The Sean McDowell Show - A Homicide Detective Investigates the Gospels (J. Warner Wallace)

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

How does a former Atheist detective use skills help us determine the historical reliability of the Bible? J Warner Wallace applied the same step-by-step investigative process he utilized in his work as a homicide detective to the case for Christianity. In light of the ten common rules of evidence that he’d used to solve crimes throughout his career, Wallace realized he could no longer deny the truth of Jesus Christ. And his life was never the same. He recently re-released an updated and expanded 10 year edition of his book Cold Case Christianity. READ: Cold-Case Christianity (Updated & Expanded Edition): A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace (https://a.co/d/dumL4BM) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

are the gospels eyewitness accounts that we can potentially trust or are they second or third hand claims that we should skeptically reject the new testament gospels were not written by eyewitnesses or by people who knew eyewitnesses the gospels they passed the test as well as any ancient account our guest today jay warner wallace became a christian while investigating the gospels with the tools of a homicide detective. So I'm trying to sort out the lie from the truth. Why would I consider this even to begin with? Well, because he's making a claim. The 10-year update to his book, Cold Case Christianity, and I can't believe it's been 10 years, Jim. You make the case that the Gospels are eyewitness testimony. We're going to get into that today. Jim, thanks for coming on,

man. This is always fun. Well, it's 10 years that you actually are part of that story because you're the one who said, hey, you should write a book about this. When we were training students 10 years ago, well, actually probably more. It was probably right around 2011 maybe because by the time you get a book published, it takes about a year. So i think it was probably 2000 late 11 or early 12 when we were uh on a trip to berkeley together and my daughter uh was on that trip with us and she ended up going to school at your school after that and and she was we were just there teaching some of these things i've been teaching in youth group for i don't know a bunch of years um because it really was the process that i used to examine the scriptures. And so

you were the one who said, Hey, you should write a book about this. And I remember I had, I think I had two cases in trial and I had no margin. I had no margin to do this. And I went home and told Susie, you know, Sean says we should write an outline. And she's like, well, why don't you? I mean, Sean's saying he's going to help you figure out how to do this. Why don't you do it? And I thought for sure she was going to say, yeah, you're right. We have no margin for that, you know, but it ended up being what became Cold Case Christianity. So I owe it all to you. Well, I don't know about owe it all to me, but the moment I heard that presentation, I thought this is such a unique, fresh approach.

And you cover a ton of stuff in the book, but we're going to kind of focus down on the claim that the gospels are eyewitness testimony. Now, what I love about you is you don't approach this as an academic who's read books. You've been examining eyewitness testimony and presenting this kind of evidence before a trial. So you're kind of bottom up rather than top down looking at this approach in a sense. Now, before we get to your case that the gospels contain eyewitness testimony, what kind of training did you get as a detective to be able to identify and analyze eyewitness testimony? Well, everyone who starts as a patrol officer, right? That gets some training even before they get training because you're taking reports and you're interviewing eyewitnesses. And so you get a sense of the texture and the kind of level of variation

you're always going to see between any eyewitnesses. You get that while you're working patrol. But at some point, they said this dude who had a master's degree, they thought, well, maybe we should see if he can do any investigations. And I ended up in our couple of investigative teams that were street teams doing street dope doing you know working stuff like that where you're working gangs and so you do a lot and I eventually was made into an investigative position on a surveillance team still wasn't a Christian but I had I was already a senior detective by the time I became a Christian because I you know you spend enough time on these trust me all of us who work in law enforcement, we're looking for that pay raise.

So we're collecting our years working as an investigator to hopefully get to advanced investigator. So I was working in that capacity and stumbled into a church with my wife because she wanted to go to church. And so my training, by that time, I actually had a bunch of training. I had investigative because the details you get through an intermediate and advanced investigator, you're going to go to schools. These are all post-certified schools. So I ended up in post-certified schools to do investigations. I ended up in post-certified schools to do interviews because on my team, I was the guy who was doing interviews. And one of the ways you develop cases is when someone's arrested and they're in jail, you can pop in and pull them out of the holding cell

before they go to court. And you can ask them questions if they want to help you as an informant. It's all about interview skills. And so I was doing that every day, every morning. And people saw that was working for us. And so they sent me to schools. And one of those schools, I'm not sure if they still do

this anymore but I think by the time you're in an intermediate interviewing school you're probably gonna put your foot in forensic statement analysis and I did I was I went to a class did the entire course and then I fell in love with it and now this is not a science this is is an art. So you only get good at it if you do it again and again and again and again. And you have to make a lot of mistakes and you have to be willing to make a lot of mistakes. And I did. But then I became obsessed with it and people were getting irritated that I was working with because I wanted to stop everything. Let's go interview this guy and have him write this out and do some forensic

statement analysis. But it ended up being one of the major things that we did in all of our cold cases because the DA I was working with, he loved the idea and he wanted to get good at it. And so his name is John Lewin, and he's pretty well known here in Los Angeles County. He's the Robert Durst case most famously. And anyway, the point is he's always been a fan of this. And so we used it over and over and over again now you're right about the idea of being a detective instead of an academic and here's the difference I think and you know this because some people have both kinds of what I call smarts right street

smarts that's a title of our friend yeah locals book but a lot of it is you see really smart educated people who are silly victims of crimes they didn't need to be a victim of because they don't have any street smarts. They lack a certain level of common sense that can see immediately, that is probably not where I should go, or that is probably not what I should do. And a lot of the kind of street smarts that detectives get is not that we've read books on what eyewitnesses do. It's that we have been in the trenches with eyewitnesses and we kind of learn it firsthand. And we also are better at spotting the lie because what profession has a group of people who is consistently lying to you aside from law enforcement. It's almost like there's a probably 70, 30% chance

on any call of a disturbance or domestic violence or whatever that someone's going to lie to you. And the resolution of that call is going to come down to whether or not you can spot the deception. So a lot of that is like, well, can you teach that? Of course. And we've had classes on deception indicators. Of course, we do that as part of that forensic statement analysis. But to be honest, most of that stuff you're learning just talking to people and dealing with people. And that was my whole life. That was my dad's whole life.

He would talk about it when I was growing up. So now it's become Jimmy's whole life, my son. So you find yourself just kind of leveraging what you learn on the street. Yeah, that makes total sense. It was passed down to you. You've been doing it for years. You've been studying it. It's kind of in your DNA, so to speak.

Now, when it comes to, say, making a case, how important is eyewitness testimony compared to other kinds of evidence for securing a conviction in a court of law? How would you weigh it compared to DNA or other forms of evidence, whatever it may be? I've weighed it just exactly even. It's no better or no worse. I don't look at this testimony and say, well, this is the, I got to have, look, eyewitnesses lie all the time. So we have to do something and we can be mistaken also about material evidence like DNA. Are we sure it's even the right DNA we swabbed? Are we sure it came from the right spot?

