The Sean McDowell Show - The Surprising Genius of Jesus (ft. Peter Williams)

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

“Genius” is often not the first word that comes to mind when people think about Jesus. But when studied in detail, Jesus’s teachings portray brilliance. In “The Surprising Genius of Jesus,” Dr. Peter J. Williams examines the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15 to show the genius, creativity, and wisdom of Jesus’s teachings. This interview is meant to strengthen Christians’ confidence in the intellectual fortitude of Jesus and to challenge skeptics to reconsider how they view him. READ: The Surprising Genius of Jesus (https://a.co/d/fe6D9we) WATCH: Confronting Misconceptions about Jesus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuMC9Gs8338) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Can Jesus actually be considered a genius? Intellectually speaking, does he belong in the same category as thinkers such as Einstein, Aristotle, and Mozart? Our guest today, Dr. Peter Williams, believes the answer to that question is yes. There's emotional intelligence plus intellectual intelligence. He's demonstrably clever, with the fact that he is God. We're going to walk through his case in his recent book, The Surprising Genius of Jesus, which I thoroughly enjoyed, Peter, but you, the audience, get to evaluate if he made his case or not. We're going to jump in, but first off, thanks for being on the show. It's been long overdue having you here. Great to be with with you so let's just jump right in

and you tell me why do you think the term genius is rarely applied applied to jesus why is it such a surprise to try to convince people that jesus is a genius well i think people are often prepared to think of paul as an intellectual genius because of his writings. Because Jesus doesn't leave writings directly, then I think people can think there isn't something there that we can study. But of course, you've got so many of his words. Now, sometimes people say, are those words come from the gospel writers, not really from him or they come from the early christians and people see all the things that come from jesus is actually not from him but coming from later people and i think we can make a real really good case it go back to jesus and it is intellectually brilliant i think you're right i think there's also the sense that jesus kind of

told these stories and bumbled around and talked with kids. But even the teachings themselves, I think, even though we have them with us, people don't understand and appreciate, and many times, myself included, the kind of hidden Jesus within it. And that's exactly what we're going to unpack. Now, in some ways, this is an obvious question, but I want to make sure we're on the same page. Tell us what you mean by the word Jesus. And i'm sorry let me rephrase that tell us what you mean by the word genius and why you think jesus qualifies as a genius well i think jesus combines really real um factual knowledge of a great kind lots of detail with an amazing insight and ability to

simplify he's able to teach uh different levels simultaneously um there's emotional intelligence plus intellectual intelligence uh packed together um lots of analysis lots of scriptural knowledge there, and his analysis of the human condition all piled together. So I think together it's an amazing array of intellectual capability that we have there. Okay, so when I'm asked to fill out applications for students that are trying to go, recommendations, going to college, it'll be like top 25%, top five top ten and then top one percent is like exceptional are you saying jesus in that top one percent or arguably even higher one of the greatest thinkers of all time the divinity issue aside i just want to make sure i understand. I would say he breaks the instrument of measurement. So whatever it is you're trying to calibrate him against.

And I really do think that that can be demonstrated. And. Of course, it is connected with the fact that he is God as a Christian. I believe that. And I think I commend that as a very intellectually defensible position to others but I think sometimes people think that people simply assume he's smart because he's God. So God in a sense puts the smartness into Jesus, there's there's something absolutely right about that, but I'm wanting to say he's demonstrably clever. So that is, we can look at the things that he said and we can measure cleverness in it, just as we could see cleverness in anyone's equations or discoveries.

So what's great about this is there's kind of a top-down approach. If Jesus did the miracles, if he claimed to be God and the scriptures are reliable, like genius kind of a top-down approach if jesus did the miracles if you claim to be god and the scriptures are reliable like genius kind of comes with that by default or we can go bottom up like you do in this book and say let's just look more closely at his teachings and you even argue we don't have to assume he's god we don't even have to assume the bible is entirely or the gospels even generally reliable to get there and we're going to unpack this that's what i do think is genius about the argument that you're making here it's very fresh now we're going to walk through the particulars because it's not it's not a super complex argument that i think you make but it's a step-by-step one that you have to follow the links tied together. But before we dive in, maybe give us like a 30,000

foot view, a sense of where you're going. So we understand the scope of what you're arguing for. Yeah. So it's a brief book that I've written about 35,000 words. Maybe you can read it in under four hours. And half of it is about Jesus's shortest, sorry, longest story, which is the parable of the two sons, which takes about three minutes to say. It's under 400 words. My argument is that when you look at that and the layers of meaning there are in that, the skill of word choice at every point, that there is no story which has ever been told like it. Like, no one can find me another author, and there are some really amazing authors out there in the world who can do quite so much in quite such a short story. And we already know, of course, that Jesus' stories have been found to be powerful

and repeated around the world, and people form charities like the Samaritans because of his story of the Good Samaritan there's already a sense that he's got powerful stories and what we try and do is go into depth on this story and just show how many layers there are how every single word counts emotionally there's emotional power in that there's um an intellectual and analytical power uh they're both in terms of understanding and presenting representing the Old Testament scriptures and understanding his audiences so give folks some context I just finished yesterday an update to more than a Carpenter, my dad's classic book, and that is 34,000 words. Your book is 35,000 words.

