The Michael Knowles Show - Viral TIKTOK Atheist REACTION: Dr. Jeremiah Johnston

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

Join Michael Knowles and New Testament scholar Dr. Jeremiah Johnston as they dive into viral TikToks from angry atheists and dismantle their flawed theological arguments with sharp logic, historical insight, and biblical truth. Together, they expose common misconceptions, defend the rationality of faith, and explore how reason and spirituality intersect in today's skeptical culture. This eye-opening discussion is packed with thought-provoking rebuttals you won't want to miss! Don't forget to like, comment your thoughts on the debunked claims, and subscribe for more faith-affirming content! Get your copy of Jeremiah J. Johnston’s new book,The Jesus Discoveries: 10 Historic Finds That Bring Us Face-to-Face with Jesus ==> https://www.amazon.com/dp/0764243667 - - - Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://get.dailywire.com - - - Today's Sponsors: Hallow - Download Hallow for 3 months free at https://hallow.com/knowles - - - DailyWire+: Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dailywire.com/subscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📘 My book "Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/Speechless 🕯️ Get your Michael Knowles candles: https://thecandleclub.com/collections/michael-knowles 👕 Don’t dress like a squish. Shop my merch here: https://dwplus.shop/MichaelKnowlesMerch - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3RwKpq6 Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3BqZLXA Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eEmwyg Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3L273Ek - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Gay crackhead? And I am very, very pleased to be joined once again by one of the great guests we've ever had on our shows, Jeremiah Johnson, who is famous in the Michael Knowles show universe for his excellent explication of the Shrout of Tour. And so if you haven't seen it yet, if you're one of the few people who hasn't seen that yet, you have to go. Someone stopped me in the street the other day. About this head. Jeremiah Johnston interview with Shrout of Tour. So anyway, he's back. We are going to analyze with Jeremiah's great expertise, woke religion TikToks.

But before we get to that very, very important work, you've brought some goodies. I have. What have you brought? All the way from Rome. I need you to hold Codex Vaticanus B. Am I able to hold it? Will I physically? It is 16 pounds.

I want you to open it like you're opening your Bible. Wow. This is a facsimile that was issued by Pope John Paul II. He signed it Christmas Day 1999. These are very hard to come by. So this is... It is an exact facsimile, 739 leaves. This is the entire Greek Bible, Michael.

So the Codex of Vaticanus, for people who don't know, is one of the oldest Greek manuscripts of the Bible. If not the oldest. It might be the single old. This is five years. after the Council of Nica, 325. So I dated to 3.30. Remember, my area of expertise is paleography and code ecology.

Yeah. The fascination that there is no difference, truly. It's 98% text stable, meaning the Bible you open at mass literally matches this with a 98% accuracy. When I was an atheist, I used to say to Christians, I say, well, no, look, how do we even know? I mean, it's been so many years, so many translations. How do we really know what you're reading? It's nothing to do, perhaps. Yes.

But then I actually looked into it. No, it's pretty much the exact same thing. Exactly. Literally. You can't get this on Amazon. You can't or eBay. No. And, you know, I'd have to kill you if I told you I got it.

Yeah, I know, I know. What sort of underground networks at the Vatican are you plugged into? I can't confirm or deny, but I'm with the brotherhood. This is magnificent. I love that phrase that the nearest relative to... Christianity is archaeology. Evidence. I've often described it to people.

They say, well, how do you distinguish Christianity from other religions? I say, other religions really begin in poetry or philosophy. Or a crazy vision? Or a crazy vision. But in terms of literary genres, Christianity begins in journalism, because the Bible is journalistic accounts. It's a text-based religion. That's amazing. Okay. This is unbelievable. What else do we have? Okay, Michael. Brother, I need you to hold something. I don't know if you remember, but all four Gospels. First, tell me what you're holding.

I'm holding a pair of dice. A pair of dice. Now, these are not any dice. These are first century Roman dice. This is the real thing. I'm not saying they're the ones that were gambled in front of Jesus. Yes. But these are two thousand. They're made of bone. What I'm saying, this is not a recreation. This is an artifact. Yeah, this is, I just acquired this, again, through my antiquities dealer.

You can see the punched, so these are made of bone. All four Gospels record the fact that the executioners were so desensitized to the fact that the author of life is dying before them, and they begin to gamble for his clothes. These are made of bone, they're stamped. Romans love to gamble. So tell me what you're thinking right now. Have you ever held first century Roman dice?

