Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Dr. Michael Licona and Dr. Abel Pienaar Debate

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Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Dr. Michael Licona and Dr. Abel Pienaar Debate

April 2, 2025

Is it reasonable to believe that Jesus rose from the dead? Dr. Michael Licona claims that if Jesus didn’t, he is a false prophet, and no rational person should follow him. In this episode, Licona argues a case for the resurrection using the historical method and based on five facts gleaned from Paul’s writings. Former Christian minister, now agnostic philosopher and writer Dr. Abel Pienaar disagrees, citing biblical discrepancies, a pre-scientific worldview, the lack of hard evidence, and parallel stories of ancient gods and heroes coming back to life, as indicating that the resurrection of Jesus is a myth. Listen to the two scholars debate this critical topic in this episode of the Risen Jesus Podcast.

Transcript

Hello, today's episode is a debate on the historicity of Jesus's resurrection. Dr. Abel Pienaar, a former Christian minister and current agnostic philosopher, proposes that the only evidence for the resurrection is found in the Bible, a human work taken by some to be God's word that is rife with discrepancies and a copy of the rising god myths from other cultures. Dr. Licona counters this with facts drawn from Paul's writings using the historical method.

This is Dr. Kurt Jares, welcoming you to the Risen Jesus Podcast. Welcome to this debate on the topic, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? A very relevant topic today. Now, before we begin, the debate itself and introduced tonight's two speakers, there are just a few things that we should say to each other before we begin.

And I think the first thing, the purpose of tonight's debate, I think, really is to stimulate intellectual thought between different groups of people. I mean, so many times we are very, very quick to speak and very slow to listen. And who of you has read Stephen Covey's book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and to see a few of you.

And here's one principle, seeking first to understand before seeking to be understood. And this is the purpose of tonight's debate. Not this is really to find counter arguments or anything.

That is what our two debaters is going to do. But we as listeners, we as the audience, I think should be here to really understand what the other side is trying to say. And we want to take, we want this all to take place in a true way, of course, give it a solid bite.

We're not in it all, follow us off the corner of the corner, let's see what's going on in the corner of the country club, it's really typical about us as a recovering and maybe even as South Africans. But having said that, though, we would like to, this all to happen in a spirit of mutual respect. So I want to ask you as an audience as well, that both our proponents this evening that's going to speak are very passionate about what they're going to say.

And so are we as they follow us and as people who listen to them. So I would really like to ask you to help us create an atmosphere of mutual respect, no brewing or any derogatory remarks. Please, that's really not, that will not be good for me.

And so, and also hold your applause for when each speaker finished the time slot and they go to sit down again, you are free to applaud them. Now, the format of the debate is going to be as follows. I'm first going to introduce Michael Kona and then after which he will give his introductory remarks for 20 minutes.

When he sits down, I will introduce Arbo Pinar and then he will come up and give his introductory remarks for 20 minutes. And then after those three introductions, we will have a 15-minute rebuttal from each of them and then a 10-minute rebuttal and then a 5-minute rebuttal, after which we will open the floor for a Q&A. So while you think and while you listen, you can already start to think what you would like to ask afterwards.

But we will elaborate on that when we get there. Okay, so I think let's begin without further ado. I'm going to introduce Michael Kona too.

Mike has a PhD in New Testament studies from the University of Pretoria. He serves as research professor of New Testament at Southern Evangelical Seminary and has external research collaborated at the Northwest University, that's the University of Focha Strobel. Mike was interviewed by Lee Strobel in his book The Case for the Real Jesus and appeared in Strobel's video The Case for Christ.

He's the author of numerous books, including The Resurrection of Jesus, a new historiographical approach and Paul meets Muhammad, co-authored with Gary Habermas of the award-winning book The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus and co-editor with William Damesky of Evidence for God, 50 arguments for faith from the Bible, history, philosophy and science. And they're also a micro-member of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the Institute for Biblical Research and the Society for Biblical Literature. And he has spoken on more than 50 university campuses and has appeared on dozens of radio and television programs.

So friends, without any further ado, let's give a warm hand and welcome for Dr. Michael Kona. Well, thank you very much. I'm a chucky and I'm proud of it and I'll bet you are also proud of your National Rugby Team.

So I figured that this evening I just had to celebrate with you. Well, anyway, it's great to be here. And I was just excited about this topic this evening.

But I just want to say too, I appreciate the University of Pretoria for hosting this debate for UNFORT Ministries for inviting me to participate. And I also want to just thank Abu Penar for a delightful lunch today and getting together. It's just wonderful when people who have a disagree on some important issues that they can get together and talk peacefully and respectfully to one another and we did.

And it was just great. And I was told that by the UNFORT guys that there were a number of Christians who were commenting on his blog site and they were just downright nasty. And I know I can speak with the UNFORT guys to say that that's just embarrassing to Christianity.

When Christians turn around and treat someone who doesn't agree with them respectfully. I mean, Peter says in 1 Peter 3.15, be willing to defend our faith but to do it with gentleness and respect. And Paul in Colossians 4.6 says that our speech should always be with grace season as it were with salt so that we should respond to know how to respond to each person.

So, you know, I expect that we'll have a great time this evening where we can dialogue respectfully and respectfully disagree and we can go after one another's views without going after the other person. So with that said, I'm happy about tonight's topic because I think it's a very important topic. Did Jesus rise from the dead? You see, Jesus Wall on Earth made some really radical claims.

He claimed to be the uniquely divine Son of God. He predicted his imminent and violent death and subsequent resurrection. And when you go around making these kinds of claims, your skeptics or your critics are going to bring up some objections.

You say, show us a sign or two. And they did this with Jesus and that's okay. Jesus responded, I'll give you one sign, my resurrection.

So, the bottom line is if Jesus did not rise from the dead, that makes him a false prophet whom no rational person should follow. But on the other hand, if Jesus rose, then he did so in confirmation of his personal radical claims and that gives us something we're all going to have to think about. So the question is, in the 21st century, is it rational to believe in something like a guy rising from the dead? Well, I think it is and I'm going to bear the burden of proof this evening because I'm taking the affirmative position and I'm going to, this evening, I'm going to construct a positive historical case for Jesus' resurrection using two major building blocks, facts and method.

Now, let's begin with the facts. Now, maybe you think I'm going to start with the gospels because that's where our resurrection narratives are. But actually, I'm not going to use the gospels this evening.

Now, I believe that the gospels are historically reliable documents. In fact, great books written on it like the historical reliability of the gospels by Craig Blomberg or the historical Jesus of the gospels by Craig Keener. But I have to admit, there's still some questions about different places in the gospels we haven't been able to verify and not even know genre in some places for certain.

And so rather than get off on discussions like that, I decided that I'm going to restrict what the case that I'm going to build tonight to some literature written prior to the gospels by a guy named Paul. Now, to give you a little idea, Paul was this guy who hated Jesus. He hated Christianity.

He was persecuting the church and Christians. He wanted to destroy it. And then by his own omission in one of his, several of his undisputed letters, he said he had an experience that he was convinced was of the risen Jesus who appeared to him.

And this experience radically transformed his life from being a persecutor of the church to one of its most able defenders. All right, fact number one is Paul was an eyewitness and he was hostile at the time of his conversion. Now, just to give you a little timeline, most scholars believe that Jesus was crucified in either April 30 or April 33.

We really don't know which one it's a toss up. So let's just round the number off and say 30. Now, they also agree that Paul converted to Christianity by this experience he had, whatever that experience would have been, but that led to his conversion probably one to three years later.

Let's just say two and so were at the year 32. Now, one of Paul's undisputed letters, in other words, this is a letter that virtually all scholars, regardless of their theological or philosophical strife, agrees Paul wrote these. In Galatians chapter one, Paul says that three years after his conversion, so now we're looking at the year 35 or five years after Jesus' crucifixion.

Paul says that three years after his conversion, he went up to Jerusalem because he wanted to run, he wanted to meet Peter, the lead apostle, and he also met James, the brother of the Lord at that time. Now, it's interesting to note that the Greek term that Paul uses here for visit is the term hysterecyte from which we get the English word. What do you think? History.

So this suggests that Paul's reason for going to Jerusalem was to get a history of Jesus. After all, he had not been one of Jesus' disciples during his ministry. So he wanted to get the whole nine yards from someone who had been.

And so he meets with him for 15 days at that point, and he sees James, the brother of the Lord. So our second point, fact, is that Paul knew Jesus' disciples. Then in Galatians chapter two, Paul reports that 14 years later, he goes up to Jerusalem again to meet with the pillars of the church, Peter, James, and John.

So Peter is second time, James is second time, John, for the first time. And he says his objective for going up there was to run the gospel he had been preaching past them, to see that he was still preaching the same thing that they had been preaching. Imagine being in the room, Peter, James, John, and Paul talking theology.

That'd be pretty cool. So he said that once he did this, ran the gospel past them, he'd been preaching. He said they added nothing to what I had to say.

They extended the right hand fellowship. In other words, they're saying they're good, Paul. Keep up the good work, brother.

So within 16 to 19 years of Jesus' crucifixion, we can be pretty sure that Paul was preaching the same thing as Jesus' disciples. At least that's his story. Fortunately, we can corroborate this, because otherwise we wouldn't know Paul was telling the truth.

There are a couple different ways of doing it. Let me just give you one that I can explain pretty quickly. There were two guys who were probably disciples of the apostles.

Yep, some of the apostles had disciples later on. Peter had one named Clement of Rome, and John had one named Polycarp. And so if Paul was preaching in the central doctrines, the gospel doctrines, different than differently than what Peter and John were, then we would expect Clement and Polycarp to chide and correct them on a matter.

Well, when we read, first Clement, written by Clement, and Polycarp's letter to the Philippian Church, we find something very interesting. Clement refers to the blessed Paul and places Paul on par with his mentor Peter. Polycarp quotes from Paul's letters twice and refers to them as part of the sacred scriptures.

And then he says, and I quote, that Paul taught the word of truth accurately and reliably. And they're writing this after Paul's been dead for a couple of decades. So what's neat about this is if Paul was teaching things, if he was a heretic, they wouldn't say this about him.

But if Paul was teaching the same thing, they were teaching on the essential doctrines, this is precisely the kind of things we would expect him to say. So what were they teaching? We know that Paul was teaching what they were teaching then, and then what were they teaching? Well, when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, we go to 1 Corinthians chapter 15, and Paul has some interesting things to say there. In the first verse, the first two verses, he says, now I would remind you brethren, in what terms I preach to you the gospel, which you received and which you stand and by which you are saved.

In other words, he's going to give him a fresher on the gospel that he preached to them. So what is this gospel that the Jerusalem apostles had certified were in alignment with what they were preaching? He says right here, I delivered to you at first what I also received, probably from the Jerusalem apostles, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, then to the 12, then he appeared to more than 500 at one time, most of whom are still alive, but some have died, then to James, and to all the apostles, and then Paul says, last of all, is to one and timely born, he appeared also to me. So here we have the death burial, resurrection of Jesus, three appearances to individuals, to Peter, James, who he met with twice, and to himself, we got firsthand testimony here, and then three group appearances, to the 12 to more than 500, and to all the apostles.

