Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why an Atheist Homicide Detective Changed His Mind About the Resurrection: An interview with Detective J. Warner. Wallace

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

How can a rational, intelligent person believe that Jesus rose from the dead? J. Warner Wallace, a Dateline featured cold-case homicide detective, asked this question as an atheist in his 30s. He hoped to disprove the resurrection by using the skills he developed solving unsolved murders. Instead, he proved the opposite. In this episode, he shares his journey and the evidence he found that led him to become a follower of Jesus. If you're interested in following J. Warner Wallace, check out his Twitter: https://twitter.com/jwarnerwallace (@jwarnerwallace). You can also purchase his book https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Case-Christianity-Participants-Guide-Investigates/dp/1434711447/ref=sr_1_10?dchild=1&keywords=J.+Warner+Wallace&qid=1615909024&sr=8-10 (Cold-Case Christianity) online. Do you follow us on https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter)? Now's a great time to start: https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (@tmbtpodcast). Want to follow https://twitter.com/PatrickKMiller_ (Patrick) or https://twitter.com/KeithSimon_ (Keith)? Check them out here: https://twitter.com/PatrickKMiller_ (PatrickKMiller_) & KeithSimon_ Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. If this podcast has been helping you in your walk with God, would you take five seconds to help us? Hop onto Twitter and follow our new Twitter account at TMBT Podcast. If you go there, you can see our latest episodes. You can also follow Keith and I and send us messages. We'd love to follow you back and see what's happening in your life.

life. The other day I was having a conversation with an atheist, and we were talking about the resurrection. And he looks me straight in the face, and he says, I don't know how any rational, reasonable thinking person could possibly believe that someone rose from the dead. We know that that does not happen. And I said, well, that's interesting. Have you looked into the evidence of Jesus's resurrection? He said, I don't have to. I've had plenty of Christians tell me all about it. And as we began to discuss, he finally gets frustrated and he says, look, I don't want to hear something based on feelings. I don't want to hear something based on what someone just thinks or what their opinion is. I want to look at real evidence. And I looked at him and I said, I think that the real evidence might

be out there. I think you might discover that there is a good reason to believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Now, maybe that's you as you're listening right now. You've wondered, how can we really believe that a dead person came back to life? Or maybe that's the person. Or maybe that's someone that you love and your family and you've wanted to talk to them about Jesus, but they think no rational, reasonable person out there could believe this kind of nonsense. If that's you, then this podcast is going to be great. It's going to be a podcast that I think you want to share with those friends, or at the very least learn from yourself and be able to share on your own. Today, I am interviewing Jay Warner Wallace. He is a Dateline-featured cold case detective in Los Angeles. He is a

Colson Center Senior Fellow and an adjunct professor at Biola. He's an author. He's a nationwide speaker. And this topic, the topic of the resurrection is something that he has spoken to many, many, many people, many large audiences about. And he has some great things to say and offer. So thanks so much for being on the show today, Jim. Oh, I'm so glad to be with you. It's important topics. So let's talk about it. We both realize this is coming out on April Fool's Day. Recorded well before that. And nothing we're about to say is a joke. But I'm curious, Jim. Jim, if you were talking to my friend who was an atheist who said, look, no reasonable person could believe in the resurrection.

What would you say? I was that guy who would have said that to you not that long ago. I've yet been a Christian half my life. I was about 35 when I first began to examine the claims of Christianity. And I knew that resurrection claim was out there. And I thought it was patently absurd, not even worth trying to negate. I mean, I've got a friend Lee Strobel who wrote the case for Christ. And his wife, Leslie, became a Christian before him.

So he spent some time like pushing against this because he wanted to try to show her how crazy this was. So that wasn't me. I thought it's so stupid. There's not even any point in trying to defend it. Why would you care? This is like trying to prove or disprove the Easter Bunny. No one thinks the Easter Bunny exists.

