probably about fifty five hundred Greek manuscripts that are quite early. OK, not all of them are early, I should say, but, you know, maybe a hundred.

Oh, let's see. I don't know. I don't want to get off the top of a lot. But what you would do is you can look a lot and you can see where a lot of the corruptions of the manuscripts occurred. And you can get back using the principles of textual criticism to get back to what the original text probably said. And there are some places in the New Testament where we just aren't certain. A lot of them are really minor, like 1 John 1, 4, I think it is, where it says, we write these things so that our joy may be full, or is it we are writing these things so that your joy may be full? And we have no idea which one the original said, but it really doesn't matter. But I don't think there's any,

you know, New Testament scholar who works in the field of textual criticism who would say the text that we have today doesn't bear a very close resemblance to what was originally written. Okay. So we have very good reason to think the New Testament documents are reliable. We now understand what the genre was, right? They went writing science fiction. How did you put it? They're ancient biographies is what the Gospels were.

Right. Okay. So then here's what I want to do. I want to get to the resurrection right now. Suppose you have like a minute to explain to me what happened to Christ, how he was killed, what happened, why he was killed, and the story of the resurrection. Just kind of break that down really briefly for us, and then I want to dig into it. Well, if I only had a minute, and we can unpack it, but if I only had a minute, I'd say, you know, we're all biased. Every one of us is biased in certain ways. Some of us want

the resurrection to happen, some not. Some of us really couldn't care less. So what we want to do is we want to really put a check on our bias. Let's consider those facts that have the, for which the data is so strong to support them that a nearly universal consensus of today's scholars agree on them. And that way we kind of rule out bias here, okay? So you've got Jesus' death by crucifixion, and shortly after, a number of his disciples had experiences they interpreted as appearances of the risen Jesus to them. And number three, a persecutor of the

church named Paul likewise had an experience while he was persecuting the church that he interpreted as an appearance of the risen Jesus to him. Now, these are pretty benign facts here, but they're facts upon which virtually everyone agrees. Now, what you do is you formulate a hypothesis, various hypotheses to account for those experiences that led them to believe Jesus had been raised and appeared to them, right? Well, if they actually had these experiences and believed it, they weren't lying. If they actually had these experiences, it wasn't a legend that developed over time. So what was it? You got hallucinations, you got a number of other explanations, and the resurrection hypothesis is the only hypothesis that can account for those facts in an adequate manner.

That's what I would say in a minute. Okay, so let's just throw a few objections out. Jesus didn't really die. It appeared that he died, maybe he was unconscious and eventually woke up. Yeah, well, that was somewhat popular a little over a hundred years ago, but it has been nearly universally rejected today by contemporary scholars, even skeptical ones. It's rare, extremely rare, to find a scholar who will propose this, and for a number of reasons. Number one, Jesus' death by crucifixion is attested in multiple independent sources. So not only do you have Paul, who's probably our earliest source, or perhaps is our earliest source, you've got it in all four Gospels,

so you have multiple independent Christian sources. You've got it in unsympathetic sources like Tacitus, Josephus, Lucian, Marabar, Serapion. There's even an embarrassing element to it, because when you read the ancient Jewish martyrdom literature, even the ancient Christian martyrdom literature, the martyrs come and they're very bold. Like in 2 Maccabees chapter 7, you've got seven Jewish brothers who are being tortured to death in unspeakable ways because they won't submit to the Seleucid king's edict or command at that time to eat pork. And at one point, you've got one of the Jewish brothers who's had the skin peeled off his head and his tongue cut out. They're going to cut off his hands and feet next, and he holds them out and he says to the king, go ahead and take these because I'm going to receive them back

in the resurrection. But for you, O king, there will be no resurrection. Well, then that's like, whoa, he's trash talking the king, you know. Of course, later on, you recognize these kinds of things. Some of them are embellishments, amplifications, because how do you say this to the king without a tongue, you know? So even you find this kind of stuff in the Christian literature. So it's and then right before the Jewish martyrs die, they will pray and they'll say something like, God, I did not forsake your law. So what happens with Jesus? Is he trash talking the Romans or the Jewish authorities?

