Licona and Martin Talk about the Physical Resurrection of Jesus

00:00

Licona and Martin Talk about the Physical Resurrection of Jesus

May 21, 2025

In today’s episode, we have a Religion Soup dialogue from Acadia Divinity College between Dr. Mike Licona and Dr. Dale Martin on whether Jesus physically rose from the dead. Dr. Licona presents a positive historical case for physical resurrection based on the following five historical facts:

1. Paul was an eyewitness to the risen Jesus.

2. Paul knew the apostles personally.

3. Paul checked with Peter and other apostles to verify that he was preaching their gospel.

4. Both individuals and groups reported experiences that they believed were encounters with the risen Jesus.

5. These encounters were of a physical Jesus.

Dr. Martin argues against this, asserting that the resurrection cannot be historically established. He cites the vast differences among the recorded appearance accounts and that the tomb of Jesus did not become a place of veneration for the early Christians. Martin contends the resurrection involved a “pneumatic” body and cites scripture frequently recounting people not recognizing Jesus when he appeared to them as support for this view.

Transcript

Welcome to the Risen Jesus podcast. Today's episode is a fascinating discussion between Dr. Mike Licona and Dr. Dale Martin of Yale University about the physicality of Jesus' resurrection. While Dr. Licona affirms that it can be historically established that Jesus bodily rose from the dead, Dr. Martin claims this is not possible and postulates that instead, those who testified to seeing the Risen Jesus were having an experience of a pneumatic body.

Join us today to find out precisely what that means. I want to thank each of you for coming onto the stand by trust that you will find very informative and educational. That is the goal of Risen Jesus.

Regardless of where you stand regarding your use on Jesus' passage, we hope that these events will give you much to consider all over in the coming days, months, and years. And there are hope that Risen students will create a view of a desire to learn, because you are not going to turn you explore the history behind the founder of the Christian being namely in Jesus, that you will begin to study out on the light of arguably the most influential human being who has ever lived. We want to thank the many sponsors and supporters who have helped to make this night happen.

It takes a lot of time and energy as well as financial support to make an event like this move from an idea to a reality. For this reason, we give thanks to the main organizer of the event, the Navigators of Canada, which I work with. And then as President Dodd said, the Navigators are international Christian organizations that strive to help people learn about Jesus through both word and deed.

We, the Halifax Navigators, are involved in local ministry on campus here in St. Mary's. As well as internationally, in our work with the Indiana Convention, the Indiana Convention is how the vaccine university students need experience of serving the core in rural Indiana, which is just a small case of what we do. We can find a more of both the Navigators inside their own program for this evening.

We also like to thank St. Mary's University for generously supporting this event financially, as well as the Canadian Community College that is one of the keyst powers in this event. The Canadian is a leading seminary in Eastern Canada and is one of the most academically recognized faculty in the country. And you'll find an information table for an Indian Community College of authority and employment on your way out.

We also like to thank Child University Church for recognizing some Halifax in the Army. The Catholic Christian outreach, the Larimer Chapel, and Excel Business Systems for their sponsorship of this event. We've also like to say that if you feel inclined to make a donation out of the cost of this evening's dialogue, that'd be much appreciated.

Although this event is free, I hope you've enjoyed it so much that you wouldn't mind contributing to one of the two donations being located through the doors on the way out. Your scribble came from the filming of this evening's dialogue so that thousands of people can view it on our YouTube and be inventive for it as well. So we thank you in advance for whatever you are able to give.

Unlike last January, which was a debate, this evening is a dialogue. You'll find an order for tonight's event outlined in your programs. We're going to start the opening presentations by both Dr. Phil Coven and Professor Martin.

And then we're going to move into a 25-minute dialogue when both presenters will engage with each other's thoughts on the topic. I want you to imagine if you get to be applying a wall when these two scholars are sitting in a local pub, featuring back-and-forth book reviews of an evening's talk. That's what we're trying to create tonight with bottles of water and a few other flies in that wall.

After this, we will have questions for the audience, for you. That's where you're coming from. Like last January, you were asked to text message your questions to the phone members found in the program or up on the screen.

As Stephen Peterson, the reviewer of last year's event, wrote in the form of a herald, that Q&A format works by gangbusters. So please do text your questions, make them interesting, relevant, don't sermonize or even lecture. Make them challenge them.

What we're going to do is we're going to screen them, make sure there's no duplicates, and find some of the interesting questions that you've put forward for our guest tonight. We would kindly ask you to not forget the audio or video recordings of this event. This event is being professionally known for the YouTube review within the next few weeks.

Also, if you have a file or phone, you can please turn that on. Sometimes it's always a young person who's up over the door. Sometimes it's the older person who gets to even have a sub-order file.

So check the sub-order, you're firing. And we're going to violate it. The explosion soup is an annual dialogue event aimed at fostering discussion around topics relevant to the Christian faith.

Tonight we bring together two of the unique scholars who have been feeling the Christian origins in order to discuss one of the biggest questions relating to Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus. It is helpful if you're at different perspectives in order to be both informed and to expand on something horizon. Christianity is an historic faith, rooted in ancient Judaism, and finds its origins in the community of first century devotees to Jesus and Nazareth.

One of last year's presenters, Professor Crennan, is acting to say that Jesus has left a very big way in history. This is true. Without Jesus Christianity would not exist, who would not be here this evening, having this dialogue.

Last year's other participant, Professor Parker, who recently stated in his latest book, that Jesus exists, that, quote, there are several points of which virtually all scholars have been taken to agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher in Egypt, who was crucified in Jerusalem through the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. When Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea, this is the view of nearly every trained scholar.

One must ask the question, how did Christianity get stuck in the first place? How do you crucified Jewish man in the first half of the first century manage to spawn the largest world in the world today? The first Christian we are told to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead by God. Whether or not this HAPPENED is the topic for tonight's dialogue. We are very proud to welcome Dr. Michael Aykona and Professor Dale Mark and Halifax to see these religious suits die off.

Tonight, they will be discussing the resurrection of Jesus and why it matters. I will give a brief introduction to our defeat to the opening presentations. Both of our guests will present for approximately 25 to 30 minutes, beginning with Dr. Michael Aykona.

Mike Lacona is associate professor of theology in Houston Baptist University, and he is the president of Resin Jesus Incorporated. Michael is interviewed by Lee Strobe, who has booked the case for the Real Jesus, and appeared in Strobe's debut in the case for Christ. He is the author of numerous books, including The Resurrection of Jesus and the New History of Wrath and Approach, which you can purchase at the book table on the way out.

He also is authored, Paul meets Muhammad. He is also co-authored with Terry Habermas of the award-winning book, The Chase for the Resurrection of Jesus. He is co-authored with William Genson on evidence for God, 50 arguments for faith from the Bible, history, philosophy, and science.

Mike is a member of the Evangelical for the Sophilus Society, the Institute for Biblical Research, and the Society of Biblical Literature. He has spoken on more than 50 University campuses, and has appeared on dozens of radio and television programs. His website is www.risinjesus.com. Michael is PhD with the highest extension from the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

We're very very pleased to have him with us this evening, and Dr. Lacona, let me ask you this question. Did Jesus rise physically from the dead? He is Dr. Lacona well known spiritual well known. Thank you.

It is wonderful to be here in my discussion how it acts. This is my very first time. It's been a long time since I've been to Canada.

But this is just beautiful up here, and so I don't want to happen to go back. But then we are going to wait until February before I make that kind of choice, right? Instead of back over. I want to thank St. Mary's University for hosting this evening's dialogue, and just look forward to it.

This is going to be fun. About 2000 years ago, Jesus, with the Queen, made some radical claims. He claimed to be God's age of children, to usher in his kingdom.

And a bunch of other claims he made as well. So radical that his critics would come up and say, if you are who you say you are, you can do what you say you can do to show us a sign. So give us a proof.

And Jesus said, if you want sign, my resurrection. So the bottom line is this. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, that makes him a false prophet who no rational person, if they should follow him.

On the other hand, if Jesus rose from the dead, then he did so in confirmation of his personal radical claims. And that gives us something we are going to have to think very seriously about. The question is, is there any good of it to show that Jesus in fact grows from the dead? I think that there is.

And I've devoted a lot of study to this. The reason I did was because by my nature, we all have our idiosyncrasies, and one of mine is that I have a second guess or five. I second guess and now just about anything.

I want to tell you the story. It's truly embarrassing to me, but just to give you an example of it, a few years back, I ran out of cologne and I wanted to get something else. And so I was thinking, well, which did I get? I went to this department store and I was looking at all these different fragrances.

And I got down to about two that I really wanted. And so I go back and forth back and forth, wondered which one I enjoyed over the long term. And so I chose it.

When I purchased it, leave the store about 15 minute drive home. I get about two minutes from my house. But the whole time I'm thinking, I should have got that out of the way.

No, I'm glad I got that. No, I should have got that out of two minutes away. I keep you not.

I turned the car around. Went back to the department store, swapped it, came back. Thank you, Ari.

I think I got the right one. I mean, this is just frustrating, this kind of stuff. But that's just the way I admire it.

And I'm going to fret over something that's silly as a bottle of cologne. Of course, I'm going to fret over other things that are much greater important. So if I make a mistake on a bottle of cologne, I've only wasted 40 bucks.

But if I make a mistake, I would say, you know, my worldview, it hasn't the potential to cost me eternity. And so I got thinking, gosh, the history of the world and Plato, Aristotle, all these people up through today, we disagree on so many different things when it comes to worldview. How will it hurt? But I never figured this out.

Maybe I can. I wanted to see if there was any good evidence for the truth of Christianity. Is it rational to believe it, to be a Christian, to follow Jesus? And since Jesus gave his resurrection as a sign in which we could know Christianity was true, I figured, well, that's a great place to start.

And in fact, the apostle Paul wrote in 1st Corinthians 15 and said, Christ has not been raised. Our faith is worthless. And so it seemed like this would be a good thing to investigate.

I got Paul in a PhD program and started my investigation. I was talking about approaches a little bit differently. I would approach it from the viewpoint of an historian.

So I wanted to study how professional historians outside the community of biblical scholars go about their business. Because very few biblical scholars are actually trained in these areas. And so I wanted to tell they did it.

So I started reading hundreds of books in journal articles on how to do history, how to do historical investigation. And it all resulted in approach a little over 700 pages. And I just really was consumed with this.

And in the end, I was convinced that what I had originally believed had been revealed by God's Spirit, had been confirmed by history. And they believed that God existed and that he actually revealed himself to mankind within Jesus Christ. Now I don't know that you can show that God raised Jesus from the dead, but I do think that we can show that Jesus was raised from the dead.

