Licona vs. Fales: A Debate in 4 Parts – Part Three: The Meaning of Miracle Stories

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Licona vs. Fales: A Debate in 4 Parts – Part Three: The Meaning of Miracle Stories

June 11, 2025

In this episode, we hear from Dr. Evan Fales as he presents his case against the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection and responds to Dr. Licona’s writings. This is the third segment of the four-part debate between the two scholars at the University of St. Thomas in 2014. Dr. Fales does not take the miracle stories of Jesus as historical events; instead, he contends they are figurative and can be understood using the anthropology of religion. Fales claims these stories were written to provide solutions to the existential crises confronting the world of the Roman Empire and gives examples through his interpretations of the stories of Barabbas’ release and Jesus' three days in the grave.

Transcript

Hello, today we continue the debate between Dr. Mike Licona and Dr. Evan Fales. In this episode, Fales responds to Licona's writings on the historicity of Jesus' miracle stories. Dr. Fales rejects that these were actual historical events.

Rather, he sees them as myths crafted to offer solutions to the crises experienced by those living. This is Dr. Kurt Cheris and you're listening to the Risen Jesus Podcast. I might say that I also asked a couple of friends about Mike and was told quite similarly that he's a very third-minded person, so I guess we both passed each other's background.

I do feel at a little bit of a disadvantage, because I have the sense that our roles have almost been reversed, that he's responding to me rather than the other way around. And what I had prepared has to do with the reading material that I take, you all got in the book, and there will be, I trust, plenty of time later in the afternoon to discuss things backwards and back and forth. So, this thing has two parts.

First, some stuff on the methods for evaluating miracle stories, that was Mike's first presentation. And secondly, we'll have a little bit of Sunday school mis-survival stories you may not have heard before. Now, I do have to issue a disclaimer, and it's an important disclaimer.

I am not a Bible scholar like this. So, caveat, emptor. Most of what I say in part two could be wrong.

In fact, most of you are going to hope that it is wrong. But it might be right, or at least I hope to convince you of that. And if you were to agree with that, I think you might need to realign your posterior odds that Jesus rose from the dead.

Of course, nothing I say in part one will be wrong. So, here's the menu. I aim to defend Hugh's basic position.

But his argument must be reformulated in some somewhat significant ways, I think. First, Hugh is nowhere near as clear as he needs to be on what a miracle is, and he is not alone on that score. Secondly, he lacked proper knowledge of confirmation theory.

Unfortunately, Bay's work, Bay's was a contemporary, was only posthumously published by a friend of Bay's only two years before Hugh died. And so far as I know, Hugh never at least published any further reflections in the light of Bay's work. Thirdly, and quite importantly, Hugh does not have a sophisticated account of diffeasible laws of nature and how they are confirmed or disconfirmed.

I think in part because he has a stunted conception of causation and of laws of nature generally. He tends to think in terms of positive and negative instances and their relative frequencies and not enough about inference to the best explanation. Still, Hugh's basic intuitions, I think, are on the mark.

He has a better explanation of religious miracle stories than the apologetic ones. But does he have the best sort of explanation of our data? I think the answer to that question is no. And one reason I think that is because I think that Hugh violates a principle of charity that I want to defend.

And let's see if I can do this now. There's evidence of principle of charity. So you've got two interpretations of a text.

And one interpretation imputes a significant amount of stupidity to the author of the text. And the other doesn't. Then there's a presumption, that's a diffeasible presumption, but there's a presumption in favor of the interpretation that does not impute gross stupidity.

Now, the presumption can be defeated by independent evidence of stupidity. On the other side, we shouldn't presume authorial genius, absent special evidence of authorial genius. In the case of the gospels in Paul, we have tons of special evidence of authorial genius.

These are just as literary works, really quite extraordinary. And as displaying a mastery of the Jewish traditions, they are also extraordinary and extremely subtle. And so I have to draw the conclusion just on internal evidence that these guys were really, really smart.