The group appearances are kind of interesting, because in modern psychology we learned that group hallucinations are extremely unlikely if not impossible, and we're not talking about just one, but three, so it strongly suggests that whatever these experiences were, they weren't group hallucinations. So they were teaching then the resurrection of Jesus, that brings us to fact number four, they taught the appearances to individuals, to groups, to friends, and fellow alike. Fact number five, they were teaching that Jesus had been raised from the dead physically.

Now, since I'm using Paul, how would I get that out of just Paul? Because admittedly Paul doesn't mention the empty tomb. How do we get physical resurrection on a Paul? Actually, it's kind of easy. You see, on five occasions, at least in his undisputed letters, he says that believers will be raised as Jesus was raised.

And he doesn't talk directly on how Jesus was raised, but he talks directly and specifically on how believers will be raised. And if they will be raised as Jesus was raised, if believers are raised spiritually in an immaterial sense, then that means that they were preaching Jesus was raised in a spiritual immaterial sense. And because the gospels report an empty tomb and a missing body, that would mean their legends, because we go with the earlier accounts.

On the other hand, if they're preaching that Jesus had been raised physically or that believers are raised physically from the dead at the general resurrection, then that means they were preaching that Jesus was raised physically from the dead in the year 30 or 33. So let's see what they were teaching. First Corinthians 15-20, Paul says, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep.

First fruits was an agricultural term that referred to the first of the crops to be harvested. How many of you have planted a garden in your backyard in some time? All right, a lot of us have. You know when you have that tomato plant and that first tomato gets ready, it's all red and ready and you pluck it off the plant and you slice it up and you put it on the chicken sandwich.

Any of you hungry? And you put it on and it's good. And the rest of the tomatoes will be ready in time. They're kind of orange getting red, maybe some still green in them.

They're coming. They're going to be harvested, but not yet. They're not the first fruits.

So Jesus is the first to be raised from the dead. Well, wait a minute. What about Lazarus and Jerris's daughter and the widow's son? They were raised by Jesus, according if the gospels are true.

They're raised, but they're raised in the same kind of body to die again. Jesus was raised, as Paul would go on to describe in chapter 15 in a resurrection, an immortal body. So he's the first to be raised in that sense.

Well, one's everybody else can be raised. One of the apostles can be raised. One are followers of Jesus going to be raised.

Paul answers that three verses later. In verse 23, he says, but each in his own order, Christ the first fruits. After that, those who belong to Christ at his coming.

So Jesus is raised in 30 or 33. Believers are raised when Jesus returns. It says this elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 15.

He says, in a moment in the blink of an eye at the last trumpet for the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we will be changed. For this perishable will put on the imperishable. This mortal will put on immortality.

So the dead will be raised at the general resurrection when Christ returns. Here's one more text. 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 verses 13 through 17.

But we don't want you to be informed, brethren, about those who are asleep so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again. Even so, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Christ.

Again, to fall asleep is just a euphemism for saying they're dead. Like in the United States, we say he passed away rather than saying he croaked. So they fell asleep.

Jesus is going to bring with him when he returns those who have died as believers. This we say to you by the word of the Lord that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend with heaven with a shout with the voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God and the dead in Christ will rise first.

Well, wait a minute. Didn't Paul just say he's bringing him back with him? How are they going to rise first? Well, elsewhere, Paul also says to be absent from the bodies to be present with the Lord. 2 Corinthians 5, 8, or Philippians 1, 23, 24, he says you can die and be with Christ or remain in the body.

So it's pretty clear what we're looking at here that the apostles are teaching is when a person dies through bodies buried, their spirit leaves the body and goes to be with Christ in heaven. Existing there is a disembodied spirit. When Jesus returns, he brings us back with him as spirits, put us back in our bodies, resurrecting our corpses and transforming them into a glorious, powerful body that's immortal.

And so it's a physical resurrection. There's no question about it. This is what they're teaching here.

And if Christ is the first fruits of those who sleep and those who sleep are going to be raised in a physical resurrection body, then that means Jesus was raised in a physically resurrected body. Okay, that's what they're preaching. But how do we know that this is what they really meant? Did they mean for us to take this in a literal sense or how about a symbolic sense? Well, Paul answers this same chapter.

1 Corinthians 15, 13 through 19, he says, but if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, your faith is also in vain. Moreover, we are even found to be false witnesses of God because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised.

For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless. And you are still in your sins, then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.

If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are all men most to be pitied. Few verses later, he'll go on to say, if the dead are not raised, then let's eat drink and be married for tomorrow we die. In other words, Paul says this, if Jesus is not raised, our preaching is in vain, we make God a liar because we said he raised Jesus and he really didn't, our faith is worthless, our sins are not atoned for, we're not going to be raised.

So when we die, that's it, period. And we'll never see our loved ones again. So let's live it up today because tomorrow we die if Christ has not been raised.

This is not symbolic. This is talking about a physical bodily resurrection of Jesus in space time. That leads us now to my second major building block and that's method.

What do historians do? Because we'll look at a bunch of different hypotheses in order to determine what's the best one. And here we've got resurrection hypothesis, we've got Jesus didn't really die, we've got it was a legend, all kinds of things that we could put in there, a hallucination, anything like that. Here's what historians do.

What they do is they take the criteria for the all the facts, explanatory power. Does it account for the facts without forcing them to fit or excessive ambiguity? Which hypothesis is least ad hoc, meaning it has the least amount of non-evidence assumptions or improvisation involved? And plausibility, is it an agreement with other widely accepted or known facts? Now the resurrection hypothesis does pretty well when we look at it according a number of people had experiences in individual and group settings in which they were persuaded, fully convinced, were appearances of the risen Jesus to them. We have to explain those.

And even a skeptic named Paul had an experience that led to his conversion because he believed Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to them. We have to account for those. The resurrection hypothesis accounts for all of those without forcing them, any of them to fit whatsoever.

There's no improvisation or non-evidence assumptions involved. At most, one might say, well, you're assuming that God exists. Well, if I was doing that, that still wouldn't be a non-evidence assumption because there's some decent evidence that God exists from science and philosophy.

There's a lot of scientists today who are coming up with results of top scientists who are given some results that strongly suggest that God or some kind of an intelligent designer of the universe in life exists. So it's not a non-evidence assumption. Someone might not be totally persuaded by it, but that's a far cry from saying there's no evidence for it.

And plausibility is an agreement with other widely accepted facts. I'll be the first to admit that people do not rise from the dead by natural causes. But if God exists and wanted to raise Jesus, then the plausibility factor would be very high, be 100%.

The problem is as historians, we don't know whether we can't say ahead of time whether God exists and wanted to raise Jesus. So I'd say that rather than presuppose God's existence or a priori excluding it, the fair thing to do is to leave the matter open and to look at it with openness and try to be as neutral as we can and let the facts speak for themselves. Otherwise, the historian places him or herself in a dangerous position where they allow their worldview to guide their historical investigation and bad philosophy corrupts good history.

So this is my case for the resurrection of Jesus, and until we can find a hypothesis that does as well in meeting these criteria, then the resurrection hypothesis is the best explanation of the facts and we should regard it as an event that occurred in history. Thank you. Thank you, Mike.

Now, Dr. Oopinar is going to give his introductory remarks for 20 minutes, but let me introduce him first. Dr. Oopinar is an agnostic philosopher and writer, he's the director of the Center of Contemporary Spirituality. He studied theology at the University of Pretoria after which he earned his MA and his PhD.

He started working as a full-time minister in the Dutch Reform Congregation in Pretoria immediately after completing his theological studies. He also served for many years on the executive of the Dutch Reform Church of South Africa. Now, as a founding member of the Renaissance spiritual community, he is keenly interested in open dialogue and the relationship between religion and science.

He has written some opsutna hot and often take part in theological and philosophical discussions on radio and television. Arbel is married to Zelda and her four children. To French, let's give a warm hand and welcome to Dr. Oopinar.

Because my English is very deliciously, I'll stick to the text in front of me. I would like to thank the organizers and the opportunity to discuss issues of such vital importance with such a seasoned debater as Mike Licona. Because whether you are a believer, a fundamentalist, evangelical, a moderate, a liberal, agnostic like myself, or a non-believer, coming to understand what the resurrection of Jesus actually is and is not is very important.

Just as Mike, I started out as a committed Bible believing Christian. I was certain that the Bible down to its words had been inspired by God. Maybe that's what drove my intense study.

I mean, if it is the actual words of God, the communication of the Creator of the universe and Lord over all spoken to us mere mortals. Surely knowing them intimately was the most important thing in life. At least it was for me.

And so my search started and then over a period of time what I found led me to change my mind about the Bible and therefore what I thought about the resurrection of Jesus. I did not change my mind willingly. I went down kicking and screaming.

I prayed lots about it. I wrestled with it. I resisted it with all my mind.

But at the same time, I thought that if I was truly committed to God, I also had to be fully committed to the truth. You agree? And it became clear to me that my former views of the Bible as the inherent revelation from God were flat out wrong. The Bible were not God's words.

It was human words and thoughts. Why do I say this? Well, as you know, the Bible is filled with discrepancies. Many of them irreconcilable contradictions, especially when you read it as a historical document.

For example, Moses did not write the Pentateer, the first five books of the Old Testament, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write the Gospels. As you know, there are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another we are considered canonical. Other Gospels, for example, written by Jesus as followers, Peter, Thomas, Mary, etc.

Now even in Christianity today, during this year, one of America's biggest way, Christian theologians said that they agree now that Genesis 1 and 2 should rather be understood metaphorically than literal. Even one of the most prominent Christian scientists, Pope Francis Collins, said that he now agrees that Adam and Eve could not be understood as literal. Even the Exodus described in the Old Testament probably did not happen as described.

The conquest of the Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are at odds on numerous points and contains a lot of non-historical material. Theological scholars now agree that it is hard to know whether Moses ever existed and what exactly the historical Jesus taught.

The historical narratives of the Old Testament, of thought with legend theory fabrications, and the Book of Acts and the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life and teachings of Paul. And all New Testament and history academics scholars agree that many of the New Testament books weren't written by other apostles but by later writers claiming to be their apostles. For example, Jesus' disciples were lower-class illiterate Aramaic-speaking peasants from Galilee and the anonymous writers of the Gospels, the Bible you have in front of you, as we can see from their writing were highly educated Greek-speaking Christians who probably lived outside Palestine and their agenda on their minds fixed on converting the world and running the church.

People who write 35 to 65 years later, people who had not seen any of these things happen, people who were basing their stories on oral traditions and had been paused down for decades amongst people trying to convince one another to believe in Jesus, and sadly the list goes on and on and on. They are simply too much evidence and to reconcile all of these hundreds of differences amongst the biblical sources requires so much speculation and fancy food work, as we will see tonight, that no person can honestly say they know for sure. The words of Percy Shelley keeps on ringing in my mind.

If God has spoken, why is the world not convinced? Except, of course, if you say, I believe it. I don't need evidence of truth. I don't need this debate type of or a clue of stuff.

I just believe it. It's a matter of blind faith, but then you can believe anything. Is that not so? We do need evidence.

Isn't that what tonight's debate is all about? Isn't that why Mike is trying to shake you all at ease that the resurrection did really happen? My research led me in a different direction that Mike is going with Paul. For me, what I found made me question important aspects of my faith. Eventually, not long after I left the church, I came to a place where I still believed completely in God, but understood the Bible in a more metaphorical, less literal sense.

