The Hidden Flaw in Every Resurrection Argument (Alex O'Connor vs Trent Horn response)

Alex O’Connor and Trent Horn recently debated the resurrection of Jesus — but beneath the polished arguments was a much bigger problem nobody stopped to examine. Let's discuss the hidden assumptions behind the reliability of the gospels, group appearances, martyrdom claims, and whether resurrection apologists are quietly treating disputed Bible stories as established history.

=== original posting May 12, 2026

original video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp0YRt9Q7p4

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Transcript

SPEAKER_15 0:00

Sure. We've all heard a lot of debates on the resurrection of Jesus, but I bet you haven't heard this one. Grave robbery was primarily about valuables that might be left in a grave. If you're gonna be there anyways, and you're a dub you're a dubious fellow who's into witchcraft, you might like some free garments that are super expensive in the ancient world. Take that with you as well. So I would say up. Hey, there hey, there's no nice Walmart to go to to get stuff here. It's the argument from no nice Walmarts.

SPEAKER_10 0:27

Depends on how nice the linen is, right? I mean, the kids like Joseph and and Nicodemus were doing a bit of an emergency burial. They probably just threw him in whatever they could find.

SPEAKER_15 0:34

Well, one finds in these situations it's good to set the bar extremely low when it comes to expectations. Welcome to Pologia. Paul from Pologia. Uh, though I think I uh mangled the pronunciation in my previous video addressing some of his topics.

SPEAKER_03 0:55

And this one, where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians. Recently this happened.

SPEAKER_04 1:01

Did Jesus rise from the dead?

SPEAKER_03 1:03

No.

SPEAKER_04 1:03

I'm John Nelson, and today on Unbelievable, we have two exceptional guests discussing the resurrection. Joining me in the studio is Alex O'Connor, a public philosopher and host of the Within Reason podcast. And joining us online is Trent Horn, a Catholic apologist at the Council of Trent.

SPEAKER_09 1:20

And even though this one didn't quite set off the Christian YouTube alarm bells that Alex O'Connor appearances sometimes do, Alex O'Connor debates Trent Horn on whether or not if Jesus did in fact rise from the dead, he brings up Mormons and how if so many people witnessed Jesus resurrect from the dead, why don't you believe in the Mormons?

SPEAKER_10 1:48

Mormons and atheists have more in common than many think, and Alex O'Connor may have proved that.

SPEAKER_03 1:54

You guys, you Catholics, are just as crazy as these Mormons, okay? And I'll show you why. I thought we'd talk about it as I definitely have thoughts, mostly for Trent, but also for Alex and John as well.

SPEAKER_15 2:06

So I think that we should follow evidence, see we don't necessarily we shouldn't necessarily rush to supernatural explanations, but we should see which explanation best accounts for everything without cramming the evidence, without bringing in outside ad hoc explanations. And I think Jesus rising from the dead really does do a good job of explaining a lot of the data surrounding Jesus' resurrection. And I think it's up to everyone should really look into this well, the data, to put forward what explains that happened. And I think resurrection, it does explain all the data without having to compress or force it really, whereas other explanations tend to have to bring in more ad hoc elements.

SPEAKER_03 2:50

What is perpetually frustrating about resurrection debates is a failure to agree upfront or in advance on what data is to be explained. While that trend was not really broken in Alex and Trent's debate, at least Trent put forth something he called his three core facts.

SPEAKER_15 3:07

When it comes to showing the resurrection, it's basically showing three facts. Jesus was alive, then he was dead, then he was alive again. So whatever the evidence that would show he was alive in the first place should be good enough to show he's alive in the second place.

SPEAKER_03 3:20

Well, those are some crazy facts to declare. You don't get to win a debate by pronouncing that the debate topic is a fact. Imagine if a state prosecutor's opening statement was we have three facts. The victim was alive, the victim is dead, and the defendant killed the victim. Whatever evidence shows he was alive in the first place should be good enough to show that the defendant killed him. This absolutely does not follow.

SPEAKER_10 3:45

Alex asked for clarification on this. Trent said earlier at the very beginning of this debate, he said, you know, the evidence uh that Jesus was alive after his death is as good as the evidence that he was alive before his death. I don't know if if if that was if that's what you believe or if it just sort of came out that way.

SPEAKER_03 4:06

So Trent seems to be advocating that if testimony is good enough to determine someone's life or death, then testimony should be good enough to establish a once in a history supernatural resurrection. Again, this doesn't follow for the murder case, and it follows even less for a miracle claim. That someone named Jesus lived or died is an incredibly mundane claim. Billions of people have lived and died, so the threshold to accept this is very low. For something like a miracle, even if one absolutely believes that God performs miracles, it is far more likely that someone is lying, exaggerating, or sincerely mistaken than what they are describing is a genuine miracle. Of course, that pendulum could theoretically swing if one adds non-testimonial evidence. But if we're talking about pure testimony alone, as Trent is advocating for, we can and should prefer the explanation that the person is lying or mistaken, even setting aside one's worldview on supernatural interventions. If one is skeptical of the supernatural, then the evidential burden is even greater. And Trent's testimony strategy is doomed to convince no one who doesn't already agree with him before the debate begins. Of course, Trent will betray that he also considers group appearances, an empty tomb, sincerity of the apostles, unexpected conversions, and other Bible plot points to be, quote, facts. And we'll get to those. But first, let's spend a few minutes on his grounding for these so-called facts, the New Testament.