No. In fact, right before he's arrested, he's saying, Father, if it's your will, let this cup pass from me. He wants out, if possible. Kind of embarrassing, because just shortly before that, he told his disciples, if you want to be my disciple, you ought to take up your cross and follow me. And now when it's time for Jesus to pick up his, he wants out. And then when he's on the cross, he doesn't say, God, I have not forsaken your law. He says, my God, why have you forsaken me? Right. So in other words, if these were the writings of merely kind of Christian fanaticists, zealots, they wouldn't be including these apparently embarrassing details. That's exactly right. They'd be doing the opposite. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, now I forgot what I was answering here. That's okay. Oh, Jesus' death by crucifixion. Yeah. So you've got multiple independent sources, unsympathetic sources. You've got,

it's rooted in eyewitness testimony, if not eyewitness testimony itself. You've got, did I say embarrassing sources? Yeah. The chances of surviving crucifixion are very small. So there's only one account in antiquity of a person surviving crucifixion. And in that account, Josephus reports seeing three of his friends crucified. So he went to his friend, the Roman commander Titus, and requested that he, as a friend to him, as a favor to him, that he spare the lives of his three friends. And as a favor to Josephus, he did have all three of the victims removed from their cross and provided every medical care that Rome could offer at that point, in spite of that two of the three still

died. So even if Jesus had been removed prematurely from his cross and medically assisted, his chances of survival were quite small. But on top of that, there is no evidence whatsoever that Jesus was removed from his cross before death, or that he was provided any medical care whatsoever, much less Rome's best. So any internet blogger can propose on the web, on a blog or a Facebook post or a tweet that Jesus survived his crucifixion. However, historians got to go where the evidence points and they have to go with probability. So given all the evidence we have for Jesus' death by crucifixion, without any evidence to the contrary, the historian at least has to conclude that Jesus was crucified and that the process killed him. Okay. The only problem is, though, when you start

weighing the probability of someone rising from the dead or someone didn't actually die, why not just go with he didn't actually die and that this is the second exception in antiquity, and maybe the apostles were horrified when they saw Christ so mangled and bloody, and then just decided to come up with a story. Isn't that possible? Okay, so we've got two things there. The probability of resurrection versus the probability that he survived crucifixion, and then you've got the fraud hypothesis. Disciples lied about it. So let's do with the probability first. First of all, the probability that Jesus died by crucifixion is very, very strong, given all the evidence we have and no evidence to the contrary.

How do you calculate the probability that Jesus was raised from the dead? Well, if you want to go, we know from natural law that when corpses die, they're going to stay dead. They're not coming back to life ever, at least by natural causes. And we see time after time with an exceptionless regularity that when a person dies, they're staying dead. They're not coming back to life by natural causes. That's what science tells us, okay? And we see it with an exceptionless regularity. However, nobody's ever claimed that Jesus was raised by natural causes, that he came back to life by natural causes. The claim is that God raised Jesus, and that's a game changer. Unless someone thinks that that is special pleading, it's not, because if we wanted to see, can a person walk on water?

And everyone in the world was tested by their governments. And more than seven billion people are unable to walk on water. And then finally, there's a little three year old boy by a swimming pool. He's the last one to try. And his dad comes up to him and says, give me your hands. And he gives him his hands. He holds him above his head, holds him over the swimming pool and says, all right, son, go ahead and walk.

gives him his hands, he holds him above his head, holds him over to the swimming pool, and says, all right, son, go ahead and walk. And he walks on water, and boom, 7 billion people unable to walk on water, tells us nothing pertaining to whether this boy could. You say, well, wait a minute, that's cheating, because someone helped him. You have an external agent assisting him. That's exactly right. It's a game changer. And 100 billion people unable to rise by natural causes tells us nothing

pertaining to whether God could raise Jesus if he wanted to. It has no relation whatsoever. So the question is, do we have good reason to think that Jesus was raised from the dead? And one of the facts that is agreed on by virtually every historian of Jesus, regardless of their background, is that Jesus performed deeds that astonished crowds, and that both he and his followers regarded as divine miracles and exorcisms. That's not to say that they were divine miracles and exorcisms, but they did astonish crowds, and they were regarded by Jesus and his followers as divine miracles and exorcisms. And we get that through things like multiple independent sources, etc. So that's a context. You've got him performing these astonishing deeds that he's called divine miracles and exorcisms. You have Jesus teaching that he is

God's agent. He's got a special relationship with God who has chosen him to usher in his kingdom. That is agreed upon by virtually every historian of Jesus, regardless of one's background. So even just by that, he claims to be God's divine agent. He performs deeds that astonish his crowds. Just those things agreed upon by virtually all scholars create a historical background where we might expect a God to act if Jesus truly was who he claimed to be. So when we see all the historical evidence pointing to resurrection, well, then that becomes far more likely than Jesus surviving crucifixion.

