Pints With Aquinas - YES! The Bible is Reliable. Here's Why.

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

Matt chats with Dr. Bergsma about the why the Bible is reliable.   Hallow: https://hallow.com/matt Sign up to Emmaus Academy here (and get 2 weeks for free): https://stpaulcenter.com/matt Watch Bart Ehrman Get Rekt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn7lmu0pek0&t=1680s

Hey everybody, before we jump into the podcast, I wanted to let you know that if you become an annual supporter over at matfrad.locals.com support, you will get a free pines with Aquinas beer Stein, you just pay shipping, you'll get access to our free courses, you'll get access to our post show live streams that are exclusive to our local supporters. spiritual direction with Father Gregory Pine, as well as our free quarterly newspaper sent to your door. It's called The Jill and we even pay the shipping on that one, no matter where in the world you live. If you're interested in getting these perks, please go to locals.com, sorry, matfrad.locals.com slash support and sign up as an annual supporter to get those perks and you'd be tremendously helping us as a ministry. Thank you. No, we're not. And we're live with Dr. John Bergsmuth. Thanks for being here. Yeah, absolutely Matt. So you were shocked more that I hadn't seen Casablanca than I haven't been to the Holy Land.

That's right because it only takes two hours to watch Casablanca online. And it's significantly longer to fly to there. Yeah, you got to really plan for the Holy Land. Why Gethsemane? Gethsemane is my favorite spot on the usual itinerary of Holy Land pilgrimages because it's under Catholic control and it's a Class A1 site. It's like no doubt, I should turn that off. Or answer it, whatever you want.

But you might want to turn the sound off, Russell, just so you know. Yeah, exactly. You're a wanted man. Yeah. It's beautiful, and I mean, no doubt Jesus was there. You have 2,000 year old olive trees there. At least their roots are going back to that far.

And you know, there's this, the oil pressed stone is what the church is built around. It's a beautiful church, done in purple, so it's dark, it's solemn, it's moody, and yet it's not nihilistic or stoic or fatalistic or anything. The mosaics inside shimmer. And it's all built around the stone of the olive press, where they used to press out the olives, you know back in ancient times which is probably where Jesus would meet because it's kind of a landmark within the within the garden and

To pray there have mass there. It's just so moving And it's quiet and And just a powerful pressure to do two favorite places in the Holy Land Matt are the Mount of Transfiguration and the Garden of Gethsemane. And to me, they represent the glory and the suffering of the Christian life, and that kind of sums up the whole path of discipleship. And both churches at both sites were built by the same Italian architect.

One was done in gold, one was done in purple, one is moody and sorrowful, one is like exultant and transcendent. And it kind of captures the whole, you know, spectrum to me of the Christian experience. Given my temperament, I think the moody and sorrowful would be where I would vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me too. That's why it's my favorite, right? But I mean, the transfigure is nice as a contrast so that you can kind of feel that tension between the two. You said there's no doubt Jesus was there. I mean, it's got to be some doubt. Well, the, no, not really.

I mean, how do you respond to people who have that kind of, because you've done these pilgrimages, people go there. I have that kind of mind. Maybe you do too. You're like, come on. I mean, how do we know? Because these sites were venerated and going back all the way to the first century in many cases, you know.

So how do we do that? Because of archaeological remains. Like take for example, the church of, over St. Peter's house up in Capernaum. We've got the ruins of Capernaum there, first century Capernaum, all the foundations of all the houses in the town are laying there. The synagogue where Jesus delivered

the bread of life discourses there, or at least the foundations, and a new one was built upon it, but on the same foundations. And then you've got successive churches that were built around this one location, and at the center of the location you dig down and you find the foundations of a first century fisherman's house. And they've been, you know, Christians have been coming there since, you know, the first generation after the apostles. And so that's how you can know. At what point does skepticism become unreasonable?

That's a good question to ask, I think, because it's easy to be skeptical, because all you got to do is go, how do you know? But we often, when we're in that state, don't ever become skeptical of our skepticism. This is true. Yeah. Why do we do that? And what's a good response to that? Why do we do what? Why are we so skeptical of everything? I mean, there's probably a good side to that. We don't want to be hoodwinked. We don't want to be brought into some story that's not true.

Yeah. I think it goes back to Descartes and, you know, his whole remaking of the Western philosophical process based around skepticism and systematic doubt. And I think that's really shaped the modern mind. And I think prior to Descartes, you have kind of an Augustinian mentality, which is I believe in order to understand. And when you look at the two approaches to life,

the believe in order to understand is, you know, works a lot better actually in the existential reality of the human condition. We have to trust other people. You know, we have to take people's word for that. It's good to trust traditions. It's good to trust your parents. These things work.

They're functional in actual human society. Trying to do everything based on doubt is really destructive. So as a general rule, you know, go with trust. Yeah, I'm thinking of that bumper sticker question. Question all authority, even this one. That's a good one. I haven't seen that one yet. Yeah, it's interesting. Mm-hmm.

So good. So what do you want to talk about, man? Well, I want to talk about the Bible. I want to talk about how... I love talking about the Bible. I know you do. You've brought a bag of books with you. Yeah, a random assortment of stuff. Yeah. But before we do that, I do want to tell people about Emmaus Academy, which I know is something you've worked on, and I'm really excited about it, just from what I've seen. Yeah. Yeah. So the St. Paul Center, for which I work, which is, you know, of course, this

biblical apostolate started by Dr. Scott Hahn, whom we all know and love, has started this new initiative called Amais Academy. And it's, Matt, it's kind of to fill in that kind of middle area between I have, you know, a good understanding of the Catholic faith. I've got, you know, I'm initiated. I went through RACIA, you know, kind of that level, versus I'm ready to pack up and move to Steubenville and take an advanced degree. You know, kind of that middle area

between catechesis and higher education, Emmaus Academy fits that. And I think a lot of us are in that area where, hey, it's not an option for me to go back and get a degree, but I would really like to know more about, say, the science of prayer, as it were, or how to understand magisterial teaching or, you know, the theology of St. Paul. And so what we're doing, Matt, is putting short courses together, usually eight to 12 segments long, usually about half hour sessions, little easy self quizzes at the end of them by experts in certain areas.

So St. Paul, I was going to say St. Paul, I was going to, Dr. Scott Hahn, I get him confused with St. Paul sometimes, but Scott Hahn has a intro to the theology of Saint Paul on the Emmaus Academy, which is an online platform. And I tell you, taking a course on Saint Paul with Scott Hahn is like taking a course on Saint Paul with Saint Paul. Okay. It's like, I think Scott Hahn channels St. Paul. And to be clear, he's not paying you to say this. No, no, no. It's just the truth. A little bit. I'm just checking.