The Bible seemed to me to contain inspired literature in that it could inspire true and useful thinking about God, but he was still the product of human hands and contained all the kinds of mistakes that any human undertaking will bring. But there came a time when I left the faith. This was not only because of what I've learned through historical criticism of the Bible, but because I could also no longer reconcile my faith in a theistic God, the God of the Bible, with the state of the world that I saw around me.

There is so much senseless pain and misery in the world that I came to find it impossible to believe there's a good and loving theistic God. A being up there on a throne above the clouds, all seeing, all knowing who is in control. There had to be another way of understanding God, maybe as a life force, maybe as an energy, I don't know, but a theistic king God on a throne, no more.

So why am I yet abiding Mike on the resurrection of Jesus? I think mostly I'm here because I honestly believe that to get closer to the truth, we need to be open and brave. We should ask the hard questions. And one of the hard questions is, is Jesus really God? Can a physical resurrection confirm that? Or do we need to understand it as a metaphor that Jesus were only an ordinary man living a life that was exceptional, aground that, just as many other examples of exceptional people? What can the resurrection mean in a modern scientific world? What can it mean to me who still wants to live a spiritual life? Now if Mike had said he believed that Jesus was resurrected by God and that this is his religious assumption, I could have agreed with him in the sense that this is his belief.

Just as a Muslim, Hindu and a Buddhist as they believe, it doesn't mean it's true, it just means he wants to believe it. That's why we call it blind faith. And as a philosopher, a lover of the truth, I could even understand that his belief of his made him live in a certain way and that he felt it made him a better person.

But Mike did not say that. He actually claimed that the resurrection can be proven historically. He even spoke about facts.

He spoke about minimal fact approach. He said that this is an approach that only regards a new testament in this way, looks at Paul in this way. My question is really, this is fact and everyone agrees, name a lot of skeptics that agree on stuff, I don't accept it.

As I understand fact, is that it can be proven with hard evidence. It can be submitted to scrutiny. When today, almost sorry is committed, not in South Africa and the police, the CSI of course, on television, a ratio, detectives coming to the crime scene that began searching for little scraps of evidence, looking for the traces of a fingerprint strand or hair on the floor.

And by this building, their case, a case that later can be proven in court. This is our understand facts. Now if Mike says there's proof or the physical resurrection, not I believe it is true, no actual proof.

I want to see it and I want to judge it for myself if it's reliable evidence that it can withstand all my skepticism or even the questions raised by the scientific method. So what does Mike present tonight as proof? The Bible. That's all.

What only that? Yes. Only the Bible. He works of criteria that he says consider data to meet strong evidence and scholars must agree and all that stuff, but he's working with the Bible, only the Bible.

Firstly, there's no such thing as all scholars agreeing on something. Then science, the science process of finding nuances and proof would have stopped. Secondly, data that is strong evidence.

I don't see it. Okay. Then he said there's other sources and I've read a lot of stuff that he said that people from outside the Bible said it, they never said anything about the resurrection.

No, the crucifixion. They said they were someone crucified, but that means nothing and doesn't prove the resurrection. You see, Mike only so called evidence for the resurrection come from the Bible.

Why? Because he believes it as a word of God. As he said, God did it. Okay.

But the problem is, I don't believe it's a word of God. I think the Bible is book written by human hand. A book thought with not only history or even facts, but also by legends and myths.

To me, the Bible is no more the word of God than the Torah, the kumbra, or the Upanishads, or the sutras. It's a human stories, ancient people, people of antiquity, struggling with their world and trying to understand how things work. They started telling stories, rain comes down when the gods cry and thunder God's voice and so on.

It really doesn't count as proof. It's contaminated or rather it's compromised by the fact that it proclaims stuff that I think is built on a pre-scientific worldview. I mean, the writers of the Bible believe the earth is flat.

We know today it's not. The writers' worldview was so different than ours today. I mean the world had three stories according to them.

Hours have none. It's round. They view the cosmos, generated amazing legends and gods, and they believed in the heroes.

Oh, they believed in their heroes. Special people were connected to all three stories of the universe. A divine being is his father, an earthly woman's mother.

He would do miracles, be killed, go down to Hades or hell, be resurrected and given a new body and ascend to heaven. And you know what? I'm not even talking about Jesus. I'm talking about myths.

That is so much older than the Jesus story, the exact same story that we've got in the Bible. Dionysus, Midras, Odysseus, Hercules, even Thor could be counted among them. The Jesus story, myth, isn't even original.

Yes, myths can have historical core and mostly do. I mean, when Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, Alice Carmel appeared in the sky seven days after his death. Augustus, the new emperor, immediately issued the coin with a comment on implying that the soul of Caesar sent it into heaven.

Of course, Augustus called himself the son of God. A cult rose around his figure with priests reporting appearances of the exalted one to them. Does it prove it was true? No.

It only proved that they really believed it was true. According to their interpretation of how things worked and what they believed. Myth are open to be changed, rewritten, reinterpret and expanded because of a changing environment.

Often two contradictory versions of the same myth will live side by side, as we can see in Genesis 1 and 2. Mists allow contradictions of natural law, a tower of time, place, events, supernatural explanations, miracles and God did it. This is not historical facts. This is mythological narratives.

So when Mike starts quoting, interpreting and presenting the Bible or Paul as his only proof of the resurrection, all are E and C's myth. And other church fathers like Uranius, I think that's wrong, we pronounce, but Aeneas also doesn't really inspire me with confidence. People that at that time really believe that the resurrection did happen, but it was then a time of myth, legends, talking, donkeys, witches and wizards, the stuff Walt Disney movies are made of, because just look at Jesus as presented in the Bible.

It's a typical mythological character covering all three stories of the cosmos with powers. Luke and Matthew supplies Jesus with a miraculous birth, not so Mark and John. The same was done to see Dhatra, you'll know him better as Buddha.

Then Jesus dies violently, just like each and every God forming the cold, the so-called mystery cults. He sent him to Hades or Tartarus, Acts 2, 1 Peter 2, 2 Peter 3. He has resurrected the Pietus on special followers, become leaders in a new cult, a saint to Evanna from which he would return to judge the living and the quick. All evidence again I see is that of typical myth.

And now we are the contradictions to natural law, supernatural happenings, different time places and events that are so typical to mythology, more evident in the differences among the gospels accounts of Jesus' resurrection. The discrepancies are a lot. We don't have the originals of any of the gospels.

Only copies made later, in most instances, many centuries later. Remember, Paul teaches the same than them. These copies all differ from one regional set on the basis of these later manuscripts.

In some places, the decisions are straightforward in other places. There's a lot of debate and the differences is a lot. In mythology, this of course is not a problem.

You can add, subtract and even create new characters because it's about telling the story of the gods and they could do anything. Walk on water, fly, die and then come back to life, whatever. But they always had powers, healing powers, like our superheroes today, Superman, Spider-Man, Green Lantern, our modern myths.

But when you present the Bible, especially Paul and the New Testament as your only strong evidence of a physical historical resurrection of a man, then we have a problem. The questions keep on piling up and I can go on. On virtually every issue, at least one of the gospels are out of step.

I'm not even going into it. The point in particular seemed to be irreconcilable in Marx. I just want to just lift out one.

In Marx's account, the women are instructed to tell the disciples to go meet Jesus in Galilee. But out of fear, they don't say a word to anyone about it. You know, Mark, the oldest of the gospels in the Bible doesn't proclaim the resurrection.

A late described added to be in line with other gospels. According to Mark, the women went to the tomb and were so frightened they ran away. In the scribe put on our note, they were right, they saw and they went back.

But if Matthew is right that the disciples immediately go to Galilee and say, Jesus is the same from there, how can Luke be right that the disciples stay in Jerusalem the whole time see Jesus the same from there and stay on until the day of Pentecost? These are just some of the discrepancies in the counts of Jesus resurrection. There's not even time to go into Paul. And my problem is this is in the end, whatever we are saying, that's the only evidence Mike is presenting is the Bible.

And he's talking about oral traditions and eyewitnesses. There's no eyewitnesses. These people later on saying, ah, and Paul, he believed, of course he believed any soul.

That's most of the time what happens if you believe, you'll see. Does it mean it's true? Does it mean it happened? I don't think so. But let's stop there.

Thanks. Thank you very much. All of Mike's going to have these first rebuttal now for 15 minutes.

Okay. In my openings, and I appreciate your opening statement, in my opening statement, I said I was going to construct a positive historical case for Jesus resurrection using two major building blocks, facts and method. I'd like now to review that case in light of what the Bible just said.

Let's start with my facts. Here I presented five facts. Paul was an eyewitness.

Paul knew Jesus' disciples. He taught what they taught. They taught the appearances to individuals, groups, friend and foe alike.

And they taught that Jesus was raised physically. Let's see what Abel said. In terms of the appearance of Paul, Abel says, well, these, Mike says, these are facts.

Most scholars accepting says, I don't accept it. Well, fine. Give us some reasons for why not accepting it.

I presented this and I said, these are undisputed letters of Paul. There's hardly a scholar in the world, no matter how skeptical you want to go, hardly a scholar in the world who would deny that Paul wrote these letters that I used. First Corinthians, second Corinthians, Galatians, first Thessalonians.

If you don't think Paul wrote them, give us some reasons why not, because virtually every scholar in the world grants those that I've used. So tell me why I'm mistaken. He said, well, I used only the Bible.

Well, Erman and other, Bart Erman, famous American skeptic. And I'm sure he's read it because a lot of the arguments he gave are the same stuff that you hear it from Erman. Erman and other skeptics use the Bible to learn about Jesus as well.

I can do this with the Quran. I don't believe the Quran is in any sense inspired by God. But nevertheless, as a student of history, I can learn about Islam through it.

For example, in Surah 5 verse 51, it says, take not the Jews and the Christians as friends, because if you do, it says God says he will regard you as one. So I don't believe God ever uttered that statement to the Muslims of the seventh century. But what it does tell me is that Muslims in the seventh century were being strongly discouraged from having friends with Jews and Christians.

So even though I don't believe the Quran is inspired by God, even though I believe it has all kinds of problems with it, I can still come to it as a student of history and learn. Skeptics do this all the time. Let me show you what Bart Erman, that agnostic skeptic says.

He says, how is it possible? This is after he dogs the sources and says the gospels have so much problems with the same stuff Abilji said. He says, how is it possible to use such sources to find out what really happened historically? In fact, there are ways. Scholars have devised some methodological principles that have followed closely and rigorously can give us some indications of who Jesus really was.

This is what I've applied this evening. I've showed you by four criteria that historians, professional historians use for weighing the best explanation to get to the best explanation and given reason for believing these things. He says, well, Mike uses the Bible as the word of God.

Well, no, I didn't. I used the historical method. I am not making any presuppositions at the Bibles that God's word.

I do believe, I want to be clear, I believe God, the Bible is God's word. But I am not approaching it in that sense this evening. I am fine just for the sake of this debate to say that the Bible has all sorts of errors and contradictions and contains myth.

I don't believe that, but I'm willing to say that and grant that to Abil tonight because I'm just using historical method here to see what we can arrive at using the historical method. And these things I've said tonight are things that virtually all scholars would agree upon with the exception of my fifth fact about how they were preaching the physical resurrection of Jesus. But I've been presenting this around.

