[Music]
well i'm a christian and uh i don't know
where to start
i'm just glad i got on the air
sounds like you started congrats on your
thousands of episodes
thank you that's gotta be exciting well
i wanted to start with something
jesus said in john 14 26
he says the holy spirit whom the father
will send in my name
he will teach you all things and bring
to your remembrance all that i have said
to you
i think what he's making a reference to
is that the four gospels will be
written this way
oh okay and when we look and we look at
john 16 13 he's making a reference to
the
epistles and the book of revelations
when he says but when he the spirit of
truth come he will guide you into all
truth
so you've found some verses and you have
an interpretation that suggests that
they're pointing to the gospels and
uh the revelation of john yes
okay um i i don't understand what value
that is
because somebody else could come up with
another interpretation that
they're pointing to something else but
even if you're correct uh
for somebody to say i mean somebody
could have jesus could have literally
said
by the way after i'm gone there'll be uh
some letters written
uh about me
there's nothing remarkable about that
there's nothing that points to the
divine
and um you know so i have no reason
until somebody gives me a reason to
believe that that the bible
is authoritative that is something that
i should pay attention to
i have no reason to pay attention to it
i mean i do
because i'm constantly talking to the
people who believe it but
i i don't know maybe i just don't
understand what point you're trying to
get to
well there's got to be well there's a
reason for the four gospels the way
they're written
yes people believed something and they
wrote it down
well matthew was written specifically
for the jews because
when you look at the first uh miracle he
did leprosy
he he cleansed the leper and that
in ancient israel it was uh viewed as a
punishment for sin
yeah matthew matthew is over the top for
for the jews so luke was most likely
written first and matthew and mark
generally are viewed as adopting things
from or sorry mark was written first and
matthew and luke are generally viewed as
adopting things from
uh mark as well as potentially a cue
document or whatever depending on which
model you want but matthew
made everything jewish matthew sought
out to make make it appear that jesus
answered all sorts of
uh prophecy and goes back and even uh
references
uh things in in the old testament that
took the tour on the talk that aren't
even there
or aren't in the versions that we have
so if we're in agreement that matthew is
constructed specifically to spin this
story so that it would be appealing
for the jews what conclusion can we
reach from that
well i'm not saying each gospel has a
specific purpose i think
do you think it's important the gospels
be congruous do you think the gospel
gospels should line up and agree with
each other
well john doesn't line up with the other
three
my question is do you think that the
four gospels
should line up with each other and agree
well some of them have not all of them
have the same stories on them
all right the story is covered by each
of the four gospels
would you expect those stories in god's
perfect word to agree
um it depends because we have four
different authors
matthew matthew and john were
eyewitnesses
no and uh go ahead
we have no idea who any of the authors
of any of the gospels were
but the bulk of scholarship doesn't
identify any gospel author as an
eyewitness
and it looks like mark had two if not
three authors i believe
and in fact mark i think has two if not
three endings
um well yeah then there's secret ending
and then there's
the one that ends at 69 and then back at
the beginning of the call you said
something interesting when you and you
made two points and you said i think
this verse says this and then you say
well i think
this verse says that do you find it odd
do you think it's it's
if you were listening to somebody who
was speaking about the quran and they
were reciting a verse
that was supposed to be absolutely true
100
divinely inspired and authored as a in
accord with god's will
and you started the sentence about that
verse with i
think what do you say i mean
does that sound right do you think we as
human beings are should be
interpreting or do you think the message
should be clear and you don't have to
say i think you can say i know the verse
means this well i guess i should have
said i know
so you know without a shadow of it in
your mind that these verses
have a specific intent and meaning
yes with without question okay
how do you know that and because a
minute ago i think if i
instead of correcting i think if i'd
have asked you probably would have said
that you know that matthew and john were
written by eyewitnesses
correct and yet they weren't or they
there's no reason to think they are
because
we don't know who wrote them
well we know we know well there are
other uh
i don't know where to go with this the
mark mark's getting it from peter
and uh luke is getting it from paul
um okay i'd ask how you know that
but the thing is if you go look at
the bulk of scholarship related to the
authorship
even just within the new testament
matthew mark and luke are anonymous
gospels there's no mention of within
them of who wrote them there
and they're written in the third person
john
just says uh john a disciple of jesus so
that the only reason it gets that
name is because it's self-reinferential
but you have no idea which
john that is and the best scholarly
dating of these things put them
uh decades even as much as a century
after the events that they're talking
about
so if you look at those and we don't
know who wrote them i don't know how you
could say that they were
eyewitnesses when the best dating puts
it in a position where they're
not eyewitnesses and they're not written
as if they're eyewitnesses and if
matthew and luke are eyewitnesses or
matthew
if matthew's an eyewitness he doesn't
have to borrow anything from another
gospel
if seth and i go see the same show i
don't have to read seth's review of it
edit out clips from seth's review and
then add my own embellishments on top of
it i can just tell you what i saw
well we found the pool of bethesda in
john 5
2. we found the pool of cylon in john 9
7.
