The Eric Metaxas Show - J. Warner Wallace

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Detective J. Warner Wallace shares results from his newest investigation, "Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible."

Eric McTexis show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Hour 2. Hour 2 is going to be different from Hour 1 in that it's going to follow Hour 1. Hour 1 never follows Our 1. Hour 1 actually is Our 1. But Hour 2 always follows Hour 1. But here's where it gets tricky. In Hour 1, we were talking to Johns Merak.

And in hour 2, we continue talking to John Smirak. After this segment, we talked to Jay Warner Wallace. and by the way, he is one of the best guests on this show, Jay Warner Wallace. But maybe the best guest is John Zmirak. So let's just go to John. John, we'd love you to conclude some of those sentences that you were speaking just before we went to the newsbreak. Sure. There was a small core group of people on January 6th who believed they were going to Washington, D.C.,

to serve as a deputized militia force that they thought Donald Trump, would invoke under the Insurrection Act and they would help with reverse the steal of the election. These people were bonkers. They may have been well-meaning at their core, but they were bonkers. These people need to be investigated. They are all going to jail, except the guy who led them, who organized this crackpot conspiracy. His name is Stuart Rhodes. He was the head of Oathkeepers.

He was the guy who told them what to do, who told them where to go, who told them where to hide weapons, that they were going to be the secret militia force to restore Donald Trump as president. It was all his idea. And the FBI is not pressing any charges against him. The January 6th committee has not asked him to testify. They want Steve Bannon to testify, who hadn't worked in the White House for three years when this happened.

But they don't want Stuart Rhodes, the guy who apparently organized the one part of January 6th that was genuinely crazy was apparently an FBI plan. So this was, so this seems to be a sting operation. This was a sting operation that they said, let's find some crazy people who might go for this. And then if we can lead them to, you know, carry a couple of zip ties, that's the end of America, Zeghiel. Isn't that a sweet little plot? It's beautiful.

And there's another one, Ray Epps. by the way, if you want more news on this, go to Revolver News. Darren Beatty and Revolver News has done all the great reporting on this. Mike Huckabee has been citing it. There was one guy, and we have him on videotape, going up to the protesters outside, saying, we have to go in the Capitol. It's about the Constitution. We have to storm the Capitol.

And some of them are saying, no, I don't want to do that. Others are saying, are you a federal agent? They're actually asking that on Capitol. camera. It turns out he was a federal agent. Uh-oh. He was a federal agent. What are the odds of that, John, that he was a federal agent, Ray Epps. And what is Ray Epps doing today? Ray Epps is sitting at home drinking his coffee because no charges have been filed against him.

The people who listened to him when he said, we have to storm the Capitol, they're all in jail in solitary confinement. The guy who told them to do it, the guy who ran around basically shoving, them in through the door, he's sitting around watching the view. He's drinking chamomile tea, because apparently he's a federal agent who recruited the people to do the fake insurrection on January 6th that is currently being investigated by a Stalinist purge committee, a Stalinist show trial organized for the Democrats in Congress. How much do you think, this is not your grandfather's America? How much do you think democratic leadership like Nancy Pelosi knows about this? 100%.

Nancy Pelosi, you think she knows all about this. I think she knows it. I think Liz Cheney knows about it. I would suspect that the George W. Bush and his family know about it. I think the Republican establishment conspired with the Democrat leadership to try to destroy the Donald Trump movement, to try to destroy the nationalist American First movement to clear it out of the way. It was a mistake. We let them get there. We let them vote in 2016. We weren't ready. to steal the election. Fine. It was a terrible mistake. It will never, never happen again. The people will never have a voice again. The oligarchy must close ranks. We must censor the media.

We must get people fired. We must make everyone take the vaccine. This country's gotten too disorderly. The people are getting too loud. We have to show them who's really in charge. It's us. Shouldn't it be it is we? Now, listen, tough guy. I want to I'm going to ask you another question. And by the way, I don't know that it is. I think that usage determines that you're correct, actually. But let me just say this. No, no, no.