So why are we spending our time on this? That was me. But the first question you want to ask is a question when you're interacting with people who make claims. To say that it's patently absurd or to say that it's not reasonable or rational. So the question is, well, let's just back up a second. what do we think that makes something reasonable or rational? So, for example, let's do a thought experiment. If I said to you, there was documented evidence, ancient manuscripts that describe an ancient

wise sage. And the only thing the sage ever did was travel around the area of Mediterranean Sea and did some cool sermons, told some parables, had some really interesting teaching on moral ethics. Disciples kind of came to him. He grew a group of followers. And that's it. it. That's the entirety of the story. He's just an ancient sage who lived and died in the ancient past and taught a bunch of stuff in sermon form that has been captured in ancient manuscripts. Would you consider his existence to be reasonable and rational? Can we make a case for that? Would that bother you in any way? Anybody would believe that. Socrates did that. Okay, okay. So clearly, if all we had were

gospels that describe Jesus in such a way, and we had the amount of manuscript evidence we have today for the Gospels we actually have, but all it did was describe Jesus as an ancient teacher. There wouldn't be a person on planet Earth who would deny the strength of that manuscript evidence. They would not deny the existence of Jesus. They would not deny that he is the most well-documented ancient sage in all of human history. If you doubt a documentation of Jesus as a sage, you have to doubt every other culture's sage. It really comes down to the issue of the miraculous. the reason why you don't think this is reasonable is because you don't believe that anything happens outside of space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry.

That's the naturalist. And that was me. I was a very committed philosophical naturalist. I was entrenched. I was just not going to move from that. If you're going to start talking about an event in the past and then you're going to include something miraculous or supernatural, extra natural outside of space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry, I would have told you you're in a completely different genre.

You no longer talking about history. about mythology. So if I'm tracking with you here, you had before you ever looked into the resurrection and the resurrection accounts, you had a presupposition, you had a belief that you were bringing to the table. And that's that this world is a closed world. There is only matter. There is only physics. There aren't things outside of this physical world that can have any effect on this world. And that fundamentally means that if there's any stories, any histories, anything out there that suggests that that's not the case, they must be false. Yes, that's right. And that's exactly the hidden pre-suposition that,

causes people to say someone rising from the dead, that's irrational. Well, it's actually based on a presupposition about what would qualify as rational. And almost always, it's about you thinking that the entire story, all of history has to be impacted by simply the stuff that's inside the physical universe, space, time matter, physics, and chemistry. Now, here's why that's an absurd presupposition. Because even as an atheist, and you probably heard me say this in the past, I accepted Big Bang cosmology, the idea that the evidence we have from several different lines of study, even philosophy, all the physical evidence in the universe points to a universe that is finite. In other words, our universe is not infinitely old. It's expanding from a point of expansion. The second law of thermodynamics demonstrates this, the philosophical law of infinite regress.

There's lots of reasons to believe that we evidentially are in a finite universe that had a beginning and that everything in the universe, all space, time, and matter did not exist until the universe began to exist. So we have a universe with the beginning in which all space, time, and matter does not exist until the universe exists. But here's the problem. That means the cause, and everything that has a beginning must have a cause. the cause of the universe by definition is outside of the stuff we talk about in naturalism,

which is space, time, and matter. That didn't exist until the universe existed. So whatever causes the universe is already extra natural. It's already outside of your naturalistic presupposition. And I held that view. I would have said, I don't know what that is, what that could be. But look, if that thing out there that causes the universe to come into existence is personal, It's a being rather than a impersonal force.

And there's also a good reason to believe that, but we can go into that later. But the point is, then why are we fretting over New Testament miracles? It turns out that the most amazing causal event from outside space, time, and matter, a miracle is not anything on the new page is the New Testament. It's in Genesis 1. It's everything from nothing. If there's a being that can do that, then everything you're reading on the New Testament pages, I call those are small potato. Miracles. These are not big deals for a being that can blink everything into existence from nothing. And so I had to really ask myself, why do I hold this presupposition when the standard cosmological model in astrophysics

already embraces a cause outside of space, time, and matter? I'm just suggesting that cause might also be chronicled on the pages of the New Testament, at least allow that possibility, that reasonable inference, given the reasonable inferences about the beginning of the universe. And at the very least, if you want to deny what you're saying right now, acknowledge your presuppositions. Be willing to say, I don't necessarily have a reason for why I believe that nothing can happen outside of our universe, but that's the presupposition I bring to the table. And whatever presuppositions you bring to the table inform what you see.

You told a story once about coming to a crime scene, I think, and everybody made a lot of assumptions about what they saw in the crime scene because they had preceptitions. Do you know what story I'm talking about? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is something that you would never like walk into a death scene and assume you already know all the answers. I call this a proximity principle.

The likelihood that somebody, you put yourself in a harm's way without either knowing it or by dating somebody you shouldn't be dating, living next door to somebody who's a crazy, or you're in some proximity to your killer most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time. So if I walk in and I see a woman's been killed and her husband's not home, I am going to start to look at the husband. Right. Where were you? Because so often, it's somebody you know intimately who ends up killing you. But if I walked in assuming the husband did it, well, now you've got a problem.

