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1:00
This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
1:13
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:15
Let's get into it.
1:15
All right, guys, today's episode is titled, "Jesus Didn't Exist."
1:19
So I'm not pulling a fast one on you.
1:21
Like, I didn't change my entire world viewing thing.
1:24
So don't get all freaked out.
1:25
It all makes sense here in a little bit why I named it that.
1:28
But I got to kind of go back to about a week ago when the idea for this podcast came.
1:33
So this is like the third week in a row where I was going to be talking about
1:36
a particular subject and then something else happened.
1:38
And I had to like scrap the whole deal and start on something new.
1:41
So this story starts as many great stories do with a beef on Twitter.
1:46
So I'll bring you up to speed this way.
1:49
So a lot of you know who Derek Carr is.
1:51
So Derek Carr's quarterback of the Oakland Raiders soon to be the Las Vegas Raiders.
1:56
And he is obviously an outspoken Christian as well.
1:58
So even before he got his huge contract, I think it was before last season or whatever.
2:02
He was just been an outspoken Christian this entire time.
2:05
So he's an easy target for a lot of people that are on the cultural left or the
2:08
atheist left, those types of folks.
2:09
And the story started with him and then it ended with a guy named Arian Foster.
2:16
So you probably know who Arian Foster is.
2:17
He's now retired running back, but he spent, I think it was six seasons with the
2:22
Texans as a running back and one season with the Dolphins.
2:24
Made the Pro Bowl a couple of times, led the league in touchdowns a few times.
2:27
So I had a decent career.
2:28
This is a guy who ESPN made him a hero during his career because he came out of
2:36
the closet as atheist.
2:38
Like that's kind of how ESPN treated this.
2:40
Like he was some sort of hero.
2:42
It's like, you know, you got Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and then this guy.
2:46
That's kind of like how it goes with a lot of different people, right?
2:48
Um, so he comes out as an atheist.
2:50
He's seen as a hero for being so bold to do something like that.
2:53
You know, a guy that was raised Muslim, uh, and then now, uh, is living as an
2:57
atheist, which interestingly enough, I wonder if he believes or knows that the
3:01
Muslim faith thinks that he's an apostate that should die now, but I'll dig digress
3:04
from that point.
3:05
So here's how the story started.
3:06
So Derek Carr put a tweet out there.
3:09
And so I'll read the tweet to you and then I'll read kind of what, where it all
3:13
went from there.
3:13
So the tweet read this by Derek Carr.
3:15
I've seen with my eyes what miraculous things happen in the name of Jesus.
3:20
There is no harsh word or smart person that can take that away.
3:23
Okay.
3:24
So I mean, not really a crazy statement by anyone who, uh, is a member of the
3:28
Christian faith and has a discipleship, uh, set up with Jesus.
3:32
Uh, but Aaron Foster, who, you know, is no longer relevant in terms of the NFL.
3:36
He decided he needed to sub tweet Derek Carr and he sub tweeted and said, simply
3:41
AKA confirmation bias.
3:44
So obviously the atheist is trying to get over with kind of like a cheeky
3:48
comment against a, uh, well known and famous Christian.
3:52
And so I responded to Aaron Foster.
3:55
Not something that I normally do anymore.
3:56
I don't really try to get into Twitter battles with anybody, but I was just
3:59
like being sarcastic with them.
4:00
And this was my response.
4:01
I said, man, you're so woke.
4:03
I mean, you have no baseline understanding of your own worldview or how you came to it,
4:07
but yeah, sure.
4:08
So woke.
4:09
And so that's what I tweeted back.
4:11
And then I just kind of left it because that's the thing is this is a guy who's
4:14
operating as an atheist, but he doesn't have the foggiest idea of where his
4:18
worldview comes from.
4:19
He just doesn't have an idea.
4:20
He's operating under Western constraints within his brain without even the
4:24
foggiest clue as to how those constraints got there.
4:27
Kind of, you know, the whole Judeo Christian influence of, of the world
4:31
he's even living in in the country he made his millions in, right?
4:34
And Foster apparently didn't think that was a good enough just to leave it there.
4:39
So he sub tweeted me hosted it for all his followers and says this bout as
4:44
deep as a pothole.
4:45
So obviously this guy is quite the, quite the theologian, quite the, quite the scholar.
4:49
So this bout as deep as a pothole.
4:51
And so I responded to him as well.
4:53
Cause you know, I was like, okay, if we're going to go there, like, let's,
4:55
let's keep this going and let's, let's try to be, let's try to be cogent.
4:59
Let's try to be polite.
5:00
But I basically said this in response to Aaron Foster, you attack a disciple of
5:04
Christ for his historically facts based belief system, but you couldn't even
5:09
fully articulate how an evolutionary biologist or naturalist comes to understand
5:13
morality.