So it's a smaller book. You can read quickly, but it packs a punch. You don't waste any time. Jump right into your argument. Now, what struck me is that at the heart of your book is a focus on the story in Luke chapter 15, which is known as the story of the prodigal son, but it's really about the father with two sons. Now the camera can't see it, but I'm looking right now at Rembrandt's painting

in my office of the prodigal son. Peter, this is one of my all-time favorite stories in the book. And I love the book by Henry Nouwen on the prodigal son. Love the book that you have written here. And you even make some insights that I stopped and told my wife. I was like, wait a minute, how did I not think about this? So I love it. But tell us why you focused on that story of all the stories of Jesus. Well, it is the longest story. And I think it's the one that most has these layers in

demonstrably. Okay. And I've also been using it as an interactive Bible study for many years. So often when I would go and teach a small class of 10, 20, 30 people, I find it works really well. You read the story out and you take people through it. So man has two sons. Younger one comes to him and says, give me my share of inheritance. First question is, what does he do? People then come immediately back with the wrong answer, which is he gives it to him. And I say, no, the passage says he gives it to them.

Of course, I can take longer to spin that out. The point is he actually shares the inheritance between the two brothers. And we go forward from there. It works really well Socratically asking questions so that got me into studying it and as I looked into it more I began to see more layers obviously some of these things have been seen before Tim McKellar has seen the um a similarity with Cain and Abel and lots have been said by Kenneth Bailey on his connection with Esau and Jacob that's all great but I think it was gradually over time realizing that it's

hit on all of Genesis's major stories and that it only works if it's told to the audience specifically that luke says it was told to so it's not just the story has been well transmitted but there are specifically four groups of people that luke says it was told to tax collectors and sinners you don't expect to know the bible and scribes and pharisees and scribes who copy the Bible, on the other hand. And I've been studying manuscripts for quite a while now, so quite interested in scribes. And you start thinking about a way a scribe thinks, and then you start reading this through scribes' eyes. And it's phenomenal, really. You know, this is one of the stories that I wish was in John as well or in the other synoptics. We only have it in Luke,

but we don't need another telling of the story to capture its brilliance. The first chapter in your book is just taking the story kind of on its face, so to speak, and saying there's layers of brilliance here that I think people are missing. Now, I'm not going to ask you to walk through all of it. We could probably spend hours just analyzing this story. And it's the kind of story, even for me, when I read Keller's book, when I read Nowen's book, every time I read it, something new pops out to me. And I think, wow, this is a brilliant story. Maybe just give us an insight of two or three of the points that jump out to help our viewers appreciate why there's such a depth of brilliance within the story itself. Yeah, so I think I'd mention a few omissions. So each time the younger son, whose prodigal son, talks to his father or thinks of talking to his father in his head uh all three times he calls his father father

and he uses the word father even more than three when the older son who seems to be behaving well at first uh speaks to his father that's the missing word he just says look all these years i've been slaving for you so there's a brilliance in the ability to omit a word which actually contrasts the younger son who is physically far away or for most of the story and yet seems to be emotionally closer to his father than the older son who is physically close and yet emotionally far away another case would be the missing ending so we it's the chapter starts with a story of someone losing a sheep one of a hundred sheep goes gets lost by going away from home then we got a story of a woman losing a coin that's lost at home

then we have a story and there's rejoicing when they're found then we got the story of a younger son lost away from home comes back and there's rejo then we've got the story of the older son at home not explicitly said to be lost but using sudoku principles you can work out yes he is lost because he's like the coin at home and what would happen if he actually were to come into the party there would be great celebration but the story ends with this missing ending which is not telling you how the older son responds which is very powerful thing because it makes it an invitation. It's that ability to have a cliffhanger, if you like. That's very good.

Or another aspect of the story is normally when people retell the story, the bit that they dwell on is what the younger son actually did. That is told in one word by jesus living and then this word riotously or prodigally however we want to translate it because sin isn't interesting and so jesus doesn't make a big thing about that and he actually leaves it to our imaginations which is really powerful because that means that we can all relate to it whichever way that's right that's right it works it doesn't glorify sin that's a really good way of doing things so that's just negatively then you can look positively and you can say well there's word choice where you see something like when the youngest son doesn't get a job it says he

attached himself to a citizen of that far country and you think wow um that's a powerful word it really rubs in that he's not a citizen he's a foreigner or you see uh where it will say that they began to celebrate or he began to be in need it gives you a sense of this going on for a long time so i think there are just many touches which are very clever emotionally even the fact that if you're talking to Pharisees who are really big into law observance and they're not going to like the fact that he's dishonored his father by asking for the inheritance up front they're going to be really glad as the story gets to that point where he's feeding the pigs so they're absolutely emotionally on side before the story turns around and starts hitting them and again that's that's a

very high um eq i think it's maybe hard for westerners sometimes to appreciate the brilliance of a story because we think in brilliance in terms of math and in terms of science and yet the brilliance to tell a good story at the right pacing with the right depth what to include what to not include what how to emotionally capture somebody tell a story that people remember this is hands down not only one of the greatest stories that Jesus told, but arguably one of the greatest stories that has been told. And it's amazing even today how many people, when we see a movie, we go, oh, it's the story of the prodigal son. I mean, this is really framed Western and Eastern culture. And yet your point is saying is if we just go back to these verses, which I think you said is 388 words, if I'm not mistaken, less than 400 words.