Listen, I've been in cases where one of us on the team made that kind of overarching assumption. And we ended up trailing on stuff that wasn't relevant for days because we should have been more open-minded when we first walked in the crime scene. And so the first principle of good investigations is, I always say don't be a know at all. You don't know. At least suspend your presuppositions long enough to see if the evidence is good. But look, in the end, your friend who's the atheist, made a good point. Go on the way, he's kind of telling you. And you could ask this question.

So tell me, what evidence could I show you that would convince you that God exists, for example, or that Christianity is true? And sometimes people will say things like, God would have to come and write, you know, I exist on that mountain over there. And I'd have to be tested later to make sure I actually am not crazy and I actually saw that. Well, then you can ask yourself, okay. So Patrick, can you do that for him? Can you snap your fingers and get God to write that on the mountain?

So if people set the bar this a crazy high, it may just be a matter of jury selection. In other words, I'm looking for those people that are not so on either polar extreme. We don't put people on juries that are so dead set against the prosecution or against the defense team that they won't be fair. I call these ones and fours. They're either extreme. Either they're totally sold out to the cops, in which case the defense attorney is not going to want one. like all those ones or their number fours. They're completely think all cops are liars.

And of course, the prosecution is not going to want that guy on the jury. So each side takes off the ones and fours, leaving us with twos and threes, people who are on one side of the issue or the other, but they're fair and they're open. And they are telling us they can put aside their biases to make a reasonable inference from the evidence we're going to present.

Look, and your friends, when you're talking to them, that's a good question to ask. If I could demonstrate this was true, a thought experiment, If somehow I could meet all your criteria, would you follow Jesus? You'd be surprised how many would say no. And then you know this is not an issue related to Evan.

This is more an issue related to the heart. And the truth is in everybody's life. It is an issue of the heart. And that's where obviously God comes into play. I can't change people's hearts, but God really can. And yet, God calls us, we read this at First Peter, to have a reason for our faith. We should be prepared to defend. Yeah, you're right.

Let me tell you something about that. That's a great point because I'm not suggesting that my memory. making the case is what wins people. No, God calls people. So when I'm dealing with a four on that far extreme, I cannot talk him into a three position. I can pray him into a three position because only God does that transition where you enmity toward God is removed long enough for you to hear the case. But the question is, you're going to share something about Jesus with them. If you follow the pattern set by the apostles in the New Testament in the book of Acts, you're going to find yourself doing it a very specific way, which is evidence dependent because that's what they did.

The method we've been using in the past. And sometimes I got a great friend, Ray Comfort. I mean, I love his way of the master approach. You know, are you a sinner? Have you ever stolen anything? Well, you're a thief. Have you ever lied? Well, you're a liar.

You know, there was no one, demonstrate our need for a savior. But you won't find that approach on the pages of the book of Acts. Which you're going to find are eyewitnesses. That's called direct evidence of the resurrection, selected because they were eyewitnesses. Matias gets into the group because he was a, eyewitness from the baptism to the resurrection. He replaces Judas. Well, that's because he's an eyewitnesses testifying to the resurrection repeatedly that is what's used as a way of introducing people to the gospel. And so I think that I just follow that same pattern. I'm going to make a case

for why this is true evidentially before I present the gospel, because I want people to come in to the family through a renewal of the mind as well as a change of the heart. And so I needed to come in that way. So let's talk about that for a moment. Obviously, you were once an atheist, and then you began to look into some of the evidence. And in particular, I want to talk about the evidence for the resurrection, because when I have these conversations with people, I tend not to focus on the cosmological things, because that tends to be a more metaphysical conversation. Yeah, yeah. Can we start with the one thing that I really do think they're a strong evidence for, and then we'll build our way out from there. And it's the centerpiece, actually, of the entire Christian faith, the idea that a person,

named Jesus of Nazareth died on a cross and rose from the dead. As a cold case detective, help us walk through the evidence. Help us think through this. Okay, so what happens in the book of Acts, you'll see that these eyewitnesses offer their eyewitness testimony. That's the same thing I do here in 2021. I simply say, hey, there were eyewitnesses who originally saw the resurrection and offered their testimony. The question, of course, is, why should we trust anything they're telling us. Why would they, we call them reliable? Well, I spent a lot of time talking to people about what are the earmarks, what are the traits, what's the template by which we judge an eyewitness to be reliable in court. You can simply apply that to the New Testament authors as well.