And you know what's, I love dice. I actually, I don't want to tell Tales at school, my stepbrother and I, we would roll C-Lo at bars. Oh, yeah. I love it. I love, we'd roll dice for everything. This puts you in the world of Jesus, though. What's really striking to me is that dice, 2,000 years ago, they were a little smaller, otherwise they look exactly. And they're made a bone.

And they're made a bone. We were in the drive-through, and one of my triplets said, Dad, they stink really bad. I was like, son, they're 2,000 years old. Yeah, that'll do it, yeah. Can I? Yes, please, yeah. Absolutely. No.

No. A nine. There we go. There you go. Three to the third. So there it is. So these are the kind of artifacts that I bring out in the Jesus' discoveries because I want people to know that if we cannot believe that Jesus died and rose again based on the evidence

outside the Bible, we shouldn't believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. The evidence is that strong. Right. And there's pictures throughout. This was a labor of love doing this book because there's photographs throughout it. I got all the permissions from all the archaeologists that help us really under how these bring us closer to Jesus. That's the whole point.

It's not to be smarter. I wanted the book to bring, like, do you feel closer to Jesus now that you've held dice? Right. And it's like, wow. We were talking a little bit earlier because I've had a lot of conversations with my friends about this. A friend of mine has given me quite a number of holy relics, first-class relics. Amazing. The bone of martyrs or, you know.

And it's funny, I was telling a Christian friend of mine, I mentioned this to him, and he recoiled. he recoiled. He said, oh, I don't really like, I don't like the rights. Why? There is a certain strain that has been around since antiquity of iconoclast or a kind of Christianity that says, no, no, we should only focus on spiritual things, not physical things. And I get it. You don't want to be idolatrist in any way. But, you know, Christianity is an incarnational faith. Totally. So for me, when I hold the dice, when I examine whatever, even, you know, even a facsimile of this 1700-year-old. Old Bible. It speaks to the fact that, you know, we're soul, we're spirit and body. That's right. I can feed, you know, like people touched the hem of Christ's garment. Literally. And we're healed.

That's right. Yeah. Okay. What else do we have? I know. I want you to hold this. Jesus in Matthew 19 says, it's easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle. A camel to go through the eye of. Yeah. It's easier for a for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. It's easier for a, for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, thank you, then for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. You're holding a Roman needle, and you can imagine him holding that. That is a first century Roman needle. That is not a replica. I got one more quick one. Okay. All right. I need you to hold. Now, this is brand new. I did not have this for Michael Ann. Yeah. I need you to hold an actual crucifixion, though. You held a replica before. This was unearthed in Jerusalem. I know it's first century because of

the square shaft. Put it against your wrist and just get the feel. So, And I want to ask you a question. Do you notice how it's bent? Yeah, yeah. It's bent because it was used so many times. They would reuse crucifixion nails on all of their prisoners. So can you imagine, there's DNA on us. There's rust.

And the reason that it's bent, Michael, is they would want to minimize movement, but maximize torment. So they would adjust the nails while the victim was being crucified. Here's the faith lesson. Even the nails that put our Lord and Savior on the cross had probably been used on others that deserved death, and yet he didn't. It never occurred to me. You know, all of the indignity of the cross. Right.

And to think. A used nail. A used nail. Four of them. You somehow always have the greatest goody bag. I have, which you gave me, the man in the shroud. Yes, yes. I have that displayed in my office.

I see that whenever I walk into my office. There's a lot more to say first, though. Go to hallow.com slash knolls, K&WLES. We're deep in Lent, walking steadily toward Holy Week, the cross, and the resurrection. This is not a season for the half-hearted Lent is a summons to conversion, to strip away what dulls the soul and return to God with sincerity. This time of year demands movement, prayer, fasting, and self-gift, and our sponsor, Hallow helps you do that.

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Spend intentional time in prayer and meditate on God's love for you. You can get three months free at hallow.com slash knolls. Wow. We got more, though, to show. Okay, all right. So without further ado, I want to just talk about this all day. Yeah. Let's engage others here, specifically heretics through woke TikToks. Maga versus Jesus round 16. Maga says real Christians support Trump. But the Bible says, those who say they love God that hate their neighbor are lying. You cannot follow Jesus Christ while actively supporting politicians or policies

that hurt your neighbor, you know, like cutting their food aid or their health care. Salute the wrong. Maga says, we must protect Christian power, but the Bible says, my power is made perfect in weakness. Christianity isn't about accumulating power. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the religion. Instead, what the gospel is, is about is creating peace through the presence of justice. Besides, Christian power is really just about propping up people who are already wealthy and powerful, usually straight white men. Maga says, destroy the people who oppose us. But Jesus says, love your enemies and pray for those who

persecute you. More than the error is the cringe that bothers me. It's so powerful. It's so powerful. powerfully lame. But would you like to take any particular aspect of his argument? First, I'm Maga. I've never said any of those things that he claims not said. Every premise is wrong. Secondly, all what we just saw was a 101 heretical example of doing what's called isogesis. Let me take a text out of context. Let me put a gay looking, woke perspective on it and let me do heresy. Have you been reading heresy license? Unacceptable.