Let me just say. Let me just say. Nancy Pelosi, I don't believe she's going to run again in 2022. She wanted to go out like Queen Victoria. You know, she's been in there since, I don't know. I think since McLean was a general, she's been in there. But I think she decided in 2022 it's going to be such a bloodbath. She doesn't want any part of it.

So she's going to go to the non-feces infested part of San Francisco. It's very expensive to get there. But I believe as a result of what happened yesterday in Virginia, the election of Yonkin and so on, I don't believe that she sees a way out. except to leave. I just have to say that I hold Nancy Pelosi goes out, not like Queen Victoria, but like Catherine the Great. I know what you mean.

I have to tell you, honestly, that if she and others knew of this sort of thing, let's be honest, okay? We know that they firmly believed that they were saving America. I'll give them that. In committing these crimes, in committing these crimes against we, we the people, they believed they were saving America. You know, good people, bad people always believe they're doing good things. Hitler didn't think, oh, I'm demon-possessed. That's why I hate the Jews.

He didn't realize that. He thought he's doing a great thing. He has been anointed. You know, he's riding the vector of history. And the reality is that all of these people that we have mentioned, whether it's the Bushes or anybody, They believe that they're saving America from Donald Trump and his minions like you and me and Steve Bannon. They believe this. Let's face it.

They believe it. If they believe that, what does that mean? What does it mean about their other beliefs? Well, I mean, look, it means they're cuckoo for cocoa puffs. We know that. But yes, go ahead. They believe the people are a threat to America. They believe that the experts and the people who are.

went to the better sorts of schools, and the sociologists and the teachers' unions and the diversity coordinators and the government bureaucrats and the federal, the federal bureaucrats, the deep state, the FBI, they are the real America. The people you see at Walmart and the people you see at shopping malls and the people who see as firemen, they're not the real America. Yeah. Your mother and father and my mother and father don't really deserve the same kind of vote as Nancy Pelosi. Let's be honest, this is true, John, what you just said.

It's absolutely true. But see, the problem is places like Yale, they made the mistake. They were so liberal that they let in, you know, white nationalist, racist, bigot freaks, like the two of us, for example. and now we are in the immortal words of, I guess it was Apocalypse now, like Kurtz, he's the weed up commands took us. You know, basically they are in big trouble right now because there are enough folks out here who see what's going on and this is going to take time. This can't happen overnight.

But it is unraveling. Who thought that Tucker Carlson would be doing this big story on this? who thought that you'd be writing this. We're here now, and it's not looking good for our friends on the side against we the people. Well, they have shown their hand. I mean, you're Terry McCalliffe in a debate saying parents should not control what their children are taught in school. It's none of their business. Well, thank you.

Thank you for making that perfectly clear. Now, that was clear when they created the public school system in the late 19th century. Horace Mann said the creator of mass public school. schooling, Horace Mann, said our job is to save these children from their ignorant big-did parents and teach them to be good liberal post-Christian Americans. Okay, wait a minute. This is way too important. We're going to end this segment tomorrow or the next day.

You and I need to talk about what you just brought up. Folks, keep listening. Thank you, John. Hey, folks, I've got to tell you a secret. about relief factor that the father, son, owners, Pete and Seth Talbot, have never made a big deal about, but I think it is a big deal. I really do. They sell the three-week quick start pack for just 1995 to anyone struggling from pain like neck, shoulder, back, hip, or knee pain, 1995, about a dollar a day. But what they haven't broadcasted much is that every time they sell a three-week quick start, they lose money. In fact,

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Jay Warner Wallace is my guest. And then beyond that, his book is called Person of Interest. Who's the person of interest? Jesus of Nazareth. This is a very exciting, provocative, and unfortunately important book. Jay Warner Wallace, welcome on the program. Hey, thanks so much for him. You know, if I had known, Eric, that I was going to release this book,

At the same time that Eric Metaxus is going to have a new book, I would have said, you know, let's wait until January. What am I doing trying to release a book while you got a book out? I was thinking the same thing about my book. So here's what we have to do. We have to tell people, if you don't buy both books, you're crazy. You're dividing a friendship. You're destroying the body. Okay.