And so I'm going to talk a little about that. And I'm going to make it simple. In fact, I'm going to make this so simple that even a Southern Baptist could understand.

I'm going to construct a positive historical case. You can construct that from the transcript. I'm going to construct a positive historical case for Jesus' resurrection using two major building blocks, facts and method.

Let's begin with the facts. And I'm going to give five. Now in doing these five facts, I want to start off with a timeline.

I'm going to add all this timeline from a friend and mentor of mine named Gary Habermas. And he talks about most scholars. If a child who studied the subject would say that Jesus was crucified in either April of 30 or April of 33.

It seems that there's a slight majority who opt for April of 30. It really doesn't matter. And since 30 is a round number, let's start with that.

So we'll say that Jesus was crucified in April of 30. Now a few years after that, there's a skeptic persecuted church named Paul. And Paul had an experience that he would at least was convinced, was the reason Jesus appeared in virtually all scholars agree on this as well.

They're not saying that Jesus appeared the book, but they're saying that he had an experience that he was persuaded was the reason Jesus appeared in. And that experience radically transformed his life from being a persecuted church to whatever it's supposed to be able to defend us. Now scholars have no exactly what this happened, but the guess is somewhere between maybe one and three years could be a little bit more whatever.

Let's just say two years to work with it. It doesn't really matter for what we're presenting here this evening. In fact, the later the better, the later the crucifixion for me the better, but we're just going to take 30 for the crucifixion.

And let's say Paul two years later, that places it 32 when he has this experience that he thinks is the reason Jesus appeared in. Now in our New Testament, there are 13 letters attributed to Paul. Of these, it's undisputed that seven of them Paul actually wrote, and then the other six are disputed to various degrees.

So just to make things simple this evening, I'm only going to appeal to those letters for which we are certain Paul wrote. One of those letters is the letter that Paul wrote for the Church of Galatia. In Galatia chapter one, Paul says that in three years after his conversion, 35, Paul goes up to Jerusalem and he meets with Peter, the lead apostle there.

And he also sees James, the brother of Jesus, and he met with him and he remained with him for 15 days he said. Now it's interesting to note that the Greek term that Paul uses here for meat or visit is history-side, from which we get to English word, history. You see, Paul had not known Jesus during and walked within during his ministry, so he wanted to get the whole nine yards from one of those paths, and who better than Peter believed apostle.

In Galatia chapter two, Paul says that 14 years later he goes back up to Jerusalem. Now the text, whether you read it in Greek or English, it's in the U.S. here in Spain. We don't know if it's talked about 14 years after this visit or 14 years after his conversion.

So we'll say 11 to 14 years after this visit, that places are somewhere between 46 and 49. And at that point, Paul said the objective of his visit was because he wanted to run the gospel message. I want you to remember this, the gospel message.

He wanted to run the gospel message past him that he had been preaching all these years to ensure he hadn't been working in vain all these years. In other words, he wanted to make sure he was preaching what the Jerusalem houses were preaching. And he said to say, I didn't know people what I had to say.

Instead, they granted to me the right hand without shit. In other words, they said, you're good Paul, keep up the good word from him. So according to Paul, within 16 to 19 years or 46 to 49.80, Paul says he's preaching the same thing as the Jerusalem apostles when it comes to the gospel message.

Now, for all we know Paul could have been lying there. He could have been exaggerating. So historians look for corroborating theta.

Unfortunately, in this case, we have some. There was a people who history reports probably knew and were trying to find the apostles. For example, there was a guy named Clement of Rome, and he probably had a friendship with Peter.

And then another guy named Pauli Clark, who had a friendship with his mentored by John. Now remember some of these things. In case you have children someday and you're trying to make the names for guys, you know, some of these Pauli Clark.

So you've got part of who knows Peter, probably Pauli Clark, who probably knows John, and we have a letter from each of these two guys who have survived. And they're writing after the death of Paul. So the interest is if Paul had been teaching heresy on the essentials, we would expect these guys to have to chide and break Paul in it.

Instead, what we find from that is saying very modestly thinks that Paul. Clement Paul is in the blessed Paul, places him on par with his mentor Peter. Pauli Clark says that Paul, I quote, accurately and reliably talk the message of truth.

That's pretty neat. So that seems to suggest that even after Paul's death he hadn't changed. He had that what he said here was correct.

He was preaching with the Jerusalem apostles for preaching. And then after his death they said, yeah, he continued preaching with me, you know, a message of truth, accurately and reliably. I could give some more evidence, but that should suffice to show that at least we're hearing Paul in the gospel message, the essentials.

We are hearing the voice of the Jerusalem apostles. 46 to 49. A few years after that Paul goes up to an ancient Mediterranean city named Corinth and he starts a church there, the first Baptist church of Corinth.

And after he spends a little time there, he leads and he goes on to some other work in the ministry. And the church, according, sent him some letters in their dialogue and are responding with him. They're asking theological questions, questions about practicing Christianity within the church and what to do in this situation and so forth.

And Paul answers them. They go back and forth. They're in three or four of these letters that Paul wrote back and then we have two of them.

One of those letters is 1st Corinthians. We're going to write, he writes in about 55 or within 25 years of the crucifixion. Now, we're going to look at chapter 15 in just a moment.

But before we do, I just want to give you an idea of where the gospel is sitting here. I'm not really going to be appealing to them this evening. That's what we're going to do.

I want to just give you an idea of when they were written. We don't know exactly when they were written. Scholars aren't going to agree with this.

You know, it's not like James Crossley, kind of a skeptical guy and a Gnostic check deal. He puts Mark in the 40s. First dollars put Mark between 65 and 70.

Some conservative scholars would put Matthew in the maybe the 50s and so forth. Other evangelicals may put Matthew in the 80s or the 70s. So I don't want to get into the different arguments.

But the standard dating is Mark was written 65 to 70 or another 10 to 15 years later. And then Matthew comes more blue. We don't know which one.

One comes a little later. You know, maybe Matthew around 80, blue, 85. And then John Glass writes probably between 90 to 95.

So within 35 to 65 years of Jesus death. Pretty early actually by its ancient standards for biography. But the point I really want to make here is first granted it comes before any of them.

At least the death date if not more before any of the gospels are written. When you look at chapter 15, Paul opens up by saying, I want to remind you of the gospel message I had preached. Do you remember that? The gospel message he ran by the Jerusalem apostles in between 46 and 49.

Here it is in 55. He says, I want to remind you of the gospel message I preached to you by which he became Christians and if I continue to walk in faith. And then he begins in verse 3 to talk about that gospel message he gives.

And let me give you that. And in fact, Paul is my witness or he claimed he believed he was an eyewitness of the risen Jesus. He's hostile at the time of his conversion.

Number 2, Paul and Jesus disciples. 3, he was teaching what they were teaching. I felt when they teach me when it came to the resurrection.

Here's the gospel message Paul talks about. I delivered to you at first what I also received. And twice died for our sins according to the scriptures.

And that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures. And that he appeared to Peter. Then to them as well.

Then he appeared more than 500 at one time. Paul adds most of whom are still alive, but some have died. Then he appeared to James and to all the apostles and then Paul had classed the balls to one in time before he appeared all since May.

So here we have Paul giving three individual appearances to Peter, James, whom he met with twice between and then Paul himself. This is how he has testimony. And then three group appearances to the twelve more than five hundred to all the apostles.

The reason that group appearances are at work is because we know from modern psychology that group appeared by group hallucinations are extremely rare if not impossible. And so that a three of them would be very, very, very rare if not impossible. The interesting part about this too, remember, he's saying this is 55.

He said, I delivered to you when in 51 when he wrote the letter. However, when he started the church there, what I also received before then. So remember, we are looking at fairy, fairy, early tradition here that goes back to the first apostles themselves.

So what we find here is number four, they were teaching Jesus the disciples were teaching that he had risen from the dead and had appeared to them in individual and in group settings to frame and follow Him. And number five, they were teaching that Jesus was raised from the dead. His corpse had been raised from the dead, it's what I meant by that.

Now, if I'm not using the gospels, there's no empty tube narratives, Paul has a mention in every tip, so how do we get this in Paul's letters? Well, it's really not that hard at all. And Paul's not reporting a narrative of the resurrection, but his life, he's going to get there incorrectly. So for example, there are at least five passages in Paul's undisputed letters in which he says things like the way we will be raised from the dead is how Jesus was raised from the dead.

Let me give you an example. This comes from 1st Corinthians 15, 1st Psalm. Paul says Christ is the raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who are asleep.

The firstfruits was an agricultural term, meaning the first of the crops to be harvested. How many do you throw in some vegetables to be a plant or something like that? Great. Well, I'm from the deep south, and there are some of them throw in the front yard, you know.

They do a longer sit on the couch on the front porch, looking at it, you know what I mean? So you throw these tomato plants, and you watch it throughout the summer. They start off small, and they get bigger, and they're green, and then they turn yellow, and they get darker, and finally red. And you pull that first one, it's right.

You pull it off the plant and slice it up. Put it on a sandwich, and eat it. It's just a spread, right? Well, that's the firstfruits.

You're ready for the others, but they're not ready yet. They're coming later. To be asleep was a euphemism, and I take what he did to mean that you're dead.

It's like the day we say he passed away, rather than saying, be clever. So what Paul's saying here is Christ is the raised from the dead, the firstfruits of the dead. He's the first to be raised from the dead.

Now, I know I'm not using the gospels for this, but here's the thing. Maybe you're saying, well, yeah, but the gospels talk about Jesus raised the lastfruits. Jared's his daughter and the widow's daughter.

How could Jesus be the firstfruits? Because they're raised in the same kind of body only to die again. Jesus, according to the context in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul's saying Jesus is the first to be raised with a resurrection body, and he's going to go on to explain that in a minute. Well, Jesus is the firstfruits.

One of the rest is going to be raised. One of the apostles is going to be raised. One of the Christians who have died from that point on in the saints and in the Old Testament.

What do they get to be raised? One of our loved ones who have died is believers. What do they get to be raised? Paul answers that three verses later. He says, but each is on the order of Christ the firstfruits, April 30.

After that, those who belong to Christ add his coming when Jesus returns. What happens to us in the meantime? All right, so that's up to the other of the speed of life. He says, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

So you're going to be absent from the body. He says that he has the option. He can die and be with Christ or remain on the body.

In other words, when you're with Christ, you're out of the body. Your spirit goes to be with the Christ. 1 Thessalonians 4 verses 13 through 17.

He says, but we don't want you to be uninformed about those who have died, so that you will not read this through the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, God will bring with him those who have died as believers. There's no brain with him, which means you're with him now.

For this to be saved by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain to the coming of the Lord will not perceive those who have died. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Amen, Paul, you said Jesus, bring up the dead back with him.

