The Sean McDowell Show - Refuting Alternate Theories for the Resurrection: Vol 2 Is Out!

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Is the resurrection of Jesus still defensible? What are the strongest naturalistic hypotheses, and what are the best responses? How have alternate theories for the resurrection shifted in the past few years? Dr. Gary Habermas, who has probably studied the historical evidence for the resurrection more than anyone alive, will be releasing Vol 2 of his magnum opus this fall. We give you an in-depth look at his research and analysis related to alternate theories for the resurrection that began in the first century and continue today. READ: On the Resurrection: Alternate Hypotheses, Vol. 2, by Gary Habermas (https://amzn.to/3SZyHaC) WATCH: 50 Years Studying the Resurrection: Magnum Opus by Gary Habermas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoSOoqSRPvg) Make sure to subscribe and check out some of my other videos for more on Christianity, Theology and other aspects of culture! *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% 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

What are the most common naturalistic explanations to the resurrection of Jesus? Dr. Gary Habermas, our guest today, has likely studied the historicity of the resurrection more than anyone alive. In his forthcoming book called On the Resurrection, Volume 2, Alternate Theories, his second of two volumes on the resurrection, he explains and responds to the leading alternate theories from the past to the present this volume is the most extensive critique of naturalistic hypotheses for the resurrection i have ever seen whether believer or skeptic i'd encourage you to read it today we're going to give you an in-depth view of what you will find in the book i believe the first interview you've done on

this gary thanks for coming back. You ready to go? I'm ready to go, Sean, and you're an excellent interviewer, so I'm looking forward to a great time. Well, let's just jump right in. In your first volume, which I'm going to show here, because the cover for this one looks similar. So this is the first volume, 1,100 pages, your positive case for the resurrection. This book is coming out soon. It's responding to alternate hypotheses. I'm just curious how the writing compared and contrast making the positive case as opposed to responding to criticisms. Let's say the first volume was probably easier to write because most people who do resurrection apologetics are more familiar with evidences. But volume two, just give one example.

I have three chapters on there on 19th century German liberalism. One is the one of the liberal theories. One of the liberals versus the liberals., one of the liberals versus the liberals, and one is the conservatives at that time, people at Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, going after the German liberals. And it was much more difficult because those three chapters are packed with German sources, just to give you one example. So I had to get into the german text a lot more get into the page numbers of a volume that was written in 1829 for example and you could find these things and uh so it was harder it was harder to pull off because i was i was uh dealing with uh different languages

and i was dealing with a wider array of critiques that I'd say nobody on either side really deals with. I mean, who does naturalistic theories? They remember David Strauss, and they remember Theodor Keim, and they remember Bousset and some of those guys. But the really obscure German writers that come up with other things, nobody does them. But because they unpack some of the things of the bigger names, yeah, they're there. So volume two was harder to write, but it was fun because the data we have today are plenty for refutations. Now, the first volume, I asked you to do the math and you estimated like 32,000 hours. I didn't ask you ahead of time to run the math,

but did it take you about as long as the first volume, more, less? How would you assess just off the cuff? Well, the first one is about 170 pages longer. So it's going to take longer to write 170 extra pages. But volume two was 900 pages. So probably because going through the German and going through the languages is slower, they're probably both comparable as to how long it took. And I also give long lists of refutations, more than I have to, because... And refutations at different strokes for different folks. So if I give 10 refutations more than I have to because in refutations at different strokes for different folks so if I give ten refutations of a theory and I think for example one two and three are the best a reader could think no six and eight are

the best so I never know which one might connect with somebody who thinks this naturalistic theory is worth talking about. And so I would give a lot more refutations each time of each of these theories than is normally found. You could read a normal book. Well, here's the best way to say it. From what I can tell, the longest book in print before this on naturalistic theories was Mike Lacona's PhD dissertation his his revamped his edited dissertation with InterVarsity and I think Mike has about 250 pages in their refutations Mike says it's not that long, but I went through the book, and that's what I counted, 250. The next one before Mike was the co-edited book that Mike and I, the co-authored book that Mike and I wrote, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. It has about 100 pages of naturalistic theories.

So you drop from 250 to 100. This one is 900. So I think it's probably fair to say it's the longest treatment of naturalistic theories, maybe ever, maybe of all time. I'm certainly not aware of one that comes close. In your first volume, I appreciated that you list out, for example, not the common arguments for the empty tomb, but you had said in other volumes, there's 20 arguments. And I had always wondered, well, where are those 20 arguments? Finally, in the first volume, they came out. We do that with hallucination, with the swoon hypothesis, with each one of these, it's like an extensive list. Now we won't walk through all those. We'll walk through some of these and maybe give folks two

or three so they know what to expect of what you consider stronger ones, but the research and evidence is there. Now, you were really honest in our first interview to talk about how a lot of your personal doubt before doing your dissertation on this, and then going through a period of doubt, driving your research. And without doubt, you might not have spent or probably wouldn't have spent the amount of time that you've spent studying the resurrection. How did doubt play into this volume? Where were you at emotionally? Were you studying some of these thinking, gosh, what if I uncover something here and it challenges something of what I believe?

I might have to shift my views. Or are you at the point you've done this so long you just knew these hypotheses would not stand? Yeah, that's a great question. I tell people, the way I usually say it in a lecture is, I went through doubt straight for 10 years and off and on for a second 10. So that's 20 if you put the both together. But the first 10 were the most intense when I wondered, could I keep my faith? And then the second period came, which you and I may have talked about. I've done so many interviews, it's hard for me to think about which one. But after I did my PhD dissertation on the resurrection, that is when I had my bout with Buddhism, my personal bout with Buddhism. I think when people say, I mean, I know guys, you know guys, evangelicals who will say,

I used to be an atheist. And if you ask them personally, they'll say, oh, I was 15. Now, at 15, they were brilliant, because these guys are brilliant people. And at 15, I'm sure they thought more deeply than 90% of the people. But I'm just saying my doubt about Buddhism was not when I was 15. It was post-dissertation, after I did that book on the resurrection. But here's the other side. My doubt ended pretty much about 1990. So it was about 35 years ago, my doubt ended. Strangely enough, my wife died five years after I'm using for the end of my doubt.

She died in 1995. And I wrote in kind of a little diary, and then I wrote a book about her about her death and I said it in the book I thought at the time wow this is horrible it's not bad enough that I have to lose my wife and the mother of my my four children uh my doubts are probably going to come back again darn it I haven't had them for five years 90 or 95 they're probably going to come back again. The doubts never came back. So I hear things every once in a while that I have to stop and think about for a little while, especially the wild ones. There are some crazy ones in this book. Crazy because you never hear them, and odd because they're really silly. Like, what if a UFO? What if Jesus was an alien? In our first co-authored book, Michael Cohen and I, on the case for the resurrection of Jesus, we did Elvis Presley sightings. So some of these

are crazy. But I think my doubts were settled by 1990. And virtually nothing bothers me anymore, because there are some, in the minimal facts argument, there are some breaks that you can put on that, in my opinion, things don't get past it. So I'm not bothered by new things that come up. I might stop and think about it and give you an answer tomorrow, but for the most part, by God's grace, the doubts are behind me. In the book, Gary, you go back to some of the earliest objections in the first, second century, you go through the Middle Ages, 18th, 19th century to today. We're not going to look at all of these, but let's look at a couple of the objections that appear first in the first couple centuries, because they still kind of bubble up today. And one of these is that a common objection is that there were alternate Christianities

in the early church that show a kind of theological diversity that was eventually defeated by orthodoxy. And as a part of this is often that the resurrection was not central to the first proclamations, but was one of a few beliefs that were embraced by some, rejected by others. What do you make of that objection? Well, what bothers me the most about it, I just read Jimmy Dunn, D.G. Dunn, James D.G. Dunn on this. He made a comment the other day, and it would be the thing I would say. He says, strange thing about these guys that champion the gospel of Peter and the gospel of Thomas. He says, the funny thing about them is, while New Testament scholars as a whole

have normal dates for all the New Testament books, these guys like to bring Thomas and Peter, parts of them at least, back to 50 and 60 AD. And they're only these radical guys, and nobody else does that kind of stuff. Well, so I do think if Jimmy Dunn is right about that, and I think he is, today some of these guys bring those books back in the 50s and 60s, but they didn't do that in the early church because they knew Thomas, and they knew—let's put it this way. Bart Ehrman dates Thomas and Peter to a little before 130 AD. Strangely enough, Daryl Bach of Dallas Seminary, a very well-known evangelical New Testament scholar, he allows that Thomas could be late first century. So there's some bending here, but let's just say it this way. Books from 90 AD to 150 AD, and I think that's pretty conservative dating for some of

these books. If you're going to bring these books back from 90 to 150, these renegade books in the second century, how are they going to spar with the creeds, the creedal data, that go back to the 30s AD? So even if you take that, oh, I don't know, Thomas may be 95 AD. Well, good for you. You're only 65 years after our early creeds. Or somebody says, hey, dates back, but what do you say about creeds from the 30s AD? We have a new kind of data with information that the people who bring those later books back to the 50s and 60s, I think, don't have. They can't back that up, and it's evidenced by the fact that people outside of their group don't buy those views. Let me give you an analogy. It'd be like if evangelicals said,

well, apostles wrote Gospels 1 and 4, and near apostles were involved in Gospels 2 and 3, and that's an evangelical read. Well, critics don't think like that, so they're not going to give you that kind of, they're not going to give you that material. And I think the mainline critics don't grant that those books have roots back in the 50s and 60s, let alone into the 30s, but they allow the 30s. I mean, for crying out loud, Rudolf Bultmann, who's probably the most, of the major theologians, he's probably the furthest to the left, further left, I think, than Bart Ehrman. Rudolf Bultmann said, we have creeds from the earliest church coming out of Jerusalem, coming right out of Jerusalem. That's Bultmann. Thomas and Peter in those books aren't going to compete with that.

That helps. When I was doing my research on the apostles, one of the things I had to show is if they're willing to suffer and die, that it's a resurrection faith. And you're right. From the creeds, 1 Corinthians 15, Romans 1, 3 through 4, some even embedded in the gospels, you consistently find the resurrection there. You see Jesus predict it in Mark, which might be the earliest gospel, and told by an angel they'll see the risen Jesus. Rest of the gospels, the preaching in Acts, there is no early Christian faith apart from the resurrection period. I think we know that definitively. Now, Q, talk to me about Q a little bit, because Q is this idea that Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark for some of the writings they have in common, but how do we account for the similarities between Matthew and Luke that are not accounted in Mark? And this writings saying is positive, even though there's no

physical evidence of it, of short sayings that arguably even predated some or all of the Gospels. If that were true, would Q pose a challenge to the resurrection being central and early? Yeah, absolutely not. Because, well, I can take a lot of viewpoints. I only teach PhD classes, and I tell my PhD students, I'll say, look, here's what I'm doing. I'm going to introduce Q into this class, and let me define how I'm going to do it. Let's not talk about whether there's a document called Q, because nobody knows that. And let's not talk if there's a first, second, and third Q, as some of these real radical scholars say. There's an early Q, middle Q, and late Q.