Jesus said, I've come to bring the sword. He said that to follow him was to hate your mother, Luke 14. You've got to hate, which is a Greek idiom of preference, your mother, your father, your brother, sister, meaning you've got to put me first. And this is what I'm tired of. I am tired of people that twist scripture. There's a special place in hell for people that do that. And then they pervert the gospel.

It is beyond the pale that anyone would actually leave. actually listen to that, but unfortunately so many people listen to that kind of terrible preaching. That person is committing spiritual adultery right now. They are an apostate and they are committing spiritual adultery. They should have a big A on their... Yeah, even the first one that came to mind, it was one in the first or second example, where he's, you know, having this imaginary conversation with a MAGA person. It doesn't really resemble a real MAGA person. But then he says, well, you can't be a Christian when you're harming your neighbors. And so the Republicans who want to cut food stamps, which they don't even

actually want to do that. No, exactly. But let's just say, you know, you can make an argument to reform welfare programs. But you say, okay, man, but your side is calling for the wholesale slaughter of babies in the world, which is not only... And to be euthanized, by the way. And youth, yeah, that's right, and to be euthanized, elderly people, sick people, even young people. And, you know, not only can you point to much of scripture that would argue against that. But also we just know, because Christianity has a lot of archaeological evidence and documentary evidence, we know that abortion has been explicitly prohibited by the church since the apostolic age at least. The didache, second century, if not earlier. And again, what is ridiculous about this is to use scripture, this person's

demonic, to use scripture to try to say that Christianity doesn't care about. about people. Christianity invented hospitals. Do you know if you and I were sick in the first century, we'd go to the Temple of the Asclepias have to pay for healing? Jesus healed people for free. And guess what? Modern health care comes out of the cut and thrust of the Christian movement. Yeah. In fact, the word hospital we get from the Knights Hospitler. I don't know if you know this. I was just at Wef at the World Economic Forum, speaking in Davos. I don't know if you knew that.

Speaking of demons, do we have to brush any off you old. Jesus name. And I made it clear to all those individuals, the event who are of free enterprise, of forgiving debts, loving your neighbor, being generous. That event horizon comes from one moment. And I said it's not Marxism, it's not socialism, it's not wokeism. You can see that me say this. It's the resurrection of Jesus Christ in this amazing syndicate called the church. I'm sure you had raucous applause. Oh, I had people staring at me cross-side. Who is this? We've never heard this before. What have you to do with us? Yes. That's my response. Okay, next one.

Nationalists walk around with a mouthful of scripture and a heartful of hate. Oh, this guy's. Don't tell me what you believe. Show me how you treat other people and I'll tell you what you believe. Jesus didn't tell us to love our churches. He didn't tell us to love our doctrines and our creeds. He didn't even tell us to love our scriptures. He told us to love our neighbors.

And there was no exception to that commandment. Love thy neighbor regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or immigration status. One of my favorite theologians, Barbara Brown-Taylor, once wrote, The only clear line I draw these days is this. When my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor. Jesus never commanded me to love my religion. He literally did, but... Yeah.

You know what's interesting. Not once in the entire Bible does Jesus ask us to worship him. Oh my goodness. All he asks is that we follow him. Love. Oh my goodness. Okay, it's just one before you go off. He says, you know, Jesus told us to love our neighbors.

He doesn't tell us anything about loving our religion. Religion, to quote our good friend St. Thomas Aquinas, is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves. That's right. And before our Lord tells us to love our neighbor, the more important commandment that he gives is actually to love God above all things. Jesus replied, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. The line he uses is a clever political line. My opponents have a mouthful of scripture and a heart full of hate.

And yet, it's a good turn of phrase, but I think it applies much more to him than to his opponents. This guy, I guess you would have to, you look at all the things he promotes, using scripture, so sacrilegiously. He promotes slaughtering infants, mutilating little kids. He refers to God as LGBT. Awful sorts of sacrilege and blasphemy. And I guess the question I would have to say is, when you hear what he says and stands for, does James Tala Rico sound more like Christ or the Antichrist? The Antichrist. It's not even close.