But to make it even shorter, look, in the end, when we walk into a death scene, not every death scene is a crime scene. There are four ways to die. Only one of them is a murder. You can die by suicide, accidental, natural. We got to figure out which of these four ways is the most reasonable, given the body and the scene and the evidence in the scene. That's what we're doing at every single death scene. And then we're going to communicate that to juries. When I walked into this scene called Christianity, I knew from Paul in 1st Corinthians 15 that this resurrection thing was the cornerstone pivotal piece of evidence. He claims it was. He says if that's not true, you'd be pitied. You believe false witnesses. And every witness in the book of Acts is

hinging their testimony on the resurrection. So I simply knew I had to examine one. claim. But I would have said there were a number of ways. Now, first of all, when you walk into death scenes, you just make two lists in your mind, a list of all the evidence in the scene, a list of all the ways to explain it. That's it. A list of evidence, a list of possible explanations. So I thought, okay, I'm going to walk into this scene. I'm going to make a list of evidence. So what would I as an atheist agree to about this resurrection thing? Because I would have said, okay, yeah, I'm not a Jesus mythor. I think that Jesus lived. Doesn't mean he rose from the dead. Doesn't mean he did any miracles. But the fact that he lived, to me, is utterly, like I said before,

if you take out all the miracle events, nobody would doubt the historicity of Jesus on the pages of the New Testament. Doesn't matter whether you're a conservative Bible scholar or a liberal Bible scholar. The idea that Jesus is a myth is probably by definition of conspiracy theory. Bart Ehrman, who is a skeptic, who's not a Christian, he's written a book on why it's ridiculous to believe that Jesus didn't even exist. And he's written that book against other atheists who do, you know, the Jesus mythors. But again, sometimes a small percentage of the voice that's out there gets a lot of play on social media, right? Those YouTube videos go viral. But that's really a very small number of people.

And even atheists would fight against that notion. But this does not mean, like me, I would have said, Jesus can live, the Christianic can still be false. I would also have said the tomb is empty because this is what started this whole mess, right? They couldn't find a body. Find the body. It's over. Get the original eyewitnesses to recant. It's over.

So, okay, so he dies on our cross and there's an empty tomb. this does not mean Christianity is true. You can explain the empty tomb a number of ways. And they said they saw a risen Christ. So what? I mean, people say all kinds of crazy things. It can be true that they said that, yet Christianity could still be false. And finally, they do seem to be sold out for this idea.

But so what? There's lots of people who are sold out for false things. So I would have said those are the only four things as an atheist that I would agree to. But there's a number of ways I have my list, right? Those are the four things in evidence on the list. Now, what's the explanations for those four things? And so as I thought about it, there's like a number of explanations. And there's like classically, these have been, you know, I think who started this process

years ago looking at the explanations. But for me, I was just trying to mine out every possible way to explain the life of Jesus, the empty tomb, the disciples claims. How do I describe those? How do I explain those? Maybe they're lying. Maybe he wasn't really dead. Maybe they imagined this or somebody who maybe one person was so influential, he imagined it.

And then he convinced the others. Maybe this is just an elaborate conspiracy. or maybe this is just a legendary account that developed over time. So whatever the simple version of Jesus was to begin with, it eventually ends up with a resurrection 150 years later. I looked at every possible explanation. I remember that one of those explanations is simply that the Gospels are telling us the truth. Okay, I put that in the bottom.

So I went through the first six or seven, which you can hold as an atheist. They lied about it. They imagined it. These are all things you can hold as an explanation as an atheist that would explain those four little things I was willing to give you without revolving anything crazy. Let's talk about some of those. One that I've commonly heard, and this is something I heard when I was studying the New Testament at a secular university here in town, the University of Missouri, and it was that Jesus didn't

really die. We know that crucifixion takes a long time to kill people. And so there's a theory that, look, Jesus, he passed out on the cross. He looked as though he was dead. They took him off the cross, and then they resuscitated him, or he resuscitated on his own. And that's why people thought they saw him resurrected. Yeah. No, there's good.

I think there's actually some reason to make that case from inside scripture. So you could say, well, look, he's crucified alongside two thieves. Yet these two thieves, when they come to collect the bodies off the cross, the two thieves are not dead. They have to break their legs in order to kill them. So two and other three did not die in the few hours are involved in the story. Yeah, you're telling me that Jesus, of course, he's dead. Well, no, maybe he's like the two thieves. By the way, they didn't break Jesus's legs to make sure he was dead.