How may God arise first? Very simple. Remember, Paul suggests here that when you die, your corpse is buried, your spirit leaves your body, and goes to be with Jesus in heaven and exists as a disciplining spirit. When Jesus returns, he brings our spirit back with him, put some back in the corpses, resurrects the corpse, and transports it into an immortal, glorious, powerful body that's, excuse me, that's animated by the Holy Spirit.

So it's a physical resurrection of the corpse that's then transformed into something immortal, a glorious, powerful, and moved and livened by the Holy Spirit. It's a physical bodily resurrection of the corpse, and a crisis of first fruits of the dead, and we're going to erase our corpses, aren't we? That means Jesus, according to what the apostles were teaching, his corpse was raised from the dead. It's a bodily physical resurrection.

So that's our fifth fact. That takes us into our second nature building block. Now then, what do we do with this information? Well, historians typically use four general criteria for what they call arguments of inference to the best explanation.

This has nothing to do with how we get to the facts. It's once they take the facts, the things that we have a good, secure evidence for, so these are the way things work, these will call them facts. We can define facts differently, but let's just call them facts and just make it simple.

And then what they do is they formulate hypotheses in order to explain these facts, and then they compare the hypotheses to see which one best explains those facts, and the way you measure which hypotheses best explains those facts are using these kinds of criteria. And even though they sound kind of fancy, they're pretty commonsensical. Explanatory scope is the ability of a hypothesis to account for all the facts.

So let's say you've got ten facts that you want to consider. My doctor says they can account for eight facts, as greater explanatory skill than one that can only account for three. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle and each piece of the puzzle is a fact.

You know how you try to put the puzzle together and some of the pieces are orphaned? So the puzzle solution that uses the most amount of pieces has played greater explanatory scope. Think about these puzzle pieces being a fact. Explanatory powers, the ability of a hypothesis to account for the facts without forcing them to fit or without excessive ambiguity.

Think about this for a moment. Think about a jigsaw puzzle. You know how you can take pieces, and you know how you can force them to fit, but you know they really don't go there.

Well you can do that as a historian too. It doesn't quite fit the hypothesis well, but you kind of make it fit that way. That's like an explanatory puzzle.

Or if you had too much ambiguity or fakeness, Michael Googler is an agnostic through custom discovery, and he says, well, whatever the disciples experience in terms of these appearances, I'm not going to say they're hallucinations or delusions or illusions or whatever, but we kind of get the idea of what they are. They're a natural phenomenon. What? Well people with a mental health profession would say, there's a massive difference between elucidation, delusions, and illusions.

And for you to just clump those all together, it is just naive. And so what Googler is doing here is he says, but he says, I don't get the idea of what you're not really describing what happened. And so his hypothesis lacks explanatory power.

And that's a Latin term that means for this. Imagine if we were to have the hypothesis that undetectable remnants from Saturn were responsible for raising Jesus from the dead. They visited here for the first century.

They fit real care for Jesus, thought he was a lunatic, but they really didn't like what the Jews and the Jewish and Roman leaders did to him. So in order to get back at them, they entered his body and reanimated it, spoke through it, and convinced others he'd been raised from the dead. Now that adequately explains all the facts that we're talking about.

Thus so without forcing that. The problem is, it's ad hoc. It was created, the hypothesis for this.

Complete improvisation without shred evidence for the stuff that would, like, undetectable remnants from Saturn. In other words, we wouldn't expect that hypothesis to be true, other than it explains the facts. It's very ad hoc.

Every hypothesis has a degree of ad hoc history, but one of its least ad hoc is to be preferred. And then finally, the possibility we have to be greeted with other widely accepted facts. So let's just take the resurrection hypothesis.

Certainly, we have to say that it's impossible. It's widely accepted that people don't come back from the dead. At least by national politics.

But this is supply of Jesus. I think not, because hypothesis from the very beginning is that Jesus was raised naturally from the dead, or unassisted. By hypothesis, from the very beginning was that God raised Jesus, or Jesus was assisted in coming back to life.

And a hundred billion people died and remained dead. And not coming back by national politics or unassisted tells us absolutely nothing pertaining to whether Jesus could come back from the dead, assisted, or by a supernatural hypothesis. So I don't think the resurrection hypothesis is implausible.

I don't know that I could say it's plausible. Now, over the last few months, six months, I've coveredly that there is a degree of plausibility, but I don't have time to argue for that this evening. So I'm just going to make content this evening and say that the resurrection hypothesis is neither plausible nor impossible.

It's just inscrutable. Because you have to know that whether God and Jesus would want to raise Jesus from the dead, and that's pretty difficult to be able to determine. What about ad hoc? I don't think the resurrection hypothesis is ad hoc.

Most you could say, well, it kind of supposes that God exists. Now, I haven't really said that God raised Jesus after saying it's raised by, let's just say, a supernatural cause, if you will. And because we can't prove that it would have been God that raised.

I think God's best can be ignored, of course. But as a historian, I can't show that God raised Jesus any more than as a historian. I can show Jesus died by crucifixion, but I can't prove that his death at all is for sin.

So I don't think it's ad hoc. But even if you want to say God raised Jesus, it's a pretty good evidence from philosophy and science that God exists, I think. It's a planetary scope and pound.

I think the resurrection hypothesis adequately accounts for all of the facts that we're talking about in the past. Without forcing them to fit a word without excess or any ambiguity. So it passes these.

Bottom line resurrection hypothesis passes three to the fourth hypothesis of a criteria for the excellent and best explanation with flying colors and doesn't fail the fourth. So it does a pretty good job. What about the leading naturalistic hypothesis? There's a lot of them out there but probably the one held by most would be hallucinations.

Elissimations come to many different forms in terms of the hypothesis. Everybody has a different hypothesis. What just did you hear it from? That is Jesus died.

He died of sudden violent death. His disciples went into despair. They were shocked.

What are we going to do now? When people are frustrated like this, they often turn to the bottle. You know, they can get drunk back then. They also don't get drunk with flying.

They had a list of genetic drugs. You know, maybe there was another reason they called Jesus the most high of God. You know, so there's a straw about this.

They get high and drunk. Something they see a show. There he is.

Oh, he's up there. You know, they think Jesus reads it from the dead and, you know, that's how the appearances. The problem with the hallucination hypothesis is number one.

It can't account for the group of appearances because, again, we don't want to but three group appearances in this earliest material that says that, you know, they can solve Jesus. Second, you got the problem with the fact that hallucinations come in six different types of modes. Visual, auditory, olfactory, goose-tatory, tactile, when you feel something touching you or kinesthetic or you feel the sense of motion.

Like when you're having a dream that just before you wake up you feel like you're falling on something, and that is called a kinesthetic-lucination. We've all had those, so you don't have to be a flake to have a hallucination. All right? The group most likely to experience a hallucination or senior dose for e-colossal olfactory.

Multiple studies reveal approximately seven percent of that experience visual hallucinations. That's the highest percentage. And yet when we come to Jesus' disciples, you appear to the twelve, you appear to one at five here one time, you appear to all the apostles.

At least in two of those cases, it's one hundred percent, not seven percent, but one hundred percent experience a visual hallucination simultaneously, and the content must have been so similar that they all thought they were seeing in the same thing. It doesn't sound like a hallucination. Loosination also don't account for the appearance of talk.

Jesus would have been the last person in the world who would have wanted to see. So it does have good explanatory scope. It's impossible because it's not agreement with what we know through modern psychology pertaining to loose nations and group loose nations.

In order to account for studies, you might have to say, well, weird things happen sometimes. This is one of them. They've not wanted to, but three weird things happen with the group appearances.

That's worse if it applies explanatory power. Or maybe Paul was feeling guilty for killing all those nice Christians, and he wanted to resolve that. So he had a conversion disorder and experience of loose nations resolved.

Of course, the problem with that is there's not a short evidence for it. So it's ad hoc. So we're going to be compensate for its lack of explanatory scope and plausibility, you've got to sacrifice some other things.

So that is the leading naturalistic hypothesis that does a horrible job of fulfilling the criteria for the best explanation. Resurrection hypothesis does an outstanding job. Free of the court.

It doesn't fail the court. Therefore, just from an historian's viewpoint, we can see that the resurrection hypothesis is far superior to the loose nation hypothesis, the leading one. And when you do the same exercises in other hypotheses, you find out that the resurrection hypothesis comes down on top every time.

It is by far the best historical explanation of the beta. And that excitement is Christian. And I think, just in conclusion, we talk about why this is important at the very beginning.

But the practice of implications for everyone is if Jesus rose from the dead and chosen Christianity is true. It tells us that God loves us, he cares for us. And if you're experiencing some difficulties in your life, a blown up marriage, you've just found out you had cancer, you've got financial problems, your house is ready to get repossessed, you've just lost, you've got whatever it is.

And Jesus rose from the dead. It gives you the matter to God. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Our second participant this evening is Dale B. Martin. Dale Martin is the Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University.

He was educated at Aberdeen Christian University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Yale University. His work explores the New Testament, Christian origins, the Greco-roading world, the ancient family, and gender and sexuality in the ancient world. Professor Martin has been awarded fellowships by the National Journal for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He was elected to that edition of 2009. And his publications are quite numerous of the political authors. These publications include Slavery as Salvation, the Corinthian Bible, Invented Superstition, Sex and Simple Saviors, and Pedagogy of the Bible, numerous of these books are for sale on the book table on your way out from this evening.

Professor Martin lives in New Haven Connections, and we are very, very pleased to have him with us this evening. So, Professor Martin, let me ask you, did Jesus rise physically from the 10th? You give Dr. Martin a warm-up of service today? I'm not going to walk around. I'm going to stay here like the boring professor that I hand.

And I think that this might be just fine for me. If you can't hear me, please let that man wandering around aimlessly in the other part. No, thanks for inviting me.

This is my first time in Nova Scotia. As a boy from the Gulf Coast of Texas, I'm a doll away from home. But it's absolutely gorgeous.

But I couldn't think about that being a Texas boy along with that being reminded is one of my favorite Aggie stories. You know, different people in different geographic locations have different people that I make fun of. In Texas, we tell Aggie jokes.

So, this is one of my favorites. It's three Aggies. These are people who connect with Texas P and the University.

They're these three Aggies arguing about their favorite holiday. And this is kind of an American-centric joke, but you'll understand it. And one of them says, I love Easter.

It's my favorite holiday. The whole family is together placing soft balls, shoots off firecrackers, eats hot dogs, and just has a big picnic and waves flat. And another next to you, stupid Aggie.

That's not Easter. That's the Fourth of July. Because that's when the whole family says, they have turkey and dressing.

You watch football and TV. You have to touch the ball outside and give thanks to God. That's, you stupid Aggie.