But yeah, it's just amazing. And Father Boniface Hicks, amazing course on prayer. He's a Benedictan mystic out in La Troberobe not far from where we are sitting at this very moment And my good friend Mike Cirilla has a fantastic course on the magisterium This is something he did his doctoral dissertation on what I what I love about it is I went there By the way, if you click the link in the description, it's called st. Paul centered.com slash Matt. Is that what it is? Yeah, we should be when he says not paying, he means not paying him to say nice things. They are paying. They are paying for the course or to have access to this. They're paying us to advertise. Oh, they are paying us

to advertise. Yeah, we should be clear about that. But you get two weeks for free. So click the link in the description to sign up to this. If you know, I think a lot of people want to love the Bible in the way they want to love exercise. And by that, they don't love it. They don't really want to love it, but they want to want to love it. And I think people want to love the Bible. They want to want to love the Bible. And I think this will help with that. So if y'all click the link in the description below and sign up, you'll get it free for two weeks. You can try it out. And if you don't like it, you can quit. You won't be charged. So please do this because we spend so much time listening to politics and listening to the opinions of the, about the pope. But what we're going to be judged on is

are we being faithful to the word of God? There's no other book. Correct me if I'm wrong. The church has commanded us to read. Right. And yet we spend myself included so much of our time reading and listening and watching things that just distract us from the main goal. So again, click that link, two weeks for free. One thing I loved about it when I signed up was I started a course and given my weakness and temperament, I knew I'll probably do three of these and I'll stop. But as soon as you sign up, it says, when will you be? How many hours a week would you like to dedicate to this? Like, ugh, I gotta kinda commit. I love that I did that. Yeah. Yeah. Why did you incorporate that? Yeah, for precisely the reason that you

mentioned there. It's kind of like psychological. It makes you think, okay, you know, what am I practically gonna do and what does it look like if I were to actually finish this, you know? So it makes you actually think about how would I have to plan my life to be able to complete this course of education? I've got a course on there, like a 12 session course on the Gospels. I think people really enjoy it. It has my signature stick figures in it,

which are always delightful. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I think everybody, you know, theoretically, well, I'd love to learn more about the Gospels. Well, this is a really easy way to do it. And yeah, just, you know, an hour, two hours a week. We spend that much time, you know, compulsively watching YouTube.

I know I just get on there like, you know, all this drivel. And I think, no, I could I could be spending my time much better Yeah, really learning something substantive what I was impressed to and this isn't just something I'm saying because they're paying me like I have to say it, but I actually also mean it I think lines are sins. I hopefully people believe me is how well it was produced like the cameras You've done a really good job with it. It's not just in front of your laptop. It's- Right, right, exactly.

Yeah. High production. Yeah, high production values. I thought that was important. You know, you want it to be enjoyable. Reminds me of St. Augustine, you know, when he talks about education. One of the things that a teacher should try to do is delight. Right?

So visually appealing pedagogical experience, I think is important. So we really try to do that. Good stuff. Yeah. Well, let's let's talk about the Gospels, the Bible. I've heard people ask this question. Why should I put my faith in a book that was written 2000 years ago? Right. Like, isn't it more reasonable to assume that there's probably enough errors in there to make it unreliable?

And that I should rely less on that and more on what, like, maybe modern people have to say? Yeah, yeah. Well, you could you could flip the script on that and say something that's lasted 2,000 years is probably something worth trusting, whereas modern theories that haven't even been trusted yet, haven't even been tracked for even a generation, that should arouse suspicion. You know, all these proposals for new forms of family life or new forms of sexuality or all this stuff, all that's untried. And actually, the tracking that has been done on a lot of that stuff is really negative, but we can't talk about it without getting demonetized. You can talk about it.

That's my goal, to be demonetized. To finally find a Thursday. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, it's a joke, I love you. So yeah, there's all kinds of philosophies from pundits and so on that you can find on YouTube or other social media that are untried and probably don't work, but something that's been working for people for 2,000 years, that's scripture, that's the Gospels. And it stood up to countless attacks, attacks from other religions, attacks from atheism, attacks from hostile philosophical movements, and still commands the respect of millions

upon millions of people all over the world, giving them meaning, inspiration, inspiring them to good works. Jesus gives us an empirical rule of thumb for testing the truth of things. By your fruit you will know them, right? So you got to look at the fruit of this teaching, you know, this the gospel teaching. What has it inspired people to do? What has it resulted in? Well, it's resulted in hospitals, schools, universities, you know, the advance of human rights and human dignity, the protection of the poor and the weak, etc.

So I think that those are motives of credibility, so to speak. I'd like to talk about the Bible as a whole, but maybe just so we can narrow in on something, maybe we could talk about the New Testament. Absolutely. So what's the criteria people, historians, or whatever, look for, biblical scholars look for, to say, okay, this is a reliable document? What do we mean by a reliable document?

Yeah, well, one of the things that we mean by a reliable document is one whose texts we are certain or fairly certain really comes from the author. And for that you need manuscript evidence. And I think that's one of the issues where the New Testament just shines compared to other ancient documents. And we can give some examples. For example, Julius Caesar, between about 58 and 50 BC, he wrote a work called The Gallic War, basically his wars in France.

So memoir, right? And so he wrote that in, like I said, 58 to 50 BC. What do we have in terms of manuscript copies of it? Well, we have 10 manuscripts of it. That's it, 10 manuscripts. And the oldest only goes back to about 750 AD, okay? A distance of about 800 years from when he actually wrote it. So 10 manuscripts?

10 manuscripts. And when you, and so, okay, if this, when you say we have 10 manuscripts, what does that mean? We don't have the original manuscripts. We don't have the original manuscripts. We have 10 copies of the Gallic War written by medieval scribes, and the oldest of those was written around the time of what we call the Carolinginian Renaissance, about the time of Charlemagne in 750 AD. So we have nothing, you know, we have a gap between

the composition and our oldest copies of this document of about 800 years. Now nobody's really concerned or strongly doubts that we pretty much have a good copy of the Gallic War and it was by Julius Caesar and the text is pretty stable. You know, because in historical research, ten manuscripts is actually pretty good because we have a worse situation in other ancient documents. Like Tacitus, who's writing about 100 AD, about the time of the death of John. Tacitus is a Latin author, one of the greatest historians of the ancient period, wrote a massive like 14 volume history of the world. We only have about four and a half volumes of that remaining and only two manuscripts and it only, our oldest manuscript only goes back to about 850 AD. So again,

about an 800 year gap between when Tacitus wrote and our oldest manuscript copy, you know, handwritten copy of his document. Does anyone doubt seriously that Tacitus really wrote this, that it reflects his thought, etc.? No. You know, they're willing to accept it on the basis of two manuscripts. But Matt, when we move to the New Testament, we're talking about 5,800 manuscripts, and that's just the Greek copies of the New Testament that we have. And when we talk about how old those go back, our oldest complete copy of the entire New Testament, which is 27 different documents when you think of it, Matthew through Revelation, our oldest complete copy of the New Testament, comes from

around 350 AD, a gap of only about less than 300 years from the time of its composition. And then if we go into individual books, our oldest complete copy of the Gospel of John goes back to around the year 200, same with the Epistles of Paul, around the year 200. So we're talking only about a gap of 100 to 150 years between when it was written and when our oldest manuscripts. That's unprecedented in ancient research in terms of ancient documents. And in particular with the Gospel of John, our oldest fragment of the Gospel of John goes back to 125 AD, about 30 years after it was written, because most scholars think John was written about 90 AD.