Most people think that's ridiculous. I'll say, here's how I'm going to define it. Q are simply the verses, as you said, they're simply the verses that are in Matthew and in Luke and not Mark. Evangelicals can't argue with it because it's in their gospels. That's what I do. Okay, now some of the critics will say, well, there's no resurrection there, or no death and resurrection there. And I think that's silly. They'll say, for example, the Gospel of Thomas is somewhere to queue, because it's a sayings document.

But in the Gospel of Thomas, you've got the parable about Jesus dying. It's sort of like Mark 12, but it's a little different one. Thomas begins with these words. Thomas begins, the living Jesus said. And a very common interpretation that even the Jesus Seminar, whether they buy it or not, the Jesus Seminar, as I recall it or not, the Jesus Seminar, as I recall, say it's a possible interpretation. The living Jesus is very possibly a popular interpretation of this. He's the resurrected Jesus. So in a sense, no. I mean, in a sense,

it's not talking about, Thomas isn't talking about the resurrection. It just, it doesn't mention resurrection, really. However, every verse is spoken by the living, i.e. resurrected Jesus. So it's like the whole thing comes from the resurrected Jesus. That's far stronger than we can't find a verse there. And people like Reginald Fuller, New Testament scholar of the last generation, Tom Wright, N.T. Wright of this generation, these guys have publications saying, is it true that the resurrection wasn't in Q? And they'll say, first of all, it's not true. Secondly, it's a bogus point. And if I were going to take a stab at that, I would say this, same way I answered Thomas and Peter. I don't have any problem with the Gospel of Thomas

and the Gospel of Peter. There might even be some real, there might be a few true statements in Thomas that we don't have. We're not opposed to that. But here's my issue. If you're going to say a book called Q, which the Jesus Seminar dates to just before the gospel, so they're going to put Q at about 60 AD, maybe 55 AD, and let's just say for the argument there's no resurrection there. Well, first of all, is there a type of living Jesus who speaks that? That's important. But here's the second point. If I've got these creeds from the 30s AD, and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, which this next statement is true, of the dozens of creeds in New Testament,

the vast majority, some have said as high as 80% of the creeds, are about the death and resurrection of Jesus. If the creeds center on the death and resurrection of Jesus, and they're in the 30s, I could just say it this way. I don't care what you do with Q. It's not going to overcome what we have from the 30s, where the death and resurrection is central. Now, you move into the second century and the third century with skeptics like Celsus and Porphyry and others. We're going to let people go to the book to read that. Let's jump about 1700 years up to the Enlightenment with Hume. You have an in-depth analysis of really who Hume was, his impact. So for starters, how significant was Hume and how much does the shadow of Hume still loom today?

And then I'm going to come back and look for some of your critique of it. Okay. Hume wrote, well, he died right within days of the Americans signing the Declaration of Independence. So Hume, his life ends then. He writes his Of Miracles, which is not a standalone book. It's not even a standalone. It's part of his inquiry. Part of this big influential book inquiry, section 10, is his famous essay on miracles, and it's not very long. Depends on what edition you read it in, but it's not very long. Hume was very influential, very influential, and he still is pretty influential today. But to spill the beans a little bit, today the philosophers mostly, they're philosophers who go after professional

philosophers who investigate Hume. Many of the philosophers are not theists. Well, a couple of the key ones are not theists. And the tendency today is to think Hume got it all wrong. Hume blew it. Now, we can talk about that, but you said save the critique, so I'll just talk about his influence. When he wrote it, about 20 years before the Declaration of Independence was signed, critics later, when liberalism was in vogue, what's called German or old liberalism, theology was way more liberal in the 1900s in Germany. Theology was much more liberal than it is today. Third quest for the historical Jesus is to the right of the German liberals. And there are German liberals, David Strauss, for example.

David Strauss says in about 1835, now what would that be? That'd be like 85 years after Hume was written. Strauss says something like, ever since Hume is written, we don't have to entertain the thesis that miracles occur. Oh, my goodness. So he was very influential. When I was doing my dissertation and some other journal articles, I cited a string of guys up through the 40s and 50s who said, 1940s and 50s, who said, Hume is still very influential, and we don't even have to entertain miracles. One of the newest ones was a debate that was done on the pages of Christianity Today in the late 60s, as I recall, and there were several guys participating, but the best known one was Harvey Cox of Harvard University.

And a guy, J. N. D. Anderson, a well-known evangelical apologist, J. N. D. Anderson had given a presentation on the resurrection, and there was a panel of three guys making comments, and Cox was one of them. And so as late as almost 1970, Harvey Cox makes the comment. He says, this is the best presentation, Anderson's. This is the best argument for the resurrection I've ever heard. And this is pretty close to a direct quote. He said, but I can't buy it because the Humean mark on my brow is too strong. The Humean mark on my brow was too strong, like 1968. So Hume is still hot. Now, some of the best interpretations today have gone the other way, and I can talk about why that is but um okay he was hot bro he was hot for a long time more than uh you know if you go back to the revolutionary war and we got people all like the 1970 bragging

about him uh he was the end guy against miracles for a long time i still have some students graduate and have told me at times they're in philosophy class and basically the assumption is hume defeated the possibility of miracles and of of course, this is anecdotal, but I've heard that enough to say his shadow is still looming. Now, you have, I don't know, a 15, 20 point critique. Give us maybe just two or three of the key critiques why you think Hume's rejection of miracles fails? Well, rather than, you tell me if this helps, but instead of a one, two, three, here's problems, let me go back to when that first essay was written, 1751. Sure. And when he wrote it, in those days, pastors, evangelical pastors, were not exactly like evangelical pastors today. These guys were very frequently theologians with a heavy dose of philosophy in their training.

And I've got a book on my shelf. It's Critiques of Hume that started in the 1750s and went through about 1780, and there's a few sporadically after. Huxley's one of them. But there were critiques of Hume where these pastor philosophers went after him, and they chewed him up. And a lot of people don't know this story, that they chewed him up in the 1750s and 1760s so badly. This is hearsay, but Hume said something, okay, supposedly said something in the presence of an eyewitness who wrote it down, not circumstantial, all right, say whatever you want. But he said, I was in the presence of Hume when he said, golly, Pastor so-and-so really whipped me. I mean, he whipped my tail. And he makes this comment. I don't know if they were drinking a beer or if they were having a coffee. I don't know what they were doing.

But in a pickup conversation, I picture being in a British pub. Hume was up in Edinburgh, could have been a Scottish pub. He admitted that he was taken apart. Now, why? Okay, here's the key. There are a number of interpretations of what Hume was trying to do. And skeptics will say, here are several key one, two, three ways to just simply interpret Hume. Now, the old traditional way was Hume defines miracles out of existence, and the circular definition is followed up by a circular argument. Because at the end of part one, there's two major parts in the essay, and the last couple paragraphs of part one, he defines a miracle, and this is where we get our definition. He says a miracle is a violation of a law of nature brought about by God or an invisible agent. Now, he goes on to say there are no violations, and I don't believe.

Now, that's another thing where things have changed. Today, Hume is usually interpreted as being a deist. Back in the early days when I was in school, he was interpreted as being an atheist. Today, people think he's a deist, but that doesn't help a lot because the deist God doesn't evolve himself in nature. So these pastor philosophers, as I call them, they tore into him and they said, that's a circular definition. That's a circular argument. And he says in the same paragraph where he defines miracles, he says this. It is a miracle if a man should rise from the dead. We're continuing, same thought, no break. It's a miracle if a man should rise from the dead, because it's never been observed in any country at

any time. And you go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You would do that way too, it's like saying there are no Westerns on American television in the 1960s. And since there aren't any, whoa, whoa, have you ever seen Cheyenne? Have you ever seen, have whoa, whoa, have you ever seen Cheyenne? Have you ever seen, have you ever seen, have you ever seen? And we give examples. So he's passed it already. And he says there's no resurrection because they don't occur. And the only interpretations of him is that it was circular definition, a circular argument, and he never really gets away from the circularity. Okay, now the critics today, more like 20 years ago, will say, nah, Hume meant a lot more than that. You're not giving him credit

for being the skeptic he was. But back then, the circular definition thing was true. And what they said was, Hume responded to a lot of his critics. He responded to them back in those days. These guys are writing op-eds and newspapers, seriously. They were writing and he was disputing them, but he never said that that interpretation was not true. He never said what the guys say today. No, I have a lot more nuance than that. You're not getting where I'm going. He defended his circularity, basically. So that was the early interpretation. Number two, Hume never refuted it. And you could say, well, that's an argument for silence. It is. But number three, you've got this writer back then who says that Hume said to a few people who heard him that he got whipped by this pastor theologian

who really tore into him, and he couldn't do anything about it. So he allowed, which a lot of critics don't do today, Hume allowed that he'd been torn up a bit by the critique. So that's one of the main problems. If the view goes that Hume was doing a circular definition followed by a circular argument, there are no resurrections because they don't occur. Okay, wonderful. Yeah, you really solved that problem. If it's all circular and you're going to own up to that kind of deal, we only have to refute that one.

And we've refuted Hume. Now, I have two chapters on Hume because the second one says people have tried to revivify Hume in the 20... So I go to respond to, okay, let's say, who cares if Hume... Let me jump in here for a second. We're going to come to some of these. This is really important. But essentially, you have like a 12, 15-point critique of Hume. But at the start, if you define miracles in a way that is circular and you're called on it, the rest of the argument doesn't go forward. And you have a great quote by C.S. Lewis to the effect of pointing pointing out to hume saying we know miracles don't happen why because we've considered the evidence they don't happen well how do we know that we can trust the

evidence well because miracles don't happen it's like wait a minute you're kind of just defining this in a circle so to speak right and so we can challenge this definition you challenge his standard of proof for witnesses that are so impossible to find, and of course his conclusions. But you're right. At the beginning, if we just critique his understanding and definition and circularity in miracles, that's sufficient. Now, to your point, how you update it, let me just ask you, this is one that I hear commonly in my students in my resurrection class. We spend time interacting with this, is now that it's kind of shift towards the idea that history cannot evaluate miracles. Now, by the way, before you respond to that, I want to make sure people realize that these are kind of meta critiques of the resurrection.