There's a brilliance built into it that traces back to Jesus. So step number one is just to appreciate how brilliant the story is itself. Now, step number two, this is where last night I was reading this and I paused and I was having dinner and my 11-year-old was saying something. I go, son, hang on. Just stop. I got to share this with your mom because I loved this story for so long. I almost felt bad with my 11-year-old, but I was so moved by it. Were you reading this during your family meal?

Well, so it wasn't officially a family meal. My wife was doing math. We're just kind of hanging out, having a late meal. But fair question. I'm not judging. You were judging, but that's okay. We're friends now. So I'm sitting there and sharing this with my wife. This connection, which is part two, is the connection of this story to the Old Testament. Now, you give six examples of this, and I don't know why, as much as I've read the story, this never went through my mind. We don't have to look at all six of them,

but the one that I stopped and was reading to my wife, I was like, look at this, this is incredible, was the connection with Jacob and Esau. And the way you get there is to ask the question, Jesus is telling the story about a father with two sons. Well, if we go back to the Old Testament, what are the famous example of a father with two sons? The moment you said Isaac, it's like this window opened up for me and I thought, how did I miss this? So tell the connection to Jacob and Esau and how that advances your argument? Yes. So when Jesus says a man had two sons and I ask people who've been reading the

Bible a bit, who's that remind you of? They're going to come back to me with one of three answers usually. Sometimes they'll say Adam because of course he had two sons and some more later. They might say Abraham because he had two sons and then some more later. But the most accurate answer is Isaac, who had two and only two sons. Now, I would say Jesus triggers all three of those stories with just that opening. A man had two sons. But of course, what's going on in Jesus's story is this older resentful brother who is resenting the fact That the inheritance Some of the inheritance has been taken and spent By the younger brother

And of course the whole story about Isaac And his sons Is hinges round inheritance Because Jacob Tricks his older brother Into giving away his birthright His inheritance He then tricks his

father into giving him a blessing so at each point he's usurping the older brother older brother is therefore really angry therefore Jacob goes off into a far country and feeds animals so you've got something like this but then he comes back and you're expecting Esau his older brother to splat him because he was angry and wanted to kill him last time and he's coming towards him with 400 armed men so that doesn't sound very good and you get a whole chapter basically on Jacob's defensive measures splitting up his family into different groups so they're not all God at once or some might get away and then the stunning thing is that Esau it says runs embraces and kisses Jacob and there's only one time that happens in the Bible now scribes have to count

phrases that's how you distinguish one thing from another so they knew that phrase really well and so the dramatic high point of jesus story is um also this uh point which describes no so well so i want to read this part because the moment you mentioned that jacob he saw it started unlocking ideas for me i thought okay okay, there's a battle between siblings. There's sibling rivalry. They're vying for the father's love and the father's attention. There's debate about inheritance. There's a story of the goat. There's one son being sent away. In my mind, I'm going, holy cow, there's all of these connections. But in Luke 15, it says, while he was still far far off his father saw him and felt

compassion and ran fell on his neck and kissed him and then the wording you said there's only one other text in the entire bible in which someone runs falls on someone's neck and kisses that person and this is in Genesis 33 with Esau and it, but Esau ran to meet him and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him and they wept. What would you say to somebody who just says, well, this is kind of a coincidence? Sure. So I think you can believe things are coincidence at a certain level um but coincidences become less probable through quantitative um sort of arguments and so that would work if it were just that case uh but if we bring in lots and lots of cases from the story of jacob and esau alone then it becomes uh far more probable that Jesus is referring to it so when we see that um there is mention of a robe the father says bring out the best robe and Jacob wore specifically

Esau's robe to trick his father when we see that there's mention of a meal with young goats and we realize there's only other one one meal of young in the bible and that's Esau sorry Jacob tricking his father when you see the younger son in Jesus story say here I am dying of hunger and you realize that that's exactly what Esau said I'm dying of hunger when he came in from hunting starving and gives away his inheritance all of these cases you start saying okay there's more there and then it's not just that's going on with the story of Jacob and Esau it's the fact that across all of Genesis's greatest hits you have these sorts of references and so I think when someone looks at what's chapter two of my book together, I hope they realize that there's a cumulative element to that. So you might, if there were just one case, not be sure whether the author intended

this. But when you start getting a whole heap of them, you start thinking, no, this really is going on. Okay. So help us understand how this advances your argument. Because I think so far, if people are with us, they're going to say, okay, the story of Luke 15 is a brilliant story fine okay great connections to the Old Testament all right that's neat we haven't gotten to the rest of your argument but how do these two points advance your argument so far so Luke presents it as a story told to people who don't have much bible knowledge they're sort of um pretty well known for their sin or their interest in collecting money for the romans and then he also presents it as told to bible experts like scribes now jesus story Jesus' story will work in just about any culture, as far as we know. It goes to deep themes within human existence.