So I'm going to lean way over on the side of the view that whatever these texts say, the odds are in favor of they're saying things that are true or mostly true. And if not true, then rational for smart people to have a leap at the time. That's a strong constraint for me.

There is another constraint that is an important one, I think. And it has to do with the fact that a lot of people, including a lot of smart people, devoted their lives, became Christian converts, obviously, when the movement started, devoted their lives to the faith, often at some considerable risk. Whatever those truths are, they must have had a strong grip on people.

They must have been seen as quite profound and important, given the cultural context. And in fact, given the kind of existential crises which people in the Roman Empire generally were experiencing during the first century. So if one comes up with an account that doesn't explain how that can be, that's obviously a demerit of the account.

Now, so what would the alternative be to apologetics on the one side of view or the other? And I don't know of any answer to that question other than that the texts are not in many things they say to be taken literally. But it's one thing to wave your hand in the direction of figurative accounts. And it's another thing to try to figure out what they actually mean.

So I think the important project here is to do more than hand waving, but to try to figure out keys that can unlock the meanings if they are indeed figurative and not literal. How do you do that? What tools can you use? What I found helpful is appeal to the anthropology of religion. And that involves for most of us a paradigm shift.

I hate the term, but that really does describe what has to go on. I mean, you have to start thinking about the possibility of seeing these texts in a way you're really not used to at all. Let me mention just four figures that have been influential for me in the history of anthropology.

I have plenty of bones to pick with them. But I should mention first of all, Emil Durkheim, who recognized as scholars now generally do that in tribal societies and also in the ancient areas generally. People did not make a conceptual distinction between political matters and religious matters.

These were just not two sorts of business. And I mean, the various ways you can try to slice and dice that. But I think it's fair to say, for example, that in ancient Greece, religious piety was the same as civic piety.

That's what being a good citizen amounted to. Now, what Durkheim does with that is to suggest that the gods are unconscious projections of dimly perceived social realities. And I would take issue with the claim that it's unconscious.

It seems to me they just were talking about social realities in often very sophisticated ways. How does that sort out? Well, that's a long story. It's a whole chapter in this book project that I've just finished.

But let me just give you a little bit of a hint. So nations, we ourselves were referred to as if they were corporate persons of some kind. They act, they deliberate, et cetera.

They have personal characteristics. They're not exactly material things, though. And they are in some sense, at least for the citizens of the nation, ubiquitous.

They're kind of everywhere sort of omnipresent. They are at least potentially immortal and they tend to be thought of as never suffering a demise. They are the source of the law and of social authority.

They have, in fact, precisely many of the characteristics that the gods tend to have. And I want to say that in fact the people we're talking about is just that sort of thing. And they understood it at a quite abstract and theoretical level.

Now, there are big ontological questions here. Are institutional entities like nations? Are they real things? I am a realist about them, but that's obviously controversial. Matter.

How are they related exactly to their realizations or embodiments? That's an important metaphysical question you really have to think about. And we have not just gods, but in the context we're talking about. You've got angels, you've got demons, you've got souls, you've got a whole sort of population of different kinds of entities that you have to really see if you can understand in a way that will map onto the text that we have.

That's a big project, and I can't even begin to undertake it here. Second figure, I'll mention is Marcel Mouse, a classic book called The Door, The Gift, about principles of reciprocity and exchange, which are, in fact, cultural universals. Very interesting and important.

Arnold von Gennep, Les Reets, the Passage, rights of passage. Gennep looks at cultures all over the world at rights of passage, many of which involve, and not accidentally so, symbolic death and resurrection. The old person dies to the old social role and is reborn into a new social role.

And often the rituals themselves enact a death and resurrection. And last but certainly not least, Claude Levy Schloss, Structural Analysis of Myth. All these guys are French Jews.