We're not looking at the facts. We're not offering alternate hypotheses. These are ways of cutting off the legs of the resurrection argument before we even get there. All you have to show is these critiques don't work for various reasons. Now we can start looking at the facts, but give us your response to the claim that history in principle cannot study miracles. So therefore any amount of evidence we offer for the resurrection isn't doing history. Yeah, there's, you've got a lot of things there. Let me explain the difference between Christian apologists, Christian pastors often say, I prior rejections are illegitimate. You can't have an I prior rejection. Okay. In my PhD class, I start off by telling my class, of course, on the resurrection.

I tell the class, a posteriori arguments against the resurrection, which dismiss it without looking, no matter what. That's illegitimate. But the kind you're talking about are I priori. Let's take the legs out before we get to the body of the argument. And they're legit because all they're saying is there are considerations before we look at the miracle that if my considerations are true, we could never get to the argument per se. That's right. I think those are I priori objections. I tell my students there's a difference between an objection and a rejection. Rejections are circular. If you reject it on this I priori premise, you are arguing in a circle. But if you set things up ahead of time,

and there are a lot of them that are claimed to be redoings of Hume, although Hume never said that, as far as we know. You have to handle the eye-per-eye ones. And that's what I do in the next chapter. I handle, well, in the second chapter, I'm not going to get into it. The second chapter, I handle 22 new takes on Hume, and I give almost 100 responses to those 22. All I'm saying is there are new takes, and there are four times as many answers to the new takes. So I don't know if that helps, but it's true. I would grant, if you can take the legs out from under the table before we see if the table can hold something heavy, well, if you take the legs off, that makes it very hard to put something heavy on top of the table. So we have to argue the first part that there are no I per I objections, but you're not allowed to do I pri rejections. If you're going to look at this fairly as an objection that admit when you can't make a go forward, that's not the same as saying, well, there's a swoon theory. There's a hallucination.

That's that's got you rejected. OK, so we'll get to some of those alternate hypotheses. But one of the common ones today is that history itself cannot consider the miraculous. Thus, history is not a tool that will even allow us to engage the resurrection. If this happened 2,000 years ago, you've cut the legs out on us. What's your response to that? Maybe one or two points how you would engage that idea. Well, first of all, I'm a little bit, there's a little part of me. You interviewed my associate

researcher, Ben Shaw, not too long ago. Ben wrote his whole dissertation on philosophy of history and defended the view that historians, non-Christian historians should be able to view the resurrection. I'm not as strong as Ben is. I'm not as positive as Ben is. Michael Kona has some issues on this too. The three of us talk around. I see that point, but here's where I would come back. I would say, at worst, you're saying the historian doesn't have the tools to notice a theological argument because he's not

a theologian. The historian, at worst, can't recognize this because he or she's not a theologian. The historian at worst can't recognize this because he or she is not a philosopher. Okay, so I'm going to say, let's just say that you have this data, and you say, I'm not trained to answer this. Well, then I'll ask this question. I'll say, but if you had a second PhD in philosophy or a second PhD in theology and your PhD in history, like a couple of them, there is a German critic in this whole thing who had a German PhD in history and a German PhD in theology. There are some examples. But if you knew that field, then could you respond to it? Oh, yeah, yeah. And that's how they parse these disciplines. I would still say you're not changing the data. It's almost irrelevant whether a secular historian can answer the question.

The question to me is, in the overall field, do we have enough data to bring this thing forward? And if there are some historians who say, I'm not trained that way, wonderful. Get somebody who's trained in both fields. Now, I'm not trying to point to myself, but my PhD had to satisfy the philosophy and the history departments at Michigan State. I had to satisfy both. They had representatives there, and I had to let them see that this works. And the most complimentary guy on my committee, most complimentary guy, was from the history department. And he was a Jewish historian. He was a Jewish historian. And when he walked out of the oral defense, he said, I think this is kind of thoughtful. I think this kind of, but he was

an historian. So I think it's irrelevant whether we're going to push whether a historian has the tools. If the historian has the tools, great. If the historian doesn't have the tools, let's either get somebody who has the tools for both, or let's help the historian with the tools so he can graph those in, and then we can still do this question. Don't think you're going to avoid it by saying, I wasn't trained that way. Let's say the guy says, I'm a 20th century American historian, and I don't know about that stuff. You're just telling me you're not trained in ancient history. But you might have as much trouble answering questions about Alexander or Caesar, because that's not your field, 20th century America. So I think it's kind of an irrelevant question in a way. When Ben and Mike and I talk, we just kind of let it go, because I think that we can do an end around. It doesn't make a

difference who's able to answer it and who isn't. Let's get somebody who has enough views grafted in that they can answer the question. Now, where are you? You're not going to, you know, I'd say to those guys, you're not going to cop out on me because you're trained in history as you can answer the question. Great. That's fantastic. You're going to, that doesn't get you out of the discussion because we'll use this guy over here and he can answer it. He's an historian who can answer it.

I'll give you an example. J.K. Eliot is an agnostic historian. Another one is Michael Grant, a well-known historian. Wrote books on Jesus and Paul from an historical perspective. Get some historians who can get in there and wrestle with this stuff. That's all you got to do. I don't think we have to answer it for any particular guy. I do have some feelings for that because I do think of a guy's only chain in history, he's going to throw his arms up and go, I don't know about this stuff. I don't know about Caesar or Alexander either. So I see what he's saying, but I think we'd get around it very easily. So we're going to shift to 19th century naturalistic hypotheses, but I agree with you on that assessment. It's as similar as the question intelligent design has to wrestle with. Is it science or not? And I think a good case is made

that intelligence is a part of science. When it's all said and done, whether it's science or not, and we have to bring in philosophy, my question is, is it true? Where's the evidence point? Let's be at least open to a possible intelligent agent. And if we look at history this way, then we can follow the data where it leads. All we have to do is be open to it. And you point this out. Now, in the 19th century, the objections were less kind of meta, as we might say, cutting out the legs, people were offering naturalistic hypotheses. Now you point out in the book that these are much less popular today, but they pop up on the internet. They pop up in a few journal articles. So we won't walk through all of these,

but maybe just give us a sense of why you think these hypotheses don't work. Now, a big one is the swoon apparent death hypothesis. Now, you have multiple chapters in your two volumes on this, the most in-depth analysis I've seen, but what are one or two reasons why the vast majority of scholars reject that alternate hypothesis? First of all, let me make a comment in passing about what you just said a moment ago. You said intelligent design and bringing that up. We've got people in intelligent design, Bill Dembski, who has the PhD in math and a PhD in philosophy. We have Steve Meyer, who's trained in philosophy of science. So they can get in there and answer because they paid the price to do both.

Okay, back to naturalistic theories. You want me to give some refutations of apparent death? One or two reasons why that one just has been rejected almost universally. Yeah. By the way, that thing goes way back before the German... That goes back to the deists, guys from 1729, way before, and they're doing swoon. But there's a lot of problems today. Let me start with two quotes, and then I'll fill them in. I know quotes won't solve it. John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar and Marcus Borg, the late Marcus Borg of the Jesus Seminar, both have a quote that is very similar, and Crossan's is this. He says, I take it absolutely for granted that Jesus died by crucifixion.

And Borg says something just like that. Today, it is, well, it's a minimal fact, so I'm going to say I'm allowing it because it's unanimous. All right, there's a number of problems with this. Number one, Ben, back to Ben. Ben Shaw, myself, and a medical doctor from Texas, a neurologist, the three of us did an article for the Baylor Medical Journal. And we asked the question, what do scholars in the field think killed Jesus on the cross? And there are a lot of medical doctors, Christians and non-Christians, who object to this. But by far, the most common theory, this theory is more held than all the other ones doubled. And that is that Jesus died by asphyxiation.

The thing about asphyxiation, if it's true about asphyxiation, is that you don't have to have an MD from Johns Hopkins or Harvard. You can just be a lowly centurion standing there and just report what you see. All right, how do you know the guys on each side of Jesus had to have their ankles broken? Well, because they're kicking up a storm and cussing everybody out and saying things and by the way, you've got to push up to do that stuff because you've got to exhale. But Jesus is real quiet and he's on the low position on the cross. And if you're in the low position on the cross for any amount of time, in certain German experiments, that can happen in as little time as 12 minutes to die in the low position. Jesus wasn't saying anything, and he

was out. You don't fake out. That's like when they go to push my head underwater, I'm just going to hold my breath and outlive it. Well, what if they hold you underwater for five minutes? Holding your breath is not going to help. So if Jesus is on the low position on the cross, you can't fake asphyxiation, if that's true. And by the way, if it's not asphyxiation, why did they break the ankles of the two men on each side of Jesus? Now, one comeback for that is, oh, come on, that's in the Gospels. And breaking the ankles are in the Gospel of John.

The other Gospels don't tell that time out. We have archaeological cases, which I bring out in this second volume, archaeological cases of people having their ankles broken on the cross. And so they did. Now, why do you break ankles? If you wanted to, I mean, Hengel's little book on crucifixion, they threatened one guy with a bow and arrow. Shut up and quit screaming at us or we're going to shoot you. Another guy, they went over and crushed his skull with the club. So you don't have to break ankles. Why do you break ankles? Why is it in the literature and archaeology? And it seems that if you smash ankles, let me say it this way, anybody whose life depends on pull-ups is not going to be alive very long. So first

reason is death by crucifixion appears to have built-in checks and balances, where a centurion does not have to have a medical degree. The guy is low on the cross. He's just hanging there. He's not doing anything. The guy's dead, okay? Okay, that's one. Secondly, we argued in this medical article, even if we don't know it's asphyxiation, there's a couple other arguments. We don't have to say, and here's what we conclude in the article, we don't have to say how Jesus died, we only have to be able to argue that he died. And here's the other two things. We also have, not just broken ankles, we have arguments for piercing bodies like John describes. And you go, yeah, once again, that's only in John. Time out. It's also in a Roman source or two. And one Roman source, Quintilian, says the centurion is allowed to give the body to the family for burial.

This guy's dead. So they take him down, and he's allowed to give the body to the family to bury after they pierce him one more time. Now, the word for pierce there, it is a Latin term, and it's a military term. And that kind of piercing is almost always done in the literature with an axe, a spear, or a sword. And the guy, it says they have to pierce the body, and the word meaning, most likely, axe, spear, or sword. He's already dead. All right, give him one more for the road. Now you can have his body. So a second argument is a death blow. The broken ankles is an incoming blow, but the guy's dead. They put him on the ground they smash him one more time and they say take the

body all right so there there's evidence for a a chest wound um and thirdly david strauss's famous critique against the swoon theory which is devastating down through history crossing in borg you go why do they admit this? Because of David Strauss. David Strauss is a German, he's a, there's almost nobody more liberal than David Strauss in the 19th century. In fact, when he died in the early 70s, I think 72 or 73, 1872 or three, he died as a disillusioned man who'd given up belief in a personal God and had given up a belief in personal immortality. Those views were very common in German liberalism, but he walked away from them. He's very skeptical. And yet he said, here's the problem with the swoon theory. The famous, and it's still given today, Strauss's critique is still given, a man who's been crucified

in his shape. And well, if you believe the gospels, a day and a half later, he's going to walk to where the disciples are. He's hunched over. He's holding his side. He's worked the wounds back open. He's sweating. He hasn't even taken a shower, hasn't washed his hair. He looks horrible. He can't walk. And he knocks on the door and he says, I told you I would rise again from the dead. And he could barely get the words out. Well, basically, Peter would say, Andrew, get some water in a bowl. Mary, get some clean rags.

