Pints With Aquinas - Dr. Brant Pitre DESTROYS Tiktok Heretics

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

It's Last Call! Catholic biblical scholar, Dr. Brant Pitre, is back to absolutely DESTROY heretical TikTokers (in a nice way) with Last Call host, Matt Fradd. Pints: Last Call Ep. 5 📚Resources Mentioned:  The Case for Jesus: https://a.co/d/0gPXFWeA What Are the Gospels? https://a.co/d/03Ehs8j2 Jimmy Akin vs Bart Ehrman Debate: https://youtu.be/Zn7lmu0pek0?si=_g1gVA9eGjlmxmmT https://truthly.ai https://www.catholic.com https://www.vatican.va - - - Today's Sponsors: PreBorn: Make a difference for generations to come. Donate securely online at https://preborn.com/PINTS or dial #250 keyword 'BABY' Good Ranchers: Get $25 off your first order and FREE meat for life when you use code PINTS at https://GoodRanchers.com   Seven Weeks Coffee: Save up to 25% with promo code 'PINTS' at https://sevenweekscoffee.com/PINTS - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month your first year. Terms apply on covered repairs. So you're not reading the original word of God. You're reading someone's interpretation of a translation, and yet you still think it's an errand. So I'm sorry, Brian, because I know clearly you weren't ready to hear that. So I just, he just doesn't understand how translations work. Destroy!

Dr. Petra, thank you very much for being here. Thanks, Matt, for having me. I'm happy to be here. Very excited to review some skeptical TikToks with you today. This would be my first time on TikTok. I'm not ever seen TikTok. You're a beautiful man. This reminds me I was walking down the road with my wife and I said to her something about

Was it Kanye West or something? And she went, I don't know, who's that? And I went, you're so precious And then somehow in the same conversation only fans came up. And she went, is that like a sporting thing? I went, you're so beautiful. I'm not letting anybody talk to you. That is awesome. So that's really cool. Anyway, so this is my maiden voyage here with TikTok. So All right, but more general question before we look at these TikToks, and that is, you know, any worldview anyone holds, there's going to be, generally speaking, somebody who's going to press against that worldview, and we're going to have to live in a world where we don't always know the answers to things. And it saddens me that Christians have lost their faith over such poor arguments, say, against scripture or this sort of thing.

But just generally, what should a Christians out of the way? that you'd be or how should they respond when they hear an objection that rattles them, I suppose. Okay, this is a really good question. The first thing I would say is it's okay to not know the answer, but it's not okay to not seek it once you realize that. Okay. So one thing I would really stress to any, especially anyone engaged in apologetics,

like giving an explanation for your faith. If you don't know the answer, say that. Like, be honest. I don't know, but don't leave it there. I don't know, but I'm going to find out. And then if you're having a conversation with a loved one or a friend or a coworker, follow up on it. Actually go do some research.

And when you've got an answer, you find satisfying and then come back and share it with that person. Because there's so much to know, especially as a Catholic. I mean, there's so many church fathers, so many councils, so many. You could spend multiple lifetimes, not even scratching the surface of the depth and the breadth and the wisdom of the faith. So it's okay. You don't know the answers. It's fine. Like, there's a lot of answers.

You're not going to know. The important thing is to ask questions and honestly seek the answers. Sometimes I'll tell my students, if you're not asking questions, then you're not on a quest. Like, a question means I'm on a quest for the truth. That's what we all should be. So it's okay to not know the answers, but not okay to just leave it there. So go look at the Bible, look at the catechism, look at good resources and good scholars or people that you respect church fathers and saints and ask what, what did they say about it? And then when you found those answers, share them with the people you didn't have.