That's right. Now look, seriously, this book, my book is not really about Jesus, actually. So my book is, I set a low bar for my book, is atheism dead. I just wanted to show in a way the scientific evidence for a creator. You don't have to say it's Jesus. You don't have to say, but to say there is no creator of any kind is at this point preposterous. I then talk about biblical archaeology, which makes it really clear that the Bible is certainly no collection of folk tales. And it's probably totally historical, even though you can't prove that it's totally historical.

And then I talk about atheism. but I do not go into what you go into in this book. So I think we could pitch it as their companion books. Like you read my book and you're like, huh, okay, so now I am thinking about this Jesus guy. Anything I could read about that? Hey, Jay Warner Wallace has just come out with a book called Person of Interest. Seriously, this is an amazing book. I don't want to do all the talking.

So if you don't mind, tell my audience. the premise because it is actually really fascinating what you have have done in this book, Person of Interest. Okay, so here's the weird approach I took. I work cold cases, and a lot of the cases I get are what are called nobody murders or nobody missings, where somebody kills his wife or a wife kills his husband, and then claims that they ran off and they file a report, a missing person's report, and that's how we take the case.

And then years go by, no one works the case. Okay, so you, you, just to be clear, some people know. this, some people don't. You are a cold case detective and you've been a cold case detective, a real cold case detective for a long time. And you're bringing those skills to this issue. So I don't want to interrupt, but just in case people think you're like blowing smoke, this is what you do. Well, I've done a bunch of these cases. They're actually on a dateline. And several of these are nobody missing persons cases. And so what happens is, is they get away with it for a while because there's nobody has ever discovered.

There's no crime scene ever photographed. It's taken as a missing person's report. I opened the case. I had one case, Eric, I kid you not, that 30 years after the crime was occurred, she'd been missing for 30 years. Her family never once called our agency because the killer is so thoroughly convinced the family

that she had just run off. Now, what do you do when you have no crime scene, no evidence from a crime scene, don't even have a body? How do you make a case like that? Well, I always tell people that if she'd banished on that day because he murdered her, it's like a bomb went off on that day. But bombs are always preceded by fuses that burn slowly toward the detonation of the bomb. And afterwards, there is shrapnel all over the blast radius.

So we'll make the case by simply examining the fuse and the fallout. So I thought, well, look, if Jesus is who he said he was, and let's imagine a future world where every single New Testament document has been destroyed. There are no Bibles. There are no New Testaments. it turns out in that kind of absent of crime scene, no New Testament, you could still determine the historicity and deity of Jesus from simply the fuse and fallout of history. That's what this book does. It takes a look at nothing other than just the history of unusual places that have Jesus's

fingerprints all over them like literature, art, music, education, science, and even non-Christian religions. It turns out you can reconstruct the story of Jesus. from those aspects of culture in a way that maybe is surprising to people, because I'm not just going to show that he's had big impact. I'm talking about being able to reconstruct the story from those aspects of culture. Okay. And that's what we're doing in the book.

So what you're doing, it's a beautiful thing. You're using logic. The same logic we use, as you've said, in crime detection. We want to know. People want to know what has. happened. We demand justice. And in most cases, there is a way to get there, including in what you call or what is called cold cases. There's no body. What do we do? You know what we do, and you have applied your considerable skills to the murder, the execution of Jesus of Nazareth. So what is in this

book? I mean, there's so much in here. I was just looking through the illustrations. It's actually I would say that makes it like a really fun read because there's so many different pieces of information. So let us let us know what is in here. Yeah. Well, actually, there's over 400 illustrations in the book because that's just the way I think of things in front of a jury. And it's honor for it was good enough to let me spend two years building the jury presentations. And then I wrote a book from those stage presentations. That's what that book is.