And here it is, Sean. The Jesus of the swoon theory is a living Jesus, but he's not a raised Jesus. He's not, as Strauss says, he's not the crucified and risen Lord of life. He's a guy who skirted the Roman, faked him out, and he's still alive, but he's going to die again. He's like Lazarus. So those are three responses. You can tell what happens on the cross, and the broken ankles are key. What do you do with the chest wound? And even if those fail, Strauss's critique, pardon the pun, but Strauss's critique killed the swoon theory. Because Strauss says, even if he was, basically Strauss says the problem with the swoon theory is logical, not medical,

because the Jesus on the cross cannot make somebody think he's alive, but he's not raised. But what did the church proclaim immediately? He's raised. That's not what Jesus was. He wasn't raised. They nursed him back to health, and they all knew that. How do you explain their transformation? How do you explain their willingness to die? So that's how it started. And guess what? Crossan, who says, I take it utterly for granted. Crossan even says, Jesus died on the cross. I take it for granted. Probably something to do with asphyxiation and pushing up and down and going back down again. So he gets no further than the first one of those three. But Strauss was the end of the swoon theory. I'll make one more comment. In the famous, it's one of my favorite books, Albert Schweitzer's Quest for the Historical Jesus.

It's brilliant the way he goes through all these German theories. And before Strauss in 1835, the swoon theory was the most popular view probably had held by schleimacher definitely held by heinrich paulus just before strauss after strauss's critique there are no more takers of the swoon theory for the rest of the book so it's almost like david strauss the critic single-handedly silenced all his buddies you point out that a lot You point out that a lot of these 19th century critics who don't believe in the resurrection kind of do friendly fire and shoot each other's theories down. Now, you walk through the wrong tomb theory. Kersop Lake and others popularize that.

You walk through some non-disciple stole the body of Jesus, but maybe just make one or two criticisms about how you think either the disciples or someone else stealing the body, that's not an adequate theory. Yeah, let me make a passing comment about Curse Hoplite. He came from England, and he was a professor at Harvard, and he doesn't really propose the wrong tomb theory. It's in his book on the resurrection of Jesus, and it's a passing comment, like of a half a sentence. He goes, I don't know. Maybe they went to the wrong tomb. But here's the crazy thing. He doesn't argue the theory. It's only a passing comment. And secondly, got to be ready for this. Kersop Lake believed that Jesus was risen from the dead.

He believed in the resurrection. So we don't know that stuff. When we tell the theory divorced from the historical context and you got a resurrection there. Okay. But let me go back to your question, Sean. You want me to talk about... So the stolen body, you separate from the disciples stealing it from others stealing it. But why does anybody stealing it give us one or two reasons why that theory just doesn't fly?

Yeah, you mentioned the disciples doing it. It's the worst theory of all. It's the most illogical one. And as far as we can tell, I mean, you know, I'm the guy that went through all the sources. Nobody has held that theory seriously. The disciples saw the body. You get some little tiny side views. But Herman Samuel Michael Reimarus, a German rationalist, 30 years before the birth of German liberalism, 1760s, Reimarus taught that the disciples stole the body. Nobody has really done anything with that sense. And the main problem is, implicate whoever you want to. If I'm going to use that theory, here's me. I don't know. Somebody came and took it. We don't know who he

is. He didn't leave his name etched in the rock. He didn't tell us who it was. Some unknown person took the body. That's better because you can't get your hooks in there. But if you say the disciples stole the body, oh, are these the same guys who turned the world upside down, put their families on hold, James and John the fisherman, Peter the fisherman, Matthew the tax collector, they put their life on hold to go out, and they were totally transformed. And you're the man that did this research, but totally transformed. And as far as we know, you've got a comment like this in your Fate of the Apostles book. As far as we know, none of them ever recanted. And we don't know that all the apostles died, but they were willing to die. And people say to me, well, how can you say that?

Can you read Paul's mind? Can you read Peter's mind? And I'll say, no, but I can read their feet. And you go, what do you mean? Well, look, if I go into a city and get beat up, seriously beat up to preach the gospel because I care about people, and I come back two years later and I go in the same city and take the same chance, I'm willing to die for my faith. I'm reading my feet, not my words. But these guys, of the ones we are sure of, you give just a few, the two Jameses and Peter and Paul. Okay, the Jameses' son of Zebedee died too young to be a player in this discussion.

But James, the brother of Jesus, Paul, and Peter. You add John in there, who's there in Galatians chapter 2, but you get those first three. Nobody's been more influential in the church than those three, Peter, Paul, and James, the brother of Jesus. And we have first century sources for the martyrdom of all three of them, okay? If they stole the body, are you telling me they're so dim-witted that they forgot it? Number one, they're willing to leave a loving family. Number two, they go out and preach and sleep on a rock every night and don't eat adequately and get beat up and run out of town and Paul Stone for dead at Lystra, they're going to be willing to die, and they give their whole life for this message. You're going to tell me they're the same

ones that stole the body? I mean, this is ludicrous, and everybody knows it is. So if you bring that up in a debate with a smart critic, and you go, oh, I suppose you hold the disciples stole the body, he'll likely say something like, I would never say such a stupid thing in my whole life, because nobody takes that. Now, you're better off taking somebody else stole the body, and take the one I said, an anonymous person, so we can't sink our hooks into them. Here's the problem. Even if that happened, all you've done is explain the empty tomb. You go, well, the empty tomb is a lot. It is, but you haven't explained the appearances. That's great. And if you can't explain the appearances, you don't have a resurrection theory.

You've got to deal with the appearances. Yeah, you've got to get around to the empty tomb, but you've got to deal with the appearances or your theory is worthless. So stolen body theories just don't make it. And here's another problem. Where's the data for it? Where are the data for the someone's... Do you have any sources for that? No. No. As one critic told me one time in a dialogue, he said, I don't need sources. That's my Bible logic. Well, your Bible logic stinks. There's no logic to it at all. There's no evidence anybody stole the body. So you're postulating it out there. And we have a whole, look at that book. We have all kinds of reasons. They have none, and yet they think they can put it out there and say someone took the body. Really, the only ones who say that kind of stuff today

are the mythers, the Jesus mythers, not the guys that teach in the body. Really, the only ones who say that kind of stuff today are the mythers, the Jesus mythers, not the guys that teach in the universities. Hey, one quick story. I was at Stanford once, actually a couple times, but I was there one time, and I was doing a lecture on the resurrection. And I made the comment at the end, because I couldn't get it in, and I said, and these facts are enough to refute the naturalistic theories. And if any of you want to ask me that during the Q&A, go for it, because I don't have time to get to naturalistic theories. So it was in a saucer-shaped room, and this guy comes down to the microphone, and a lot of people there, and he goes, very, very polite. And he said, can I offer naturalistic theory?

And I said, absolutely. Thank you for doing that. He said, okay. How about the disciples stole the body? Now, I don't know what it is, Sean, but these people, that is a go-to view, along with hallucination. You hear these two popularly, regularly. But he said, how do you know the disciples tell us still about it? Well, I tell my students, when you're in a debate or talking, number your critiques, so that when you walk away,

someone doesn't say, oh yeah, he gave me three critiques. And I would go, excuse me, I gave you eight. Don't you remember the number eight? Because they think if there's eight critiques. So I said, okay. I said, I'm only going to use the minimal facts, and I'm going to address your theory, the disciple stole the body. And I went, one, and I gave it. Two, and I gave it. Three, and I gave it. And I got up to number eight, and I said, eight. And this ripple went through the crowd. And you know how sometimes you can interpret ripples? Sure. The ripple was like, sit down, dude. You shouldn't have been up there in the first place. And before I even gave eight, the guy bends over to the mic and he goes, sorry, sorry. And he turns around and scampers back to his seat. That's a great story.

You'll get that. You'll get the objection, but not from the scholars who know the data. Now, your books focus distinctly on the scholarly literature. So you're not engaging YouTube videos, you're not engaging blogs or the internet, which is totally fine. You've got to focus. That's where it's at. On a popular level, I hear this a decent amount, but certainly not in the scholarly literature. Now, let me jump to another one that is the same before we get to modern day objections. This one I want to bring in because for me, I've shared with you, I went through a doubting season in kind of the mid 90s. And one of the things that hit it off was this idea that Christianity was just patterned

after these dying and rising gods and Jesus didn't exist. And I had never heard that before, Gary, as probably 19 years old. And it rattled me. I don't know what it is, but there's something about this theory for people that don't have the training are drawn to it. It's all over the internet. And yet I think it's one of the worst objections for so many reasons. Now you narrow down your critique to two questions. One is, were there dying and rising gods?

Second, do we have evidence that the early Christians borrowed from these dying and rising gods? Now, if there aren't any dying and rising gods before Jesus, then clearly they didn't borrow from the dying and rising gods. But you have the most careful discussion that I have seen on scholars who differ over whether or not there's dying and rising gods before Jesus. Maybe just give us a synopsis of that, then we can move to question two. Sure. There is a Scandinavian scholar. Interestingly enough, I never met him when I was lecturing up there, but I was with one of his Ph.D. students.

I think he was Swedish, but his name is Mettinger. And I can't say it the way the locals say it, but it's Mettinger. roll. They roll it. And he wrote a book arguing that there were, not that Christians borrowed, but that there were pre-Christian dying and rising gods. And I think he gave three examples, that there were three of all the many that people put out there in the literature from India over to Western Europe, there's dozens. And he picked three. But here's the interesting thing. He took the view, not that Christians borrowed. In fact, he said later in the book, I think there are three, and I don't think Christians borrowed from any of them. So the second question, so now it's, like you said, if there's none, they can't have stolen it. Well, his answer was, there are a few, but they didn't use them.