So that would be my piece of advice there. It's okay. Yeah, one resource I would point people to. I'm not sure if you've heard of it. I'm the co-founder of this full disclosure, so you can't say you don't like it. And that is truthfully. Truthly. So truthfully is like chat, GPT went through OCI.

and it just became the world's greatest evangelist. So I would recommend people check that out. Obviously, Catholic.com is a great place to go to if you have questions about the faiths. So check that out as well. And also the Vatican website. The Catechism of Catholic Church is all there online. I'm a book guy. I'm a whole school.

But we have more access to more resources than any generation in the whole history of the church. So, I mean, the sources are there. we just have to learn to access them. All right. Now, you have not seen any of these TikToks. I haven't seen a TikTok. You don't even know what TikTok is. There's something to do with a clock?

I thought it was a clock. Yeah, yeah. For a long time. All right, so let's look at this first one and then we'll respond. Things that Christians aren't ready to hear. With me, a former pastor, now atheist. We don't know a single word that Jesus actually said. We know none.

I want you to let that sink in. The Gospels were in decades after his death, in Greek, non-Aramaic, the language he actually spoke. Every quote is already a translation, and it's often reshaped to fit the agenda of different communities. The Gospels don't even agree on what Jesus said. Matthew's Lord's Prayer is different than Luke's. The beatitudes aren't the same. Jesus' last words on the cross. Four Gospels, four different versions.

That's not consistency. That's contradiction. The earliest Christian writer, Paul, never records a single teaching of Jesus. No parables. No sermons. No prayers. Nothing. So let's just be honest. When you say Jesus said, you're not actually quoting him. You're quoting church spin centuries removed. So let's stop pretending you got his actual words. Because you don't. What you have is myth, editing and wishful thinking dressed up as history.

Oh, so first of all, this fella seems like he's got a chip. on his shoulder. Now, I do like the, I do like the Lion King'ship. I'll give him that. But what do you say to that? We don't even know what Jesus said and it's just church spin. It's translations of translations of translations. And besides, Paul doesn't talk about the parables. Wow. Okay, there's like so many errors built in this one video that might take me a second. But let me try to break a few of them down. Number one, he's, the first thing I would say is his statement that we don't know a single word, Jesus said, is just patently false because he's operating on a principle that is mistaken. What he means is we don't have verbatim transcripts, right?

Like a court stenographer, you know, recording that. If that's what you meant by it, like that we don't have a verbatim transcript, then yeah, that would be the case. But that's not the standard that we require for knowing what someone did or said. Because although we don't have verbatim transcripts, we do have biographies. And they do tell us what Jesus did and what he said. So this is really important. So just because there are discrepancies, like he mentioned, between, say, Matthew's version, I think he said, of the Lord's Prayer, and Luke's version, Lord's Prayer,

doesn't mean they're not telling us what Jesus said for a couple reasons. First, I can relate a conversation to you about something I said yesterday, and I can do it in a short version or I could do it in a long version. The longer one might be more exact, but they both are going to be substantially true, as long as they are accurate representations of the substance of what I said. So I think it's a particularly modern demand that we have like verbatim accuracy in order to have truth.

But we don't even do that in an ordinary conversation. So that's the first point, I would say. I think he's assuming mistakenly that the Gospels aren't verbatim transcripts and then they're not telling us what Jesus said. That's false. Second, gosh, there's so many, there's so many errors. He said what we're getting in the Gospels is not history, but myth centuries removed. Okay, that's just flat out wrong.

even the most skeptical New Testament scholars date the Gospels to, at latest, 70 AD with the Gospel of Mark being the earliest, and then 95 AD with the Gospel of John being less. That's the late date setting. So that only puts the Gospels some 40 to 60 years at most away from the events that they purport to record, not centuries later. That's ridiculous. Also, there are actually scholars who argue that the Gospels were written much earlier,

even into the 40s, which would only put them 20 years after the crucifixion. And when you're interviewing someone, like, so for example, if someone was in World War II, they might give me an account of what happened in World War II in 1985 or even 1995. And that doesn't make it less accurate. What matters is who's giving the account? And were they eyewitness to the event? Did they have personal proximity to it? So even if the Gospels are decades after, they're actually still perfectly