The only way to get rid of that is to give a conclusive argument that God does not exist, and no one's been able to do that. In fact, I think we've got really good evidence that he does exist from other arguments. Right, but I can agree that God exists and still perhaps try to argue that Christ didn't really die, still appeared to his disciples, and then his disciples just lied about it maybe because they were embarrassed or something. All right, so let's consider that. We've got testimonies from Luke, Tertullian, John, Dionysus of Corinth, Origen, Polycarp, Ignatius, and Clement of Rome.

Just a few here. Some more. There are some more, but there's just a few that show that these disciples were willing to suffer continuously, and they were willing to die for their gospel proclamation. Now, certainly you could, you know, you say, wait a minute, you've got Muslim jihadists who are willing to die for their cause, willing to commit suicide. That's true. And why do they do that? Because they really believe Islam is true. You're not going to get a guy who gets signed, hey, I want to serve Islam. Okay, strap this bomb on your back and go kill these people. And then he sits back and think, well, let's see, you know, the Quran is not

divinely inspired. Muhammad was a false prophet. And if I do kill all these innocent people, I might go to hell. Sign me up. You know, that's not what's going to happen. They do it because they sincerely believe that Islam is true. And likewise, the disciples sincerely believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead. This is evidence through their continuous commitment to endure persecution and even willing to go to their deaths. Liars make poor martyrs, right? Right. And although I think we've all heard that the apostles, save John, were martyred, we know that through tradition, but isn't it true that we don't really have good evidence for that except for perhaps Peter and Paul?

I'd say Peter, Paul, James, the half-brother of Jesus. Those are the ones that I think we can have a lot of confidence that they were actually martyred. But these other sources even tell us that these disciples were willing to suffer continuously. And you think that's enough? It is, because let's say we're together in a restaurant and someone comes up to us and say, hey, you guys are in Christian ministry, you're Christian apologists, you defend the truth of Christianity, you got to die unless you'll deny Christ. And they say, okay, Matt, let's start with you. What do you think? Are you willing to deny Christ? And you say, Jesus is Lord, and so they shoot you. And then they look at me and they say, all right, Lacona, do you believe, are you willing to deny Christ? And just then,

hey man, we're in Georgia, concealed carry, someone stands up and shoots that guy. So I didn't die, but I was willing to say yes. I was willing to confess it. I just didn't get killed for it. I was still willing to die. My faith was the same as yours. So, yeah, they see Peter, they see Paul, they see James die, and they continue to do the same thing. Yeah, they're willing to die. Now, some of them probably did die as martyrs. We just don't have the same kind of evidence as we have for Peter, Paul, and James. All right, fair enough. What about a lookalike? Maybe it wasn't actually Jesus on the cross. Maybe it was somebody who looked like him. My understanding is that Islam or some Muslims hold to something like that. Yeah, Muslims claim that God, well, there's a couple of different,

one thing is that they only made Jesus appear to die. He was actually crucified. They made it appear that he died, and they removed him off the cross. God healed him and took him to die. He was actually crucified. They made it appear that he died, and they removed him off the cross. God healed him and took him to heaven. The other is that God made another one, like maybe Simon of Cyrene, or as the Gospel of Barnabas says, made Judas look like Jesus, and they took him and they crucified him instead. So a couple problems with that. One would be, that's certainly not going to convince Paul, right? A lookalike. It wouldn't convince Paul. It could convince the others if Christ had then appeared to them, and we could just say Paul was hallucinating. And it's a lot more likely that one person

hallucinates than a crowd does. Yeah. Except with Thomas, they said that Thomas, no, I'm sorry, Judas, that the Gospel of Barnabas says that, you know, he was made to look like Jesus, you got Matthew saying that he went out and hanged himself, right? And however you want to reconcile that with Acts, it says he fell headlong. But either way, they both reported that Judas had died. It's not like he just disappeared. He went out and died, committed suicide after that. So that wouldn't fit with that kind of theory. And then you got to look and you say, okay, was this a supernatural thing that someone was made to look like Jesus? Or was this just mistaken identity? that God made someone look like Jesus, then why—we can understand why God would deceive

the Jewish authorities, the Romans, but why would he deceive the disciples of Jesus and lead them to believe that Jesus had died for their sins and rose from the dead, and then build the largest religion in the world and the greatest defeater, the strongest defeater of Islam today. Why would he do that? That wouldn't seem to be very wise of God. And the Quran refers to the disciples of Jesus as Muslims. And that means that God deceived Jesus' disciples who were Muslims. And if he's willing to deceive them, how do you know that he's not deceiving you and Muhammad's followers back then and you today? Gosh, that's a very good response. Have you debated Muslim scholars on this point?