What's up with that? Yeah, I don't know. By the way, I don't understand the notion of myth in the way most people do, nor in the way that is sometimes used in the Greek. So you had that quotation from Thessalonians, I think it was.

I got my principle of charity. I think by and large myths tell us things that are true. They're meant to tell us things that are true and they succeed.

And if not true, then rationally believed. Fifty years ago, forty-five years ago, when I first formulated these ideas, saying the stuff I'm saying to you now would have been being a voice crying in the wilderness. Not so true anymore.

A lot of people have begun to take anthropology of religion seriously. I might just mention off the top of my head Marcus Borg, Sanders, Horsley and T. Wright, a whole bunch of other people. All right.

I should have given you this thing for decoding, criteria for decoding, the figurative. So I'll actually, I'll just let you read that. There are certain signposts.

They're not infallible. It is an art, not a science to do this. But to give you some kind of clue as to what sorts of things one looks for if one is an anthropologist trying to figure out what's going on in these strange stories that people tell.

This one I did mention here. Okay. So here's, this is again a rough and ready first stab at what a miracle is.

There are lots of, you know, epicycles. Calls them over determination, pre-empting, all kinds of stuff you have to worry about. But I think this is a good way to get started.

And it's the defeat of a defeasible law or laws of nature by the more or less direct action of a supernatural agent in particular God. Okay. But it's just God doing stuff.

And the picture is not that the laws are violated. They're defeasible laws. They can be defeated in the following sense.

You've got an event which is such that we're only natural or physical forces acting on it. It would behave in such and such a way. Right? But in fact, it doesn't behave in exactly that way.

Not because those natural forces aren't acting on it, but because there is some additional force acting on it whose source is not natural. Right? So God gives stuff an extra shove in directions that he wants. That seems to me is the most coherent way to think about what a miracle might be.

So there's been a lot of stuff written often by atheists to the effect that miracles are just outside the purview of scientific or for that matter historical. Investigation, most of that strikes me as nonsense. Basic business of science is to discover causes.

Miracles are caused by God, maybe Satan. I don't see why in principle you couldn't have an influence to the best explanation whose conclusion is probably God did this. This sure doesn't look like something that can be fully explained just in terms of the available natural forces.

Well, let me just say a brief word about the question are miracles metaphysically impossible. My view is maybe actually leading in that direction. And again, that's a bigger story than I can tell here.

I found that the clearest way to tell the story though is to worry about in fact Newton's law and says that when you push on something it pushes back. Push on something is to assert a force. I think, not unconditionally, but I think that forces just are closings.

That's what they are. And it's essentially or necessarily so. If it's not a force, it's not a causing.

If God can't push on things, then he can't do stuff. As far as I know, I could be corrected here, but as far as I know, the third law is indefeasible. Now, there are ways to get around this.

There's a very interesting work by John Robert Russell on collapsing quantum wave functions and how God could affect that, which would not violate Newton's third law. And I'm not enough of a physicist to make a judgment about that. So I'm going to say maybe on this point.

And in fact, just to prove how generous I am, oh, wait a minute. Yeah, okay. I'm not quite there yet.

Our miracles by definition are unique, unrepeatable, improbable, beyond the reach of science, destructive of knowledge in the past. Now, if God can do, he can do as many times as he pleases. He might not do it often, but that's just contingent back.

I take it. They need not be unique or unrepeatable. They need not be improbable.

I just tried to suggest that there would not be under the reach of science. Nor do we, I have to worry, think about certain atheist worries that if we couldn't rely on the laws of nature being exceptionalist, we could never make inferences about the past. Okay, so that said, I want to give Mike a freebie, okay, for the purposes of this argument.

Now I see that I'm running off the edge of my screen here. All right, so what is he trying to prove? And what is he not trying to prove? He's not trying to prove that miracles are impossible. I mean, you wouldn't have any luck with that sort of thing in any case.

And he's not trying to prove that miracles have never occurred. It's just not his project. Or the sense experience could never establish a miracle, right? He's interested in testimony, what testimony can establish for us.