and we found the oshawa f typhus which
was in matthew 26 57 in john
18 13. so we're finding archaeological
evidence every day
uh archeology archaeological evidence of
what
of the stories in the bible no okay so
the the position here is not the bible
is a fiction and nothing in there is
real or mentioned i mean
they talk about jesus going into
jerusalem we know jerusalem is real we
don't even need archaeology for that
you can't how do you find archaeological
evidence
for the first of all uh
that would confirm authorship and and
your your
view that these were eyewitnesses but
how do you find archaeological evidence
that supports
uh miracle claims or anything that would
get to whether or not jesus is divine
i mean russell years ago
what's that go ahead go ahead i was just
saying
russell years ago in the show came up
with an example that all of us have used
which is you know in a thousand years of
archaeologists dig up new york city that
doesn't tell us whether or not
spider-man was real
i guess that makes sense
but when you look at all the books of
the bible we got 66 books
in the protestant bible yeah yeah
written by uh 40 authors over 1500 years
written by an unknown number of authors
but it's probably around that
over many many years yeah but the
the main theme is paradise created
paradise lost and paradise restored
okay so why don't we just read milton
and throw the bible out
read basic storytelling 101 yeah let's
let's go through and read joseph
campbell's uh
series on myth stuff i mean the fact
that the bible
has a narrative that is common to
humanity that shows up all over the
place
to me would seem to be evidence that
there's absolutely nothing remarkable
about it that this is the sort of thing
that we find
well when you look at what he
jesus said in john 3 12 he said if i
told you earthly things
and you don't believe them how how can
you believe heavenly things
well first of all jesus has not shown me
anything earthly or otherwise
well when you just look at the book of
job all the science in there
all the sun okay now now we're tap
dancing on something like uh how do we
get
jesus into the book of job uh that was a
that was a little bit of a leap for me
yeah and yeah and the science objective
yeah well i can understand that but i
want to come back
if i if i may all right go ahead if
we're
when we have the gospels and if the
gospels are divinely inspired god's
perfect word instruction manual for
all of humanity and the gospels disagree
and i'm i'm guessing on this show you
must have covered it a thousand times i
don't want to cover too much old ground
but i mean the basics
disagree with each other uh how jesus
lived where he went what he said
what he didn't say how he died his
resurrection there were four different
conflicting versions of the empty tomb
story in the gospel
in the gospels the four gospels so if we
know
the gospels disagree with each other and
can't be trusted to agree with each
other on something that is supposedly a
perfect truth
do you think we have good cause then to
have
real doubt about anything else that the
gospels or any other biblical book might
say or state or claim
well we found the nazarus inscription
which right after jesus died
they made it basically a capital offense
to steal from a chimney
so that's a good piece of evidence right
there a good piece of evidence for what
that they did not have an explanation
for why the team was empty
okay so i i haven't looked up this story
um i have no idea about the veracity of
it but i can tell you that
a report that a law changed about grave
robbing
isn't confirmation of an empty tomb or a
missing body or somebody rising from the
dead
that is specific to any of these stories
and would jesus have subjected himself
to the natural law in place when he was
bending
the laws of the natural world to to be
the savior
he would have done it his way anyway
i hear you i mean the thing the thing is
i always try to like
remove yourself from and i'm not saying
well you can do this but
it's difficult um remove yourself from
saying i believe this and then looking
at all the things that seem to support
what you believe
and instead look at it you know john
loftus's outsider test for faith
if you didn't believe what would it take
to convince you
and if the claim is that there was
uh an itinerate jewish rabbi that said
things
okay that's a completely mundane claim
i'm fine with the fact that there were
probably a bunch of those probably a non
of them named
yeshua even but if the claim is that
there was
an individual who raised the dead turned
water to wine
healed the sick and the blind gave these
passionate messages
was killed as a heretic and then rose
from the dead and ascended to heaven
those are extraordinary claims and they
require more than the story
especially when you have multiple
stories with different accounts even if
even if the all of them lined up
perfectly and said in roughly different
words exactly the same thing that's
still not sufficient evidence for this
and if it were if that was the standard
by which you
felt that you could be reasonably
convinced of something then you would
have to believe every alien abduction
scenario that comes along there's
some of those are far more similar than
other things you would have to
to to believe uh you would have to
accept multiple different religions
because
your standard doesn't get you to which
one of these is right
if any it's just this is the one i'm
convinced of and now it just becomes
nothing more than a
well i believe it and blah blah blah
it's an opinion
well when we look at the gospel of luke
he was a physician