So there's usually every page has got some type of graphic element if it doesn't have a list. But here's what things I think you'll find interesting. I heard you recently being interviewed about your book with Sissy Graham, for example. And we talk about the impact of science and how science can demonstrate, well, I don't know people realize that science, the history of science, is standing on the shoulders of Jesus of Nazareth and his followers. As a matter of fact, the fathers of the major disciplines in science, all of the major disciplines, from cosmology, from chemistry, biology, all the way to quantum mechanics and computer sciences. it turns out the fathers of those major scientific disciplines are all Christ followers. Okay, hang on. Hang on. What you just said, this is the class thing like you say that and we move on. Ladies and gentlemen, did you hear what Jay Warner Wallace just said? I touch on most of this,

not all of what you said in my own book. This is huge news. This is huge news. And when you say Christ followers, I mean, I would go farther and say that most of them, these are the fathers of these very various disciplines in science were profound, devout Christians. That's not the kind of thing most people think. Most people think science diverges from faith. Yes, and you know those people are so devout that they wrote in their personal letters and journals about Jesus of Nazareth. If all you had were the personal writings of the science fathers, you would get more information about Jesus than you get from the church fathers. And I have a list of all of that in the book.

That's amazing. Seriously, that's pretty cool. Wow. Well, it is. And so that's why I'm saying. You'd have to destroy more than the New Testament to get rid of Jesus. You'd have to destroy the entire history of science as we know it. I don't think anyone is teaching this to our young people. No one. No one is teaching this.

So, as a matter of fact, it's been argued, and I think Dineshiusu wrote this quite well, that Christendom in Europe is what causes the scientific revolution. That's true. But then you hear, well, look, everyone in Europe in the 16th and 17th century was a Christian. That's not the point. There were more people outside of Europe. Why didn't science explode in Asia? Why didn't a science explode in Persia? Or ancient Greece? I mean, look, there are many places that in some ways were more advanced than 16th and 17th century Europe. What is it about that time? And you're right. So many people have written about it. I was not aware of this until I was researching my own book. And it's one of these things that it's such huge news that we need to, to, shout it from the rooftops because most people just have some baked in idea that the opposite is true. So I'm glad that that's one of the things you go into. Well, how about this? In terms of

education. Now, I don't get people to realize that modern education, as you know at the modern university, as you know it, it came out of three universities planted by Christfallers, at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford. Those three universities gave birth to the 24 daughter universities from which the scientists in the scientific revolution emerged. This is entirely, and here's what's great about it. If you would research right now the top 15 universities in the world today, you would find they're all founded by Christ followers. The top 75 of the top 100 universities, in fact, were founded by Christ followers.

Here's what's cool. If you were to visit those campuses, you would find that the original buildings in which they taught students still exist. And on those buildings, you will find the images of Jesus, the stained glass of Jesus. the inscriptions of scripture from Jesus. You can reconstruct the story of Jesus just from the campuses of the top 15 universities

in the world today. If you wanted to erase Jesus from history, it would take more than just the science fathers. It would take more than the scriptures. You'd have to destroy the top 15 campuses because they actually have the images and story of Jesus embedded on their buildings. I mean, wow, there's a lot here.

the book is called Person of Interest, Why Jesus Still Matters in a world that rejects the Bible. I have to confess that I was myself, when I first, in two of my books I wrote about the resurrection, not in the new one, but I was myself genuinely astonished that you could use logic to effectively prove the case of the resurrection. I was sure that that had to be something you just take on faith quote unquote. But a lot of these things are canards. They're just rumors, their myths, they're terrible ideas. And when you start using logic, so I want to challenge people, dare to be logical. You'll get scared by what you find if you don't want to find Jesus. The book is person of interest, why Jesus still matters in a world that rejects the Bible. We'll be right back

with Jay Warner Wallace. Don't go away. Zero. Make like a mystery. Hey folks, Eric Metaxis here. Joe Biden and the Democrats have laid out the most socialist agenda our country has ever seen. Instead of following President Trump's blueprint that had the economy booming, the Dems are going to raise taxes, increase regulations, and skyrocket an already outrageous national debt. If your retirement is in traditional investments, it is in jeopardy.

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Precious metals today. That's 866-473-6204. Folks, I'm talking to Jay Warner-Wallis, famous cold-case detective, who now applies his considerable skills as a cold-case detective to the person of Jesus. The title of the book is Person of Interest. what else is in the book that we can talk about on this program? There's so much. I just don't know where to start. It's loaded with good stuff. Well, I can tell you, the literature is one of those things we talk about in the fallout, right?

We talk about how much impact Jesus has had. There's no other historical figure who has been written about more than Jesus of Nazareth. You can check this with the Library of Congress. You can just check it on a Google book search. I mean, you will find that the second place finisher is pretty far below Jesus of Nazareth. Not only that, just from the writings in the first 300 years, I don't think people realize, that there are more non-Christian voices on ancient manuscripts in the first 300 years of Christianity, than there are Christian voices speaking about Jesus of Nazareth.

There's a sense in which not all you have are these Christian sources. Not true. So I've got a list in the book and an illustration of all of the non-Christian sources. That goes all the way from the non-canonical authors, all the way to Greek and Persian and Egyptian and Roman sources to even Jewish sources, most of what they say about Jesus is not flattering. But they have to stand on the claims of the Gospels in order to criticize the Gospels.

The same way that the rumor mill about Elvis and all of the books that have been written about Elvis end up affirming the basic life biography of Elvis. Like, for example, they might say, yeah, and Elvis on this date, he stayed at a hotel in Memphis. And then they'll say, and during that time, he was sleeping with so-and-so. Well, the sleeping with so-and-so part is just rumor.

But you have to affirm a fact first that he was in Memphis on that night, which is true. The same kind of thing happens with the ancient sources about Jesus. They'll change the claims. They will start a rumor. But they build those rumors on true claims so that you can reconstruct the story of Jesus from the common true claims of all of the rumors. And that's what's so great about the evidence for Jesus. You have to erase more than just the New Testament.

You have to erase the history of early literature that's also written about Jesus. What this reminds me of, I mean, when I write my books and I wrote this recent book and in this book that you've written, if you're looking at things from a legal standpoint, not a scientific standpoint, but from legal evidence, you can prove the case, you can make a more than a reasonable case that God exists, that Jesus existed, that he rose from the dead. most people, including people of faith, they're not aware of that. They think I have to quote unquote take it on faith as though faith means parking my brains at the door. And it's just the opposite. If you park your brains at the door, you will not be a Christian or a believer in the Bible because you kind of have to, at this point, let's put it this way.

At this point, the evidence is so overwhelming that I think it's really troubling to people who are atheists or were somehow anti-Christian, and they're forced to look away, like the folks who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. They said, I don't want to know, because if I look through there, it's going to influence me. And so I dare people to read this book, Person of Interest, or my book is Atheism Dead. I dare you, because if you're interested in the truth, and everybody says, like, sure, I'm interested in the truth, but you can't prove it. well, I dare you to look at the evidence because I think the reason you don't want to is because it's challenging something.

It has to do with the person's will. They don't want to be troubled. So they think, I'm going to look away. I'm going to let it ride. I'm going to ignore it. Well, I remember the standard is different, right? So the standard is not beyond a possible doubt for anything in the highest levels of criminal trials. It's beyond a reasonable doubt.

What I mean is we tell jurors that I'm going to tell you up front, I'm not going to be able to answer every question. I still have open questions about cases. And in no body missings, unless he can. I'm not going to be able to tell you how he did it, how he got rid of her body, how he moved her car. I had these open questions in a case. Now, we found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but there were still open questions that needed to be asked. Now, later he confessed to this and he gave us all that information.

But at the time of the conviction, he hadn't yet. And so we have to be able to make a decision to render a verdict legally based on the fact you may still have open, unanswered questions. But that's beyond a possible death. That's not our standard. It's beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, the same thing is going to be true for your faith in Jesus. Do I still have open questions? Theological, of course.

We all do. The more you study theology, the more questions you're probably going to have. But you have enough evidence to render a verdict, to make a decision beyond a reasonable doubt. What often keeps us, and this is why we have a voir dire process of selecting jurors, is that we are trying to eliminate the jurors who hold presuppositional biases that will make them act either unfairly toward the prosecution or toward the defense. both teams are trying to make sure we eliminate the far edges of the group that are presuppositionally biased against us. Well, you've got to realize when we're sharing the gospel with people, if you give it my book or you give Eric's book, you're going to find that there are people who hold those biases.

And you cannot remove those by argument often. Those are the things that I typically will model Christ and pray about because it turns out that it's God who moves the heart toward the reasonable center that allows us to hear the gospel. to begin with. But I think these kinds of books are important for those people who God is already moving and this need to know, need to have the barriers removed. Sometimes we've constructed false barriers against Jesus and against God's existence that books like this will help remove so the gospel can be heard again. And that's what we're doing in this kind of a project. I don't ever think that my genius in building a case is going to convince somebody. No, God is going to use this, though, after I help remove barriers between the people who read the book and the gospel itself.

That's almost exactly how I put it when somebody says, I'm going to give this book to this atheist, this hard question. And I think, you know what, that may be casting your pearls before swine. You're wasting your money. They're not going to read it. They have a bias against it. If people are interested in the truth, that's another story. I'm talking to Jay Warner Wallace, the brand new book,

Person of Interest, Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects, Bible. We'll be right back. I've seen fire and I've seen rain. I've seen sunny days that I thought would never... Hey folks, you've all helped build My Pillow into the amazing company it is today. Mike Lindell has an amazing offer for my listeners on his standard My Pillows. You'll get a standard MyPillow regularly 6998, now only 1998. You'll also receive deep discounts on all My Pillo products such as My Pillow towels,

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That's MyPillow.com promo code Eric or 1-800-9778-3057 MyPy7, Mypillow.com promo code Eric. Folks, brand new book looks like a great book to me. I don't say that lightly. Person of interest is the book. Person of interest by Jay Warner Wallace. He is known as America's foremost cold. case detective. Think about that. America's foremost cold case detective. Kind of a big deal. Jay Warner Wallace, how did you get that title? Because

there's a lot of cold case detectives out there. They are working it. They're working hard. Who said that you were America's foremost cold case detective? Well, I'm sure there actually, I mean, just to be a big deal in your own mind is sometimes where you start, right? So that's a lot of it. I think part of it also comes from how many times I appeared on Dateline, which is probably just by virtue of the fact that we're right down the road from NBC Universal here in Los Angeles County. But I think I have been on Dateline more than any other cold case detective. And so people start to think, well, yeah, you're the only, no, there's tons of really good detectives out there who are probably even better than I am. But sometimes

you just ends up being the one who's the most publicized. Okay. So you're the best known cold case detective. Yeah. If that. And you, you've turned your attention as a cold case detective, to the Bible, to Jesus. And how is this book, person of interest, the new book, different from previous books? What do you do in this book? What do you try to do that you didn't do in the other books? Right. I actually think this is no other book. I mean, everyone likes to think that right, but I think there's actually no other book that does this. So here's what we're doing in this book. I've got another book called Cold Case Christian, where I'm looking at the gospels themselves. Are they reliable eyewitness accounts related to Jesus? That's considering everything inside

the crime scene called the New Testament. This book rejects that, says, no, what? Let's pretend like all those have been destroyed. What would we know about Jesus outside the New Testament? And that's what this kind of book does. And I think what it does is it answers certain skeptical claims. Like, for example, one of this, like, is Jesus just a copycat savior, another recreation of ancient mythologies? Well, I actually look at that as part of the fuse leading up to Jesus. There are a number, it's hundreds of ancient mythologies that have broad general similarities. to each other and to Jesus, but they're only broad. They're not specific. So these people, these are the common expectations of people who think about God. And although they shape out differently,