And he doesn't think either that testimony could never provide strong evidence for a miracle. In fact, he allows for the, at least theoretical possibility that evidence could give us, I'm sorry, that testimony could give us evidence for the occurrence of a miracle that could match in strength the evidence against that. All right, whether it could overpower it, actually there's been a mathematical work within the Bayesian framework to show that enough independent evidence could overpower any level of probability that's less than one.

Okay, so what is he trying to show? Well, that miracle testimony, especially in support of a religious cause, never has or could establish rational belief in a miracle. So, let me, perhaps all too briefly, try to defend him against white comments. So, I guess I'm in the interest of time not going to say too much about some of these.

In the, the chapter that you read, Mike complains that he's criteria for trustworthiness and miracle testimony are too strict. That he sets the bar too high. I don't see why one shouldn't set the bar high given the cloud of the cloud under which miracle testimony labors because, you know, one, it's pretty extraordinary.

And number two, there is the temptation which we know on empirical grounds all too often gets succumbed to, to spin the truth, to put it politely. You better have high standards. Mike mentioned Craig Keener was a huge two-volume thing over 1200 pages.

We can talk about it if you want. I'm not impressed. I'll say that.

Secondly, Hume appeals to uniform experience and the uniformity of nature. And Mike takes us to be so similar to a principle of analogy that has been invoked by various theologians who have been skeptical about miracles. And the complaint is that this would exclude scientific anomalies and interestingly enough dinosaurs.

I don't think Hume would ever given the evidence we have for dinosaurs now and hesitated at all to allow that dinosaurs. I think this understands what Hume is up to. With respect to anomalies, I think there are at least four interesting cases that we can distinguish.

And it's really worth thinking about what the confirmation conditions are that they impose on laws of nature. So, first of all, you might have a regularity which has occasional exceptions. And it turns out that the exceptions are evidence that the laws of statistical law, like the laws of quantum mechanics.

So, that's one kind of case. We want to distinguish that case from a case where something weird happens which we have reason to believe that we can explain away without modifying what the laws of nature are that we're committed to. I think pulsars are an excellent example of that.

We can talk about that in Q&A if you want to. There are game-changing anomalies that really do threaten what we took to be the laws of nature. I suspect that would be a game changer.

That is to say enough about water, I think, to know that the current science couldn't explain that. Having to give way in some way or other. And finally, miracles.

Now, Hume is alive to these distinctions, though what he says about them is not very sophisticated. Right? So, remember he has the case of the Indian who doesn't believe that water can turn solid, right? And who is within his intellectual rights not to believe that, though he ought to be worried about the question of whether the conditions in Moscow are different from the conditions in India. And you also have Hume talking about, you know, suppose that the earth was dark for several days.

And we had sort of global reports and that. And he also has, as an example, a statistical behavior of the weather. So, I think that in fact, and this is as much as I'll say about this, I think that you can give a reasonably good Humean account of how to distinguish these things.

Though, in the end, I would prefer to think about it in ways that are not human. Third, Mike objects to Hume's use of antecedent probabilities in part two of miracles. If I understand Mike's objection here, I think he's just objecting to Hume's invocation of the straight rule of induction, where you look at a, you know, a fear sample and you look at relative frequencies and you just projected a probability like that.

That seems to me to be a controversial rule, it's inconsistent with Bayesian updating, but it's not a crazy way to try to proceed. And after all, Hume's use of it in this context is just to give us some sort of estimate of how likely it is that people might be tempted to tell miracle stories. And his appeal here is to what he takes to be a certain psychological feature of human beings are fascinated by, you know, really wild kind of stuff.

You know, I mean, I'm not a psychologist, I think there's some truth to that psychological observation, probably. Still, I think we do need to rethink the way Hume puts his case. How should we think about all this? Let me give you an illustration that I think might perhaps be helpful.