I'm published on it. I haven't heard any response from scholars that criticize that view if Abil would like to. I'm willing to entertain it.

And my second major building block was method. I presented method. He didn't respond to that.

Now, let's look at the arguments that he gave that didn't touch on my argument. He said the Bible's filled with contradictions. That's irrelevant because today I have not been arguing for the reliability of the Bible or anything like that.

I'm just talking about some things which we can know historically when we look at the text using historical method. He says, well, there's two resurrection narratives. One in Mark, one in Luke, in Mark, they see him in Galilee and Luke, they see him in Jerusalem.

Luke is obviously using here. The contradictions are something I've been really devoting myself to studying in the gospels for the last three years now. And Luke is using a rhetorical device here used name time compression.

In other words, he's compressing all the events into one day in order for either dramatic purposes or theological reasons. I don't know why in this particular case. But Luke does place everything in Jerusalem on Easter, the resurrection, all the appearances and the ascension, whereas the other gospels presented over a period of time.

How do we know this is time compression? Because Luke wrote a second volume. He wrote the look of acts, acts of the apostles. And in the first chapter, he says, Jesus appeared to them over a period of 40 days.

So Luke obviously knows it happened over a period of time. We've got time compression here. This is not unique to Luke.

Matthew does it several times. It's done in other ancient writings. So that's not a problem.

He says, well, many of the gospels didn't make it into the Bible, such as the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary. Well, let's just talk about that for a moment. The Gospel of Peter, all that remains of the so-called Gospel of Peter are four fragments containing 18 incomplete lines dated to the third century.

The Gospel of Peter that we read today comes from a Akmim Codex from the seventh to ninth century that's six to eight hundred years after Jesus. And it has so many variations in it that scholars even wonder whether it's the same thing from the beginning or I'm sorry, the early third century from those four fragments. So we should be very careful about using this text as a foundation for any view.

The resurrection in the Gospel of Peter, the narrative in it is far different than what we find in the canonical Gospels. You've got on Easter morning, a bunch of people have lined up by the tomb. The stone rolls itself away.

These two angels come out of the tomb carrying Jesus on their shoulders. Their heads go all the way up to the clouds. Jesus' head goes up above the clouds.

And then there's this loud voice from heaven said, did you preach to those who are asleep? By the way, there's also a cross that comes walking out of the tomb as well. And when the voice asks that, the cross says, yep. Now these are the kind of things that we find in the Gospels which are toned down like this.

But these kind of details of a giant resurrected Jesus with a cross beside them appears. They don't appear until the second century Christian literature such as the Epistle of the Apostles, the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas and 4th Ezra. And this strongly suggests that the Gospel of Peter should be dated to the second century.

J.K. Eliot who is a leading expert on the non-canonical Christian literature rights concerning the Gospel of Peter, and I quote, nowadays it is generally concluded that this Gospel is secondary to and dependent on the accounts of the Passion in the Canonical Gospels. He adds that few go to the quote extreme and extreme and claim that this Gospel represents an independent witness to the Passion of Jesus. What about the Gospel of Thomas? What could be said here? But let me just say that just as scholars studied the Canonical Gospels to see which saints of Jesus can be established historically, they do this as well with the Gospel of Thomas.

There are only two saints in Thomas which even mentioned the resurrection of Jesus, 37 and 51. These speak of disembodiment and enlightenment. However, not even the radical left fellows of the Jesus Seminar regard either of these as authentic saints of Jesus.

And so really when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas offers us nothing for this debate. And I'll add that most scholars today don't hold that the Gospel of Thomas is earlier than the Canonical Gospels and some very good reasons. Many of them are now beginning to date to the latter part of the second century, but that would take us off topic.

When it comes to these other Gospels, here's what Bart Erman who again, he's an agnostic just like Aval and he's an expert on these has written much on the non-canonical Gospels and he writes this. On the whole, though, the non-canonical Gospels are of greater importance for understanding the diversity of Christianity in the second and third and later centuries than for knowing about the writings of the earliest Christians. In another place, he says, if historians want to know what Jesus said and did, they are more or less constrained to use the New Testament Gospels as their principal sources.

Let me emphasize that this is not for religious or theological reasons. For instance, that these and these alone can be trusted. It is for historical reasons, pure and simple.

Moreover, the Gospel counts outside the New Testament tend to be late and legendary of considerable interest in and of themselves, but of little use to the historian interested in knowing what happened during Jesus' lifetime. With the partial exceptions of the Gospels of Thomas and Peter, which even by the most generous interpretations cannot provide us with substantial amounts of new information, the only real sources available to the historian interested in the life of Jesus are therefore the New Testament Gospels. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not an agnostic bordering on atheism.

I've debated him several times and great guy. We sit down, we have dinner, we talk, I mean, he's a friend of mine, a leading expert on these Gnostic Gospels and that's what he has to say. Now, let's see, he says, what about all these other books that were written that weren't made into the New Testament? Okay, dealt with that.

He said, what about these New Testament books written by the apostles? Couldn't have written them because they were written in Greek and the apostles would have only known Aramaic. There's a lot that could be said about this, Erman has said this in his new book, Forged. I've written a review of that book.

You can go to it on my website, risenjesus.com and I have a review of that book there. Basically, a lot of the New Testament authors used secretaries. It's not like a lady sitting behind a desk with the microphones in, good morning, this is the Apostle Paul's office, can I help you? It's not that, okay? It's a professional who was there to record things down and they did this for a living.

We know Paul used it. They identify himself sometimes in his letters like in Romans 16-22 with Tertius. You've got him in several other Paul's letters where he says, I Paul write this greeting with my own hand, which means he didn't write the rest of it.

And Peter and several of them could have used secretaries. They spoke to them in Aramaic. They could have written down an outline, wrote things out, read it back for a final approval.

Not a problem there. A lot of these things like 35 to 65 years later, that's not too light, that's very recent by ancient standards. I've responded to this in my debates with Ehrman.

If you want to see some specific response, go to the number four truth.net forward slash Ehrman. What about pre-scientific? He says they were writing a pre-scientific view, these early Christians. Well, we know the disciples, the apostles of Jesus and Paul believed that Jesus rose from the dead physically and appeared to them.

So maybe Abel can explain to us in his rebuttal then the origin of their belief within a scientific worldview. Explain within his scientific worldview how they came to have these beliefs that Jesus had been raised and appeared to them. He says, Genesis is a myth, it's irrelevant.

Even if it is a myth, it doesn't explain why they came to believe that Jesus rose. We can't look at the Bible as just a single book. The biblical literature was put together in a single volume later on.

Even if there was myth in Genesis, then you still have these claims, historical claims that we find in Paul that you have to deal with. He says, parallels. What about all these parallels? Well, many of the details in these parallels are mistaken.

In fact, I saw what he wrote recently and published in the paper and on these parallels, he lists 10 different areas in which he says these ancient, dinerizing gods match. Well, I looked at these and here's what we find with Dionysus, Osiris, Heracles, Thor, and Jesus. You can see Jesus has all these, but you'd have to put all these guys together to come up with one Jesus.

They really don't match on a lot of those points. I did it with even once he didn't mention it. I had this from before, 26 different ones from antiquity.

There's only six that I could find that even have remote parallels to Jesus. I don't really see that that is a problem. The fact is when we look at these parallels, you can find parallels in just about everything.

We're early one morning from Massachusetts and just after nine o'clock, flew into the largest skyscraper in the world or one of them in New York City between the 78th and 79th floors, killing everybody on board and 11 people in the building. You all know what I'm talking about, right? Well, it's when the B-25 flew into the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945. That's exactly right.

All those details, the same exact stuff as the 767 flying into the south tower on 9-11. All those details match. The parallels are impressive, but the crashes aren't even connected in any way.

You could come up with all sorts of symbolic meanings for this, like the crash of the towers, a thousand years from now, it never happened. It was symbolic of the collapse of the American economy, which by the way, that did start the worst recession in American history. So the symbolic meanings can be interesting but entirely imaginary.

What Obel has to do is to show that, do more than identify parallels, he has to show that there's a connection. And this is difficult because when we look at the historical evidence, we find things like Jesus death by crucifixion, even atheists admit, that it's one of the most certain facts of history. Jesus the miracle worker.

We know that even though skeptics won't admit he performed miracles, they will say that he performed deeds that appeared like miracles and exorcisms. We know that the disciples really believe that Jesus rose and appeared to them. So if we know that Jesus really was crucified, really performed deeds that amazed the crowds and that his disciples really believed he rose from the dead.

How does this, how do ancient pagan myths really matter here? And if they were the Christians were so interested or so against Jewish Christians, eating with Gentile Christians, Gentiles needing to be circumcised, Christians couldn't eat meat, sacrifice to idols. Do we really think we're going to borrow everything from these Greco-Roman myths? Thanks. Mike does believe it.

That's clear. He witnessed. But he can't claim it as a historian, even if he happens to be a professional historian.

When he claims it, he can only claim it as a believer, and in his case a Christian believer. Mike tries very hard to prove that Jesus rose from the dead. He tries to show that his arguments are objective facts, which are not like any other religious truth claims.

It was very hard to come what facts? I see no facts. But in actual fact, his religious truth claims are subject to furniture just as any other religion. Christians quickly says, other religion truth claims is only a matter of reading their own scriptures and believing it.

It is a matter of inward feeling or the number of impacted lives. But in actual fact, it's exactly the same thing Christians are doing. Mike claims to present historical proven facts so much better than any other religion, so-called subjective historical facts.

He even wrote in one of his books, miracles in the other religions can be dismissed with a plausible opposing theory, whereas we Christians have seen their opposing theories fail to answer the fact regarding Jesus' resurrection. Christians through claims can scientifically be proven. Again, really? Okay, let's agree that science in the natural science way is different than the way in which historians work scientifically.

Let's granted that. Let's consider how historians like Mike works differently from the way natural scientists work. Natural scientists do repeated experimentation to demonstrate how things happen, changing one variable at the time.

If the same experiment produces the same result time of the time, you can establish a level of predictive probability. For example, if I want to prove scientifically that the rock can break an ordinary glass window, I simply need about 50 same size rocks, 50 ordinary glass windows, then I throw the rock through the glass, morning, afternoon, at night, each happens 50 times, then I can conclude that I'll get the same result even if I do it a hundred times. But as I understand, historians have to work differently.

Historians are not trying to show what does or will happen, but what has happened. And with history, the experiment can never be repeated. Once something happens, it's over and unworth.

Therefore, you can't claim the resurrection as a fact in the sense that it can be empirically proven. You can't. It's not as if you can repeat it over and over.

So we have a settle for, it's always have to settle for reading manuscripts, digging up old cultures, trying to reconstruct antiquity and trying to understand what happened some way decades ago. Working, of course, with different levels of evidence, some good, some not so good. All kinds of evidence in order to show what probably happened in the past.

And that is all Mike can show what properly happened. Okay, so historians can never know for sure. But in some instances, the evidence is so good, so overwhelming that there is no doubt.

For example, there is no doubt in my mind that my rapid team, the jersey is wearing, the spring box won the previous World Cup. The evidence is strong with that one. Video types of the final game, newspaper reporting, eyewitness testimony.