Family dynamics, older, younger, sons, parental relationships, inheritance, envy, hatred, love. It's all there. And so it works at that level. But it also works if you are a bible expert so i think that is a clever thing to be able to do so none of the references to the old testament are clunky or felt like oh that's someone's had to work in an awkward way and slightly twist the story in order to get there um then you find that there are actually more stories so I'd argue the story of Jacob, the story of Laban, the story of Judah and Tamar, the story of Abraham, the story

of Cain and Abel are all referenced in this and it's a three-minute story and actually we have quite prominent references so I would say when the father says bring out the ring and the robe uh well there's only one other place you get ring and robe that's joseph and he of course is a son who is his father's thinks he's dead and then alive again that's at a time of great famine there's that phrase great famine occurs in jesus story so you get all these things together and what that's doing is how could you have a major Old Testament reference every 20 seconds across this and that's a major one plus lots of other subtle ones and reversals and so on so it's like every phrase in the story can be mapped onto something from the book of Genesis how can you tell a story like that so that if you don't know

the Bible at all, it's still a powerful story? And if you do, it's got lots of layers of meaning that draw you in and which are not just there to show cleverness. They're actually there to make points. So if Esau is such a bad guy who was tricked out of his entire inheritance and he forgave his younger brother well shouldn't the older brother in this story be able to forgive his younger brother in fact the older brother's done very well because the younger brother did the dirty work of asking dad for the inheritance up front as a result older brothers um you know had an advance on his inheritance he should be eternally grateful to his younger brother and be willing to do him any favors for the rest of his life so it's each of these uh stories actually is is powerful or if it references the

story of joseph uh well joseph was um his brothers tried to kill him and then sold him so and he forgave that so it's a very powerful thing to reference in the story okay so there's a genius that scholars like yourself 2,000 years later are still unpacking insights but there's also genius that somebody who might not be literate from virtually any culture in the world can relate to this understand this remember this be moved by this. That's the heart of what you're arguing. Now, step number one, the story of the father with

two sons is a literary masterpiece taken by itself. Second, when we go deeper, we find this considerable in-depth awareness of the Old Testament that is woven in in both subtle and intentional ways in less than 400 words also takes a layer of genius. Now, this stage, as I'm reading, I'm thinking, okay, if this story does trace back to Jesus, and we haven't argued that yet, wouldn't we expect to find other stories with numerous allusions to the Old Testament? Like this shouldn't be the only one. So do we find other stories? And what might this suggest about the feasibility of crediting this story to Luke alone as the source as opposed to Jesus?

Yes, so I think we do find other stories with this. So Jesus tells 40 or so parables and quite a number of them have Old Testament references. Obviously, this is Jesus's longest story that just gives more opportunity to find more things. shortest parable arguably which is when he says in Matthew 13 and in Luke 13 that the kingdom of heaven is like a woman who hides yeast or leaven in three seers or measures of flour until it's all risen and that's a very powerful story because it actually references some one of the same verses that the long story references. So I would say that Jesus's story of the prodigal son has his father figure. Who's the archetypal father figure in the Old Testament? It's Abraham. And Abraham runs in Genesis chapter 18 to welcome some guests, which is very surprising. The very first word out of Abraham's mouth is

then the word quick which he barks to Sarah then says three seers of flour and then he goes off and gets the fatted calf so in Jesus's longest story he has the father the old man running he says the word quick and then he goes and gets the fatted calf or orders the fatted calf so it's the same sort of thing going on but Jesus takes the next phrase from Genesis 18 verse 6 and he makes that into the shortest parable which is the kingdom and it's the only time that you get specifically these three particular measures they're called seahs s-e--A-H, in the Old Testament. So, and it says the kingdom of heaven is like that. So Genesis 18 is the story of three visitors coming to Abraham and Abraham and Sarah entertain them really well. And Sarah does some baking.