When I was a freshman physics major in college, we had to do something called the Milliken oil drop experiments, classic experiment that was devised around 100 years ago to measure the charge in an electron. We had these crappy little old gadgets to do this with, and it's a delicate observation to make. And like my colleagues in the class, I came up with a value for the charge in an electron that was, I don't know, 15% away from being valued in an electron.

And one thing that I did not succeed in doing was revolutionizing physics. Why not? Because nobody, including I myself, believed my value, right? Why deeply? Well, because there's an obvious explanation or a set of circumstances that would explain why I got a value that was a bit off. And if one were to accept the conclusion that there are occasional electrons that are that far off or in fact at all off from a certain value, it would in fact revolutionize physics.

That would be a major, major reform that physics would have to go. So a lot of stuff, they would have tons and tons of that. So one point I want to make about this is that actually making these sorts of judgments is radically holistic.

It's not a question of sort of local data that you have, but all kinds of data that can be relevant to whether you think somebody's observed something correctly or not. Now, this also have a large theory in play. They have views about God's purposes and projects, about human freedom, sin, stubbornness, lots of things.

And all of those can be invoked in forming an estimate of the likelihood that God can and would perform a particular sort of miracle under given conditions. The atheist, meanwhile, invokes her knowledge of human nature, et cetera, and each offers an explanation of the data. Now, a note here, and I'll come back to this, I take the data to be that you're trying to explain to be largely the texts, not supposed hard historical facts that we have in the texts.

That's what we have to start with. So there's a contest of explanations. The atheist relies upon views about human motivation and behavior that justify placing considerable prima facia confidence in a deception scenario and a hefty prior probability to the claims about human nature.

For all this, there are independent empirical evidence that human nature displays these sorts of characteristics. Theist can perhaps also get a decent likelihood for a miracle by building into her God hypothesis, T, enough about divine power and intentions. But at the cost of seriously lowering the prior probability, the more you build into the hypothesis, the further the prior goes down.

Unless there's independent confirming evidence for T, that's the advantage that the naturalist has here. They get all kinds of independent confirming evidence for what they want to claim about human nature. And so here, I think the theist is not a match for the skeptic.

Fourth objection is the many contenders objection, and Mike here does what seems to be the right thing to do, which is to claim that there's good enough evidence with respect to the Christian miracle stories and not good enough evidence with respect to the competitor. At that time, I'm going to look at how the evidence shakes out with respect to the New Testament a bit. As for the rivals, they are a multitude and it's not a trivial task to evaluate just how good or bad the evidence is.

I had an African student years ago, a very intelligent young woman, her father was a Christian minister, you know, from Ghana, originally called Dubois, and her mother was a high priestess in the local African cult where they came from. And she told me she knew of Africans who had changed into animals. I didn't believe her.

I bet you wouldn't believe her either. So interesting case is Carlos Castaneda, this is probably before the time of most of you. You remember, tales of power journey to extract.

Very, very powerful, actually odd writing style. This was an anthropologist who was studying the Yaki culture in northern Mexico, hooked up, supposedly with a blue hoe, a shaman, Yaki shaman named Don Juan, all sorts of amazing stuff, really amazing stuff. None of it was true.

But it sold a lot of books and it sold a lot of people. In fact, I think it was an experiment to see if you could sell people. I think it was an anthropological experiment.

Think about it that way, the light bulbs start to go on. Anyway, Joseph Smith, not just the golden plates, I mean, I have not very familiar with this stuff, there are a lot of miracle stories within Mormonism. Spiritualism, which managed to convince Arthur Conan Doyle of all people.

Madam Blavasky, theosophy, I don't know if you guys know anything about that stuff. For a while back there in the 60s and 70s, the Maharishi and his TM stuff with people who are meditating in the golden donaries, this stuff is all over the place. But in the end, I want to undefend him because I think his interpretation is what I call the fraud and filing view.