able, especially if they're written by eyewitnesses like Matthew or John, to give you testimony to what Jesus did and said. So the idea that we don't have any access to what he said or what he did is just patently false. It's just not true. Do we not have audio recordings? Yeah, but we don't have that for any ancient history. But no one goes around saying, we don't know what Alexander the Great did or said or we don't know what Josephus did or said or what Julius Caesar. This is how ancient biographies in ancient history works. Third, the whole point about Paul, Paul doesn't have the sermon of the mountain. Yeah, that's because Paul wasn't writing a biography. He's writing letters, okay? So it's a question of genre, right? So Paul's contribution to the New Testament are epistles.

They are letters that were meant to instruct, to exhort, to correct, and to inform various Christian churches throughout the world. So he's writing a particular kind of document with a particular aim. His aim is not to give an account of the life and the death or the sayings and teachings of Jesus. It's really to exhort, frankly, too, to reflect on the mystery of Jesus' passion, death, resurrection. Now, with that said, he's actually not even right about the fact that we don't have any sayings because he's forgetting 1st Corinthians 11, in which Paul actually says, I received when I handed on to you that on the night Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, said, this is my body given for you, and they took a cup and said, this is my blood, do this in

memory of me. So actually, to the contrary, the earliest recorded words we have of Jesus, if Paul's letters are the earliest are in the letter to the Corinthians, and they're the words of institution, which is pretty powerful as a Catholic to think about. The earliest recorded words of Jesus might have are about the Eucharist. So he didn't even get that right. So I mean, I wouldn't give this guy too much credence, because if he hasn't read First Corinthians, he's probably wrong about the rest of the New Testament as well. Destroyed. All right, God bless you, Lank and Guy.

Let's take a look at the next one, your dear friend. Have you met Bart? Do you know Bart? Many years ago at a conference. We don't know one another personally, but I met him when I was in the United States. All right, let's see what Bart Ehrman has to say. I am firmly convinced that Jesus never talked about himself as God. We have the first three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Most scholars today continue to think that Matthew and Luke had access to some other source of written source of information that they call Q. Matthew has some materials not found in Mark or Luke, so they say, well, that came from some other sources, and Luke has some material not found in Mark and Luke, so that's other sources. Okay, so you have Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Matthew's special sources, and L, Luke's special sources. If you look at all of that material, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Q, M, and L, all of our earliest sources, where Jesus starts calling himself God is the Gospel of John. our last source. It seems to be completely implausible that six authors would describe the sayings of Jesus, knowing that he's called himself God, and neglect to mention that part.

Like, that bitch just isn't important enough to bring up. And so I think it's completely implausible. There you go. So Jesus never claimed to be God. I guess this perceived divinity kind of took shape in very later on. Sure. Oh, yeah. This is, okay. This is important. Actually, so my book, the case for Jesus, I dealt with actually Bart's particular claim here. So I would say if he were right and we had six authors who in which Jesus never claimed to be God and only one in which he did, John, then that would be a very powerful argument. But it's just not true. So let's back up and say why. First of all, the hypothesis he refers to there, the Q hypothesis, that there was an independent source that Matthew and Luke both utilized, that they didn't know one of other, but they used Mark, and then they also used Q, which is from the German word Kvella, which means source, and then that their independent material, special M and special L were sources

they also drawn. That's possible, but it's hypothetical. Like, no one's ever found a copy of Q, there's no manuscripts of Q. Some people will try to argue that Papius refers to collections of saying that might be Q, but he actually says that it's by Matthew. So, he might actually just be referring to the gospel, Matthew, as we know it. And that's certainly how he was interpreting. So first of all, the whole. schema he laid out here of six authors is hypothetical. It's speculative. It's not like it's a fact. But let's take that off the table, even if it were just three authors against one. So Matthew, Mark, and Luke had a merely human Jesus and only John had a divine Jesus. Again, that would be a powerful