5:14
If you tried deep enough, or shall we keep digging?
5:17
And he, he came right back and said, let's dig.
5:20
You're asserting that it's a quote historically fact based and try to follow
5:25
me.
5:25
It's, it's kind of broken up English a little bit here, but this is what he said.
5:28
Theologians don't agree on this.
5:31
Even if I granted that lens, no credence or zero credence to modern day.
5:36
Also demonstrably false things in there.
5:39
And morality is based on societal norms, even your Bible proves this.
5:43
So my response to him, uh, after that, and this is kind of where it starts to
5:47
flame out, this was my response historically verifiable facts.
5:51
Jesus of Nazareth existed.
5:53
He ministered publicly for around three years.
5:56
He was crucified under Roman rule.
5:58
He died.
5:59
He was placed in a tomb.
6:01
Over 500 people saw him alive a few days later.
6:04
All has been disputed, but none disproven.
6:08
He went pretty quiet after that one.
6:10
So I'm not going to say I just kind of threw down the gauntlet and all that,
6:13
but maybe he just lost interest in the conversation.
6:15
Who knows, but he goes pretty quiet and that seems kind of par for the course,
6:19
but I even invited him to speak offline.
6:21
You know, hey, you know, I know that nobody changes their opinions based on
6:25
what somebody just puts out there on Twitter or very few people would rather.
6:28
And I invited to have a discussion, you know, send a DM with my, with my phone
6:32
number or whatever.
6:33
Uh, he didn't seem to, uh, to respond to that.
6:36
So apparently the last thing I said was the last thing he wanted to hear.
6:39
He just wasn't interested in talking further, but, you know, considering the
6:43
fact that, you know, I've, I've got a few thousand followers and he's got, uh,
6:47
several dozen thousand followers.
6:48
I can't remember it's maybe a few hundred thousand followers.
6:50
So it kind of got some attention from some different folks.
6:53
Um, and then just basically I'm just getting flooded with comments.
6:57
Cause these are all his followers, right?
6:58
So if you're following Aaron Foster, you're, you're a fan of his,
7:01
maybe you're a fan of his ideology or, uh, maybe you're an atheist as well.
7:05
And then so, uh, most of the comments that I got were just trash.
7:08
They were useless.
7:09
It's just people online being dumb, uh, some were polite and calculated.
7:12
I'll, I'll put that in the very few category.
7:14
Very few of those were polite and calculated, uh, but there was one
7:18
theme that kind of came about as I was going through some of these responses.
7:21
I didn't respond to a whole lot of people and I tried to keep it, you know,
7:24
very facts based and, you know, not go after anybody in particular, because
7:28
again, you're online, you're just flaming people.
7:30
If you're just getting all mad and all that kind of stuff.
7:32
But the theme that came out was that several, several of the people that
7:37
responded to me think Jesus didn't exist.
7:40
I mean, like the historical Jesus, they think that that guy never existed, right?
7:47
I know it like sounds crazy.
7:49
And, and I understand how a lot of people can question Jesus's divinity.
7:53
Sure.
7:54
I mean, I can absolutely see why somebody would do that.
7:57
Uh, I mean, there's a myriad of worldviews that kind of go contrary to
8:00
Jesus's divinity and the story of that, right?
8:02
But not his existence, right?
8:04
And so this got me curious is like, is this a thing?
8:07
Do people like honestly think that this is a guy that didn't exist?
8:11
Um, and I just started doing a little bit of research in the research kind of
8:15
blew me away.
8:16
It, it really kind of threw me for a loop.
8:19
I found a recent study that was done in the UK.
8:22
It was done in 2015 where it showed two out of five, right?
8:26
So 40% of people don't believe that Jesus was a real person.
8:31
40% of people in the UK.
8:33
Now, I don't know how accurate this stat is, but it was kind of taken with the
8:38
normal data structures that you would take for a study like this.
8:41
So 40% of people can't say that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person, right?
8:47
So I'm like, gosh, is this, this must be a thing now?
8:50
And so I did a little bit more research.
8:52
And then I, I came across this phrase, the Christ myth theory.
8:55
So I was like, okay, that sounds pretty official.
8:58
Let's dig into that.
8:59
Basically, the Christ myth theory is saying that Jesus of Nazareth is a myth,
9:04
not a real person, like never existed.
9:06
That's kind of the, the basic crux of that.
9:09
So some history scholars have made kind of quite a living off of writing books
9:14
and doing speaking engagements, basically saying that Jesus was a mythical
9:17
character, not a real person.
9:19
Even in the early days of YouTube, there was a documentary that kind of made
9:22
the rounds and it was called Zeitgeist.
9:24
And so it made this same assertion.
9:27
So in the same thing, they were obviously talking about night, they were talking
9:31
about 9/11 in this documentary and all these different things.
9:33
It was basically a conspiracy theory documentary, but they also threw in this
9:37
Christ myth theory.
9:38
That, and this basically the Zeitgeist documentary said that the story of Jesus
9:43
was basically stolen from Egyptian mythology, you know, the stories of
9:47
Horus and of Osiris and that type of thing.
9:50
And then they just kind of put it all together and there you have Jesus.
9:53
But I guess people that are Christ myth people, they can kind of be put
9:58
into two different camps.
9:59
And so the first camp is that Jesus might have existed.
10:03
You know, one of the guys that responded to me, he was kind of like,
10:06
ah, Jesus might have existed, but we don't know anything about him.
10:09
And he has nothing to do with Christianity.
10:11
So if there was a Jesus from Nazareth, he has nothing to do with the Jesus of
10:16
the Gospels.
10:16
Okay.
10:17
So that's kind of one group.
10:18
And then the other group on the Christ myth theory is that Jesus never existed
10:22
at all, that his story is straight up 100% myth or fable.
10:26
And then it became historicized later, right?
10:29
So it was, it was a myth.
10:30
And then later we kind of blurred the lines between story and history.
10:34
And then people just made it history, right?
10:35
Um, and this is just the crazy thing is that you can't even get to the question
10:41
of the divinity of Jesus, which, which is the core question for humanity, right?
10:46
I mean, that, that is not a hyperbolic thing for me to say.
10:49
Like the core question for all of us is, is Jesus divine?
10:52
Because if he is binary at that point, if he is, then we got to follow him that.
10:57
I mean, that's would be the only logical conclusion.
10:59
And if he's not, then we're basically highly evolved monkeys, right?
11:02
Um, but the thing is, is you can't even get to that question.
11:05
Unless you get to the historicity of Jesus.
11:07
Cause some people think that historically Jesus was not a real person.
11:12
And so as I was thinking through this and thinking through, especially how
11:16
I was going to respond to this guy, uh, that was actually very, very polite and
11:20
it was a pleasure to speak with, uh, he's a guy who didn't want to talk offline.
11:23
He wanted to make sure it was all out there for the world to see.
11:25
Um, but I, I thought of 10 questions that need answers.
11:30
So if Jesus of Nazareth never existed, here are 10 things that we need answers for
11:37
somehow, like we, we've got to get these answers from somewhere and we're not
11:41
just going to get them from sitting around.
11:42
And so I want to take you through these 10 questions here.
11:46
And I want you to ask yourself as I'm going through these questions, would you
11:50
have known the answers to these?
11:51
Or would you have even thought to bring this up in a debate of some kind?
11:54
So just be thinking through that, uh, as I go through these.
11:58
So here's the first question.
11:59
If Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then why do the overwhelming majority of
12:05
ancient world scholars believe that a man named Jesus, who was from Nazareth,
12:10
was an actual person that existed?
12:12
Okay.
12:13
There are no serious ancient scholars or historians that believe otherwise, guys,
12:19
they're, they're really aren't any.
12:21
And I, I, I give you that caveat, serious ancient scholars, right?
12:25
There are people like I mentioned earlier, they've made their career off of the
12:29
claims that Jesus might have not existed, which is basically helping people with
12:34
their worldview, because if Jesus never existed, it answers a lot of moral, moral
12:37
questions that people may have or, or qualms with the church or guilt about
12:40
not going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but almost all, right.
12:44
I mean, historical, uh, significance wise, almost all near East and
12:50
New Testament scholars believe the history, the historicity of Jesus is
12:54
completely certain.
12:55
Like one of the dumbest things you could possibly do is challenge it.
12:58
That's basically their position.
12:59
I mean, there's three huge, voluminous books that really talk about this
13:02
specifically.
13:03
So, uh, the three that, that I found that are, are really cited a lot are the
13:07
historical reliability of the gospels.
13:09
That's the first one.
13:09
The second one is on the historicity of Jesus, why we might have reason for
13:14
it out.
13:14
So obviously this is person coming from more skeptic point of view, but
13:17
eventually comes around to believing that this was a real person.
13:20
And the third is the classical world and epic history from Homer to Hadrian.
13:24
So this is just a straight history book.
13:27
This is not a theology book.
13:28
This is not trying to convert anyone to Christianity.
13:30
This is just basically we're looking at the history of the ancient world, which
13:33
Jesus is a large part of.
13:35
So that's the first question.
13:36
So let's go ahead and get into the second question.
13:38
Okay.
13:39
If Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then why is it that the life crucifixion
13:44
and death of Jesus of Nazareth is the most widely attested to event in all
13:49
ancient history?
13:50
Okay.
13:51
This is a very, very important question because when you're looking at ancient
13:55
texts, you have to look at how those texts were preserved.
13:58
You have to look at how those were transcribed, how they were passed down.
14:01
Um, and there's a reality here.
14:03
There are just things in history, things that we heard in, in humanities
14:07
class or ancient history class or anything like that, that we don't even question.
14:10
We don't have pictures.
14:11
We don't have video.
14:12
We don't have eyewitness accounts of people that we knew that are like first
14:16
person eyewitness accounts or anything like that.
14:18
All we have is what was transcribed and written down, right?
14:21
And then we also have to remember that things that were written down in ancient
14:24
history is very, very different than we write things down now.
14:26
We live in the, the, the laziest research culture on the planet.
14:30
I mean, you can find out just about anything you want on the planet, just
14:34
sitting in your underwear on your couch at home, right?
14:37
You don't have to actually go and search for anything.
14:38
But here's the thing, there's more evidence to show that Jesus was a real
14:45
person from Nazareth, that he was crucified on a Roman cross and died.
14:49
Then there is evidence that the battle of Thermopylae ever happened, right?
14:53
So, so King Leonidas and the 300 and that whole thing, there's, there's way more
14:57
evidence to suggest that that didn't happen as opposed to Jesus living, right?
15:00
Like there, there are literally more attestations to the historicity of the
15:05
claim that Jesus was a real person than there is that Julius Caesar was
15:09
murdered on the floors of the Senate.
15:11
Like there's way more to attest to that.
15:13
That's one of the most famous happenings in the history of humanity, right?
15:17
And little factoid, he actually wasn't killed on the floors of the regular
15:21
Senate.
15:21
He was killed at a Senate meeting, but it wasn't held at the normal
15:25
Senate chambers that day, the day that Julius Caesar died, it was held on
15:29
another place.
15:29
You don't really see that in a lot of television shows, right?
15:31
But, and even like, look at Alexander the Great.
15:34
That's another one of the most famous people in the history of humankind.
15:37
There's more evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was a, was a real person
15:41
than there is that Alexander the Great became king at the age of 20.
15:45
That's one of the most famous parts about Alexander the Great's life.
15:47
But no one really questions those things, right?
15:50
Like the battle of Thermopylae and Julius Caesar and everything that happened
15:53
in ancient Rome and Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun and all these
15:57
different things.
15:57
No one really questions any of the things around those people's life, even if
16:01
they kind of seem a little bit folklorish, right?
16:03
But, but again, you have to ask yourself the question.
16:05
If Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then why is it that the life
16:09
crucifixion and death of Jesus of Nazareth is the most widely
16:12
attested to event in all of ancient history?
16:13
Okay.
16:14
Move on to question three.
16:15
If Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then why have the historical records
16:20
enclosed in the New Testament not been disproven by now?
16:23
I mean, just think about it.
16:25
The New Testament documents, you guys, those are the most scrutinized
16:30
documents and writings in all of human history in all of humanity.
16:34
Like nothing would people would like nothing more than to completely
16:39
disprove and tear apart the gospel accounts of Jesus's life, right?
16:42
And yet there's been no practice.
16:45
So history, archeology, anthropology, science, I mean, just pick a medium.
16:50
None of them can disprove the claims that are made there.
16:53
Like the claims or the historical things surrounding what was going
16:57
on in that part of the world.
17:00
Nothing can show that it was false.
17:01
I mean, here's the thing.
17:03
You've probably heard this before.
17:04
People say that the gospels were written hundreds of years after Jesus died.
17:08
I mean, you may have heard that in your comp one class in college or
17:11
something like that.
17:12
And if you didn't have a really robust understanding of the gospels,
17:16
you may have believed them.
17:16
But that's one of the most ridiculous things you could possibly say.
17:18
And it's just flat out wrong.
17:20
I mean, we see in Paul's writings, which were in the in the very first
17:23
century, it shows that people believed in the divinity of Jesus right after
17:27
Jesus's resurrection.
17:29
I mean, that's kind of the thing.
17:30
If you say you're going to come back from the dead and you do it, it's
17:32
like, all right, we're going to go ahead and believe this person and what they say.
17:35
If he says he's God, okay, I'm good with that at that point.
17:38
I mean, and just think about it as well.
17:40
And these things are written hundreds of years later.
17:43
Then wouldn't you mention the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 AD?
17:48
I mean, this, this is something that a lot of us have heard of.
17:51
If you, if you know a lot about ancient history, and on August 6th of, um, of
17:55
the 70th year after the after death, um, or 70 AD rather, sorry, a little
18:00
tongue tied, but that was when Rome went in and sacked the city of Jerusalem.
18:05
It was one of the most insane things that have ever happened in the history
18:08
of the planet up to that point.
18:10
So, um, the fact that that you don't see that mentioned in the New Testament,
18:14
you don't see that in Paul's letters.
18:15
You don't see that in any of the gospels is an unbelievable oversight.
18:20
If it actually was written way later, right?
18:23
So just think about it, if you were writing a history of, uh, we'll say
18:27
the last 100 years of American life, right?
18:30
So the last 100 years of American history, okay?
18:32
Wouldn't you include 9/11?
18:35
Wouldn't that be kind of like one of the most important and crazy things
18:40
that, that ever happened in the history of the United States, especially the last
18:44
hundred years, right?
18:45
Or just what if you went back all the way to the founding of our country, right?
18:49
Go back to the late 1700s, like wouldn't you mention 9/11, even amongst the pantheon
18:55
of the other things that have happened historically for our country?
18:57
So, so the idea that these things were written so far after the fact is just so
19:02
stupid, but, you know, somebody smart or somebody with a PhD after their name
19:06
says it and then it's like, oh, maybe it's real.
19:08
So again, if Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then why have the historical records
19:13
enclosed in the New Testament, not this, but not been disproven by now?
19:16
That you got to have an answer for that question if you're going to claim something like that.
19:19
So let's move to the fourth question.
19:21
OK, if Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then why do Josephus and Tacitus make
19:26
mention of Jesus and their writings?
19:28
OK, so you may know those names, but I'll go ahead and go into who those guys are.
19:31
So Josephus is a Jewish historian, a very, very famous Jewish historian.
19:35
And as a Jewish historian, there's really no reason for him to corroborate
19:39
something that aids Jesus as followers, you know, so let's go ahead and start there.
19:43
So he wrote the antiquities of the Jews.
19:46
And so that was written in the late first century and in his writings,
19:50
he mentions Jesus three times and his writings.
19:54
It wasn't like a book.
19:55
It was like an encyclopedia is worth of stuff on the history of the Jews, right?
20:00
So he mentions Jesus first as the brother of James, right?
20:03
So there's mention of him there.
20:05
There's also mention of John the Baptist and his role in early Christianity
20:09
and kind of how he attached relationally to Jesus.
20:12
And also there's the testimonium flavonum, so that's basically means the
20:17
testimony of Flavium Josephus.
20:18
And this is a passage that's found in the 18th book of his volume of the
20:24
antiquities of the Jews.
20:25
And it's in chapter three and basically it describes the condemnation
20:30
and the crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans.
20:33
So so three times in a Jewish scripture or not scripture, but in a Jewish history,
20:38
we see Jesus of Nazareth mentioned, right?
20:41
Again, we don't go into this divinity because that's not what we're talking
20:43
about on this podcast.
20:44
We're talking about his historicity.
20:45
Okay.
20:45
So that's Josephus.
20:46
Now, what about Tacitus?
20:48
So Tacitus, you may know that name.
20:49
That's a Roman historian and another guy who had no reason to corroborate
20:53
something that aided Jesus as followers.
20:55
And Tacitus is seen as one of the more verifiable and most important
20:59
Roman historians in the history of the Roman Empire, right?
21:02
He mentions Jesus in his writings called annals, which is one of his last
21:06
writings, I believe.
21:06
And that's this was written in the early second century.
21:09
And so he specifically mentions Jesus's execution under the rule of
21:14
Pontius Pilate and the existence of early Christians in Rome.
21:18
Okay.
21:18
So there was the great Roman fire of 64 AD, where, you know, the
21:23
Nero, he basically said that, you know, it was the Christians that did it,
21:27
even though it's very likely Nero started the fire himself, but he
21:31
blamed it on the Christians.
21:32
So here we have Josephus and Tacitus that are writing about the historical
21:37
Jesus and they have no reason to substantiate him if he didn't exist.
21:40
Right.
21:41
And then there's nothing tangible to suggest that we can't trust Josephus's
21:45
or Tacitus's attestations of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.
21:49
There's nothing.
21:49
So again, you have to ask the question, if Jesus of Nazareth never existed,
21:54
then why do Josephus and Tacitus make mention of Jesus in their writings?
21:57
Okay.
21:58
Let's get into question number five.
21:59
If Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then how do you explain why the way,
22:04
which was the movement of disciples following Jesus even started?
22:08
Because again, that's another very historical verifiable thing was that the
22:12
way, you know, the following of Jesus disciples of Jesus was an actual thing
22:16
that actually happened, right?
22:18
And that leads right into the sixth question.
22:20
Okay.
22:21
And that is if Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then why did the Roman
22:25
Empire try to stamp out the way as an affront to Roman customs and worship?
22:30
I mean, if, if he didn't exist, then why would you do that?
22:34
Right.
22:34
I mean, look at it, run down the list, Nero, Demetian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus
22:39
Aurelius, Decius, Valerian, Diocletian, Galerius.
22:42
These were all emperors that tried to stamp out Christianity within the first
22:46
three centuries after death, right?
22:49
So within the first three centuries that we know that was something that was
22:53
really a hinge point for a lot of Roman emperors.
22:55
Now we see Christians that were not only martyred, but they were maligned in
23:00
business dealings.
23:00
They were seen as kind of outside of Roman society.
23:03
And so again, if he never existed, then why did the Roman Empire try to
23:08
stamp them out?
23:09
Like, why did they see that as a direct affront to the kind of the pantheon
23:14
of Roman gods, right?
23:16
And, and this really leads into the seventh question, the five, the fifth,
23:19
sixth, and seventh question, and really I'll, I'll lean on one another.
23:22
And the seventh question is this, if Jesus of Nazareth never existed, then why
23:26
are so many followers of the way willing to die horrible martyrs deaths, right?
23:32
And again, I've suggested a book on this podcast before called tried by fire.
23:36
It's a history, a very, very detailed history of the first thousand years
23:40
of the Christian church.
23:41
And in the first thousand years, we saw some pretty terrible things.
23:44
We saw Christians that were eaten alive by animals, wild animals, like
23:48
leopards and bears and tigers and stuff like that.
23:50
They were forced to fight against gladiators, but they were forced to fight
23:54
unarmed, right?
23:55
We had people that were ripped into by horses, basically strap one leg to one
24:00
horse and one leg to the other, and they were ripped apart as the horses ran
24:03
apart from one another.
24:04
We saw guys that were dragged down, down stairs, stairways by a bull.
24:09
We had people that had hot oil pulled, poured over their bodies while they were
24:12
alive. We had people that had their heads covered in tar and then they were
24:16
set on fire.
24:16
I mean, we can't assume that thousands and thousands of people died in the first
24:22
several centuries for the worship of someone specific.
24:24
If that someone specific never actually lived, like that's absurd.
24:29
That's a really, really stupid thing to say.
24:31
So you have to explain all the martyrs because if Jesus never existed, then
24:37
why were so many of the followers of the way willing to die?
24:39
These horrible deaths.
24:40
I mean, we don't have this long historical records of these people, you
24:44
know, you know, basically being dragged to their desk, kicking and screaming.
24:47
A lot of these people walked calmly to their desk.
24:50
I've talked about that before.
24:51
They just walked calmly.
24:52
Some of them were singing hymns.
24:53
They were relaxing.
24:54
This was like an extension of their worship to Jesus that they could possibly
24:57
die in a way that would be honoring to him, you know what I mean?
25:00
So you got to have an answer for that.
25:02
So let's get into the eighth question here.
25:04
If Jesus, some Nazareth didn't exist, then how do you explain the
25:08
writings of Celsus in the second century?
25:11
So if you don't know who Celsus is, no reason why he should.
25:15
He's a second century Greek philosopher.
25:17
OK, not really a major one, but he was one, right?
25:20
He put some stuff out there and we're talking about him 2,000 years later
25:23
pretty much. So this guy was a pagan, but his kind of claim to fame.
25:27
It is he was the first writer that refuted the divinity of Jesus, right?
25:31
He wrote something called the true word.
25:34
And it was kind of the first comprehensive criticism of Christianity.
25:37
OK, so his work, Celsus's work, was likely a response to the work of Justin
25:43
Martyr. So Justin Martyr is seen by many as kind of the first Christian
25:48
apologist. This was a guy that died in the late second century.
25:51
And so a lot of the work that was done by Celsus was seen kind of as a response.
25:55
So they were kind of bickering back and forth.
25:57
But here's the interesting thing about Celsus, again, a pagan who was thought
26:01
Christianity was absurd.
26:02
He thought his followers were ridiculous.
26:04
But this guy never refutes Jesus's existence.
26:07
Like ever, not once.
26:10
He doesn't think that this was a fable that some people kind of like made up
26:14
that this guy even existed.
26:15
He didn't think he was divine by any stretch of the imagination.
26:18
This guy pretty much worshiped the sun and the dirt, right?
26:20
But he never refuted his existence.
26:22
But if Jesus never existed,
26:25
how do you explain the fact that Celsus wrote about him in the second century?
26:28
How do you do that, right?
26:29
Let's get into the second to last question here.
26:31
And that is if Jesus of Nazareth didn't exist, then what is the explanation for why
26:36
seven century rabbis shunned the thought of Jesus's name being able to provide
26:41
healing as per the writings of the Talmud.
26:43
Okay. So again, in the seventh century,
26:45
rabbis, it was kind of brought up that that people were being healed in Jesus's
26:49
name, that there was like healing power using the name of Jesus.
26:54
And they wrote about it all the way back in the Talmud.
26:56
Okay. But if he didn't exist, then why would it be be scared about people using
27:01
his name? If he didn't exist, why would they do that?
27:04
It wouldn't make a lot of sense, would it?
27:06
And so let's get right back right in here to the last question.
27:08
Okay.
27:09
So here's question number 10 that I would ask for people.
27:11
If Jesus of Nazareth didn't exist, how can you logically or realistically
27:16
explain why some of us worship him 2000 plus years later?
27:19
And this is probably the most important question, right?
27:23
How can you logically explain that?
27:24
I mean, explain that tidal wave of logic to me,
27:28
because apparently I'm a little bit too simple to get it, right?
27:30
Because there's no reason why the way should have survived the first
27:35
century. There's just no reason for it.
27:37
If you look at everything that was stacked against followers of Jesus at this
27:42
point, namely the Roman Empire, how in the world did it make it out of the first
27:45
century? And if I some miracle made it out of the first century,
27:48
how could it have made it through the next two, the second and third century?
27:53
There's really no reason to explain that, right?
27:56
There's, there's not a reason for that, especially if this Jesus person didn't
28:00
exist. And so here's the deal is essentially if you, if you take even the
28:04
existence of Jesus of Nazareth out of history, right?
28:09
So just erase it completely from history.
28:11
It literally creates thousands of questions and points that can't be explained.
28:17
It creates way more questions than it answers, right?
28:19
If you just completely wipe them away.
28:22
So here's the thing, if you believe that a man named Jesus from the town of
28:25
Nazareth never existed, you are flying in the face of considerable,
28:29
considerable historical facts and even just basic logic and reasoning at this
28:34
point. So here's the thing, and as I'm sure you would agree, as I mentioned
28:37
earlier, you, if you can't come to the realization that Jesus was a real person
28:41
that existed at some point on the planet, then there's no reason to discuss his
28:44
divinity, right? But this is such an important question because you have to be
28:49
able to ask yourself before you listen to this podcast, did you have good
28:54
defenses of the historicity of Jesus?
28:56
Because we really can't take anything for granted anymore, right?
29:00
With the way culture and with the climate kind of around Christianity,
29:04
especially in the West, especially in America with politics getting very,
29:07
very divisive and, and, you know, Democrats going way, way, way left and some
29:11
Republicans going way, right, you know, we can't take anything for granted.
29:15
Like we've been walking around, I certainly was thinking that, oh, it's a
29:18
foregone conclusion that Jesus was a real person. Everyone just has a problem
29:22
with whether or not he was divine. And that's not the case at all. Like not
29:26
even a little bit. Okay. And the thing about it is, is all this kind of can
29:30
fall into this conspiracy theory nonsense? I mean, and we've all heard
29:33
about different conspiracy theories, and I don't want to go into any of them
29:36
just because it'll lend them credence. But I do want to bring up a story that I
29:39
remember that Andy Stanley told. And it was a story from whenever he was in
29:44
divinity school, so whenever he was going to seminary, so that he could
29:47
eventually become a preacher. And so as he's going through one of his
29:51
classes, one of the professors basically was talking about how
29:55
you can't start transferring a story into being something of fable or folklore
30:00
until the last eyewitness dies, right? So if we're making claims about Jesus's
30:06
divinity, or we're making claims that he was resurrected from the dead, we're
30:08
gonna wait for that 500th person to die, right? Because again, there's a recorded,
30:13
it's recorded in the New Testament that 500 people saw him resurrected, right?
30:17
Not just the apostles. And so if that's the case, then if you are going to make
30:22
something up about Jesus, you would have to wait until all of the eyewitnesses
30:25
were killed, or until they all died, right? That that would be how you would be
30:29
able to get that because there would be no one to refute what you were saying.
30:32
And so Andy Stanley's professor, so again, I'm just trying to think through the
30:36
years is probably in the eighties when he was going through seminary school.
30:40
But he basically said that within their generation that they would see people
30:44
that would deny that the Holocaust ever existed.
30:48
This is what the professor was saying. And pretty much everyone in the class
30:51
started laughing like that is such an absurd thing. Like, I mean, we have video
30:56
and we have eyewitness accounts and we have all these pictures like that,
31:00
that the Holocaust was a real thing. But this professor said you just watch
31:05
as the follower or sorry, as the people who were eyewitnesses
31:09
start to die, we're going to see some of those things come out.
31:12
And so even if you just look in the last few years, we've lost
31:16
just about every Holocaust survivor that there is, right?
31:19
And every year there seemed to be more and more people that believe that the
31:23
Holocaust never happened. It is one of the dumbest
31:27
and one of the most mind-numbing realizations that people think this way.
31:31
But it's real. People actually think the Holocaust didn't happen.
31:36
That, you know, Auschwitz and all these different pictures we have and
31:39
you know, all the different videos that we have of the prison camps and
31:43
the concentration camps and all the different, you know, death pits and all
31:47
those things. They think all that was basically shot in a Hollywood studio.
31:50
Like, I'm not making this up. This sounds ridiculous. It's ridiculous even saying it.
31:54
I feel like I'm becoming dumber by even saying this out loud.
31:57
But that's the world that we live in where there's just the ubiquitous
32:01
nature of social media allows stupid ideas to spread like wildfire.
32:06
I mean, think of the fake news phenomenon, right? Like if it just goes out there,
32:10
even if it's retweeted by someone that works at your favorite news station,
32:13
all of a sudden you think it's true. You see a meme online and all of a sudden
32:16
that's true, right? But you have to ask yourself, is
32:20
can your faith stack up against conspiracy theory nonsense?
32:26
So, and I'm not going to go into what you think happened to JFK and what do you
32:29
think about happened about 9/11 or a Newtown or any of these other shootings
32:33
where people just have all these conspiracy theories, right?
32:35
I'm just talking about the person of Jesus because there's apparently a growing
32:39
trend of people that think this was not a real guy that this guy didn't exist.
32:43
There's plenty of books and documentaries out there basically saying you're a lunatic
32:47
if this person, if you think this person existed.
32:49
But can your faith stack up against conspiracy theory nonsense and even deeper
32:53
more than your faith, can your knowledge stack up against conspiracy theory nonsense?
32:58
Do you have the ability to take in knowledge like some of the stuff I did in researching this
33:03
podcast today and is that logged away in your brain somewhere so that if somebody
33:07
said something ridiculous like that in a party or in a social setting that you can
33:10
calmly and in a gospel centered manner correct them and say no, that's actually not true.
33:15
This is actually what's true. This is what's verifiable.
33:17
So, this is a very, very important thing and it really leads us
33:20
into the wrap up here which is the quick resilience boost.
33:23
So, as you know by now, we are a men's ministry and our mission is cultivating manly resilience.
33:28
Specifically, we do that by providing content that for just spiritual, mental,
33:33
and physical toughness. And today, I want to suggest a book to you that will help you
33:36
with your mental and your spiritual resilience.
33:39
And this is a book that did not make it on the hundred books list, the book list that's on our
33:44
website, the hundred books that every modern Christian man should read list.
33:47
It was just kind of right outside that top 100 but it's still a very, very important book.
33:50
And the book is called tactics, a game plan for discussing your Christian convictions.
33:55
And it's by Greg, Gregory, I think it's like Coke or something like that.
33:59
I don't know how to pronounce it but it's K-O-U-K-L. So, Coke, cockle, something like that.
34:04
And so, in this book, he basically talks about tactics that you can use to share your faith
34:09
with people, to have a cogent and very forthright discussion about different topics.
34:15
He goes through individual things that he experienced when working with people
34:20
and when running into people at the grocery store and just different conversations that he had
34:25
and how to traverse those different conversations.
34:26
So, again, I never in a million years thought I was going to have to do a podcast on the fact
34:31
that Jesus of Nazareth was like a real historical person but y'all never be amazed at the stupid
34:37
things that people actually believe but we have to be able to say things that would be able to
34:41
convince these people that they were wrong. And just like I say all the time, you have to ask
34:45
these people, if you were wrong, would you even want to know? It's going to save you a lot of
34:49
trouble if they don't want to be helped and if they don't really want to be any better than what
34:52
they are at that point. So, as always guys, thank you so much for listening to the podcast.
34:56
Please subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud or Google Play and refer your friends to listen
35:00
and share this on social media. Guys, if we deserve a five-star review, please leave us one and make
35:05
sure that you leave a comment for everybody as well. And then also our website, www.undaunted.life
35:11
and you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter @undauntedlife and on facebook.com/undauntedlife.
35:16
You can check out our free devotionals on the Uversion app. Just search "undaunted life" under plans.
35:21
And as always, we want to thank the band, August Burns Red, for allowing us to use their music
35:25
library for our content. The intro outro track on this podcast is their song "King of Sorrow,"
35:30
which is off their latest record entitled "Phantom Anthem." The links to all of this are in the
35:34
description. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep cultivating manly resilience,
35:39
keep forging spiritual, mental and physical toughness, keep seeking the lion of Judah.
35:55
[Music]