So from 125 AD we have a scrap called P52, Papyrus 52, which is a scrap of a pocket edition of the Gospel of John from Egypt in about 30 years after it was composed. So this is amazing. This means most people think, most scholars believe the Gospel of John was written in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, and 30 years after its composition we're already finding pocket editions of it being written in Egypt, which is quite some distance away. So that document spread like wildfire. And that little scrap that we have, P52, it's from Jesus' dialogue with Pilate in John 18, and it's a little triangular-shaped scrap, and it's got part of John 18 on one side and then a continuation on the back side.

And we can line it up with the Gospel of John, and we can figure out the size of the page and how much text he lapsed from the front of it to the back of it. And that's how we can figure out it was from a pocket edition. So this little one that you might slip in here. So it's amazing. And it's striking to me because Billy Graham, you know, I was a Protestant for the first 30 years of my life, and I went to Billy Graham Crusades, and he used to pass out pocket editions of the Gospel of John.

And I thought to myself, you know, this is amazing, it's one of the oldest forms of Scripture, there's a pocket edition of the Gospel of John being used for evangelism. This goes way back to the very beginnings of Christianity. So my point is, Matt, that we have this amazing manuscript resource of thousands of manuscripts, and they go way back within shooting distance of when the documents were composed. And we don't have this kind of manuscript attestation for almost any other ancient documents, not for the works of Plato, not for the works of Socrates. And so, you know, we have hundreds and thousands of more manuscripts than with other ancient documents. Why is there so much pressure placed on the New Testament? Why is there such a high bar

that people want to place on the Bible and the documents of the New Testament in terms of their credibility when, you know, other ancient documents just get a pass with a couple... the Bible and the documents of the New Testament in terms of their credibility when you know other ancient documents just get a pass with a... Can I suggest what it is? Yeah well I know it is, but go ahead. Well it's that it's it's talking about people coming back from the dead, people walking on water, people multiplying five loaves and two fishes, one person specifically. Right. It just seems incredible and so if it didn't have these supernatural elements, people would be willing to accept it. But it does, and it seems so unlikely given our everyday experience, that's why it's being questioned.

Yeah, and I can understand that. But the unique situation that we have with the Gospels is that we have very strong circumstantial evidence to believe that these documents were written by people that knew Jesus and that lived in that first century Jewish world prior to the destruction of the temple in the year 70. Whereas when we have these legends about miracles and other supernatural stuff from other civilizations and other cultures. Typically it's coming from documents written many generations later by people who are not in touch with the reality, boots on the ground, of the era that they're trying to describe, if that makes sense. But very clearly, the Gospels – well, okay, take the Gospel of

John, for example. Since our earliest scrap of it comes from 125 AD, it's got to have been written earlier than that. And most scholars, the evidence points to around the decade of the 90s. That's still within the lifetime of somebody who would have known Jesus. Church tradition ascribes it to the Apostle John, who was very elderly when he wrote that gospel, but in his youth obviously knew Jesus himself. And then when you look at the gospel, John, it reflects information, Matt, that only somebody who lived at the time of Jesus could have known. Is that what you mean by circumstantial evidence? Yes, absolutely. Get into that for me. Yeah,

absolutely. Okay, so John 10 23 says that Jesus was walking in the portico of Solomon in the winter. And like, just a throwaway line, it doesn't call attention to itself or anything. But when you do the historical research on this, you find out that when you reconstruct how the temple was shaped and built, that the Portico of Solomon was on the east side of the rectangle that defined the courts of the temple. And on that east side, the Portico of Solomon had a wall that blocked the east wind. And in the winter in Israel, you get a cold east wind that comes off of the desert.

So where do you want to walk in the temple courts in the winter? You want to walk in the portico of Solomon where the wind is blocked and it's warmer than the rest of the environment. Just a tiny little, you know, tidbit. But to me, Matt, these subtle pieces of evidence that don't call attention to themselves speak that much more powerfully. Because if you're dealing with a pseudepigrapher or a con man, they're going to try to call attention. What does that word mean? Pseudepigrapher is a false writer in Greek. If you're dealing with a charlatan or somebody who's trying to fake it, they're going to try to make claims that call

attention to themselves, you know? But what you find throughout the Gospels is little details that upon further research suddenly make sense only within that Jewish culture of the first century. And let me give you another one. There is a throwaway couple of verses in the Gospel of Mark, Mark 14, 51, and 52. It says that there was a young man following Jesus into the Garden of Gethsemane, and when the guards show up, they grasped him, they seized him, but he was wearing a single linen garment, nothing but a single linen garment, and he slipped out of his linen garment and he ran away naked. It's like two verses, Mark 14, 51, 52. It's like nothing precedes it, nothing follows up. It's like, what the heck is that all about? You know, this teenager, teenage streaker photo bombs the shooting of the of the Passion of the Christ, you know? Right, right. It's like a literary photo bomb,

you know, with a streaker. So what is going on there? Well, you start doing the research, Matt, and you find out that, this is very curious. This young man is wearing a single linen garment. Now linen was expensive. So if you're wearing linen, you're wealthy. But wearing a single garment was a sign of poverty, like a slave.

So it's a paradox. Why would somebody with the wealth to wear linen be only wearing a single garment? Well, one class or sect of Jews actually dress this way, and it's the Essenes, okay? The Essenes are this sect of Jews that we know about from Josephus and from the Dead Sea Scrolls, because they had a monastery on the shores of the Dead Sea, left us the Dead Sea Scrolls. And from their own writings and from Josephus's writings we know that they only wore linen because it was a ritually pure fabric associated with the priesthood and yet they practiced extreme poverty of dress. They would wear the same garment until it wore out. So you have this little tidbit of this guy strangely dressed,

it's a throwaway line, it doesn't call attention to itself, but church tradition tells us that that young man is John Mark himself, the author of the Gospel. And that's also the best explanation for why those verses would even be in there. You know, if it was somebody else, the author, you know, wouldn't share that kind of shameful incident, but it's kind of an act of humility that he pencils himself into his own painting, like Rembrandt used to do a little self-portrait in the corner of his painting and so on.