I have. I can tell. Okay, so from what you've said then, I was about to go to, you know, maybe the women went to a different tomb and found that different tomb empty. What do you say to that? I think you may have already responded to that, given that the disciples had appearances of the risen Christ. What do you say, I guess, just in general to the hallucination theory? Well, in terms of the wrong tomb, let's do with that first. The wrong tomb theory, that the women went to the wrong tomb, let's face it, when the women came back, if the Gospels are correct, the disciples didn't believe based on their testimony.

You've got John that says Peter and the beloved disciple ran to the tomb. Peter left, you know, and, you know, confused. The beloved disciple saw and believed. He's about the only one, if we interpret that believe to mean believe Jesus had been raised. It's a difficult verse there. He believed, yet they didn't understand the scriptures. So that's kind of odd. Could they have went to the wrong tomb also? Not just the women, but the disciples? Possible.

I suppose they could have, but even then, when the disciples went, Saul, when Peter and the beloved disciples, especially Peter, when he saw the tomb was empty, it didn't say he believed. It didn't even say the women believed, right? In fact, Mary came back and said, they've taken the body. We don't know where they've laid him. And later they're saying, you know, she's speaking to who she thinks is the gardener. And hey, if you've taken him and reburied him somewhere, let me know so that I can get him. So the empty tomb did not convince them Jesus had been raised. It was the appearances that convinced them Jesus had been raised.

Theft, an empty tomb could have only indicated theft to them. And certainly that would have been the first thing that Paul would have suspected. Okay. What else is there? What's another? What do you got hallucinations you mentioned, right? Yeah. Okay. Hallucinations. Okay. So first, let's understand what a hallucination is. It is a distorted perception of reality. You think you're seeing if it's a visual hallucination, you think you're seeing something that's not actually there. If it's an auditory, you think you're hearing something like a voice or music, but that's not actually there. And we've all had like an auditory hallucination where we thought we heard someone call our name, but they didn't. We've had a tactile hallucination when we put our cell phone in our pocket during a lecture and we had it on silence and we thought

that it, we felt it vibrate and we pulled it out thinking we got a text message and it's like, nope, nobody loves me. And it's like, that's a tactile hallucination. We've also had what are called kinesthetic hallucinations. That's when you are like, you have a sense of motion. So you might be having a dream that you're falling and then you wake up. That is a kinesthetic hallucination. The person most likely to experience a hallucination is a person grieving over the loss of a loved one. And multiple studies have shown an average of 7% of them experience a visual hallucination. Moreover, hallucinations, because they are distorted perceptions of reality, false, not distorted, they're false sensory perceptions. They're going on in my mind.

They're not going on in your mind simultaneously. I couldn't wake up my wife and say, honey, I'm having a dream. I'm in Maui. Go back to sleep. Join me in my dream and let's have a free vacation. You can't participate in the same dream. You might dream you're having, having, you might dream you're in the same place, but you're not interacting with one another in the same way, in the same dream. It's not the same dream in this because it's going on in your head. It's no external reality. And it's the same with a hallucination. You can't have a group hallucination. You can have a group illusion, like you think you see Mary in the side of a building that has mirror glasses on it, you know, but you can have an optical illusion, but you're not going to have a mass hallucination. Okay? So with that, consider that

not 7%, but an unthinkable 100% of Jesus' disciples had these experiences that they interpreted as the risen Jesus appearing to them. Number two, there are multiple group appearances that are reported. Even in the earliest report, in 1 Corinthians 15, verses 3 through 8 and 3 through 7, go back very early as an oral tradition, you've got three group appearances, to the 12, to more than 500, and to all the apostles. You've got other group appearances reported in the Gospels. So this wasn't a hallucination. And then you got the appearance to Paul. Paul's not grieving. Paul thought Jesus was a failed Messiah and a false prophet.