All they did was poke him in the side, right? So, I mean, I think you could almost make that kind of a case using Christian scripture as your guide. But of course, what that does is it minimizes a couple of things. I think one of the things we get set up, when you look at classic art on this, and I've gone back and looked up the art from the Middle Ages all the way through the Renaissance, nobody ever has the courage to draw the divine Jesus of Nazareth with a bruise or more than just a trickle of blood coming out of his side. So when you look at the passion story in classic art, you're going to find that Jesus always looks pretty good. Yeah. He's clean.

Every picture is about to be struck or about to be whipped, but he hasn't actually been whipped yet. And I think that's interesting. I think it's out of a defined kind of holy deference to the nature of Jesus. Nobody wants to paint him in an ugly way. Let's get to the Passion of the Christ. You're at that movie. And we're all going, oh, my gosh, we didn't see that coming, right? Because we've never really been shown the nature of the beating.

that Jesus took until that movie. And I think that we've got to remember is that Jesus' path to the cross is very different than the two men who were executed alongside of him. So you end up in a place. And there's also good reason to believe, just from internal biblical evidence, look, they punctured his side and water is seen to be separated

from his chest cavity from the blood. Now, this always intrigued me because there's a reason why it would be separated that would demonstrate that he's dead. It's called plural effusion. So I'm wondering how early in history was plural effusion known. So did John insert that detail to make it look like he's dead? That would indicate when you have cardiac arrest and your heart stops beating and water fills up either around your heart or in your lungs.

If I puncture your lungs, you will see a separation of water. So I just went back and I started reading the church fathers, searching for the church fathers and what they wrote about that passage in the gospel of John. And what you'll find is really interesting is that every single time a church father writes about the separation of blood and water. Most of them skip it, by the way, because they don't understand it themselves. But the few who write about it, like tertillion origin, they will write about it and they will describe it as something other than water because they don't think it's water. They're like, that's got to be a symbol. Symbol of the Holy Spirit, symbol of the water baptism. It's a symbol of something.

And John meant it to be interpreted symbolically because they didn't understand plural effusion. So you got this confusing factoid in the gospel of John that really describes plural effusion when everyone for centuries is going to think it can't be true, but this is what happens if someone's dead. And so it's a good piece of internal scientific evidence from the scripture, which, again, if I could find evidence that they knew about plural effusion back then, they'd be different, but they didn't. And John a fisherman simply wrote what he saw, and it was confusing to everyone who read it

for centuries. If they knew about plural effusion, then presumably John could have made it up to make it look as though he was dead. Instead, he tells what he saw in such a manner that it almost sounds like later writers were embarrassed. It almost falsified the account because what is this. I don't know what this is. This is going to make people not believe it. So they would move right past it. And yet, as it turns out, we now know what this was.

And it makes a lot of sense as someone was really dead. I talk about this in front of audiences. There's always somebody in the audience who's had the same experience. I have to go to a lot of autopsies. And if you've seen dead bodies, we have the sense that dead people are kind of like unconscious actors in movies, right? They're laying on the floor there. Well, that's my experience with dead people.

Yes, exactly. Well, for a lot of people, though, who work in, yeah, who are first responders or they work in medical services, you know, there were funeral homes. You know that there's this thing called a mortis triad. It's the stiffness of dead bodies. It's the temperature loss in dead bodies. It's the puddling or the pooling of blood. These are called rigor mortis algorithm.

mortis, liver mortis. These are things that are common. It's called the mortis triad. So the idea that we're going to mistake and manipulate, carry a body off the cross and get him to a tomb, and then manipulate him and wrap him up and anoint him in some way and not notice the mortis triad is just ludicrous. It's only because we aren't as familiar with death. And by the way, in the first century, those folks were very familiar with the mortis triad because you couldn't call the mortuary to get your love one off the cross. You couldn't call the coroner's. There was no coroner's office. You treated and handled your own dead. So people who are familiar with death, I don't think we'd be fooled by somebody who's not dead. And that certainly explains, again, is it possible that Jesus was still alive?

Well, yes, of course, it's possible. But when we look at the evidence, it's not reasonable. It's not the best explanation. It's not the simplest explanation. She just said is so important, because I think that's a rule of evidence that would help a lot of skepticism. So this idea is that this is an incredibly high standard beyond a possible doubt. And if you can't get me beyond a possible doubt, I just can't accept this. But that is not the standard for anything else in your life. Not even your birthday. Can you prove what your birthday was?

Do you remember it? People go out in their cars in the morning. Somewhere in America, someone's going to go out in their car, turn the key, and it's going to explode in their driveway. It happens, okay? You can't be 100% sure. It's not beyond a possible death. That'll happen to you today.