And I want at James, I would debate him any place, any time, any day of the week, with two hands tied behind my back blindfolded because he twists scripture. I want to say something to everyone watching. This is a fact. You can look this up with Open Doors, which is an international religious freedom network. President Donald J. Trump is the most pro-religious freedom president of all time. Yeah. Out of any sitting president, nobody has been for more, and that's not just Christianity. That's religious freedom.

He spoke at the UN when no other sitting president would. And my pastor, Jack Graham, sits on the Religious Freedom Commission there in Texas. And I can tell you this, everything that that man just said is false. That's kind of like the line of Joe Pesci and my cousin V. Everything that guy just said is BS. I agree. I agree. Next one.

Are you an atheist? For all practical purposes, yes. Nobody can actually say for certain that anything doesn't exist. but I'm an atheist in the same way as I'm an a-lepraconist and an a-fairiest and an a-pick-unicornist. So you're not 100% sure God doesn't exist, but you're sure enough to make it practically... I'm as sure as you are sure that fairies and lepracorns don't exist. And do you see an equivalence between the idea of God and the idea of a fairy and a lepracorn? The evidence for both is equally poor.

Oh my gosh. This was, 20 years ago, this was what passed in the... not among intellectuals, but among kind of polite, yuppie society. This was what the smart people believed. And I'll tell you, it got me. When I was a teenager, this kind of stuff really got me. It took me away from the church, helped take me away from the church for 10 years. Is there a flaw in his argument?

That was at the height of what was called New Atheism, the four-horsmen of the New Atheist Movement. Everything he said is a flaw. The evidence that we have for God is unimpeachable. The evidence that we have for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, as we have. already said is unimpeachable. It is a historical fact that Jesus rose from the grave on April 5th, AD 33. We know that date with certainty. The resurrection and the crucifixion are the best established fact of the ancient world. So for him to compare God and the evidence for God with the tooth fairy or leprechauns.

The thing that drives me crazy, because Richard Dawkins is supposed to be intelligent and is, I guess, educated in his field of study, Oxford Dunn. Which is not biblical studies. Oh, no, it's evolutionary biology topic for another time. But it's just that statement, well, I don't believe in God because you don't believe in leprickons. You know, which is Reddit tier, fedora-tipping atheism. I remember Alvin Plantinga, the Calvinist philosopher, he was asked what he thought of the new atheists. He said, I think they're far inferior to the old atheists, like Bertrand Russell. At least Bertrand Russell was somewhat logical.

And Bertrand Russell said he couldn't find a flaw in the ontological argument. for God. What Dawkins seems blithely unaware of is that, one, this question of the supposed tension between faith and reason is one that has been taken up over the centuries, and that the

arguments for God's existence generally rest on natural reason, so much so that the Catholic Church declares in the first Vatican Council that the existence of God, not necessarily the resurrection, the person of Christ, the Trinity, the

the mysteries, but the mere existence of God can be known with certainty strictly from human reason in light of the created world. You know, St. Thomas Aquinas famously has his five ways, his most famous and his favorite one rests on empirical evidence, observing change and motion in the world. But there are many, many other arguments. And you just think... Teleological argument, design... The ontological argument.

All of it, cosmology, purpose, meaning. And I want to say something, my heart does. go out to Richard. I have a book called Unimaginable What the World Would Be Like Without Christianity. In part two, I studied these atheists. And without getting into terrible detail, he had some serious childhood trauma. Serious. And when you look at the new atheists, most of them have broken relationships with their dads. Well, you know, Hitchens was public about this. He has. I mean, his mother called him, he missed the call, and then she stuck her head in an oven. So, you know, I, yeah, you're right.

trauma and they, same with Bart Erment, a problem of an experience of evil suffering and pain. So I don't want you to think that he doesn't believe in God for an intellectual reason. It's an emotional reason. Well, that's a good point. Just crazy to say, you know, well, you know, I just have no proof of it. You're not even, you're putting yourself out there as the great debunker of Christianity. You're not engaging with the most basic arguments of the question that is supposedly at hand. Okay, next one.

When there are signs of physical maturity, it becomes permissible for, the husband in Islamic law to have marital relationships or consummate the relation with his bride. And this is the example of the prophet, peace be upon him. Do you know what precocious puberty is? Starting puberty unusually early. Is there anything in Islam that prevents you from a man marrying a five-year-old that started precocious puberty? You can arrange a marriage even as an infant, but that doesn't mean that sex is allowed.