Now at this time, Sarah has no children and they are promised that they're going to have children as many as the stars and sand in that you can't count them. And so from Sarah's baking for these guests, two angels and God himself, comes this expansion where she comes to have more spiritual and physical children than could possibly be counted. So Jesus has that all packed into that story when he talks about the kingdom of heaven. Now, that is a story that comes up in Matthew and in Luke. So you don't explain how it is in Luke unless where you could say Luke copies Matthew or Matthew copies Luke that that's

possible but what you start finding is the pattern of the stories across Matthew Mark and Luke which is where the parables occur they don't occur in John is such that you don't explain anything by crediting the story to one of those gospel writers because you end up having to have multiple gospel writers able to come up with these really cool parables even though in the early church Christians didn't seem to do much with parables I mean there's something called the shepherd of hermos which is a bit like a parable but it's really long and really quite different and Jesus's parables have a particular style they have a style commonly working old testament allusions into them rabbis from the time of Jesus and the land of Jesus didn't normally put the old testament reference into the parable itself they put it at

the end so again it's just a difference It looks like a feature of this one particular composer, this one particular artist, let's call him Jesus Christ. It doesn't make it doesn't explain anything to say, oh, Matthew came up with this. Luke came up with this. It doesn't explain as much. There's still going to be stuff which is just going to be left out of the explanation. OK, so I want to make sure viewers are tracking here. You're kind of making two points in your book. Number one, that this story is the work of a genius. And second, that this story traces back to Jesus. And you do this. So far, we've covered three layers. We're about to go to four. Number one, look at Luke 15 on its surface, literary or masterpiece. Number two, there's all these Old Testament allusions brilliantly woven in, which shows that whoever wrote this has powerful, in-depth awareness of the Old Testament

and the ability to weave it into this story in a way that's subtle, but also direct. Third, we start to say, well, this is not the only story that has these kind of illusions, because if it were, maybe we could attribute it to Luke, but we don't find it in John because John doesn't have the parables, but in both Mark and in Matthew, in multiple cases, we find these kinds of illusions back to the Old Testament, which suggests not that Matthew Mark and Luke invented this themselves separately but there is a common source namely Jesus who is the author of this now we haven't connected all those dots but am I laying out your case accurately so far yeah yeah that sounds good okay perfect so let's go to the next step. Maybe this is step four, if I'm naming it correctly, is you say the author of the story is likely from Palestine. Now, why is this significant?

And how does this potentially rule out Luke as the source, the ultimate source? Well, Luke is traditionally thought to come from Antioch in Syria so and not to be Jewish so if parables are exclusively Jewish and in fact they're not just Jews anywhere they're Jews from Roman Judea Palestine Israel whatever we want to call it that's where they're coming from that's already locates the likely origin of these sorts of stories. But there are further features to it, which is, if we look at Luke 15 through to 60, we've actually got five of these sorts of stories. So we've got the parable of the lost sheep, of the lost coin, of the two sons, of the unjust manager,

and then the rich man or temporarily rich man and Lazarus of course he's not rich for most of the story but those five stories and when we look at them they have all sorts of cross connections between them so they seem to be coming from the same person of the unrighteous steward has specific phrases such as two of the measures, which are a core and a bath, which are particular dry and wet measures and liquid measures. And the phrase the sons of righteousness and sorry, unrighteous mammon and the children of light these are particular phrases that you can trace to the land of Jesus you can say that the story of the lost sheep is very reminiscent of a parable which seems to be told independently within Judaism in which Moses goes after a lost sheep there's a parable of a lost coin which is reminiscent of a story told within Judaism

where losing a coin is like losing the law so and they're really the warm-up act to Jesus's bigger story about the two sons and they're making some quite pointed um well, points, they're quite painful points for people to realise that they're digging at people who might say they're experts on the law of God, but they actually have lost the sense of it. Moses goes after the lost people. That's what Jesus is doing. People can be actually losing the law, that's a really bad thing. Jesus is keeping the law by going after the lost. So that all works very powerfully together with the third element of the story and remember those three stories in Luke 15 are said to be one parable. So all of that seems to be from a single mind. Now, the bit about the lost sheep, that's over in Matthew as well. So how can we explain that unless it comes from Jesus?

There's a bit more we can say about it because we then start looking at some of the phrases, specific phrases that begin and end parables, some of the features in there where we can trace those same features to Jesus's teachings elsewhere so it doesn't really explain a lot to say Luke came up with them what what's more if Luke is a gentile author brilliant gentile author but gentile author what is the point in him writing to an audience, putting in lots of Old Testament references they're not even going to notice. Whereas if the story is told to a bunch of scribes, just like Luke says it is, suddenly you can see the sense of it. So the story is most effective if it's actually told to the very audience that Luke reports it's told to. So in this way, I think you can also have a further element of saying it's not just that the story has been handed down to us from Jesus,

it's also that the context of the telling of the story has been handed down. Okay, so before somebody concludes, okay, maybe Luke was the genius. After all, Paul tells us he was a physician the problem with that is there's an awareness of certain rabbinic background knowledge which is surprising if he's gentile but also the same features of the parables in the other gospel books obviously matthew and mark as well which says wait a minute, Luke can't be the source. Now we have multiple sources with common features rather than the most simple one that this traces back to Jesus himself. Now you, oh, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the question is how many geniuses do you want to have as well? I mean, maybe the earliest Christians were just all geniuses, but it's a lot simpler to try and not posit too many.