That's not Easter. That's Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday is Easter.

Because the most important Christian holiday in the whole year, we tell the story of Jesus who's crucified, put him to the tomb. And on the third day of Sunday, the stone rolls away. Jesus walks in up.

And if he sees his shadow, he goes back in. I'm going to start just by telling you what I will need. Theologically, I attend church and stand up about every Sunday to say that I sing scream which confesses that we believe in the resurrection of Jesus.

I say the Apostles scream. I confess in the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of the body. When I, in my physical church, go through the liturgy.

Historically, though, I do not believe that the resurrection of Jesus can be established as a historical fact by the normal means of modern historiography. The most, I believe, to be established historically is that the Apostle Paul and some of Jesus' followers believe that they saw him alive sometime after his death. Now, when I ask the question you believe Jesus raised, physically, you have problems.

Because the term, the category of the physical, I think, is absolutely problematic with the state of physics, as it is right now in our world. I've asked many scientists what is matter, and they don't know how to tell them. If you say the universe is composed of two things, which is what physicists will tell you, matter and energy.

Is energy physical? And scientists will say yes. It's not matter, necessarily, but they might. They call it if it's matter in a different form.

Now, if scientists say that's not exactly what they need. But I simply don't know what it means to call something physical. And a universe where one atom can be in two places at the same time, where you might have string theory that the most, the basic bulk building block of everything in the universe are these wavering strings that nobody can see.

I actually read up a lot on pop representations of theoretical physics and cosmology, and the category of matter and the category of physical doesn't mean anything anymore. Second, I also don't believe that he is using a category called the supernatural. I've written on this in my critician body book, and a bit more of my authentic superstition book, so I'm going through this stuff really pretty quickly, but I'm basically this.

I have to say this stuff because there are certain words I just won't use because I don't believe they're helpful, either from a scientific point of view, or from a theological point of view. Nobody in the ancient world, until maybe even neo-blackness of the fourth or fifth century, had any kind of category of supernatural in their heads. They believed, and Greeks and Romans believed this, and I think most early Christians and Jews believed it, that everything that exists exists as part of nature, the fuses.

So they just didn't have a category of the supernatural. There was no word for it, I found a word around 500 and soot of that this is theology. He used the Greek word Pluparapuses, which is the closest thing.

It's a new word around your 500. Before that time, I can find nobody in the ancient world who divides a universe into the natural world and the supernatural world. I believe that division came about mainly from Rene Descartes and his philosophy.

So I think it might have been earlier, but that's where I placed the beginning of modernity, which separates out a realm of the supernatural, angels, demons, souls, spirits, these kinds of things, separate from a range of nature. And so I just don't use the term because it didn't exist in the ancient world, Paul or Jesus knew nothing about it, no early Christian writer until maybe the fifth century or sixth century knew anything about it. Also, I don't think it makes any sense in modern world, or what in my world is the post modern world, that cleans up the nature that we know everything about and operates by rules that we know everything about.

Now, I don't think that exists. Now, modern science shows that it doesn't exist, so I'm not using the word supernatural. I also want to make the difference that what I mean when I say history, history is not the same thing for me as the past, nor is it the same thing as what happened.

Since I don't know what it means to ask whether or not Jesus physically grows from the dead, I'm going to address this issue by saying, what about the earliest Christian claims about Jesus' resurrection can be historian to think as historical? What claims or stories rise to the level of history, and how and what? History refers to what modern professional historians construct about what they think may have happened in the past. There's no way the past is accessible, the past is gone, it doesn't, the past is shockingly, the past does not exist. So, if I write a history about the Civil War, you can't take my book on the Civil War and hold it up next to the Civil War and see where I got it right.

All you can do is take other people's historical constructions of the Civil War and say, does this, does their mark complain about the rules of modernist choreography as well as are better than other modern historians? That's what historians actually do. They don't travel back in time by the Civil War. They read historical accounts in just which of them play among the rules of modern story art.

So, the past is something that's happened, but the event of the past is not the same as the history of what happened. For example, no history of the Civil War could reenact the absolute whole Civil War, right? It's just that when we possibly have to take out the whole four years that the Americans of War happened. So, the history of the Civil War is a story in a narrative about an event, not the event, nor is it even a reconstruction of the event, a reconstruct movie like that, who could take the Titanic out of the ocean and remains on it, haul it all away and put it physically back together.

That'll be a reconstruction of the Titanic. Histories can do nothing like that when they write history. They are constructing history as accounts about things they think of from the past.

So, what can we do with that about the stories of Jesus raising rather than the dead? I believe we have basically five people we can go to for dad about this. Paul, who was the only eyewitness, the only eyewitness we possess, I believe, was Paul, to any of resurrected by a Jesus. And then the four gospels that are in our camp, Maggie Martin and Joe.

What did Paul see? He claimed to have seen the resurrected Jesus. He's also the earliest account we have by far, as Mike showed very well. But Paul claims that he saw the same thing that all the other people saw.

He gives a list. And as Mike again said, Paul's claims in 1 Corinthians 15 depend on his insistence that what he experienced was not different in kind from what the 12 and the other apostles experienced. Paul's claim also depend on his insistence that the future resurrected by his Christians will be in the same kind as Jesus' resurrected body.

And Paul's resurrected body, I believe Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 15, is not a flesh and blood body. It is a body in which the flesh and blood has been transformed into a purely pneumatic body. And this is the way I've heard a critic rather than the strange translations you get in your English Bibles of 1 Corinthians 15.

To Numa, this Greek word is often written as an inspiration. In the ancient world, it was considered a material stuff. It was invisible, perhaps.

Or it was what we see when we see life. We see fiery of Numa. It's not too different from the way ancient scientists talk about the ether, which is that very, very thin kind of gasses stuff, that's the lightest and highest stuff in the cosmos.

Numa was, even though, I will say, Numa's that stuff that exists in your head. You breathe it in the air. Your brain refines out every day air, and refines out the Numa in that air.

And that's a material stuff that exists in your body. And it runs through your body to tell your body how to move. This is Numa, right from my brain, through my arm, telling my body about the data.

When I touch something, it's Numa, a physical stuff, racing them through the nerves. To get to my brain, tell me I touch something. Well, it's too hot.

Numa is the stuff that brings the whole cobbles together in stoic thought, for example. So before we translate spiritual or spirit, it actually was in ancient science and medicine and philosophy and I think in everything thought, a physical material stuff, just very, very, very, very, very, very rarefied stuff. Like we might think of as oxygen.

Like we think of as oxygen. So what Paul was teaching at Bertrand 15 is, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. And I make a much more elaborate about this in the whole chapter of my book, The Corinthian Body, where I show how this is a perfectly rational thing for Paul to believe in the first century.

What Paul believed was that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. So he says, what kind of body did Jesus have in his resurrection? And we will have, it's as different as a seed is for flower. But it's this continuity, but there's also a discontinuity.

And I believe, I said, the discontinuity is the flesh and blood body, which had some plume in it, will be transformed in the kind, just like Jesus's body at his death, was transformed so that no longer had flesh and blood. It was a purely, it was a body made of pure plume, a pneumatic body. So it was a question of what? The relationship to Jesus' previous resurrection body to his close resurrection body is like the relationship of a seed to a plant.

They need not look anything alike. Does a flower look like a seed? No. Note that Paul gives no indication that he knew anything at all about an empty tomb.

He claims to have seen the body of the resurrected Jesus. But it was not a flesh and blood body. It was a pneumatic body, a body composed of the stuff of the pneumatic body.

So Paul's our only eyewitness to this body, and he describes it as a pneumatic body, whatever that could mean. It's hard to imagine what he's thinking about. He does believe it's physical in his sense that we're physical, but because pneumatic is a physical stuff in Paul's mind.

Now, arguments that it is the history of the empty tomb scenes, though, is what I'll be constantly known for the next ten minutes. I believe that none of the empty tomb stories in the gospels has any claim to history at all. They differ about who saw something, what they saw, where they saw it, when they saw it, what Jesus looked like, that his book was very naturely fine.

Was it flesh and blood? Or not? Mark, three women married a mother of fangs in Solomon, discovered a empty tomb to see a young man in the tomb itself. They do not see Jesus. The young man tells him to tell the disciples on Peter to go to Galilean, and there they will see Jesus.

But the test of Mark tells us that the women do not tell the disciples. No one sees the resurrected body of Jesus in the gospels of Mark. No one.

Matthew seems to follow Mark, but with his own changes. In Matthew, Mary, Magdalene, and the other Mary know there is no mention in Matthew of Solomon, because there was a mark. Experience in the earthquakes.

The descending angel rolls the same stone away. Note that Jesus does not exit from the tomb. They don't see Jesus walk out even though they supposedly see the stone broken.

Jesus is fighting their work, may not have been considered by Matthew as a tactic of the stone rolled away to exit the tomb in the gospel of Matthew. He tells the women that Jesus has been raised and has gone to Galilean. On their way to the disciples, note that unlike in Mark, the women are said here to have some fear but also joy, and Mark is afraid.

They are met and greeted by Jesus to him. They worship him. He tells him to announce to his disciples his resurrection, and that the 11 now, because Judas has killed himself for the Matthew, the 11th disciples should meet him in Galilee.

No one but the women see Jesus in Jerusalem on the third day. Two women, that's all. The 11th and only the 11th and 4th Matthew don't have any image of anybody else.

They go to Galilee some days later. They would take at least four days probably to get from Jerusalem to Galilee. They see him on a mountain in Galilee, and Jesus gives him what's called the Great Commission.

Notice there's no real ascension seen. We kind of imagine often in Matthew, New York. He just entered the commission.

Now time and place go together. But we might not have time to talk about that during this first 25 minutes of life. Look.

In the gospel, which will be a little bit just from Acts, which was also written by the Saint Paul. The women, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, and the other women. So there are several women, we just thought there's a lot of man.

And they see two men. Notice there are two men now, not one. In dazzling quotes.

They see to him, they tune, but they do not see Jesus. They tell the 11th. Peter then expects to give you two, but doesn't see Jesus.

So so far no one's seen the Bible. Later that day, Jesus appears to Cleophas in another unnamed disciple at Emmaus, which is seven miles from Jerusalem, according to the NRSB choice of 60 stadia, rather than 160 stadia in some other text. Perhaps later, they're the first people who are married to see Jesus' body after his death, according to Luke.

They go back, maybe simultaneously, it is reported that Jesus appeared to Simon, who is a prophet to him. Jesus then suddenly appears to them all, the 11 and their companions, except so we're not pretty sure exactly how many of them are. Jesus so chosen his flesh and bones and wounds, and he eats fish and burn them, and denies it to ghosts.