Could a man have a marriage to a five-year-old consummate it if she started precocious puberty? If she starts showing signs of physical maturity, then yes, that's permissible. How about age four? If there are signs of... So this is something that becomes biologically impossible. Because precarity, there are... I have a study that shows it goes as early as 11 months. Well, that's something that the parents would not...

See, the thing about Islamic marriage is that parents are involved at these ages. Yikes. Everything... I've read the Quran, so you don't have to, by the way. Everything he just said is endorsed by the Islamic trilogy. which of course is the Quran, Sira, Suna, Hadith. And there are four specific ayas that actually endorse what he just said in the Quran. So I want to make sure that people understand this is not an aberrant form of Islam. If they actually read the Quran, they would see that sex slavery is not a bad thing.

It's funny because I remember I read the Quran at 14. I don't think I made it all the way through, but I read a lot of it at 14, because everyone at the time, this was 2004, was saying that Islam is a religion of peace. And I said, you know, that means submission. Yeah, and I'm just looking around the world, I said, I don't really buy that. So let me read it, and I was disabused of that popular misconception.

But I read it. And then I read a little bit about the origins of Islam. And what's interesting about it is it clearly begins as a Christian heresy. He seems to be heavily associated with various ancient heresies, including Nestorianism. and you have this thought, especially reading my main man, Dante. Dante curiously puts Muhammad with the schismatics. Yes, that makes sense.

As if Islam is just a schism from a break off of Christianity, which I kind of think it is. You think, what if, instead of encountering heretical monks or encountering heretical versions of Christianity around the Arabian world, what if Muhammad had been exposed to an Orthodox guy, a guy who really believed the real religion? He could have been, it's all hypothetical, but you could have a world in which Muhammad was a great figure of Christianity. Where Arabia was Christian, where Islam didn't exist. And it could have happened, you know, would have should have. But it is amazing.

Sometimes people, to tie it all back around to these ideas, they'll say, you know, it's so crazy in the Middle Ages or antiquity, the church was so harsh on the heretics. You know, you read Thomas Aquinas on the Heretics. It was pretty tough. Well, so was Jude. He had 36 descriptors for him in the book of Jude. Great point. Why?

It's just, you know, in our free speech kind of error, we say, what's the thing? You know, what's so bad about these bad ideas flowing around? Well, the fruit of a bad idea is that. Bad ideas have body counts. They have bought, wow. And Islam, I would encourage people to check out my debate with Eniat Bangalahu who is publicly supportive of Osama bin Laden after 9-11 and Adnan Rashid, the Hiddith scholar, and I just mopped the floor with them because all I did was keep quoting

the Quran back to them. What they're saying, the Kaffer, you and I are the Kephyr. We're the infidel. And you can do anything you want to the infidel. And if you go inside the Dome of the Rock, you will see incised on the ceiling of the dome of the rock. They believe that Islam is the culmination of Judaism and Christianity. Right, right. Period. Yeah. And it's curious too, because the Jews are famous for infamous. for denying the resurrection. Everybody knows that.

But the Muslims deny the crucifixion. Surrah four, I.157. They crucified him not. They crucified him not. And then I think of, I think it's Philippians 318. I might be getting it. I'm Catholic, so we don't do chapter and verse that way. That's okay.

But I think it's somewhere around there where St. Paul writes, he says, there are many who are walking now, and I tell you even weeping, who deny the cross of Christ. That's right. It's very interesting. You know. Yes. Yeah, denying the resurrection is one thing, bad in itself, but to deny the crucifixion, an error in some ways worse because it's on the cross in which Christ conquers death.

And it flies in the face of all the evidence. I mean, I know atheists who will tell you the best established fact of the ancient world is Jesus' death by Roman crucifixion. Nissan 14, AD 33. I'm going to say it to him blue in the face. It's April 3rd, which incidentally this year on Good Friday is April 3rd. the very day that he was crucified in AD 33. That's ominous.

There are a lot of other signs out there. I'm sort of waiting for the trumpets. Yes. Yes. But I want people to know this is not an aberrant. This is a text-based religion. Islam is the greatest threat to Christianity around the world, and they have grand designs, and they have the money to pay for it.

That good. Plu Sajanj, pluze, Le M. Shos. This has been going on for about 14 years. Next one. If you are Protestant, atheist, Muslim, or any religion that is not Roman Catholicism, you will not go to heaven. Oh, okay. According to who?