Of course, a lot of Christians, South African Christian fans believe because of their prayers and their faith, God gave this victory to us as a nation. Or the losing team may even believe it is the result of evil cosmic powers. But this is not part of the proven historical fact that the spring box won the World Cup.

Only the result can be counted as strong evidence. Okay, now, what about the game played a century ago? Well, they may be good evidence, but it won't be as good as the evidence regarding the outcome for the spring books. What it about a game played in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago, the outcome of that game would be much harder to establish.

Don't you think? Why? Not so much good evidence. They are for my argument. Given the nature of things, there is better evidence for some historical events than for others.

And the only thing historians, as Mike can do, is establish levels of probability. So historians, more or less, rank positive events on the basis of the relative probability that they occurred. And all historians can do is show what probably happened in the past.

Therefore, they can't give historical evidence for the resurrection because of the nature of historical evidence. Let me try to explain it regarding the resurrection. There's nothing historical problematic about Jesus getting crucified.

No problem. Lots of people agree being crucified. Probably every day in the Roman Empire.

And the death of Jesus is part of everyone's understanding of being a human being. We all will die. He died.

It proves nothing regarding the resurrection. But if you ever say Jesus was raised from the dead, you are doing it as a believer, giving a theological interpretation. Historians have no access to God only to what goes on here on earth, for which we have historical records.

Being raised from the dead is by definition a supernatural happening or a miracle. And historians cannot give historical evidence for a miracle. Just as much as no historians can give evidence that the spring walks won the lost World Cup because God has started to let them win.

They can only give evidence on the outcome of the Jesus was not historical event. That could be proven or disproved. Since historians are not able by nature of the craft to demonstrate the occurrence of a supernatural happening, that is part of mythology.

So the crucifixion is a historical event. Yes. But the resurrection is a mythical statement about God.

The crucifixion is a historical event but the resurrection is a mythical statement about God. Why do I say the crucifixion is historical event? Because there's lots of records that show how the Empire dealt with rebels. The crucifixion is historical event rooted in human politics.

As C. Sullivan writes in his book with a great title, rescuing Jesus from the Christians. He says, viewing Jesus' death as a does not harmonize with viewing Jesus' death as a political event. The execution of a potential rebel against the Roman Empire.

That's about his death, his crucifixion. And the resurrection, well, the basis of Mike's argument for the resurrection lies in his belief that the resurrection is the action of God. Jesus was raised by God but as a historian that he claims to be, not the believer we know what he believes.

He cannot prove that. He most probably can only prove the crucifixion. And anyone who disagrees with me who thinks historians can demonstrate that God can make a miracle happen needs to be even handed about it across the board.

Then all claims go. Then Islam can claim their miracles and the Hindus' days. But a little problem rears his ugly head.

Muslims and Christians, for example, has conflicting truth claims. Both of them, truth claims is both on miracles and supernatural happenings. My problem is most religions are mutually exclusive.

In other words, they possess conflicting truth claims. Both, for example, Islam and Christianity claim to be the only way to God. Yet it cannot be the both are the only way to God.

This leaves me with a conclusion that either the exclusive claims of one or both of these religions are wrong, or the truth claims are. And isn't it the problem we have at this stage in history? Religion against religion. All claiming to have the only truth.

Bishop John Shelby Spong, it's the now on the 8th when he says all religions seem to need to prove that it is the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars, prosecutions and burning daily, is finally no God or faith system at all.

Mike, all your claims seem to me like you always said, a red hearing. Your footwork is trying to represent the historical tradition of biblical truth of Christianity, but it cannot stop the advance of knowledge that will render every historic claim for a literal resurrection, all faith, questionable at best, no void at worst. Even Mike has to admit that there are many conflicting truth claims in Jesus's day.

There were other Jewish only men, such as Anina, Mendoza, and only the circle drawer. They were other pagan only men, such as Apoleanias, I think it's Apoleanias of Tiana, a philosopher who could allegedly heal the sick, cast out demons and raise the date. He was allegedly ascended to heaven.

Sounds familiar? They were pagan demigods, such as Hercules, and I think the parallels are very very nice. We could also bring back the date. Anyone who is willing to believe in the resurrection of Jesus needs to concede the possibility then of other people's claims of resurrections and in other religions, such as Islam and igneous religions of Africa and Asia, because just as you as Christians, they also claim God on their side.

The only reason Christians is the victor is not because they're right, it's because they won. That's our other saga of Constantine and the narrative text, as I look at it, then all this doesn't really matter. You understand that this is about pre-modern people trying to get to grips with their reality, and in actual fact is telling this story as they understood and believed it.

I really think they believed it. They experience themselves with something bigger than themselves. Joseph Campbell wrote, every religion is true one way or another.

It is true when understood metaphorically, but when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you're in trouble. That's why I argue that the non-literal reading of the resurrection narratives as myth makes much more sense in the 21st century, because it helps us to read this story, to reflect on it internal and external renewal, to move away from our old self, the ego, and our old idols, money, sex, and power, and be reborn again, dying to the false self and living as one with each other. That's why Joseph Campbell says that the function of myth is, the function of a myth is to awaken in the individual essence of all mystery, gratitude for the ultimate mystery of being.

And if you can understand the concept of resurrection, which is really an very old symbolic expression of hope, and it has a long history, much older than Christianity. For example, it was already being applied to the Jewish martyrits in the Maccabin revolt 150 years before the Christian era, as a metaphor. A metaphor for each one to realize that being truly alive means being resurrected each day, a symbol of becoming a new.

Like another great prophet said, Calil Hebron, your daily life is your temple and your religion. Whether you enter into it, take with you your old. That's a resurrection.

That means something. Historically, I'm not convinced. Thanks.

Now Mike and I will each ask 10 minutes. If you recall my opening statement, I said that I was constructing a positive historical case for Jesus resurrection using two major building blocks facts and method. So let's again review this in light of what Abel just said.

Let's begin with my facts. Here I presented five facts. And Abel has said, well, he grants the facts, but he can test that we can prove it as a historian.

And to that I'd say, well, what about it that I haven't proven? I've subjected this to the typical methods that's used by professional historians outside the community of biblical scholars by applying four common criteria, explanatory scope, explanatory power, less ad hoc and plausibility. And based on these, I showed that the resurrection hypothesis meets these very well. In fact, it meets it better than any other naturalistic explanation out there.

And when you the best explanation, historians use inference to the best explanation. So it meets these criteria better than any others, then this is how historians award historicity. And they say, okay, if it meets it better than the others, we can say this is what probably occurred.

And this is what the resurrection hypothesis does. It meets it better than any of the others. So I think we can prove it as a historian.

Now, he does say that, okay, I'll get down to that later because we're talking about probability and stuff. When he comes to my fifth fact here, and he says, I'll grant that the the original disciples, the apostles, Paul, they sincerely believe that Jesus rose and appeared to them. I'm glad he admits this because he's with the majority of scholars there.

But he says, what? So what happened? Well, they experienced something something bigger than themselves. Well, why agree with that? It's the resurrection of Jesus. And he didn't explain what else that could be, which means there was a lot of ambiguity involved.

I mean, of course, it was something bigger than themselves. What was it? If you don't define it, then that's lacking explanatory power. The disciples, the apostles, Paul, they based their future resurrection.

They based their lives and how they were living their lives because they believe Jesus had been raised from the dead physically and had appeared to them. Now, if Jesus did not rise from the dead physically and appear to them, what happened? I presented a hypothesis. Jesus rose from the dead physically and appeared to them.

It meets the best in terms of explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, and less ad hoc. If you don't think Jesus rose, then give us an idea of what you think happened. Now, he said in terms of the historical method, he used a lot of the same things.

I know he's been reading Bart Erman here because he used the same kind of objections. This is great. I've debated Erman a couple of times here.

So he says, there's no access to God. This is a theological objection. Yeah, I agree.

Historians do not have access to God. Two problems here. He's confusing a historical conclusion with its theological implications.

So what we do is we go through and we say, all right, this happened, this happened, all right, Jesus rose from the dead. We know that this did not happen by, we can turn this down. We know that this did not happen by natural causes.

So what happened then? What would have caused this to have occurred? And well, if we know it didn't happen by natural causes, it had to happen by a supernatural one. It's what we know from science today. It would say dead people don't rise from the dead.

And 100 billion people not rising from the dead really shows us that scientifically, dead critters stay dead apart from God's intervention. So if that's the case, then we know that there's supernatural invention here, intervention. Say, well, I don't, you know, I don't like that.

Historians can't get to God. No, but this is the theological implications of a historical conclusion. It's kind of like what William Dempsey, a friend of mine says in science, and astronomers and physicists do this all the time, is the look at phenomena in the universe and they'll try to explain this.

Well, maybe they don't see things like black holes. Black holes, quark strings, gluons have never been observed, probably never will. But what they do is they see the phenomena and then they posit a theoretical entity in order to explain that.

So I just say, okay, a guy rose from the dead. I wasn't there. I didn't see who raised him.

I don't know how this happens scientifically. So let me posit a theoretical entity, God, and it does pretty well. And that's doing no differently than what scientists are doing and presenting positive theoretical entities for what happened.

Historians can go ahead and make a conclusion that the event happened, and they can even leave a question mark pertaining to the cause there. They do this all the time. He says, well, natural science has controlled and repeatable experiments.

I agree. Historians use inference to the best explanation. And we see that when we apply this to modern historical scenarios, it works almost all the time.

And so this gives us confidence that it will work for ancient events when we can't go back and check those. Here's the thing I was thinking of earlier. He says that historical investigation shows what probably happened.

I agree. I can't prove it with absolute certainty. And I'm not looking for that.

I'm looking for reasonable and adequate certainty. And by the way, that's what the science sciences do too. I had dinner a few years ago with two MIT professors of physics and Harvard professor of the philosophy of science.

We had a great discussion about all this. And they said, so many of the results of science today are so tentative. They're so speculative.

We know a lot, but there's so much that we're just guessing and theories and hypotheses we come up with today are expelled a year, two, three years down the line. These are what two physicists at one of the leading physics universities in the world were telling me. They told me that there's very little for which we can have absolute confidence in physics.

And that's a science for which we have the most confidence about because it's based in mathematics. Yes, we look for the most probable explanation. Wise people choose probabilities.

And the resurrection hypothesis, because it outdistances its competing hypotheses by significant margin, this gives us even more confidence that it is what actually occurred. He says, well, if we claim that Jesus did miracles, then we must allow miracles in other religions. I agree.

We have to be open to that. And I do allow the possibility of that. I don't apply our excluded.

I said, just like we'd have to do with any miracles of Jesus or anyone else, we got to look for the evidence. I am fine in saying that although I believe that Jesus was born by a virgin, I can't prove it. There's not enough evidence.

I believe Jesus by faith walked on water. I can't prove it. I believe he fed the 5,000.

I can't prove it because I don't have the evidence for it. I do have enough evidence historically speaking that Jesus did perform amazing deeds that all the crowds that he, his followers, and many others interpreted as divine miracles and exorcisms. This is a conclusion that almost all historical Jesus scholars have arrived at.

And I do believe we have enough evidence to show that Jesus rose from the dead. He said, well, okay, you know, again, you got all these miracles. These religions then, if they're mutually exclusive, like Islam and Christianity, don't they cancel each other out? Not at all.