So he's going to take the next best answer. But he does say this in the book, and here's why I'm citing Mettinger. Mettinger says, as far as I know, I'm one of only three scholars who believe there are pre-Christian dying and rising gods. Three. Of all the specialists in the field, I'm one of three. And then he goes on and says, but they had no influence on Christians at all. Christians didn't borrow. And the guys who say that, they will usually add they didn't inspire the Christians. They don't do this in order to make a theory to the disciples. They do it just to answer the question of their dying and rising gods. And Mettinger says there are, and it's almost irrelevant. The point I'm making is the vast, vast majority of trained scholars think this is a dead end at the first one. Are there any? The

vast majority think there's none. And the ones who argue against it, there's two guys both named Smith, unfortunately one of them just passed away a couple years ago, but he was one of these guys who has a title Professor at Large at University of Chicago. And Professor professor at large as i understand it means you can go into any department and teach at any course i mean these guys are just great but he did a phd at yale on dying and rising gods and he said there are absolutely none and and his is his reasoning is uh taken by people he's like the Dean of you're not going to get to first base but he has this comment and he says there are a lot of stories in

the ancient world where a guy goes away and comes home okay there are other stories where a guy dies and he doesn't come back. There are other stories. There's one in particular, Zalmoxis. There's a case where a guy made an apartment for himself. I'm juicing it up, but he lived underground for a while, said he died when underground, and came out later and said, I'm alive, but he never died in the first place. And so Smith makes this great little one-liner and he goes, they leave and come back or leave and don't come back, but they don't die and rise. They die and don't return or they return and don't die. And then he says the summary sentence, but we don't have a case in the ancient world where somebody clearly dies and comes back.

And you're not talking about human beings here. You're talking about mythology. You're talking about Fraser's Golden Bough. You're talking about stories. He's asking, is there a Hansel and Gretel story that Hansel dies and comes back to life? That's what it's like. They're not arguing there were real people. They're just just saying was there a story and and and smith says not a one now mettenger says no i think there's a few but i'm one of three guys so first of all square number one you have to get the first base before you can get home but if there's like virtually nobody who thinks you can get the first base, this theory is hurting badly. But almost nobody today thinks the disciples borrowed that stuff. And like Wolfhard Pannenberg said in the 60s,

when he was an atheist, and he was famous for thinking you could show Jesus was raised from the dead, and if he was raised from the dead, then what he said about himself was true, and so on. This is Wolfhard Pannenberg, and Pannenberg says what you can't do with these theories, even if there were myths out there, and even if the Christians were bound to buy something from them, you can't start the theory with the myth. The myth doesn't get the guys psyched up and ready to die and exuberantly going from village to village. You need something else to get the ball rolling. If the ball's rolling, maybe they took a story here and there down the road, because he wasn't like an inerrantist or something. He believes all kinds of problems in the New Testament. But he's saying it doesn't

get the ball rolling. His words are, it's an idle venture. That's a quote. To think that getting these stories, even if you get past the first stage, you get to second, and now you say that it fired them up. They're not going to be sitting around a campfire and say, hey, you know what? I heard a story, and this was really cool. And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, like blazing saddles or something, you know, to go back to date myself. These guys are on the fire and everybody's talking and, you know, it's like what happens when you get drunk, I guess. And, and they get all excited. That's not going to get you exuberant because you hear a story that's really cool. You're going to say, I'm leaving my fishing business tomorrow, and I'm going to go, I'm going to convert the world even if I die for it. It's not the beginning of it.

Pannenberg's point is you can't start the story with that. The story starts with guys, and everybody's unanimous on this, and the critics. You have to start the story with these guys thought they saw something. Nothing about the legends gets you even going on that one. Might help you when you're down the road, but you got to get the car. If the car doesn't start, it can't go down the road. So talk to me later about the car going, but if you can't get the engine going, you're not going anywhere. And that theory does not get the Christian engine going.

Gary, when I helped my dad update his book, Evidence Demands Verity, because this objection was so personal to me, I really oversaw it and did a lot of the research on that chapter and was like, this is the best critique in my mind of the dying and rising God hypothesis. When we do an update in 2029, that's actually the next update, there is even more in your chapter because you've gone back to the original sources that I had not seen before. You point out a lot of really important things like a lot of the similarities that Christianity allegedly borrowed from these pagan myths. You actually find in the Old Testament, there's nothing really unique that's there. You also say the differences are far greater. You talk about the dating, that many of these that have any similar parallels actually come afterwards, and Barwin might have gone the other direction. So there's an entrenched critique of this. I hope people will check out. Now let's shift to more modern objections that people might have, where you

might say the debate is being... By the way, if I could jump in there real fast. When you say most of them are later, they are. Addis and Adonis, two real well-known ones, they're from the second and third century AD. And we have data from those towns. have data we have critics who tell the story christians came to town and said trust christ and you can have eternal life well the the local mystery religions were teaching weren't teaching the eternal life part but when the christians came and one upped them because they promised a life here and eternal life in the age to come, the mystery religions added eternal life onto it. They added resurrection to their story, Attis and Adonis, in the 2nd and 3rd century AD.

And critics admit this widely. So that's another big problem. The story comes late. So, I mean, you raise it. It's a knockout point. And when you put them all together, there's a lot of knockout points. And this is a reason why nobody holds that view. When I say nobody, I'm talking about critical scholars.

Right. Brained in this. So let's move to some of the alternate hypotheses that somebody, meaning at least some scholars, embrace. Because some of these 19th century ones are pretty easy to dismiss in light of where we are in terms of scholarship today, where maybe they weren't at that time. One of the big hypotheses, of course, Gerd Ludemann has talked about this in advance, this and debated William Lane Craig on this, is the hallucination hypothesis. Now, hallucinations, just really quickly, of course, you on this, is the hallucination hypothesis. Now, hallucinations, just really quickly, of course, you know this, there's nothing objective like a UFO or an alien or another, maybe Bigfoot, some have said.

These are internal projections of the mind. Yet this one seems to have some feet in the scholarly world, as far as I can tell. What would be your critique of the hallucination hypothesis? Maybe give us one or two that you think just are potentially devastating to it. Well, I play off on one of the updates of David Hume in that chapter to answer this one. To me, the comeback, you can go a lot of places, but you're right. An hallucination, okay, first of all, definitions. So many people will say things like, hallucinations happen. I know they do. Well, like what? Because, well, one time I saw this creature out in the woods and I thought it was Bigfoot,

but there was something there. It turned out to be a bear and I just misinterpreted it. But see, the two hunters with me, we all saw it. So you can see things, and you can see them in a group. Time out. You saw Bigfoot, you thought. And on closer inspection, which is a key, you found out it was a bear. Okay. Hallucination is much more radical than that, as you said. And hallucination is when you, it's like you're looking at thin air. Here's a hallucination. I'm lecturing to my class, and I turn, and I say, honey,

what are you doing here? And I begin talking to my wife, who died in 1995, and I say she's in the classroom with me, and I'm dead serious. And the students are looking around, and someone's calling the campus police and wondering what's going on. That's more radical. It's not seeing the bear and thinking it's Bigfoot. It's looking at thin space and coming up with an interpretation that everybody shares. What if everybody in the room saw my deceased wife with me? Oh, that's different. That's way more complicated. One of my biggest problems with hallucination is that students will say,

well, I'll tell you what, I'll give you the strongest form of it. Anthony Flew, when he was an atheist, the guy debated three times, got to be very good friends with him. He published more things pro-atheist than anybody who ever lived, as far as I know. And he gives what he calls the natural miracle objection. I'll give people who are listening, I probably shouldn't do this, but I'll give people probably maybe the toughest, it's a form of hallucination, but I'll give the toughest maybe the toughest, it's a form of hallucination, but I'll give the toughest objection. Here's Anthony Flew.

Okay, my theory is, Flew talking, my theory is the disciples saw hallucinations, and the Christian is all revved up and ready to go. And they've got five refutations that they were taught in church and already, and they go, you can't say that because of A, B, C, D. And Flew says, hmm, what's your main critique? There are no such things as group hallucinations. And Flew comes back, my friend, there are no such thing as resurrections. Now, which one is more believable? That the people in class, as crazy as it is, could have seen my wife standing up in front? That's crazy. But a resurrection is more crazy. There's no other example of somebody coming back in a resurrected body. Lazarus doesn't count. Elijah doesn't count. Jesus is three. They don't count. And it's called

the natural miracle objection. And he says, well, resurrections are impossible. Okay, so I got thinking about that a long time ago. Now, we debated three times, and Flew never brought it up. Boy, I wished he would. I was loaded for bear. But he never brought it up. And here's my point. There are more group resurrection reports in the New Testament, easily, more groups than individuals. Most of the appearance reports are group. And they go so his thing was okay whatever i'll give it to you i won't argue about the text i'll just give it to you so you got a group but there's no such thing as resurrection so whatever that group saw it wasn't a resurrection and i and so i thought about this for a while and i said i didn't have to say it this This is what I would have said, but he never brought it up. I said, Tony, consider something. The the psychological or medical literature for 25 years. I've had guys look through the med sources, and there's no verified case.

But let's say you got one. It's still more likely than a guy coming back from the dead, which has never happened if you disallowed Jesus. And I said, but Tony, here's the problem. Your natural miracle isn't a natural miracle. A natural group hallucination that's never been cited before won't fit here. Why not? Because there were multiple group appearances. In 1 Corinthians 15, the earliest creed, the most respected text in the New Testament, you have three group appearances, the 12, 500, and all the apostles. Tony, you're trying to put that they wrongly thought they saw Jesus because a natural miracle has more chance than a real resurrection. But Tony, you can't get off that easy. Here's the

resurrection theory. Here's what you have to say off that easy. Here's the resurrection theory. Here's what you have to say, Tony. I want you to defend this. Here's your view. Not the disciples thought they saw Jesus, but it was a group hallucination. And it's never been noticed before in medicine, but it happened one time because that's more likely than a real resurrection. I said, Tony, you can't do it like that. Here's your objection. You have to defend a, not a group hallucination theory. You have to defend a group hallucination, group hallucination, group hallucination, group hallucination theory. Now, what is more likely? That there is one resurrection or five or ten group hallucinations that have never been observed possibly in medical science or psychological science. Now what's more likely? And he might say,

I don't know, I still think a resurrection is less likely. What else is he going to say? He'd have to say it's still less likely. I'm saying, Tony, here's your problem. You're a naturalist. You don't have God in your system. A lot of people, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, there are a lot of smart people who think God's there with good reasons. If God is in your system, you lost everything. Because a major naturalistic philosopher, by the way, he just wrote a critique of the resurrection

and said there's virtually zero chance that it could happen. But then he wasn't, I think he wasn't watching what he said, but here's what he says. I don't believe in God, he says. But if you have a being who's omnipotent and omniscient, I would say there's 100% chance of the resurrection. He actually says it in print. So, Tony, what's more likely? One group hallucination or group hallucination, group hallucination, group hallucination, group hallucination? When I can say I've got good evidence for God, and all God has to do is click his fingers, and you've got a resurrection just like that.