So Luke's certainly very smart. But if Luke comes up with this brilliant parable, that won't explain any brilliance going on in bits of Mark or Matthew that aren't paralleled in Luke. So that's where it just does have a much more limited scope as an explanation. Okay, so you list six of these features that suggest the parables all trace back to a common source. We don't have to look at all six, but let's look at maybe three of them, just to kind of give viewers a sense of what you mean here here one of them is that questions uh begin parables yeah so so i mean it's a feature of a lot of what jesus says uh in i'm just getting my book out to you know refresh my memory i don't have absolutely everything in my head but it's a feature of a lot of um jesus's uh or things attributed to jesus across the gospels that he uses an awful lot of questions he even uses counter questions and so on and what we find is that Matthew and Luke independently report

Jesus as beginning stories with questions even when they're telling different stories so um in uh luke luke 15 he would uh begin a story and uh well actually we've got a whole number of cases in luke seven of them at least where he says which of you will have a friend which father of you which of you by worrying can add and so on lots of these which of you uh sorts of uh questions that he has now you can't explain those by by saying that they just come from Luke and not from Matthew because we can find similar ones over in Matthew but with different sayings. So that's one element and so you actually have two stories of two sons. So the saying a man had two sons comes up in Luke 15 and it comes up in Matthew 21 and they're actually two different stories but with a quite a similar structure so one of them is this longer three minute story

about the runaway son the other one is about a father going to two sons asking them to go and work in the vineyard the first one says no and then does it and the second one says no and then does it. And the second one says yes and then doesn't. And the thing about that is then the conclusion is that tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom ahead of you. That is, people who look like they're saying no actually end up saying yes. And, you know, in religious terms, it's obviously often there's a reversal of what you'd expect. So it's a very similar point going on, but it's a massively shorter story. It's got nothing except for its logical structure in common. It doesn't have have common wording after that man had two sons, but he's got some of the same features.

So Jesus will begin with that question what does it seem to you which is quite similar to the way the first two stories in Luke 15 begin which of you is is the way Luke 15 will begin so it's it's a similar sort of thing going on then there's a further element which you might which I can might as well slip in here as we're on this story, how you address a father. So Luke 15 is very conscious about how you address a father because the prodigal son addresses his father as father. The son who's supposedly hardworking back at home forgets that and just says, look, all these years I've been slaving for you. Well, over in Matthew 21, in this story that is not paralleled in Luke and is completely different, you have the same sort of thing where you've got the son who says no, who then goes later and he's quite brusque with his father and doesn't say

anything, whereas the son who says yes, but then doesn't go, he says, sir. And so you see this um storyteller technique about how even the address becomes an important thing now you can't explain luke by saying comes from matthew or matthew by um say it comes from luke because there's such different stories and the person who's polite is actually the opposite person in each story. So but you can see the same mindset behind it, the way that you use a term of address in telling a story to give you emotional closeness or distance. So Luke obviously begins his account by saying many have undertaken to write an account who are eyewitnesses so Luke used sources most argue that it was Mark maybe Q these sources that are

written down but he also includes a lot of details and stories hence Luke 15 not in any of the other synoptics and tell stories in a different way at times but with this underlying common thread that you lay out in these six principles that make us pause and go okay wait a minute why are these features so similar in terms of how jesus tells these parables in maybe obvious ways like how you begin a parable is not that hard, but even how to address the Father in a particular way, they match up and suggest a common source outside of the Gospel writers. I think that's brilliant. itself tied to the Old Testament is suggest this common source that is not Matthew Mark or Luke but of course the next question is going to be well how do we know that common source is Jesus it could have been some other genius make that connection for us yeah sure and so of course

you've got to remember there's an infinite number of explanations for everything, an actual infinite. You can always posit aliens. There's not an infinite number of simple explanations. So let's allow that anyone can explain any of my data by positing aliens. Mike, that's fine. It's just not a simple thing to do. So I'm saying there's this beautifully simple thing what if these really brilliant sayings actually go back to the most famous

Jewish teacher that there ever was one who started a movement with like two and a half billion people saying that they they follow him nowadays you know that's it's it's not a very expensive hypothesis it actually hits on everything it gets us someone from the right land knowledge of rabbinic stuff it explains the context it explains what arises so i don't want to sort of get into the area of a proof prove to me something comes from something. Of course, I can't prove anything comes from anyone. That's not the way we that's not the way we live our lives. You know, prove to me that food on the supermarket shelf isn't poison before I eat it. I mean, that's like stupid, dumb. No, it's not the way we live.

We live. Humans are social creatures creatures we have to recognize that the social nature of knowledge is really key it's going to become more key in the next few years as video fakes become so much more powerful uh and so that that we are social creatures who need to depend on other humans now using the normal rational way that we consider truth you can see that we have a very simple explanation for how the story got to Luke's Gospel that it actually comes from Jesus and over against that we've got lots of hand waving about what might have happened and we can invent some other genius who comes up with a great story for no reason and doesn't want any credit for it and so on. And it's just a question of, well, which is more believable? I appreciate the way you frame this, that it's not proof.