You know, fingerprint. Do we lift the right fingerprint? Is it possible this has been contaminated before we got there? I mean, there's lots of things you have to test. And you have to test both direct evidence, that's eyewitness accounts, and you have to test indirect evidence, which is DNA and fingerprints and material evidence and everything, blood spatter, everything else. So you have to test both of these and in the end the judge's instructions to juries is that you are to treat

them direct evidence eyewitnesses and material evidence indirect evidence as having the exact same value so they are not to be treated as one it says that the instructions none neither has any greater weight than the other so i think eyewitness testimony is important but i think untested eyewitness testimony is ridiculously it's it's actually troublesome so that's why i knew when i read the gospels for the first time the issue is not whether or not this is eyewitness testimony it's could i test it in a way to determine if it is and could i test it in a way to determine if it's reliable? So this is probably true for other what other historians do. I don't know. I just know what detectives do.

You know, I'll say one more thing about this. I was kind of questioned me about whether or not, you know, I was working cold cases when I first got saved. So my dad had a case called the Terry Lynn Hollis case. It got solved in 2019, ultimately, but it occurred 1972. And I was 11 when Terry was 10. When she died and my dad got the case, he talked about it. And it shook our entire family because I was about the same age as Terry. And it changed the way we protected our kids in that city because this girl got snatched off the street. It was terrible. So in the end, it was important to me. It went unsolved. And when I was doing forensic statement analysis

before I got to become a Christian and I was working in the back room, our undercover position, I happened to stumble across the big notebook that had the interview of the guy who confessed to killing Terry Lynn Hollis. There was a guy who confessed to it in 1973. So I thought, well, wouldn't it be nice? Maybe, they moved off of him by the way. They determined he wasn't the killer. And I thought, well,

maybe they're wrong. Wouldn't it be great to solve this like that by just doing a forensic statement analysis or Ronald, his name is Ron, of his statement, of his interview. And so I first just dove in. So I started investigating my first cold case about a year or two before I became a Christian using forensic statement analysis because I was so involved in it. But I was not assigned as a cold case detective because most detectives in America who are investigating cold cases, you would say, is that a cold case detective? Yes. Is he officially assigned as a cold case detective? Yes. Is he officially assigned as a cold case detective? No. He's either a homicide detective or robbery homicide detective,

maybe a forgery. He's just working a case. So that's how I first got started in working cold cases was that Terry Lynn Hollis case. Okay. Interesting. That's helpful. So you start at that point. You've obviously been doing it for years and years now. How do you determine like, say that document, for example, that you have? Somebody wrote this document at the time you started this, it had been decade or decades before. How do you root if it's reliable and if it's eyewitness testimony? What kind of things do you look for while you're signing that?

And of course, everybody knows we're going to shift and go to the gospel soon, but I want to get in the mind of how you think as a detective looking at a're signing that. And of course, everybody knows we're gonna shift and go to the gospel soon, but I wanna get in the mind of how you think as a detective looking at a document like that. So here's a good example of this. This guy's name, I think, was Ronald Kozak, and it's in the news, so it's not like I'm giving away an investigative secret. And he confessed to the entire thing and said he was there when it occurred.

He did it, so he's claiming to be there. So he not only saw it as he was there when it occurred he did it so he's claiming to be there so he don't know he saw it as he was doing it he's claiming to be there okay uh it's a long confession about thousand pages so the first claim is wait a thousand pages not just a thousand words a thousand page transcript yeah about five because you know we're it's double spaced and wow the investigator asks a question then ronald responds blah blah blah got it so it's so this is big he has two notebooks it was two red notebooks so um i'm looking at this case and i'm thinking okay so why would i consider this even to begin with well because he's making a claim he's making the claim internally in the document that he was there so i got to test it now is it is he an eyewitness? Is it reliable? How would I know? Well, does the stuff he's telling me match up with the evidence we have? We have some evidence that kind of shows us the kind of murder this was. And he's going to have to describe, the sad thing about it was that the initial investigators gave him too much information in advance that he just kind of leveraged to make up a story what you want to do honestly is to give him no

information you tell me what happened then I'll see if what you're saying matches the evidence I have in hand and once we did it that way it didn't match and we did solve it ultimately with DNA years later and it wasn't him so he was lying the whole time so what am I looking for is there some claim and also look if i said um i i did this and i took her body to the hills in oxnard but there is no oxnard or he describes oxnard and he describes it inaccurately because he's from the east coast and doesn't even know what oxnard looks like well then i'm starting to doubt but if he accurately describes this i can at least say well he's familiar with the area so i'm trying to sort out uh the lie from the truth because every lie

contains truth that's what a good lie is you've ever played that game spot that's about the lie game where i'm going to tell you what do i do i tell you a true story but i change one detail it's really hard to catch it because it kind of sounds like a true story. I've just changed the detail. I could tell you how my dog ran away, give you every detail that makes sense, but actually it was my cat that ran away. So it is a lie, but it's harder to catch because all those other details line up. That's what we're doing in these kinds of investigations. That is not a game I would want to play with you that would not be fair you'd probably fool me because I mean we are look I'm not a Sherlock Holmes right don't you love watching

that show where Sherlock spots some little weird thing over here and he puts these connects all these dots back to the killer that doesn't really happen I mean but we do have some processes in place that's why we test eyewitnesses under those four criteria that I always talk about, because there's a test in place. But number one, does it appear to be an eyewitness account in the sense that it is not just giving you a bunch of facts? For example, compare the gospel of Thomas with the gospel of Matthew. I don't think anyone looks at the gospel of Thomas. You might say, well, maybe somebody is there to hear these statements, but it doesn't even appear to be an eyewitness account because it does not describe in any kind of chronology any series of events. It's just a set of proverbial statements of Jesus

that could be true or could be false. How would you test them? He's not saying he entered, you know, Capernaum and he went into the house of Peter's mother. He's not making claims about a sequence of events that is typical of eyewitness testimony. And also, if you compare like the gospels to like Peter Pan, like the author of Peter Pan never claims that it's history. He never claims that he's viewed as an eyewitness. the gospel authors are quite different luke says i i i didn't see this stuff i was with paul in the book of acts but but i i talked to the people who were the eyewitnesses oh you mean there are eyewitnesses apparently well if there were eyewitnesses according to luke like what are they witnessing there you go now we're looking at claims the only

question is is their testimony reliable? Okay. So in a court of law, you would say eyewitness testimony is equal to other kinds of testimony in assessing other kinds of evidence. Eyewitness testimony is a form of evidence equal to other forms of evidence. Good, good clarification. Thank you. When it comes to the, say the gospels and their reliability with would that same thing apply? Whether they're ultimately eyewitness accounts or not doesn't determine if they're true, or would it help our cause more so if we have reason to believe identity of the eyewitness doesn't matter to me. But the question is, is this written by an eyewitness does matter to me. Because the easiest thing to do to lie about Jesus is just wait till everyone who knows the truth is dead and then say anything you want. Because there's no one even if it's not written early enough, there's not even forget about

the fact that I can't be an eyewitness if it's written in the second century. The better thing is that I can't be fact-checked by an eyewitness if I write it in the second century. So the question is, is it early? That's important to me because it's harder to lie early than it is to lie late. And then could it be tested in some way? That matters as well. So I think in the end, those are the things, those are the highest values I hold. Because by the way, this happens all the time in cold cases. You know, you, you, you were 30 years after the case and you, and they thought they interviewed all five people who saw it, but it turns out there was a sixth person who was never comfortable talking about it 30 years ago because he or she says, I was too close to the suspect and now I don't fear the suspect anymore.