It's not beyond a possibly of a fuel leak on the way someplace and the whole car will blow up. That's not beyond a possible doubt, but you're not going to live that way. It's beyond a reasonable doubt, and that's good enough. So we're not looking for absolute certainty. Yeah, we're looking for proper confidence. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Like, what point is enough enough? At what point do we have evidential, we would call certainty?

And I think that word is scary because it means that most people would say, well, yeah, I'd have to have, and we ask us to jurors all the time. Are you the kind of person who cannot have an unanswered question and render a verdict? because the reality of it is, I have never been able to answer every question. It just doesn't work that way. You're going to have open questions, but I'm still going to ask you to render a verdict because there's always questions I can't answer. I've had cases where I couldn't tell you, how did he kill her?

I don't know. Where did he kill her? Don't know. What did you do with her body? Because we'd never recovered her body. Don't know. But still, people render verdicts. And you have to do that with all kinds of open questions.

That's because the standard is not beyond a possible doubt. it's beyond a reasonable doubt. That's a lower standard. Let's look at one other example on your list of possible explanations for those four facts. Look, any atheist can believe these four facts about Jesus. Another one was that the disciples lied about it, that they made up a story. It was a big conspiracy for maybe personal advantage, but they lied. What would you say to that? Oh, boy, you sure we want to start this now?

I'll tell you, this is a tough one. Now, I'll tell you why it's tough. I think as a culture, we are susceptible. to advancing conspiracy theories. We do it at an alarming rate. I only know that because I'm on a lot of social media. I've got, you know, relatively decent-sized social media platforms. And so I watch the news feeds.

What are these people who follow me because they love Jesus and they want to see what the case? That's all I ever post about. I don't post about politics. I don't post about other things. I post, is the Bible true? And should we take it seriously? I stay in my lane. And so that's all I'm posting.

But yet, people who follow me never talk about those things with each other. Instead, a lot of what they do is advance conspiracy. theories of one nature or another. And I'm like, wow, that's interesting, right? That's very disconcerting. As a culture, I think we are just generally. We love conspiracy theories. And what I've always discovered is that when you think there's a conspiracy, what it really

is is a bunch of chaos. And at the very end of the chaos, one entrepreneurial bad guy figures out how to leverage that chaos to do something fantastic for himself. Okay. It doesn't mean he was involved five years ago at the beginning of this chaotic set of dominoes. He just knows how to take advantage of the last domino falling. That's always the more reasonable inference than there's hundreds of people over a number of generations who have put this in place and have to keep a secret. So you need five things in order for a conspiracy to work.

These are the five things we try to unravel when we work conspiracy. And we do have conspiracies. If more than one person doesn't murder, you're going to add a conspiracy charge. So here's how you break the conspiracy. Number one, you need the smallest number of co-conspirators. It's much easier for two people to tell a lie than it is for 6,000 people and the federal government have to work in unison to tell them. a lie. It's just easier for less people to tell a lie and keep a secret. So you want the smallest possible number. Two, you want to hold it for the shortest period of time. So it's much

easier to keep a lie and tell a lie and keep a secret for a day than it is for a year. So the best conspiracy is where two people do a crime and then right afterwards, one kills the other. Because now you are down to one person and the conspiracy is over. It was held for a short period of time. You only had one other person involved. That could probably go all the way to the bank and you're not going to have any problems. But the more people you involve and the longer you try to hold it, the more difficult it's going to be. Third, you want to have excellent communication between co-conspirates because the first thing we do when we get four or five people who are involved in our crime is what?

We separate them. We don't allow them to talk to each other. We get the stories from each person in as much depth as we can. And then we compare how these stories don't line up. So we can tell if they're lying or not. You need to be able to communicate to your co-conspirator and say, hey, he just asked me this. Make sure you're ready for that question.

If you can't communicate with a co-conspirator, it's harder to keep a conspiracy. four, you want some type of close-knit relationship. Siblings are less likely, unless they don't like each other, they're less likely to rat on each other. No mom is going to rat on her son. Although sons do rat on moms, it doesn't happen the other way around. So if you've got a close family relationship, you've got a better chance of pulling it off. And finally, low pressure.

If no one's pressuring you, this can go on forever. But as the pressure increases, it's harder to hold the conspiracy. So those are the five things that we try to unravel when we were conspiracy theories. And this is why I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories because they're almost always involving too many people for too long a period of time. But again, anything is possible. I don't care about possible. I only care about reasonable because not everything is reasonable.