And this philosopher allows it, the argument. He's a very sophisticated philosopher and he allows it. So I think one of the biggest comebacks is one citing, one isn't going to do it. You could say, well, I've got a case over here and I think this is a group citing and it wasn't real. Okay. But now you've got to come up with group citing,, group sighting, group sighting, group sighting, group sighting, and someone goes, well, you can't argue that many from the Gospels. Hey, I got three from the Creed alone, and they always include Mary Magdalene and the women. That's four. So I have four. So now I

have a group hallucination, group hallucination, group hallucination, group hallucination. That's just one of the comebacks. But I can argue other things. Refutations of hallucinations happen when something extraneous occurs. Let's go back to my wife. And the class thinks they see my wife in the room. What if people say, I don't know what's going on here, but can we ask her if she can do something? Like what? Take my book and throw it on the floor. And she takes the book and throws it on the floor. And somebody's got their camera going, so they've got this on film. In other words, if they're doing something, so there's other backups, and you have that kind of backup in the historical text. There's a bunch of things. I'm just saying the data we have can refute, and I give several forms of hallucination. I do several deals, but the hallucination theory doesn't stand up to the data. I just gave one example. I can do others if you want. And one of the things I want people watching to know that you do when you approach this is you take certain facts and say these hypotheses have to explain the facts. So the stolen body theory at best could explain the empty tomb, but not the appearances. The hallucination at best could explain the appearances, but not

the empty tomb. Plus you have Paul and you have James and you have these other facts That's this ride that I find really helpful Let's talk about one one more that you have here. You call it the Illusion hypothesis now if I understand correctly This is what you were referring to earlier that there's actually a physical object UFOs Aliens, I know that sounds extreme and somebody there's actually a physical object, UFOs, aliens, I know that sounds extreme, and somebody- There's a bear, yeah. A bear, et cetera. What would be your critique of an illusion hypothesis?

Okay. Let me give the three definitions. I should have done that at the beginning. One is mental illness. People who think they're seeing things and nobody else, but they go, yeah, but he's a schizophrenic. I mean, you know, he's my own son and I'm not trying to be critical, but ignore him. He's not a good source. Okay, second is illusion. A lot of times when people say I can prove their group hallucinations, I saw one and give that bear example and thinking it's Bigfoot. That is not a hallucination. It's an illusion. Hallucination is the most radical. It's healthy people seeing something in thin air that produces data. It's the hardest one of all. And now I got

to introduce groups. Okay, let's go back to illusion. Okay. Let's go back to the hunters. How did they find out that it wasn't Bigfoot? It was a bear. How'd they find that out? Well, obviously they went and looked and they talked to other people and they were able to empirically investigate it. And there's a bear running around there. It's a grizzly bear. It's way out of its range. Not supposed to be here, but it is. And we've got footprints. And the biologist comes and says, I can tell the way how the weight is put on the heel and everything. I don't know how they do it.

But this is a bear. This is not anything else. So you dispel illusions by doing the research. Illusion is something of the real world that is misinterpreted. That's what it is. And so you disprove it by doing research. For example, the empty tomb that you gave a moment ago, that's an example. It can't be an hallucination. Look, no one's in this tomb. That's how you do these things. And they would have to investigate. And somebody could say, for example, they could say, I touched him. Well, yeah, but you're kind of alone. No, no, no. Peter

was there. And Andrew, and wow, really? You guys touch? You bring other data in to show it's a this, not a this. So illusions are just proven by research, by discovering the data. Same thing if it's a UFO, same thing. You get in there and you look at what's there. I give a bunch of refutations even of illusions. But I mean, again, you're going to say, what about the empty tomb? What about the empty tomb? Peter, I mean, empty tomb, Paul and James are three kind of stand up refutations that work with almost anything. But the main thing, the main thing you got to remember is when something weird is reported, you put your best reporter on it for the paper and the person does an expose and says the guy, it wasn't a giant. The guy was walking over. There were stilts on it for the paper, and the person does an expose and says, it wasn't a giant. The guy was walking over. There were stilts on it. He had 15-foot made blue jeans on, and it was a fake. There's no guy 15 feet tall, or it was a bear, not a big foot, or this is not a this, it's a that.

When you get in there and refute it, and then again, you have to come back with, and even if you did, what happens with changed lives and what happens with willing to die? And then what about Peter? And what about James? Sorry, I said Peter again. What about Paul? What about James? What about the empty tomb? So the major thing with illusion is get in there and find out what happened and we'll see if your theory is right or if it breaks down when you do the investigation. So last one on this before I have a few kind of different final questions for you. What about Marian apparitions? Would you put this in the category of illusion? Would you put in a category of hallucination? Is this an objective vision? And what would be your response to that? Because that comes up a lot when I'm talking to people. You have group appearances of something supernatural.

What's your take on Marian apparitions? Now, tell me something. The way you hear these, because I wonder if you're going to hear it the way it usually is given. What does a person say about who was seen Mary? What's the report? I don't know that people often give specifics on this unless I'm reading a book when they do, but typically it's people who go to see this. It's not something that invades somebody's life. They're heading with the expectation of seeing this Marian apparition within a group.

They're already Catholic as far as I'm aware. Maybe there's some exceptions to this, but that's typically the group of people who see it, as far as I'm aware. And how many people see Mary? I don't know. I've never given specific numbers, but it depends on how we interpret Mary or something in the sun or an image on the side of a building But there's certainly groups and sometimes big groups that I've heard of that claim to witness this Yeah, there's one of the best critics one of the best-known critics in the world Says this more than once the person says what about the thousands of people who've seen the

Virgin Mary? Time out. Thousands of people don't see the Virgin Mary. Oh, that's because you're a Protestant and you're an unbeliever. No, no, no, no. I'm a graduate of a Catholic university. I can move with the Catholics. That's okay. I can think like that, but you're missing my point. Thousands of people come, but they don't see Mary. They watch the kids watch Mary. If you think about it, it's the opposite of resurrection. As far as we know, in the resurrection appearances, everybody present saw Jesus, as far as we know. In the Marian apparitions, a few of the kids see Mary, and 99% of the people there don't see Mary. They don't see her.

They watch the kids watch her, or they watch the kids say they're watching her. Then what do you do with the cases where some of the kids say she's there and one or two say she's not? What do you do with those cases? So, first of all, you know, before I even started like this, I should have went to something else. I know a lot of your listeners may not like this point, but I'll make the point because sometimes when you're arguing against theories, you concede things that while they're not going to make some Christians happy, you're going to kill the theory by doing it. And what if I started like this? I'll come back in a minute to the thousands watch the women, watch the kids watch Mary. What if I said, whenever you read the literature on group appearances, and if they're not using illusions, the bigfoot ones, if they're doing hallucinations,

they're saying thousands saw Mary as a general rule. Not true. Not what the people are claiming. But what if I said, so every case you have, because there are examples in books where every case they use is a Marian apparition, and what if I said this, whoa, well, I'm not Catholic, but if that really happened, I guess the God of Christianity exists, and we're all on our way to heaven. Wait a minute. You're not Catholic. You can't say that. No, no, no, no.

Just hang in there with me. I'm not saying it happened. I'm saying what's the worst that could happen for Protestants? Mary really appeared and I got you. Mary really appeared and uh-huh. Is that a Hindu view? Is that a Buddhist view? Is it a Christian view? No that a Buddhist view? Is it a Christian view?

No, she's Jesus's mother. Hmm. That'd be pretty cool if God let Jesus's mother come back and appear to everybody. If God wants to do that, I'm going to tell you something. God can do it. Now, I don't believe it happens, but what happens with this theory? Ready? Christianity is confirmed. Yeah, but you're not a Christian. Well, yeah, I know, but my master's degree is from a Catholic, a Jesuit university. I'm going to tell you, they think in Vatican II, and I got the book right over there on the shelf, in Vatican II, they embrace a universalism. But certainly Protestants are going to make it. Protestants are included.

So if I just go time out, let's just say it's true. I don't think it is, but let's just say it's true. I think this debate's over. I think God exists. Mary's his mother. Jesus is raised from the dead because Mary tells us that the gospel is true. I'm good to go. Thank you for helping my faith. And they're not ready for that because in the books that do this, they're almost all the group things are Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary.

Well, you know, Mary goes to the empty tomb, you know, and so, but, but back to the people, what about the case that it's the opposite of resurrection? A few children claim to see Mary, and one or two says they don't, children, and none of the people do. What do they see? They see the sun dancing across. Listen, we just had an eclipse, a worldwide eclipse. If you stare, what do they tell you? Put glasses on. There's a certain kind. I'm no expert, but I understand. There's a certain kind of eye destruction that leads to blindness.

And if you stare at the sun, people on drugs sometimes, if you stare at the sun, you can drugs sometimes, if you stare at the sun, you can lose your vision or a significant part of it. So these people are saying they see that they're staring and they see all this stuff happen. And that's another thing of the thousands who are there and they see the sun, only a few do it. I know a guy, if I told you, you would know him in a heartbeat. He's a very well-known Christian apologist. He went to Medjugorje. He went there.

And he watched the thousands of people, and he watched the little visionaries, the children. He watched them. And one of his relatives, I think he said, he has made 17 trips to Medjugorje, the guy's uncle. 17 trips to Medjugorje. I said, has he ever seen anything? He said, well, you know what? I'm not the guy to ask because I'm not sure. Boy, I'm sure I'd ask him this if I were with him. He said, I'm pretty sure he's never seen anything. He's never seen the sun dance. Of course, he's never seen Mary. He just goes there because it's a wonderful atmosphere, and he's Catholic, and the guy's well-to-do, and he can do it. But he's been there and not seen anything. So what is it when a bunch of people see the sun,

but thousands don't see it? The story just breaks down at all kinds of levels. But when people say thousands of people saw Mary, you know from the beginning, it's a joke, because that's not what the reports say. And the Catholics don't think that. But what do you think about that first response, Sean, if I just said, thanks for confirming Christianity for me. Are you captain? I think strategically, it's a wise move to say, even if this objection is true, what follows from it? So I'll do a similar thing with contradictions. Even if there are contradictions, does that mean Jesus didn't claim to be God, the resurrection didn't happen? Not necessarily.