So I'm willing to talk today well okay were you really there i mean how do i i gotta test this thing because you can make any kind of claim i don't know if you were really there i gotta start to investigate those issues were you really there okay so we haven't gotten into your case yet but do you think the gospels could pass as testimony in a modern court of law, is that relevant or not relevant in determining their reliability and historicity? No, they would not be admitted in a court of law and it is not relevant. And here's why, because there's a hearsay rule.

So, so hearsay, basically you under the, in the United States, you have the right to confront your accuser. And if you cannot confront your accuser, that testimony is not allowed to be heard. So if I came in and said, hey, my dad told me that he talked to this guy and he said X, well, someone's going to say,

well, then get your dad in here because you didn't hear it. Your dad heard it. You can't testify for your dad. You can't be cross-examined. You can't ask me the question. Well, what do you, what was he wearing? I don't know.

My dad just said, he said this. Okay, then get your dad in here so I can ask all the questions that can cross-examine the accuser. Okay. But my dad's dead. Okay, well then you can't, that testimony is not coming in.

Now there are some exceptions in federal law. Okay, we're not going to forget about that for a second. And the cases that I work, that's hearsay. But that's a standard that we developed for reasons of protecting the accused. It's not a standard we would apply. In other words, we would rather free. We don't want to convict anyone falsely. We'd rather free 100 guilty people than falsely incarcerate one innocent person.

So what we do is we set a standard that's really high but if you held the hearsay rule against claims related to history there's virtually nothing you could know or would be allowed to know outside the lifetime of an eyewitness so if you say well what are my great grandparents like you couldn't ask your grandparents because they're not they can't be you know you can't ask your parents anyway for sure because they how are they going to know they're trusting what their grand when their parents said that they can't be, you know, you can't ask your parents anyway, for sure, because they, how are they going to know? They're trusting what their grand, what their parents said you can't, you need to get to the actual eyewitness. Well, can you imagine how short history, reliable history would be? It would be in the lifetime of like two, two, two generations. And then after that, everything's hearsay. So you can't trust anything in history. That's not how we

do history. So you can apply the, uh, the, the criteria that we use for eyewitness reliability to historical claims. And you should, but you shouldn't think that, that the fact that we can't bring in hearsay in a criminal trial means we could never use it to determine history. If that's the case, be determined, be ready to throw out everything you think, you know, about your own family. Gotcha. Fair enough. All right. We're talking with Jay Warner Wallace about his 10-year update to his book, Cold Case Christianity, one of the top books that I recommend for Christians and non-Christians to engage the gospels. So earlier you said you started kind of

going to church and this time you were practicing as a cold case detective. You decide to investigate Mark in particular in the gospels. What was your mindset going into this? And I asked because my dad was challenged by some Christians and he was setting out to disprove Christianity kind of with a legal mindset. Were you trying to see if it's true? Were you trying to disprove it? And what were your assumptions about the gospels when you started? i'm pretty neutral i was pretty neutral about it i mean i i was a pretty committed um naturalist i didn't think that anything that was recorded anywhere that included a miracle that part couldn't be true even if other parts of the story

were true i was i was a very committed naturalist but i wasn't like lee's trouble or like your dad who said let me show you this is Instead, I just didn't know any other way to investigate any claim. So I had a sociology teacher. Now, by the way, I was not assigned to cold cases when I first walked in, but I was working a cold case, two different things. Same skillset though. By the way, the skill set that cold case detectives use is pretty much the skill set I use on every fresh homicide. If I get called out tomorrow to something to consult, I'm just going to use this. I mean, the thing's only four hours old, what I was trying to do was to say, okay, I've got this. This pastor was very much a seeker sensitive. Remember those old terms we used to use in the nineties for pastors? They were seeker sensitive pastors who would pitch the Jesus in a way that he expecting that there's probably a non-believer, a seeker

in the room. I'm not a seeker,ker but my wife probably was i think she was more interested than i was for sure um and so we we get in there and he pitches jesus a certain way he said he was um super important the smartest man who ever lived the most important man the most influential man all these claims and i thought well is that true so i bought a bible which is sitting back here on my shelf. And I was just going to read to see what were the wise statements. When I was in high school, I had a sociology teacher who was a Baha'i. And he got me to read the wise teaching of Baha'u'llah. He gave me a book. And I remember reading it and thinking, oh, this is some really good stuff, like fortune cookie stuff.

You know, it's like, you know, it's like wise people. There are a number of wise people. Maybe Gandhi said a bunch of wise things. I mean, we write books, we quote wise people all the time, and I was interested in wisdom. So I bought the scripture to see if it was actually wise. Now, as I'm reading it, it struck me that these things were variant. The details, the way that these scenes were described were not the same exactly. Sometimes they would overlap because clearly if you've heard Frank Turek describe something a thousand ways and you're going to describe it, you might describe it like Frank Turek. This is not unusual, right?

But a lot of stuff had variation. And that variation is what captured me because there was always variation between eyewitness accounts. And it's not something that's ever shaken me. As a matter of fact, I'm always suspicious when there isn't variation. And the only thing we ever ask the dispatcher when we get called out to a homicide is, hey, have the officers on the scene, separate the eyewitnesses, because I'm going to be about an hour and a half before I get there. I don't want them talking to each other because they'll just line up their stories. I want to see the messy puzzle because it's in that puzzling together of all the messiness that we're going to catch a bad guy. So I want the puzzle. And when I saw that the scriptures were puzzling this way, I thought, hmm, now I'm interested, but not because I'm trying to

prove them wrong, just because that provoked me to say, well, let's just test them. Why not? By the way, you can't test the writings of Baha'u'llah because they don't make any historical claims. They make no claims involving a chronology of events. Every murder is a chronology of events. There's that period before the murder, that period after the murder, the cataclysmic event. So I just knew that was the approach i could take and and that's what got me interested i was not really motivated against or for i figured well there's going to be some truth in here and some lie but the biggest claim