I must have missed that part of the Bible. In 1302, Pope Bonifist the 8th. Ah, the Pope. Okay, so your Pope that you claim is in- Bonafus is a controversial one. Is the only way to salvation. Okay. The same exact message is then reaffirmed by Pope Eugene the 4th.

Oh, it's reaffirred by another Pope. Okay, oh, must be true. There is a tiny theological loophole that might change that. Oh, cool, there's a loophole. Is it also in the Bible? According to Catechism 847 and Lumen Gentium 16. Wait, real quick, Noah, why should we believe you in the Catholic Church? We have 2,000 years of church history to back up our theology.

So you say 2,000 years validates y'all's view, but the Roman Catholic Church today isn't the same church as before. And didn't Paul have to write letters to the early church because they were getting corrupted? Y'all submit to Jesus Christ, amen. Okay, well, we might have, I actually don't know that we actually have different views on this. The claims that the debunker is making are, he's getting it stuff, which is that the early church, they all disagreed. And Paul had to write and correct them.

And actually, what I love about the apparent dispute between Paul and Peter in Acts, what I love about it is Paul is much more of a theologian than Peter. Paul is, in many ways, he's like more the active player than Peter is. And yet, he brings these questions to Peter because, you know, the role of the Pope is misunderstood. the pope is not some wizard. No. The pope is not necessarily. We've had good theologian.

Ratzinger, Pope Benedict. Joseph, yeah. University of Regensborg. Yes, we've had very good theologians. But not always. Sometimes the Pope is just a guy. Who's a White Sox fan? Who's a White Sox fan?

Yes. Sometimes the Pope is, you know, a guy who has to keep things together. There's a famous phrase attributed to Augustine, which derives from his teaching, though he didn't literally say this, which is Rome has spoken. The matter is settled. But one of the cold. of the church is that the church be unified.

You know, it's why we have ecumenical councils and all. So there is a teaching which is extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside of the church is no salvation. Which in principle, I think every Christian would agree with because the church is the mystical body of Christ. And some kind of disagree over the nature of the body. And to the point of the Catholic in the first video, he says, well, because of the Second Vatican Council,

there is an understanding that the, you know, basically not all of the Protestants are necessarily damned to hell. Or the Eastern Orthodoxy. That's because of goodwill, because of all sorts of reasons. So the debunkers problem is the one that gives me issue here. Because he's blithely writing off 2,000 years of church history. Absolutely. And a visible church.

I mean, hello. Yeah. in favor of a kind of pure private judgment of scripture that I think is Protestantism gone much too far. Absolutely, without a doubt. And it's where many people are, especially in the online church age. They're too godly to be part of a church. Remember, no perfect church exists. And I want to remind people, Acts 11 and Acts 15, two Jerusalem councils were held as early as the Book of Acts.

And Brother James of Jesus hosted them. There were disagreements, healthy disagreements. What is the gospel? Oh, we need to take care of the widows and the poor. That's a big thing. We need to flee sexual immorality. So these kind of healthy debates are great. But Michael, the reason I love you and your show is you actually get beyond the sound bites and you get into substance.

We cannot be educated by that. We cannot be educated by a sound bite. We believe in the unified church. And the gospel says in Romans 109, my nine-year-old triplets just memorize this. If you believe in your heart that Jesus rose from the dead and you proclaim that Jesus is Lord, you will be saved. So that's if you're a Catholic, if you're an Eastern Orthodox, if you are a Protestant, if you are an atheist right now.

Hold on you want to let the Eastern Orthodox say? Yes, absolutely. Romans 10.9. Romans 109, I believe there are believers in all of the, I believe in the unified church. The power of the gospel. There's a very interesting conversation to be had on the sacramental aspect of it. Absolutely. And you, you being a Protestant, have maybe more than any Protestant friend of mine,

and I have many of them who yell at me all the time, but you have a keen appreciation of the sacramental, of the physical. Yes, because it's an act of worship, and it brings you close to Jesus, and you understand it in its context. Yeah, okay, that's all right. Let's see if those TikTokers want to react to our reaction, to the guy's reaction, to the first reaction. Excellent.

What is the difference between Orthodox and Catholicism? So, theologically, there are a number of differences, but I'll tell you why we claim to be the original church. We were one church until the year 1054, where the Great Schism took place. And of course, for a couple hundred years before that, things had started to split up a little bit. The Roman Catholic Church historically can claim to be part of that original church, but theologically they changed. In the Roman Catholic Church, they've changed an antidote. One thing, the infallibility of the Pope. We don't believe that the Pope's infallible.