argument if it were true, but it's not true. So let's just go through some examples. In the gospel, Mark and Matthew and Luke, Jesus actually begins his public ministry with the famous story of the healing of the paralytic, in which he tells this man who's paralyzed, my son, your sins are forgiven. And when he says that, the scribes and Pharisees react by saying, who can forgive sins but God alone, right? Now, although Jesus doesn't say, I am God, he's making an implicit claim to divinity by doing something in a Jewish concept only God can do, namely forgive sins. And his Jewish contemporaries get it. The scribes recognize it because they say, who can forgive sins except God alone, or in Greek,

actually, except the one God. That means the God, the Creator God, the God of the universe, the God of Israel. The other thing is, in Matthew and Mark, if you fast forward to the end of those Gospels, Jesus is crucified for the charge of blasphemy. That's how the story ends. And the problem with saying that he doesn't claim to be God in that context is that it wasn't blasphemy to claim to be the Messiah. Sometimes people don't get this point. The Messiah was just the anointed king of Israel. It was the descendant of David, the heir to the throne, the long-awaited king. Well, if it were blasphemy to claim to be the Messiah, how you're going to ever find out who the Messiah actually is, right? It would only be blasphemy if you claim to be a divine Messiah.

In other words, if you claim to be not merely a human king, but also a divine being, which is exactly what Jesus does, not just in the Gospel John, but in Matthew and Mark as well, when he says to Caiaphas, I am the Messiah, and you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of God and coming on the clouds of heaven. Now, those are allusions to two Old Testament passages, Psalm 110, which describes a divine king who's equal with God because he sits at the right hand, that symbol of equality or equal authority, and then even more important, Daniel 7, which describes this heavenly being,

the son of man, who's coming on the clouds, which is something only God does in the Old Testament, to receive power and glory and dominion and honor and adoration even from the nations. And it's when Jesus says, I'm the heavenly son of man who's going to sit at the right hand of God, be equal with God,

and come on the clouds of heaven, that Caiaphas says, he tears his garment, and he says, we've heard us blast me, we don't need any more witnesses. He's condemned to death. So my question for Bart would be, if Jesus doesn't make a divine claim, why is he accused of blasphemy in the context of a question about his identity? So actually, the fact is he's accused of blasphemy in the gospel of Mark

in a context of his identity. He's accused in Matthew of blasphemy. He's accused in Luke of blasphemy and he's accused in John of blasphemy. So far from the score being three Gossom, where he's human and one where he's divine, actually all four actual sources, not hypothetical sources, all four actual biographies we have, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the first century, written within limiting memory of the events, depicted Jesus who not only claims to be the Messiah, but who claims to be divine and gets crucified for the charge of blasphemy. So the score is not actually six against one or three against one, it's four against zero, all in favor of a divine Messiah. Destroyed.

I'm sure Bart's a sweet guy. I know people who know him. They speak really highly of his character. Yes, absolutely. But I did want to point out that if you do want to see his ideas to take a hiding, go check out his debate with Jimmy Aiken. Did you watch that? I have not seen that.

It's worth watching. Yeah. No, I actually, I mean, I've said this as soon as before. Bart is, he's brilliant. He's one of the best writers in the field today. Like, he's a gift of clarity. I've heard from students to his, I know he's an, excellent teacher. I just think his presuppositions are wrong. I think his presuppositions about the

depiction of divinity of Jesus and the synopsics is just wrong in particular because he ignores the fact that Jesus claims to be the Messiah, but he does it in a Jewish way using allusions to scripture. He's not going around explicitly saying, hey everybody, I'm God. That'll get him crucified right at the beginning. But he is gradually leading his disciples and his audience into the revelation of his divinity. And it ain't just in John. It's in Matthew Mark and Luke. Let's take a look at the next one. fast. And right now in towns and cities across the country, women are being pushed to make this terrible decision in moments of fear and confusion. They're told you've got to decide now as if the beauty of motherhood is something that could just be erased in a moment. Many of these women