So Luke's, Jesus, is an action for flesh and blood, body. Jesus leads them to Bethany, server of a Jerusalem, blesses them, and while blessing them, he ascends them to heaven. So it sounds like this all happens in one week, basically, or are you on the third day? But just in the few days, Jesus appears to them to the 11 and their companions, and then he ascends to heaven.

In Acts, though we get a different account. Jesus here is depicted as hanging around Jerusalem, appearing regular to the disciples, and for a 40-day period of time, who's specified that Jesus appears to be disciples for 40 days. He tells them to remain in Jerusalem until they are baptized in the Holy Spirit, which happens in Pentecost, 50 days later.

He ascends to heaven outside Jerusalem from Mount Olivet, and then they see two men and return to Jerusalem. They do not leave Judea until much later in the Mary, and they are explicitly said to remain in Jerusalem until after Pentecost at the earliest. That's Acts.

All of the appearances of Jesus and Luke and Acts take place only in Jerusalem and in suburbs. All. They all bear only here in the 40-day period of time, and then stop.

In John, Mary not even is the first to go to the tomb. She sees the empty tomb, tells Peter in the below of the cycle. They return home without seeing Jesus.

A bit later, Mary, still at the tomb, sees two angels get the head and foot of a slap, but she doesn't see Jesus in the tomb. Later, she sees Jesus in John 2014, but thinks he's the gardener. Notice, Mary just saw him three days ago.

She's standing right there with him, and she doesn't recognize him. Mary is told to announce the resurrection and becoming ascension to the disciples, which she does. That evening, so the evening the first day, Jesus appears in the disciples in a lot of room in Jerusalem.

One week later, Jesus appears in the dead, now I'm including Thomas, Dallelujah. Now, the last chapter of the Gospel of John, most of us believe, is an epilogue tacked on sometime later by somebody else in the author's other part of John. And it sounds like it's cool, because it says this.

After these things, in chapter 21, some of the disciples are in Galilee. Simon Peter, Thomas, the twin, Nathaniel, to send the Levite, and two others on his disciples. They go fishing, Jesus appears to them just after they graded, and Jesus makes breakfast.

And then the chronology says, this was now the third time that Jesus appeared in the disciples after he was raised in the dead, so John gives us even a chronology of the counting. Okay, what it concludes means. The only two things, all five accounts, the four bells you call, have in common, is, number one, that Jesus did in fact rise in the dead, and number two, that was on the third day.

Everything else, who saw him, where they saw him, when they saw him, what else they saw was the man and angel, two men, desiccos, two men sitting at two, one if I had one foot, Mary sees, what Jesus looked like, differs in all the different accounts. Paul's list, for example, says he appeared first, and this sees the chronological, first to see this as the Peter, then the twelve, the disciples that is, then more than 500 brothers at one time, then to James, which is Jesus's brother, and then all the apostles, notice for Paul, the category of the apostles is not the same thing as the category of the twelve. And in the Paul, obviously not our list of himself, it's imperative to call himself himself.

The earliest, the earliest lips, Paul's, doesn't mention Mary Magma and Act Paul. Matthew and John say that Mary was the first to see Jesus. Matthew has apparently several days, but only the thirteen people.

Acts has these appearing all around Jerusalem and suffer over limited period forty period. Paul has the appearances going on for a few years, and apparently several different locations. Acts insists that all appearances occur only within the forty days, and only here Jerusalem magnuses that Jesus appeared to their eleven only in gathering.

Finally, what did Jesus look like? According to Paul, Jesus' pneumatic body could have looked no more like a selection blood body than the flower does to the sea. According to both Luke and John, his disciples tended not to recognize him, when they first saw him. Suggesting that we have here reflections of earlier traditions that Jesus' resurrected body didn't resemble his pre-residented body.

The disciples on the road to the mass don't recognize him until he breaks the bread. Mary doesn't recognize him if it's him. The disciples have to see a gallery don't recognize him first.

And so at least one later they say, ah, he's making a prayer. I think it's Jesus. So they didn't recognize him when they first saw him.

The gospel, sorry I said that. Also according to Luke and John, Jesus' body was flesh and blood. These are the kinds of inconsistencies that a story would expect when encountered stories that grew up and changed over time and space.

You get the basic idea that Jesus was raised to the dead right. You even get this very alternative from the third day. But every other detail differs.

If you put five people involved to claim they saw a murder, and you put them in five different rooms, and the only thing all five of them could dream on is that they saw it. But they can't agree on who did it. How many accomplices were there? How many people were there? Was it an amusement or was it in Washington? Was it over, did they take over 40 days afterwards to do it? They did it on the third day.

If you had all these disagreements among five witnesses, you wouldn't be able to accept the witness of any of them that they actually were there. So the only witness we have, and what we have who claims to be an eyewitness for everybody is that Jesus Paul and he saw a pneumatic body and it happened in the years, at least two to the main four years after the death of Jesus. All the other details just don't happen.

One last piece of that seems to me, and I'm just trying to watch my time. The empty tomb, if the empty tomb stories were historically true, I looked story of religions with a strongly expected that that tomb would come in place of veneration among early Christians. If they knew where it was, why did they go back? It was very popular in the ancient world where people had picnics around tombs.

The family and the loved ones would get together in the anniversary of the death, and they would actually celebrate the person's memory with a picnic. If they believed, if they knew the tomb where Jesus had been raised from, why did it take over 200 years for Christians to start venerating the tomb? And then they had to pick one that doesn't seem to fit the archaeology of the biblical narratives. It took basically the hell of the mother of Constantine, the emperor of Constantine, to go back and she was hearing traditions about where the tomb might have been.

But she said, okay, this is the tomb built in terms of the Holy Sepulant period. That's in the fourth century. If I knew where the tomb was, why did they use it as a place to pray? As a place to have a Easter worship service.

There's no evidence that early Christians knew where the tomb was until too late to count the historical evidence. And I think I'll stop there if you want. Yeah.

I'll let you two more minutes. There's a lot of other stuff I could talk about, which is matters of the historical. Why is it that historians have come to believe that you can't bring God in history? You may believe that the North won the American Civil War because God did.

But if you try to get tenure with that as your thesis, you will be denied tenure and any reputable American or Canadian university. It won't happen. That's not what historians do.

The other things I can talk about is history has to be symmetrical. So if you believe that God is the ancient who calls the resurrection of Jesus or the resurrection of Jesus is an absolutely unique historical secret but supernatural event, you've got to be able to deal with the claims of other religions that are very similar and have similar supporting evidence. If you accept Paul as an eyewitness evidence thought, that makes you think this rises out of history, you have to do the same for other historians, all the way through.

And those of us who teach religious studies in a comparative way were used to being held as a standard. You cannot give a historical capital for your own religion that you would not allow for other people, but please religion, you are not a period. And we can talk about that principle of symmetry during this special time.

So what we're going to do now is actually my favorite part of the Bible. I thought those opening presentations were very good, but we're going to move into a time of dialogue. So each of these scholars, we're going to be able to sort of ask questions and critique each one of each other's views on a disease-based topic.

And so we get to be there as they talk to each other, which is exactly what we're doing. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with when the dale is able to figure out the modern electronic device. You got it? I'm 39.

I don't know about that. Okay. So dale is going to start asking my question, but we know for about 25 minutes, and I'm just going to ask you guys to sort of, you know, share the time I wrote back before, talk about who you really are, and just do the beyond, ask each other a question, try to treat each other up, have fun, and live home home.

Okay. So are you ready to go? Okay. So dale, you can get started.

Well. Since you didn't talk about the NP-PM guarantees, I would like to know at number one, how do you deal with those? Or do you want to be curious as a historical event? And if you do, does it bother you, the kinds of questions that I read, that are in existence. And it seems to me that what you need to do is not only give an account of what you think happened there, and either which kind of vest or some amalgamation of them, or if you believe they can all be harmonized in some way, I just don't see it, but what I want.

And then the other thing is, and see, I believe I can get a fairly historical guess, a historical guess of how from the belief of some of his disciples that they saw him after his death, and I have no idea what they actually saw or what they experienced, and I don't know if it's seen, at least some of them really believe they saw these after his death. From that core journey to belief, which is one of the things you and I share with you, how do you get all these different 52 stories that don't match each other? Well, I'm really glad that you asked me. I was going to detail because this says, since my first debate with Barbara back in 2008, he raised his course.

And I don't know. The difference is never really bothering me, but they do bother a lot of Christians. And so I really started to look into these differences.

The first thing I did was I read the Gospels many times, in Greek, because it really slowed me down, as you don't read it that way, and helped you see things that you just don't see anything much because we're so familiar with it. I began to see a whole lot more differences when I did that than I ever suspected were in the internet. So I started recording, and that was through, and that was through, and I also wrote a document that's 50 pages long, a difference as I found between the Gospels.

So then I put them into these categories, what I thought the evangelists met, who are doing their count for the differences, but then that's only speculation on my part. And some of the literary religions I thought they were taking. And of course, as you know, there are a lot of historians who look at people like Cassius who are telling us who taught our view of Cassius, and they look at the same accounts and see how they told them differently, and then guess what their sources are to do with the sources.

But what I started to do, I thought, you know, there might be a better way to go about this. And so I started reading Flip's Heart's Lives, the 50's in a biography that he wrote. And I found that both of those 50, nine of them involve figures that look at the same time.

People like Caesars, Tubby, Antony and Brutus, all of them, you know, he's got it. I looked, I had found all the parallel curriculum in there, and I found that there are 80, five curriculum stories that appear two or more times. There are nine that appear five or more times.

So this provides a unique opportunity for us as historians where we can compare these parallel stories in Bhutan to see how he told the same story in different times, or did it in different ways. And what kind of different did he talk about? And I read Theon, a guy from the first century who taught how to write literature, and some of the techniques that he taught about evolution in the second century, and the only in the stamp thing, actually how to write history, how to write history. And look these in, and I find little flute target, and we see a minimum of six different liberties that flute are taught.

I'm still studying it, I think there's even several more, but six that are in there. And when I go back to the gospel account, say the resurrection areas in the empty tomb, and just in the gospel, period through it, I find that the advantage was that of our flute and John, especially when we can look at it with John, and he doesn't just know if it's Matthew and Mark, and move what they do with Mark. That they're doing the same kind of liberties that Theon said, ancient historians, biographers should do, and that if I can give multiple examples of flute art doing things.

So flute art, when you do tell stories, you actually, there are greater differences in the way flute art tells stories. The same story in the way the gospel authors say Matthew and flute retell the story of Mark. So what I see, all of these examples that you've made in your open statement, I believe that all of them, and I can show you examples in flute art, where he takes the same kind of liberties I believe that they could be explained.