We believe that when Christ spoke to Peter and said, I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, he was actually talking to all the disciples, who are his successors. And we, the clergy of the Orthodox Church, are the successors of the apostles through ordination. You might think ordination wasn't in the Bible, but it was.

It's called in Greek heretonia, which means the laying on of hands, and that's how you see it. Okay, I thought he was hit in Phillyoga. Yeah, yeah. But he didn't. Proceeding from the Father and the Son. Okay, can I take this one for a second, Michael?

So Eastern Orthodoxy, and again, there are two things I appreciate about Eastern Orthodox, and there are seven reasons I'm not. not an Eastern Orthodox. I actually just gave a talk on this on YouTube. I love their churches, they're cruciform, they're worshipful, and I love the fact that one-third of our 5,800 Greek New Testament fragments are protected right now by the Greek Orthodox Church in many persecuted lands. Mount Athos alone has over a thousand Greek manuscripts. And so let me say that for any Eastern Orthodox who's watching. I appreciate that. Here comes the butt. But here's the butt.

There's actually seven reasons I'm not a Greek Orthodox, but the main one is they don't have any theology. They don't agree with each other. It all goes back to what their local bishop. And do you know that the Eastern Orthodox Church, Michael, has become one of the greatest persecutors of Christians in the world? Are you aware of this? I'm not. Because it becomes a state religion. So you go to places like we have ministries where we go to Romania and we go to other places where they believe you don't even have to have an act of faith to be.

and Eastern Orthodox. I could baptize you Eastern Orthodox if we live in Romania. You never have to express faith in Jesus of any kind and you're Greek Orthodox and you're good. So then we're going to persecute anyone who tries to give you the gospel, even imprison you for trying to lead you to a personal relationship. That is factual. So they've gone from being persecuted themselves. You know, you look at the Bolshevik revolution, you look at all of it. And now they're one of the greatest persecutors of non-Eastern Orthodox Christians. And that's one of the best. And that's one of biggest reasons I'm not an Eastern Orthodox. Yeah, it's funny because...

Beyond the fact they have no theology that's unified. Yeah, this is one of the issues. I got in trouble recently. You did? I did. Occasionally I did. And I got in trouble because I made this claim. I said, you know, the Eastern Orthodox, they flirted with every heresy.

And I did... But it was actually misinterpreted because as much as I would like to be chauvinistic in my religious views and kind of mock the Eastern Orthodox, I really... have a great deal of respect for these. Absolutely. I love the liturgy is great. I love the icons. I don't love, they don't have chairs in their churches. No, I actually like that. Oh, you do. You know why I like it? I like it because, look, I don't want it to be too Islamic or anything. But I like the idea that one is sort of kneeling or standing or really, you know, I actually, I think pews are too modern, okay? But

all of that. There we disagree. Yeah. I mean, it's like, I'll sit. Like, I'm not above sitting. Jesus sat when he taught the Bible, just so you know. We could have a nice lounge. Yeah, he sat. Every time he taught, he sat. Yeah, okay. Well, look, that gives me a justification. Rabbi Jesus. Don't forget that. But I, the East, maybe just it was a geographical fact. A lot of heresies came in there. Sometimes there'd be ecumenical councils. The Eastern bishops, they would. Yeah, they'd seven, to be clear, seven ecumenical councils.

Yes, yeah. And so they would, they'd go in, they'd go back home, they'd disingenical. agree with the councils. There were all these issues. Then it became fused with the state. So you had a kind of Cesaro papism in the East. Very interesting, speaking of that previous video, one of the great battles in the Middle Ages was between Dante and Boniface the Eighth. Yes. Boniface the Eighth was claiming a lot of temporal power. Dante said, no, there's actually a distinction between the temporal and the spiritual power. The temporal power should be illuminated by the spiritual power. He writes this in monarchy, but they're distinct. Monarchia, which was then put on the index of prohibited books, but then taken off the index by, I think it was Leo

the 13th, who was an inspiration for Leo the 14th, the current Pope, all sorts of interesting reasons as to why that happened. But because of that, I do think the East has been subjected to a lot of bad political pressures, including Islam. Absolutely. We even mention Islam. 100%. And so it's a labored... Look what happens at St. Catherine's right now. Yes, yes. And I love the Eastern Orthodox guy. He says, Look, when Jesus is talking to Peter and he says, here are the keys to the kingdom of heaven, I read that as he's talking to all the apostles. It was kind of funny because the way he himself phrased it was, when he's talking to Peter,

he's talking to Peter, maybe he's talking to Peter. And the Eastern Orthodox can point out all of the problems and difficulties and struggles that have happened in the Catholic Church. Very few people are more sensitive to that than I am. I know. Trust me, I could give you a hundred more. But this is something we see in the ancient world. world is that our Lord wants unity, I think, among the churches. Absolutely.