that's important is going to be the resurrection and at some point as i'm reading this i'm going that this is really what separates jesus all the miracles can, but look, there's lots of wisdom from people who did a number of different things. Jesus uniquely rises from the grave and that separates him from Baha'u'llah for sure. So I just wanted to know if that claim was true. Now, this might be jumping ahead to your case, but you notice the variance across the gospels. Are there any other things that just kind of jumped out to you that made you pause, go, hmm, this is interesting. This is different. That was kind of building the case in your mind towards them being eyewitness and

ultimately reliable. Well, there's a ton of things that I kind of try to talk about them a little bit. There's some of the same things I suspect that textual critics will use and kind of identify as internal evidence. But it is true when some when people make claims, eyewitness claims, they will often include details that seem important to them. But you never end up using those details in the case proper before a jury because they weren't really they're just like little. And you see this sometimes, right, with eyewitnesses, you know, that there's no point in my even mentioning that to a jury because it doesn't do anything to advance the case. But you see some of that in the gospels. You see the, the kind of what has been called undesigned coincidences and not

every undesigned coincidence I think has evidential value. So I don't use that term. These are the kind of these are the unwitting kind of statements that, that, that, that, that witnesses make, not knowing that they're actually leaving me wondering even bigger question. This is not unusual. Somebody makes a statement and you're like, okay, that explains A, B, and C, but now I've got a question E I didn't have before, because that seems confusing to me. But later on, you talk to another eyewitness and he covers, you know, B, C, D, and E, although he never covers A. This kind of puzzling between where everything kind of fits ultimately is really common in eyewitness accounts.

And there are several places in the Gospels that I talk about in Colicates Christianity that those things intrigue me. And also just little things, right? You talked about, for example, Peter being an influence on on mark and that's only you know we only know this because papias and some ancients will tell us that that mark is sitting at Peter's feet and how do we know that how would we and there's lots of folks who will look at some of this at by the way evidence is different than an inference. So, for example, if I'm making a case for God's existence, I'm using the exact same evidence that the non-believer is using. I just think the inference is different from the exact same evidence. This happens all the time. This is what juries do

constantly. We present all this evidence. The defense doesn't, it tries to knock down some of them. When he's stuck with it, he just basically he just basically says well yeah but he's making the wrong inference it better points to this other guy okay we're just trying to change the inference from the evidence well the same is true in the gospels there are lots of people for example when looking at mark's gospel will say the fact that he doesn't seem to mention peter is an evidence against peter's influence well wait a minute but what if he's trying to let's go back and take a look at when he doesn't mention peter and it turns out he leaves peter out every time peter does something stupid hmm that's interesting because it might be that that the omission of

peter's involvement is actually an evidence for rather than an evidence against if they all share this one common thing peter's doing something stupid so so it turns out there's ways of making cases with the exact same evidence i come to a different inference but i'm also doing that a lot in cold cases right where the initial investigator collects this evidence and he thinks yeah because he draws an inference and i'm going to come back look at the exact same evidence and say, well, wait a minute, can we think one level deeper here and see what it is that unifies all of this? And then we'll look for what the unifying explanation might be. And so that's when we hear people talk about seeing the evidence as kind of hiding in plain sight. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about, well, is it possible that you made an inference because you just didn't go the next level and look for what unified everything so

that's the stuff we're trying to do so you're looking at Mark you're looking at the other Gospels you notice these variants which kind of matches up with the way eyewitness testimony often occurs you notice these undesigned coincidences between Matthew, Mark, Luke, sometimes John that overlap and fill in. How do you know the gospel writers intended their writings to be taken as eyewitness? Is it as simple as them just saying, we were witnesses, we're there, we're reporting what we saw? Is it that simple? How did you assess those claims when you saw them first time you're reading it well sometimes it is but we talked sometimes it is is that that they've said you know and if you look at first Peter look at first John you look at places we're now

of course this is where skeptics will come in and say well we're gonna toss those letters out because to be honest if you include those letters you get a unifying picture of eyewitnesses who are making an acclaim that doesn't work well for them so you often I see as what they're motivating what's motivating them to toss out some of these secondary letters is really um explainable and any other again same evidence different inference and so i see a lot of that happening um but i will tell you this i've talked about this earlier i don't really the authorship like is that really peter or is that really rather is that really mat? Or is that really Matthew? Is that really John?

Or is it a different John? I don't care who it is. I don't care if the authors of these four texts are one of the official, later on, bigwig, you know, top name apostles. I don't care if they're, because the issue is, is it the writing of an eyewitness? I don't need it to be given authority because it's Matthew who's writing. What if it's Matthew's buddy, John or Phil, who happened to be, you know, never mentioned in the scriptures, but he happened to see the whole thing. And so he wrote it down. I need to know, is it reliable eyewitness test? The actual who's attributed to it is not a big concern for me. Now, I'm going to

say this as somebody who's looking at it as a non-Christian, right? Because I was a non-Christian when I first read it. So it didn't matter to me. It did seem odd to me, though, that if you're going to falsely attribute these accounts, you falsely attribute two of them to people that don't really seem to give you any cachet. For example, if you look at the non-canonical gospels and documents, they're not going to get attributed to someone like Mark or someone like Luke, who you'd have to read the text to even know who this dude even is. And he's not an apostle and certainly not an eyewitness of Jesus. That's a weak kind of attribution. You'd be better off taking that first paragraph of Luke's gospel out and attributing it to somebody who's in the 12th,

if you're trying to convince someone falsely. So it just seemed to me that that didn't seem like a heavy criteria. The question is, does this make a claim about a sequence of events that occurred that does seem to match up with other corroborative evidence of the first century? Does the writer appear to say that he saw this and that he could have written a lot more, as John says, but it would take too many shelves to fill those books up, right? It would take too many shelves of books to say everything that Jesus did.

Are there places later on in scripture where these apostles claim to be eyewitnesses? And then you look at and say, when Luke says, yeah, I was speaking to the eyewitnesses and servants of the word, and when luke says yeah i was speaking to the eyewitnesses and servants of the word and i've looked at all the objections to that language it's torturous i mean the reality of it is the plainest reading of that language is is that luke was with paul you know years after the resurrection and had to talk to people who had seen the resurrection in order to write his gospel well then who's he's he quoting? He quotes Matthew. He quotes Mark. I mean, he's quoting other people. So are we to accept then

that these are also eyewitness accounts and they fit into that category of the eyewitnesses and servants of the word? Anyway, I think in the end, there's a reason. I'm not motivated to try to include these folks. I don't even care who wrote them, but I can see why a skeptic would be motivated to try to exclude these folks. And that's why I think of the two approaches, that one is more sensible than the other. Okay, so you can make a case, and you do in the book,

that the gospel writings are not anonymous, but even if they were, it wouldn't in principle undermine the possibility that we could ascertain eyewitness testimony within them. Is that accurate? Yes. Now, here's why. Because you think, oh, it would in a criminal court.