All of them, not by carbonization, I think they'd be part of my son. But I don't want to make a perfect subject that protects the political water warming until it tells you what you want to hear. That's not what I'm into.

But I am into seeing what the ancient historians, what liberties they told us. And I think I see the gospel authors in the exact same liberties, and many times to a lesser extent that flute art does with the almost flute when he retells the same story. Does that make sense? I agree to be convinced, and I think that's why those of us who do a lot of comparison of the test materials, with other Jewish and Greek and Roman texts that are contemporary to them, we're not at all surprised, when you find that the writer acts probably himself composed most of the speeches and sermons of acts, because Thucydides is beginning to visit the story of the Peloponnesian War tells us that's what he did.

And we know from flute art, and from other ancient historiographers, the story of the history writers were expected to make up from their own report of training, not to reproduce the speech that Pericles said on the funeral oration in Athens, in the fifth century. But Thucydides considered me what he thinks Pericles should have said as such a funeral oration. And that's what we think, I think that's exactly what's going on in the back, is you see the author constructing things, except sometimes I think when he's, it shows he's using a source, a great sort of a boredom, that because the speech doesn't fit his own theology.

So I think the speech is stealing, especially in acts, because Stephen's actually getting an anti-Mosey, an anti-evolve, anti-timple speech. And the writer of the Macs is not anti-vault, not anti-Mosey, he's pro-tipped. So I think therefore, if you have this, in that case, the author probably used some pre-source that would speak to Stephen, that's why, because he just thought it a bit well there.

But it doesn't match on the county. But in most of the other places, the speech is what he gives. It doesn't matter if Peter's giving it or Paul's giving it, or whoever's giving it, they were remarkably similar, and it's precisely because they were written by the author.

So my question is, though, that what that shows me is that these texts are reliably untrustworthy when it comes to providing historical data. See, I wouldn't go that far. And the reason being is we can test how far they've been built, and the right piece of these talks about how to write speeches, so does Olivia's, a little bit later, so does beyond in the first century, and so the solution in the seventh century.

And in no case do they say that you can invent a speech that did not occur. In the case that you mentioned with these interviews, what happens, yes, you can invent the speech that you wouldn't give it on that occasion, but it's not a fictitious occasion. It's an actual occasion, right? And that's always the case they don't actually.

And there are, of course, tons of stuff. We monitor these stories, don't they? Right. So if they were to believe that this occasion, whatever would have happened, and they would have reproduced the speech according to what they thought, they would set on an occasion, if there were no eyewitnesses or even when they could give them information.

But if there was data on that speech, you couldn't just invent a speech on a whole problem. The specific piece is clear on this, and so is Olivia's, so Hispanic and Lucian, where you have to reconstruct the speech as carefully as you can. And if you're the eyewitness, you also get mother eyewitnesses and you reproduce it as best as you can.

But then as Lucian says, the historian can take the data that he knows in reproducing those speeches, and then he can dress up with his own laboratory skills and show off his own oratory skills. So, yeah, of course this isn't. There wasn't where he had video cameras or digital reporters who were there to do this.

There was shorthand starting at Cicero's day, but we don't know that these shorthand or reporters were around when the apostles were created. But I would think that when we look at the speeches and acts, that these are fairly accurate recollections of what Peter or Tom or Steven other than that day, and we'll be just saying one other big thing about this, especially when it comes to not only the apostolic curriculum and the speech also, but also Jesus' service. I do a lot of itinerary speaking here.

On the road a lot of self, what is interesting is, if I do a lecture on the resurrection or the historic reliability of the Gospels, whether I do it in Halifax or Fairfax, it's going to be a lot of the same thing. And, you know, Bart Ehrman, your colleague, I think I consider to be a form of faith to mine as well, although we're not, you know, but he gets the same speech all the time. I couldn't was quoting him for beta, and he will mix it up at times.

But as he's talking, I can say it up. Yep, it depends which Gospels we read. No, I don't know.

Yeah, it does. It depends which Gospels we read. It does the same thing all the time.

And so it's the same thing with Jesus. He's not reaching a new sermon. Every time he's out there, he's got maybe a dozen of them, something like that.

The disciples are talking. And can you imagine? I mean, I've heard the parable of the product of so many times that I could just see Peter turning to Thaddie's sand note. Look at that business guy over here.

What do you really say the Father gave to his inheritance? Oh, look at him. He can't stand it. You know, because it's the same thing each time.

So I think that there's a greater probability than when they were recording Jesus' service, that they're getting things extremely active because they've heard of time and time and time. And what do you think about that? Well, I don't think any of my Gospels were written by people who were themselves. I would agree with Jesus' ministry.

I think they were all blue, obviously. It points out that he's not. But I think all of our Gospels were written by people who were not disciples of Jesus during this lifetime.

And I think they're not going to do so. I think that was information that I really spoke to. Yes, but this goes to the next question.

I think you're completely exaggerating about your Bible's testimony. And I think this is even fewer for the ancient world or for people kind of the eyewitnesses. And it's not the Bible.

But it's also being proved all over the place right now in court cases where the vast majority of people would be cleared by DNA evidence that's now useful. They were convicted on eyewitness testimony. And in almost every case, eyewitnesses went as strong as evidence they had.

They didn't have the proper material evidence. And we had hundreds of cases overturning. And proving that eyewitnesses's testimony is not survival as a lot of our people seriously.

And I don't think it was any more reliable than the ancient world than anything. It was not a reliable and the ancient world. It's a mighty hard world.

And he was one of the great new examples of Nicholas of Damascus, was a friend of the Avian. He was a friend of Harry the Great. Harry the Great was the Nicholas of Damascus in Rome when he was under the Holy Spirit.

No. I think people might have said that. I don't think it was accurate.

There were people with similar status. You wouldn't usually have a normal person as your books. You know, well, you'd have to say it for a second.

Nicholas writes a live of Augustus. And he knew it. He knew it.

He knew it. He knew it. He knew it.

He was not a servant of any time, who would accept that a whole lot of work tells us about Augustine's truth, because, you know, Augustine's our God for him. He's trying to build an Augustus. You know, living up could have been made pregnant by a God, just like Alexander was great because he was made pregnant by his mother and by his mother, as well as his mother, but his mother, even during his lifetime, was made pregnant by Zeus.

So, you know, just because Nicholas says he's an eyewitness, and he was an eyewitness of much about David's life, no modern historian believes a lot of what he says, both by God's own actions and by God's own Europe. You see his accessory was a contemporary of Constantine preached in his church a lot. Constantine was a patron of his sequence, the Caesarea, and a very poor security.

But no one would believe that you see his life on Constantine, even though he's serious because he's an eyewitness of him. We just can't trust it as for historical fact, but because of the nature of ancient historiography. That's where we come into applying certain criteria by multiplying the same sorts of sources.

You know, I just don't think we can trust. I don't think we can call the hospitals anything like evidence for history. In the way we can call, I think Paul's letters evidence that I think that if the very least we can say is that Paul believed he saw a resident body of Jesus after his death.

And I think he sincerely believed it. And I think that some of the people he lives, although I certainly don't think he lives, also many times has seen the rest of Jesus. But I think that that's as far as history can think.

I agree with you that if we have to choose to think about this as Paul, we give a little bit of an edge here with a little more weight, because he is earlier, and we can really tie him to the Jerusalem Apostles with a little more strongly than we can. But I don't think that these differences in the gospel, if these guys are just writing according to their exercises and liberties that they have available to them, we have to judge them not according to Matthew and John did not form a committee for misleading the future historians. They use the literary liberties that were available to them in that day and we have to judge them not according to 21st century literary standards, but the 1st century.

And when they're using these kinds of liberties that others use, the end result is we might not know some of these vertical details in which there are differences. The position of the angel is at the end of the two of some of the ordered events, certainly time compression, inflation, transferable displacement, all these kinds of things are going to paraphrase. So we might not know some of the vertical details, but I don't think when we're looking at this ancient biography that that means that they're historically untrustworthy.

I think there's still trust where it doesn't, well, it doesn't prove or trust where it is. And then we're looking at things like off-wind and in sources such as, you know, John is an independent source from the south. And so you would at least have Mark and you would have John with the empty tomb narratives.

You would have Paul, which he believes that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. And so I know you said physical, we don't have to find it. So I was trying to see this in the courts.

I think we got to be able to transport it. So if Paul believed Jesus' courts is raised from the dead, that's certainly compatible with his into amendments. I don't see how it is.

Paul's paul's pneumatic body, Jesus, didn't need a empty tomb. A pneumatic body doesn't have to have a stone rope to it. A pneumatic body can test her rock.

And I think Paul's stating a thing about it. I think it's a historiographically wrong to introduce even the possibility of eating a tomb as it Paul's thinking about it. There's no evidence that Paul had any notion of any condition.

And I think that's quite the cause because he couldn't wear it just without a plate of it. And Paul's writing only say 20 years after the death of Jesus, and Mark tried to do 40 years after the death of Jesus. Mark could have invented the account of the empty tomb.

And he's precisely the one who has no one seen Jesus at the empty tomb or even at the doors. Matthew could build up in what he's finally marked and say, well, there was many people who had had some stories around him. And Luke also made him use his marker.

He made him use his magic and marker for the other theory. And so Luke also said what we've got him and he truly has some stories about it. So Luke developed totally different stories than the ones we find in Matthew.

Because the ones that they had in common is Mark who has given me two of those stories. And I think Paul is John. I don't think we can say that John had Matthew Mark and Luke in front of him.

I think there's really good evidence that John moved to some other tradition. And I think it's really easy to read John because they're just paying Matthew over here and Luke over here and trying to make him both work. And so he comes up with his own stories, some new stories, but some of them take place in Jerusalem and some of them take place in Galilean.

Because that writer now writing maybe in the 90s in the first century says, well, I've got him. I'm going to make a sense of all these different things because they don't agree with me. I want to ask you another question though, the rest of the value line.

Can I just, I want to just follow one thing you said. You said Paul had no need for an opportunity to do this with the pneumatic body. I'm curious to see how you respond to something I said in my opening statement.

I said that Paul believed in the resurrection, of course. When you look at 1st Thessalonians, which I'm sure you think is probably like that, it's probably the earliest piece of literature that you can just kind of do. And in chapter 4 of 1st Thessalonians verses 13 and 17, Paul talks about that the crisis they're bringing with you, and then the dead are going to be raised at first.

Paul also saw that when a person dies, they go to be easily to be with Jesus in heaven. So just being with Jesus in heaven is in resurrection. Something happens at the parasy of the Second Coming of Christ, which is called the resurrection.

He brings the dead back with the experience of whatever you might want to call. He puts that back in the corpses and then raises those corpses to transform themselves here. My point is that Paul envisioned the transformation of the corpse.