So Jesus would have been the last person in the universe that Paul would have expected to see or wanted to see. And if we grant the empty tomb, hallucinations don't explain how the tomb got empty. The body should have still been in there. So there's all kinds of reasons. A hallucination wouldn't lead to the impression or thought that someone's grave was now empty. They thought that the person was raised spiritually, that their ghost, their spirit was appearing to them. There's all kinds of reasons to reject the hallucination hypothesis. Okay, yeah. Why not think that perhaps the disciples did interpret it as a spiritual event, and it was something for which they were willing to die? Well, because we don't have any evidence for that, you know, that they interpreted as a spiritual

event. All four Gospels talk about an empty tomb. You've also got appearances in Matthew, Luke, and John, and the appearances are predicted in Mark 14, 28. You've got Paul, who would be our primary source, our best source here, because he's very early, and we can certainly connect him with the Jerusalem apostolic leadership. And in 1 Corinthians 15, he says in verse 20, Christ is the firstfruits of those who are asleep. In other words, he's the first to be raised from the dead in the general resurrection. In verse 23, he says, but each in his own order, Christ the firstfruits, after that, those who belong to him at his coming. So Christ is raised from the dead, and then we will be raised when he returns, at the general resurrection.

But remember, Christ is the first fruit. So basically how Jesus was raised is how we're going to be raised. So now we look at how Paul says we're going to be raised. And like in Philippians 3.20 or 21, he says, the Spirit who—oh, I'm sorry, Philippians 3.20 or 21, he says, we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus, who will transform our humble body to be conformed to his own. It's a transformation of our body. Romans 8.11, the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead will also, also give life to your mortal bodies. And in verse 23, he talks about the redemption of our body, bodily resurrection. And then in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, verse 13 and following, he says, I don't want you to grieve as those who have no hope, because those who have died, Christ is going to bring back with him when he returns.

So he's bringing back the spirits of the dead when they return. And then he says, the trumpet will sound and the dead in Christ will be raised first. Now, wait a minute. He said he's bringing the dead in Christ back with him. So how are they going to be raised? Well, that a minute. He said he's bringing the dead in Christ back with him. So how are they going to be raised? Well, that's easy. He's bringing back the spirits, and then those spirits are going to be put back into the corpses, which will then be resurrected and transformed into an immortal resurrection body. It's a bodily resurrection. So Paul talks about bodily

resurrection throughout for us, and if we're going to be raised in the same way Christ was raised, that means He was raised bodily, physically from the dead, leaving behind an empty grave, entirely consistent with what we read in the Gospels. Fair enough. Nothing that should say it's just a spiritual resurrection. You've studied this issue more than most people on the planet. Let's just do a thought experiment. Suppose God does exist, but Jesus Christ, contrary to you, wasn't actually raised from the dead. What then do you think is the best explanation, if that's the case? To be honest with you, Matt, you know, I have been doing this for a while and trying to look at it as objectively as possible.

I don't think there are other explanations that do as well as the resurrection hypothesis, not even close. I don't think there are any strong alternative explanations. I try to do thought experiments to come up with things, because we don't have to fear truth. My greatest fear is that my biases will keep me from discovering truth, and it costs me eternity. Sorry, that was a lovely point, and I just cut you off. No, it's okay. But here's a thought experiment. Extraterrestrial life exists. They have a plan for human history.

And so, therefore, after the death of Christ, you know, orchestrated things in such a way that the disciples would come to believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. They became sort of incarnate as Jesus, if you want. They took on his appearance, gave that impression. He didn't really rise from the dead, but, of course, the disciples thought that. That's a possibility, right? Well, sure, it's a possibility. But do you know what's funny? Once you start hearing objections to the resurrection that are this outlandish, you start wondering what it is you're running from. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. And I would agree, Jesus is an alien. He was not from this world, right?

And I would agree, Jesus is an alien. He was not from this world, right? But in all seriousness, I mean, we couldn't disprove that hypothesis. But is that, like you were just insinuating a moment ago, is that really what you want to go with over resurrection, especially when eternity may be in the balance? Well, yeah, so I suppose to that point, I would say, I don't choose any alternative, you know. Just like you, Mike, I mean, there are issues that you haven't looked deep into, but you dismiss. I don't know you personally, so I'm just going to throw a couple out there and see if you do dismiss them. I'm a Catholic. You're evangelical. You've probably heard of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Guadalupe to Juan Diego. It's said, this is in Mexico, that conversions began occurring at an astounding