So the question here is, okay, I've got what? Originally there's 12? No, but not really. There's a lot more than 12 disciples of Jesus, probably who are standing on the mountaintop when he ascended. You know that there was 120 in the upper room in Acts 1. you know there's a 500 who saw the risen Christ on the same day, according to Paul and 1 Corinthians 15.

How many people are involved in this? If you told me there was just 12, I'd be skeptical. But if you're telling me there's 500 plus, I'm like, eh, we're not going to cut it as an explanation. But then how long do you have to hold it? Well, about six decades. It's even less likely. Well, do you have excellent communication? No, it's the first century.

So when Thomas is in India and Matthews in North Africa and Paul's in Rome and John's in Ephesus, is how are they communicating what they're telling to each other as they're starting to be questioned. Let's face it, these folks died of miserable death. The best historical evidence we have is they died of miserable death for their claims. And by the way, if I died for my claims as a Christian or you died for your claims, this would have zero value, okay, because lots of people die for what they don't know is true. But when the person who was actually there, because you and I, we weren't there. We're taking it on that manuscript evidence. But the people who were really there, if they die for their claims, that's the person.

that's got high evidential value. So my death doesn't matter, but theirs does. And this is what we see repeatedly. And finally, the question, you know, that they have close family relationships, Matthew came into this last. I don't know if you're watching the chosen series. I think it's pretty well done. And in that series, you see kind of this, their fictional account of who Matthew is. But regardless, he was not popular at the time he was selected. He came in. And so if you're looking for the guy who didn't start off as a Christian, hoping for the Messiah, I didn't start off as a disciple of John the Baptist. And one of these guys who had close relationships, they're all buddies. They're all. related to each other. He's a Roman sympathizer. He's a tax collector. Yeah. If you're looking for the

dude who's skeptical, who's not somebody who's been trained up to look for the Messiah, who is not just handed off when John the Baptist says, there he is, there's the Messiah. That's Matthew. He writes one of the earliest gospels and dies in North Africa defending his gospel. So in the end, I think all of the things you need, communication, close family relationships, and by the pressure, being tortured for your claims, these things are missing. So is it possible they conspired and lied about this? I always say absolutely. It's just not reasonable. I don't cling to things that aren't reasonable. So if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying, look, just from your own experience as a cold case detective, it's hard for two people to keep their lies straight. It's hard for two people to keep that lie for a long time. And it's incredibly hard for those two people when you apply pressure to them to not turn on each other, to not finally give up the ghost. You know what? It was all made up. Anyways, that's hard for two people, but the New Testament is claiming over 500 people.

That's right. I mean, no one disagrees. Yeah. That's exactly right. But that's also, though, Patrick, why I am hesitant about other conspiracy theories. So it's not just this conspiracy theory related to the. And so, for example, if you're somebody who really is quick to embrace conspiracy theories, then be consistent.

You'd have to embrace the resurrection account because to me, they fall in the same category. They all suffer from the same five deficiencies. And by the way, I'm not saying that conspiracies don't are. occur. They do. But if you know the conspiracy, it wasn't successful by definition. The reason why you know is because it failed in one of these five ways. The conspiracy theories that survive are the ones that no one even is looking at. They're not even paying attention because they are so well done that you don't even think for a second there might be a conspiracy going on. Yeah, but when we look at the New Testament, it seems obvious that these guys, they had tremendous pressure applied to them. They were many

of them. Their story was remarkably similar across massive geographical regions. In fact, those stories, this is Richard Bacom's work, it's really helpful. They have the marks of eyewitness accounts. All of them are just barely slightly different, not in the sense that they're telling a different story, but you can tell these are eyewitnesses who saw different parts of the story. I mean, it's got everything that you would look for if it was a true story, not a conspiracy. Yeah, if I can help with that too, because Richard's got a great book, and I've quoted him somewhat in mine as well. But, you know, historians don't get a chance to talk to it. witnesses. They don't. So they do is they look at ancient accounts and compare ancient accounts.