This is not a knock down, drag out argument. But it simply starts with the idea that the gospel writers claim to be reporting truth, either their eyewitnesses or they are reporting what eyewitnesses said. And they tell these stories of Jesus and consistently trace them back to Jesus being the source itself.

And then you've laid out your case that this fits and makes sense. And then simply said, if this is the most simple explanation, why not adopt it? I think that's a very fair, balanced conclusion from the argument that you've made. Now, one piece of this, and this might go somewhat beyond the scope of your book, is people say, say okay maybe these stories trace back to jesus but how do we know we can trust the time in which they were passed on to when they were written down whether luke wrote in the 60s or the 80s you still have a lot of decades in between that time i don't know they weren't changed and adapted and really reliable since we have the physical documents written later.

Yeah, so I think that way of reasoning is a bit unusual. I mean, it's very common on the internet when people are talking about Christianity, but it's not the way people usually live their lives. So you go up into the attic and you find a long family photo and your question isn't how did this survive uh you'll think oh it survived um so what i'd want to say is you know you can you can the example i give in the book is you can bump into a friend in a city where you're not expecting to see them and you're absolutely sure it's them and that is does not depend on the question how did you get here that's an absolutely secondary question uh so i have no idea uh you know how you got into your studio today but i can see you're there and and

you can see this you know face face to face with people even more powerfully so what we can say is committees don't come up with brilliant is committees don't come up with brilliant poems committees don't come up with brilliant stories so if you want to tell me that say Jesus tells a bit of the story then someone else adds snowball snowball and it suddenly becomes a story which is better than any three-minute story you can tell me of any great writer on the planet so wow i mean give me any case in history where a committee is able to come up with such a good story i mean we i mean go go into a bookshop and look at all the novels there are and tell me how many of them are written by committees yes i know committees do some children's books I understand that but but

really it it just doesn't happen all the great writers they're uh they're single storytellers yes committees can make film scripts I understand that but but really it it it it's not as good or simple an explanation and I'd want to say that there are lots of ways that the information can get to Luke so for instance it's such a good story Jesus could have taught his disciples to learn it by heart I'm you know say right okay repeat after me just learn it that's not problematic people can learn an awful lot most of us know 10,000 lines of film script we may not even know that but we do or poetry and you know whether it's it's hymns or lyrics and these sort of things we yeah not just film script but when you take all the lyrics that we could do sure

we know an awful lot so there's no problem with that sort of memorization we talk about three minutes yes it could be written down on wax tablets because people did Jesus goes around teaching in different places he can use the story more than once that's another way there are lots of different ways that it can get to Luke I absolutely don't know I don't even I mean I'm really interested in the story in the question of how the information gets over but nothing huge depends on it I think you can recognize this is the hallmarks of what is attributed to the same teacher in another book, therefore it seems to come from the same teacher. When people look at things by Plato and they say this comes from Plato, we're talking about manuscripts massively

later than Plato, a really long period of transmission, lots can change, but say aha we've got this feature of the way Plato writes in this dialogue that's similar to the way it's written in this other dialogue. So probably they go back to the same author. It's just a simple way of reasoning. But this prove to me something hasn't changed, prove a negative is a rather strange way of looking at things. Seems a lot of your case is just saying, what's common sense? What's straightforward? What's the simplest explanation?

That's really your methodology, isn't it? Yes. So, I mean, common sense is a loaded term because it can be all the prejudices that we got by the time of 18. But what I would say is when Jesus reasons with people, he asked them to be consistent so often

in his counter questions he'll say why do you do this so what I would want to do is I'd want to look at the people people are already the way people are already reasoning and I would suggest that people in other areas of their life tend to reason one way and then they sometimes change the way they reason when they come to questions about Christianity and Jesus and so I'd say no no just be more consistent this isn't the sort of way that you go about evaluating truth hypotheses in other areas of your life so why are you applying it this particular in this particular case Because I think it reveals something that often humans are not looking for the truth and hopefully by just encouraging people

to be consistent, that will help people to see what's really going on in their hearts. So Peter, of course, there's more depth in your book. You look at stories like Luke chapter 16, which is the very chapter after Luke 15, is the story the father with two sons and you make some important connections there in that story of Lazarus there's a lot more in your book but as far as laying out the basics of the arguments

that Jesus is a genius did we miss anything no no I'm really you've covered it well okay so few last questions I want to know and this goes beyond the scope of your book in some ways it's an apologetics book you're arguing it's also a book just to appreciate who Jesus is and arguably have a more accurate view of who he is but I'm curious what your message would be for skeptics who are watching this someone who's not a believer and that could be somebody who's a muslim could be an agnostic just somebody who's not convinced of christianity and jesus so i mean i would just encourage anyone to read the gospels and uh to look at the person of jesus ask themselves the question could this really be made up and ask yourself

what you think of this person because I think that Jesus as portrayed in the gospels is amazing unique unlike anyone that we come across and yet so very real and I find it very hard to imagine how the Jesus of the gospels could be made up. I also think that the hypothesis that this is really good reporting actually will explain far more of what we see in the text so I just say read the nine hours of text we have in the gospel see the person of jesus and um yes i think that's the very best thing to do so the takeaway for believers i'm curious because as i was reading this i thought a lot of the writings of dallas willard and you quote him so you're aware of this yeah one of my one of my colleagues at biola who's been a mentor of mine jp moreland was a student student of Dallas World and just deeply shaped by Dallas's argument that Jesus was smart.