Yeah, of course it would. Because if I found a note that somebody wrote and it describes every single thing that happened that day, yet I don't know who wrote it. Well, guess what? I'm not sure what to do with that because I can't cross-examine. hearsay issue but we're not doing a criminal trial here we're doing history so does it really matter who wrote it he's making a claim if it's for example John's gospel let's say you don't know who wrote that gospel but at the end he's saying that I'm the one who saw this the guy you know I'm the one who saw all this and you know, I'm trustworthy. Okay. Now let's just test it. By the way, I wouldn't on that basis go,

oh, I guess I can trust John's gospel. No, we're going to test John's gospel the same way we test all the other gospels. If they passes the test, then why would we toss it out? So that's, that's kind of the approach I took. Could I test these under those four criteria? That became the big thing for me. So you give kind of a four-step approach in your book. The first one is that the gospels are written early. Now, before you jump in and make your case, obviously they have to be written within the lifetime of the person who is alleged to have written it, or at least within the lifetime of somebody who could have been present to see these events. But how vital is it that we date it kind of into the

60s, which you typically do? For example, things like acts don't include the death of Paul. Or if we took, say, into the 80s, which is where Craig Keener is keen to date them. Does that difference matter in your mind as a detective? If so, why and how much does it matter? Well, it does matter. So if I didn't know anything from a common sense perspective, but I did know the 13 questions that are in the California jury instructions, well, then I said, okay, I don't know. I don't know anything about eyewitness testimony, but I know the judges will tell jurors that they need to consider these 13 things when they're listening to an eyewitness on the stand. If I broke those 13 things down into four major categories, there they are. Is it written early

enough to have been written by an eyewitness? Can it be corroborated in some way? Has this guy been honest and accurate over time or has he been changing his story? And third, have a motive to lie to me those are the things we test so i thought okay let's test them under those four criteria now the first one is going to be is it is this early enough to have been written by an eyewitness so acts i'm not as concerned about as i am the four gospels but acts gives us the key that unlocks the dating of the four gospels, because as you kind of lock down the writing of Acts, it ends up backing up the writing of Luke. And this backs up the writing, backs it in time, up to whatever he's considering an eyewitness account.

And he's clearly comparing his account in the first chapter of Luke to other early accounts. I say this all the time in presentations on the stage, but if I said, this is my black clicker, okay, what am I really telling you? Words matter. I'm not just telling you this is my black clicker. I just told you I have more than one clicker because clearly you can see it's black. That optional word, black, is only necessary if I have another clicker that's not black. This is my black clicker. I happen to have a gray clicker as well.

Now I've just told you I have two clickers, but I never actually say that. Well, Luke does the same thing. He makes a comparison. He says that using optional words, he doesn't need to use. He says that his account is careful. I've carefully written this account to you, Theophilus, so that you may know with certainty all the things that you have been taught. Well, he's carefully,

why would you need to say it's careful? I can read the account and see it's pretty robust, but he's saying it's careful because if there's another early account that's a different color clicker, this would separate his account from the gray clicker. And that account is the Gospel of Mark, I believe, because Mark, when compared to Luke, is pretty,

Matthew compared to Luke can hold its own, but Mark is really short compared to Luke. Doesn't seem to be as careful. He also says that his account is in the correct chronological order. He says it's orderly. That Greek word is not tidy. It means it's in the right chronological order. Well, why would you need to say that? Because if there's another great clicker account out there that's not in the right chronological order, this would separate my account from his. And that's what he's talking about. It's Mark's account because Mark, when compared to Luke, just do it.

You'll see there are some places where the chronology is slightly different. And Papias tells us that this has been known for centuries because Papias said that his account was accurate, if not orderly. Here's my whole point. The dating of acts only to me is helpful in that it backs up into the dating of... Now, I don't know how you could, even if someone like Craig, who's a friend of mine, a friend of yours, I think he would say we're friends. We're back and forth all the time. But we don't agree on this issue. That's okay. The question is, why don't we agree on it? What is the evidence upon which he's making his case? I'm a little bit hesitant when the entire reason you don't like a case is based on

literary criticism, not looking at the events that are missing, but instead looking at the style of writing, looking at these kinds of things. Those kinds of things don't seem to matter to me because I've worked cases from 30 years ago where the detective who wrote the supplemental report ends up it was four detectives who wrote it. Oh, didn't end up on the on the top or he one of them, he sat down to a steno and she typed it and corrected his errors as he was speaking it to her. Very common back in the day. And it was typed, not in a computer.

So if you make a slight mistake, you just leave it. It's good enough because how are you going to go back and get that two paragraphs ago? So you see these kinds of errors and it's based on the technology and the number of people writing. And certainly we had technology problems and number of people writing in the first century. So I'm not convinced sometimes the best way to determine whether this is actually from the hand of Moses or the hand of, of one writer, you could base this, first of all, you have to assume then that he is the actual writer, there's no scribe involved, there's only one scribe involved rather than two or

three, and that the technology did not inhibit. So So I think this is to me, it's a bigger, too big of an assumption to make. What I can say is this, there's missing data in the book of Acts that backs this up. Yes, the temple is still, it has not been destroyed. But worse than that is the siege. Because if you're writing a history of New York, I don't care if you're writing about terrorism in New York, you're just writing about life in New York or around New York or in the state of New York.

A hundred years from now, you never mentioned the Twin Tower attacks, I'm gonna go, why? Why would you leave that out and write a history of this region? If you're writing a history of the region in which one of the primary characters, James, has got the biggest church in the system at the time in Jerusalem, would you not mention this terrible siege?

I'm sure there are lots of ways you could describe how God was working through that, blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah blah blah it's missing the siege and the destruction of the temple and the death of paul and the death of peter and the death of james and the death of barnabas these are people who are major figures look james the brother of john is a nobody yet his death is mentioned by luke in 44 So why would James, the brother of Jesus, a much bigger James, be missing in 61? I think it's written before 61. So I think that's why I date these kinds. Now, look, could I be wrong? Yes, of course. Look, I say it this way all the time. Anything is possible, but I'm not after what's reasonable. I'm not not after what's possible they claim to be eyewitness accounts the earliest church fathers consider

them eyewitness accounts and they lack the data that comes out of anything beyond the life of eyewitnesses okay it seems like that's reasonable to infer that this is probably the work of an eyewitness now you can still say it's false it could be an eyewitness who's lying that's why we do the test but the first test is is it even early enough to count as an eyewitness who's lying. That's why we do the test. But the first test is, is it even early enough to count as an eyewitness claim? So if it was in the 80s, assuming Luke was still alive,

then it would be possible for it to still be an eyewitness account, right? Yes. In principle, because John writes into the 90s, but does it lose some of its authority? And if so, since John was written so much later,