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which is the latest Gospel, canonical Gospel, I should say. That's where that arises. And in fact, the story of Doubting Thomas famously, he doesn't believe that it's the risen Christ, and Jesus says, come and touch my wounds, and he touches his wounds, and he says, my Lord and my God. And Jesus says, you believe because you've seen, blessed are those who believe without seeing. So in my view, what we have is this so-called mythological development of no post-resurrection appearances. And as the time goes on, as we get further away from the source, the stories get more fantastical, ending in a moral lesson to believe without seeing.

Yes. This to me does seem a little bit suspicious. All right. So this is similar to Barts, but a little different focusing on the resurrection. Yeah, okay. No, this is interesting. He's so eloquent. I wish I had that British accent. It would make me sound so much smarter. And he is smart. He doesn't just sound smart. So I would home in on the error of mythological. You'll notice he said that what we have here is a mythological development. I think that's a major category mistake. Why? Well, because the genre of the four gospels is not myth. It's biography. Richard Burrage is a critically acclaimed book called What Are the Gospels, a comparison with Greco-Roman biography? And what he shows is if you look at the gospel genre, the kind of books they are, within a first century Greco-Roman setting, their closest analogies are the biographies of Alexander the Great, Plutarch's Lives, Swutonius's Biographies of the Caesars. These are short books, and they give an account of the life, death, life and death of their figures.

And like with Suttonius or like with the Gospels, they tend to be written either, ideally, within living memory of the events or by people who knew people who had access to the lives and character of the person in question. That is not how myth works. Myths take centuries to develop. Myths are kind of like cultural memory over time,

passed down, and think here of, of its metamorphoses, right? Those are not accounts of recent historical figures written by eyewitnesses or disciples or public figures like Caesar or someone where we have testimonies and accounts of what they did and what they said. So I think by importing the character,

the category of mythological, he's making a category mistake. Now, what we have here are biographical accounts. They're making extraordinary claims, to be sure, I mean, ordinarily dead people stay dead. So the resurrection is a big claim, but it's not a mythological claim. It is a supernatural claim, but it's not mythological.

Because the Gospels are only writing decades after the event, not centuries. Myths take centuries to develop. So that's the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is his position there, he completely presupposes that he knows the order in which the Gospels were written and that that order is significant. But if I've learned anything from studying what's called the synoptic problem, like the question of who copied from whom, like did Matthew first, did Mike, right first, was Matthew right copying from Mark or was he copied from Luke? Like the whole,

it's a question of the literary relationship between the Gospels. It's that it's practically insoluble. Like I'm actually an agnostic about the exact order and literary relationship of the Gospels because it's very complex and scholars have taken every conceivable position you can imagine. So you don't want to act like it's a fact that Mark wrote first, Matthew wrote second, Luke wrote third, and John wrote less. That's a theory, but it's not a fact. Secondly, even if that was the order in which they were written, the chrono, the literary order of the gospels doesn't have any bearing on the historical truth

of what they're claiming, right? In fact, you could have a later account of an event be more accurate than an early account. So for example, if like you show up at the scene in an accident, when things are really confused, you might get accounts that are firsthand and they're recent, but they were confused about certain details and then over time as more testimony comes in,

you can actually clarify this. The same thing's true with political events. It's like sometimes you actually gain clarity as decades past, you don't lose it. Yeah, this is actually a really important point. So just because there's more information about the resurrection in the putatively later Gospels doesn't make that information less credible. You have to judge each episode or each claim in the gospel on a case-by-case basis. Is it contextually plausible within First Intry Judaism? Does it cohere with other evidence that we have about what Jesus did and said?