Whatever you want to call it about what the comment, I don't know, but it's from Paul, that is. But he envisioned resurrection as involved in the corpse. The corpse is raised in the transport.

And so if the corpse is raised in it, it's transformed. Well, then that would involve an empty grave or whatever that would be. I think you're putting two steps where Paul may not have thought of these steps.

I think Paul thought that the resurrection is the same thing as the translation. The resurrection for the dead body is the same process as the transformation of living bodies. And I think he said that would be an appointment on it.

And all of a sudden, if you were standing there, your flesh and blood body would be thought of as feminine. And Jesus comes back and says, the word, whatever, then you would go, true. And the flesh and blood would be chemically transformed into manicists.

I think that's what he believed happened to Jesus' body. I think that's what he believed what happened to his body. He's still living.

And I think that he believes that if the different parts of the body have been separated by death, so to say the soul of spirits, it's some other place. And the flesh and blood are going to be hurt. I think that what he must have imagined is that all of the different parts of the body also and the miraculous of the reunited improved.

Is that part of the body? In other words, I don't think he had to have a resurrection of a flesh and blood corpse first. And then the transformation of it to a resurrection body. I think the resurrection is not possible.

The resurrection, I believe Paul believed the resurrection of a flesh and blood body is not physically possible. The resurrection of a flesh and blood, okay, I would call that, if you want to say this, part one is part two, it's necessary to find that we can move on from there. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on that.

But it does seem to be whether it is a simultaneous thing, like soon as the part of the person and go, what's this? Can I just call it spirit? It was the integer. Okay. So the spirit calls actually very consistent in the way he puts out in a person.

Okay. So just so we can talk consistently here, the spirit that Paul believes in a person dies, the spirit leaves the corpse goes to be the Jesus of Heaven. The resurrection would involve the spirit being reunited with the corpse and then move, let's say.

Okay. It's transformed. So even if it's in this pneumatic or, as you say, your book like perhaps an electric bomb or something like that, it's still something, there's a transformation of who that happens to this corpse.

And so it's like second group, 49 to 51, you know, 49. How are the dead raised? 50. They're short chapters.

50. Well, the earth returns them in the same form in which to receive them, 51. And then these were transformed into glorious blood in the shine like the stars.

So it's still something that happens to the corpse. And so, I mean, Paul seems to think this corpse can do, transform the corpse. Swallow up right by the light.

It can use a really cool stuff, although it doesn't go on to describe a bunch of these things. But it's still to the corpse. And it happens to the corpse.

It does be behind an empty chipper group. Yeah. And I'm saying Paul could easily have imagined that Jesus' tune, if Jesus had a tune.

So he never talks about a tune. I don't personally believe we have any evidence that there ever was a tune of Jesus. I think it would be countering good for the Romans.

I think I don't vote with Don and croissant on a lot of things, but I think it would be odd for the Romans to allow the stragging of the followers or a guy to get just been crucified for imperial pretensions, and to allow them to take his body and get him an honorable burial. And, you know, to, I just, the Romans didn't do that kind of stuff to people they crucified. Well, you know, the other side, Michael, quite for example, in Josephus in Jewish wars, book 4, section 317, he talks about just prior to the destruction of Jerusalem, there were some mercenaries that the Romans hired to come in and kill a bunch of Jews.

And then it said that the Jews were assessed because prior to this, it was the Roman custom to allow the Jews to remove the crucified again from their crosses and give them a proper burial in Jerusalem. So this did happen in Jerusalem, whether it was an honorable burial is something that could be disputed, but that the Romans allowed them to remove them from their crosses and to give them the proper burial. Josephus himself justifies to him.

And I don't think everything Josephus says. Josephus, Josephus is one man riding defensively about the Jews in himself, but then you go out and probably make these are 90s and you're in Rome. And Josephus makes that stuff all the time.

And if everybody can make up something to make the Jews look special, he will do it. So one example from one author does not historical method make it. You have to have general things.

And I'm just saying, generally, most of the historians just believe that's not what the Romans typically did. But they didn't Jerusalem, according to Josephus. And Josephus has been shown in the act at all a lot of things, even the color of the king at Eric's bedroom has been shown that Josephus was accurate about that.

Yes, I agree, he doesn't vankey, he embellishes, he does things in things wrong. But he gets a lot in writing. And so when you've got Josephus saying that, and then you can say, hey, you've got Mark.

So they don't even have multiple out of the station. We just shoot through the 30 minutes, add one right there. In other two minutes, do you have one last negative question for Dale? And then Dale, in one minute, I'm just joking.

So one of the last questions, I'm going to ask him a question. I can get one last negative question. So I'm writing it.

Oh, then I have the first time. I'm looking for probably the most significant thing. Okay, well, let me just say this.

You said history, it's what historians can reconstruct about the past, it's not the past. I think you and I are in agreement there. What we have about the past, I would say, I'm curious what you said about this.

What we have, like what the historical Jesus is a reconstruction of what the real Jesus who bought the shores of Galilee would have been like. The real Jesus, of course, would have been more than we can reconstruct when he's not less. It's kind of like a gravestone.

The gravestone has a bit of information that we can know about the person, their name, date of birth, and date of death. The person in the grave is a whole lot more than the grave stuff, but it's not here. She is not less.

In the historical Jesus, I think it is a long and it's a brief construction of basic things we can know about it. I would agree, it's non-profit cancer. It's not absolute.

In history, we talk about probability because we can't get into a time machine and return to the past and verify our conclusions. But neither can archeologists, geologists, or evolutionary biologists. We apply historical method.

We talk about probabilities. It's not perfect to do a scientific method, but we find that it's on a regular basis. It's generally reliable and far more reliable than other methods, such as carrot cards and magic, any falls.

Would you agree with what I just said? I just wouldn't put any in that method. How would you put it? Historians learn certain practices when they're in their PhDs. They learn certain actions for alcohol and further actions are typical for the doing history.

They learn certain tools and certain sources are better than other sources. And then they enact this practice over their career trying to live by the rules of the psoriography as they can. What they produce is not a reconstruction of the past, is a construction of the past.

And what the test of whether it's good or not, better than carrot cards, anything else, is not just a corresponding one that happens. It's been played by the rules of modern psoriography in professionally accepted ways. That's the only thing it can do.

You can't talk about measuring the past because you don't have access to the past. One historian's book is considered better or worse, simply by other historians. Notice it's all peer review kind of stuff.

Just like the only people who really judge whether a scientific fact is a scientific fact or other scientists, not journalists. In the same way, so the best account of Socrates or Jesus will be what other historians believe plays by the rules of modern psoriography the best. But I mean, like the response, we don't have the time.

My question is, when you put this much great on my witnesses, I think this is either problematic. I want to use it as an illustration to see what do you think's going on here. I trust that you probably don't believe that Joseph Smith actually found miraculously gold tablets from which he translated the book in one.

But we have actually, actually, months better, I would just testimony for those gold tablets that we do for anything related to Jesus at all. Three men claimed that they saw a two of them together with Joseph, and one would be based later because he couldn't see it the first time. The album was the angel appeared to Joseph and then, at the same time, holding gold tablets.

It was the heavenly sword that had the shield on a rod. A few days later than then, eight men for Joseph Smith's family and four of them of a very close family. They walked out of the Smith's home and out into the forest of the woods.

And they all came upon him. Joseph was sitting there with the gold tablets. He showed them to them.

They touched them. They held them. They handled them.

They saw the writing. It was the writing one that they couldn't see. We have eleven eyewitnesses to the gold plates.

They all sign the sworn epidemic at the same time. And that happened in July of 1829, and it was published only six months later in March of 1830 when the book was published. Six months later from the event, eleven eyewitness sworn testimonies in writing.

From the 19th century, rather than from the first century. That seems to be by your standards. I mean, we as historians would have to say that the gold plates are a historical fact.

And I don't know any historian except the Mormon historian. And even a lot of them wouldn't say the historical fact. Who would say they could affirm that it's history.

And I know not one. And that it's a piece of something. I know not one, not a Mormon historian who thinks any of that it's history.

Not one. I'd say this to say, the practicing history has been a semester. So what would you do with that fact? Well, first, the story that you mentioned about the eight of them being taken out back and actually getting touched and pulled the plates.

I've studied performances, so I might not have heard that story. I'm waiting to come to Richard Lyman Bushman by Joseph Smith Russell on the roll in 2005. And I checked with John Kerner, who also has just published a book on Brigham Young, who's an expert on Mormon.

Well, I've heard that story. The story I've heard about how they saw was Smith brought them into a building because they had been asking to see these plates. And it's like he wasn't challenged.

He said, what do you want to see these? So he brings them into the house, one of these hats. You know, top hats like Lincoln would have worn. He wanted to say, he says, already I want you to come up one at a time and look down on the hat.

That's a different story. That's he did that with William Harris and a couple of guys proud. But that happened earlier before this revolution happened.

And what I understand are like eight of them there. And one of them didn't see it. And they all said they didn't see it at the end.

He said, oh, we need a little faith trying. And they come up and apart. They saw it at that time.

So I think it's also telling that all those other witnesses, shortly after Smith died, eight of them left Mormon Church. And only three of them. Only three of them remained.

And they were all related to Smith. They had the right. I've been attracted, even the ones who left, never in their whole lives, denied what happened.

Oh, don't mind that. There could be some pride there too. I mean, why would you leave the Mormon Church if you thought it was true? The designers on the other hand were all willing to suffer continuously.

Can all million die? I think the history that showed that Peter and Paul did and came back to the brother of Jesus. And Joseph Smith did. And meaning why, I'm telling you, if you read the history of the Church published by the Mormon Church, he was even though the Church was against wine.

On the night of his death, he asked the sheriff to go out and they said, hey, you know, you want to eat meals? He said, yeah, pick up some wine for us. And the history of the Church, again, this is more than a term, a visual form of literature. He said that he was shooting down the steps of people while they were shooting back up at him.

That's far from meaning the land move. Allow himself to be sure to answer the problem with you when you're not. You don't submit the early literature of Christianity to the same kind of critical scrutiny that you're willing to submit more in the Church.

Well, why would you say I'm not? I am, but because you're not. You're allowing, when you talk about people who are listed, you talk about people as if this really doesn't represent witnesses. We don't have that.

All we have is a list we call. Would you read Peter? Yes, we don't have that. Yes, we don't have that.

Peter is my victimist next month. All we have is Pearson, and I believe Peter may have been one of them. I believe Mary and I believe they have been one of them.

But she doesn't even make a false list. Well, because she's a woman, right? But we don't know that. That's another thing.

It's another thing. It's another thing. It's all special.