You've got atheism and theism as competing worldviews. Once does God exist, the other says God does not exist. Does that mean they're both wrong? It can't.

They both can't be wrong. Either God exists or he doesn't exist. So even though they're mutually exclusive, doesn't warrant the conclusion that both are wrong.

You've got to look at the evidence. He mentions Hennina Bendosa, Honey the Circle, Epilonius of Tiana. Yeah, you look at these, but watch the changes when you see that Hennina Bendosa and Honey the Circle drawer.

Watch the changes that take place as when these miracles are reported by Josephus and then later on in the Talmud. They can't even get the years correct within 500 years. So there's some, you can see the legend going from when Josephus tells the story and then just 100 or so years later when the Talmud talks it.

Again, they're just way different and the Talmud really embellishes things. So when you look at Josephus, it doesn't look like any real big deal, but I'm open to a miracle taking place there. I'm not ruling it out.

I'm not against the supernatural. And then you look at Epilonius of Tiana. That was a biography written by Phyllis Stratus in the third century.

About 125 years removed from Epilonius of Tiana. He's got all kinds of problems in there. Yeah, you got, he says, we've got competing stories.

We don't even know if Epilonius died. One story says yes, another story says no. In terms of the resurrection appearances, the only one that's reported, it's not even a resurrection.

A guy sees Epilonius in a dream. That's it. And we don't know who it was.

We don't know when this appearance occurred. Phyllis Stratus says he got his information from a guy named Damas of Nineveh. Well, many scholars, classes today will say that this is just a literary device in there to make up a source, because Nineveh had been destroyed hundreds of years before.

So Damas could have been around in the third century when, yeah, the third century when Phyllis Stratus was writing this. And there's a lot of clues in the story to suggest that Phyllis Stratus was writing this for the emperor's wife in order to be in competition with Christianity. So there's no reason to believe then that this should be a credible account.

It was being written to compete against Christianity. The resurrection account had been around for over 200 years. So in conclusion, for this then, I'd say my arguments for Jesus' resurrection still stand, and Abel's criticisms to the contrary have failed under critical scrutiny.

Many Christians don't want to hear this. But the reality is that there are lots of other explanations for what happened to Jesus. There are more probable than the explanation that he was raised from the dead.

Remember, science is open and still learning, and they are honest about it. So everything already knows the truth. And now we are defending this.

We are proving this. So it's closed. And they are building the whole understanding of reality on this.

And that's a problem. That's the difference. And Mike is actually proving my point by going after how need a poor circle drawer.

That's my whole problem with Paul and other, the other people. I can also come up with a few not so impossible, possible historical ones, not that I believe it or that it can be proven. Why were the two empty? Go reach all treatments, a new history on early Christianity.

There's a few interesting and very plausible history explanations. Or why did some of the disciples claim to see Jesus alive after his crucifixion of Paul? Well, I don't doubt at all that some disciples claim this. I don't have a problem with that.

We don't have any of the written testimony, of course. But Paul writing about 25 years later indicates that this is what they claimed. And I don't think he's making it up.

And of course he knew at least a couple of them, whom he made just three years after the event, always after the event, Galatians 1. But does the fact that some people claimed to have seen Jesus alive mean that you really did come back from the date? Is that the most profitable historical occurrence? I don't think so. Let me try a plausible explanation. It is extremely well documented phenomena that people sometimes have visions of their loved ones after they die.

For example, a man sees his wife in his bedroom and die after she was buried. A woman sees a dead son. A girl sees a dead grandmother.

Even fans who sees their idol like Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson happens all the time. It is extremely well documented. In many instances, this person having this experience can talk to the dead person, can give them a hug and even feel them.

There are even documented instances of groups of people having such visionary experiences together, especially when there is a common belief among them. The blessed Virgin Mary, for example, appears a lot of times to a lot of people. Oh, howly Hindu gods appears to groups of believers.

There are thousands of eyewitnesses. Do I think that they really appear to them? No. Or that the little girl's dead mother really did come back from the dead to visit a grieving daughter.

Maybe that guy from crossing over believes it. But I know, I don't think that happened. Do I think they think it really happened? Yes, I do.

Mike says, Jesus closes followers and Paul claims they saw him alive after it. Does it mean he was really erased from the dead? Is it good, historical evidence? No. It means that they, like so many thousands of other people, had a real seeming tangible experience of a person after he died.

We all had it. If you had someone close to you that died. They experienced what they experienced and they interpreted in terms that they knew.

Jesus was alive. He must have been raised from the dead because in the pre-modern world view, people come alive and ascend to the heavens all the times. What Christians believe is not new.

It's old. I am decidedly not saying that Jesus was not crucified. I'm not even saying the tomb was not empty.

I'm not saying that these disciples did not really believe he appeared to them and ascended to heaven and including Paul. Believers believe that all these things are true, but they do not believe them because of historical evidence. They take the Christian claims on faith, not on the basis of proof.

There is no proof. And Mike concluded, when I came to understand that the Bible were a mixture of history and mythology, human stories about how they perceived and experienced the world, I could clearly see the human ideas, human thoughts. He didn't destroy my sense of awe and wonder in the world.

He did not make me lose my integrity to morals. In actual fact, my spirituality became much more real and grounded. Yes, the way of thinking about the world this way I'm speaking about is human-made.

No one can think what they are thinking is not human-made. We are humans. Of course, we think like humans.

No one can think any other way, not even people who claim that they think the thoughts of God as God has revealed them. Even that notion is a human idea, an idea that people have because it was handed down to them from other peoples living before them since the time that someone somewhere made it up. And looking at much arguments regarding the resurrection of Jesus, I'm not convinced it's not a human idea.

Just as Paul and the four gospel writers went exactly on the same page about Jesus. The evidence is there. Why? Because the human ideas clashed about who Jesus was.

Firstly, Paul was writing before any of the gospels were written as Mike said. Most Christians, even they don't know that. About 15 years before our oldest gospel mark.

Secondly, so Paul and the gospel writers all were writing after Jesus' death. And as people who had a gender to prove that Jesus was God, their human idea, they told the stories of Jesus' words and deeds in the light of their own theological understanding. So did Paul.

So did all the Bible writers. And they didn't agree on lots of stuff. Anyone who had experience of a church meeting will understand how different views and egos can clash.

Just a small taste. Was Jesus in doubt and despair on the way to the cross according to Mark or calm in control according to Luke? Did Jesus' death provide a element for sin according to Mark and Paul or not Luke? Did Jesus perform science to prove who he was? He said he did miracles according to John or they did refuse to do so according to Matthew. Must Jesus' followers keep the law if they are to enter the kingdom according to Matthew or actually not according to Paul? It all depends on what the writers' point of view is.

What he wants to say to me typically human agendas played out through the writers. To further illustrate my point. John's gospel, the last of our gospels to be written, probably some 25 years or so after Mark's, John is the only gospel that indicates that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the Son of the world.

His theology and his interpretation of the death and the resurrection here and there and it colors his whole agenda. Clearly evident, John, our lost gospel, changed the day and time of Jesus' death. Why should you ask? It may just be because the writer of the gospel of John wanted to show that Jesus is the Passover Lamb, his theology, who sacrificed, brings salvation from sins exactly like the Passover Lamb.

Jesus has to die on the day, the day of the preparation and the time somewhere afternoon when the Passover Lambs were being slaughtered in the temple. In other words, John has changed the historical datum in order to make a theological point. John has had to create the discrepancy so to get his human idea over to his readers.

I see therefore more and more evidence of a human book and not as Mike tries to prove an inherent book of God. That's why I was struggling in my life as a Christian because I knew it. I saw it and therefore all the so-called evidence can only work and bring everything together if Mike concludes that the resurrection is an action of God as he is doing.

In actual fact, history, I can't prove it. It is from God. It's divine.

It's supernatural. What can I say about that? Jesus was raised into the meaning of God and that of course means it cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history. It is a supernatural and divine intervention.

He can't claim that as a historian. It is outside the scope of a historian. So what he should have done was come here and says, I'm a Christian.

I believe this and I'm going to show you all the stuff and nice food work but this is what I believe. Then it's okay. But don't say you can prove it historically because as he admits, you can't.

Thanks. Now for each closing statements each for five minutes. Well, thank you.

I really enjoyed this exchange tonight. This has been a lot of fun. In my opening statement, I said that I was going to build a positive historical case for Jesus resurrection using two major building blocks facts and method.

Let's look at one more time how this evening's debate has panned out. I listed five facts. Now in this recent for our first major building black facts, I listed five.

Here's what Abel said this time. Yes, some disciples claimed that Jesus rose but this does not mean that he actually rose. Well, there are multiple appearances to groups and even to an enemy.

And so this, again, when I compare this with explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, less ad hoc, the resurrection hypothesis becomes the best explanation for these facts. Symbols don't work this way because it can't explain why the disciples were claiming and really believed that Jesus rose physically and staking their future resurrection on this as well as living their lives. Paul says, hey, if the dead are not raised, then let's eat, drink, and be married for tomorrow, we die.

In other words, if the dead aren't raised, Christ has not been raised. Hey, let's just go out and live for today because there's nothing coming down the pike. And so this shows that they really believed Jesus rose and I'm glad that he admits this.

But the resurrection hypothesis was by far the best historical explanation for the facts. Now, I will did take, he took issue with that and he says, no, there are some more plausible explanations than this. And he listed a couple of different things.

He said, well, there's apparitions of the dead. Hey, I'm open to apparitions of the dead. I really am.

Dale Allison wrote a book on this and he used this as a way of maybe trying to explain the appearances. I think he failed in many senses. In fact, in my big book on the resurrection, it's a little over 700 pages.

I have a whole appendix that deals with this apparitions deal here. But the apparitions don't occur within groups. They're not usually physical.

Only maybe, I forgot what it is, it's less than 1% have any physical qualities to it. And there's not a single account anytime where an apparition of the dead appeared to an enemy and they converted as a result. So the apparitions do not have good explanatory scope because there's so many things that they cannot account for that the resurrection hypothesis does.

What about the Virgin Mary appearances to groups of people? What I think about that? Well, I do think something happened. In fact, I believe something supernatural happened in those cases. There's a guy named Kenneth Samples who has interviewed some of these people who this has occurred to.

They've experienced these marrying apparitions. He's convinced. He's a Protestant.

He's convinced that they've seen something. I've not looked at it really closely, but I'm fine with saying something happened. Was it Mary? I don't know.

I'm not a Catholic, so I'm not inclined to think that it was Mary. But I don't know. But they saw something.

What's interesting is when you see these apparitions of Mary, she never identifies herself. And even the Catholic Church hasn't verified that this was Mary in any of these situations. Okay, he says, well, Paul wrote prior to the Gospels.

Yep, that's why I like him because he's early. Earlier is better. He says, well, the sometimes Paul contradicts the Gospels.

I disagree with that. But even if he did, then you prefer Paul because he's writing earlier and we can definitely trace him to the Jerusalem apostles. So if there's a tension between Paul and the apostles, I prefer Paul because we can trace him right back to the Jerusalem apostles.

And we know that they were claiming Jesus rose physically and appeared to them. Finally, he says, Paul and the Gospels had an agenda. Yes, they did.

But does this really mean we can't believe them? What about Jewish historians who write about the Holocaust? Should we just throw everything out because maybe they had a relative who was there? No, the agenda can actually work toward making it so that we should pay attention because they're going to dig deeper into it. Does that mean a homosexual activist can never write on homosexual rights because they're biased in that way? What about Richard Dawkins who writes in the book The God Delusion and says if this book works as I intended to, people, religious followers who pick it up will be atheist when they put it down. Does that mean everything that he says in that book is bad? We shouldn't believe it? Not because, no, we have to look at the arguments.

And when we do that, then we do find his arguments are bad. But we reject it because of bad arguments, not because he's biased. Bias doesn't mean that it's wrong.

It just means we have to be careful. Yes, the disciples were biased. But you know if Jesus really rose from the dead and appeared to them, they have every reason to be biased and want to get the greatest news out this world has ever heard.

Appreciate all your time tonight. This has been an enjoyable debate. Thank you very much.

You know, Paul never made Jesus only through a vision. This is better than the so-called eyewitnesses. I think we must debate on that another day.

The Christian message about God, Christ and the salvation he brings is and Mike's five facts. Again, what facts? He asked why are the disciples so convinced? Because it's based on myth. What is myth? A set of stories, views and perspectives.

That is not historical fact. That is how people interpreted and believed in their time. What happened? What their reality is, they gave it a story.

They name it. They talked about it. Is it true? Most probably not.

Yes, Jesus' death was not a myth. But the idea that it was a death that brought about salvation, that is by definition, a myth. The death of Jesus was for me, an act of self-giving love.

According to this myth, Jesus was willing to live and die for the sake of others. This makes Jesus just as Socrates, Buddha, Gandhi and many other exceptional role models an example for me to emulate and live by. This is not because I could prove their self-sacrifice as a historical fact, but because it resonates with me on a spiritual level.

In my humble opinion, people need to use the intelligence to evaluate what they find to be to and untrue, especially when it's claimed to come from God. This is how we should live life generally. To me, the Bible is no more the word of God than the Torah, the Qumram or the Upanishads.

It's human stories through symbols and metaphors of trying to understand the world and its realities. So, just as I came to see the Bible as a very human book, I came to see Christianity and all other religions for that matter as very human creations. It did not descend from on high.

It was created down here on earth among the followers of Jesus in the decades and centuries after his death. To me, all myths should be translated into a modern metaphor or symbol, so that it can make sense to people living in a postmodern and ever-changing world. Let me put it another way.

We need to translate or re-metallologize the myth of Jesus' resurrection. Otherwise, people will be forced, as it is, at present, to accept not only the idea that Jesus has risen, but the cosmology on which it's based. We need to find the contemporary spirituality.

We need to take responsibility for our planet. We need to take responsibility for each other. We must translate Jesus' real message, not as a God, but as a man.

Love one another. I think the rest is secondary. To me, as an agnostic, open and still searching, to me living with a different understanding of myself and the world in which I live, this is a normal part of the cycle of life.

And being human, like everything and everyone else, I will not be resurrected, but recycled. And that is one of the reasons why Christianity is in need of a new paradigm that will take into account the real position of human beings in the cosmos. The New Testament, the Four Gospels, all the Bible, are mythological narratives, and should be read and studied as that, and not as if there are historical documents telling us exactly what Jesus did and when and where he did it.

And then building your whole life on that, living with guilt and living with stuff that most probably never happened while you're living now and to love each other is hard enough to waste that on decades ago. Thank you. Okay, Frances, what we're going to do now is we're going to open up the floor for question and answers.

I just want to say a few rules. I want to urge you to ask questions. This is no time to give your testimony.

It's no time to open the debate or start a new debate. This is not your moment of fame. This is you ask a question.

All right. And keep it short, the question not being stated longer than 30 seconds. Okay, we'll start that side.

Oh, this side. All right. So you were talking about the modern-day apparitions and people who see dead loved ones.

And I presume they don't conclude that because they see their loved ones in a vision, these loved ones have, I mean, have risen from the dead physically. So can you please give some substantiated explanation of why the disciples started to believe in a physical resurrection? Instead of concluding what other witnesses of apparitions conclude, instead of being alive, Jesus was in fact dead. That's my whole point.

Antiquity. And the people that lived in that time, they didn't have a problem. When you said people, you know, resurrected from the dead.

Can you give explanations of why that is? I mean, are there any other physical resurrection stories? Yeah, yeah, there's a lot. Jesus' story is not unique. It's built on a lot of other stories.

Diagnosis is a story that is resurrected. There's even a cross. And it's a lot of years older than the Jesus myth.

So in that time, that's what people really believed. In response, I did think she brought up a good point in terms of the apparitions. When people see apparitions of the dead today, of their relatives or so forth, whoever, they do not conclude that that person has been raised physically from the dead.

They're seeing their spirit. They wouldn't dream of going back to their tomb and exuming the body and thinking it's gone. But with the original disciples, they thought Jesus had been raised physically.

There aren't a lot of accounts in antiquity of dinerizing gods that predate Christianity. T. N. D. Medinger, a senior Swedish scholar, has written the most comprehensive recent treatment on it. It's a book called The Riddle of Resurrection 2001.

He says, the overwhelming and nearly universal consensus of modern scholars say that there are no accounts of dinerizing gods which predate Christianity. Now, Medinger takes issue with that. He says he thinks he has three and possibly as many as five.

But when you look at these accounts, they are so different from the Jesus resurrection. He says there really are no parallels in the ancient Near Eastern religions. He said Dionysus was crucified.

No, he wasn't. He's talking about an amulet that, a jewel that has a crucified figure on it. But that has been shown to be a third century forgery.

And so I'm amazed that he would appeal to that. That comes from freak and gandy to authors who have no credentials in this area. They don't even have a bachelor's degree in ancient history or biblical studies.

And they're the ones writing on it. And he's getting this from Hansi Volmeron's. And it's amazing that Volmeron's even appeals to it because these guys aren't even scholars and it's been proven to be a forgery.

Okay, thanks. We have to just want to add this. There is people claiming today resurrections.

I mean, there's people that say how many of them are prepared to die for those convictions? Are there is people dying? Is that your question? Is that your question? Listen to me. I cannot have a new debate here. Okay.

One question, one answer and one reaction. All right. Although you can finish what you wanted to say.

I just want to say Elvis Presley lives. Okay. Right.

The answer there for Mike. Shouldn't we doubt the reliability of an individual who claims or makes the statement that who who doesn't believe in the resurrection of Jesus makes God a liar and also somebody who misinterpreted the message of Jesus by believing Jesus second coming would still be in his lifetime. Hold on.

Keep that. Repeat that for me again. I'm not sure what you're saying.

All for Jesus. All says that whoever does not believe in the resurrection of Jesus physical resurrection makes God a liar. No, he said if we are preaching that Christ has been raised and he hasn't, then we're making God a liar because he didn't raise Jesus.

Okay. So, but if we if we don't believe in in the physical resurrection, wouldn't that be the same statement then? I don't think so because Paul's not talking about belief there. He's saying if Christ has not been raised and we're going out and saying that he has been raised, then we are we are given false testimony here.

We're making God a liar. Isn't it one of the same thing? I don't want to split here. So, go ahead and move on.

Okay. And the second question he shouldn't be then also doubted our ability of a person who misinterpreted Jesus's preaching by believing that the second coming will still be in his lifetime. Well, Paul did believe that at first, but as Jesus did not come during that, by the time you get to 2 Corinthians 5, Paul is reassessing his beliefs there and saying, it could be, I think he's not going to come during my lifetime.

And so, he's struggling with that with resurrection. He's saying, gosh, well, if I die prior to the Jesus coming, I'm going to be a disembodied spirit, but I take comfort that I'll be with the guardian spirits. So, are you saying that that would be because he was wrong on that, he could have been wrong on the appearance? Is that what you're suggesting? I'm just saying that we based the biggest religion in the world on statements of one individual, and we're not even sure if the appearances of Jesus to him might be as you use the word in a hallucination, for instance.

Yeah. Well, I think I had to move on. Yeah, it's not just Paul that's given us.

He's getting us from the early curriculum that comes from Peter, James, the rest of the apostles. So, you do have multiple independent reports here, and virtually all scholars who are studying this subject, even against skeptical ones are admitting that it's not only Paul saying he had an experience, which he says multiple times throughout his undisputed letters, but it's also the Jerusalem apostles that we have in these, the kurigma, the oral traditions that are peppered throughout the New Testament, Paul's letters, also Luke's gospel, things like that. So, you've got Clement of Rome and Polycarp, who I mentioned, and they talk about how, especially Clement of Rome, saying that the disciples and Clement was discipled by Peter, and he said, yep, Peter's claiming, and the disciples were claiming that Jesus rose and appeared to them.

So, we do have multiple independent testimonies that Jesus, they really believe that Jesus rose and appeared to them in individual and group settings to friend and foe alike, and hallucinations don't do a good job at explaining appearances to groups. Neither would they do a good job of explaining the appearance to Paul. Paul is not grief-stricken.

He's glad Jesus is dead. He's trying to destroy the church. Jesus is the last person he wants to see.

So, it's very unlikely that he's going to experience a hallucination of Jesus. Abel, do you want to react on that? Just want to say, I'm not contesting the fact that they didn't really believe that it happened. We're contesting the fact that we can't today prove it, and they are pre-modern worldviews.

So, we understand why they said what they said, and that's what mythology is about. It's organizing a lot of symbols, images and narratives together, and you understand what those people in that time believed, and of course, they would have believed that. That would be their conclusion.

Okay, he asked two questions. So, you can also ask your one. Thank you very much.

From now on, it's one question per person. Does it count if I say I didn't know the mic was on? Okay, by the way. Okay, Abel, throughout your argument, one of the prevailing themes was the fact that we can't trust the Bible.

The New Testament is not trustworthy in any way. An objective test that ancient historians use to determine the historicity of a text is as follows. When was it first written? What is the oldest copy in existence? What is the time span between those two dates? And then lastly, what is the number of ancient copies still in existence? You even mentioned Julius Caesar, so that is quite convenient.

Let me give you the following. His commentaries on the warring goal was written in 40 BC. The oldest copy we have in existence is 900 after Christ, and that's the time span is 900 years, and the number of ancient copies in existence is 10.

Now, if we apply that test to the New Testament, we get the following facts. It was round about completed in 140 AD was the entire of Britain. It was first apparently written in the 60s, so that gives us a rather shorter time span than 900 years.

In the amount of ancient copies we have in existence are quite more than 10. There are 24,000 copies in existence. Doesn't that kind of disprove your point? No, in actual fact, you're proving my point.

Are you sure? Could you just explain the logic there? How I'm proving your point? Nothing you just said, but we believe Julius Caesar has history. Why had a shot? Did you understand the question? Do you understand the question? I'm not building my whole life, my whole view and reality on Julius Caesar. It's not as a question or building it on that as a historical fact.

And what you're saying now, I can get on every point you just might. There will be an expert that is contesting you on that. So all I'm saying is, we don't know.

That's why I'm agnostic. I don't know what you just said. You can't prove.