do you put less stock in that than mark being written earlier no i i don't well here's why i i don't think it's written in the hades but if if it was let's say it was written in 85 the question then is does this still does the missing data of the death of the foremost for them look at those four people paul james peter and barnabas all who die in the 60s or later or the early 60s or later they're all missing from that account i think it's reasonable for us to ask why the author is also claiming he had access to the eyewitnesses and servants of the word which he wouldn't have if another generation passes i think they're so to me i'm trying to get not to what what when is acts dated i'm trying to get back to when is luke dated and then winter is anything prior to luke dated so and by the way all of the dating i'm

offering lines up with the date with the dating of the letters that people like bart ehrman will agree at least that hey you know he does he thinks Romans is written by by Paul he thinks first Corinthians is written by Paul and he dates these things and in the 60s he may not first Corinthians he dates in the 50s in the 50s yeah yeah so 53 to 57 right in that range so so I mean that all works if if the dating I've offered is true so i'm not as concerned yeah so so i don't think that if if acts is written in the 80s i don't think it has it now the bigger question sean is this can somebody take something they saw and retain it long enough to be accurate 30 years later and i would offer yes here's what i mean. If, um, when I wrote, um,

cold case Christianity, if you knew my presentation, I give to students, cause you were there to see it. You'll see that my book is word for word, that presentation. Why? Cause I've given that presentation so many times to so many people. You do too. If you were to look back at, pick your most popular presentation. Yeah. Okay. And you look back at the transcript none of that compare the wave files if you're given 30 minutes to give that presentation you've done it over and over again I want you to compare the wave files you will see that your pauses and your peaks line up pretty well because you do it over and over and over again yet you never do

it as much as the enthusiastic eyewitnesses repeated what they saw in the first century they repeated it over and over and over and over again it's very different to say I've got a witness who says they were there 30 years ago and never told anyone this stuff and now they're coming up and trying to recall it for the first time 30 years later. That's very different. On the other hand, if you have witnesses who basically repeated the story several times a day for 30 years, well, now we're just writing it down. This is not a matter of, it's a repetition. And also you probably don't feel that your talks, I don't feel that my talks are as precious as an observation that they thought was precious.

So the care that I take to repeat my talks over and over and over again is very different than if I was telling you something that was of critical importance that would save your spiritual life. Well, that takes on a higher priority. And those kinds of talks, if you've got certain things you say all the time. I remember one time my daughter was at a book table with me at an event and she said, I've heard this talk now like 20 times. I can do the whole talk word for word. And I thought, well, yeah, that's true

because I used to tease Frank Turek about this. I used to tease Frank that he would do the same joke with the same pause, the exact same delivery. One time he started his talk and he skipped, he started and he was about to skip a joke he always puts right there and he stopped and his brain kind of re-fired and he backed up and told the joke anyway and i thought oh my goodness this is because you you do it over and over and over again yeah so and also i don't think every memory is created equal that's the bigger part you know

yeah i always say it this way that not every Valentine's Day is the same for people. I mean, I've had 45 Valentine's Days with Susie and I can't remember any of them except for one in 1988 because that was the day I married her. So not every Valentine's Day is the same for me. And we often will see in criminal trials, a defense attorney will challenge an eyewitness. Oh really? Let me get this right. So you think you saw that he had blue colored glasses? That's a pretty minute detail. Tell me how you can remember that 30 years ago. You couldn't even remember. I had one guy take off his own glasses, come back into the courtroom before he asked the question, what color are my glasses? And of course the witness is like, I don't know. You couldn't even remember the color

of my glasses. And I'm right in front of you and half an hour ago, you're telling me you can remember the color of his glasses from somebody 30 years ago. Redirect. Okay. Now the prosecutors redirecting the question. Okay. So Mr. Witness, how many times have you seen guys with glasses? Oh, hundreds of times. And guys like this defense attorney. Yes. How many times have you seen guys with glasses? Oh, hundreds of times. Guys like this defense attorney? Yes. How many times have you witnessed a murder? Once. Will you ever forget it? No. Is it kind of etched in your mind in a way that other memories are different? Yeah. And that stuff ends up being pretty persuasive in front of a jury. Not every memory is created equal. Well, I don't remember a lot of Valentine's days either, but I remember the day after Valentine's day in 1991, because that's the

first day I asked my wife out to go with me. And she said, yes, but that is another story. Now you have a four part case. By the way, by the way, could you imagine if I said, forget about February 14th. I want y' all in the room here to remember the last significant February 15th. But no one's going to remember that date. Well, I would. That's right. Because not every memory is created equal. That's a great point.

Okay. So we spent some time unpacking this first one. Let's move through the next three a little bit more quickly, just so people can see kind of the holistic case you're making. The second one is corroboration. Maybe just mention how this is important for detective and just some of the basic things you noticed as you looked at the gospels. Yeah. So corroboration of an eyewitness could be another eyewitness who repeats the claim. It could be something that has been moved the way that the guy said it was moved, some physical

evidence that matches what they're saying. So in gospel case for example we're looking at things like archaeology things like the use of words that we find out later are actually confirmed in ancient documents even if in fact they were doubted at the time this happens in the gospel of luke quite a bit we're looking at internal corroboration isn't it interesting they happen to use the right proper nouns when in fact there's lots of proper nouns of jewish men and women in other regions that don't would not be that correct so if i'm writing for example out of egypt like many or north africa like many of the gos anostic gospels they don't use a lot of proper nouns you don't get a lot of character development because they don't even know what the names those people would be they're writing from egypt so i think in the end or some number of things i

always tell people though that we are looking for touchpoint corroboration, touchpoint corroboration. That's good. No piece of corroboration on any case I've ever had will give you every detail. It's not like we're doing a case like today where everyone's got video from their phone. Okay. That doesn't happen this way. Instead, if someone says, hey, he jumped over the counter and he was wearing a black tank top, jumped over the counter, pulled a gun from his waistband and screamed, get down on the floor. Well, where did he jump? Right here. I fingerprint the counter. I get a palm print. Well, that palm print is going to be used as corroborative evidence. That's exactly where this witness says he jumped the counter. But the palm print will

tell me nothing about what he's wearing, if he had a gun or what he said. It's just touch point corroboration. So you have to be very realistic about what you're looking for in terms of corroboration. And then two, do we have, now, for example, does archaeology confirm every locational detail or even like the kind of monies? No, of course it doesn't in scripture, but touch point corroborates a ton. By the way, under Mormonism, you won't find a single claim of the Book of Mormon regarding the North American continent that has any corroboration archaeologically. I don't expect every detail to be corroborated, but I would be suspicious if not a single detail was corroborated. And that's what we're kind of looking for here, touchpoint corroboration. That makes sense. That's helpful. Let's move to the third one. And this is where it involves assessing what was said and how well