Hold on. Let me be clear about that. In the first century, a woman's testimony was not regarded with much weight.

And so Paul in verses 11, 12, and 14 refers to this oral tradition as critical. That's what he calls it. In other words, this official formal proclamation.

I'm not being bigoted to saying that. But what I'm saying is that Paul, or the apostles who formed this curriculum, would be brushed with an out because it wouldn't give them any amount. That's why we think we're in there.

But Paul meets with Peter over two occasions, according to Galatians 1 and 2. Then he's getting the information from Peter to this gray side. And this is, you know, this is, he says, whether I think this is what we preach and what you're hoping. So it seems like he is giving this information from the Jerusalem apostles in terms of Peter, James, the 12.

Well, I just think that evidence that you are willing to get a great resource for a lot of our freedoms, that you're willing to accomplish. Well, you can agree to disagree. So because of time constraints, we're going to vote for 10 minutes.

Okay, 10 minutes of Q&A from the audience. So those of you who text in your questions, if you guys are with a raffle and get your question asked. So the first question.

So maybe we'll look at two questions. So actually, here's the question from both of you. You can share this one and try to make your answers concise because you'd like to move quickly.

So we all do our belief systems at times. What is the one party that is against your belief in Jesus' resurrection, that wakes you up in the middle of the night and cause you to raise your friends while you're filming? I'm sure I just dumped it. And because my faith is not based on this choreography, I believe in my faith is a miracle.

And I believe I believe because I wake up and I still believe. And I go to church and meet in mind. I'm literally meeting both my prayers and my community meeting both.

And I believe that providing faith is just a gift from God. I just take it to the race. And I really don't.

I don't think it. I don't bother to doubt our resurrection in Jesus. I wish I could say the same.

I wish I had that kind of personality. I don't. And I doubt perpetually.

And I come to understand it's just the way I'm wired. It's the way I'm wired emotionally. And I've begun to recognize that I figured when I finished my 788 book, I never had doubts.

But shortly after that, I found myself down here. And I said, why am I doing this? And it's because it became a habit. And you just don't turn it off when you put the period at the end of your investigation.

The thing that keeps me up at night sometimes, and it doesn't happen nearly as often as it used to, would be, what if I'm wrong? I still ask that question. What if I'm wrong? What if I've done my investigation with at least the greatest amount of objectivity that I could question? I'm not saying it's completely a bias. Nobody could be.

But I tried. I really tried. And I have a very good consciousness on that.

But it's like, what if I'm wrong? What if I'm missing something? And that's the thing that caused me to really appreciate that. That's a great question. So, one more question for each of you.

This one is for Michael. When Jesus cries out, and the scriptures say that, and you've heard this one before, say that the two of the Roman bodies and saints that fall asleep are raised, how can these be the first roots when he did not get the raise? Yeah, that's a great question. It's asked a lot, and I've got to trouble last year for my post-solution with some of those on the far right.

I think, as I read through the rep of Roman and Jewish literature, I see a lot of the same kind of stuff happening at the death of Julius Caesar, where pale parents were seen walking around the dust, now had nothing erupted. There were the tritings in the heavens, a stream stopped flowing, black intestines were found outside the town. You find a similar kind of thing when Julius Caesar invaded Egypt as reported by Rio Cascus, when Claudius Caesar died, Rio enforced this pacifist, and Josephus reported various importance, interesting things that happened prior to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Josephus said the Calvary Earth to the land. I mean, you see these kinds of things, and I think that this is kind of a target to common poetic or apocalyptic language. I don't know what you're labeling, but I don't know that these things were intended with these kinds of things, because we see a lot of literature that surrounds things like the death of Caesar's and great kings.

It's kind of, in my opinion, I think it could very well be, though I'm not certain, I think it could be some kind of special effects meant to emphasize the death of the king. So I don't know. I'm just saying, I don't know.

If Matthew intended for us to interpret those raised saints in a literal sense, if he did, you do have the problem that you mentioned, Christ is the first group, what about that? The only way you could get around that, if you hold that these were literally raised, that would be to say they were raised in a body like Lazarus. But that means they're going to die, and that means they need food, they need shelter, they need clothes, and I'll bet they have some really cool stories to talk about what happened in the past, but we don't hear anything about making that from the early church fathers. So I do have my question about it, and there is one interesting thing, and that is when Kim Jong-il died December last year.

Similar phenomena, they reported coming out of North Korea, praying the bird received, bounding the sorrow that the statue of Kim Jong-il's followed, the mountain on which Kim Jong-il was said to be born. There was a lake in the foot of that, and it was very thick ice, because it was winter, and it said the ice cracked, it was heard from miles away, and there was glowing letters on the mountain that said something about Kim Jong-il, something about being in the vine, or something like that, and then it vanished from sunset. So, are we really, did the North Korean government mean for this to be interpreted literally? I don't know, it's just kind of hard to understand, but we see these things that they have to do today, and some cultures like that.

I don't know about really interpretive, so I suspect that what we may be seeing here is some special effects that's common in the literature. That's right. Okay, the final question is for Bill.

According to the Gospels, Jesus healed and sick and raised people from the dead. Do you think these resuscitations influence how the disciples interpret these through that? Yeah. I think they definitely affected the interpretation.

I find it difficult to explain the rise of the interpretation of Jesus' resurrection without presupposing some kind of belief arising in some way from some of his disciples that they saw him after himself. I don't think you can say, when it happens or where it happened, I think you probably have to go over a few years and several different places. And I think what happens is, you basically didn't have to say, wait a minute, if he really is a Messiah, then what kind of Messiah is he? Because Messiah weren't expected to die.

So, you've already been shocked by the fact that he's crucified, and no army came to be in heaven to save him and to withdraw the Roman Empire. And I think what you have to do is start looking for other kinds of ways to interpret the Messiah. Now, the Messiah had never been a crucified Jew in Jewish literature at the time.

Their work is that the Messiah's could be very powerful, heavily sick years, maybe even divinely figures themselves. And so, I think what they did is they went to the scripture and they started trying to come up with, and we believed we saw him and happened, and he was killed, and we believed that he was a Messiah but some period kind of type. How do you put that all together? And I think we come in with a pretty good call that says, oh, this is the beginning of the end.

This is first of God's confirmation that he really is a Messiah, even though he didn't look like a Messiah. And then, it means he's going to be a different kind of Messiah, but it also means the resurrection of Jesus beings, the resurrection of everybody is very certain. And I think that what actually happened is that there were enough stories of feelings and resurrections from another different cultural source of the ancient world that they didn't have to go very far to interpret these as having special significance for Jesus.

Thank you very much. So, sorry. We have time to give it up.

Okay. More questions. Bonus.

Okay. All four gospels have been shackled and I do not even recognize Jesus. How do we know the man they saw was not a good thing to foster? Well, the Matthew 2017, I think it was a very interesting one where he says, they went to Galilee and saw Jesus there and some worshiped him but others down.

The word that is used there by Matthew is this tanto which means to think two things. The only other occasion is in Matthew, I think it's 16 around there where Jesus is walking on water and he invites Peter to come out. Peter goes out and he's walking on water and says, then he's down and he starts from him.

See the waves and he's sunk. And Jesus grabs him and he says, why don't you go? This is a tanto. But it's important to see that in Peter's valley he was thinking two things.

He was out on water because he trusted. But then he was thinking, well, wait, how can this be? How can I be walking on water? And so he's down. This is great.

But I'm walking on water. How can this be? So I think you can see Jesus' disciples in his cycle. Wait a minute.

We just saw him die. How can this be? So they've got summers to immediately worship him and others going, why? How can this be? Luke tells a similar thing to from 24 when he says Jesus appears to them in the room and it says out of joy and amazement they were of unbelief. And he says, I mean, it's stronger work than this tanto.

And how can you have joy and amazement and unbelief? Well, it seems to me that Luke is using this the same way we would, or walk out home running at the bottom of the night. Unbelievable. I think it's that way.

I mean, here these guys, they see Jesus crucified. The world is parent upside family. And then all of a sudden, I mean, it's the worst thing that could happen.

And then shortly thereafter, the very best thing could happen. And eyes filled with tears, jaw dropped. It's like, how can this be? Out of joy and amazement, it was like unbelief.

So I don't think that he was unrecognizable. Now, Luke, that demands disciples when he appears to them and says he kept that their eyes were kept from recognizing him. So that's the only occasion which that really occurs.

The only other occurrence would be marriage didn't recognize him. And there's just not enough detail to know what's going on in the text. She's just been talking to the angel, or she thinks of the gardener, the body scar, who knows, her eyes couldn't have filled with tears and not see him.

He couldn't have been wearing a hoodie or something like this. And he couldn't have been right. Could have still been somewhat dark.

There's just not enough information that John would be cleared. But Luke, her eyes were kept from hearing, and then Matthew and Luke had those. I don't think that's the case.

And Mark doesn't give us resurrection appearances. So, I can't say that he wasn't a breakfast guy. What do you mean? Okay, so is this the real last question? This is the real last question.

Okay. Do you think it's the belief that in disciples that Jesus was raised from death is only imagined or did it happen in a way that anyone could have seen the resurrection Jesus had been there assuming they were not blind? Well, this is like the film, if a film critic, a film camera recording, I don't know what you're out to understand the exact question. Would anybody have seen him alive or would all these certain people have sort of only taken out of him? No, I have no idea.

When... I believe that what makes me historian is that there are certain things that I'm willing to say rise below the history. One of those things is Jesus was raised from death. The other is God did.

That's why I have no idea what these people either saw. I certainly imagine it was kind of like the end of Jesus of Montreal, where, you know, they see a shadowy figure and they say, I've seen him as before, but because, of course, they wanted to. They loved him.

I sometimes imagine that's what happened. Sometimes I imagine that people, some people had some kind of actual visionary experience on another religious and scholar from a comparative point of view to say, I don't feel any need without the reality of religious business on the parts of the people. That's all I can say as a historian.

What makes me a Christian, I believe, is the one thing I'm going to say is, whatever they think they saw, God did. Even if they saw a light and believed in the resurrection of Jesus, God caused them to believe that. I can't say that it's a story, but I think that's the difference between me and a non-Christian historian, who won't say that much.

What I will say is, I don't know what happened. And I won't take care of it. The one thing I care about is, by faith, I believe that whatever those people experience, I will, I'm willing to take God's deep pages.

Okay, so for me to give a applause, I want to say that these people that are going to be bookends in the back, and numbers of books are for sale, you want to keep learning, both are for my ideas. And next year's religion soon, there's Myers and Myers, who's working on his ideas, who will be the first people to know through, and the one who will email the system. So folks, please give a round of applause.

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 Risen Jesus Podcast, a ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona.