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1:18
This is Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast, I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
1:23
Let's get into it.
1:24
All right, guys, they've got a special return guest to the podcast.
1:27
His name is Jay Warner Wallace, or I just call him Jim, but I love talking to him.
1:31
We always cover a myriad of topics, and then there's always a whole bunch of stuff left
1:34
over that I didn't get to, but he is a cold-case homicide detective.
1:38
He's also a popular national speaker and a best-selling author and Christian apologist.
1:42
So he was on episode 275 of this podcast.
1:45
So if you're not familiar with Jay Warner Wallace and any of his work, I would suggest
1:48
that you go back to episode 275 of this show because we get into his story, his testimony,
1:53
like how did he go from this hardened atheist homicide detective to becoming a Christian
1:58
apologist?
1:59
It's a very interesting story.
2:01
And the thing about it, that's really cool, and you can just go back, I was about to rehash
2:04
some of that stuff, but we just won't go there.
2:06
But he's become a best-selling author of a lot of different books.
2:08
So you may have heard of God's crime scene, forensic faith, but today really the scaffolding
2:13
of our conversation was his newly released, as in it is out right now, 10th anniversary
2:17
expanded and updated edition of cold-case Christianity.
2:22
So this book has been out for a decade and I just hadn't had a chance to read it yet.
2:25
So I was very excited about this interview so that I could dig into that book and dig
2:29
into a lot of the content.
2:30
So for today's discussion, we talked about the difference between believing that something
2:36
is going to work for you versus believing in something and that it's going to work for
2:39
you in the importance there.
2:41
We talk about how presuppositions and biases affect how we investigate worldviews and philosophies.
2:46
We go into two very common objections about the resurrection of Jesus and kind of how
2:51
you should answer those things, how we should not be scared of evidential faith.
2:55
I know a lot of Christians are like, well, that's evidence-based faith and that means
2:59
it's not faith at all.
3:00
If you need the evidence and so we really dig into that, so that's really, really good
3:03
content for Christian listeners to this show.
3:05
Also we talk about the differences, but also the importance of using not only direct evidence,
3:11
but indirect evidence because a lot of things can't be proven with direct evidence, but
3:15
they can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt with indirect evidence.
3:19
So we break that down a lot.
3:20
We get into the infallibility or inerrancy of the Bible and the different gospel accounts,
3:25
how eyewitness testimony is seen by many to be completely unreliable, but we really base
3:30
a lot of our Christian faith on eyewitness testimonies from the first century.
3:34
We talk about how a lot of people think that the story of Jesus is that Jesus didn't actually
3:39
exist, but he's just in amalgamation of a bunch of older messianic myths that are kind
3:44
of Jewish and kind of pagan and they just kind of got mushed together.
3:47
We dig into that, but at the end we get into a great discussion about what it means to be
3:50
an abbreviated Christian because there are a lot of Christians out there that think that
3:54
the way they're doing it is fine.
3:56
They don't ever have to answer for their faith.
3:58
So they're kind of ignoring Paul whenever they say that, but they don't have to answer
4:02
for their faith.
4:03
They don't have to argue for it and it's never going to come up anyway.
4:06
So we dig into all that guys.
4:07
I really, really enjoyed my time with him.
4:08
It's always fun with Jim on the show.
4:10
So without further ado, let's get into it.
4:13
Jim, welcome back to the Daunton life of man's podcast.
4:15
I'm so glad to be with you.
4:17
One of my favorite places to be.
4:18
Hey, this is this is the best place for everyone to be because that's where all the fun happens
4:23
and we got a lot of stuff to cover today, not a whole lot of time, but you threw a little
4:27
thing in at me right before I hit the record button.
4:31
And you said, Hey, Kyle, my next book, because I wanted to talk to you about a current book,
4:35
which we'll get to in a second, but you're like, Hey, the next book, the next book's the
4:38
one you're really, really going to like.
4:39
So tell me a little bit more about that book.
4:41
Well, we just finished the first manuscript.
4:43
So it's an editing right now.
4:45
So that takes a couple.
4:46
It's not an out till next May.
4:48
I think May 5th of 2024.
4:50
And it's a book called the truth and true crime.
4:52
And what we do is we kind of make a case in that book, you know, all my, all my books
4:57
for the most part are affirming of a Christian worldview.
5:01
And we come at it from different angles.
5:03
This next book is 15 rules for life that you learn from investigating death.
5:09
So it's 15 stories of murder investigations and from each story, there's one principle
5:15
for a living that I think emerges now, it just so happens that those principles are very
5:20
ancient and they affirm a biblical view of anthropology.
5:24
So so it's a kind of a case for Christianity from anthropology, but it's really a kind
5:29
of a guideline of how to avoid stupid if you can do it, right?
5:34
And so it talks about a lot of the stuff that you've actually talked about on your podcast.
5:38
We kind of parse it out and it also provides all the kind of current studies because it
5:42
turns out that, that when we study human nature temporarily, like now with even a secular study
5:48
of human nature is going to reveal something that's true about our biology.
5:52
And so much of what we, how we behave as men is based not on what culture says we are.
5:59
It's based on our, our genetics, it's based on biochemistry, it's based on things we're
6:04
not going to be able to change.
6:05
You can't just think yourself out of these, these, these features of our nature.
6:10
And so those things are ancient because they are grounded in biology, which if you're a
6:14
Christian, you would say is, is so because a creator has created us in a certain way.
6:22
And that hasn't changed.
6:23
And so, so what you'll discover is that all of the current studies that study well-being
6:28
in humans end up affirming principles that are ancient because it's grounded in your
6:33
biology and you will find them on the pages of scripture.
6:36
So that's kind of what this next book is all about, but it does take an angle.
6:39
It's all through true crime stories that we talk about these aspects of human nature.
6:44
Well, Jim, I don't know if you've heard the breaking news, but I've been reliably informed
6:48
that biology is not real, that if I say that I'm a woman, that if I say that I'm an animal,
6:52
if I say that I'm a ficus, you know, that's what I am.
6:55
So I don't, this book is already offending me.
6:58
How dare you?
6:59
I know.
7:00
Well, if you're genetically predisposed toward any illness, we ought not find that out because
7:04
I guess, apparently, we can now change our genetic predispositions based on just our personal
7:09
beliefs.
7:10
And that's what's so interesting about this, right?
7:11
It's like there's a sense in which we hear all the time that whatever your old notions
7:15
were, they need to be removed because we're not in the old times anymore.
7:19
We're in a more elevated evolved state, but the reality of it is that so much of what
7:24
we do, we're finding now, is grounded in genetic code.
7:29
And because that doesn't, that's really is about biology, I mean, even more than we think,
7:33
you know, stuff dealing with mental wellbeing is often grounded in genetic predispositions.
7:39
So I think that's worth us exploring.
7:41
And as, as, if you're a creationist, that should be, that should be, you should be very
7:45
comfortable with that because it really demonstrates that you have the fingerprints of the creator
7:51
are in the code.
7:52
So you can really kind of learn something about the creator just from the creator's
7:55
code.
7:56
Well, Jim, you mentioned the code.
7:57
They reminded me of when Jim Collins, Christian scientists, some, he's got a little bit of
8:02
a sketchy job or whatever he was doing.
8:05
We won't talk about that.
8:06
But how he helped Christopher Hitchens with his cancer later in his life based on looking
8:11
at his genetic code and his predispositions inside his DNA.
8:15
And so it is interesting people that are from that atheist materialistic humanist worldview,
8:20
they will depend on things like their own genetic coding to have those types of opinions,
8:24
which is, which is very interesting.
8:26
I did want to take a little sidebar, but we're going to come back in because guys, if you're
8:30
listening to this on time, the 10 year anniversary of cold case Christianity is now out and available.
8:36
It is updated and expanded, but we are going to skip the generic.
8:39
So why did you write the book?
8:40
What's it about?
8:41
Blah, blah, blah.
8:42
Guys can read.
8:43
I talked about it in the introduction.
8:44
I'll talk about it again after we're done.
8:46
So if it's okay with you, I want to dig right into the content of the book.
8:48
You go with that?
8:49
Yep.
8:50
Let's do it.
8:51
Okay.
8:52
So one of the first things that you bring up that's very important is in the preface where
8:55
you bring up the concept of belief that versus belief in.
9:01
So talk us through that real quick.
9:03
Yeah, there's a difference, right?
9:04
Belief that is often just a kind of intellectual ascent.
9:06
So you can believe, and I use this illustration in the book, you can believe that your bullet
9:11
proof vest stops bullets, and I had a case where a guy was involved in an officer involved
9:15
shooting.
9:16
And I never forgot it because it was so, as he was walking this through, what happens
9:20
in an officer involved shooting is that, say, you're in a critical incident, and you have
9:25
to discharge your weapon.
9:27
And then afterwards, that's going to be investigated.
9:29
As a matter of fact, sadly, for officers most of the time, the officer will be treated like
9:32
a suspect in that investigation, like why did you shoot your weapon?
9:36
Did you have justification to do that, especially you can imagine today in today's climate.
9:40
So if you're on the homicide team in some smaller agencies, mine's the fourth largest
9:45
or third largest agency in Los Angeles County, but it's not nearly as big as LAPD.
9:51
So we work our own officer involved shootings.
9:53
We send our homicide team out, and we separate everybody, and we go through the shoot scene,
9:58
and then we ask questions, and I get to one call.
10:01
This guy's been involved in an officer involved shooting, and he tells me that, you know, he
10:05
pulled over the drunk driver, a guy gets out of the car, and decides that he wants to kill
10:09
the officer and pulls a gun on the officer before the officer can do much of anything.
10:13
He's like empty-handed, and in order to survive it, he said, you know what?
10:17
He had seen the bulletproof vest that he was wearing stop bullets on the range, so he simply
10:24
trusted the vest.
10:25
He simply said, you know what?
10:26
I just tensed up my stomach muscles, and I started to pull my gun, and I figure if
10:30
I took a round in the chest, I could probably survive it because I have this vest on.
10:34
In that moment, he went from belief that to belief in.
10:38
He might have believed prior to that that the vest could stop bullets, and you might
10:42
not even see that this happened.
10:44
You just ever told my people, you know, this vest can stop bullets, and he might even
10:48
fully believe that, but in that moment, he switched from belief that to belief in, and
10:54
a lot of that is about trusting in something that you know to be evidentially true, and
10:58
by the way, if you know in advance that this is evidentially true, because you've seen
11:03
it stop bullets, well, you're far more likely to trust it in a gunfight, and that's why
11:07
it's important for us to know in advance.
11:10
Is Christianity true? Can we make an evidential case for this?
11:13
Because then when you're in the gunfight, which right now in culture is probably going
11:16
to happen on Twitter or on some social media platform in the comments section of your YouTube
11:20
channel, it's going to happen somewhere, and you're going to have to be ready.
11:24
You know this because I'm sure you occasionally get some pushback on social media from the
11:28
content of your shows.
11:31
And when that happens, you better know what the evidential truth is in a way that you're
11:35
so confident in that you can stand in the gunfight, and that's when you'll be moving
11:39
from belief that, you know, like the scripture even says that the demons believe that Jesus
11:45
is who he said he was, but they don't trust in him.
11:48
And so that's the difference between belief that and belief in.
11:50
And I think that hopefully books like cold case will help people make that transition.
11:56
So you mentioned having an evidentiary faith, and so you talk about this later in the book,
12:01
but I want to go ahead and transition and keep this conversation going because there's a
12:04
quote that I think is very, very important, and this is mainly for the Christians in the
12:07
audience, so everybody listen up.
12:09
As I speak around the country, I often encounter devoted committed Christians who are hesitant
12:14
to embrace an evidential faith in many Christian circles, faith that requires evidential support
12:20
is seen as weak and inferior.
12:22
For many blind faith, a faith that simply trusts without question is the truest, most
12:27
sincere and most valuable form of faith we can offer.
12:31
So I remember here recently, Jim, there was a guy that kind of blasted me via, you know,
12:36
our email line through our website, blasted, maybe isn't the right word, but I'll just
12:40
use it.
12:41
I was appealing to logic in a recent episode of the forging table where we're talking about
12:46
how people believe things and whatever.
12:49
And people get mad at, you know, archaeological evidence or historical evidence and they're
12:53
like, look, this isn't faith based, like this is meant to confuse us.
12:57
All we need is real faith.
12:58
And then you get those like died in the wool cage stage Calvinists that are like, look,
13:03
you don't learn faith, you receive faith, it's a gift, you bring nothing to the table,
13:07
you unbelievable loser.
13:09
And so for me, I have a lot of problems with that because of the entire apologetics endeavor
13:16
that, I mean, even you even quote C.S. Lewis in the preface where you're talking about,
13:20
you know, Christianity is a statement which if false is of no importance and if true is
13:25
of infinite importance, the one thing it cannot be is moderately important.
13:29
Now C.S. Lewis is not Jesus or Paul or something like that, but that, like, that's real in
13:36
our bones.
13:37
Like, I feel like that's true.
13:38
Why do you feel like so many Christians have problems there?
13:40
Well, I think it is because, well, a couple of things.
13:43
I think the theologically, we can run down rabbit trails and theology, but here's what
13:47
I would say, just make it simple and this is what I try to do in the book, right?
13:50
I try to take the simplest, most straightforward, like any idiot like me can grab onto this.
13:56
Why?
13:57
Because typically I'm working with juries.
13:59
And I don't know the range of ability on any given jury.
14:04
I might have some idea, but I have to kind of shoot for that simplest, you know, throw
14:08
that ball over the middle of the plate at 40 miles an hour, no curve on it, just no spin,
14:13
just throw it so you can hammer it.
14:16
I try to do the same thing with these kinds of books.
14:18
And what I often will say is, look, that's what Mormons do.
14:24
Mormons will tell you that I don't need to investigate this.
14:26
I just know and I'm a Mormon because what someone, God flipped a switch.
14:31
You don't believe Mormonism is true.
14:34
And if you don't believe Mormon is probably because you've investigated the claims of
14:37
Mormonism.
14:38
Sure.
14:39
Now, so if whatever approach you're taking towards your Christian faith is the same as
14:44
that as that Mormons take toward their faith and you don't believe Mormonism is true, then
14:47
maybe you shouldn't be taking that approach.
14:49
It turns out the Mormon could not do what we do, and by the way, I wrote a whole book
14:53
about this called Forensic Faith, that the Christian faith is forensic in the sense that
14:58
Jesus commended evidence and used evidence all the time.
15:03
The two forms of evidence used in every jury trial are direct and indirect evidence and
15:06
Jesus used both of them.
15:08
He would even say, if you don't believe what I'm telling you, at least believe on the
15:11
evidence of the miracles I've worked in front of you.
15:14
And then he spends 40 days with the disciples after the resurrection, like that wouldn't
15:19
be enough, 40 more days giving them many convincing proofs.
15:24
Then he commissions them because they are the direct evidence, they're the eyewitnesses,
15:28
that's how they got commissioned that nobody, by the way, became an apostle who was an eyewitness
15:33
of Jesus because Jesus has a high concern for direct evidence.