and he's the only one that mentions
hematitrosis which is blood sweating
which is very rare the most like rare
condition on earth
i found that fascinating that he
mentioned that in the gospel
well you know i think it's fascinating
too because
he described a condition an event that
happened
if people were being crucified um
and bled out don't you think that that
would be happening to all of them or a
good many of them
no well this was before when he was
praying in the garden right before he
was crucified
that he oh you're trying sweating blood
not bleeding water okay
yeah he's so he was sweating blood and
it's actually a rare condition it's like
there's a couple people on earth that
have it but it's a rare condition one of
the
most rare conditions okay so
a rather rare condition gets reported
what does that have to do with whether
or not the individual is divine
well it mostly happens in death row
inmates and this was the night before he
was crucified i think that's pretty cool
okay so other other people
on the planet who are on death row
have sweated blood so it's
an entirely mundane occurrence it may be
rare
but the death row inmates that sweated
blood they're not god incarnate are they
no but they're going to be uh they're
going to be killed just like jesus
so what the point is there's nothing
about that that
leads should lead anyone to believe that
they're divine i have no problem with
the notion that somebody got killed
i have no pro well i mean i object to
the killing
i'm saying i don't have any problem but
you know i could grant
that jesus existed that he said things
that he was killed and that gets us
nowhere near whether or not
he was raised from the dead and ascended
to heaven because he's god
i hear you and i wanted to uh explain
hebrew
what i've been told about abraham and
isaac what you've been told by whom
uh by a preacher
okay that abraham is god the father
isaac is god the son and the ram that is
sacrificed is the crown of thorns that
jesus wore in matthew mark and john
cool story you believe it because
somebody told you
well then yeah the bible
the preacher told you or then you went
and read it in the bible
or both you know i've always uh that's a
atheist objection to the bible
yeah i i have a whole diatribe on the
abraham and isaac thing but
you know preachers apologists can
do whatever they like to try to spin
stories so that they're meaningful to
people
uh but in this one first of all i think
his analogy
fails miserably because it wasn't a
crown of thorns that was
actually sacrificed so if the ram is
analogous to the crown of thorns
it's not like he put the ram on isaac
and then killed him
so this thing falls apart at every turn
and he's trying to draw a connection
between two stories and my point is
we have no reason to believe that either
of those stories are true
so there's a there's a blackout is one
of my favorite shows and
uh there's a moment where um
lord percy is describing uh the eyes of
the infanta
and he's saying that they're bluer than
the
i don't know great stone of galveston or
whatever it was and it turns out he's
never seen either and so
blackadder calls him out by saying that
so what you're saying is
something you've never seen is slightly
less blue than something else you've
never seen
and that's what you're doing here with
the abraham isaac story something that
is
not true and whose meaning may be
questionable is
barely comparable to something else that
we don't have any reason to believe is
true
all right thanks for the talk sure
thanks for calling thanks
i'll see you let me throw this out look
we've mentioned this before as an
example but
if you believe in a literal hell if you
hold to the the verse
depart from me all you who were cursed
into a lake of fire an everlasting
definition or whatever
um the idea then
is is that i'm god's child and i'm in a
burning house
and instead of god showing up and
communicating exactly who he is
what his nature is what he wants what i
should do personally
irrefutably he writes a letter
and then he gives it to somebody else
who gives it to somebody else and he has
it translated and transcribed and passed
around and then someone will eventually
go and hand it to my child
who's on the second floor of the burning
house and i always thought you know this
to me makes no sense how
why would a personal god not want to
make a personal connection that's
irrefutable why
in the world are we stuck with this this
book that uh
is is such a mystery and such a
mess and when people you know draw from
the bible it's
it's hugely problematic so
i don't know i just threw that out there
is that was that wash with you is it a
bad example
no no it's fine and ray comfort is i
mean he used to use that example you
know
basically we're knocking the door
telling you that your house is on fire
and i'm like okay but if you knock on my
door and tell me my house on fire
and we go for a tour on my house and you
can't point to any fire
you're just a nuisance you woke me up
because you're convinced my house is on
fire and i appreciate the fact that you
care enough to get me out and out of my
house if my house is on fire
but when we investigate we find no fire
we find no indication of fire we find no
smoke
we bring in five or six different people
and you're sitting here telling me my
house is on fire when there's no
evidence for it
this person's telling me my house is
flooding and these people are going like
no
that's not right your house is fine so
the key is to rely on the evidence
to reach conclusions that's that's what
skepticism is saying i'm not going to
accept this until there's good reason
for it