it was preserved. Now, typically apologists will discuss textual criticism and you have a little bit of that, but primarily take a different route. So what is the chain of custody and how that works in a detective case? And how did you translate that to the gospels so my assumption my biggest concern as a non-believer was that hey there was probably some version of jesus that was much different than the version we have today there's as paul as uh as bart erma would say there was the jesus of history and the christ of christianity and there's a transition between a period of exaggeration over 300 years in which one becomes the other. That seemed reasonable to me. And in criminal trials, it might happen. You've seen this series of making of a murderer. One of the

claims is that the evidence was pulled out of property after the fact and then tampered with in some way to make it look like this is our suspect when in fact, or he's guilty, or he found his blood over here, whatever it may be, but it wasn't really there in the beginning. So the question then becomes, how do we trace that evidence? If, for example, the blood stain was allegedly, I think, on a key, a set of keys. Well, the question we would ask is, do we have a picture at the search warrant where the keys were first discovered? If so, can we see the blood smear? If not, then we know it was added later. So what we're looking for, but the blood smear is there that dude's taking a full polaroid back in the day when my dad would wear he'd take a polaroid the officer at the scene might take a polaroid back then we had police officers doing all the csi like the

cop would show up and end up bagging the evidence it was crazy so so you the question is is did someone take a picture write a report who'd he give it to he probably took another picture wrote another report who'd he give it to he goes to the crime lab they take pictures write their own reports who'd they give it to I come and pick it up I wrote my own report picking it up I bring it to trial so now you can see who has touched this piece of evidence heel to toe gotcha you can see them like links in a chain connecting the past to the present so I just needed to know when I was first looking at the scriptures what is the earliest version of Jesus? In other words, if I had this link, this chain of custody, and I could see the first link, how do I know that first link really is the same as the last link? Well, I could ask the question,

who's in the second link? Let's see what the second link people say. If the second link people describe Jesus but fail to mention key things about Jesus, like the virgin birth or the resurrection or ascending into heaven or any of these miracles, well, then we know there was a more primitive version of Jesus out there and that this evolved. Maybe we could even spot where these elements were added over time by examining each link. Here's what I know. As we did this with the gospels, it turns out that the miraculous claims, the ones that would give me pause like i'm not concerned whether there was five loaves of bread or three loaves of bread

or two loaves of bread that does not that's not as big a claim to me as did he rise from the grave that's a big claim is that missing in the earliest versions i need to know so you can reconstruct the story of jesus just from the chain of custody here's what i can tell you it doesn't change you may not believe it you may not like it you may have other problems with it but the idea that somehow that jesus simple jesus of nazareth morphs into the christ of christianity is just not supported by the evidence so your first point is about the dating you made that case the second is looking for corroboration the third is how well this has been preserved. You just made that case about the chain of custody and the core belief system going back to the beginning, not changing.

Fourth step is that it's free from bias. What convinces you, especially because you said you're used to dealing with people who intentionally lie and eyewitnesses lie at least somewhat frequently? Do you remember that old series house about the doctor who's trying to diagnose these weird things and you always say his key catchphrase was everyone lies. And so he's figuring out, hey, this patient is lying about something and that's the key to solving what it is this patient has.

Well, I kind of assume the same thing, everyone's lying. The question is why are they lying? So if I had to give you a kind of gold, silver and bronze medal of liars and why people lie, well, they're standing on a podium like you do at any medal ceremony, right? They're standing on a podium. That podium is something called pride. Pride is the problem that the gospel solves because it's pride that separates us from God. It's thinking that we are God, that it's our way. We want our way. By the way, the only solution for pride is humility.

But that's a whole other issue. That's another book. So the question here is, what are the three things that stand on the podium of pride? Well, they are. And these are the only reasons why anyone commits a crime, why anyone lies, why anyone commits a sin, why anyone does anything they shouldn't do.

It's motivated on that podium called pride and it is financial greed, sexual lust, and the pursuit of power is number one. That number one position, pursuit of power is probably a 70% of all prideful motivations. But here's what's great about that. If I'm looking at somebody and I'm wondering, why is this dude lying to me? Only three reasons, financial greed, sexual lust, pursuit of power. Yes, they stand on the pride pedestal, but that's the, I need to know the three, like what, how does it flesh out? So it turns out that's always what it is. So if the gospel authors are

lying, they're lying for one of those three reasons. They're either getting something out of it financially, getting something out of it sexually, or they are getting something out of from its position of authority. And I think that last position is what people like Bart think is the problem, is these were nobodies until they became somebodies on the basis of this lie. But that doesn't really work when you actually fact check it because Paul was a somebody. He was already a somebody. And he was a somebody of a larger group that although they were not well well respected by the Romans they were a heck of a lot more respected than

the smaller group he's gonna jump into and it was gonna cost him something to become a leader in that smaller group he listened to his own writings again get his butt kicked all over the planet for the next 30 years hoping to return to something he already has I mean it's possible I just don't think it's reasonable and and look these folks were willing to die for their cause. And in the end, if we know it's a lie, look, you wrote the best, most definitive work on this, The Fate of the Apostles. And I'm like you, I don't think that every one of these stories is well documented or as trustworthy as some. Some are more trustworthy than others. Here's why I think it's really interesting.

I've read all of the, for the book called Person of Interest, I read all of the non-Christian voices recorded before the Council of Nicaea. Every document, regardless of who it was written by, that records a non-Christian voice. Here's what you'll discover. Before the Council of Nicaea,

there was a pretty concerted effort to disprove the gospel accounts, to call them out as liars, to get people to recant their testimony. It happened, right? We saw this under several Roman authorities who got Christians to recant their beliefs, to say, okay, I don't believe it anymore,

but they aren't eyewitnesses. Here's what you don't have, is any recorded recanting of a statement by an alleged eyewitness. All you have are second and third generation people who are under pressure and who will say, okay, I won't be a Christian anymore if you'll spare my life. What you don't have is any evidence that any of these, there's no alternative stories mmm right the stories we have are pretty pretty much the same and they are that the disciples died for their testimony what you don't have are like well you got four of these where he doesn't in one you know no they're pretty much uniform and that uniformity actually is helpful by the way you and I would say we would die for what we believe as Christians it has no evidential value I agree there's lots of people who die where they don't know is a lie but this

is the one group that would know if it's a lie and that to me was a powerful thing to consider so there's the fourth thing is what are they lying there's only four reasons three reasons why anyone lies so the question becomes can i find something in there i just don't see it so in the end look if the evidence is pointing 70 30 or 60 40 in the direction of this why do we why are we why do we find ourselves trying to pull back to make it feel like this yes can you make a case against christianity yeah isn't it interesting that god gives you more than enough evidence to determine this is true yet enough wiggle to determine it isn't because he's such a respecter of your free agents and he knows that the one thing that changes everything is love and