15:37
I mean, there's hardly any way to cut the cake here in which you don't expose an evidential
15:42
bend to Christianity.
15:45
So I think it's fair for us to take the same approach.
15:47
However, the word of hope in the New Testament is not like the word of hope in the English
15:51
dictionary.
15:52
I've been saying this a lot lately because you have to make it clear.
15:55
Hope in the English dictionary is kind of like, yeah, I hope the Lakers win next weekend.
15:59
Do you think they'll win?
16:00
I hope they'll win.
16:01
No, that's different than the kind of hope in the New Testament.
16:03
The hope in the New Testament is certainty and confidence on the basis of what you can
16:08
know.
16:09
So when you hear someone say hope in the New Testament and why, wow, that sounds like
16:14
we're just like wishful thinking, no, no, no, that's not how it was intended.
16:17
That Greek word does not mean wishful thinking.
16:19
We have to kind of take it a view of hope that is equally certain.
16:23
And that certainty comes from knowing something about what the claim is by the way.
16:28
You might think you know that the Lakers are going to win next weekend or the next game
16:32
they play because you have done your homework and you understand the lineup and the match
16:37
up in that game and what the record is back and forth and why the home team is favored,
16:43
whatever it may be.
16:44
We are usually really good at making a case for a lot of stupid things that don't matter.
16:49
My wife says, I watched this into all these sports shows right from tonight at eight
16:53
o'clock.
16:54
We're drafting our fantasy football teams and I'm thinking, okay, look, we are so focused
16:59
on the minutiae of stuff that is fleeting and is nothing more than a past time.
17:05
Remember, past times are designed to past time yet when it comes to our theological
17:11
views or our worldview in general, even if we're not Christians, we don't spend a lot
17:15
of time investigating or being able to readying ourselves to defend those views.
17:21
So I think we just need to shift as men.
17:22
By the way, our kids are watching.
17:24
If we're doing a better job as men of raising a fan in our home of our local sporting team,
17:32
then we are in raising a disciple of Christ.
17:35
Then stop calling yourself a Christian because if you want me to know what you really worship,
17:40
just give me your thought life.
17:42
So if you think it's right off the top here, yeah, so number one, nobody wants the Lakers
17:46
to win their next game gym, like nobody.
17:48
So just so I'll throw that out there.
17:50
No one cares about the Lakers anymore.
17:51
I'm with you.
17:52
Yes.
17:53
I'm I'm all for the chaos method for fantasy drafts.
17:57
You should take a quarterback in the first round just to screw with everybody in your
18:01
fantasy draft.
18:02
Just be that person.
18:03
I'm not doing it.
18:04
I'm not doing it tonight.
18:05
Sorry.
18:06
Running back and two wide receivers.
18:07
I'm sorry.
18:08
That's the first three rounds.
18:09
Maybe the second round.
18:10
Okay, we can talk about it off off air, but the other thing is every year at the beginning
18:15
of the year, I do an episode called how to avoid being a crappy man in, you know, whatever
18:20
year it is, 2022, 2023.
18:22
And one thing that will be on there until the show no longer exists is don't let sports
18:26
ruin your night.
18:28
And it's because I have ruined so many nights for so many people, not the least of which
18:32
my spouse, because I lived and died with every single pitch that left the hands in a Saint
18:38
Louis Cardinals game.
18:40
Okay.
18:41
Stop, stop, stop, stop.
18:42
Wait a minute.
18:43
You just criticized the Lakers.
18:44
Okay.
18:45
Yeah.
18:46
And then you mentioned something that's not even a sport.
18:47
That's a pads game.
18:48
Okay.
18:49
We're talking about sports here.
18:50
Don't even bring up baseball.
18:51
You're saying baseball is not a sport.
18:52
Okay.
18:53
All right.
18:54
Here's my next question.
18:55
Jim, how long can I be 50 pounds overweight and not even be able to run a hundred yards
18:57
and play the game?
18:58
No.
18:59
Yes.
19:00
Then I'm not.
19:01
It's not a sport.
19:02
It's a game.
19:03
It is way harder to hit a spherical ball with a circular bat squarely.
19:07
It's even hard to say that, Jim.
19:09
You're telling me.
19:10
That's not okay.
19:11
Hold on.
19:12
So then are carpenters athletes to think because they can hit the head of a nail?
19:14
I'm sorry.
19:15
That is, that's, that's just not enough.
19:16
Okay.
19:17
If you look like somebody who could play checkers, then you probably aren't an athlete.
19:22
So we'll put it this way, Jim.
19:24
I just need you to go into your wallet right now, pull out your Communist Party membership
19:29
card.
19:30
And then just let everybody know snow that you don't even care about this country.
19:33
I'm just messing with you.
19:34
Honestly, to be honest, I wish I could be as passionate and as interested in baseball
19:40
as I am in other leagues just because I feel like there's a whole, you know, there's a
19:45
bunch of time there and Susie's really good at putting this out where I'm watching in
19:50
between seasons where I'm watching what Susie calls sports gossip, you know, it's like nothing
19:56
is really happening and we're just, we're just speculating on stuff, right?
19:59
So yeah, so I would, I do wish someday I'm going to have to sit down.
20:03
I just think the problem with baseball is it takes a very, you have to be smart because
20:09
it's a lot of details and you have to know the players really well to be interested,
20:13
I think.
20:14
And I think I think it's not a lazy man's sport and I'm pretty lazy when it comes to
20:18
my pastimes.
20:19
So hey, I will tell you most part of the reason why people like football is because you don't
20:23
have to know anything.
20:24
It's just a short attention span.
20:25
This guy in this color Jersey smashes into this guy, but for me having played baseball,
20:29
I noticed like, Oh, the shortstop moved over like two feet before this pitch because he
20:34
knew where the location was going to be.
20:35
But you see, if you're stupid like me, I can't figure, I don't understand that.
20:39
I can't figure that out.
20:40
I'm like, what?
20:41
That's why I'm here.
20:42
I'm here to help you, Jim.
20:43
I will help you through this.
20:44
I will make you a good American yet.
20:47
Okay.
20:48
Good.
20:49
But the number of guys that to your point that you're making earlier, they live and die
20:51
with their favorite college football team, their favorite major league baseball team,
20:55
their favorite fighter and their kids see that and when I see these videos of like these
20:59
four year olds freaking out at a soccer match or something like that, I'm like, everyone
21:04
thinks it's cute and funny.
21:05
I'm like, that is terrifying.
21:07
That is horrible because you're, you're, you're worshipping at the altar of what's going
21:11
on there.
21:12
But to even go back to what we were talking about before we went way off in the left field
21:15
all pun intended was presuppositions.
21:18
And you talk about that in the book.
21:19
There are people that come into the discussion on Christianity presupposing that miracles
21:24
can't happen presupposing their ideology.
21:27
So for instance, I already brought up Calvinism.
21:29
I've been digging a lot in that philosophy lately.
21:31
If you think that Calvinism is true, you will read scripture through that lens and everything
21:37
that sounds Calvinistic in nature, you'll be like, there's another example.
21:42
And so it's a presupposition in your, your proof texting so that you will, you know, seem
21:47
a little bit smarter, I guess you would say.
21:50
But the thing I really want to dig into Jim is talking about you brought up direct evidence
21:55
and indirect evidence, because I think that's very important to this discussion.
21:59
And so I'll actually read a quote from your book that's, that talks about this.
22:03
Most people tend to think direct evidence is required to be certain about what happened.
22:08
But what about cases that have no direct evidence connecting the suspect to the crime scene?
22:13
Can truth be proven beyond a reasonable doubt when all the evidence we have is circumstantial?
22:18
Absolutely.
22:20
And so I'm reminded Jim of, you know, Joe Rogan, the biggest podcast around the planet, whenever
22:24
he brings up the Bible or faith, he just kind of waves his hand over it and says, Oh, you
22:29
know, it was just handed down via these, these cultures that didn't write anything down.
22:33
It was written down hundreds of years later.
22:36
It was translated so many times.
22:37
We don't even have the originals.
22:39
There's no direct evidence that Jesus was a real person that lived and walked the earth,
22:45
which is one of the most historically ignorant things a human being could say out loud.
22:49
But it's because they look at the Christian faith, Jim, as having no direct evidence.
22:55
So talk to me about the importance of direct, but also indirect evidence.
22:59
Yeah, I think what they really don't understand is just the categories at all that they wouldn't
23:04
even know like they would even say there's no direct evidence.
23:06
They say there's no hard evidence.
23:07
I hear that all the time.
23:08
There's no hard evidence as if this is a category.
23:11
Well, hard is not a category, that's not like the judge is going to instruct jurors the difference
23:15
between hard and soft evidence and stock categories.
23:18
There's this direct and indirect and direct evidence can be as much of a video like your
23:22
videos also could be direct evidence because anytime an eye either a human eye or the lens
23:27
or the camera of the lens can record something and then replay it either by telling you verbally
23:32
or by just replaying the video, that's direct evidence.
23:37
But everything else, DNA, fingerprints, blood, spatter, gunshot residue, material comparisons,
23:43
anything you do with the crime scene, that's collection of evidence, that stuff's all indirect.
23:47
That's also known as circumstantial.
23:49
It's just the way the evidence is defined.
23:52
So that's just the definition and all 50 states, that's how it works and you make cases with
23:57
the combination of direct and indirect evidence and cold cases, unfortunately, because they're
24:01
lame to begin with, that's why they're cold.
24:04
They typically don't have eye witnesses.
24:06
So I have to make the case a different way and that case is going to be made through some
24:10
form of indirect evidence and because people are kind of wondering how do you do that,
24:15
well, they're called cumulative circumstantial cases.
24:18
What we do is we build, if you have 100 things, that's death by 1000 paper cuts, if you have
24:23
100 things that point to a guy, that's pretty good reasoning, pretty good inference that
24:27
he's our guy and you might think, well, any, if only had one of those things, I wouldn't
24:31
have a case.
24:32
Yeah, you're right.
24:33
There's a lot of nature of those things because any one of us could bump into some piece of
24:37
evidence that might point to us by accident.
24:40
But this is now outside the realm of accident because you just basically are playing the
24:44
odds.
24:45
And this is, by the way, I do this all the time.
24:47
I've never lost a case and many of these cases, even if we prosecuted them with nothing but
24:52
circumstantial evidence and people are like, I'm not even sure, could that be possible?
24:56
These guys have confessed afterwards.
24:58
So I know I have the right guy.
24:59
I knew it all along and we can, we convicted the guy on the basis of circumstantial evidence.
25:04
So I think this is important for us, right?
25:06
Because someone like Joe Rogan, who I think is, I actually enjoy listening to Joe Rogan
25:11
a lot.
25:12
I don't mean to have a problem with Joe Rogan, I think, by the way, do I agree with everything
25:16
that everyone I talk to believes?
25:17
Of course not.
25:18
Nobody does.
25:19
As Frank Turic often says, I don't even agree with myself half the time.
25:22
So, so I'm over that, okay?
25:24
But I do think that he's thoughtful, now what keeps us, what keeps thoughtful people from
25:29
reaching accurate inferences is often something other than the evidence.
25:34
It's something that you bring into the case with you.
25:36
It's some bias, it's some desire, something you want to be true, whether it's true or
25:40
not, or it's something from your background that causes you to distrust a certain source
25:44
of information, whatever it may be.
25:47
But it has less to do with the facts that I present to you, which is why jury selection
25:51
is so critical.
25:54
We don't do anything.
25:55
I tell people all the time, you win jury trials at jury selection.
25:59
It's not in the opening, not in the closing, not in the evidence show, it's at jury selection.
26:04
You put the wrong people on your jury, good luck with that.
26:07
And so a lot of it for us, when we're talking to people, is to recognize quickly, okay,
26:11
if Joe's like not open to it, even listening, now he just adds Stephen C. Meyer on his show,
26:16
who is a thinker on the Christian side in the sciences, and I mean, it got to be a pretty
26:21
high level talk, I've listened to it, and a lot of people would probably say I'm not
26:25
interested pretty quickly because it's such a high level, right?
26:27
It's not like a kind of relational, but I thought that, you know, he was fair, he was
26:33
fair to Stephen C. Meyer, I thought he was fair on the show.
26:36
And I think in the end, it's about kind of reach people where they are.
26:40
I think part of it is that when people hear that you're narrative includes a miracle,
26:44
they're already out.
26:45
I remember once watching Hitchens debate William Lane Craig, and before the thing really even
26:50
got started, he simply said, before we go any further and looked over at William Lane
26:56
Craig, and he said, so do you believe that the Jesus was born of a virgin?
27:01
And William Lane Craig said, yes, and he looked at the audience, he said, I rest my case.
27:05
In other words, the idea is so preposterous on its face to these folks that there's no
27:12
point in going any further.
27:13
That is such a bias against anything extra natural, anything that can't be explained
27:19
with space-time matter, physics, and chemistry, and there's so much about the universe that
27:24
cannot be explained with space-time matter, physics, and chemistry, and they're willing
27:28
to embrace those ideas.
27:29
How do we get a universe?
27:31
How do we get space-time matter without a cause that is spatial, temporal, or material?
27:37
Because clearly there's some cause outside of space-time and matter that causes space-time
27:41
and matter according to their science.
27:44
So how do we get there?
27:45
They're just willing to embrace we don't know yet, and this is why I wrote a book called
27:50
God's Crime Scene where we just did eight features of the universe, and every one of
27:55
those modern scientists are going to say, we don't know yet, and they're comfortable
28:00
with that.
28:01
Sure.
28:02
Because the alternative, well, it seems like a divine being would solve all eight pieces
28:06
of the all eight clues.
28:08
Nope, nope, nope, nope, that's a bias against the supernatural.
28:12
So I think in the end, that's what's happening in the New Testament documents, and people
28:16
like Joe Rogan are looking at that and saying, "Yeah, you know, on its face, it's ludicrous.
28:20
There's no point in even discussing it.
28:22
It's ludicrous.
28:23
It must be late in history.
28:26
It must be these things because there's no way it could be true because, to me, on its
28:30
face, it's ludicrous."
28:32
And that's why the first chapter I wrote of cold cases don't be a no-it-no-it-all.
28:36
It all comes down to our biases.
28:37
What we think, we want to be true, often overrides what we find to be true.
28:42
And so I think in the end, we have to have an open hand.
28:45
That's all I would say.
28:46
And here's what I would say.
28:47
Kyle, if they aren't having an open hand, walk away.
28:51
There is no point in it.
28:52
And it turns out that-
28:53
I tell people-
28:54
Go ahead.
28:55
No, and it turns out you're right, like you were talking about Calvinism, for example.
28:58
I hold that with a very open hand.
29:00
I see the case on both sides.
29:01
I'm not going to land that.
29:02
I just- I can't- now what that does is irritate people on both sides because I'll post things
29:08
from both sides.
29:09
And every time I do, somebody will say, "Oh, look at this ridiculous Calvinist stuff.
29:12
Oh, this ridiculous, you know, the Calvinist hate when I post anything that involves free
29:16
agency."
29:17
So I mean, you know what?
29:19
Get over yourselves.
29:20
All right?
29:21
There's some things about the nature of a divine, infinite being that I don't expect to understand
29:25
perfectly.
29:26
They're on my list of the first five things I'm going to ask God when I get in His presence.
29:32
Tell me about Genesis 1, please.
29:33
And then 2, can you solve the riddle between your sovereignty and our free agency because
29:37
that's where we seem to divide?
29:39
Those are my first two questions.
29:41
So- but I'm going to wait until I get there to ask those questions.
29:44
Do I believe there's a God of the universe though?
29:46
That to me is on- is there's no way to get around that.
29:49
Hey, guys.
29:50
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31:31
So that tension, that tension between free agency and sovereignty, people's views on
31:36
old earth versus young earth, it's when those opinions become salvific in nature.
31:40
It's where it becomes because like I get asked all the time about having a young earth person
31:44
on my show to talk about that and have a debate with young earth and old earth.
31:47
And I'm like, guys, I would rather have a conversation about vanilla ice cream.
31:51
Like I just don't care enough about the subject because I don't think it's really knowable.
31:55
And so I'm like, I would rather not, you know, spin my tires for hours and hours prepping
31:59
an interview and then to go through with it because you're right.
32:02
Our biases and our presuppositions are so strong, but it's these people that have this
32:06
air about them that they know, Christopher Hitchens, I thought was an absolute goober
32:10
because he was just, he was so sure of himself and his accent.
32:13
He thought they added 20 points to his IQ.
32:16
But the thing is, is like I constantly find areas of the world that I'm so ignorant about.
32:21
This year I had two vocal cord surgeries.
32:23
So don't you think I've learned a lot about vocal cords and vocal folds and the musculature
32:28
that helps you phone aid in breathing and all that?
32:31
This was a world I had no idea even existed until I had to know that it existed.
32:36
But I do want to go to one more thing before we move off the kind of the Joe Rogan-esque
32:40
responses, the Christianity.
32:42
A lot of people are very, very critical about eyewitness testimony because they'll say things
32:47
like look, you know, and you know this from your investigative past, man, you can't even
32:51
trust eyewitness testimony and you'll have two people that were present side by side that
32:56
saw different things and then that'll actually bleed over into, can the Bible be inherent
33:02
when there are these contradictions in these gospel accounts by eyewitnesses?
33:07
This person saw one angel, this person saw multiple angels, this person said this, this
33:11
person said that.
33:12
They talked to me a little bit about eyewitness testimony because my, you know, I feel like
33:17
I have a pretty good memory.
33:18
But if you ask me about something that happened a couple of weeks ago, it might be a little
33:22
fuzzy much less decades ago.
33:24
Man, you raise a lot of really important issues there and we try to cover all these in the
33:27
book in different ways.
33:28
But one of the things we would say is that yes, I don't trust eyewitnesses.
33:32
So when people say eyewitness testimony is too unreliable, well, no kidding, I don't trust
33:37
eyewitnesses.
33:38
I test eyewitnesses.
33:39
And this is true on all jury trials.
33:44
What judges will say though, is that you're to test them neutrally, like you're not to
33:48
come in and start with a position of distrust.
33:51
But we do offer 13 in California, 13 questions that our jurors are allowed to consider and
33:58
those 13 questions fall into four categories.
34:01
And that's true in every state of the union.
34:03
We encourage jurors to test eyewitnesses in the critical areas of eyewitness reliability.
34:10
But if they pass, you are instructed by the judge to trust them.
34:14
Yeah, you can't just say, well, I just want the way he sounds.
34:16
He's got a scowl on his face.
34:18
Okay, that doesn't count.
34:19
Oh, he reminds me of my uncle Eddie, who I hate.
34:22
That doesn't count.
34:23
Oh, he's a different race than I am.
34:24
That doesn't count.
34:26
If you pass the tests in those four areas, you are to embrace his test.
34:30
You have no reason not to.
34:32
So I'd simply apply that test to the gospel authors.
34:37
Now, I wasn't trying to be clever or cute.
34:39
I was trying to figure out, is this true?
34:42
That's it.
34:43
You know, and it's like, this is how we test eyewitnesses and I'm like anybody else.
34:47
I don't trust eyewitnesses.
34:49
You shouldn't either if you don't trust, if you don't test them.
34:52
But that's what the whole book is about, is about testing the eyewitnesses.
34:56
Now, you're right.
34:57
People see the same thing different ways.
34:59
And that's very common, the only thing we ever ask our dispatcher to do when we're being
35:04
dispatched to a homicide in the middle of the night, I got to get a suit on and get my
35:08
gig bag and I want to be an hour and 15 minutes behind everybody else because I live pretty
35:12
far away.
35:13
I ask them to separate the eyewitnesses until I get there.
35:16
I don't want the eyewitnesses talking to each other because they'll line up their story.
35:19
And I know in the end, even though it just happened two hours ago and none of these eyewitnesses
35:24
is going to be trying to lie to me, they're going to give me what look like contradictory
35:30
accounts.
35:31
Now, they're not.
35:32
I'm going to be able to figure out, well, okay, that's how this puzzles together.
35:34
Oh, that's why they saw that this way.
35:36
Oh, that's where your biases are, or that's why you're interested in, oh, you liked that
35:40
brand of shirt or you, oh, you understand guns.
35:43
Okay.
35:44
Okay.
35:45
I'm going to be able to piece this together based on the nature of each eyewitness.
35:48
And that is what every case presents.
35:50
And so when I first read the gospel authors and I had a chance to see what they were saying
35:55
and the variations between the accounts, it provoked me to investigate them because I
36:01
thought that they were just one account.
36:03
I'm like, really, why would you trust that one account?
36:05
Oh, no, but there's, there's more than one account and they don't quite line up perfectly.
36:09
Ah, that's exactly what I'm looking for.
36:11
If they all lined up perfectly and you even see where somebody has borrowed from information,
36:17
like if Luke is interviewing Mark, unsurprisingly, Mark also has that account in his gospel.
36:22
That doesn't bother me either because again, Luke says to us that he is interviewing the
36:27
eyewitnesses and servants of the word.
36:29
So I would expect some of this, but my point is that I saw in the gospel variations exactly
36:37
what I would expect to see from reliable eyewitness accounts.
36:40
Then you raised another issue.
36:42
You said, well, what do we do about an errancy?
36:44
Like, how does that work?
36:45
Why would God, okay, well, what is your definition of an errancy?
36:48
That's really the question.
36:49
And I think we, we have a very, it depends and not everyone you talk to has holds the
36:53
same definition.
36:54
I always say it this way.
36:55
If God, what God wanted to do was to divinely allow eyewitnesses to observe an event and
37:02
still maintain their autonomy as an eyewitness, in other words, you'll see that even, even
37:07
the scriptures clearly at least have the, the character, the nature of the observer.
37:12
Like he didn't, the God did not like say, okay, stop, you're saying it wrong.
37:15
Let me say it the God way.
37:16
He allowed Luke to talk like Luke with his interests, his vocabulary.
37:21
He allowed John to talk like John and Matthew to talk like Matthew and Mark to talk like
37:25
me.
37:26
He had his hands off of that and he allowed them to talk about it in a way that we then
37:31
could later test to see if it's true.
37:34
If that was the goal, because I don't know that you would have more confidence in the
37:37
scripture if there was just one account and I don't know that you'd have more confidence
37:42
in the scripture.
37:43
If there were four word for word identical accounts, I think you'd probably have less
37:47
confidence in the scripture.
37:49
So if God's goal was to inspire four real eyewitnesses or real people who are talking
37:55
to eyewitnesses to write an account that we could then test as eyewitness testimony later,
38:01
he did a perfect job because we actually have those kinds of accounts.
38:06
And now I don't, I don't think there are contradictions.
38:09
That's why I know when people are making an observation, I'm going to use all the witnesses
38:14
in trial.
38:15
Even if at first you're like going, was he wearing a t-shirt or not?
38:18
Because I'm going to be able to explain to the jury why this observation looked this way
38:22
to him and why this observation looked that way to her.
38:25
I'm not to do that in the jury trial.
38:26
I get that.
38:28
But this is the nature of eyewitnesses.
38:30
They will say things that leave you scratching your head.
38:33
And by the way, defense attorneys love this.
38:35
They play this angle.
38:36
We're all ready for it, okay?
38:38
So even when I've got that kind of variation, we still don't lose the case because we recognize
38:42
and people recognize and it's better than their effect.
38:45
There is a jury instruction in which judges tell juries that there will be variations
38:51
between witnesses and that's real.
38:53
That's what you should expect.
38:55
So it's in the jury instructions and it ought to be in our mind as we're reading the gospels.
39:00
When I think what you bring up there, and by the way, guys, you go into such detail in
39:03
the books on all these subjects matter, so all the different books and specifically co-case
39:08
Christianity.
39:10
But it's when people are doing surface level analysis or univariate analysis, these arguments
39:15
sound smart.
39:16
But when you start digging into the details and going more than one layer deep, it's like,
39:20
oh, it tends to fall apart fairly quickly.
39:23
It's kind of like paper mache that when they think their arguments are made out of iron.
39:26
And so what I want to do now, I want to actually shift because you did a good job of this in
39:31
the latest book or in the re-release of the book.
39:35
You go into a couple, well, you go into several, but I want to bring up a couple of common
39:39
objections to the resurrection of Jesus because ultimately, guys, the hinge point of our entire
39:44
conversation, everything I do for a living, everything Jim does for a living is the resurrection
39:49
of Jesus.
39:50
Because if that didn't happen, we're having a bunch of different conversations right now.
39:53
We'd still be talking about fantasy football and baseball right now.
39:56
That's basically where we would be.
39:57
The very first thing that you bring up in the book that I want to talk about is this objection
40:03
that the disciples, they just lied about the resurrection.
40:06
And before you get into that, there's a lot of great quotes, but there's a little bit
40:09
later in the book.
40:10
This is probably my favorite one liner from the book.
40:13
It's while it's reasonable to believe you and I might die for what we mistakenly thought
40:18
was true.
40:19
It's unreasonable to believe these men died for what they definitely knew to be untrue.
40:25
So talk to me a little bit about the objection that, oh, the disciples made this up because
40:29
they wanted chicks and money and prestige and all these different things.
40:33
And it just didn't work out for them.
40:35
Yeah, I think that the question becomes, this is one of the tests we offer in jury trials.
40:41
Are they motivated?
40:42
Do they possess some motivation?
40:44
Like you find out, you know, this guy tells you all the stuff he's called in by the defense.
40:49
He says, no, that my, you know, that guy was never even there.
40:53
I was there and he wasn't there.
40:54
Then you come to find out that he is the suspect's cousin and you're going, oh, okay, he's just
40:59
trying to protect his cousin.
41:01
That kind of motive will help a jury to decide, is it possible he's lying?
41:05
Like would it benefit him in some way if he would just lie?
41:08
Because if it might, then you might at least consider that and judging his veracity, right?
41:13
So the question is, is something motivating these disciples to lie?
41:16
Well, there's only three motivations for any lie.
41:18
They're the same three motivations for any misbehavior, including murder.
41:22
And that is the sex money and the pursuit of power.
41:26
And the pursuit of power is the big catch-all that is responsible for like 70% of stupid
41:30
is the pursuit of power, believe it or not.
41:32
It's that, hey, you disrespected me, you know, I'm jealous.
41:36
I'm upset about how you treated me, how you look bigger than me.
41:39
You look like you're more important than me.
41:41
You're a different color than me.
41:42
I mean, all these things are pursuit of power things.
41:44
And so the question then becomes, well, what is it that's causing these people to lie?
41:47
Now, what I think is true is that there are lots of people who will lie, just not about
41:53
groups now, just individuals.
41:55
There are lots of individuals who will be mistaken about what they think is true.
42:00
And they would be willing to die for what they think occurred, right?
42:05
And there's lots of people who die for what they do not know is a lie.
42:09
And this is true of people who fly planes into buildings.
42:10
They don't really know, you know, several centuries later whether or not the initial
42:14
claims are true.
42:16
So you and I said, hey, I'm so committed to my Christian faith that I would be willing
42:19
to die for it.
42:20
It has zero evidential value because you and I weren't there.
42:24
But when somebody who is there who was there says, you know what, I'm willing to die for
42:31
what they would know if it was a lie.
42:33
That's very different.
42:34
That has high evidential value because they would be the one person who would actually
42:38
know if what they're saying is true.
42:40
We don't.
42:41
By investigating, by doing all we can to corroborate this, we develop a level of confidence that
42:48
this is true.
42:49
But that person would know with certainty because he was there.
42:52
Now that's just an individual.
42:54
But when you see large groups are willing to in total die for the claims, this becomes
43:00
even more dramatic.
43:02
And that's why I think that this now again, we could not know.
43:05
I see skeptics will argue, well, we don't know they really died that way.
43:09
Okay, Sean McDowell has done some great work on this book that he wrote.
43:13
It's on you can get it on booksellers that he has called the death of the apostles or
43:17
the death of the disciples, I think it was called, but it's really a good book that just
43:20
looks at how reliable are the death stories of the disciples in the first century.
43:26
And I'll tell you that there is no counter stories.
43:30
It's not like there's some set of non-Christian ancient documents that says, yeah, Peter never
43:35
really died.
43:36
Paul never really died that way.
43:38
He lived an old age, you know, there's no counter stories.
43:41
And that's why I think that we have good reason to believe that people suffered for their
43:45
claims.
43:46
This is even happening in scripture.
43:47
Paul tells you that long list of ways he was beaten and shipwrecked and tortured and
43:51
all that for his claim and in prison for his claims.
43:54
This was happening pretty early in an empire that if you didn't bend your knee to the Roman
44:00
gods, the only group really that had the exception on that was where the Jews.
44:05
But this was not seen as Jewish, this was seen as another group that now was not bending
44:09
its knee to Roman gods.
44:11
So I think that the idea that Christians were persecuted early and would have known if it's
44:15
true is a powerful notion.
44:17
Again, it's not the only thing I would consider.
44:20
But when you build circumstantial cumulative cases, it's one of those pieces that's part
44:25
of the overarching puzzle I'm looking at.
44:28
It's one of the four areas of eyewitness reliability.
44:31
Do they possess a bias or a motive to lie?
44:34
I just can't find it.
44:36
If there is one, what would it be?
44:38
That's the question.
44:39
Well, it's like, what is the motivation?
44:41
And by the way, that that's how McDowell book is the fate of the apostles and they go into
44:45
a lot of detail there.
44:47
But I don't know of a single case of not just a prominent Christian, but any Christian in
44:53
the first or second or third century that recanted on their way to the gallows or on
44:58
their way to being burned alive so that Nero could have parties or be being thrown to
45:04
beasts.
45:05
We get reports from secular authorities, from Kelsus and Josephus and other places where
45:12
it's like, hey, these followers of this like Middle Eastern Jewish carpenter that they
45:17
think is resurrected, like these guys are they're like singing hymns and praying.
45:21
I don't think they would have called him hymns or singing songs and praying on the way to
45:25
being murdered in these horrific ways.
45:27
And again, if you know these things not to be true, none of that holds up.
45:31
Like nobody gets, you know, crucified upside down.
45:34
No one gets beheaded.
45:35
No one gets stoned to death.
45:36
They go, wait, wait, just kidding guys.
45:37
Just kidding guys.
45:38
Let me explain.
45:39
Let me explain.
45:40
But another one will only go over as the second one.
45:42
So it'll be one more common objection and it's that the disciples were just fooled by
45:47
an imposter.
45:48
Now, I will say this that it doesn't happen often.
45:51
I don't hear that one often.
45:52
But as I was reading the book, it hit me like a bolt of lightning and I know I'm not the
45:55
first person to think this and I know it's ridiculous and I don't believe this.
46:00
But what if Jesus had a twin?
46:02
What if this is like that movie where I forget what it was or there was like this magician
46:07
that had this impossible trick or whatever?
46:09
That was a great movie by the way.
46:10
Yeah.
46:11
Yeah.
46:12
Yeah.
46:13
I can't remember what it is.
46:14
But it's like, yeah, the entire time he had a twin brother, there was a body double.
46:16
Like that's what happened the entire time.
46:17
That's how they could pull off this trick.
46:19
But if in my most imaginative state that Jesus was part of a twin and they just showed different
46:26
Jesus is here and there.
46:28
And one of them through the short straw had to get crucified and died and the other one
46:31
got the lip.
46:32
But like to walk me through this idea that the disciples, they were just mistaken.
46:36
They were fooled.
46:37
Well, this is, you know, Islam largely offers kind of a version of that because they'll
46:42
see a hopper died on the cross was not Jesus.
46:44
Okay.
46:45
Yeah.
46:46
Kind of a swoon theory as well.
46:47
So there's a lot of different theories and what's interesting about those number of theories.
46:50
So I list them all in the book.
46:52
There's like six theories that atheists might suggest are possible explanations for the
46:56
sightings of a risen Christ for, you know, they'll accept certain base, baseline ideas.
47:03
Okay.
47:04
The guy named Jesus lived.
47:05
Okay.
47:06
Even if that was true, it doesn't make Christianity true.
47:07
A guy like Jesus lived and he died on a cross.
47:09
That doesn't make Christianity true and afterwards people said they saw him alive.
47:14
That does not make Christianity true because they may have been mistaken.
47:17
He may not have actually died on the cross.
47:18
They may have imagined this as hallucinated.
47:20
They may be able to posture, fooled them.
47:23
Maybe, you know, there's a number of six different ways that decide that the skeptics will typically
47:29
try to.
47:30
Now, by the way, when you see that, when you see there are six different ways, that should
47:34
be a tip because they all know that they don't work because the guy who holds the explanation
47:39
number five, he's rejecting one, two, three, four and six.
47:42
The guy who holds three is rejecting one, two, four, five and six.
47:45
In other words, these guys don't even agree with each other because they all recognize
47:49
the weaknesses in the other five explanations, which I also recognize.
47:54
There is a weakness in the Christian explanation, explanation seven.
47:58
The weakness is that it requires a resurrection, but that's the whole thing we're trying to
48:02
test to begin with.
48:03
You cannot begin by casting that out.
48:06
It's not possible.
48:07
What if it just is the best explanation from evidence?
48:10
What are you going to do then?
48:11
The imposterous thing is interesting to me because if you've ever worked imposters, con
48:16
artists, it would have to be a con and con owners are called con owners because they gain
48:20
the confidence of the people they're conning.
48:24
You have to have two things in order to con people.
48:26
One, you have to have their trust, their confidence.
48:29
Two, you have to know more about the deal you're trying to con than the person you're
48:32
conning.
48:33
Like a guy like a Ponzi scheme that you have to know more about business than the guy who
48:37
you're trying to scheme because if he knows more about this, he's going to spot the lie.
48:40
You have to have his trust.
48:42
That means whoever's doing this has to be so intimately involved with the disciples that
48:47
he knows everything that Jesus told them.
48:50
So he has to be trusted.
48:52
He has to have a lot of information.
48:54
And that's why I think this idea of a twin seems to be the most effective, but here's
48:58
the problem.
49:00
The problem is the miracle sightings because it appears that Jesus did a bunch of miracles.
49:06
And if he's one of the twins who had the ability to do the miracles, then after the resurrection,
49:12
Jesus did a bunch of miracles and he even ascended into heaven miraculously.
49:16
He appeared miraculously.
49:17
Look, there's the problem.
49:20
It's the miracle stuff is that this appears to be something other than a human who can
49:24
do things that other humans can't do.
49:27
Okay.
49:28
And if you think there's a twin involved here, I don't think you've solved the problem.
49:32
I think you've just expanded the problem.
49:34
So most times people will offer that the imposter is just somebody who wants to con the disciples.
49:39
But the problem with that, of course, are all the miracles that the Jesus worked after
49:43
the resurrection.
49:44
This guy has to be a really good magician in order to do this.
49:46
I just don't think it's reasonable because number one, who would it be?
49:50
Who would know enough about what Jesus said to the disciples to be able to play that afterwards?
49:54
Because you remember, there are times when the disciples after the resurrection and Jesus
49:59
has got a glorified resurrection body, they're like, they're only certain it's Jesus when
50:03
they hear the conversations when he says something, they go, Oh my gosh, that's you.
50:10
So I think in the end, that to me is just not a reasonable explanation.
50:13
That's why it's not a popular one.
50:16
The more popular ones are swoon theory, he didn't really die on the cross or they're
50:19
just lying.
50:20
It's a conspiracy.
50:21
Those are more popular theories.
50:22
I think because they recognize the deficiencies of the imposter theory.
50:26
Well, there's also just the obvious thing.
50:28
If you've ever been around twins or identical twins or whatever, like they don't have the
50:33
same personality.
50:34
They have the same parents.
50:35
They have the same eye color.
50:36
They have the same hair texture, but they don't have the same personalities.
50:38
They have different tastes in music.
50:40
They have different interests in sports, athletic ability, the whole nine yards.
50:44
And so it does kind of tend to fall away pretty quickly.
50:47
We're running a little short on time.
50:48
So I'm going to kind of narrow down the areas that we're going to hit before we get you
50:51
out of here.
50:52
There's one thing that you've brought up that I hear apologies deal with somewhat, but it
50:57
doesn't really come up.
50:58
It's not another popular one, but it's another one that does cause people some consternation.
51:02
They will hear things or they'll see memes on the internet where it's like, okay, the
51:07
story of Jesus is just this amalgamation of a bunch of older messianic myths.
51:13
And they just kind of all put it together in kind of a Jewish context.
51:16
And then it just took off more than all of these other ones.
51:19
And so you deal with that in the book, but can you give us a little bit of a primer on
51:23
on that and some of the arguments therein?
51:25
Yeah.
51:26
When I hear a lot of it, there's no doubt that Jesus personifies a lot of the attributes
51:31
of important Jewish patriarchs, but that is how God works.
51:35
It got often foreshadows that, for example, if you looked at some of the attributes of
51:40
Moses and Joshua and Jonah and David and you'll see that some of these attributes, I could
51:47
pick out parts of their story and describe David and you'd think I'm describing Jesus.
51:54
And I can describe Moses.
51:55
You think I'm describing Jesus, Jonah?
51:56
No, it's Jesus.
51:58
And so you could, you could definitely cherry pick that up, but you could also do that for
52:01
each other.
52:02
You know, you could say, well, I could describe David, no, I'm actually describing somebody
52:04
else over here.
52:06
It's because God, but number one, we are humans created in the image of God and we do possess
52:09
certain commonalities as part of that lineage.
52:12
But two, God always foreshadows this coming Messiah.
52:15
So he's part of the Davidic line and he's going to have attributes that you're going
52:18
to recognize because he's part of that line.
52:21
But what I hear more often is that Jesus is a recreation of non-Jewish myths that are
52:26
just collected of dying and rising saviors.
52:29
Oh, he's Mithras recreated.
52:32
He's Osiris or Horus just recreated in a new culture.
52:35
Okay.
52:36
I talk about that at length in a book called Person of Interest, but in this book, Cold
52:40
Case Christianity, it's just that the idea that Jews, when trying to create a mythology,
52:47
a mythological figure, this also assumes that he never really lived, that he's a late legend
52:53
that was created maybe in the second or third century, that's to me, that's the question
52:58
is how early are the gospels written?
53:00
And I address that in the book.
53:02
This is not a late legend.
53:04
It is an early claim about Jesus.
53:06
So you can't lie.
53:07
The best way to lie about Jesus is to wait till everyone knows what happened in the first
53:11
century is dead, then you can say anything you want.
53:13
But it's problem is it's written in the first century and that's going to be harder to do.
53:17
But more importantly, the idea that the Jewish people would try to convince other Jews who
53:24
have been warned their entire history as a nation, not to embrace the false gods of the
53:30
neighboring nations.
53:32
And so in order to convince this group that Jesus is the Messiah, they borrow and cobble
53:38
together the ancient pagan mythologies to convince the one group that has rejected the
53:44
ancient pagan mythologies, tough sell, but more importantly, it turns out that yes, God,
53:52
we have natural expectations and the ancient people right now, if you said, Hey, to most
53:56
people don't know anything about Christianity, do you think that God exists?
54:00
Most people on planet earth would say, yeah, believe it or not, the vast majority of people
54:04
on planet earth believe in some form of theism.
54:06
And if you ask you, well, what do you think God is like, you're going to find that we
54:09
imagine the same characteristics of God.
54:13
This has been true forever.
54:14
Like most people think if there's a God, he can probably defeat death.
54:18
He can probably work miracles.
54:20
He's probably got power, like a royal kind of power, like a king.
54:24
Okay, it turns out that the ancient mythologies also used primitive people who are thinking
54:29
about God and they get something to write as we do today.
54:33
Yeah.
54:34
And then God, Jesus comes, God comes incarnate and he ends up fulfilling all of the expectation
54:40
of the ancients in a way that none of those ancient mythologies do, not nearly as robustly.
54:45
Jesus fulfills them, why? because he is the God you've been imagining all this time.
54:50
That doesn't surprise me.
54:51
Why would it surprise you?
54:52
Didn't surprise Lewis.
54:53
C.S.
54:54
Lewis either.
54:55
He said, yeah, Jesus is the one true myth, not meaning a false story.
54:59
That's not how he's using the word myth.
55:00
He means a narrative, a story about God.
55:02
He is the true myth where all of the mythologies are the myths of men.
55:08
God comes and Jesus is the mythology of God.
55:11
It's God's story about God, not people's story about God, and that's why there's a difference
55:17
here.
55:18
Yeah, I think that's very important because again, you even just touch on something there
55:22
that I wish we had more time, like just the use of language and modernity, like when you
55:25
say the word myth, it's the same thing like, okay, a hundred years ago, gay doesn't mean
55:29
the same as it does now or like whatever these different words are that colloquially, we just
55:34
use them differently.
55:36
That's obviously very important to take into effect when you're looking at certainly ancient
55:39
documents that are thousands of years old.
55:41
So the last thing I want you to touch on before we get you out of here is what you talk about
55:45
in the book towards the end, which is the dangers of becoming and as you call it, abbreviated
55:51
Christian.
55:52
So I guess you could go ahead and define what that is for us and then talk to us about
55:56
why that is such a dangerous way to operate.
55:59
Well you would say this even on your show that there are certain attributes of masculinity
56:03
that if we simply reject them, we are abbreviating what our role is in culture, what our role
56:08
is in our families, what our role is in our marriage, if we decide that we're just going
56:11
to reject certain attributes that are driven really by our biochemistry, we would be abbreviated
56:16
in some way.
56:17
Well the same thing is true for Christians, I mean we have been called to give the reason
56:21
for the hope we have in Jesus and the entire history, the earliest Christians were defenders
56:26
of the faith.
56:27
If you look at the earliest church fathers and earliest public Christians who basically
56:33
making a defense against attacks against Christianity, we have to take our responsibility seriously.
56:40
If you think well you know I think I have responsibility to evangelism, well evangelism
56:43
in this century is spelled apologetics because that is what we have to do in this culture
56:49
and it turns out that we're not actually, we're called to make disciples and part of
56:54
that is going to be evangelism, part of that is going to be well why is this true?
56:57
And so we are called to do this, this is our duty as Christians, we make two professions,
57:04
two claims, two decisions, one for Christ and one to defend what we know is true.
57:09
And that's what we do as Christians, we're both of those.
57:11
If you don't do the second one, if you just make a decision for Christ but never learn
57:14
how to defend what's true, you are abbreviated, you're not quite the Christian you ought to
57:20
be, not that we have to earn our Christian, that's not what I'm saying, but we've been
57:24
called from the beginning, it's Peter doesn't say hey if you feel like it or some of you
57:28
should be ready to defend this, you should hire an apologist occasionally, read an apologetics
57:33
book, no, he says you need to be able to give the reason for the hope you have in Jesus
57:37
with gentleness and respect.
57:39
So I think that's what I fear is that we don't do the second thing very well, you know we
57:44
can wear the Rams shirt but we have no idea who's playing on the team.
57:47
So it's time for us to know who's playing on the team and why this is true before our
57:52
kids decide it's not true.
57:55
I absolutely cosign that again, I know that a lot of people they don't have disputatious
57:59
natures so they don't want to prepare themselves for a fight because they want to avoid the
58:03
fight entirely but what they don't understand is just like a physical altercation, the fight
58:07
may come to your doorstep and at that moment you don't have time to train anymore, you're
58:12
left with whatever tools that you have at your disposal and hopefully it's not you and
58:15
your wimpy little arms.
58:17
So the same thing in your Christian walk is when someone comes to challenge you and that
58:21
challenge may come in the form of your 16 year old daughter or son and you have nothing
58:26
with which to inform them as to why you have your faith in the way that you do.
58:30
That's a dangerous proposition just for just about any Christian.
58:33
So Jim as always when you and I talk I have 17 more things I wish we could have talked
58:37
about but we are out of time.
58:39
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
58:41
No, Kyle, I'll tell you this and please invite me back because I love doing this podcast
58:44
with you.
58:45
If you want more information on this latest edition of the book is go to coldcaseChristianitybook.com
58:49
we want to say any more about that it's all the information is there but I'm willing to
58:52
come back anytime Kyle just let me know.
58:55
Absolutely that is in the show notes guys Jim thank you for coming back on undaunted life
58:58
a man's podcast.
59:00
Thanks I appreciate you.
59:01
There you go guys I hope you enjoyed my time with Jay Warner Wallace but before we let you
59:04
go we are going to do a quick resilience boost out undaunted life our mission is equipping
59:08
men to push back darkness with content that forges spiritual mental and physical resilience.
59:13
So here's a link that I've got for you today I've got an Amazon link to cold case Christianity
59:16
the updated and expanded edition because there's other links to the older version this is a
59:21
link to the newer edition.
59:22
I've got a link to his previous appearance on the show episode 275 a link to his website
59:27
which is the one he mentioned the show cold case Christianity.com and also a link to his
59:31
YouTube channel you guys should definitely subscribe.
59:34
Thank you guys for listening to this episode wherever you're listening to this please subscribe
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I'm your host Kyle Thompson remember keep pushing back darkness keep forging spiritual
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