And so you have this little tidbit where the author is slyly tipping his hand, showing his identity, letting you know, I was actually there, I was a teenager at the time, this is where my life intersected with that of Jesus, giving us cultural information that's very strange and only fits into a certain time period. Because the Essenes who dressed this way, they were all destroyed in the year 70, along with the temple, their movement came to an end.

So this kind of cultural manner of dress only really made, was significant and fit into the culture of a certain time period. So again, little details like that, that mesh very well into a culture that lasted, you know, just a matter of decades and a few generations, which is indeed the time period that these documents are claiming to represent. That really speaks powerfully to me. Can you give us some more examples? Yes, absolutely. So in John 5, the author mentions that Jesus performs a healing at the porticos of Bethesda, or the twin pools of Bethesda, which he mentions were surrounded by five porticos.

Now, prior to the 1950s, a lot of scholars thought this was completely fictitious because no such area in the vicinity of Jerusalem was known or had been discovered, and they thought it was some kind of symbolism like the two pools or, I don't know, the Father and the Son and the five porticos or some reference to the books of Moses, or, you know, so some kind of symbolic theological statement. Well, in about the middle of the 20th century, they're doing excavations in the area of Jerusalem, and they discover these pools. There's over two massive cisterns that were venerated both by pagans and by Jews for healing properties.

The pagans attributed it to the god of healing Asclepialus, that's a very hard thing to say, and the Jews attributed it to God. And as far as the five porticos, that was regarded as fictitious because it was imagined that this was a pentagonal structure, you know, and no pentagon-shaped structures were known from Greco-Roman culture, et cetera. But when they dug this up, they discovered,

no, that's not what's being described. What we have is a rectangle with four sides, and then in when they dug this up, they discovered, no, that's not what's being described. What we have is a rectangle with four sides, and then in the middle of the rectangle you got a portico dividing this rectangle into two squares, and these two squares surround the two pools. And so that's what he means by he says it's five porticos. And I just got back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and there's a diorama, like a scale model of Jerusalem from about the year 66 in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. And you can see the whole layout of Jerusalem, and sure enough, there they've got the five porticoes surrounding the two pools of Bethesda. Well, that was completely

wiped out in the year 70. So after the year 70, nobody would have known about the existence of those twin healing pools or this unique five porticos and so on. So clearly this is information from somebody who lived at the time of Jesus prior to the destruction of the temple in the year 70 and has these, you know, cultural and geographic memories, just as he has this memory of, you know, back in the day before the temple was destroyed, you walked in the portico of Solomon during winter. So again, little details.

On the Gospel of John, I can say another thing about that, and that is there's a lot of unique phrases and terminology in the Gospel of John that a hundred years ago or more was attributed to the influence of neo-Platonism or Greek philosophical currents. Phrases like Spirit of Truth and Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness, and this was thought to be, again, the influence of later Greek dualistic philosophy or neo-Platonism on the author of the Gospel of John, philosophical movements that post-date the time of our Lord, and so the thought was the Gospel of John is this late, fictitious philosophical document, right? Well with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars were shocked because in the scrolls, particularly

in what's called the community rule, which is like the central theological document of the monks that left us the Dead Sea Scrolls, they found all this vocabulary and all these phrases that were otherwise known only from the writings of John the Apostle, okay, the Johannine literature of the New Testament. So sons of light, sons of darkness, spirit of truth, spirit of falsehood, and a whole bunch of other, you know, phraseology parallel between the Gospel of John and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, all of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written before the year 70

because the monastery was wiped out at that time. So what that showed, Matt, was the language of the Gospel of John, which has typically been targeted as, you know, supposedly the most fictitious or the most theological or the most made up of the four Gospels by skeptical scholars. Again, the language of the Gospel of John authentically represents pious, devout, Jewish, religious jargon from the lifetime of Jesus. And we can demonstrate it by comparison with contemporary documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is how pious Jews spoke back then. This is their theological vocabulary. This is the way they think, they thought, I should say. And we can demonstrate that from hard literary evidence. So really, again, bespeaks the fact that the accounts that we're getting about Jesus in

the Gospels were written by contemporaries, by people who knew and understood and reflect and express the cultural patterns and the language of that era. What do you say to the charge that the Gospels were originally anonymous and only later did we put names on them? I think Bart Ehrman makes that claim. Yeah, Bart Ehrman does it. Here's a book by Bart Ehrman misquoting Jesus. Don't read it. Well, I do want to say if people want to see Bart Ehrman get royally destroyed in a debate, Jimmy Akin, I don't know if you watched that. I haven't watched that.

I had no idea that Jimmy. That Jimmy's so good. Holy mackerel. I would really recommend people check out that debate. Thursday is going to put a link in the description. It was because I had respect. I had heard Bart Ehrman debate William Lankregg, and even though I thought William Lankregg did a good job, I thought Bart was quite a formidable opponent. And then Jimmy just completely schooled him.

Yeah, yeah. Another person who schools him is Brant Petrie, case for Jesus. Yeah, everybody should have this in their library. And speaking about anonymous Gospels, Brandt is really good on that. Brandt's my buddy. We graduated at the same time from Notre Dame. But okay, let's talk about that. There's several problems with the anonymous Gospels theory. I talk about this with all my New Testament classes. First of all, we don't have any anonymous manuscripts of the Gospels.

All the Gospels that we have that preserve the beginning and the end of the document, identify it. Sometimes the identification comes at the end, like at the very end it'll say this is according to Luke, or sometimes it comes at the beginning. But we don't have any, there's one copy of I think it's like Luke, that is missing its ending and the beginning doesn't have an inscription. But we presume it would be the kata Luke on, or the according to Luke would have come in the end. So we have one ambiguous example that at best might have been anonymous. Out of hundreds, well, thousands really,

but you gotta look at the dates. And with so many, we mostly just look at the oldest ones. But okay, so what am I saying? What I'm saying is you have one possibly unattributed copy of the gospel amidst all of this manuscript evidence, all of which identifies him. And it's not like there's ambiguity. It's not like sometimes we find Mark attributed to John, or sometimes we found John attributed to Luke, or something like

that. No, it's always Mark. Mark's always Mark. It's always Kata Markon. Luke's always Kata Lukon. This is the Greek, according to is Cata, right? So Cata-Lucon is according to Luke, you know, and John. So that consistency, and that consistency is very strong, because when there's ambiguity in the tradition, you usually get diversity of attribution, right? But none of that. Okay, so our manuscript evidence very strongly supports the authorship of the Gospels. Secondly, secondly, people in the ancient world, just as they do today,

distrust unattributed information. Everybody wants to know where is this information coming from. If you get an anonymous email, you know, Matt, do you or I respond? Like, no. You know, if I get a text that's anonymous, it's like, you know, one of these texts would say, hey, what's up? What you up to? Like, delete that right away, okay? People in the ancient world were the same. They did not trust anonymous documents. So if somebody's trying to fake or act fictitious What they would do and what they in fact did was at least claim