But it turns out if you're working in investigations, you will talk to thousands and thousands of witnesses over the course of your career. And what you'll discover is that they never agree. They just don't. And by the way, as this is happening, you get a sense like, first of all, I know they don't, I'm not going to agree. So if I've got five people who watch the bank robbery, I'm like, oh gosh, here we go. Because what I'm going to end up doing is providing fodder for the defense attorneys at some point when you go to trial, they're going to pin on these differences. And sometimes you can help people to kind of figure out why there's a difference, and sometimes you just can't. But this does not mean that the differences render any of these eyewitnesses

as unreliable. As a matter of fact, witnesses, there's a jury instruction in California, that a witness can be wrong about a detail yet still be considered reliable about something else. So it turns out, and I'm not suggesting this is the case with the New Testament at all. But just as a thought experiment, if you thought, oh, I don't trust this thing over here, X, okay. That does not render the entire account unreliable in a criminal trial. Now, I get it. I don't think that's the case at all in the Gospels. But we have to at least give the Gospels the same benefit of the doubt we would give

eyewitness accounts in trial. And I would have to imagine if the resurrection was truly lied about it, if it was a true conspiracy, everybody would have memorized the exact same lie. And you would expect that you would hear the exact same story in almost every detail across the board, because they're all telling the same lie, a way to tell if it's the true. truth is that we're seeing different perspectives on the exact same thing told in different ways, which again is what we have in the four gospels. Yeah, and sometimes it's not even a perspective.

It could be a physical geographical perspective. I was in a position where I didn't see that. That's one thing. That can happen. But a lot of times it's just a matter of like how I'm wired, what my interests are, what my personal history is. So, for example, if I've got a bad personal history with somebody who abused me and the person who walks in resembles that person, well, then I'm not maybe going to make the same kind of eye

contact or there's a reasons why are even historical in each person's story that these stories don't line up. And by the way, if you think for a second that somehow if we had a bunch of four accounts that were word for word identical, this was somehow appeased the skeptic, well, you know it would just be the opposite. They would say, well, this is collusion. Clearly, this is collusion given the fact that they're exactly the same. So it's kind of like you can't win either way. but the reality of it is the more you do this thing of interviewing eyewitnesses, the more convinced you are is a certain texture for the kinds of disagreements that witnesses have. And what I love about it is it's not like, okay, so these gospels are out there in groups are using these gospels.

But by the time the edict of Milan and the edict of Thessalonica, Christianity becomes the religion of the empire. And now we've got things like the Council of Laidaecia, where we're codifying and listing which gospels, well, you don't think we could have worked out some of these differences in the first 300 years before we get to that point. Like, you don't think people noticed these in the first generation of documents. You don't think they said, oh, we should probably like either take that piece out or maybe add some clarification here, explain why. No, nobody touched them because they recognized that there could be differences between the accounts and all of them could still be true. There are obviously so many other things we could talk about. You speak well about

the theory that maybe they were hallucinating and having a vision, or that perhaps there was an imposter, someone who looked a lot like Jesus, who was able to trick people, or that the story changed and became a legend. But we are running out of time. And I only bring those up to say that if you want to hear more about that, I would encourage you to go and buy a copy of Cold Case Christianity by Jay Warner Wallace. You can also follow him on Twitter. He's very active there. Same Twitter handle, Jay Warner Wallace. Is there anything new coming out that we can look forward to? that we could download and connect with? Well, I just finished, which is probably the most researched and creative book I've ever

written. It's kind of the companion piece to Cold Case Christianity, it publishes with Zonnervin in September, and it's called Person of Interest. And so what I'm basically doing in Cold Case is making a case for the historicity and deity of Jesus from the New Testament. Why would we trust it? Why do we think it's reliable? Well, how about this?

If we had no New Testament, if every single New Testament manuscript had been destroyed by some evil regime. Could we still make a case for the historicity and deity of Jesus? Well, actually, we could. And so what this book does is it makes a case for the historicity and deity of Jesus without any New Testament manuscripts. Just from, as a process we do in criminal trials where we'll say, hey, I don't have a body and there's no crime scene because they didn't report it. And he got away with it and he got rid of her body. But it turns out on the day that happened, that was an explosion that took place in that house, and I will tell you, it was preceded by a long fuse and then followed by a ton of fallout, like any explosion has, a fuse and fallout. It turns out that the fuse and fallout

of history demonstrates the historicity and deity of Jesus, and that's what person of interest tries to do. I am looking forward to that. I just bought it on Amazon as you were talking, so I'll be reading that, and I'm sure I'll be enjoying it. I hope other people listening to the podcast will do the same. Thank you for being on the show today. It's been fabulous. talk about the evidence to the central claim of Christianity that Jesus rose from the dead. And I just want to talk for a second to anybody who's either sharing this with someone they love or they want to share some of the ideas with someone they love. We started here.

I want to end here. Don't forget to pray for those people. Don't forget to ask that God would be at work in their hearts. But at the end of the day, this is a work of God to transform and change people. So let's not forget that key critical piece. Thanks for being on the show today, Jim. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you.

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