love by its very nature has to be offered freely he is not going to coerce you or create robots who are just born with an innate sense this is true instead he's going to give you the chance to do the one thing that even the atheist values more than anything else and that is the chance to do the one thing that even the atheist values more than anything else, and that is the chance to love freely. And that's the thing that God gives us by allowing us this much disparity. Jim, I've got one more question for you, but you mentioned my work on the apostles, which by the way, this spring, I'm working on a 10 year update on that. I was on a trip to Berkeley. We had an atheist, a mutual friend of ours, speaking to our students. He challenged if the apostles lived, let alone died as martyrs. And I was like, Jim, do you think this is a good dissertation title? You said it's great and I've got a bunch of books, go for it. So you

were probably the key person to tell me to do my dissertation on that, which is pretty cool. Well, you know what's funny is I was getting ready to start a blog series on the fate of the apostles. So I collected all these books you did what i typically do is i collect the first set of books look at their bibliographies collect that set look at their bibliographies collect that set and i was maybe two rounds into that when you mentioned this and i'm like well i'm not gonna write this there's no point and this so i just gave all my books to you and i said okay here you go let's see what you can do. And I'm here trying to get a great book. That's fun. Cool memories. Going back a decade. So last question. You're a detective, you're examining this and you're starting to see, guy, this is early dating. There's

corroborative evidence. I don't find any good bias here, but there was a supernatural component that was here. If you were studying this in any other text, wouldn't you be likely to dismiss the supernatural? So why accept that here when it comes to the New Testament? Well, I don't think I ever yeah I was a very committed naturalist but I think as I'm working through this and one of the things I had to do is ask myself a question could my philosophical naturalism explain the universe the way it really is so when I wrote God's crime scene that's not like I did that next no that's actually what I kind of did first and when I pitched

the books to you are the one who said I should write this book so I pitched three books to the publisher God's's crime scene, forensic faith in cold case Christianity. I wasn't sure which would, I kind of thought the order should be God's crime scene, cold case Christianity and forensic faith. They picked cold case Christian because it alliterates so well. They thought the title God's crime scene was terrible. So they said, no, we don't want that one. We want this one. So that's why I wrote them in that order. But for me, I had to look and say, did my philosophical naturalism, was it reliable? Can I explain the origin of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, the appearance of life in the universe, the appearance of design and biology, the consciousness, free

agency, objective moral truths, and even a standard of righteousness by which we judge something and call it evil. Can I get that from space,time matter of physics and chemistry? That's all I thought governed the universe, space-time matter of physics and chemistry. Well, you can't get the most important features of the universe by looking at those causal factors. So it turns out that if there is something out there that is the cause of all those eight things, why would we doubt it couldn't interact?

I always say it all the time. I think Turek does the same thing. We talk about, hey, I can stop gravity as a finite being. You don't think the author of gravity can intercede in gravity, could change, could interact in the actual alleged laws we talk about that govern nature? He's the governor of the governing laws. So I think the reality of it is, is that once I got past the idea, there was something out there that is immaterial. Now, when I come to a text and I see something that's a claim, I no longer say, well, miracles by their very nature are ridiculous. But I would say that untested anything is ridiculous. Even a naturalist,

an eyewitness account, that's a pretty natural thing we can do. Those have to be tested. I don't trust them without testing. I don't trust miracle claims without testing them. I don't trust physical evidence claims without testing them. Everything has to be... Here's why. Because some defense attorney is going to test that in front of you, in front of a Dateline camera if you don't test it now. So tell you what, you test it now, you won't be a fool later. So that's always been the approach we've taken. So yeah, all of it needs to be tested. And by the way, when I was worked on a show one time, the very famous director came to me. You know his work. He does a lot of macabre kind of science fiction, cultic kind of horror kind of stuff, movies. and he wanted to do a tv show in which we examine

cases in which it wasn't really clear if this could be explained with a natural suspect or a supernatural force so i had to develop a criteria by which i would judge the difference it turns out that yes you start of course with you start at the bottom of the ladder and the bottom of the ladder is material suspects the top of the ladder is something immaterial now if you hit a you know rung number five and you got the answer you stop so so i've never had a case in which i couldn't explain it as i'm climbing that i might make a few missed steps but by rung number five i got a suspect if you don't you keep climbing the ladder. And so he wanted to look at cases where people had already climbed the ladder in 10 levels and they hadn't figured out who it was. Maybe it's a demon. Maybe it's something like that. Well, then the question would be, well, how would we even identify demonic forces versus natural forces?

This became a huge conversation and it was fun. And by the the way it never developed beyond the you know the kind of planning stages but this is similar to demski's filter look at natural causes first and then only design once you've ruled out natural causes and by the way i framed this to you i realized in a way where i said if you'd seen these kind of supernatural claims in any other text you'd reject it but when it came to say the Book of Mormon, you already made it clear that it's not equal with the New Testament in terms of historical reliability. And so we can reject it before we get to those supernatural claims. That's an important distinction to make. I just interviewed an ex, a former radical Muslim, and he described how when

he looked at the Quran, these statements were just, there was no historical context, no detail. They were kind of free floating. And we'd read the Bible. He's like, wow, people, places, times we can investigate. There's a qualitative distinction that's there. Okay, you said that too before we cut off.

That's a really another good distinction for what eyewitness accounts have. These kinds of claims about people, places, events, and sequences of events are unique and they are native to eyewitness accounts which by the way the gospels didn't have to be that way they could have been like like the quran in the sense or like baha'u'llah's writings just proverbial claims it could have been all like this book of proverbs in which case you would say well no one assumes proverbs is an eyewitness account, but you assume the chronology at least has the capacity to be an eyewitness account.

Let's test it. That's what we're trying to do here. Well, Jim, I was fascinated. First time I heard you present this to students, maybe 13, 14 years ago, whatever it was. I love the first edition of Cold Case Christianity came out. The 10-year edition is even better if that is such a possible thing. If folks haven't read it by now, follow my channel, hit pause and go read it. It's up there on one of the top popular level books that I recommend for people. It's always good to have

you on. Now, folks, before you click away, make sure you hit subscribe. But even further, if you want to study apologetics, we would love to have you join us at Biola. Jim is an adjunct professor for us. He will teach a class every year or two, kind of a weekend class, top-rated apologetics, we would love to have you join us at Biola. Jim is an adjunct professor for us. He will teach a class every year or two, kind of weekend class, top-rated apologetics program of its kind, now fully distance program. And by the way, next May, I'm teaching my applied apologetics class. So if you're watching this and you're in the program or thinking about getting in the program, I guarantee you that class will be worth your time. Or if you're not, now's the time to sign up to be in his class in May. That's awesome. We also have a certificate program if you're not ready for masters and a discount below. We'd love to

walk through training you more formally in apologetics. Jim, this is always fun. Thanks for coming on. Give Susie my love. Thanks so much. I appreciate you, Sean.