SPEAKER_10 5:34

But the thing that makes the historical Jesus case so strong and undeniable is the extra-biblical material. You don't have any of that for the post-resurrection appearances.

SPEAKER_15 5:41

Maybe because I I would I would still find the evidence from the Gospels and Paul's letters. I understand this existing to be enough.

SPEAKER_03 5:48

In his own words, the Gospels and Paul's letters are fully sufficient evidence. Around here, we call that if Trent wants New Testament mentions to be enough evidence for someone like Alex or myself. He should really be spending the entire debate arguing for the reliability of the New Testament, and spending no time at all on any other topics that require that assumption of the reliability of the New Testament. Presumably the most important thing to establish is the reliability of the Gospels, but he spends no time on a positive case for them. In fact, he backs down on apostolic authorship of the fourth gospel.

SPEAKER_10 6:25

Do you therefore reject the traditional authorship of John's Gospel? Because near the end of John's Gospel in John chapter 20, uh the beloved disciple is referred to seeing something, and the author of John's Gospel says, and we know that his testimony is true. And given that we have to just mean that it's speaking in the first person, that means that John was not authored by the beloved disciple, right?

SPEAKER_15 6:43

It it is possible that John was authored by someone else, like John the Presbyter that was part of the Johannine community, which undermines any notion that book is eyewitness testimony.

SPEAKER_03 6:54

The only real gospel defense given is to compare them to apocryphal gospels in an attempt to put the canonical gospels in a more reasonable light.

SPEAKER_15 7:02

Okay, well, when do we see myth making? What does it look like? When you read like the Gospel of Peter, for example, and people go on an absolute myth making binge, uh, it's it's really, really over the top. That's from probably mid-second century. And you have all the Romans at the tomb, all of the Jews, the angels come down, they're like, they come out of the tomb, they're giants. Jesus comes out, he's like 500 feet tall. So that's a lot different than than the more sober accounts, especially like what we see in Mark. So it's kind of funny that Mark's a bit more sober. We say, oh, well, he doesn't have all these appearances. Then if he did have a bunch, you'd say, ah, that would just be a bunch of mythmaking. So I worry if that's kind of catch catch 22 there. I would say Mark is very clear.

SPEAKER_03 7:42

The fact that Mark is modestly less outlandish, though I think one can reasonably argue it seems less outlandish, primarily because we're more familiar with the Mark account. So the repetition and reverence gives it more credibility, as if water walking is fundamentally more mundane than animated wood, doesn't mean that Mark is free from embellishment. Trent is conceding that the Christian community was fully willing to write embellished accounts, like the Gospel of Peter, but simultaneously thinks they were unwilling to embellish earlier works. The alleged words of Jesus acknowledge the slippery slope. Whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. No reason is given why these so-called somber accounts would be free of legendary development. And I will say that legendary development or embellishment are better phrases for discussing the canonical gospels. Alex used the word myth early on.

SPEAKER_10 8:33

I mean, for example, Jesus walking on the road to Emmaus in Luke's Gospel, one of the most extraordinary stories in the fact that the two disciples, Cleopatra and the other one, don't recognize Jesus. And yet when he sits down and breaks bread, they suddenly recognize him. Now, there could be some sort of miraculous intervention here, right? But uh looking at these as historical sources, it seems to me that this is the genre of mythology. I mean, I don't know if Trent believes that the road to Emmaus to be a historical story of something that actually happened. It seems to me definitely mythological.

SPEAKER_04 9:01

And just to clarify there, would you see the gospel resurrection stories as all taking on this mythological character?

SPEAKER_10 9:07

Uh I I I don't know what the intentions of the writers were. I don't know. With with the Rotomaius, it seems to me almost certain that the intention there is mythological.