rate. The missionaries were in awe of what was happening. The Indians were coming from everywhere to be baptized and receive the sacraments. Within eight years, you've got almost nine million Indians had converted. That would be one example. I could give another example of Our Lady at Fatima, where they talk about the miracle of the sun taking place. And I could say you've got these non-bias sources, you know, communist atheistic newspapers who are also attesting to the truth of the sun. Something's going on here. I'm not wanting to look at any of these particularly. I'm just pointing out that there are all these other stories like Joseph Smith receiving the golden plates from the angel Moroni, these sorts of things. I could see someone coming up with a similar thing that you're doing. They're saying, okay, we can accept these basic facts and then we can conclude that the only possible, you know, the only reasonable explanation

is that this thing did occur. And I would imagine that you would look at that and you would say to your Mormon friends, yeah, I'm just not going to accept it. And you would probably say something like, because I have, I don't know what you'd say, but you probably see where I'm coming from. What would you say to that in general? Well, I'd say in terms of the Marian apparitions, yeah, I can't verify them. I do think something happened in some of these, or maybe even in all of them. Lourdes, Medjugorje. Now, the Medjugorje, I've got a friend, Ken Samples, who has, you know, looked into that one and actually interviewed one of the seers, and then afterward spoke to that, witnessed that seer having an apparition even recently. So, uh,

well, at least that's, that's, that's one of the apparitions I'm most doubtful of. I don't think, yeah, I would agree with that. And the reason being is he, he asked if Mary had ever said anything to him. This is one of the original seers for, for the Medjugorje, uh, youth. And he said, and the seer said, yes. And he said, well, what did she say to you? She told me to read a book and here's the title. And so he looked up the title and it was a book- Filled with heresies. The occult. Yeah. So that could be demonic. Some of these others, I'm not going to claim it's demonic. I'm open to it being Mary. I'm not a Catholic. My theology would kind of

bend me in the direction to say it may not have been Mary. I don't see, because I don't have that kind of a high view of Mary. I mean, yeah, I think she's great and stuff, but I don't have the same high view as a Catholic or an Orthodox might have. I love that. I would love to see like what Catholics say about Mary, you da da da da da da and then you yeah she's great and stuff sorry that was just funny keep going um so I think she's great and stuff too yeah yeah so um you know I'm not going to deny that she actually I I've just opened I'm open to it I'm not going to deny that a supernatural I think probably a supernatural event of of some sort occurred, and maybe it was Mary.

Now, with Joseph Smith, I would say that guy was a fraud. I think we've got good reason to believe he was a fraud, that there never were some golden plates, or if they were, they were fabricated. Then they went missing, you know. The 11 people that testify in the front of the Book of Mormon that they actually saw the 11 plates, when Joseph Smith was killed later on, eight of them left Mormonism, and the only three that remained were related to Smith. So, I mean, you've got a plausible naturalistic explanation for that one. and I suppose you would say that you don't have to assess every alleged supernatural hypothesis in order to say that there's good reason to think Jesus Christ rose from the dead but then I guess what I'm getting at is how do you make people interested in something like if I get a couple of Mormon boys come to my door to talk to me about Joseph Smith I'm really uninterested. And I'm not even saying that as a virtuous thing. I don't have time to care about every potential thing that's taken place. And I have a set of views that kind of lean me against that

particular view. So when dealing with skeptics, how do you get them interested in this? How do you make the resurrection of Christ seem different to things like Joseph Smith or the Virgin Mary appearing in my toast or something? Well, Matt, I mean, I don't know. I mean, if they're not interested, there's nothing that... I mean, I can try if I want to try to make them interested by raising some issues. Like, I don't know. A lot of times when I'm sharing Christ with someone might be when I'm on the plane flying somewhere, you know, and I'm sitting next to a person and usually I'll just ask him, well,

do you live here in Atlanta or are you just flying through or, you know, of course we're headed to the same place, but, you know, why are you going out there? And we just get a friendly conversation. And then it's just typical for them to say, well, what do you do for a living? And I say, well, I'm a New Testament historian, and, you know, I focus on, you know, what can we actually know about Jesus? And focused on some issues like the reliability of the Gospels, and, wow, you know, discovered that the evidence that Jesus actually rose from the dead is quite astonishing. And so I lecture on that a lot. And then I see what they do with that, you know, and a lot of times they'll say, really, you know,

