Best Historical Argument for the Resurrection and Why Scholars Can't Dismiss It | Wesley Huff Ep 232

0:00 There are other Messianic [music] movements in the ancient world,

0:03 but I bet you could name any of the individuals involved in those.

0:06 And there's a reason why we're asking questions

0:08 about Jesus of Nazareth and not Simon bar Kokhba.

0:11 Wesley Huff, welcome to my podcast.

0:13 It's a pleasure to be here.

0:14 I am a trained historian.

0:15 I work primarily in the area of New Testament manuscripts.

0:19 Oh, that's cool.

0:20 One of the points that I make when I have to do presentations on this is

0:23 that as time goes on we're not getting

0:24 farther away from the original wording of the Bible,

0:27 we're actually getting closer to it.

0:28 How does the Bible compare to other ancient documents that we do trust?

0:31 it depends on what we mean when we say trust and compare.

0:35 Sounds like my dad.

0:36 Speaking in tongues in the New

0:38 Testament is almost exclusively an actual language.

0:43 The English Bible is changed,

0:45 but it's changed for the sake of clarity, not corruption.

0:47 You know, if you evaluate what Jesus' [music] claims actually are about himself,

0:50 he's either lying through his teeth, he's either a lunatic,

0:53 or he's the Lord of the universe who actually validated the claims

0:56 that he made about who he is by rising from the dead.

0:58 [music] The people who rise from the dead have more

1:00 credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead.

1:07 [music] Wesley Huff, welcome to my podcast.

1:12 It's a pleasure to be here.

1:13 I'm really excited to talk to you.

1:15 Uh I know we just had you film a course for Peterson Academy,

1:19 which I'm I'm so thrilled about.

1:21 I think I first saw you I saw you before you went on Rogan,

1:24 but I saw some of your stuff on Instagram and I was like,

1:27 "Yes, this is the kind of thing that would have helped me uh

1:32 the like the logical part of my brain uh before I became a Christian.

1:36 And I didn't really see a lot of that or really any of that online.

1:39 I probably could have dug deeper,

1:41 but I wasn't a Christian, so I wasn't digging that deep.

1:45 But uh before we get started, for anyone who isn't familiar with you,

1:48 although I'm sure a lot of my audience is,

1:50 can you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do?

1:55 Yeah, so I am a trained historian.

1:57 I work primarily in the area of New Testament manuscripts,

2:01 although I look at kind of the ancient literary culture more broadly.

2:05 And so I study ancient scribal culture.

2:09 So the ways that scribes wrote and particularly the features

2:13 that they incorporated into manuscripts

2:17 that made things like reading publicly easier.

2:21 So Okay.

2:22 Yeah, so it's called paratextual features and readers

2:25 aids is kind of the formal category.

2:27 So I look at a number of Christian manuscripts from the 2nd and 3rd

2:31 centuries and rather the conclusion I'm drawing

2:33 is can we differentiate between a manuscript

2:36 that was produced privately as someone's like

2:39 personal copy say of the Gospel of John or that was produced for a public

2:44 reading liturgical setting in a Christian community.

2:47 So I do comparative analysis with a number of ancient literary works,

2:51 but then because my area is it's New Testament studies formally,

2:56 but it kind of crosses over into early church

2:58 history and then kind of broader antiquity in general.

3:01 I I get away with talking about a bunch of different stuff.

3:04 Wow, okay.

3:05 That's very niche.

3:07 That's cool though.

3:08 Did you were you a Christian before you went into that?

3:11 Yeah, so I grew up as a missionary kid.

3:13 My My parents were missionaries both in Pakistan

3:15 and then the in the Middle Eastern country Jordan when

3:19 I was very young and then my dad was a pastor for a long long time now retired,

3:24 but so I grew up was both a missionary kid and a pastor's kid.

3:28 So very much within a Christian context,

3:31 but it was in my teen years in sifting through some

3:34 of the things granting that my parents

3:38 raised me to believe something very specific,

3:40 but kind of figuring out you know sifting through is my parents

3:45 telling me to believe this a good enough reason to believe it.

3:48 And I don't think it's a bad reason.

3:49 I want my kids to believe things because I tell them.

3:52 But, uh going through some of that data and living in a missionary household,

3:58 uh I'd read the Quran as a teenager.

4:00 I'd read a number of other literature.

4:02 We had a Book of Mormon in our house.

4:05 Um I read the Bhagavad Gita.

4:07 And so, just trying to figure out, okay, well,

4:09 what's really going on in terms of these big

4:12 worldview questions and is Christianity really the answer?

4:17 Yeah, okay.

4:18 And did you come across anything in your findings

4:21 that surprised you since you've been studying this?

4:24 I mean, I think I was definitely solidified

4:30 in the worldview that I was raised in uh because

4:33 I felt like it genuinely answered answers that that fit

4:39 within categories like logical consistency and empirical adequacy,

4:44 experiential relevance, and historical accuracy.

4:47 Uh when I investigated things like, say, the Quran,

4:51 I found that there were more red flags than there weren't.

4:54 Even in some of the narratives and some of some

4:56 of the stories that I was familiar with with the Bible,

4:59 the Quran would tell similar stories but seemed to get the details wrong.

5:03 And it was that just comparing it to the Bible or historically?

5:07 On both ends.

5:08 I mean, if if you like in my field in New Testament studies,

5:12 even the most radically skeptical scholars will say,

5:15 "If we can't really even know anything about Jesus,

5:17 we know that he was crucified under the Roman governor

5:20 Pontius Pilate." And that's something

5:22 that's fundamentally denied within the Quran.

5:24 Chapter 4:157 denies the crucifixion outright.

5:28 And so, there are ways that that Muslims try to get

5:30 around that, um that Jesus may have survived the crucifixion.

5:34 And so, in that particular passage when it says

5:37 that they neither killed him nor did they crucify him,

5:40 well, maybe what the maybe they tried to crucify him

5:43 but they didn't kill him kind of kind of thing.

5:45 But, I I found things that I I just didn't think lined up perfectly.

5:51 And talking with Muslims,

5:52 not really getting answers that sufficed in terms of my curiosity.

5:58 And and the thing that stood out to me about Jesus in particular

6:03 was that it the Christian worldview hinged on him being a historical character.

6:08 Mhm.

6:09 Whereas if you in my investigation of something like Buddhism,

6:14 it could have been another character who came up with the philosophical

6:18 system that eventually was described as Buddhism in terms of, you know,

6:23 the the path and um the the philosophical categories.

6:27 It didn't have to be Gautama Siddhartha who who we refer to as the Buddha.

6:32 But it had to be Jesus.

6:34 And the historical information around the person

6:36 of Jesus I I've just found sufficient.

6:40 Okay, fascinating.

6:42 I mean, that's good.

6:43 And I suppose I've found it sufficient too, otherwise I wouldn't be a Christian.

6:46 But um just based on the text like from a historian's perspective,

6:51 uh how does the Bible compare to other ancient documents that we do trust?

6:55 Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on what we mean when we say trust and compare.

7:00 Like I I think Sounds like my dad.

7:03 Yeah, that's right.

7:04 out of here.

7:05 Um but but I think, you know,

7:06 the definitions matter in the sense of how we're defining those categories.

7:11 Uh when we're talking about something like Alexander the Great,

7:14 we're waiting about 450 years between when he lived

7:17 and when our first kind of comprehensive biographical material comes up.

7:21 So, there's a guy named Arrian who

7:23 who wrote our first kind of comprehensive biography.

7:26 And it's not that we distrust that biographical material.

7:30 There's reasons to believe that Arrian got

7:33 significant details about Alexander the Great's life right.

7:36 But it was 450 years later.

7:38 It was, and that's not unusual for the ancient world.

7:40 I think because we live in such a hyper literate culture,

7:44 we assume that people should be writing

7:46 things down during the lifetimes of individuals, right?

7:49 Yeah.

7:49 And that's just not how things operated in the ancient world.

7:52 Uh is some of the best biographies we have

7:55 by individuals uh like uh Velleius Paterculus or Tacitus

7:59 or Suetonius or Cassio Dio of the Roman

8:02 emperors are coming in periods after they actually lived,

8:06 sometimes centuries afterwards, right?

8:09 And and this is just the norm.

8:11 And the fact that we're waiting a few decades

8:14 for Jesus is actually closer in proximity and interestingly enough,

8:20 I would argue, within the kind of cultural

8:23 and uh uh literary memory of Jesus Yeah.

8:27 than the vast majority of the people who we

8:30 would just kind of assume existed within the ancient world.

8:34 Oh, that's cool.

8:35 I didn't know that.

8:37 That's cool.

8:38 Okay.

8:39 Um I've got a whole bunch of questions that I spent a bit of time on.

8:43 Okay.

8:43 And I don't was like sometimes I want to have a conversation,

8:45 but there are a bunch of things I actually want answered.

8:48 So, I'm going to run through a few of them.

8:50 Okay.

8:50 Um how close how close are modern Bibles to original manuscripts?

8:56 And does it matter which translation you read from your perspective?

9:00 Yeah, that's a great question.

9:01 So, interestingly enough,

9:03 one of the points that I make when I have to do presentations on this is

9:06 that as time goes on, we're not getting

9:08 farther away from the original wording of the Bible,

9:10 we're actually getting closer to it.

9:12 Okay.

9:13 as time chronologically goes on I would argue that because of the evidence

9:18 that we've actually had the privilege

9:21 to be available to us mainly the manuscripts,

9:25 although not limited to it we are able to track and trace

9:31 the chain of custody back to the original wording more accurately.

9:35 So, the way I often word this is if you compare say

9:38 modern translation of the Bible to something like the King James Bible.

9:41 Yeah.

9:41 So, the King James Bible is translated between 1604 and 1611.

9:45 It's translated not from handwritten manuscripts as much as it's translated

9:49 from printed editions of the Greek New Testament and Hebrew Old Testament.

9:53 Okay.

9:54 So, there's a printed edition of the Bloomberg Hebrew text.

9:58 And then there are these seven printed editions of the Greek New Testament.