do we see consequences like effects in the early church? If it meets those kind of basic historical criteria, then it's reasonable to conclude that it is historical. This kind of mythological evolutionary scheme, it might sound appealing, but it's not really historically sound. So I would disagree with him on that. Like, for example, let's say John, for example,

let's say John is written last. Maybe it's written in 90 AD, and he gives you the longer account of the resurrection. If it's written by an eyewitness disciple, like if it's written by the beloved disciple who laid his, head on the breast of Jesus' Last Supper, I don't care whether it's written 10 years, 20 years, or 40 years after the resurrection. It's still firsthand testimony to what happened after Jesus was crucified. So you actually have to look less at literary relationship and dating. That's less

important for establishing historicity than authorship and proximity to the event. Destrored. Oh, excellently put. Let's take a look at the next one. Something that Christians aren't ready to hear. The Bible you read in church, the thing that you claim to be the Word of God, is not the original. It's not even close. The original Bible text were written in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. But remember, you're not reading those. Your Bible has gone through at least five major language transitions, from Hebrew to Aramaic, to Greek, to Latin, to German, to English. And then it was revised. It was re-translated multiple times for me. modern language and culture. And here's the kicker. Those ancient manuscripts, they were incomplete. They didn't always agree with each other. So scholars had to make educated guesses about what certain verses even meant. So you're not reading the original word of God. You're reading someone's interpretation of a translation, of a reconstruction, of a collection of fragments that has been passed down for nearly 2,000 years. And yet you still think it's an errand. There you go. So I'm sorry,

Brian, because I know clearly you weren't ready to hear that, but I wanted to play a few anyway. Okay. I'm glad you played this one because this whole question of translation over the centuries is one of the most common errors I've actually encountered in, I don't mean this to be rude, but in like uneducated or really simplistic, even fundamentalistic Christian circles in terms of the way they approach scripture. So there's this idea that people sometimes have that, like, the English.

This translation I have was made from German, which was made from Latin, which was made from Greek, which was made from Hebrew. You see how he trussed out like a cycle of languages? This is the, what do you call it in America, where the whisper game. We call it something different. Oh, the telephone game. Yeah, yeah, right. Like, it goes from one. In this case, it's from one language to another.

So the first thing I would just say is he clearly doesn't understand how Bible translations are made. So Bible translations are not translations of translations of translations. Like, they're not going from one language to the other. any contemporary translation of the Bible that's a credible scholarly translation, like a literal translation, like the Revised Standard Version or the New American Bible, they are all made from the original languages in which the Bible was written. They're not made from German and then from German, from Latin, and from Latin. That's not how it works. It's just like, that's a fundamentally wrong, like he's just wrong about that. Second, just because something's a translation doesn't mean

it doesn't communicate the substance of what someone says. So, for example, we could have this show, translating to Spanish, and it's still what we said, as long as the translation is substantially accurate. So, like, translation doesn't mean you lose the information. In fact, the whole point of translation is to communicate the substance of the original language. So, again, I don't think he understands that although nuance can be lost in translation, it doesn't mean substances, unless it's a bad translation. In fact, Bart Ehrman, who we've talked about, he has a great analogy. reading the New Testament in Greek is like the difference between watching a television show in color or black and white. The translations like black and white, the originals like color.

So it brings out a vibrancy. There are certain nuances and elements that you just can't get, but you're still watching the same show, right? Whether it's in black or white or color, doesn't mean, as long as the translation's good, that you're not getting the substance of it. So he just doesn't understand how translations work. All right. Yeah. Fantastic. Let's go to this one. So I love coffee. Look at me. I'm using the word love. I love coffee and we've tried a lot of coffee over the years. But our sponsor today is seven weeks coffee and it's the one that my wife and I have landed on. Honestly, if you open up the cabinets above our espresso machine, it's just stuffed with seven week coffee espresso. And it's not just great coffee. It's a brand built around values that we take seriously. Seven weeks coffee is a America's pro-life coffee company on a mission to fund the pro-life movement, one cup of coffee at a time. Now, you might be thinking, why are they called seven weeks coffee? Matt, good question. Because at seven weeks, a baby is the size of a coffee bean. And it's the same time a heartbeat is clearly detected on an ultrasound.