That their fake gospel was from some famous figure like Peter or so on so we have fake Gospels attributed to Peter we've got fake Gospels attributed to James and stuff like this, but but got fake gospels attributed to James and stuff like this. But releasing an anonymous gospel is a great way not to gain people's trust and a great way not to be heard. Because people are going to look at that like, who is this from? Why isn't the person identifying themselves? Why should I trust this? And they're going to discard it. So it's just what we call a priori unlikely, you know, just in advance we can say that this is not a strategy that ancient people would have used. And then you bring in the patristic evidence, and you're going all the way back to Papias, one of the earliest of the church fathers

who lives between like 600 and like 110, I mean, what am I saying? 60 and 110 AD, you know, so he is, you know, he's born just before Peter and Paul are martyred, and so would have been a contemporary of the Apostle John in his later age and some of the other apostles, and in fact talks about having oral conversations with Matthew and John and the others. And he tells us, for example, that Matthew was the first Gospel writer who began to collect the teachings of Jesus in the Hebrew language and so on. So our external witness to the authorship of the Gospels begins very, very early within the lifetimes of those who would have known the men, and then it continues thereafter.

And I think another point that Brent makes is if you were going to attribute the four Gospels to somebody, why would it be Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Maybe John, but why Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Can you speak to that? Yeah. Matthew, you know, maybe, but is still an unlikely candidate because he is not a leader among the 12 and he's got a mark against him by the fact that he was a tax collector, which is kind of like being a drug dealer in our society. Is it really that bad?

It is really that bad, yeah. Tax collectors would, yeah, I think that's the best analogy. Ancient people looked at tax collectors the way that we look at drug dealers. In other words, you are an unscrupulous person that has no problem with making a living, doing something that's utterly destructive to society. Wow.

And so, you know, so Matthew, yeah, a bit of an unlikely candidate to be, you know, attributed to as the first gospel. Mark even worse because Mark has a sketchy CV because he abandoned Paul, you know, in Acts, you know, and, you know, was so, you know, Paul distrusted him so much that he refused to take him on missionary journeys. So that's, that's a Mark's, uh, you know, checkered resume. Yeah, exactly.

Well, they did it, you know, and, and Luke is, uh, you know, I kind of a nobody just, kind of a nobody, just to kind of Paul's assistant and not an apostle, you know. So why would you attribute it to him? And indeed, the fake gospels or the the suit epigraphical gospels, they all, you know, choose one of the 12 and go with that. You know, I'm James or I'm James or I'm Philip or something like that. So yeah.

And why do we know that James, Philip, Peter, how do we know that these gospels are false? Because the manuscript attribution of them is so late. Unlike the authentic gospels where we have, for example, in the case of the Gospel of John, we got a complete copy from the year 200. These fake gospels, their attestation, you know, goes back to like 350 and so on. Plus the information in the pseudepigraphical gospels,

the information in them, and the theological issues that are being dealt with, etc., reflect later heretical movements that we can trace in the church and don't have that nice first century Judaic cultural background that we find in the authentic gospels. You know, speaking of the Gospel of Matthew, let's talk about that. My buddy Michael Barber just published last year a book, I believe it's called Jesus in the Temple Memory Methodology and the Gospel of Matthew with Cambridge University Press, like you don't get any better than Cambridge. And in that book, Michael Barber points out that again and again in the Gospel of Matthew there is a presumption that the temple is still standing. In Matthew 5 and the

Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, if you're offering your gift at the altar and there remember, you know, what do we think? That that's a throwaway line? That he wasn't in earnest about that? And there's no little explanation by the gospel author to kind of like adapt that for a temple-less situation. The gospel just seems to presume that there are Jewish Christians that are still using the temple. You know, again, later in, I believe it's in Matthew 17, we have that discussion of the temple tax. And Jesus, you know, is asked, do you pay the tax of the temple?

And he tells Peter to go, you know, catch the fish and pay the temple tax on his behalf. After the destruction of the temple in the year 70, that was very provocative because the Romans continued to tax Jews for the temple, but instead of sending it to the Jerusalem temple, they sent it to the temple of Zeus or Jupiter. And so in the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel seems to be a proving of Jewish Christians just quietly continuing to pay the temple tax. But that would have been very scandalous after the year 70 when the temple tax was going to paganism. So another sign that this document is being published prior to the destruction of the temple. You know, Michael Barber goes into

much greater detail at the highest academic levels about this, but that means then that this document has to be written by a contemporary of Jesus. Further, when we look at Matthew 16 and the whole discussion of binding and loosing, where that power to bind and loose is given to St. Peter, that language of binding and loosing is unique to first century Judaism. Binding meant to authoritatively prohibit something based on your interpretation of the divine law, and leucine meant to authoritatively permit something based on your interpretation of God's law, basically the Torah or the Pentateuch, right?

So binding and leucine was contemporary terminology for first century Jews prior to the destruction of the temple. After the destruction of the temple. After the destruction of the temple, the language changes because in the Mishnah, which is this Jewish lore written about the year 200, we don't get that language of binding and loosing anymore. So this is reflecting this first century reality. And there was a debate within first century Judaism about who had the authority to do this. The Sadducees claimed to have it, the Pharisees claimed to have it, the Essenes claimed to have the authority to do this, and Jesus is saying, none of y'all, okay? None of y'all have this authority. I'm giving it to my number two guy here. He's going to do it. And then in Matthew 18, 18,

it's also shared with the apostles as a group. So again, what am I saying, Matt? I'm saying that we find authentic Jewish terminology, concepts, cultural reality, which really only existed prior to the destruction of the temple being reflected in this Gospels, which is all the more powerful because it's indirect, because a faker would call attention to his claims. But this is subtle stuff that it really rings true. It's like, you know, when you have a veneer is a fake, right? But when you cut down into the wood, you want to see, do I still have oak down there? And so this subtle stuff that's in the Gospels is like cutting into the heart of the Gospels and seeing, does it still really ring true as Jewish documents of the first century when we really get into the fine detail, the high resolution analysis, and yeah, they do. They really do. So I think it provides us, you

know, really strong confirmation of our faith. I like what you brought up about the temple, and I've heard people use the destruction of the temple to show that these Gospels were written prior to that before. Can you help us understand how traumatic it would have been for a first century Jew for the temple, and I've heard people use the destruction of the temple to show that these Gospels were written prior to that before. Can you help us understand how traumatic it would have been for a first century Jew for the temple to be destroyed, and therefore you wouldn't just write about it lightly if it had been destroyed? Right. Yeah.