So it's not to diminish the role and the responsibility of the other bishops, but yeah, if your point is it's hard and slow going and problematic to have a unified church. And these guys in Rome, they mess things up sometimes. Gee, you don't say. Tell me something I don't know. Nevertheless, we want, you know, when we recite the creed that even without the Philly Oakway laws, which. should be in the creed and absolutely anyway we say at the end what do we say we say we

believe in peric corius yes we say we believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church absolutely and we'll get the Eastern back at some yes at some point okay next one realistically we have no way of actually knowing who this belonged to it could be from any random guy it's not like we have a sample of Jesus's DNA to compare it with but what we do find from a close examination of the blood is that it's not blood, it's just dye, made from red ochre and vermilion. Blood stain pattern analysis shows that the stains don't make any sense and are unrealistic for a crucifixion. The shroud's fabric was made from a herringbone weave, one far more complex than any type of fabric we see used in burials during the first century. Radic carbon dating methods from three independent sources place the actual

age of the shroud between 1260 and 1390, the same time when it first went on display at a French church. Based on these facts, we can be supremely confident that the Shroud of Turin is a fraud. But even if it were real, it wouldn't prove anything. Okay, well, did he convince you? Were you wrong? This is a hold my Diet Coke moment, if you don't mind. Okay, the blood samples were done by two Jewish hematologist, Heller and Adler. It's type A, B, blood. It's human blood. It's type A, B, blood. And we can even distinguish the post-mortem blood from its separation from the serum where Jesus is pierced through the rib five and six. So again, Barry Schwartz, who is the documenting photographer

of the Shrout of Turin, who was a Jew, for 17 years, even after he took the photograph, Do you know what caused him to go from being skeptical? Even though he was the documenting photographer, it was the blood. He said the blood put it beyond no doubt. 6% of the world's population is type A, B blood, okay, period. So much has happened since we talked about the shroud last time. I told you that the British Museum suppressed the raw data of the carbon dating of the shroud for 27 years.

And Tristan, my buddy, just did a book on it. Thirdly, I just met with Bruno Barbaris. And by the way, the irony of his last name is not lost on me. I write about that in the Jesus discoveries. He took all of the factors. And I actually have a picture of it in my book that is so fun because actually his fact, Bruno Barbaris is a mathematician at the University of Turin. And he put a mathematical equation to all of the aspects of the shroud, the crucified man,

and how they match up with what scripture says about how Jesus was crucified. He said there is a one and two hundred billion chance it's anyone other than Jesus from the Bible. Having said all that, it's not a forgery, I want you to hold something cool. I didn't have this last time. All right. You are looking right here at a Roman solidus. That is from Justinian II, late 7th century. And what is the first thing that you think of when you see the face on that coin?

It looks like Jesus. The face of the shroud. This is the first coin that ever had the face of Christ on it. So it was a very bold move. What year is this from? This is from the late 600th, seventh century. Wow. So, by the way, 700 years before the supposed carbon dating,

what's the source material if the shroud didn't exist? Crazy. Remember sketch artists in a criminal defense? You know, they would sketch a criminal. This is like four times what's accepted in a court of law to match the shroud of Turin. And I want to say something else that is so important. Waxus dating, wide angle, x-ray scattering, has showed that the shroud is, in fact, 2,000 years old.

There's actually five different ways that we date the shroud that I write about in my book. The shroud is the greatest gospel evangelism tool I've ever seen, Michael. This is a, you know, it takes a lot to really impress me. Let's go. This is cool. Well, I had to elevate my game from last time. Yeah, you did a good job last year too. Wow.

All right. What are you going to do next time you come? What are you going to bring? I'm just getting started. You can have to bring the Dead Sea Scrolls? I have them. I can do that. I can do that.

I can bring the great Isaiah Scroll. it's all in here. The book is Jesus' discoveries. Go get it. Get it right now. Let's go. Jeremiah Johnston. Good to see you.

You're a scholar and a gentleman. That was fabulous. Is that all right? Okay. I mean, how long... Is this Augustus one? Insane. Well, no, Augustus is right here.

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