They've built their business around saving lives by donating 10% of every sale to pregnancy centers and pro-life organizations nationwide. They've now raised over one and a half million dollars and saved thousands of lives. Now, let's talk about the coffee because I care about what I'm fueling my body with. Okay, it's mold-free, pesticide-free, shade-grown and low acid, and it's organically farmed. It truly checks all the boxes. Now, when I first heard about seven weeks coffee, I thought, okay, I'm open to trying it, but I'm not going to keep buying coffee just because it has a great cause if the coffee's not excellent. you know, hand to my heart. It is actually excellent and we really love it in the Frad household.

So go to 7 Weeks Coffee.com and save 15% forever when you subscribe. Plus get a free gift with your order and exclusively for my listeners use code Pints for an extra 10% off your first order. That's a 25% total savings on your first order plus a free gift. Just use code Pints at checkout. Can you prove that Jesus is not God? Point number one, he never once mentioned that he was God. the Bible. Point number two, he mentions that he is a prophet many, many times. Point number three, he worships God. How is he worshipping himself if he's God? Point number four, the Trinity doesn't exist. It's never once mentioned in the Bible. Point number five, the Bible has been altered and corrupted, so we cannot trust it. Point number six, the Quran tells us that Jesus is a prophet,

therefore it is true. Done. Okay. Feel free to pick up on a different... Oh, okay, yeah, that's how he brought Muhammad into it. That was a lot. Okay, so, um, okay, So let's just start with Jesus never claims he's God. That's false. We've already covered that. He makes divine claims implicitly, for sure, in the gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke. And then absolutely explicitly in John, chapter 8, where he says before Abraham was, I am.

That is the name of God from Exodus 3, meaning I neither have no beginning nor in. I simply am. I'm the one God. I'm not the God of the river, the God of the mountain. I'm the God who is being itself, St. Thomas, Aquinas would say. And then in John 1030, he says, I and the father are one. And his Jewish listeners pick up stones to stone him saying, you though a man, make yourself God. So that's just completely wrong. About the Bible being corrupted and being unreliable. Again, this is just a common error you'll find.

Yes, it is true that there were mistakes in various manuscripts over the centuries. Sometimes scribes would mistranscribe things. Sometimes they'd add lines or whatever. But the vast, majority of the like 99% of what's in scripture. We not only can corroborate it, but we have so many manuscripts, especially the New Testament. We have less of the old, but much of the new, that we have more evidence for the reliability of the original text in the New Testament, and like being able to establish what actually says than any other book for antiquity. So the corruptions that he's talking about there, they simply do not mean you can't trust the Bible. but that's just such a sweeping statement.

Yeah. That's just absolutely false. And what else did he say? Oh, Jesus says we're a prophet, therefore he's not God. Have you ever heard of both and? Like, he claims to, yes, he absolutely claims to be a prophet. He absolutely claims to be a Messiah, but he doesn't just claim to be that. He's not merely a prophet because prophets don't say, I and the Father are one.

Prophets don't say before Abraham was, I am. He's a prophet, but he's more than a prophet. And in fact, he even says it. He says, something more than Jonah is here. Jonah was a prophet, but I'm greater than Jonah. Something more than Solomon. Something greater than Solomon is here. Solomon was the king.

I'm more than that. He even says, something greater than the temple is here in Matthew 12. What's the temple to a first century Jew? It's the dwelling place of God on earth. What could possibly be greater than the temple? God himself made man. So, again, he's just wrong about that. Yes, the word, Trinity, doesn't occur in the Bible.