there's evidence for the resurrection, and I get in a conversation with them. But a lot of times, you know, that person will just, oh, and then they just turn away. They're done with the conversation. Well, I don't do anything then. It's like, great. Now I get to read and do some research and read some books or journal articles for the rest of the flight, you know? So I don't try to force it. If a person is really hungry and thinking about things, then I'll talk to them. If they're not, I don't try to force it. I had a pretty intense, dramatic, emotional conversion when I was 17 years old. I claimed to be agnostic prior to this point. And maybe like you and like many other Christians, I came home very happy, very intense, going around speaking to everybody about

our blessed Lord, whether they wanted to hear about it or not. And you soon discover that there are more prudent ways to go about evangelizing, that if you just start talking about Jesus to any random person, that might be, you know, more of a turnoff. It might do more harm than good, so to speak. So I like that approach. It's sort of, yeah, you're not like a used car salesman trying to get them to buy something at all costs. You're rather saying like, this is something that we have good evidence for, and this is why I believe it. And you respect the person's free will and then have a have a i think that's probably more conducive to a fruitful

discussion yeah i'm with you on that you know what do you say then okay wrapping up um what does this mean for us and here i do mean to get sort of sort of in the religious sense like what does that mean for our lives you know little, little old Matt Fradd who's trying to grow a beard, but probably can't. He may have just had coronavirus, but it turns out he didn't. Have four kids, you know,

trying to raise them the best that I can. You know, or whoever it is watching right now with their own struggles, their own issues. If Jesus Christ, this man that is said to have lived 2,000 plus years ago, rose from the dead. What does that mean for us? That's a good question. Well, it does mean that Christianity is true, right? But sometimes that can just be one of those brute facts for us, and we, you know, okay, well, yeah, but what does that do for me today, you know? So I think I mentioned earlier that my mom died seven years ago, dad six years ago.

And the resurrection of Jesus took on a deeper meaning for me at that time because, you know, I miss them. It's like, wow, I want to see them again. A year ago, my dog died. We had that dog for 16 and a half years. Love that dog. And so we took it to the vet and put it down. And I'm holding the dog in my arms, my hands. Well, you know, they administered the medication, the chemicals to put her to sleep.

And, you know, he puts the stethoscope on her and he says, okay, she's gone. And I'm thinking, you know, just a minute ago, I'm sorry, I feel a little choked up now just talking about it. But it's like just a minute ago, you know, she was alive and all the so many memories just go through your mind of, you know, what that dog was to me over the 16 and a half years. And it's like, well, she's gone. I'll never see her again. And I have no promises from scripture that I'm going to see this dog again. It just might be that I will never experience this dog ever again. And at moments like that, you just really appreciate the resurrection of Jesus, because if Christ was raised, we are going to be raised, and the Christian life is worth living. That means that I'm going to see my mom and dad again,

my grandparents, loved ones, my kids, my wife died, so I'm going to see them again. I can have that assurance. It's going to make a huge difference in dealing with grief. Now, you don't do it just so you have a psychological crutch, but if Christ really rose from the dead, why not reap all the emotional benefits from it as well? So it gives us hope of eternal life, hope that we're going to see our loved ones again. And here in the United States, we live pretty good lives, most of us, pretty Even, um, those who are the poor here in our country live a lot better than people who are like middle-class and other countries. Um, so, you know, but, but the, the people who are really, really hurting in this world, who are oppressed terribly. I think of the person,

the African American back in the 1950s and 60s, who was falsely, or even before then, who was falsely accused for a crime he never committed and went to prison and spent the majority, if not his entire adult life in prison, so that someone, the real criminal, could go free and live his life. If God does not exist, then there's no one who's going to make that right. Evil deeds go unpunished forever. You think of the woman who is trapped in human trafficking, sex slavery, whether it's in this country or even outside of this country. You know, what hope is there for

someone like that if she ends up spending her entire life in sex slavery? If God does not exist, then injustices go unanswered. So these are just horrible things. John Lennon asked us to imagine what it would be like if God doesn't exist, there's no heaven. It's a terrifying thought, because injustices go unpunished, you have goodness goes unrewarded, and death is final. But if Jesus rose from the dead, then injustices will go answered. They will be answered. The wicked will be called to account and they will be punished for these things. Goodness will be rewarded and death is not final. It's a glorious thing, the resurrection of Jesus.