I can't disprove it. But you're really building your whole life on that? Well, just because you have a good manuscript evidence doesn't mean what the literature reports is true. If we had the originals of Shakespeare's hamlet, it wouldn't mean that Shakespeare's hamlet's true.

The strength of the evidence is not contingent on the ramifications it has in our life. If you have a friend who's a stockbroker and says, hey, I want you to buy some ABC stock, it's going to be good. Maybe you say, well, I'll put $100 in it.

You say, well, or whatever, $700 rant. And say, well, OK, yeah, but this is really good. I want you to empty your entire retirement account and put it in there.

Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Well, it's a good buy, whether you're only putting $100 or your entire retirement account. But you might need more evidence before you're willing to do that.

But it doesn't mean that one thing is better than the other just because you have more in it for the deal. There's more on the line for you. It's true where it's not.

It doesn't matter the ramifications on your life. You personally may require more evidence to convince you, but it doesn't mean that the evidence isn't good for it. Thank you.

Any question for Mike? Yes, good evening, Professor Kona. I'd just like to have a notion idea of a dying and rising messiah. And furthermore, during the disciples' travels with Jesus is that at any point, expect Jesus to rise from the day to after this day, if at any point, expect Jesus to rise from the dead.

And maybe what's the significance of that? Well, it's interesting you asked that. Did the disciples expect form too? I wrote an article that was published last year in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, where I gave six arguments for the authenticity of Jesus' predictions about his imminent death and subsequent resurrection. I think that at least with Mark 831, Mark 931, and the saints at the last supper about this body being broken and blood being given, I think that we can establish those three historically speaking is really good evidence that Jesus actually uttered those.

So there's every good reason to believe that Jesus did predict his violent imminent death and subsequent resurrection. It is interesting that the disciples, it's reported that they didn't believe him. And that is enigmatic.

It's like, well, why wouldn't they believe him? And there's a couple different possibilities such as either they just couldn't comprehend a dying God, or I'm sorry, a dying messiah, or they had another agenda. They wanted to discourage him from it. Or they just weren't getting it.

We just don't really know why they weren't, you know, why they just didn't believe it and seem to think that at the time. But again, that's that's in the gospels. I believe the gospels on this.

I think there's numerous things in the gospels like Jesus' predictions about his death and resurrection that we can prove. But it's Paul's. Ultimately, that testimony and the early karegma in the oral oral tradition he preserves that I think presents our earliest witness, the best witness we have, the thing that can be most easily and strongly, certainly taken back to the disciples.

And when we do that, we see there was no symbolism here. This was not symbolic. They really believe Jesus rose and appeared to them.

And if that's the case, and these are Jews, it's very doubtful. And they all were Jews, these guys writing, it's very doubtful that they're going to appeal to the pagan myths for support of a dying and rising God. When again, they were debating over whether Jewish Christians still need to be circumcised, whether Jewish Christians could eat with Gentile Christians because of the law and stuff.

They're not going to freely borrow from the pagan religions. My answer would be, we don't have the views. Mark, Nuke, John, Matthew, they didn't write it.

It's written a lot of centuries later. So we don't have, we don't know what they thought. We only have copies of manuscripts.

And we have to interpret it through Greek writers and people that already knew about all the stuff, already wanted to prove that Jesus was God. They are writing it, not the original guys. We don't even know what they said, or they really believed.

We have to believe the scribes, the later generation scribes. I've got a bit of a mixed question and I would love to go out with coffee with you. But I just want to start to say the following, that people in the Bible did not teach that the earth was flat.

As I thought it was 22 states correctly that the earth is spherical doctrine. And the early church taught that. But I'm going to ask you a question and I need to go quickly because Rudolf I've got 30 seconds a. Okay.

Abel, do you believe that truth is relative and relevant to one's own context? Okay. Do you believe that truth is exclusive to one's own context? Okay. But then do you believe that your truth is exclusive? You see, what's interesting about, and it's very nice, that's why I understand you said you want to go and drink some coffee.

Because now you're getting onto my terrain of philosophy, you know. I'm not finished. Please, please, please.

Because it's a fact. You can answer that because the reason I'm asking you this is very quickly. You said that basically what we need to do from an agnostic perspective is we need to come from levels of probability through science, if I understand you correctly, and that basically historically we cannot prove that these events took place.

I just want to mention a few things in something that I picked up and I wrote down what I was saying. Sorry, is it a question? Please, a question. Well, you should ask me, you're almost a minute now.

Okay. So, I want to say, nothing's saying. Question.

Question is the following. If you believe that science is the best proof to actually show us truth, why does not science show us mathematical and mathematics and logic, metaphorical truths, ethical judgments, aesthetical judgments, and science itself cannot prove science itself. That's why I said, you should ask for coffee.

So, where do you come from from an agnostic perspective if the historicity is not truth? Thanks. Yeah. You know, at the night like this, you have to focus on stuff.

My whole concept is about the Coron Armstrong thing about logos and mittos or mittos. You've got understanding that you can say science and works who have, you know, empirical proven stuff and then you've got heart. Let's say knowledge or thinking and that's when mythology comes in.

And both have to meet. But I hate theory stuff. If you can't ground it and I can't feel it and be with it and experience it here and now, then it doesn't, it doesn't help me.

So I think both of those, those type of knowledge or truth claims have to connect. We must listen to it and heart. But yeah, it's complicated to, you know, just, this is a good question.

Mike, what a comment? Nothing. Okay. Question for Mike.

I think the very first fact you mentioned was that Paul was the witness to the resurrection of Jesus. But you're reading the Bible, I don't recall Paul ever having an account of Jesus. And you also mentioned that Paul was the earliest of the writers before the gospel.

So if Paul ever writes about Jesus, then what historical basis is that he ever referred to Jesus, that is Jesus of Nazareth as historical figure? Well, you got Acts chapter 9, 24 and 26, in which Luke reports and narrates the appearance to Paul on three different occasions. But the gospel's written after way of the Paul's writing. So, yes.

And Paul does say on several occasions that he appeared to me, it's in 1 Corinthians chapter 9 when he says, have I not seen Jesus? He talks in Galatians 1 about Jesus appearing to him. But Paul speaks, Paul never mentions Jesus on Nazareth. He says, Christ died for sins according to the Scriptures.

1 Corinthians 15 verses 3 and following. Christ died for sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, and that he appeared to Peter. Then 12, he goes through those and the last one he says, and last of all is to untimely born, he appeared also to me.

So he does say on several occasions about Jesus appearing to him. I believe he spoke of Christ. Okay, what are you saying, Jesus and Christ are different? I mean, Christ just means Messiah.

That's the Greek word for Messiah. Nobody's going to, no historian's going to dispute that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah and thought of himself that way. And again, since Christ is just the Greek term for Messiah, of course, he's referring to Jesus.

I just want to say, I think she should have debated you. Thank you. Okay, another question for Obok.

Oh, well, I'd just like to know, Mike brings the historical point out of a, he's a proven, well, he's proven in the field of history as a Easterist or whatever the word is. He comes and he brings our hypothesis, which he's written in a book, which no scholar that I know of, even worldly scholar, non-Christian scholars, come out and opposed in public and said, this cannot be the truth. So he makes a case.

He brings it to this debate and he says, this is what it is. Most of the points you agree on, like certain authenticities of Paul, et cetera, et cetera, then you disprove this by saying he can prove everything, but he can't prove the resurrection because that would be referring to God, which would refer to a supernatural power, which he cannot prove. I agree with that.

How is it then that you oppose him if you two believe in supernatural things, all right, such as meditation? You say, said in your opening statement, you said that you rely now even more on being a spiritual being. So you refer to spiritual things and yet you cannot accept the spiritual explanation for the most likely hypothesis that even non-Christian historians will agree upon. How can that be? Does that, I just want to finish it with this, does that not make your argument tonight biased in the sense that you are just trying to disprove something because of your belief and not based on facts? I don't believe in supernatural things and I can see, you see, that's a problem when you don't understand a world.

That's my problem with the Bible. It's a whole world people don't understand. When you talk about meditation, it's not a supernatural belief meditation.

It's a quite ordinary thing I can explain to you. So I just want to clear it up. A spirit is not naturally proven.

A spirit is saying you are spiritual and referring to a spirit is supernatural. Yeah, spirituality, in my sense, I can explain it because spirituality is only a word, a container word, and you can fool that word with your own definition. So if you would ask me, what do you mean by spirituality? I would say being here and now, honestly, that's that's my definition of spirituality.

Nothing any failure that you're talking about. Hey, Mike, you want to respond? All right. Okay, question for Mike.

No more. Okay, we'll have one more for for our and then we'll close. Oh, hi, I'm trying to understand if there were any contemporary historians who refuted the resurrection of Jesus.

I mean, God's lived in the first century second century and third century or did the skepticism asked us maybe later on, but then it was accepted in the earlier times like that Jesus was resurrected. I don't think I understand the question, but in that time, people believed it because it was pre-modern times. So that could happen.

So they believed it. Now, in our worldview, that's a scientific worldview, we start doubting it. Does it answer your question? Yeah, I think it's fine.

But then there were not any historians who tried to refute it, say maybe the second century or the third century. No, I don't know. I should also answer that.

I'm not the historian now. What was that question? Michael, you're sleeping. I'm trying to understand if there were any skeptics around biblical times, maybe in their first century or second century.

Yeah, there were these skeptics in the first and second century. I mean, Matthew, whenever he's writing, whether you date him in the 50s, 60s or 80s, Matthew says when he talks about the empty tomb, he says the Jewish leaders were going around saying the disciples stole the body and they continue to do this to this very day. So there were certainly there.

By the time you get to 150, you've got Justin Martyr saying that the Jewish leaders, he's writing the tripho, a Jew, and he said the Jewish leaders were going around saying that the disciples stole the body. It was still going on in his day. You had a couple of years later, you had Kelsus, and he was saying that Jesus faked his death.

You had Tertolian a little bit later around the year 200, and he says that there was the rebarial hypothesis going on. Now, in answer to what Avil said about the prescientific view, what I still never heard from him tonight, I said, okay, if we're going to the disciples, we know, and he's granting here, they were proclaiming and really believe that Jesus had been raised physically from the dead. So we have to say, well, what led them to that belief? And if you're going to say they believe that in a prescientific view, all right, if Jesus did not rise from the dead and appear physically to them as they believed, then what led them to that belief? Posit hallucinations or whatever, we can deal with that, but you got to posit something.

Symbolism doesn't work. Reading about a few dying and rising heroes or figures in other religions doesn't work either, because again, Paul and these early disciples were Jews. They're not going to even play around with this pagan stuff.

So I still have yet to hear any plausible scenario in a scientific worldview that would account for their beliefs that Jesus had been raised physically and had appeared to them. Okay, friends, actually, we have decided ahead of time that we're going to spend about 20 minutes on Q&A. We have been 25 minutes now.

You guys are most welcome to ask your questions just after we've closed, you still most welcome. But first, I just want to thank you so much for attending this evening, and let's just give these two proponents a great head of Catholic Church. Thanks for joining us today.

If you'd like to learn more about the work and ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona, visit RisenJesus.com, where you can find authentic answers to genuine questions about the reliability of the Gospels and the resurrection of Jesus. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast, visit Dr. Lacona's YouTube channel, or consider becoming a monthly supporter. This has been the RisenJesus Podcast, a ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona.

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