I might commonly expect that a supernatural being will enter into the world in a supernatural way. So these mythologies often show that God enters in a supernatural way, but they're all very different in how they enter in. Well, Jesus also enters into it a supernatural way. It turns out that the 15 common expectations of ancient people groups than thinking about God. They only have about six to ten similarities in the ancient myths. No ancient myth has more than ten of these, and some have as few as six, but there's one person who shows up in history

who actually embodies all 15 of the ancient expectations of people who believe in myths, and it's Jesus of Nazareth. Now, doesn't it make sense that God would meet those expectations given that we're thinking about these as people designed in the image of God who think about God, and then he shows up matching our expectations about God. Well, I mean, I would go a step further or step backwards and say that because God created us in his image,

he created us with those expectations. We long for meaning. We long for love. We long to be known. We long for justice. We long for truth. We long for all these things. And, you know, you say, where do those longings come?

come from and why is it that they're met in Jesus? It's a curious thing. And so it is, it is no surprise that all these various religions and mythologies, they're kind of echoes of the gospel, even if they happened before the gospel. And that's one of the things you talk about in the book. Yeah. As a matter of fact, what you're talking about too in your book. Look, it turns out right now, if you pull humans on planet Earth, the vast majority, the vast, only about 7% of humans right now I would say they're atheists or agnostics on the surface of the planet. Everyone else believes in some type of higher power, even cite studies that have been done now in Ivy Lake schools by non-Christians, by non-theists who will demonstrate that, yes, it turns out that our

default position as children is not atheism. Our default position is some form of theism. Young kids look at the created world and they infer a designer from what they think they see as design in the world around them. This has now been said by some researchers that this kind of theism, this kind of idea of a higher power is bred in the bone. These are by people who are not themselves believers. So this idea that we only teach our kids to believe in God is actually not true. They have a default position, which is inclined toward believing in a higher power.

And these common expectations, even of moderns, are met in their most robust form in the person of Jesus. It's part of that fuse that's burning up toward the... This is why Paul says on Mars Hill, hey, you folks are really religious. You believe in a lot of gods. I'm here to show you who the real God is, and he's basically revealing to them, as C.S. Lewis says,

your myths come from the minds of your human poets. The Christian myth is from the mind of God grounded in what we call real things. And this word for myth is not Lewis saying it's a lie. This is the story, the narrative about God that actually is true compared to your myths and narratives about God that are untrue. And so that's what Jesus does. He appears and he meets the expectations of the expectors. Anytime the expected meets the expectations of the expector, you get a really good result.

And so God shows up in a narrow window in which these mythologies are still being worshipped. And that window I show in the book in one chapter is so narrow, this cultural fuse open. opens up a red zone window of opportunity from about 29 BC to about 70 AD. And guess who shows up in the middle of that window? That is a wild concept. Can you say more about that, about that window? Right. So if you take the overlap of when all the mythologies are being worshiped,

because they're not all worship forever, Osiris worship eventually stopped. But if you can capture a window in which all these mythologies are still actively being worshiped, so the expectations of people groups can be maximized in the person of Jesus, you get a window for several hundred years. If you overlap on that, the window of culture in the Roman Empire, which allows us a 200-year period of peace called the Pax Romana in which now we have the roads and postal service and tolerance within the empire and a window of opportunity for the message of Jesus to travel,

now the window becomes shorter. Then if you overlap the prophetic window of Daniel saying that the Messiah will come between the reconstruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, now you've got another overlap. Now you end up with a window that I kid you not. I show it in the book is between 29 BC and 70 AD. Something has the opportunity to happen right there in that window that will change the world. This is crazy stuff, folks. I dare you to look at this. I actually came to a similar conclusion, not as detailed in my own book. When I realized that Jesus arrives just as Jerusalem has been rebuilt, it's never been more spectacular. Boom, he shows up. He predicts it's going to be wiped