10:04 Um five by a guy named Desiderius Erasmus,

10:07 who was this great Dutch scholar in the Middle Ages,

10:11 and then updates by a guy named Stephanus and a guy named Beza.

10:14 And that kind of sits like is the center that like

10:17 the base for what the King James translators are primarily using.

10:22 Okay.

10:23 The main text that are being used are the editions of Erasmus.

10:28 Those are primarily built on 31 approximate manuscripts

10:35 um that go back to approximately the 11th century.

10:40 So, there's a there's a bit of a there's a bit of a blurriness to that.

10:43 Uh Erasmus consulted an an individual named Bombasius in Rome to check

10:51 a manuscript that existed in the Vatican known as Codex Vaticanus,

10:54 which is actually from the 4th century.

10:57 But, if we skip ahead like 2026 today,

11:00 we're not only aware of those 31 approximate manuscripts

11:03 that the King James translation's base text was relied upon,

11:06 but we have close just over 5,000 more Greek manuscripts that have been dug up

11:12 and have been analyzed and have been transcribed

11:15 and translated and so on and so forth.

11:17 And so, that's not to cast dispersion on the King James Bible,

11:21 which I think is a very well-done translation, especially for its time.

11:25 We just have more information.

11:26 In the 19th century, we just dug up more.

11:29 That that definitely makes sense.

11:30 So, when people are re- reading on like ESV, Mhm.

11:34 that doesn't necessarily mean it's like

11:36 the dumbed-down version of the King James.

11:38 No, definitely not.

11:40 Um because modern translations take into account the breadth of the evidence.

11:45 So, the vast majority of the manuscript evidence that we have

11:48 in terms of something like the earliest copies of the papyri,

11:52 those that you know,

11:53 the documents written between the 2nd and 4th centuries on papyrus,

12:00 we were just not we didn't we didn't even know of them Yeah, yeah.

12:04 in in the 17th century when the King James translation.

12:06 Now, the King James translators would have utilized that if they had it.

12:10 They just didn't have it.

12:11 Um and so in in regards to that, yeah,

12:17 an ESV is taking into consideration the breadth of the material.

12:21 Cool.

12:22 And something like the Dead Sea Scrolls, right?

12:24 It did you know, those were discovered between 1946 and 1957.

12:28 And so, we just know more now.

12:30 So, that's why I say, you know,

12:32 as time goes on, even though chronologically the 17th

12:36 century is closer to the 1st century than we are,

12:40 the available data that we've been able to analyze and study

12:46 uh is just far more in the in the modern era.

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14:41 I grew up like with my dad telling me

14:44 the psychological significance behind some of these Old Testament stories.

14:47 He was always reading in the King James version and as a kid I was like,

14:51 "Oh my gosh, this is a lot.

14:53 I'm not really sure what's going on." But then

14:54 I felt like when I first became a Christian,

14:56 I felt like I was cheating using using the ESV cuz I was like I get it.

15:01 It resonates.

15:02 It feels good.

15:03 But like am I am I doing things, I don't know, Yeah.

15:07 the easy way or something.

15:09 Yeah, I mean if you want to read a King James version,

15:10 I've no problem with that, but I think

15:12 there is aspects of the language that is archaic.

15:15 There there's language and this isn't the fault of the King James translators.

15:18 There are certain wordages.

15:21 My friend Mark Ward has an excellent book uh

15:24 titled The Use and Abuse of the King James Bible.

15:26 And in it, he has lists of words

15:29 that are either outdated or have actually changed their meaning.

15:32 Oh, yeah, of course.

15:35 to run into words.

15:35 So, the the key example that um my friend Mark uses is halt.

15:40 So, in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal,

15:45 you have this kind of grand narrative.

15:47 Elijah's in this competition.

15:49 Uh we in my house for our kids,

15:51 we have this this book that's called the the God contest.

15:54 And it's the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, right?

15:57 The prophets of Baal, they come and they're challenged by Elijah, you know,

16:00 if Baal is the God that exists, you you try to sacrifice.

16:03 You you put some put the bulls on the altar

16:05 and see if Baal can call down fire to burn things up.

16:09 And doesn't work.

16:10 And then Elijah gets them to pour all this water on the altar,

16:12 you know, really soak it.

16:14 And then he calls down fire from Yahweh, from God,

16:17 and then he burns up and there's nothing left.

16:19 And in the the meantime, he's mocking the prophets of Baal,

16:22 you know, maybe Baal's on the toilet.

16:23 Maybe Baal's gone for gone for a vacation kind of thing.

16:26 Um but in the midst of that, the King James translation has

16:32 this this terminology where it says he's he's talking to Israel and he says,

16:37 "How long will the halt And so, you think,

16:42 okay, well, what does that word mean, halt?

16:45 Well, if I ask you, you know, Michaela, what does the word halt mean?

16:48 Like stop suddenly.

16:49 Yeah, exactly, right?

16:50 Halt, who goes there?

16:51 Kind of thing, right?

16:52 But if you look at like an ESV, um it says something like,

16:57 "How long will you go back and forth?" Oh, yeah, that's not the same thing.

17:01 wait, wait a minute.

17:02 Wha- what's where's the what's happening here, right?

17:05 That's a way different, yeah.

17:07 Until you go to the New Testament and you

17:08 find out that Jesus does things like he cures, he heals the halt and the blind.

17:15 And halt in Elizabethan King James language means

17:19 to to be like physically disabled, to to stumble.

17:24 Like And so when Elijah says, "How long will you halt be?" It's like,

17:28 "How long will you you kind of limp in in regards to this decision?" Yeah, yeah.

17:34 And so that's one that's even like a word

17:37 that we would associate with something that's archaic,

17:39 you know, "Halt, who goes there?" But we're still getting it wrong.

17:42 Wow.

17:43 Right?

17:43 And so there are things like that.

17:45 There are things uh there are other words that do we just don't use anymore.

17:49 Um There are just passages in the King James.

17:52 So if if someone is like starting out and they

17:55 they're just assuming well the King James is the Bible,

17:58 I'll read the King James.

17:59 I think they're it's not the worst thing they could possibly do.

18:04 I just think they're going to be better served

18:06 with a modern translation that's actually going to be understandable.

18:09 Mhm.

18:09 I I was.

18:11 Mhm.

18:11 And I was pretty familiar with the King James,

18:13 not from a not from like a a Christian perspective exactly,

18:17 but I was familiar with it, but ESV I was like,

18:19 "This just there's like less of a it's less hard to listen

18:25 to God I think that way if it's in an understandable language,

18:27 but I was like, "Maybe I'm being lazy or something." But I like that argument.

18:31 I like the halt argument.

18:32 I'm going to remember that.

18:34 Yeah.

18:33 That's very interesting.

18:34 I often say like the English Bible is changed,

18:37 but it's changed for the sake of clarity not corruption.

18:40 So it's it's in order to actually be understood read and applied to your life,

18:46 it makes sense that there are just and we

18:49 just find more about what certain terms mean.

18:53 So in the King James at I think I think it's 2 Chronicles 26:18, it says,

18:59 "At Parbar westward four at the causeway and two

19:01 at Parbar." So you read that and you go,

19:03 "I don't know what that means." Right?

19:05 Um and you read the ESV and it says something like,

19:07 "As for the court to the west,

19:08 there were two at the court and four at the road itself." You're like,

19:12 "Okay, I know what that means." And there

19:14 are certain words that in the 17th century, they didn't know what a parbar was.

19:21 So, they transliterated it.

19:23 The Hebrew word is literally parbar.

19:26 And so, they were like, "We don't know what this word means.

19:28 We'll transliterate it." And so, but now,

19:30 because of our expansion of the Semitic language, we know that means a court.

19:35 And so, you we can translate it as court.

19:37 So, yeah, does that impact like the essential truth of the Christian faith?

19:41 No, but do you want to know what it actually says?

19:45 Yes, then read, you know, an NIV and ESV and and NIV and NLT.

19:50 You're You're going to be best served in that way.

19:53 Cool.

19:54 Okay.

19:55 Um what's your perspective on whether or not a Christian can lose salvation?

20:02 Mhm.

20:03 I would say ultimately,

20:05 what we see within the testimony of scripture is that if someone truly

20:08 has had in the language of salvation that we see in the Bible,

20:13 the heart of stone removed and they're given a heart of flesh,

20:18 they're empowered by the spirit,

20:20 and we look at something like John chapter 6, where Jesus says,

20:24 "All the Father gives to me, I will raise up on the last day,

20:29 and no one can snatch them from my Father's

20:30 hand." I think it is impossible for a true,

20:35 genuine believer to lose their salvation.

20:38 Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't people who have

20:43 like profound experiences where they think that they are born again,

20:49 and then maybe later in their life

20:51 they backtrack on that or something like that.

20:53 I mean, the parable of the the seed and the sowers, right?

20:56 It's communicates this.

20:58 There are people that are going to fall on rocky ground,

21:00 they're going to, you know,

21:02 have the the shoots of the root in in shallow ground,

21:06 but then as the winds and the rain come, they're they're not going to survive.

21:10 Um I can think of people in my own life who

21:14 it appeared at face value to have a genuine conversion experience,

21:19 and then later in life they decide, you know, I don't actually believe this.

21:24 I'm just not convinced that you can know the creator

21:26 of the universe and have a personal relationship with him,

21:29 and then decide that that you can be made

21:32 a new creation in Christ and then undo that.

21:36 I just I look at the angel coming to Mary and saying,

21:40 you will name him Jesus because he will save his people.

21:43 And the emphaticness of that, not may save his people,

21:46 not could save his people, but that he will save his people.

21:50 And so I see that and and I don't, along with you know,

21:55 there are uh passages like uh the Gospel of John chapter 6,

21:59 where Jesus is talking to the Jews and he's

22:02 saying things like that, and then he's saying,

22:04 listen, you don't understand what I'm saying because my sheep hear my voice,

22:08 and you're not my sheep.

22:10 You're you're not getting it.

22:11 Something's not clicking.

22:12 And for that reason,

22:14 I think a genuine believer who has been transformed by the spirit,

22:20 it is impossible to lose their salvation.

22:22 That doesn't mean that there aren't periods of time where maybe we we waver,

22:26 um you know, dark nights of the soul as John Wesley would describe it,

22:29 but at the end of the day,

22:32 the perseverance of the saints is something that is is going

22:35 to follow through in the life of the believer till the end.

22:41 Okay, cool.

22:42 I had a experience like that when I first when my mom had cancer

22:47 and then in the hospital said and went from being like I would say agnostic,

22:52 not atheist, but agnostic to Catholic.

22:56 And we were like, that's weird.

22:59 Um for a long time after that I was like, she changed, you know,

23:03 like um she became a lot more patient and kind

23:06 in a completely different way and I I knew my mom.

23:09 I was 27 or something at that point, so it was a big change and I was like,

23:13 okay, whatever that is that she has, I want to have that peace.

23:17 Like that's a real thing.

23:18 Everybody in my family noticed that, okay,

23:20 maybe we weren't religious or Christian, but we could see a peace.

23:25 She like exuded a peace that wasn't there

23:27 before and she was like, yeah, it's God.

23:30 Mhm.

23:30 Um and then when I met my husband because

23:33 he he's been a Christian for his entire life,

23:36 I had an experience that I thought was me getting saved and I was

23:39 convinced I was saved for like this was I think it was almost 2 years.

23:44 It might have been a year and a half and I was

23:46 reading the Bible and I was praying and I was pretty convinced,

23:51 but then a year and a half later, it might have been 2 years,

23:56 um I like it hit me um in a completely

24:02 different way than it had before and I was like,

24:05 I wonder how many people haven't because you don't know and you don't know,

24:10 I think, you don't know until you're saved what it

24:12 what it feels like or um how overwhelming that experience is.

24:17 Mhm.

24:18 Um and so I misattributed it for a whole year and a half and it took

24:22 some kind of bad periods um and then for some reason that was time for me.

24:31 And I guess another question that could lead off of this is

24:33 how much of being saved is on the individual versus God's timing.

24:39 Mhm.

24:40 I mean, at the end of the day, I think that the act of salvation,

24:47 of taking someone from death to life, is a work of God and God entirely.

24:53 I think when you read scripture and you see, you know,

24:57 Paul in Romans talking about us being enemies of God,

25:01 us being children of wrath, and then being becoming children of God.

25:06 That's a spiritual work that we're we're fighting against

25:11 the work of the Spirit until our eyes are opened.

25:14 And in order to realize that truly and fundamentally,

25:18 I believe that is what the testimony of scripture communicates is

25:21 that it is a work of God in the person's life.

25:24 When Jesus says that he's knocking on the door,

25:28 the whole reason you're able to hear him is because there's

25:31 an empowering of the Spirit to even hear the knocking to begin with.

25:34 Because our fleshly desire is going to want to drown that out.

25:39 We're going to be, you know,

25:41 uh we're going to be tempted by the whims and the ways of the world.

25:46 And the the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh,

25:49 and the pride of life are going to attempt to drown that out.

25:52 I think so I think that the work of salvation is entirely a work of God.

25:59 And I'm very thankful and I see that in my own life.

26:02 Like I know my own heart and I know it's kind of proclivities that are acting,

26:08 that are constantly trying to pull me away.

26:10 And apart from God breaking into my life and taking

26:15 my heart of stone and giving me a heart of flesh,

26:18 my desire is to choose all of those things.

26:21 Right?

26:21 It's not necessarily that God is throwing us a life preserver

26:25 and it's our duty to like reach out and grab the life preserver.

26:27 I think we're actively trying to swim down to the bottom of the ocean.

26:31 And That's way darker.

26:32 I shouldn't even laugh at that, but

26:34 I know, but you you think about like our our own

26:36 our own like the the the innateness of our depravity.

26:41 And I think, you know,

26:41 there are there glimmers of hope in that we're all created in the image of God.

26:45 And so, of course, you know, even people who have no understanding,

26:48 no desire for God can do good things.

26:51 Of course, they can.

26:52 Because they're they be they bear the image of their creator.

26:55 And so it's less of a matter of like can you do good things if you're not

26:58 a believer and more of a question of what's

27:02 the point of those good things to begin with?

27:04 You know, where are we coming up with a standard

27:06 to ground what we call good or not good?

27:09 But I I think it genuinely is it's a work of God in our life

27:14 that thanks be to God he broke into my life and he renewed me.

27:20 And he opened my eyes.

27:22 There's con- there's this constant language of um he that is Jesus saying,

27:27 "If you have ears to hear, listen.

27:29 You know, if you have eyes to see,

27:31 see." And then that's parallel sometimes even with his miracles.

27:35 You know, opening a blind man's eyes.

27:38 That this blind man he he can't see,

27:40 he can't comprehend the world around him visually until I open his eyes.

27:45 And then there being almost like a spiritual parallel

27:47 in the teachings of Jesus where then he's saying,

27:50 "You're not going to understand these things.

27:53 You know, you my my sheep hear my voice

27:55 and you're not my sheep so you're not getting this." Yeah.

27:58 Right.

27:58 He raises Lazarus from the dead and then what did the Pharisees try to do?

28:01 They scheme to try to figure out how to kill Lazarus.

28:04 Well, I'm sorry.

28:05 Did you just see what happened?

28:07 So I I think I think it is a the the like theological term is monergism.

28:12 It's a monergistic act.

28:13 It's a it's a the single act.

28:15 It's God that's you know,

28:17 reaching into our lives and he's he's renewing

28:21 our our minds to really understand what's going on.

28:26 So then one of the things that happened to me

28:29 when I was saved was even though I'd been

28:31 reading the Bible and trying to understand it was

28:33 that it was like a different language came out from it.

28:36 It was like I was getting way deeper meaning.

28:38 I was understanding parts that I had almost skipped like subconsciously.

28:43 And it's not like I was trying to skim through the Bible

28:46 but I was re- I was rereading parts of the Bible and was like,

28:49 I didn't even notice this like whole line.

28:51 Like a lot of the demonic stuff I didn't realize how much there is about

28:56 demons in the Bible until I read it when I was saved and I was like,

29:00 I've read this before and just skimmed over that part.

29:03 That's terrifying.

29:04 Yeah.

29:05 Um so then why is the purpose of talking about it then to make people aware

29:14 and like help them identify patterns of when

29:16 God is kind of knocking on the door?

29:18 Is that do you think the purpose behind spreading the gospel?

29:22 Yeah, I think we kind of live in this tension

29:24 between uh Jesus' Great Commission to make disciples of all nations

29:29 and something like when Peter writes to the dispersed church

29:31 in the ancient world and he says in 1 Peter 3:15 and 16,

29:35 "But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord.

29:37 Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason

29:41 for the hope that you have." And he prefaces

29:43 it by you you you follows it up by saying,

29:45 "But do so with gentleness and respect,

29:47 keeping a clear conscience so that those who speak maliciously against your good

29:50 behavior in Christ will be ashamed

29:51 of their slander." So it's this juxtaposition.

29:54 Do I believe that salvation is a work of the Spirit?

29:56 Yes, I do.

29:58 But I'm I also am commanded to give an answer, to give a reason.

30:03 And the word that's used there in Greek is apologia.

30:08 It's a legal term.

30:09 It's literally what a a defense lawyer would

30:12 do in standing up before a jury saying,

30:15 "I'm I'm giving defense for my client." And so yeah,

30:20 we we give an answer for the hope that we have.

30:23 And part of that is, you know,

30:25 I've talked to people who they've put up all these barriers.

30:28 They have these intellectual barriers barriers to God and I talk

30:31 to them and as those kind of fall by the way,

30:34 I can see they're like, "Okay, I've no more excuse.

30:36 I've no more excuse.

30:37 I've no more excuse." And then God uses

30:39 that to lead this person into the admission that okay,

30:44 you know, I I have a decision now.

30:46 I either follow God or I choose to rebel.

30:50 But, um And and I think that's that's where kind of the conversation

30:56 it is engaged in is that I don't think salvation is an intellectual endeavor.

31:02 I don't think it's just about knowing enough.

31:05 Because if You can't If you could prove God, you wouldn't need faith, too.

31:09 I think that I think there's a component of that.

31:11 It's It's It's also the fact that faith in the Greek,

31:15 the term pistis can equally as well be translated as trust.

31:20 And so it's something like this.

31:21 Like I trust based on evidence.

31:25 In that my wife is back in Canada with my four children.

31:29 And I have trust I have faith that she is

31:33 doing everything that is right to parent those children, right?

31:37 In my absence.

31:38 But I know that I have faith in that because I know she is.

31:42 I have evidence to to point to that.

31:44 I know the character of my wife.

31:46 And I think in that sense there's an aspect

31:49 of There are certain things that we don't understand about God.

31:52 But based on the character of what he has given us to work off of, we can then,

31:57 you know, fill in the gaps and say, "Maybe I don't understand everything.

32:02 But I do know enough to put my trust and faith in God in moments where I don't

32:08 really know what's going on because of what he

32:10 has revealed to me." And so there's there's that.

32:14 Um I think there's also an aspect of, you know,

32:17 God uses the evidence that he gives into the world

32:21 to when the person stands before him in judgment to say,

32:25 "You know, you you really don't have an excuse.

32:28 You were given even if it's just creation."

32:31 At the beginning of the book of Romans,

32:32 Paul says that God's invisible qualities and divine attributes have been

32:35 revealed by nature by creation so that no man is without excuse.

32:41 And that word is unapologetus, without a defense.

32:46 And there's an aspect of no one's going to be

32:47 able to stand before God and say I just didn't know.

32:50 Because there's an aspect of the creation that's also communicating something.

32:55 Maybe, you know, not specifically about who the character of Jesus is,

32:59 but I want people to understand that there's a decision that they need to make,

33:05 but I I think I think it's reasonable.

33:08 I think the evidence is is on the side of the Christian worldview.

33:12 Here's a question for you.

33:13 When you think about the questions of like the intellectual barriers

33:20 to faith or what do you find as the biggest hang-ups for people?

33:28 Well, let me see.

33:32 How can I word this?