Let's keep the main thing the main thing, and then we can get to those issues. So I think that's a completely fair way to approach it amidst the critique of it happening. Now let me ask you one last one on this, is probably 25 years ago, I had breakfast with J.P. Moreland, when I was first doing research with my dad on the resurrection before I even went to Talbot. So this is like early 2000s, maybe late 90s. And I said, if you were going to give a naturalistic hypothesis for rejecting the resurrection, what would it be? And he said, I'd probably take an agnostic kind of position. I think that would probably be the easiest to

defend. Now, maybe he's changed his mind. Maybe that was just on the spot But why can't somebody? Reasonably just say this happened 2,000 years ago. There's different interpretations of the facts I just don't think it meets the standard required to believe that God is intervened in history. I'm agnostic Yeah, I have to know some things about this guy. The guy who's taking an agnostic view on the resurrection, does he believe in God, or does he not believe in God either? I'll let you answer the agnostic. Tell us how you would. I don't know. I can only role play so far. Let's take it both ways. If he believes in God, there's no reason he has to be an agnostic on the resurrection,

because God can do anything. And I love that citation. I'm looking at the book up there. I love that atheist philosopher who says, if an omnipotent, omniscient God exists, I'll give the resurrection a one. There's a 100% chance the resurrection happened. This guy maybe believes in God and just hasn't realized that he knows enough to believe in the resurrection. But let's take the roughest trail. Let's say he doesn't

believe in God and is agnostic. That's what my argument is all about. I'll say I'm only going to use these half dozen facts. And a lot of people misunderstand me on the half dozen facts. It's not just six bare facts. It's the data that confirmed the facts. I just can't say reason number one is Jesus died by crucifixion. How do I know? I've already brought in the breathing. I brought in the breaking ankles. I brought in the spear wound. I brought in the he couldn't convince anybody. It's the data on each one. But it's just those six and the data that confirm that. I'm going to say to him, you're an agnostic. What do you do with these facts? I would like you to respond to my facts and pick a naturalistic theory that accounts for all the data. And that's the point of the minimal facts argument. Dom Crosson allows these. Marcus Borg allows these. Garrett Ludeman allows. Let me use Garrett Ludeman for a moment. Garrett Ludeman, you already said, believes in the hallucination theory. He did. He's passed away now, but he believes in the hallucination theory. But Garrett Ludeman says in his book that when Jesus died, which he truly died, the apostles began preaching the message,

Garrett Ludeman's word, immediately. They preached it immediately. There's no gap. They preached it immediately. So if that's an atheist who doesn't believe in the resurrection jesus seminar member ludiman and he's going to start with that i'm going to push this guy a little bit what do you think happened with these facts well i don't think i'm prepared to say that well because you're not a are you saying because you're not a specialist in syria well sort of that's what i'm saying then i guess i'm saying if you want to check this out you better become a specialist in this area? Well, sort of that's what I'm saying. Then I guess I'm saying if you want to check this out, you better become a specialist in this area. If it's that important to you, you should study it. But I don't think you can get away with it. By the way, I have a chapter on agnosticism in that book. I have a chapter on agnosticism, and I give, I think,

five or six reasons why the agnostic position doesn't work. But one of them is you've got these arguments, so you may not want to say something about the resurrection, but you should at least tell me what's wrong with these facts. And if you can't, especially if you allow God, and now here's another thing I do. Some people say, no, I don't give you God. I don't think God happened. All right, let me go back door with you. We've talked about this before. I'll say, what do you think about near-death experiences?

And the guy goes, I don't know, but I've been reading them. And guess what? In a recent survey of atheists and agnostics, only, atheists and agnostics, 32% of them said they believed in heaven slash or afterlife. 32%. And we both know philosophy. We both know their view doesn't allow that move. If you're an atheist, you don't have that luxury but 32% of them believe in an afterlife okay good so 32% of your own people who are not specialists just run-of-the-mill people are gonna give me a resurrection one-third if I get afterlife which I think NDEs give you because there's hundreds of highly evidenced ones that showed there's an afterlife I think if there's an afterlife, I think. If there's an afterlife,

see, if there's God, and this guy says resurrection is a one, it's 100%. If there's an afterlife, that favors my view for resurrection. Are you going to be an agnostic on the afterlife too? Are you going to keep compounding your agnosticism? When are you going to stop and say, I'm checking this out, and I'm going to come to a complete conclusion? I like to go to the back door, and I like to argue there's an afterlife. And if there's an afterlife, that favors resurrection big time. One more thing we haven't talked about back in the David Hume thing, and it comes up again right here for agnostic or atheist. I have an appendix in volume two where I argue against naturalism slash materialism. And I'll say, and I cite several people, I mean really big-name people, Plantinga and Swinburne and Rolf, but I cite

atheist philosophers too. And the key is, very few people say, let me just make the assertion. I don't think there's any empirical evidence for the truth of naturalism or materialism. I don't think you can prove it. So wait a minute. Let's say you're the skeptic. This whole interview, you've been going, what about this? What about this? What about this?

What about this? And I'll say, what grounds do you do that? Oh, well, I'm a materialist. I'm a naturalist. I'm an atheistic evolutionist. Great. Let me just stop, time out. What is the empirical position for your, what is empirical data for your position? And you're going to refute data on my part and sit there smugly without position that is without data, which establish your position. If naturalism is an assertion that everybody likes, who wants to be free, who wants to have sexual freedom, wants to have political freedom, wants to have cheat in business, get the government off their back, whatever. If you want to be able to do whatever you want, and you say I'm a naturalist, you don't have any data, but it

seems like it's trying to back up your worldview and your emotions, not anything you have evidence for. So here I'm giving you evidence for the resurrection, and I go, it looks like there's a God. I don't know. I don't think so. I'm an agnostic like there's a God. I don't know. I don't think so. I'm an agnostic. There's an afterlife. I don't know. I'm agnostic. You know, if either one of those things work, the resurrection has gone up significantly in likelihood, either one, God or an afterlife. So I would use all those things. And I switch gears when I'm debating. So I'll stop and I'll go timeout. Let's talk about Indies. And I won't tell you who it is, but I was debating one time with probably the best known or close to the best

known. There's two or three of them. Close to the best known atheistic guy against Christianity. Christianity I mean not trained I mean not not a New Testament scholar and we were debating and I he said tell me something about the world that should make me open to the resurrection and I said okay something about the world yeah yeah near-death experiences if there's an afterlife, Jesus' resurrection is more likely. You know what the guy said to me? It's on tape. You know what the guy said to me? I don't want to talk about near-death experiences. And I said to him, I guess you don't. Because if you concede near-death experiences, you are going down a one-way trip to admitting the resurrection and I said and I said if you allow the resurrection if you allow near-death experiences and

there's an afterlife what you don't believe in if if you are gonna allow near-death experiences you have to be more open to the resurrection data and he said well all right if I were allowed near-death experiences, I'd have to be more open to the resurrection. And just at that time, just slightly afterwards, the moderator said, and that's all the time we have today. And I would tell myself, internally, I wouldn't like this. Yes, because the guy had just got done saying, if there's that life after death, I'd have to be more open to the resurrection. I love that point.

I mean, I taught for years and still teach the class on the resurrection. And I did not use near-death experiences early on. But as I updated the class, I added that it's one step towards more to you than just the body, continued life after the grave arguably supernatural intervention taking place here so along with information in the cell origin of the universe fine-tuning other miracles it gets us one step closer now in your chapter on agnostic what i

what i what you're modeling here i want to draw out for people is that it's not enough for somebody to just say oh i don't believe burner proof is on you you're saying the, I want to draw out for people, is that it's not enough for somebody to just say, oh, I don't believe Bernard Proof is on you. You're saying the Christian and the atheist, the Muslim, the agnostic, have a set of beliefs of how they see the world, and those need to be justified as being the most reasonable. And so I think that's a reasonable, helpful way to approach it. Now, we're brushing up on time. You told me you were working on volume four for this, so I don't want to keep you any longer than necessary, but do you have a sense of where resurrection studies are headed and or where like kind of specifically objections to the

resurrection are headed? What themes have you seen recently? And if you had to guess where they're moving, what would you maybe guess? I wrote an article for the Trinity Journal about the year 2000. And I argued that there was a slight increase in natural theories that had been popping up of late. And I gave a bunch of examples. It's like I was arguing, one of the guys on the board didn't want to publish the article because he thought I was giving a head start to critics who wanted to deny the resurrection. That wasn't my point. I was trying to warn believers that maybe you should be aware of these things. And I ended the article that way, be aware and move on. But since that article I wrote, which has been about 25 years ago when I wrote it, since that time, very few people come up with

serious, what we would call traditionally, they come up with word stuff. You're almost maybe more likely to see aliens than you are to see a classic Friedrich Schleiermacher, Theodor Keim, some of the German liberals and the others. They're not around so much today. And most of the people, that's a real major trend, is that naturalistic theories are not very popular today. And I think there's a reason they're not. The data are so firm because they're backed up. The fact that scholars back them up is not the main point. The point is, why do critical scholars allow them? Because the data backed them up. Now the scholars get on board. I think today, Sean, we're moving toward an age that's going to open up. And I think we already see signs that naturalism is losing ground very quickly. And we're going into some amorphous, I don't know,

call it what you want to. It's a pantheism or as Schaeffer used to call it, pan-everythingism. I mean, it's the whole kit and cabrón. You believe in an afterlife? Cool. Do your own thing. Just leave me alone. And yeah, yeah, I wouldn't refute that. And today, I see very few naturalistic theories. I did that book because so many people have to... When you write book one, you say, look at all these evidences, you ask for comebacks. And when they give you comebacks, I want to write book one, you say, look, look, all these evidences, you ask for comebacks. And when they give you comebacks, I want to write against them because we do have the mythicists here. And we do have occasional ones. You know what? Here's something for you

to think about. I'm going to write a journal article and say this. I hope as soon as I have enough time. The guys who believe in a single naturalistic theory are dying out. And two of them have died in the last couple of years. Garrett Ludeman and John Shelby Spong have both died in the last few years. Tell me something. How many guys, well, I don't mean well-known debaters who are atheists and they're popularists and they're not New Testament scholars. How many well-trained people in the field, history, philosophy, but it's got to be they know the New Testament arguments. They know where things are.

How many people today, how many can you name, who believe in a specific, one specific naturalistic theory? I'm not saying there's no one. I'm saying I think it's really changing. In 2000, I saw a lot of them. Today, I think most people are saying, I don't know. I don't argue like that. You can't, you can't, oh man, faith is something we all have to have and we all have to do our own thing. You can't prove faith. You know, any old goofy thing that's not a naturalistic theory. I know born again Christians who say you shouldn't be doing all this, just believe. You don't have to be a non-Christian. I think that's a major trend. We're getting away from the naturalistic theories. With Ludeman and John Shelby Spong dying, some of the critics have changed.