But that doesn't mean the reality of the Trinity doesn't occur. In fact, if you look at, just to take one example, there are many places that we go, the great commission where Jesus says to the apostles, go into all nations, baptizing them, in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. St. Augustine pointed this out centuries ago that what you see there is very interesting. He says the name, singular, of the father, son, and Holy Spirit. So you have both unity. It's one name for one God.

And then tri-unity, Father, Son, and Spirit. And if I had time, I can show you this, that in the New Testament itself, the Father is, the Father is clearly described as God, the Father. The Son makes divine claims, like when he says, I and the Father are one. And then the Spirit is despite the Spirit of the Lord as being the divine spirit. So the personification, Jesus even calls the Holy Spirit the Paraclete, he will come. It's talking about a distinct person. The idea of three distinct whose persons, but one unified what, one divinity,

is taught by the New Testament. It just doesn't use the word Trinity. Destrored. Fantastic. Do we have any more? No, we don't. Thank you so much for that. All right, so a lot of this had to do with scripture,

you know, the claims of Jesus Christ and so forth. Give us a couple of books or places to go. I'm thinking of your books in particular, that people can go, you know, skimming the surface of error on TikTok, we're actually going deep so that they can respond. Yeah, for sure. So I think with regard to some of these questions that we just looked at, the primary book I would point people at was my book, The Case for Jesus, the biblical and historical evidence for Christ. That's the subtitle. And in that book, I kind of basically start out with the

presupposition that you don't know anything and you don't believe anything. Like, you don't have to be a Christian to read this book. I'm going to take you from zero all the way to the resurrection. I want to see, where did we get the Gospels? Who wrote them? What's the historical evidence for their authorship by eyewitnesses? When were they written? How do they relate to one another? And then from that basis, then we go on to who did Jesus and Lazarus claim to be? Did he fulfill the prophecies of Jewish scripture about the Messiah? Did he claim to be God? Why was he crucified? And then, of course, what's the evidence for the resurrection? So if you really wanted to look into that question, the kind of historical liability of the New Testament, of the Gospels, and the divinity of Christ, the case for Jesus is. definitely the book. All right. Final question because he was talking about the divinity and why Christ never claimed to be God, et cetera. Here's something I've heard a lot. So this will be my final question. If Jesus was God, why did he pray to God? Oh, that's a great question. Because the Trinity is true. Because there are three distinct persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And that second person, the son, becomes man precisely in order to teach us how to relate to the Father. So one of the things he's going to do is in his

humanity, he's going to pray to the Father, both because he communes with the Father, but also as a model for the Apostles on how to worship God, the Father, and how to pray to him. So remember, in Luke 11, they're going to say, teach us how to pray. And Jesus is going to do that as a man, not because he needs to pray. He's already in communion. But in his humanity, he is going to commune with the Father precisely as the example and model for all other humanity. Because the good news, of the New Testament is that he's come into the world, not just to save us from sin, but to lead us into the life of the Blessed Trinity.

Like that's actually the purpose of the incarnation. He's gonna assume our human nature and then allow it to be crucified on the Calvary and raise it up in order to bring us into the life of the Trinity. Like he says to the apostles, I'm going away, I'm gonna prepare a place for you at my father's house so that where I am you may also be. So the father loves the son.

They are distinct persons, and he wants to bring us into that mystery of that love. That's why he's praying to the father in his humanity during his life on Earth. Dr. Petrie, thank you so much for helping us destroy bad arguments on TikTok. Thank you for watching. Please like and subscribe. Let us know in the comment section what the most annoying, annoying because it's so bad, argument against the historicity of Christ or the New Testament or Christ claims to be divine. You have heard, let us know below.

God bless. I'm Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI. We're a coalition of patriotic Americans who want to stop AI from taking our freedoms. Big Tech is propping up AI-powered mass surveillance and exploiting our children online. This is not the future we want. The alliance is working hard to ensure that we put Americans first. Join us at secureaI.Now.org to learn more. Paid for by the Alliance for Secure AI.