33:34 So, one of the really intense I don't know

33:38 what word to use other than the spiritual things

33:41 I went through like when I got saved cuz

33:44 it was it was a very dramatic experience for me,

33:48 was God telling me, and not in a like voice exactly,

33:54 but showing me that I had been trying to rationalize like all the way down Mhm.

33:59 Um something that I couldn't rationalize, that I was too small to rationalize.

34:06 So, to answer that question,

34:07 like how does like the kind of rationalization play a role or hinder people?

34:14 I I think people are trying to rationalize

34:18 something that you that you can't rationalize,

34:20 and I think it says in the Bible that you need faith is part of it.

34:25 Faith is faith is all of it.

34:27 So, I what like what changed for me was

34:33 obviously if somebody can somebody could explain the historical evidence.

34:39 But I kind of knew the historical evidence and that's not what

34:41 really did it for me even though that's what I thought would.

34:44 Um I needed to have that extra step of you have

34:50 faith that this was real and faith that we were created

34:56 in the image of God and everything that has to do

34:58 with that and that's part of what saves you and that's what I

35:01 was shown when I was saved and I was like oh

35:03 okay and it was like this weight was lifted that I didn't

35:07 have to understand all the way to the bottom and that not

35:10 only did I not have to but I wasn't able to.

35:13 Like I there was there's no way to to prove it so I I think um it

35:19 was kind of a roundabout answer but I think a lot of people are stuck on proving

35:23 why it makes sense all the way to the bottom when part of it is that you

35:28 you need faith and you can't explain something

35:32 like God all the way to the bottom.

35:36 So that's what I was shown was just like kind of how dare you

35:40 try to explain something as big as me all the way to the bottom.

35:44 You can't do it.

35:45 Yeah.

35:46 Yeah.

35:47 I don't know if that answers your question at all.

35:49 Yeah I know I I I I I get what you're saying though.

35:51 I mean I think there really is something to say.

35:54 Like I'm a I'm I find my default is very heady.

35:59 But then I interact with and work with a lot

36:01 of people who are not believers in terms

36:05 of the Christian faith but know a lot more

36:08 about the Bible than maybe I even ever will.

36:12 And I'm constantly thinking okay well what what's the difference?

36:16 Why isn't that switch toggled?

36:18 And I think you know when you read scripture

36:22 and you see Paul saying things like faith is a gift.

36:26 You're saved by faith and through grace and that that's a gift.

36:34 It's something that God gives you.

36:37 I think it helps me understand that I'm never going to argue anyone

36:41 into the kingdom nor should I try to cuz that would be exhausting.

36:46 You know, if every conversation I had I had the expectation

36:48 that someone was going to fall on their knees and say,

36:50 "Good teacher, what must I do

36:51 to inherit eternal life?" Um it's completely unrealistic.

36:54 Yeah.

36:56 And and it would be exhausting.

36:58 And and and so I I shouldn't try to.

37:00 You know, I sometimes say um that's the spirit's job, right?

37:03 The Holy Spirit has the job to do that.

37:06 My application to join the Trinity has been denied.

37:09 I failed the minimum requirements.

37:10 So let try to like my endeavor to steal the Holy Spirit's job is

37:16 a is a work in futility and I shouldn't be trying to do it.

37:20 But I still think, you know, I'm excited to tell people Yeah.

37:24 that which I think is verifiably true

37:28 even when there are legitimate true divine mysteries.

37:32 Yes.

37:33 I like that.

37:35 That was a much better answer than the answer I gave you.

37:37 Your answer was great.

37:39 Okay, I've got I've got some other good questions.

37:42 Um all right, this has been on my mind.

37:45 Mhm.

37:46 What what do you think the biblical view of suicide is?

37:52 Wow, okay.

37:53 Just throw that out there.

37:55 Yeah, I mean suicide is a complex topic because

38:00 it's wrapped up in a lot of pain and suffering.

38:05 I gave Let me give you an example.

38:07 This is cuz I just had this conversation

38:08 with my husband because like I've wondered this.

38:12 What happens if you have someone who's been in a battle Mhm.

38:16 and they're very very injured and in a lot

38:18 of pain and they decide to take their own life.

38:21 And this is like an injury that's going

38:23 to do them in and they're stuck somewhere.

38:26 Yeah.

38:26 Like what happens to those?

38:28 Cuz I find it hard to believe that that falls

38:32 into the category of something that dooms you.

38:37 But I but um and then I tried to do some digging into the Bible.

38:41 Like does it talk about suicide anywhere dooming anybody?

38:47 So that's just some context around Yeah,

38:50 I mean this was an interesting conversation cuz

38:53 early on in the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther when

38:57 he's involved in kind of his ragings against

39:00 the the um the abuses of the Catholic Church,

39:05 there's a particular story where one of his congregants commits

39:08 suicide and they won't allow this this I believe he

39:12 was like young like in his 20s to be buried

39:16 on the church grounds because this is a damnable sin.

39:20 Mhm.

39:20 And in kind of a rage Martin Luther is

39:22 Martin Luther is a little bit of an emotional person.

39:27 [laughter] He he goes and he starts digging a grave for this boy

39:31 on the church and saying that you know this person was consumed by Satan.

39:39 Like Satan was the one who led this person

39:41 to lie to himself to commit murder against his own image.

39:47 And there's kind of a wrestling there

39:51 in that when you're overcome in those moments,

39:57 I mean so a friend of actually organization I work

40:00 for a guy named Ewan Gollogher who's an MD PhD in in Toronto.

40:05 Um wrote a book called How Then Shall We Die

40:08 which talks a lot about this things like suicide, assisted suicide.

40:13 Very relevant conversation particularly where I live

40:15 in Canada made medical assistance in dying.

40:19 Yeah.

40:19 And and one of the things that I find

40:21 very profound about what UN articulates is that he says,

40:25 you know, if we human life is intrinsically bearing of worth.

40:32 We have worth by nature of bearing the image of God.

40:36 That's intrinsic to us.

40:38 It's not about what you can contribute to society.

40:41 And one of the dangers of allowing ourselves to buy into something like

40:47 medical assistance in dying is that we allow ourselves to say that if

40:53 I'm no longer able to contribute because I am too depressed or too

40:57 in pain or too in a state of any range of suffering,

41:02 then I I I don't deserve to live.

41:05 Mhm.

41:06 And even if we don't intend it to, what that tacitly

41:09 kind of says is that you don't actually have intrinsic worth.

41:13 But your ability to no longer contribute

41:15 because of whatever the range of circumstances are,

41:18 um means that you should be removed from society.

41:21 Now, that is I think more application to something

41:24 like made for someone um who has a treatable

41:28 issue than it does for someone who's genuinely

41:31 like in in the the situation that you're positing.

41:34 That they are now going through chemotherapy

41:36 and they're they're they're just in so much pain.

41:38 And and I'm sympathetic to that.

41:40 I'm sympathetic to that because I think

41:42 there is a conversation about quality of life.

41:46 And at the exact same time I feel

41:47 the tension of also understanding that, you know, life is sacred no matter what.

41:52 Um there's a particular person in my home

41:55 church community uh in Toronto who has MS.

42:00 Yeah.

42:00 And though she's very early, like in her 40s,

42:04 um she has been declining for years and is

42:09 in a very uh precarious state right now in that, you know,

42:17 she she's really not lucid most of the time,

42:22 can't move, can't talk, in a lot of pain.

42:25 Yeah.

42:26 And so looking at this particular individual and knowing

42:29 that she is just in those moments where she's able

42:32 to communicate so joyful in spite of this is it's

42:38 convicting to me in thinking about my own struggle with whatever,

42:45 you know, fill in the blank.

42:46 Mhm.

42:47 I'm not as bad as Carol.

42:49 Carol is in a genuine state of something

42:52 that would be a nightmare for most people.

42:55 And yet Carol's life is sacred.

42:59 And there's something about that that speaks profoundly to me

43:05 and just the perseverance of understanding how she lives her life.

43:12 I I don't claim to understand what any individual is going through,

43:17 especially in those kind of circumstances.

43:20 And far be it for me to pass judgment

43:23 on someone who's genuinely in those kind of states.

43:27 But at the end of the day, I would want to say, you know,

43:30 don't buy into a culture of death that tells

43:33 you that your worth is less because you are struggling

43:40 or you are in pain or you are suffering

43:43 or God cares for you more than you could ever know.

43:50 And the gift of life,

43:52 even in the times where we don't feel like it is a gift, is still sacred.

43:57 And so, you know, something like the command to not murder,

44:01 I think we should take very seriously.

44:03 You know, there's something about the violation

44:07 against the sacredness of someone else's life

44:10 or my own life that I think that I think we should take seriously,

44:13 but it's a it's a very hard question in regards to the conversation of suicide.

44:19 It it's tricky because you can see it

44:20 like the the MAID situation in Canada is insane.

44:24 And I've covered that a couple of times on the podcast where it's like

44:27 I've had some rough periods of time where I never got to that point,

44:33 you know, but I wasn't very far from getting

44:35 to that point where like maybe death would have been easier.

44:39 But the for like short trials in life,

44:41 that is so it's so risky to have that option so available.

44:46 Mhm.

44:46 Um and it's like what, 5% of deaths now or something in Canada are from MAID?

44:51 I don't don't quote me on that stat.

44:53 I just read that stat.

44:55 It was on X.

44:55 I don't know if it's real.

44:56 Right.

44:57 But it it

44:58 high no matter what the number is.

45:00 it's scary bad.

45:01 But then I can also see, you know,

45:03 like MAID's been available in some states in the US

45:05 for for decades if you're in the last 6

45:11 months of life and you're in a lot of chronic

45:13 pain and you have a, you know, stage four cancer.

45:17 And you don't want to put your family through that.

45:20 And no one really had a complaint about that until it moved beyond that.

45:26 At least not that I'd heard of.

45:28 They're like, that's a little bit that's different than this like

45:32 easy access or even the health care system being like,

45:35 well, surgery's going to be a couple year wait time.

45:38 Would you rather die?

45:39 Yeah.

45:40 Which is what's happening in Canada,

45:41 which is It's incredibly To to to describe

45:45 it as problematic is such a gross understatement.

45:48 But but it really is it's a marginalizing of value.

45:53 It it is.

45:54 And what makes it I don't know if it makes it worse or not,

45:57 but the fact that it takes so long to get

46:00 health care help in Canada or that certain things aren't available.

46:03 Yeah.

46:04 Is there aren't even like other options for these desperate people.

46:08 It makes me so angry.

46:10 The the made situation in Canada is so bad.

46:12 That was a good that was a nuanced answer.

46:14 I think that's a tricky That's a tricky question.

46:16 That's why I asked you.

46:18 Thanks.

46:19 Only the easy questions on the Michaela Peterson podcast.

46:23 [laughter]

46:23 Uh, okay.

46:23 I've got I've got a fun one.

46:25 Um, What is So, can you explain the gift of speaking in tongues?

46:32 And have you seen anybody with that and does it still exist?

46:38 So, speaking in tongues in the New

46:41 Testament is almost exclusively an actual language.

46:47 Okay, let's get into this.

46:50 Okay.

46:50 I don't think I've heard that before.

46:52 So, when you look at something like what happens

46:54 at Pentecost when you have a number of the disciples, you know, Peter's there.

47:00 They go back.

47:01 I think this is an interesting narrative because they're

47:03 preaching the gospel at the scene of the crime

47:05 only weeks after the actual resurrection of Jesus

47:08 in a place where people could have seen Jesus crucified.

47:11 And so, it's this interesting statement in terms

47:13 of if they were purposefully lying about this whole narrative,

47:16 why did they go back to ground zero where they would have

47:19 known that people could have seen Jesus die talking about how he's resurrected.

47:23 But then there's this instance where the spirit

47:26 descends and appears above the heads of uh,

47:30 the apostles in tongues of fire and they're speaking

47:33 in the language of individuals from the Jewish diaspora who had

47:38 congregated in Jerusalem for this particular event which was like

47:42 a it was a it was a religious gathering, right?

47:45 So, people from all around the the the Roman

47:50 world who are in the Jewish diaspora who aren't necessarily

47:52 speaking say the native language of Jerusalem are gathering

47:57 and the apostles are speaking to them in their own languages.

48:01 And so then you have this instance of their speaking in tongues.

48:04 Now later on in the Pauline epistles, Paul says,

48:07 "There needs to be a translator." There needs to be

48:09 someone if you have an instance of speaking in tongues,

48:12 there needs to be someone who can interpret.

48:14 Okay.

48:15 And so I think what we see primarily is that this is

48:20 a kind of supernatural experience

48:24 of someone communicating in an existing language,

48:29 in a language that they don't otherwise know.

48:33 Okay.

48:34 That But the caveat to that is

48:37 that then Paul talks about the language of angels.

48:39 And so this is usually what's capitalized

48:41 on and say like the charismatic communities of Christianity.

48:45 I'm very wary of a lot of that, although I don't totally understand it entirely.

48:50 I have never encountered that.

48:54 Um I'm not precluding that it is a possibility cuz

48:57 you do have some of these passages that talk about,

48:59 you know, if you speak in the languages of angels.

49:01 Um but I think what's going on there is is that you have

49:06 these kind of understandings of what sometimes

49:08 are referred to as the spiritual sign gifts, of speaking in tongues, of healing,

49:12 and of prophecy that are referred to in the New Testament.

49:15 I think something is going on in the New Testament that's different.

49:19 And I think it's going on in the apostolic period

49:22 in this time period where you have the disciples of Jesus going

49:26 around and preaching things for the foundation of the building

49:29 of the church where there's a uniqueness to this, to all of it.

49:34 In that time period?

49:35 In that time period.

49:36 So it's it's normative in a way that it is not now.

49:40 In that the disciples are going around and they're say healing people

49:44 in a way that we just don't see now because the disciples are building,

49:49 the apostles are building the foundation of the church.

49:52 And even if you think about the analogy

49:54 of a foundation in terms of like architecture,

50:00 you don't continue to build foundations

50:01 upon foundations upon foundations upon foundations.

50:03 That actually makes the building it compromises the integrity of the building.

50:07 Mhm.

50:07 Mhm.

50:08 And I think in that period of time you

50:11 have things like the New Testament books being written.

50:15 But in this age of the apostolic witness,

50:20 Jesus appears as the resurrected Messiah, as the savior,

50:24 as the son of God, as the second person

50:25 of the Trinity to his disciples in the upper room.

50:27 He breathes on them and he says, "I give you my spirit." And they are given

50:30 the authority to communicate in the name of Jesus.

50:34 And so there's a different level of authority that is

50:37 then codified in the books of the New Testament.

50:40 Mhm.

50:40 And so now we have the New Testament.

50:43 Now we have the books of scripture where

50:45 God speaks directly to us in a different way.

50:48 And so I mean, I think those things happen.

50:52 I have a a a miracle story in my own

50:54 life where I believe I was healed of something.

50:58 And so I think those things are reality.

51:01 I think healing, speaking in tongues, um those things happen.

51:07 Prophesying, I just don't think they're normative in the way that we

51:12 see happening in the New Testament because I think something is going

51:16 on that's different to establish the church and to kind of give

51:20 it the groundwork in order to set it off to what it is.

51:25 But if I'm taking the reading of what I see going on in the New Testament,

51:30 tongues is almost exclusively an actual language that someone can understand.

51:38 And Paul in the life of the church requires there to be an interpreter.

51:43 Wow.

51:44 I don't know what I was expecting for an answer,

51:46 but I wasn't expecting that answer.

51:48 Okay.

51:48 Did you expect me to burst out in in That would

51:51 have been That would have been amazing, but I don't

51:53 That would have That That would have gone viral, right?

51:55 That's the episode.

51:55 Yeah, that's the kind of clip I need.

51:57 [snorts] [laughter] Um No, I think I've talked to a lot

52:00 of people that are not not charismatic, but um [clears throat]

52:07 maybe more open to that.

52:08 I think it depends.

52:09 Like not not open to like that far.

52:12 Right.

52:12 But But I've also talked even people from around here.

52:15 There are a lot of churches around here in Scottsdale,

52:17 and I know there was one lady that was

52:20 doing my lashes that was going to a church,

52:22 and she said there's like a someone who could who could

52:26 see the future and all these things, and I was like Hm.

52:29 Uh maybe.

52:31 Right.

52:32 Maybe, but also maybe not.

52:33 And maybe the maybe not is fairly likely, and in that case,

52:36 maybe you should be very careful about what's going on over there.

52:39 Charismatic charismania is what we call it sometimes.

52:44 Yeah.

52:44 Yeah.

52:45 And you can see how people could get swept

52:47 up in that, and then be like conned by people,

52:49 which just gives Christianity a bad name.

52:52 So I was like So I've seen I've seen that around.

52:56 I don't know Not that I was comparing you to the that person,

52:59 but I've just I've just seen that.

53:01 Um I haven't heard that speaking in tongues might be a language.

53:05 And I didn't know that that section from Paul, so that's that's cool.

53:09 That makes sense.

53:09 That makes sense to me.

53:11 Um Okay.

53:13 Here's one I that I want to use.

53:16 Where do I have it?

53:18 My pregnancy has my brain just [laughter]

53:22 It's pretty rough just being alive right now, but I'm making it through.

53:28 Give me a sec.

53:29 Did I delete it?

53:32 Okay, I can just remember it.

53:36 Okay.

53:37 Best historical evidence for the resurrection.

53:40 Oh, okay.

53:41 Best historical resurrect evidence for the resurrection.

53:44 I mean, I take I take kind of a cumulative

53:47 approach to the resurrection in that one of the best

53:52 pieces of evidence that I think speaks to the tangibleness

53:57 of the resurrection is that you and I,

53:59 Michael, are talking about it 2,000 years later.

54:01 Yeah.

54:03 In that there are other Messianic movements in the ancient world.

54:09 But, I bet you could name any of the individuals involved in those.

54:12 And there's a reason why we're asking questions about

54:15 Jesus of Nazareth and not and not Simon bar Kokhba.

54:20 And that's because Simon bar Kokhba led a revolt

54:23 and died and his movement died with him.

54:26 And so, I think there's something unique about the movement

54:31 of Jesus that requires an explanation for what's going on.

54:36 Because we see the disciples scared

54:39 and hiding when the crucifixion event takes place.

54:44 Simon, right?

54:46 Peter, who's supposed to be the good guy, right?

54:48 He's like Jesus's right-hand man, tells Peter,

54:54 "You're going to you're going to deny me." And lo and behold,

55:00 that's what he does, right?

55:01 When push comes to shove, Peter decides three times to say,

55:06 "I don't even know who that Jesus guy is." And the disciples,

55:10 the 11 of them, because Judas has gone and hung himself,

55:13 are hiding in an upper room scared and cowering.

55:17 What What takes them from that to being this incredible missionary force?

55:25 To be able to go back into Jerusalem on something like the day of Pentecost

55:29 proclaiming the resurrection to a group of people

55:31 who very well could have seen Jesus crucified.

55:34 Something happens and I think there needs

55:37 to at minimum be an accounting for that.

55:39 And you talk to secular scholars and they will grant,

55:42 okay, the disciples had some sort of experience.

55:45 Yeah.

55:46 Right?

55:46 Something motivated them to do this because it just seems a little bit crazy.

55:53 I mean, there's the adage that liars make poor martyrs.

55:58 In that you will die for something you you believe to be true,

56:03 but something you know to be a lie,

56:06 it's a lot harder to actually go to your grave too.

56:08 Yeah, you won't push yourself that far.

56:10 Yeah, so sometimes when people hear, you know,

56:12 liars or sorry, yeah, liars make bad martyrs,

56:15 point to something like the the like suicide bombers

56:20 or or those who flew the the planes into the towers on 9/11.

56:24 True, yeah.

56:25 And my answer to that is that those aren't martyrs, those are murderers, A.

56:30 And B, they don't actually know definitively

56:33 that what they're dying for is true.

56:35 They might believe it's true,

56:37 but the difference between them and the disciples is that the disciples

56:41 both were there when Jesus died and claimed to have seen him resurrected.

56:46 Mhm.

56:47 Whereas the people who hijacked the planes on 9/11

56:51 weren't there when Muhammad was waging his, you know,

56:56 escapades in 7th century Arabia.

57:00 So, they're going off of what they believe to be true,

57:02 not what they know definitively to be true objectively.

57:05 Within their kind of own conscious experience.

57:09 And so I think, you know, there needs to be an account.

57:11 I think the breadth of the historical case

57:14 for the credibility of the Gospels is comprehensive

57:18 enough that it gives us a base work to say that the disciples were not lying,

57:24 that they believed what they were doing to be true,

57:28 and that the account for that, all

57:30 of the kind of alternatives to Jesus' resurrection,

57:36 I think ultimately fall short.

57:38 Whether we're talking about group hallucinations or you know, whatever that be,

57:43 the disciples stealing the body and trying to make up a story.

57:46 I think I think they're implausible based on then what

57:49 transpires in the years following Jesus' actual, you know, death.

57:56 That That was great.

57:57 I I already I I had known about if you if you don't

58:02 believe in a lie then you're not going to be a martyr for it.

58:04 I knew that but I hadn't connected that to they had

58:07 also seen him be crucified which

58:10 everybody basically even secular scholars believe.

58:13 Mhm.

58:14 So.

58:15 Yeah.

58:16 And they know that it's costly.

58:17 So a few a few you know, a short time after Pentecost,

58:22 Stephen who's you know, part of this inner group,

58:24 he's not one of the disciples but he's part of this inner group,

58:26 he is then proclaiming the you know,

58:28 the gospel message and then he gets stoned to death.

58:31 And the disciples see this and so that's like a warning shot across the bow.

58:35 Yeah.

58:35 They at that point know this is costly.

58:39 They could lose their lives for it.

58:40 That is the moment that you decide, okay, you know, we've gone a little too far.

58:46 Our friends are being killed.

58:47 Yeah.

58:48 So maybe we maybe we can slow our roll

58:50 in this whole conversation on the Jesus stuff.

58:53 But that's not what they do.

58:54 They seem to be more empowered than ever.

58:56 And so it's just it's I I think we see an interesting test case.

59:00 It's the whole C.S.

59:02 Lewis in Mere Christianity has a whole

59:04 the what's referred to as the Lewisian Trilemma.

59:07 That Jesus is either a liar, he's a lunatic or he's Lord.

59:10 And and I think that's still I think that still applies today.

59:14 You know, if you evaluate what Jesus' claims actually are about himself,

59:17 he's either lying through his teeth,

59:19 he's either a lunatic or he's the Lord of the universe who actually validated

59:25 the claims that he made about who he is by rising from the dead.

59:29 And so I think you know,

59:31 I think the evidence is on the side, though of course not everybody agrees,

59:35 that that actually happened,

59:37 that Jesus predicted his own death and resurrection, and then pulled it off.

59:41 And I have a friend who likes to say that people who rise

59:43 from the dead have more credibility and authority

59:46 than people who don't rise from the dead.

59:48 And so that that means something.

59:52 That's good.

59:54 I'm going to use that in conversations with people,

59:56 unsuspecting people There you go.

59:58 who aren't Christians yet.

59:59 I'm going to remember that.

1:00:00 The Stephen part is good, too.

1:00:02 Cuz yes, and they see other people suffer for for Okay, that's perfect.

1:00:07 Okay.

1:00:08 Um I'm going to wrap up, but I want to ask you a few PA questions.

1:00:12 Okay.

1:00:13 Uh like I said, I'm really glad you came to teach.

1:00:16 I think people on the platform are going to be absolutely thrilled,

1:00:21 and I've heard good things from everybody who was there,

1:00:24 and I would have gone except I'm pregnant and kind of [laughter]

1:00:27 I'm just focusing on surviving and doing that for now.

1:00:31 Fair enough.

1:00:31 But um what made you decide to agree to teach at Peterson Academy?

1:00:37 It's a good question.

1:00:38 I mean, I think I think you guys are doing something that's novel.

1:00:42 I think you're tapping into something,

1:00:44 as someone who has a broader kind of exposure to the academic world,

1:00:52 uh I think that traditional academia could very well

1:00:58 be in trouble because of a a number of factors,

1:01:02 but I think that there's room for broadening

1:01:05 the categories of how we educate people.

1:01:08 In a world where I'm seeing students turn

1:01:11 in things that are very clearly written by AI, Yeah.

1:01:15 where a lot of the universities are turning into diploma mills,

1:01:19 and where education is becoming sort of this fuzzy category of you

1:01:25 have a piece of paper or some letters behind your name,

1:01:28 but you don't seem to have any actual knowledge is becoming complicated.

1:01:34 And so I think there's room for expanding

1:01:39 the category of what we understand as post-secondary education.

1:01:45 And so I like what you guys are doing.

1:01:47 I like what your your dad has started because

1:01:49 I think that it it's tapping into something that has

1:01:53 potential longevity in a way that is affordable and is

1:01:59 approachable and that people actually want to invest in.

1:02:03 Pearson Academy is doing something that uh I think is worth being involved in.

1:02:08 Thank you.

1:02:09 I hope so.

1:02:10 Mhm.

1:02:11 I think AI is going to change I think it already is.

1:02:15 I think I think I'm already seeing I had a friend who had

1:02:19 a student who clearly submitted an AI assignment and he gave him a zero.

1:02:23 And then Wow.

1:02:25 And then the student sent in an apology letter and he thought,

1:02:28 I wonder if I check this by AI whether the apology letter was written by AI

1:02:32 and the the Oh my the probability of it being written by AI was also very high.

1:02:37 So I mean we're Oh my gosh.

1:02:40 I I'm I think we may very well see a I

1:02:44 wrote most of my essays in my undergrad by hand.

1:02:48 Oh, okay.

1:02:49 And so I I think we could be going back to that.

1:02:52 I think either that or oral examination because oral examination

1:02:56 at minimum communicates that you actually understand what you're learning.

1:02:59 Yeah.

1:03:00 Yeah, agree.

1:03:01 That or they're going to have to come up with some AI tech that can

1:03:05 identify AI faster than AI can stop sounding like AI which seems less likely.

1:03:10 Right.

1:03:11 Uh I don't know.

1:03:12 Or just do by hand.

1:03:13 That would be an easy way to do it.

1:03:14 It's hard to write those long essays by hand,

1:03:16 but something needs to change because yeah.

1:03:19 Yeah, something's something's got to give.

1:03:22 We're we're entering into like a a uh um a a point

1:03:27 of of saturation where it's getting tricky with the students that are coming in.

1:03:34 Yeah, that's for sure.

1:03:36 And is your course aimed at secular people

1:03:40 or Christians or is it kind of applicable to everybody?

1:03:42 My attempt is just to make it relevant to anybody who's who's tuning in.

1:03:45 I mean, I obviously have the bias of the fact that I'm a Christian.

1:03:49 I believe this stuff is true, and so I'm coming at something like the 66 books

1:03:53 of the Bible with a presupposition that I believe that they're inspired.

1:03:57 I believe that they have the mark of the divinity on them.

1:04:01 But I hope a fair-minded individual is able to actually

1:04:05 just look at what I'm presenting and say at minimum,

1:04:09 okay, there's there's reasonable grounds to assert

1:04:12 that this is communicating things that are true.

1:04:15 That there's reasonable grounds to look at something like the gospel biographies

1:04:19 of Jesus and say that they trace back to early eyewitness testimony.

1:04:24 I think I think that is the case,

1:04:26 and I think it's it's verifiable in that regard.

1:04:30 Um I'm hoping to present foils in in quotations of individuals

1:04:35 who communicate opposite positions of what I hold and then say,

1:04:39 you know, there are reasons why they hold these.

1:04:42 It's never It's It's hardly ever a case of we're we're arguing about the data.

1:04:48 It's It's the conclusions that we draw from the evidence that we present.

1:04:53 And so it's up to every individual to look at what is presented.

1:04:58 I'm just hoping to be able to present enough

1:05:00 information that communicates I I think this stuff is reliable.

1:05:05 I think it communicates what is so a word

1:05:08 that's often used in my field is verisimilitude,

1:05:11 which is simply a It's a great term,

1:05:12 but it just means the appearance of likelihood, truth, and probability.

1:05:17 And so, in historiography, in history,

1:05:20 we're looking for verisimilitude in all sorts of fields.

1:05:23 Does it have the fingerprint of authenticity?

1:05:26 And I think when we're looking at the various

1:05:28 books that make up the canon of the Bible, it it does have that.

1:05:34 And so, hopefully I'm trying to present

1:05:36 that in a way that is reasonable and understandable.

1:05:40 That's great.

1:05:41 I I would have taken a course on like the historical

1:05:45 reliability of the Bible in college before I was a Christian,

1:05:48 for sure, because that's what I was looking for.

1:05:50 I took a I went to an art school,

1:05:53 so it was already getting pretty progressive when I went there.

1:05:56 This was like 2012, 2013,

1:05:58 but I took a intro to theology course, which nobody took,

1:06:04 and the average age in there was probably 70, and it was all men and me.

1:06:10 I don't even know if they went to any other courses in the school.

1:06:12 It was Concordia in Montreal,

1:06:14 so I didn't know like 65 or 70-year-old men were even going there.

1:06:17 They were in this intro to theology course, and it was so far over my head.

1:06:22 It might not have been an intro course.

1:06:23 It might have been a 300-level course, I can't remember.

1:06:26 But it was so far over my head that what I was

1:06:28 trying to find was any information about the reliability of the Bible.

1:06:33 Um Anyway, I think I ended up dropping that course.

1:06:37 I was taking Latin at the time, too.

1:06:39 Nice.

1:06:39 Oh.

1:06:40 Latin Latin was harder than all other five courses I was taking.

1:06:43 And I was in psychology and classics, and all I was doing was Latin.

1:06:47 I and I I got sick, so I eventually dropped Latin, too, but I was like,

1:06:50 why do I need to learn this many conjugations

1:06:53 of each word in a language that doesn't exist anymore?

1:06:55 I think if I had had been healthier at the time,

1:06:58 I would have finished it, cuz it was really interesting to learn like the well,

1:07:02 you know this, but the background behind a lot of the words we use now,

1:07:06 I found that interesting, but I had no memory.

1:07:08 I can't believe how good your memory has been, by the way.

1:07:11 And I know I have pregnancy fog going on, so I'm feeling like

1:07:14 lesser because of that, but the number of names you just remembered was absurd.

1:07:21 So it's very pocketed cuz if you if you ask my wife, I don't remember anything.

1:07:26 But um I I think, you know,

1:07:28 part of the reason that I am really motivated for this stuff is because

1:07:34 I don't I talk to a lot of people who are way smarter than me.

1:07:38 And a lot of the stuff that they say, I feel like I'm trying to like boil down

1:07:44 to a way that has it comprehensive to me.

1:07:49 And so I I I hope that one of the reasons why people have resonated

1:07:55 with the material that I put out

1:07:56 in the world is because I'm not actually that smart.

1:07:58 I'm just really interested in the topic.

1:08:01 And so I'm trying to first learn it myself in order to be

1:08:06 able to tell other people about it in a way that I

1:08:09 wish I had heard it because that that wasn't I also took

1:08:15 like an intro to New Testament at York University and in my undergrad.

1:08:20 And um one of the things that stood out

1:08:23 to me was if you take a class on Buddhism, there's a lot of people who are

1:08:26 actually practicing Buddhists who are teaching those classes.

1:08:28 Or if you take a class on Islam, a lot of the professors are practicing Muslims.

1:08:32 But if you take a class on Christianity in a secular university,

1:08:36 it's going to be taught by an atheist or an agnostic.

1:08:39 Yeah, that's very true.

1:08:40 And so um I thought, you know, I I realized this very early on.

1:08:45 I'm sure it's not true at every university

1:08:46 and every humanities department everywhere, but I was like,

1:08:50 there seems to be something going on here where the presuppositions are

1:08:55 a lot more on the secular materialistic side than they are not for Christianity.

1:09:00 Whereas when I take the class on Islam, the guy is a believer in Islam.

1:09:06 And so, I Yeah, that's played into the conversation for me

1:09:13 is I've studied under mostly people who don't believe this stuff.

1:09:18 And that's helped me fine-tune how I do believe it.

1:09:22 Mhm.

1:09:22 And interestingly enough, it hasn't I think my dad,

1:09:26 when I got involved in this, was very worried that I

1:09:28 was going to study this stuff and that, you know,

1:09:30 the the questions and the pushbacks and all those things were going

1:09:35 to cause me to doubt what I believed more than was necessary.

1:09:39 And I actually found the opposite true.

1:09:42 Reading the the the people who the detractors

1:09:45 of the Christian worldview only made me go,

1:09:48 "Huh, I've never thought about it that way before.

1:09:49 Let me dig into why that might be." And only given me confidence that, you know,

1:09:55 what I believed all the way along or, you know,

1:09:57 what we have now is what the original authors wrote in regards to the scripture

1:10:01 or that we do have the relevant historical um in the case of the New Testament,

1:10:07 I think, you know, eyewitness accounts of who Jesus was.

1:10:10 In juxtaposition to other books that were floating around bearing

1:10:14 the names of Jesus and the apostles that just had no credibility.

1:10:18 What are those?

1:10:19 Okay, so like the the Gnostic Gospels or things like that.

1:10:22 Like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary,

1:10:24 the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas.

1:10:26 I don't even know if I know about these.

1:10:28 Okay, so the podcast is not done.

1:10:30 Okay, but then then it can be done.

1:10:32 But what is this?

1:10:33 Yeah, so were other books at the time written by other eyewitness people?

1:10:37 So, no.

1:10:38 Okay.

1:10:39 So, you have the first century, you have the Gospels,

1:10:43 and even then the understanding is that there's one Gospel message, right?

1:10:46 That's the message of who Jesus is and what he came to do.

1:10:49 But the idea is that those Gospels are according to Matthew,

1:10:53 Mark, Luke, and John.

1:10:54 One Gospel, but four accounts of it.

1:10:57 Eventually, gospel literature is kind of framed

1:11:01 in an understanding of it looks a particular way.

1:11:03 But there were groups in the subsequent centuries after

1:11:06 Jesus' death that aimed to appropriate Jesus and the disciples.

1:11:11 So, they wrote documents that tried to shoehorn the credibility of adding Jesus

1:11:17 into their philosophical systems in order to kind of bring Jesus into the mix.

1:11:25 So, interestingly enough,

1:11:26 they always almost always portray Jesus as a pagan mystic.

1:11:30 And that's very palatable for the pagan mystical world.

1:11:33 And so, at even face value, we can go, "Okay,

1:11:35 is it more likely that the first century

1:11:38 Nazarene rabbi itinerant Jesus of Nazareth was actually

1:11:44 a pagan mystic that later people tried to paint

1:11:46 as a Jew?" Or is it the opposite, right?

1:11:49 That he's clearly, you know, born in Bethlehem, growing up in Nazareth,

1:11:54 wandering around Galilee, that in this Jewish saturated Hebraic world,

1:12:01 and that later people are like, "Let's make him into a little bit more of a like

1:12:05 a pagan philosopher." I think that's what's going on, right?

1:12:09 But you have documents, even early documents,

1:12:12 something like the Gospel of Thomas, 114 sayings.

1:12:16 It's one of the more famous ones because

1:12:17 in 1945 it was discovered in the Nag Hammadi desert,

1:12:21 what's known as the Nag Hammadi library.

1:12:23 It also contains other documents like the Secret

1:12:26 Gospel of John and the Gospel of Philip.

1:12:28 But the Gospel of Thomas is one of the more kind of famous, well-known ones.

1:12:33 It's not a gospel in the formal sense of like a birth,

1:12:36 life, death, and resurrection, but it's 114 sayings of Jesus.

1:12:41 But the this Gnostic group,

1:12:44 which so the the term Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis,

1:12:48 which means knowledge.

1:12:50 And the idea is within historical biblical Christianity,

1:12:53 salvation is something that is done external to you,

1:12:56 on your behalf, by the finished work of Jesus.

1:12:59 Gnosticism comes from the East.

1:13:02 It makes its way into the the Roman world,

1:13:07 and it starts to appropriate and include individuals into its system.

1:13:14 And so, by the 2nd century,

1:13:15 Jesus gets kind of by osmosis grouped into the these philosophical systems.

1:13:21 And though there's a whole bit of dozens of different Gnostic groups,

1:13:24 which don't even agree with one another,

1:13:26 the kind of central thread is that salvation is not something external to you,

1:13:32 it's actually innate about you,

1:13:34 because it's not just that Jesus is God, but Michaela, you're divine.

1:13:39 And the way you unlock that is by secret knowledge.

1:13:43 So, you listen to the secret knowledge, once it kind of clicks,

1:13:46 and you become enlightened, then you realize, oh, I'm actually a divine being.

1:13:49 Oh, this is what Gnosticism is.

1:13:52 So, Gnosticism is about So,

1:13:55 Gnostic literature often has Jesus uh he he's very secretive,

1:14:00 and unlike the the more public ministry that we see in the biblical gospels,

1:14:03 Jesus is whispering the secret knowledge

1:14:05 into the ears of whoever is the claimed individual.

1:14:09 Interestingly enough,

1:14:09 it's never the individuals that are are the key people in the biblical gospels.

1:14:13 It's never uh Peter, James, and John,

1:14:15 it's it's always the it's always Judas, or Thomas, or Philip.

1:14:21 It's kind of the other background here, or Mary Magdalene.

1:14:23 Um in a way that kind of is trying to ostracize

1:14:26 the key figures in the biblical gospels, and actually say,

1:14:30 you know, you guys think it's Matthew and Peter and James,

1:14:34 it's actually it's actually Philip or or Mary Magdalene.

1:14:37 Oh, interesting.

1:14:39 Um But, the Gospel of Thomas has a number of key features to it.

1:14:42 It's I mean, right off the bat, all of these are written when people

1:14:47 that are associated with their names are long dead.

1:14:50 So, Thomas is dead by the time the Gospel of Thomas is written,

1:14:53 which is a key indicator that, you know, this isn't reliable.

1:14:56 Um but then it has teachings like the last line

1:14:59 of the Gospel of Thomas has one of the disciples saying to Jesus,

1:15:04 "Let Mary leave us for women are not worthy of life." Okay,

1:15:07 so starting off on a good note.

1:15:09 And then Jesus replies and says,

1:15:11 "Don't worry because I will make her a pure male as you

1:15:17 males." And the last line of the Gospel of Thomas says,

1:15:19 "Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." Wow.

1:15:24 They're really ahead of their time, though.

1:15:25 I know, right?

1:15:26 But it's this kind of stuff.

1:15:28 So, so when you have these these other pieces

1:15:30 of literature that are are they're they're trying to kidnap,

1:15:34 they're trying to put words in the mouth of Jesus that Jesus never said.

1:15:38 And interestingly enough, early Christians are well aware of these.

1:15:42 Guys like Irenaeus write treatises like Against Heresies,

1:15:46 where he stipulates that there is a book

1:15:50 called the Gospel of Thomas, and it's nonsense.

1:15:53 It's heresy.

1:15:54 It's silly.

1:15:55 And for a long, long time, until 1945,

1:15:58 we had no like tangible artifact evidence for the Gospel of Thomas.

1:16:03 But when eventually that comes to light, what does it do?

1:16:07 It confirms that what Irenaeus was talking about

1:16:09 with the silliness of the Gospel of Thomas actually happens.

1:16:11 And and we have we have evidence for that also in the the Gospel of Peter.

1:16:16 Um the Gospel of Peter pops up, also uh discovered in the 19th century.

1:16:20 And when we discover it, we have um a particular uh church leader,

1:16:26 uh I believe he's in Turkey,

1:16:28 and he's writing to there's a church in Rhodes that writes to him and says,

1:16:33 "Hey, we've come across this Gospel of Peter.