Well, the temple was the center of Jewish identity and worship. It's been likened to a combination of Wall Street, the White House, and the National Cathedral. Okay. So it was a bank, it was a university as it were, it was where a lot of education went on. That's what we see Jesus debating with the scholars in the temple. It had libraries, it was a center of learning. It was the whole focus of Jewish religion, culture, and identity. Moreover, it was believed to have been built on the place where Abraham had attempted to sacrifice his son Isaac back in Genesis 22, and the sacrifices that went on in the temple were regarded as memorializing that great self-sacrifice of their ancestor Isaac. And the temple also was built and decorated to represent the whole universe.

It was really a microcosm. So for example, the veil between the holy place and the holy of holies was blue. This massive veil was blue, and it was embroidered with the sun and the moon and the stars to represent the universe. And likewise, the high priest wore a blue garment to match the veil, which also had the sun, moon,

and the stars embroidered on it, because he was the cosmic man. He was the man whose body was the temple, as it were, or he was like the concentration of the temple. And really, when you think about Jewish worldview, the whole world is a temple, but then the whole world is, as it were, concentrated in the Jerusalem temple, and then the whole Jerusalem temple is concentrated into the person temple, and then the whole Jerusalem temple is concentrated into the person of the high priest. And so you have these kind of like a bullseye, you know, like a target of like, you know, successive concentration of the spiritual essence of all

of creation, you know. So when you destroy the temple, you are symbolically destroying the whole universe and that's why in the gospels when we have our Lord's end times discourses in like Matthew 23 through 25 you'll find a mixture of language of the destruction of the temple being prophesied which actually was fulfilled in the year seventy but that also will be mixed with language describing the destruction of the world at the end of time. And why can Jesus and the Gospel authors mix the prophecies of the destruction of the temple

with prophecies of the end of the world? It's because the temple literally represented the whole world. And so the destruction in the year 70 of the Jerusalem temple was a type sign and prophecy of what's gonna happen to the whole creation prior to the Lord's return. I've heard people point to that passage from Christ who says this generation will not pass away

before the Son of Man comes again. Right. How is that, how is, so I know we're gonna, that's kind of what you're referencing, how does that not disprove, right, I mean the generation has passed away and the Son of Man has not come. Right, yeah. Well first of all the word generation can also mean race, you know, so this race will not pass away and the human race hasn't apparently. That's the Greek word. Yeah. It's synonymous. Yeah, it's polyvalent, okay, has more than one sense. So there's that.

Furthermore, this is super interesting. I didn't even believe this before I actually worked on this and found this, but if you go back to the Old Testament, the Old Testament prophets frequently talk about the coming of the Lord, and by that expression they mean the coming of the Lord in judgment. Okay? And so you find prophecies in the Old Testament where the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem is predicted as a coming of the Lord, and they don't mean a visible apparition of the God of Israel as if He's going to appear and be seen with the physical eye, but they mean a visitation of his divine judgment. So we

can, you can demonstrate that in many passages from the prophets. And so I think what we have with Jesus's language, like this generation will not, you know, pass away until the coming of the Lord, etc., is this language of a visitation in judgment which indeed happens within a generation with the judgment that falls upon Jerusalem, which in turn, you know, foreshadows the end of the world. Do we have the Church Fathers interpreting it as such? That's a great question, and I'm just going to have to punt on that. Good.

Yeah. All right. You can look into it. Another thing that strikes me is if the Gospels were written by hucksters, salesmen, why do we do these things? Why do we lie? And it would seem that, okay, well, for one of three reasons maybe. You know, power and influence and influence money or something else. I don't know. Right. But in the Gospels, it seems to me that if you were writing a fake gospel in order to gain prestige, you wouldn't write yourself into the script as a knucklehead who keeps misunderstanding Jesus.

You wouldn't have people accuse this Christ as being a drunkard. You certainly wouldn't have Christ rebuke the head of this group as Satan. What else? I mean, do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if you're writing later, you, you would not have these predictions of the destruction of Jerusalem, which seemed to imply that the world's going to end immediately thereafter.

Now I think we have ways of understanding that, but you would want more explanation in there. And furthermore about that, yeah, all of the apostles come off looking like nitwits in this. So this is not a hagiography. This is not gaining prestige for Peter or for, you know, possibly for John, but John never uses his own name,

you know, in his gospel. He's very indirect about that. So yeah, you know, I think that's a very strong argument. You have a lot of, you know, as it were, politically incorrect things said about Jesus and the apostles that are very difficult to explain. Like he's gone out of his mind. Like his family thought he'd gone out of his mind. Why would you write that? Exactly. His family thought he was crazy. But that's so authentic because, yeah, you

can totally imagine that happening in reality. You know, so it rings true with our human experience. And furthermore, you know, I got into a debate about this at a Bible conference some years ago. This Bible scholar got up and he said that, you know, in the first century these Jews were superstitious and they just didn't understand that miracles don't really take place because they didn't have the notions of natural law and modern science and stuff like blah blah blah. And I got up after his talk and said, no that's not actually the case because when Jesus performs a miracle in the gospels, the people react just like you and I

would react. You know, they're like, dang, what the heck is going on? What's with this guy? He just commands the ways and they calm down. I mean, people are shocked, they're afraid, they're scared, they're frightened, you know, and that's precisely how we would react if somebody did this stuff. So it rings true. The reactions are kind of authentic. And you can see people struggling with this challenging person that Jesus is, you know, struggling to try to understand him and fit him into their categories and having a difficult time doing so. You mentioned that we have strong evidence in Matthew about the temple that suggests it was written prior to the temple. Do we have evidence in other gospels because of the destruction of the temple that they

were written after the destruction of the temple that they were written after the destruction of the temple? No, actually, this has been brought up several times, you know, most famously by a Bible scholar by the name of J.A.T. Robinson back in the 1970s, who wrote a book called, I think it was just like Redating the New Testament. And Robinson, who was not particularly conservative, in fact, you know, theologically, he was kind of a leftist, but he just points out that there's no smoking gun passage in any of the Gospels that clearly points to the fact that it was written after the destruction of the temple. And so Robinson said, hey, all of the New Testament documents can have been written

prior to destruction and probably were. That was his position. And just last year, this guy's name, I'm going to look at it, Jonathan Bernier. Jonathan Bernier had to refresh my memory in the name of this scholar. Just last year, 2022, Jonathan Bernier, a prominent New Testament scholar, updated Robinson's argument with a book from Baker called Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. I think that's what it was, isn't it? Yeah, Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. And refreshed all those arguments and showed that, yeah, Robinson's arguments, I mean,

they need to be adjusted for some discoveries, but it's still a sound argument to this day. You can date all of the New Testament documents prior to the destruction of the temple in the year 70, and in the case of the majority of them, that would be the preferable date. Now, personally, based on the testimony of the Church Fathers, I regard John as being written later. But there is evidence in the Gospel of John of it being written prior to the destruction of the temple, because at one point John says, for example, there is in Jerusalem near the sheep gate such and such and such and such. And this, you know,

it's a statement that implies that at the time of writing, this is still true of the city of Jerusalem. Now, personally, I think of that as, you know, John as an older man, as church tradition tells us, for whom, you know, Jerusalem is just so real in his memory. These memories are so vivid that he kind of speaks in that vivid manner. But you can, and many have and do, take this as evidence of really an early date, even for the Gospel of John. Which John wrote John, and does it matter?