There were a bunch of people who were in the business of hoodwinton, other people, and there were a bunch of people that got snuppered, and somehow or other in this particular case managed to survive. I don't believe that. Or at least I want her to look for an interpretation that doesn't require me to believe something like that.

Even though if the chips are down, I have to choose between that and supposing that the stories are literally true, I'm going to believe you. I'm going to try to say some things about this view here. I won't say what I mean by charter there, but you can ask me.

Mike's book is a meticulous and compendious job of documenting reasons for taking the resurrection to have been a historical event. This procedure is fundamentally and correctly one of searching for the best explanation for the data. Three preliminary comments.

One, the relevant background knowledge consists of well-confirmed facts about ancient Near Eastern culture and history, well-confirmed laws of nature, and well-confirmed facts about human nature. Second, I said this before the data, primarily certain New Testament texts. He hopes to abbreviate the task by appealing to a fairly long list of historical claims as historical bedrock on the strength of scholarly consensus.

And I would give you a long conversation about how this scholarly consensus was arrived at, what sorts of criteria people use. I am not at all persuaded of the efficacy of a lot of these criteria. But what I just want to declare here is that for him, those are the data to be explained, not for me, for me the text and the hard data that we have.

So I want to begin with the text. Note that it's critical for an inference of the best explanation to consider all the possible explanations, or at least all the plausible explanations. And I think the biggest liability for Mike's reasoning lies here.

So, as I said, I don't find the fraud and folly line to be very plausible. I don't, for example, find it very plausible to think that some atheists have claimed that mass hallucination explains the Pentecost of that. Don't find that particularly attractive.

But I want to focus on figurative readings. Let's begin by looking at a speed bump in Mike's argument for historicity, Matthew 2752-53. This is how Jesus has died.

There's been an earthquake, and it says the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection, they came out of the tombs, entered the holy city, and appeared to many. So they're raised when he dies, kind of hanging around in the tombs for three days, maybe out of politeness, because in 1 Corinthians 1523, Paul says that Jesus is the first fruits.

So they don't want to barge into the cues here. And I want to say, what the hell? And Mike says pretty much the same thing. He has better sense than to take this passage literally.

In fact, he quotes, and mind you, this occurs only in Matthew, nowhere else, but I know him, not in Josephus. He quotes Jewish enrollment parallels that are clearly figurative. Such prodigies symbolically mark the death of kings, and so to with Jesus, but something more is here than a royal death.

Let me mention, by the way, that precisely at this point, you're appealing to Hellenistic sources. Just when it's useful. There is a ton of scholarship, starting with George Cared and going forward, that I think shows pretty conclusively that Hellenism had very significant influence on Jewish religious thinking in the first century.

Now, I recently discovered that Mike got into a lot of hot water among some evangelicals because of his sensible figurative reading of this passage. And so I feel some reluctance in playing the role of the devil's advocate, or one might say Geisler's advocate here. It's kind of, I feel really bad about this, but clearly there's a worry that Geisler, I think, must be, I didn't find out the details.

But here's the worry. So Mike says, okay, right there, when we're talking about Jesus's death and resurrection, we have a story that's apocryphal. It's the same kind of thing.

It's people rising from the dead, right? How do you draw the line? Between the one and the other. That's worry, surely, right? Now, if that's symbolic and not historical, what about the resurrection of Jesus? And here's what Mike says, and the larger context is that handout that I gave you, okay, this is part of the book that you guys didn't read. Or at least you weren't assigned it.

So, Mike says this, he thinks that there's no indication that the early Christians interpreted Jesus's resurrection as a metaphor called, or poetic, in a metaphorical or poetic sense. And moreover, he actually said this here. Why didn't Christian opponents criticize the early Christians for misunderstanding their own stories and why didn't they defend that in certain ways? The same could be said, though, the same worries could be raised about the claim that the saints rose out of the earth, not exactly parallel kind of case.

And I think there's a good answer to those questions. Now, so I want to, in the short time that I have left, give you some of the reasons to wonder about whether the passion narratives should be taken literally or not. Okay, just to wonder about that.

You know the story of Baratas? Some of the ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew tell us that his name was Jesus Baratas. Well, Yeshua happens to be one of the most common male names in 1st century Judea. No big news there, but it's Jesus Baratas, Jesus the Son of Father.

I think we've landed in the land of Oz. And that's not a bad analogy, perhaps, because at least there was some debate that the Oz books by Elphrae were actually political. That's the word I want, allegories, right? Now, so I read that and I think, what is going on here? Right, so you've got a Jesus the Son of the Father and another Jesus the Son of the Father and something is being done here.

Fuck for a while and then it occurred to me, Leviticus 16, which describes the Yom Kippur ritual in the tomb. There are two goats. Notice the two goats.

There's a goat that gets slaughtered on the altar to atonement of the sins. And then the high priest puts his hands on the other goat and has a red ribbon tied around his horns. And he lays the sins of the people on the goat that gets driven out into the desert over a cliff and into the arms of Azazel, who is a demonic inhabitant of the wilderness and who is sometimes in Jewish lore identified in Satan.

Now, it turns out, I mean, I had to start digging around. There's a terrific book by Daniel, Stirkelbank, Ezra called the impact of Yom Kippur on early Christianity that really sets this out. It turns out the early church fathers were exactly onto this understanding.

And interestingly, they had debates about whether Jesus was the scapegoat or the slaughter goat. A longer story there than I can tell, but I'm certain that Jesus was the slaughter goat, that Barabbas was the scapegoat. Interestingly enough, what that does structurally is it places Pilate in the role of the high priest.

And it places the mob in the role of the wilderness and the demonic Azazel. And all sorts of meanings starts to open up for you that you might not see if you hadn't gotten on to this clearly, I think, symbolic feature of what looks like a straightforward historical narrative. That's one case.

Judas is another case. I didn't even begin to have time to talk about Judas and a whole bunch of stuff that I'll bet you haven't seen one of you in the Passion narratives. Let me talk very quickly, if I may, about Matthew 1239 to 42.

Barracies and scribes ask Jesus for a sign. And he says to them, Verily, I say unto you, an evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign. But no sign shall be given except the sign of Jonah for as Jonah was three days and three nights.

And the belly of the whale's social son, the envy, three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up with this generation and condemn it. Or they repented at the preaching of Jonah and something greater than Jonah is here.

The queen of the south will rise up with this generation and condemn it. She came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon and something greater than Solomon is here. Now there's a ton of information there, a whole ton.

I can only at this point ask three days and three nights. Mike worries about this. Well, maybe I'll worry about it much.

I think you should at least discuss it. It's not three days and three nights. On Friday, he's presumably buried before Sunday on Friday.

And he's out of the grave at or before dawn on Sunday, day and a half. I've got a principal carry. I want to see if I can read these texts in such a way that Jesus hasn't really fumbled the ball.

With respect to what I think is the second most important prophecy that he makes. Is there any way you can get three days and three nights out of this? The answer is yes. The risk.

Maybe not in two minutes. But you believe me, you can do it. So there are three things that you have to talk about here and I'm just going to, I guess, gesture at them.

First is that Jonah descends into the belly of the whale, the Leviathan, I think, into the chaos waters. There's a enormous amount of literature in the Hebrew Bible about the chaos waters, the pit, she all descending into she all and having, you know, praying to God to rescue you and God pulls you up out of these chaos waters, right? This is a kind of symbolism that is as pervasive as any single, what I would call, methane, in the Hebrew Bible. I'm having some started lights so you can go past the hour.

Can I go to five? Yeah, probably not for sure. I mean five to you. Certainly five past the hour.

I really could. Okay, so there's all this symbolism. It's all over the Psalms.