out 40 years later, it's why. I mean, you think, who made that up? God? We'll be right back. I'm talking to Jay Warner Wallace. It's the Eric Mataxis show. Go to my website, ericmetaxis.com. Sign up for the newsletter so we can send you all of these interviews because you want them and because you want to share them with your friends. Jay Warner Wallace, what should we talk about in our final moments together today? Well, I just want to encourage people that all of us have the ability to make a case for Jesus. This is not something that's unusual. I mean, scripture shows us this is the kind of casemaker Jesus was.

I mean, think about it. After the resurrection in Acts 1, it says that Jesus spent 40 additional days with the disciples, giving them many, and depending on the translation, convincing proofs, that's the Greek where we use for evidence. Now, they put that for a second. He's just resurrected from the grave. Do you think I really need more evidence? Apparently, Jesus is going to give me 40 days more about evidence. Now, that's an evidential approach. So that even when John the Baptist has got doubts and sends his disciples, Jesus, he wants to know. John wants to know. Are you the one? Look, if you're Jesus, are you a little bit upset with that? You're thinking to yourself, really, John, you're my cousin who baptized me, who saw the Spirit of God descent. Really? You have doubts now. You want to know. Tell you what. Go back and tell John what you just saw. And he cites the miracles he had worked in front of John's disciples. That's a very evidential approach. I think that what we're doing, Eric, is you and I are writing books that I think are important to the church, even right now at a time when the

church doesn't know how important they are. There's an entire generation who wants to know not just what is true, but please tell me why you think it's true. Because this is what the culture is doing. The culture is making claims about all kinds of things and saying they're based in evidence or based in science. Yet you religious folks, you want us to believe this stuff blindly? That was never the request of Jesus. Jesus, testimony in the first century in the book of Acts is not your personal experience with Jesus or how he changed your life. Go read the book of X. It's the eyewitness accounts of their resurrection. Direct evidence was offered by way of eyewitnesses. Blessed Thomas are those who will not have seen this, but through your testimony will know this is true. Direct evidence.

That's what that testimony is. We have to make a better effort to give young people the evidence for why God exists, which is what your book's about right now, and why Christianity is true. And that's really what we're trying to do in these kinds of works. Well, and again, I want to say that you can't force people to believe, which is why I love America, because at its core, we have religious liberty. The idea is that, look, if it's true, somehow it has to stand on its own or we have to encourage people to think about it, but you cannot force someone to believe. But if you're unwilling to look at the evidence, if you're unwilling to look through Galileo's

telescope, I suspect you have a bias. And so I want to say to people, I really do dare you to look at the evidence with an open mind. There are many books, not just my new book and Jay Warner Wallace's new book, but you could start there and see what books we've read. But the evidence is overwhelming. It's stunning. It's so stunning. that I myself was stunned by how stunning it was. When I wrote my book, I said, I cannot believe I didn't know this. I can't believe nobody seems to know this. It's almost, I think we're just living in an unprecedentedly exciting time in history,

honestly, that it's possible for us to know these things. You know, there are no cold case detectives, you know, in the 18th century. There's something about where we are now that is enabling us. And I think God's doing it for, you know, very, strange purposes because in some ways the world's gotten darker. In some ways, you know, science is more advanced. We can do so many things. I can talk to you, you know, via Skype on this program. So there's a lot here. But honestly, I think the big news is we're living in very exciting times. And if you're interested in really knowing, is there a God who created the universe who loves you

and who has a plan for your life? Like, really? I'm here to tell you, and Jay Warner's here to tell you, yes, you can actually know that. It is true. We know it to be true, and we want you to follow what we followed to get there.

Jay Warner Wallace, congratulations on an important book, Person of Interest. Thank you, my friend. Thanks for having me, Eric. I really appreciate you.