Some of them have changed from their naturalistic theory to a more amorphous view. And I might have given examples in that chapter, in the agnostic chapter. But I think we've got to be ready for them because they could come any time. But I think that in an age where we have so much data, call it the minimal facts, don't call it the minimal facts. But if there's so many facts that everybody allows, the Crossans and the Borgs and the Ludomans, and they don't believe in the resurrection, but they allow these facts. If I can bring these facts, the reason they believe them is because the facts are well-evidenced. And if I can bring these well-evidenced facts, I think the reason people don't want to take

the theory is this. If I pick one theory and I'm willing to die with it, a guy actually told me this in a debate one time. He said, well, you're an atheist. I am. Pick a theory. He said, I'm not going to. I said, why not? Pick a theory. He goes,

no. And I said, why? And he literally said, if I pick a theory and you give me arguments against it, you will paint me in a corner and I won't be able to get out. I said, well, isn't that what I'm supposed to do? I'm the supernaturalist. You're the naturalist. Aren't you supposed to do that? No, it's uncomfortable. I'm not going to pick a theory. And I think that's kind of, the problem is they don't pick one because if it gets slammed, they don't have a leg to stand on and they look silly before the audience.

So what are they going to do? I'm going to take one of these five? I mean, how does that go over? I just think it's a day and age where we're, I'm bold, I think we're winning the argument. And it's not just, you've already said part of it, it's not just that Jesus is raised. We have ID, we have God. Alvin Plantinga, at the end of his book, God, Freedom, and Evil, a great book everybody should read. But evil is often the best objection brought against God. But even naturalists believe it doesn't rule God out because they have the same problems we do from a different viewpoint. And naturalists will even say that. But Plantinga

says at the end of his book, God, Freedom, and Evil, he said, if you use the free will defense that I've laid out in this book, he said it refutes the evidential problem from evil. So even the best comeback, Al says you can handle it from philosophy alone. What about ID? What about life after death? What about resurrection, appearances? What about almost all the New Testament critics? A New Testament critic said this recently. He said it's unanimous. I don't think it is, but he said it's unanimous that Jesus was a healer and an exorcist. Really? You're going to give me that? He's a healer and an exorcist? Well, then what do you do with it if you're going to grant that Jesus was a healer and an exorcist? In Mark 2, he heals the guy, but then he pronounces his sins are forgiven.

So if he can do miracles, certain theological points come from it, like forgiveness of sins. But what do you do with Jesus being a miracle worker? Here's another one. We talked about a backdoor argument. Oh, Mary's on our side. You. We talked about a backdoor argument. Oh, Mary's on our side. You know, there's a backdoor argument. Here's another backdoor argument. Well, I had the book right there next to me, but I've already put it on my shelf.

What about a well-known psychiatrist, an MD, and basically an MD in psychology, that's not really accurate, but a psychiatrist who thinks he can prove the existence of the occult and demons. He thinks he can prove their existence. Well, there's another backdoor argument. If there are demons in the world, look out because now we're on second base.

We're on first base with Mary. We're in second place. The demons were on third base with the near death experiences. We're almost home free. And we wonder why people, I'm being facetious, but we wonder why people don't bring up arguments because I think the data are going in our favor right now. Why do 32% of agnostics and atheists believe in an afterlife? I think it has a lot to do with NDEs.

All right. Final question. Give us a quick update of when maybe volume two comes out this fall. People can pre-order it right now. It comes out soon. I'm using it in my class in defense of the resurrection, my grad class at Talbot Biola. We're using both the volumes. When is three coming out and when do you think volume four will come out? Okay. It just happened. I was impressed.

I didn't do this for our lecture. I've had it here for weeks. This is what the press told me a few months ago. This may change. But volume two, September 15th, and about exactly, what is that? One month ago yesterday. Volume two. Oh, and they tell me if the books aren't in the warehouse, they're going to be there very

quickly. They're on target for september 15th release volume three is due out may 15 2025. okay i'm three that's volume four that i'm doing now my due date's november 1st 2024 they're saying volume four will hopefully be out on november 1st 2025 one year later that's fast that is like 15 months this whole thing will be out and done well they set up a plan that the books would be out eight months apart not a year like a lot of these groups of books are a year a piece they set it up for eight months now they may not make you know there might be a lag and the last couple might be 11 and 12 or something but but yeah and then i live in a little lake i could see it out my window here but i haven't gone fishing i bought this house because i love to fish

i haven't been fishing. Oh. I live for that day. So I'll be glad when November 1st comes around. I hope my volume four is ready. But that's the one that's due first week in November of next year, 25. That's exciting. Well, it cut out just a little bit about how long it's been since you've been fishing. But the point is you've been working hours and hours every week,

plowing away at this. You should be really proud at the contribution. And this alternate hypothesis book, I've got it right here. I don't have the physical copy yet, but I printed out all 900 pages and read about 80 to 90% of it prep you are you are man oh did you say you required volumes one and two for your class wait a minute they can't get by I'm too so what do they do well they'll get volume two in September and then we'll just assign it through the rest of the semester so it better come out or I'm in trouble. All right. So you're going to, I mean, money-wise, you're going to require volumes one and two for students to buy for class? Yeah, partly because these are the latest up-to-date definitive case for the resurrection. If I'm going to teach a graduate class on the resurrection, students

should have it. Now they can get a copy from the library they can borrow it from somebody else they don't have to have a physical copy but I'm requiring readings from it and I hope that they will get a copy boy that's amazing I I've never heard I haven't heard anybody asked me last night does it has anybody required this for one of their classes and I said I'm pretty sure Sean told me he's requiring volume one I can say that was months ago I'd say now yeah Sean's gonna require volume one add volume two I'm doing now I'm also require fate of the Apostles but I have a 10-year update coming out in in spring and I won't answer this right now you and I can talk later but five of the Apostles I just slightly reassessed in terms of the past decade of studying this and getting

support and critique and I think we've really landed on where the historical evidence points I think the arguments stronger than ever but I think we need to nuance a few things that's a conversation down the road. You and I can have that one, but for now- Are you nuancing it up or down? Is the case looking better? I'm going to hold off on answering that question yet, but here's what I'll give you. I think there's been strong pushback on at least one or two of the apostles, and I think the case that I laid out is stronger than ever. I think one, I slightly notched down, and two of them might completely shift. Now, with that said, I think the four that you mentioned still died as

martyrs. I don't shift there, and I'm going to leave it at that until we release this stuff as it gets closer. But the core of the argument is there. If you're going to keep the top four, see, even if you abandon ship and say, I got to drop one of those, everybody can say there are first century sources for the deaths of the two James, Peter and Paul. First century accounts of their death within the first century. That's pretty darn early for ancient texts. Well, maybe what we'll do when this comes out, I'll send it to you and you can like flip the script here and interview me, cross examine me like I did. And we'll have that conversation would be fun.

I can because I have a I have a website, too. And, you know, yeah, that's cool. Well, I'm anxious. When is Fate of the Apostles 2 due out? Sometime in 2025. I just turned in the manuscript to Rutledge. And so I don't know the date, but sometime that year, because the first book came out in 2015. How much have you added to the manuscript? Oh. How many pages? Let me think about this. They gave me at least 20,000 more words from what I had. So that's maybe 15% more. I haven't seen the final page count, but it's a substantial, substantial update.

I'm going to do it right here on my calculator. Did you say 20,000? Well, they gave me that. I don't know that I used all of that. So I don't know, but it's a lot more I expanded and pushed closer to that number okay I divided by I divided by 300 which is what I use on words for a page and that is 67 percent 67% more content. I mean, 67 pages by the way I divided it. I took two, what'd you say, 200,000?

I won't quote you on that. All I'm saying is they gave me 140,000 and it was originally 120. And I'd have to go back and look, but I push up to that maybe a little bit more. And so that's probably 15 to 20% expansion, roughly. If you go with those number of words, divide by 300, it's 66.6 more pages. I'll double check that before you quote me on it, but somewhere in that range we're talking.

That's good, because I cite your stuff. Can you think of any, here's, let me end. Sure. Let me end with two thoughts real quickly. I tell my students, think about what the God of the universe has done for us. I often say, the reason I don't argue for God before I argue for the resurrection, the reason I'm not a classicist apologist, is because my apologetic, my evidential version, rolls both steps into one. Because I think the minimal facts argument is a teleological argument for God. It claims everything comes together to show there was somebody who raised Jesus. I say you get God

and the resurrection, and then I would bring in near-death experiences, and I would say you get God, resurrection, and an afterlife from this. It's a whole package. That's one thing. Here's the other one. If I can leave your audience with one thought, it would be this. From Friedrich Schleiermacher, 1799 until the present, easily, easily, no takers, the most common objection to Christianity, not resurrection, but Christianity, is there's discrepancies in the Gospels. Every critic says it, discrepancies in the Gospels. And here's the way I come back. I've been starting my lectures like this. You've probably heard there are discrepancies in the Gospels, and you're not sure, my audience, you're not sure how to deal with it. So let me tell you something. As long as Jesus,

definition of the Gospel, as long as Jesus is the Son of God who died on the cross for his sins and was raised from the dead christianity is true yeah but there's contradictions you're not listening as long as jesus christ was raised from the dead uh he he said he was son of god died rose from them rose and and appeared christianity is true yeah but there's all these discrepancies and i make the move you talked about earlier look let's say the bible swiss cheese and all these discrepancies i don I make the move you talked about earlier. Look, let's say the Bible's Swiss cheese and all these discrepancies. I don't believe this for a second, but let's say all these discrepancies are true. But the strongest data are on the point for the deity, death, and resurrection

of Jesus. And if I get the deity, death, and resurrection, Christianity is true in spite of the Swiss cheese. And when you get to heaven, you can talk to, I tell my grad students this, you can talk to Moses, David, Daniel, John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and ask them what the problem was with Joshua taking over the people in the Middle East. Ask them what the problem is. But all I have to get is deity, death, resurrection, and that is solid. So therefore, Christianity is true. Love it, Gary. I've learned that from you. I tell my students, I say, if evolution happened, depending on what we mean by it, Jesus resurrected, Christianity is true. Contradictions

happened, Jesus resurrected, Christianity is true. It's a helpful thing to keep the main thing, the main thing. Well, we will have you back if you're willing to come talk about three talk about four and then maybe when it's all said and done we'll just do a long q a where people can bring their toughest objections from your entire volume and we'll go live and we'll address those together that would be fun but i don't like like i'll be like 80 years old and rickety and won't even be able to i won't even be able to sit in a chair for that long. Yeah, I doubt that's the case, but always fun. I wish we lived closer.

You are way out in Liberty. I'm in Southern California. Typically, I give a plug for Biola Apologetics, but I try to be a team player. If anybody's watching this and you want a degree in apologetics, go to Liberty or go to Biola. The most important thing is that you get a degree and get trained to just help defend the faith and help equip the church. If you are interested in Biola, there's information below. Check it out and make sure you hit subscribe. This is a topic we will be coming back to many times. Gary, always enjoy it. You've given me way more time than I asked for. We'll do this again soon. Thanks, brother. Thank you, Sean. Great interview. And thanks for your preparation.

Nobody matches your preparation. And I think that's just incredible.