Beautiful. Thank you so much. What one book would you recommend a lay person pick up if they want to learn more about the reliability of the resurrection and the Gospels in general? If they want to learn about the resurrection, if they're not used to reading stuff that is at least somewhat academic, then I'd recommend the book that Gary Habermas and I co-authored, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. It's like a self-study course. If they're really motivated and they're used to reading some stuff that's not just the kind of stuff you'd pick up at Walmart, you know, by, you know, you're used to reading some heavier stuff. Then my book, The Resurrection of Jesus, A New Historiographical Approach. Yes, it's 700 pages, but I've had people say that it's an easy

read. It reads more like 75 pages. I don't know if that's true, but a lot of people said they've been able to get through it. And that will go into a whole lot of people said they've been able to get through it. And that will go into a whole lot of detail. Yes, it's got Greek in it, but I translate it and things like that. Stuff on the historical reliability of the Gospels, there's a couple of really good books out. There's one by—probably the best one's by Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. You know, it's a very good book. Peter Williams more recently has written one. It's a lot simpler, a lot smaller. It covers the basic stuff.

If you want to get into some real heavier stuff on gospel reliability that you can read kind of quickly, I did publish an article in a journal last year that you can access for free on my website, risenjesus.com, and it's Are the Gospels Historically Reliable? And in there I define what do I mean by historically reliable, and then I say, okay, let's compare, say, the Gospel of Mark with the biography that's probably considered the best in antiquity, Suetonius's Life of Augustus. And let's compare that. Suetonius writes more like we do today than any other ancient biographer. Let's take his finest biography and match it up with Gospel of Mark and see what happens. And that's what I do in that article. So they could do that. Do me a favor, Mike, and send me that by email or text, and I'll make sure that that's all in

the show notes of people so they can easily click to those books or that article. And then finally, how can people learn more about you, maybe some of the talks you've given or where you'll be speaking in the future, or is there something else people should know about? Yeah, well, thanks for asking. Let me mention those. For one, I do teach at Houston Baptist University. We are not, I mean, we're a Baptist university, but we have Catholics, we have Protestants from all sorts of denominations there, and we have a broad evangelical tent there at Houston Baptist University. So we've got a great Master of Arts in Christian apologetics, and people can complete this entirely at a distance if they want,

and it's fully accredited. So that's one way. Another thing, they can go to my website, risenjesus.com. We've got articles and videos there and all kinds of stuff. And if they want me to speak for their church or a conference, something like that, they can contact me through my website. And we're donor-supported, too, so we'd appreciate it if they'd consider that, and they can donate on our website. A third thing is they can go to my YouTube channel, which, just go to YouTube, type in my name, Mike Licona, L-I-C-O-N-A, and that'll take you to my channel. I've got over 200 videos, and we're producing, in fact, through the month of April, every weekday, we're uploading a new short video on Jesus, his death, his resurrection, things like that, what we can know about him.

One to three minutes. And just go there, subscribe, hit that little bell icon so that you get alerted every time. And next month in June, we've got a new series coming out that you just do not want to miss. It's called A Fly on the Wall. And you can be a fly on the wall while I have interviews with some really great scholars and interesting people. I look forward to it. All right. That was a fantastic discussion. We are going to go over to Patreon now to conclude it. I'm going to talk to Mike about what he thinks about Catholics, about a very interesting conversation that him and Dr. William Lane Craig had one day in the back of a car talking about Catholics. We speak of what we can learn from each other, and he has some really

interesting things to say. But the only way you can watch it is by going and becoming a patron right now. It really does mean a ton to us. All this work that we're doing doesn't just happen. It only happens because, you know, our patrons make it happen. So go to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. You see all the free stuff here. You get all this stuff in return. And we're just pumping out a bunch of content. We've got online courses on Dante, video courses, by the way, Flannery O'Connor. We have one on the Western books,

the great books of the Western canon coming out. We have one hopefully on Augustine's Confessions. These are video courses that are led by some of the experts in the field and they actually are dialoguing with you they're not just recording a video and going away they're recording these courses just for my patrons and then engaging with you specifically in the comment section look you get beer steins look at that books stuff sent to your door please consider a patron, even for a dollar a month. It would really help us out. Patreon.com slash Matt Fradd.

Patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. And, I mean, check this out. This is the greatest beer stein drinking vessel in the history of drinking vessels. You may have heard of the Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumbler. Literally has nothing on this. These are made one at a time in the United States. They actually have to be hand painted to get into these smaller areas. It's used great, as I say, as a coffee cup or a beer stein.

You can get that if you become a patron at a particular level. So go check out patreon.com slash Matt Fred. And that'll do. See you next time. And to you patrons, please, right now, go over to patreon.com. You're going to love this discussion

I just had with Dr. Michael O'Connor. Thanks.