It's in the book of Jonah. There are a number of Psalms, though, that I think illuminate what the metaphor is. And they include 2nd Psalm, 2nd Samuel, 22, and Psalm 69, Psalms 88 to 89, which is really just one Psalm, I think, and Psalm 22.

It's an important Psalm for Christians. The chaos waters, the deep, the tahole, identified with the pit, identified with she all, the realm of death. That's identified with the king's enemies to be in the pit, is to be under mortal threat from the enemies.

And finally is identified with social chaos. It's actually rather explicit in these Psalms. So death and resurrection is a way of talking about a threat to social welfare that is potentially mortal threat.

So that's one thing to keep in mind. Second thing is Jewish dualism. And again, there's a ton of ancient Jewish literature that postulates a kind of a mapping, almost an isomorphism or mirroring between the social structures of the world, the empirical world as we know.

And stuff in heaven. So God with his counselors in heaven or his heavenly counsel, if you will, just as you have the king with his counsel. There's way more stuff than I can talk about.

There is some evidence, though it's somewhat controversial, that in at least the First Temple period, the king would engage in a periodic ritual in which he would enter the Holy of Holy. Sit on the throne of God and reenact the creation story. And when you start to trace out this sort of symbolism, you begin to think, well, so there's the stuff that goes on the real world, which is pretty messed up sometimes, but there's a kind of an ideal model for how it should be up in heaven.

And just as there is a kind of a metaphysical, if you will, correlate of earthly realities that represent the ideal, there's a metaphysical correlate of the powers of social destruction and dissolution. These are called powers of the air. My Paul, Jesus talks about the hour of darkness.

This demonic is, again, kind of a parallel. So when I started thinking about this, I thought, well, we've got a day and a half where he's in the bowels of the earth. Which would be the mirror image of what is going on in the belly of the, in the bowels of the earth.

So it would be a day and a half and a day and a half. Now, interestingly, when Jesus dies, the disciples have all scattered. The only people left are his women followers.

And they're the people that discover the empty tomb as well. And there's a lot of ancient Near East imagery of women as birth givers who are there as sort of caretakers when somebody is born and when they die. Virgil, the Virgil to me gives us a wonderful example.

And he is going down into the underworld and he is shepherded down there by this priestess who is addressed by Virgil as mother, goddess, priestess, and prophet. And the rising. If I'm right about my hypothesis that there's a structural parallel that should be the day and a half in front, any anthropologist thinks about this.

Well, there should be a woman there. There is. And she is the woman who anoints him at the Supper of Bethany, which is clearly a messianic anointing.

He's being anointed king, right? But how does Jesus describe what he's doing to him? Do you have any? Where is Enta Theasia? It means embalment. It's being embalmed. And the very next verse says, and then Judas takes off to betray him.

That's the kind of structure I see as mythical structure. Last thing. It escapes me why people don't know.

Everybody sees that when Jesus is mocked and scourged and the crown of thorns is placed on his head, he is mocked as the king of the Jews, right? And we understand the irony. He really is the king of the Jews, the people that are doing it completely oblivious to that. But what I think it's actually pretty obvious is that there's a double irony.

He is king of the Jews. He's also being crowned Emperor of Rome. Why do you think that? It's in the Roman precinct, the Pretoria.

By the Roman soldiers who were the kingmakers of the day, they placed the purple robe on him, which was legally not to be warned by anybody but the emperor at the time. And the centaurium says when he dies on the cross, surely this was the son of God, which was a title for Roman emperors. So I think Durkheim when I think about this stuff.

Even if I set aside hue on miracles entirely, just forget hue and jargon completely, and asked what are the odds that Jesus was crucified, and particularly if it's the general outlines of the passion narrative are true. I'd say quite low. Okay, I'm going to stop there.

Might there be a few questions? I think they're both supposed to get up here at this point. Is that right? We can't ask the questions yet because I told you I was going to take up the whole house. I just kind of barely really made it.

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.

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