Yeah, I think that the simplest explanation is it's just the Apostle John. And Paul N. Anderson, a Methodist Bible scholar, just maybe within the past five years, wrote a tour de force defense of just traditional authorship of the Gospel of John, you know, just saying it's the apostle, you know. And he presented this at an international conference of John experts, that if my memory serves was held in Lima, Peru, all these, you know, Johanine, we call them, you know, experts from all over the world, and Paul Anderson gets up and he gives this resounding defense of John's authorship. I just think it's the explanation that best fits with the data, because, you know, at the end of the

Gospel of John, you get the big reveal where you find out that this guy, this disciple whom Jesus loved, is actually the same guy as is writing this book. You know, you find that out in in John 21. So this is the one who has written these things down, okay? And then you go back through the Gospel of John and you look at the profile of this disciple whom Jesus loved, and you find out that, for example, he always seems to be hanging around Peter. Well, that's interesting, because you go to the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, and you ask yourself, of all the apostles, who is the one that's always

hanging around with Peter? And what you find out is, it's John. Peter and John get sent into Jerusalem to prepare the Passover for the Last Supper. Peter and John get sent to Samaria to confirm the converts that Philip had made in Acts Chapter 8. Okay? So Peter and John this, Peter and John go up to the temple and they heal the handicapped man who's on the steps of the temple, you know? So it's kind of that subtle confirmation where the profile of the disciple whom Jesus loved, who's traditionally always been understood by the church as the apostle John, his profile fits with the profile of John that we have from Luke Acts. And then other subtle things. Church tradition identifies John as the youngest

of the apostles. That would fit with John outrunning Peter to the tomb. If he's a teenager and Peter's in his 30s or 40s, that would make sense. The teenager gets there first. John being the youngest would fit with John sitting beside Jesus at the Last Supper because the oldest and the youngest male present sat next to each other. The oldest male led the Passover Seder, and then the youngest male had a speaking part where he was supposed to act stupid and ask dumb questions like, why do we eat bitter herbs this night? And stuff like that. So those two sat next to each other at a Passover. And that's where we see Jesus and John. And also that, you know, John laying his head on Jesus's chest is kind of a social gesture

or kind of interaction that would be appropriate between like a much older, like older brother figure or even a father figure and a much younger man, but two guys the same age, a little bit weird, you know? So if we imagine John at, you know, maybe fifteen years old, Jesus in his thirties, you know, very much, you know, Jesus is old enough to be his dad, you know? So that kind of physical affection, like noogie, noogie, noogie, you know, kind of thing is appropriate. And then further, that explains why John is able to stand at the foot of the cross.

Being maybe 15 years old, he does not look like a threat. So the Roman soldiers allow the women, and you got a teenager there, and a tank top jams, and flip flops. You're like, he's fine. Let him go with the women, you know, and co-op. He's no threat. But Peter was a grown man who carried some gravitas,

you know, you're not gonna let him, if he shows up, you're gonna arrest him, cause he might cause some trouble. You know, he can wield a sword and cut somebody's ear off. You know? So, there's all this. You know, he can wield a sword and cut somebody's ear off, you know. So there's all this, you know, this subtle circumstantial evidence that points to the beloved disciple being young and being a sidekick of Peter, and that's exactly how he's betrayed in Luke Acts and early church tradition. So yeah, I think the strongest evidence is just the simple,

you know, what has been the church's tradition. I've heard people say that in John's gospel we see the divine Messiah, but in Matthew, Mark and Luke we don't. But perhaps since John was written later, people began to speak about Jesus with this divine sort of authority, and therefore we really shouldn't accept John and because the other gospel's don't talk about him being divine. Why is that? Oh my gosh. Oh, that's so terrible. That's awful. I just, I just got back from pilgrimage. She takes him harbor medicine and then right. Right. You have to calm down. I have to like do some centering exercises

to call myself after that incendiary thing that you just said, But- Say your centering prayer word. Yes, okay. Concentrate on the breath, back to the breath. Okay. Feel your body. Yeah. That's enough, okay. I'll stop. Look, again and again,

this problem, Matt, arises from not reading the gospels as Jews. You gotta place yourself back in that first century Jewish mindset and approach this from a Jewish perspective, and if you do, you discover that Jesus is claiming to be divine all over the place in all four of the Gospels, okay? But understandably, being a good teacher, he's subtle about it, and he kind of provides you with enough information to be able to triangulate or figure

out that he's God without saying it directly because if he says it directly he risks arrest. And it's not that our Lord is unwilling to be arrested, he just wants to be arrested at the right time and on his terms. And so he waits till he's ready for his passion and then he allows himself to be arrested. But he controls the situation. But let me give you some examples. I mean, a great example is the calming of the storm on the sea, which is recorded by Matthew, Mark and Luke.

If you go back to Psalm 107, Psalm 107 has a couple of lines where it says, you know, the Lord, using the divine name, you know, YHWH, the Lord calms the sea and stills the winds, okay? And then you see Jesus doing that on the Sea of Galilee. And any good Jewish reader, and remember the Jews recited the Psalms, memorized the Psalms, any good Jewish reader who reads that account of the stilling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee, Psalm 107 is going to come to mind and they are going to put two and two together, come up with four. Four is Jesus' God. He is the Lord from Psalm 107. Even if you're a pagan, you're gonna realize that

Jesus is divine because the winds were the domain of Jupiter and the sea was the domain of Neptune, and those two guys were at least two of the top three gods in the Greco-Roman pantheon. And Jesus has just outranked Jupiter and Neptune by telling them to shut the heck up and sit down and be quiet. Okay, so that means Jesus's power exceeds that of Zeus and Poseidon, you know, Jupiter and Neptune. You know, that Jesus exercises divine power and this is why it causes fear and then the disciples are like, who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? Again, the Sermon on the