1:16:36 We're not sure what this is." And he says, "Okay, well, you keep reading it.

1:16:38 I'm going to look into it." And then he finds

1:16:41 a copy of it and then writes immediately to them and says,

1:16:44 "This is heretical." Like all the way through this thing,

1:16:47 it doesn't represent anything that's accurate about Jesus.

1:16:50 Stop reading it within your church community.

1:16:52 Now, we don't find the actual copy of the Gospel of Peter until a long,

1:16:56 long, long, long, long, long time after that.

1:16:58 But then, once again, what does it do?

1:16:59 It confirms that when we discover the Gospel of Peter,

1:17:02 it has these kind of Gnostic, esoteric,

1:17:06 denying that Jesus ever had a physical body.

1:17:09 And so, Jesus is on the cross and he's kind of chilling.

1:17:11 He's floating because he's like the ancient world

1:17:14 had no problem with believing Jesus was God,

1:17:16 but believing that Jesus was a man, that's the actual hang-up.

1:17:19 And so, Okay.

1:17:21 If Jesus If Jesus denying the incarnation was essential point to a lot

1:17:24 of this stuff because the physical is evil and the spiritual is good.

1:17:28 So, you Wow.

1:17:30 This idea, which is once again,

1:17:32 why you read the Book of Acts and you get to Acts 17,

1:17:38 Paul is preaching on Mars Hill with the Areopagus,

1:17:41 and it seems that his audience of like

1:17:43 Jew- of of Greek philosophers are tracking with him.

1:17:46 Until he drops the word anastasis, resurrection.

1:17:50 And then all of a sudden they're like, "No,

1:17:52 we're out." And it's because an idea of a bodily resurrection,

1:17:57 they're like, "That's the opposite of what we're trying to attain.

1:17:59 I'm stuck in a meat prison because I'm a spirit that is stuck in a body.

1:18:04 And I Death actually releases me from this.

1:18:06 So, this whole Jewish narrative idea of a resurrection of the dead,

1:18:11 I I want nothing to do with that." And so,

1:18:14 this is a Platonic thought that is adopted by Gnosticism.

1:18:17 And so, they have no They have no hang-up with Jesus being God.

1:18:21 They just deny entirely that he was physical.

1:18:23 Wow.

1:18:25 Wow.

1:18:27 It's no wonder you've gone deep on this.

1:18:28 It's kind of tempting.

1:18:30 It's kind of tempting.

1:18:31 Wow, that was cool.

1:18:33 Okay, Wesley, where can I direct people to online for anyone listening?

1:18:37 Yeah, so I'm the vice president of an organization called Apologetics Canada.

1:18:42 Um so you can go to apologeticscanada.com.

1:18:45 Uh we've been producing, me specifically,

1:18:47 a series called Can I Trust the Bible, which is a documentary series.

1:18:50 I'm flying to places like Egypt and Turkey and um Italy

1:18:55 and talking about how the reliability of the Bible can tangibly be explained.

1:19:01 That's cool.

1:19:01 I want to watch that.

1:19:03 that that that these things happened.

1:19:04 So we flew to Egypt, we talked about the Nag Hammadi library,

1:19:07 and I'm standing in the Nag Hammadi desert

1:19:09 where the Gospel of Thomas approximately was found,

1:19:11 and I'm I'm telling the story of its discovery.

1:19:13 And then I go to the Coptic Museum in Cairo and stand

1:19:16 in front of the the Gospel of Thomas and talk about,

1:19:18 you know, why this wasn't included in your Bible, stuff like that.

1:19:22 So we've been producing that.

1:19:24 Um we just we just released episode three of Can I Trust

1:19:27 the Bible talking about what did and didn't happen at the Council of Nicaea,

1:19:30 dispelling some of these myths.

1:19:32 And we went and to the modern site of what

1:19:35 was the ancient city of Nicaea to tell it.

1:19:37 So that was really fun.

1:19:39 We're going to be dropping another episode very soon uh in the coming months,

1:19:43 and then I'm flying out to um an undisclosed

1:19:47 location to talk about and record some more episodes.

1:19:51 So that's something that I've been heavily involved with.

1:19:54 Um so you can go to apologeticscanada.com or the Apologetics

1:19:57 Canada YouTube to try to uh keep tabs on that.

1:20:00 You can also go to my website, wesleyhuff.com,

1:20:03 where I uh have the the relevant social media tags

1:20:09 and and blogs and videos that that I also produce.

1:20:13 Amazing.

1:20:14 That's great.

1:20:15 That that was great.

1:20:16 something for you.

1:20:17 Okay.

1:20:17 Okay.

1:20:18 So I brought this with hope that one day it may very well get to your dad.

1:20:22 Oh my god.

1:20:24 Okay, what is this?

1:20:25 on to it.

1:20:25 Okay.

1:20:26 So but I'm I'm going to I'm going to outline what this is.

1:20:29 Okay.

1:20:30 Um so I am a lover of facsimiles,

1:20:33 which are reproductions or photocopies of ancient documents.

1:20:39 And so what this is it's a it's a leather bound

1:20:42 facsimile of our earliest near complete copy of the Gospel of John.

1:20:47 So So this is a facsimile of what's called Papyrus 66.

1:20:51 So it comes from either the late 2nd or early 3rd century

1:20:55 and it preserves for us the vast majority of the Gospel of John.

1:21:00 So this is what John looked like that Christians

1:21:03 were reading in this in the the 2nd century potentially.

1:21:05 Oh my gosh.

1:21:06 And so this is in what's called You could show your camera that

1:21:10 called Greek uncial or majuscule text.

1:21:14 So it's in what's referred to as scripta continua.

1:21:17 It's all capitals, little spaces, and little to no punctuation between words.

1:21:22 This is what Greek, Latin, Coptic, a lot of ancient languages just looked like.

1:21:27 But what's interesting about this one of my favorite manuscripts is

1:21:30 that the ancient world um seemed to like scrolls over codices over books.

1:21:39 Christians for some reason prefer books and there

1:21:42 isn't really a good answer to why that is.

1:21:44 But the downside of books is that the front

1:21:47 and the back are the most vulnerable.

1:21:50 Mhm.

1:21:50 And so we have a lot of middles of books from the ancient world.

1:21:54 Oh.

1:21:55 What something like P66 preserves for us is the beginning of the Gospel of John.

1:22:00 And so we have John chapter 1 preserved

1:22:03 for us from the late 2nd or early 3rd century.

1:22:07 And walking through this I can sight

1:22:11 translate this and it virtually sound like any

1:22:14 Greek any any English translation of the Gospel

1:22:17 of John that I have on my person.

1:22:20 Really?

1:22:21 And You can just read that.

1:22:23 Yeah, so en arche en ho logos en kai ho logos en pros ton theon, right?

1:22:27 In the was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.

1:22:31 And so, this is one of my favorite manuscripts because manuscripts

1:22:35 that are handwritten tend to have

1:22:38 the vulnerability of mistakes that scribes make.

1:22:41 And actually, this manuscript has a decent amount

1:22:45 of its own mistakes because the scribe appears

1:22:48 to be more concerned with making a very

1:22:50 pretty manuscript than making a very careful manuscript.

1:22:54 And so, it appears that the scribe himself goes back

1:22:58 and makes something like 300 corrections to his own text.

1:23:01 Oh, wow.

1:23:01 But, in what we label as verses 1 chapter 1 verses 1 to 14,

1:23:07 there are no differences between the Greek

1:23:11 text here and what you would translate

1:23:12 from a a modern critical Greek text that would be used for modern translation.

1:23:16 That's cool.

1:23:17 So, I've sat with, you know,

1:23:19 the Greek text that we translate English translations

1:23:22 from and sat beside this and followed along and it's exact.

1:23:27 Wow.

1:23:28 Right down to verse 14.

1:23:31 And there's something beautiful about reading something that a Christian

1:23:36 was reading in the 2nd century and 1,900 years later,

1:23:41 1,800 years later, reading along and thinking when the Christian read,

1:23:47 "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word

1:23:49 was God and then the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." That I,

1:23:54 in conjunction with someone nearly 2,000 years ago, can say amen to that.

1:24:00 Yeah, that's beautiful.

1:24:01 this is yours and it is a a photocopy of the actual

1:24:07 manuscript that is in the original is in the Bodleian or sorry,

1:24:13 not the Bodleian, it's in the it's in Geneva, in Switzerland.

1:24:18 Oh, this is cool.

1:24:19 You can see where it starts breaking down.

1:24:21 Yeah, right in the back.

1:24:22 So, the most of the manuscripts we're looking

1:24:24 at look a lot more fragmentary like that.

1:24:27 the back.

1:24:27 Yeah.

1:24:28 Wow.

1:24:29 Wow.

1:24:31 Okay.

1:24:32 I'll get this to Dad.

1:24:34 I might wait a little until he's feeling

1:24:36 better so he can actually you know, appreciate it.

1:24:41 But like this is this is amazing.

1:24:42 Thank you.

1:24:43 It's really kind of you.

1:24:44 No problem.

1:24:45 It was very cool.

1:24:46 Yeah, it is my pleasure and know that I'm I'm praying for you and your dad

1:24:49 and your family and it's just exciting to see that grow and you know,

1:24:55 your upcoming, you know, growing of your own family.

1:24:59 Um, but I've been I've been praying for a long time, years.

1:25:02 I knew about your dad years ago before anything blew up because

1:25:05 I was studying at the University of Toronto and so Oh, that's funny.

1:25:09 Yeah.

1:25:10 When there were just the protests there.

1:25:12 Yeah.

1:25:13 Yeah, that was crazy.

1:25:14 It's been a crazy 10-year period.

1:25:16 Yeah, it's been a minute.

1:25:17 Well, thank you so much Wesley for coming on.

1:25:19 Thanks for doing a course.

1:25:20 I'm so excited for the course.

1:25:22 I'll link We're going to put this episode out way before your course comes out,

1:25:25 but the course will be linked, too.

1:25:27 I and everything else we talked about.

1:25:29 So, thanks again.

1:25:30 Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

1:25:31 I'm glad we're able to make it work out.

1:25:45 [music]