And I remember the first time I heard that, I think I was probably in college. I took an apologized class with J.P. And I remember thinking, Jesus is smart. Like I hadn't put that category in this category yeah and to me the takeaway is I trust my doctor because I think my doctor is smart and can really identify maybe what's wrong if I'm sick I trust my mechanic because he's smart well we're not gonna trust Jesus if I don't think he's smart. But your argument is not only that he's not just smart, he's a genius. So for believers, what's just the practical or spiritual takeaway of viewing Jesus this way?

Well, I think wouldn't you want the smartest guide for your life? So you could be looking for wisdom in all sorts of other areas and the latest new newfangled book and fad and realize that Jesus is the fount of all wisdom I think the other thing is to expect to see more in his teaching so I think and expect see more in the Bible people often when they've been in church for a while, plateau in their knowledge of the Bible, not interested in going deeper. It's hard work. You can get the sort of broad gist of things quite quickly. And then where do you go from there? And well,

you've got enough not to be embarrassed in church, so maybe you should just stop there but to recognize that there is a depth of wisdom which is really incredible should encourage people to go further but i'd want to add one more audience in here and this is really for academics and those more academically inclined which is i think jesus is smarter than any of us and he also speaks in a very very simple way and what a lot of academic work can be doing and jesus actually nails it when he talks to pharisees he say you take away the key of knowledge so in other words a lot of what is going on is people locking up truth by hiding it behind complicated phrases and that sort of thing. They're actually obscuring truth and so Jesus with his simplicity calls that out

because the simpler someone is communicating the less room there is to hide. When people are using really high-sounding phrases and so on there's a lot of room to hide all sorts of bad stuff bad motives and so on so I would say that for me has been an amazing example of Jesus I'd say it's something that Dallas Willard certainly took to heart he was as a teacher someone who allowed you to underestimate him and I remember when I first met him I did underestimate him and then soon came to realize oh wow uh you know and and i think um that's actually a model for us so the book is 35 000 words and again more than carpenter's 35 000 words that's like an introductory book a lot of people say i want more depth i want more arguments

and of course that's what evidence that demands verdict is supposed to be. When I'm reading your book, I'm thinking this is just the beginning of a whole new way of thinking about Jesus. I would love to see, I'm not asking you to do more work, but either you or one of your students or somebody else, take this approach to more of the teachings and parables of Jesus. Unpack it further and do kind of the evidence that demands a verdict version that follows, kind of like Bauckham's book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. He goes into incredible depth and really unlocks a way of seeing how the gospels can be taken as eyewitnesses. Do you think there's a lot more research and study that you've just kind of opened up the door to, whether you do it or further students do it, kind of in this lane?

Yeah, I mean, I certainly have been seeing things in the parable since I finished the book. And I think there are many different layers to things. So my hope certainly would be that it's going to inspire and provoke others to do things. I'm not going to do the work, so I'm moving on. No, I am. I'm going back to Old Testament. So, yeah. But yes, there's an awful lot to see there. Part of it is expecting more and having a research agenda so that we can actually look for things. Yeah.

Well, I would definitely say aspiring PhD students and not just them, get a copy of The Surprising Genius of Jesus, because I think there's a lot of avenues of further research where they could take kind of this model that you've laid out and start applying it to new passages and new parables and just unlock the genius of Jesus in a way that's been lost. But the genius of your book is it's not just for PhDs. I think somebody can pick it up and read it and be challenged in the way that we've walked through. So thoroughly enjoy the book. I think my viewers are going to really enjoy it. I share a lot of stuff with my kids and my wife and I read stuff, but I paused last night, yes, during an informal dinner and had to share with my wife because it struck me. And some of that is because I think the book

is brilliant, but I absolutely love the story in Luke 15. So people watching this, if you've been moved by that story, which I would argue is one of the greatest stories that Jesus told, and you want to understand it in more depth, pick up The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henry Nowen. Pick up, I think it's called The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller. And pick up The Surprising Genius of Jesus by our guest, Peter Williams. And before you turn away, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other shows coming up on apologetics, worldview, culture related, you won't want to miss. And also, if you thought about studying apologetics, we would love to have you at Biola. We have students from all around the world. As you know, Peter, we have a fully distanced program. There's info below. If you're like,

I'm not sure I'm ready for a master's program. We have a certificate program. We'd love to guide you through just how to become a better apologist peter we're going to have to have you back i can't believe this is the first one but keep me posted on what you're doing in the old testament and uh let's do it again thank you very much