Mount. In Matthew chapter 5, we have those famous six antitheses where Jesus says again and again, you have heard that it was said, or you heard that it was written, but I say to you. And in six different places there, Jesus corrects either the interpretation of the Law of Moses or in some instances, he corrects the Law of Moses itself. Moses was regarded as a divine man or like a theos aneir in Greek. They call it, scholars call it it like a man who was almost, you know, was so close to God that divinity almost kind of flowed through him in the Jewish perspective. So there's nobody higher in the Jewish view of the world. There's no one higher

than Moses, but God himself. So for Jesus to correct Moses in the Sermon on the Mount amounts to a claim to divinity, okay? And this happens again and again. I could go into, you know, greater detail, but on virtually every chapter of Matthew, Mark, Luke, Jesus is doing things that only God can do. And again, being a good teacher, he uses the Socratic method. The Socratic method is to allow people to, as it were, get it themselves. And so he's just, you know, not making the blatant claim, but providing folks with enough evidence from his miracles and from his teaching that they can figure out what's going on. I'm thinking of today's gospel, which is easier, to say your sins are forgiven or to get up,

take up your pallet and walk? Right. But that's you may know. You tell me and then I'll do that thing. Right. Yeah. And then, you know, he identifies himself as the son of man. Well, you go, you know, who is the son of man? Daniel seven is the son of man. You go back to Daniel chapter seven and the son of man comes riding on the clouds. Well what does that mean? Well, Psalm 18 says that the Lord rides on the clouds. In Greco-Roman mythology, Zeus or Jupiter rode on the clouds. In Norse mythology, it was Thor.

In all these pagan religions, the chief god always rides on the clouds and controls the weather. So in Daniel 7, the Son of man who comes riding on the clouds to be presented before the ancient days, the son of man is a divine figure. And even Jewish scholars admit this. So there's Daniel Boyarin, a very famous rabbi scholar from UC Berkeley, like 20 or 30 years ago wrote an article in Harvard Theological Review pointing out that the Son of Man figure in Daniel 7 is a divine figure. And so people think when Jesus calls himself Son of Man

that it means like Joe Six Pack or John Q Doe or something like that. Like I'm just a generic human being. That's not the meaning of the phrase. Look at Psalm 8 and what it says about the Son of Man. Look at how the Son of Man is portrayed in Daniel 7. Right, so if you're right about that, I would imagine that we would have a response of horror to the claim, I am the Son of Man. Do we see that?

Right. Well, we do, you know, at the trial at the Sanhedrin, where the high priest, Caiaphas, places Jesus under oath and says, I adjure you, tell us if you are the Christ. And Jesus says, I am and truly I say to you, you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds in glory. Okay, this is the divine entrance of the Son of Man from Daniel 7. And then Caiaphas says, blasphemy! Well, what is blasphemy? It's like, you know, falsely claiming to be God or, you know, offending and and so on. And so yeah, there is this response of horror. But that could have more to do with the writing on the clouds of glory than just saying, I'm

the son of man. So if you're right that saying, I'm the son of man means more than I'm a human like you, I mean, shouldn't we see people being bewildered at that statement all throughout? Well, they are, in a sense, bewildered by this claim that Son of Man, and people don't seem to understand what he means by that, but the light comes on when he's tried before the Sanhedrin. And so, like, oh, that Son of Man. This is what you've been meaning all this time, you know?

So it's like, yeah, this is kind of great, you know, revelatory moment. For those who had eyes to see and ears to hear, they could have is kind of great, you know, revelatory moment for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear. They could have figured it out before, but it finally becomes, you know, a public, public recognition at our Lord's trial before the Sanhedrin. In addition to what you've said, if you had three to five minutes to convince Ben Shapiro to convert and accept Christ as the long awaited for Messiah, what would you say? What would I say? His salvation depends on you here, so don't screw this up.

Yeah, don't mess this up. I would say, look Ben, the Gospels are authentic Jewish documents. documents. They reflect the hopes and aspirations of the people of Israel, reaching the culmination of their history. And these Jewish men who resurrection and ascension of Jesus the Messiah, God providentially destroyed the Jewish temple, making it impossible thereafter to practice Judaism. I agree that Judaism is true, that Judaism is a revealed religion, but it is no longer possible to practice it because we cannot any longer offer the necessary sacrifices in the temple. This is the same point that, for example, Justin Martyr pointed out to contemporary Jews of his own time period.

So, can we not see in God's providence, first of all, the strong historical testimony to the reality, the miracles, the supernatural power of Jesus the Christ, which is, you know, we didn't even get to talk about Josephus, but Josephus also testifies to the miraculous powers at work in Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospels provide historical testimony to this as the fulfillment of the expectations of the prophets of Israel, and God also seems to have providentially blocked other ways

of being faithful to the tradition of Israel's prophets. So this is really the only viable path still open to us to be faithful to the tradition of Israel. It's to accept that Jesus, the Christ, is the fulfillment of, say, Isaiah 53 and the expectations of the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31, 31, 34, etc. And to be faithful to the Jewish tradition the is light tradition The only viable path is to accept Jesus as the as the Messiah that fulfilled that otherwise we're left with a Religion which has failed apparently okay. Thank you. I was reading in did you have something? It's 1010 Do you want to do? Oh what time do you need to go? Oh?

Soon okay 10 do you want to do? Oh, what time do you need to go? Oh, uh, soon. Okay, can we do our Halloween? Five minutes? We need to read our Halloween. Hello.com slash Matt, go check them out. So I just found this today on Hello and it got me really jazzed speaking of loving scripture. This conversation has been so fascinating. I want to apologize to all of our local supporters who asked questions and we haven't got a chance to read them. We didn't realize that Dr. Bergman had to to leave so we'll have him on again and we'll get to those questions But I want to tell people hello.com slash Matt will put a link in the description below

Hello is the number one downloaded Catholic app. It's got a ton of great stuff They've just now included the four Gospels that are read dramatically and there's also a new podcast That's on this app. And if you know this fella, please thank him for me because he's an Aussie. It's called Daily Exegesis. And so every day he goes through the daily gospel and, uh, well exegetes it and it's excellent. Really, really excellent. It's nice to hear another Aussie too. Um, so if you download the app, right, um, you only get a certain amount of things free,

but if you want access to the entire app go to hello.com slash Matt and when you sign up there You get it for three months for free. That's ridiculous. Three months is a long time time And you might be mad content that might matter if you get charged literally offering you like $100 worth of free content guys So check that out. Hello comm slash Matt. I use it. I've been using this every morning and I've just been loving it. So it's terrific. Awesome.

Sounds great. I'm sorry, you have to go. This is fast. I love talking to you. Oh, I had so much fun. I love talking about this stuff. This was packed. Let's answer the question sometime.

You know, have me back and let's handle these. Yes, yes. We'll definitely do that. All right. Well, God bless. Big thanks to everybody. Thanks, Thursday. You got do that. Alright well, God bless, big thanks to everybody. Thanks Thursday. You got it Matt. Have a good day guys.