SPEAKER_03 9:15

And Trent jumped on that as synonymous with hyperbolic and outlandish, beyond his audience's baseline of what's in the gospels, which he treats as totally normal. It's semantics, but for the Christians listening, myth means Narnia. The legendary development or embellishments of the canonical gospels need not be anything out of the ordinary. It's just any detail that has been added or expanded for a narrative or theological purpose. Something as mundane as a soldier sticking Jesus with a spear could be an embellishment to answer doubts that Jesus didn't actually die on the cross. And the stories about Jesus circulated person to person for decades before they were written down. So some of the enhancements were baked in and inherited by the author of Mark. We don't need to posit that the gospel writers were crafting fiction whole cloth. They were working from sources that were shaped for evangelical fitness, not for historical reliability. The first generation of Christians thought that they would be the last generation of Christians. So getting people saved by any means necessary was the goal, not preserving a legacy for centuries. Now, it is my contention that there are likely kernels of historical truth in the Gospels, and definitely some parts that are sincerely mistaken or deliberately embellished. In fact, I think this is true of all historical writing across the board. Trent pays lip service to this.

SPEAKER_15 10:35

Now, the Acts of Peter, now my point about apocryphal gospels, I do not believe that everything in an apocryphal gospel uh needs to be taken as is just false. I think that's bad historiography to say, you know, okay, everything that is in a gospel is historical bedrock, and everything that is not in a gospel is just totally false. We have to sift through the different uh evidences here.

SPEAKER_03 10:59

Here he's trying to defend traditions that he likes that are found only in apocryphal gospels. But I really wish Alex would have pressed him on his conceit that since accepting a source as fully true would be bad historiography, which elements in the canonical gospels does Trent think are non-historical? If he doubts nothing in the Gospels, is he being a bad historian, or is he guilty of a special pleading fallacy, or both? Even apologists like William Lane Craig can point to something, like the detail of a guard at a tomb as potentially embellishment. But Trent sees the need to double down on it.

SPEAKER_04 11:32

Can I ask you Trent a clarifying question on that? Because I mean, do you see apologetic features within the canonical gospel narratives themselves? So do you find those same features within the gospels, but it's just in a more sober form?

SPEAKER_15 11:45

Yes, but just because there is an apologetic, it doesn't follow that it's a hollow defense or con artistry or trying to defend that which is false. Like Matthew very clearly describes an apologetic polemic that had been going on between Christians and Jews for some time about debating what happened to Jesus' body, with the Jews of his time arguing that the body had been stolen, and then the Christians saying, no, it wasn't, and because there were guards and other things like that, which shows that the apologetic there does show there is a there is a missing body. The Jews just didn't say, oh, he was thrown into a pit. He was devoured by the dogs because of the dog he was. We we don't see them making that kind of argument. So there's an apologetic, but it can reveal truths that are helpful to the case we're making.

SPEAKER_03 12:29

That's pretty much the extent of Trent's defense of the irreliability of the gospels. Unless you want to classify his defense of the reliability of Acts as an umbrella fence for both Luke and Acts.

SPEAKER_15 12:38

I also think we have good historical evidence for Luke's account of these group appearances that Luke as the atheist Richard Carrier says is a better than average historian, which is a lot from a very critical atheist like Richard.

SPEAKER_03 12:51

That's a quote mine. Here's the full context from Carrier's book, Not the Impossible Faith.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

This doesn't mean Luke was necessarily a lousy historian. He was certainly better than average when it came to some details, though even at his best, like all other ancient historians, for each detail he could only be as reliable as his sources. But on top of that, we know he lied. For instance, his account of Paul's mission and the division it created in the church contradicts Paul's own account in his letter to the Galatians, in almost every single detail, and in a way we can discern was deliberate. And if Luke lied about that, he could be lying about anything else. Moreover, Luke cannot be classed with the best historians of his day because he never engages discussions of sources and methods, whereas they did. And that is a major reason why modern historians hold such men as Thucydides and Polybius and Arian in high esteem. They often discuss where they got their information, how they got their information, and what they did with it. It is their open and candid awareness of the problems posed by writing a critical history that marks them as especially competent. Even lesser historians, like Xenophon, Plutarch, or Setonius, occasionally mention or discuss their sources, or acknowledge the existence of conflicting accounts, and yet Luke doesn't even do that. But despite all that, even if Luke were as honest and reliable as the very best historians of his own day, that would still not be sufficient to carry Holding's point for the resurrection.

SPEAKER_03 14:20

I think Trent should have to read and respond to Carrier's well-written and scathing article called How We Know Axe's Fake History as Penance for Such an egregious quote line.

SPEAKER_15 14:31

A lot of this, though, it comes to, let's say, okay, you're saying, well, we got Paul, he's got the appearances, how do we know this wasn't just hallucination? That's where I depart from the middle facts people and saying, I think, especially like Luke's description of these group appearances, I think Luke is a very reliable source when talking about things. Yeah, we know you do. Well, that's just vibes.

SPEAKER_09 14:51

Yeah. Well, you know, that's just like uh your opinion, man.

SPEAKER_03 14:57

I think Luke is very unreliable when talking about things. So does that solve anything?

SPEAKER_15 15:03

So for example, um, just because something's recorded only in one place, it doesn't mean that's, you know, it didn't happen anywhere else. So for example, in AD 41, the Emperor Claudius expelled a bunch of Jews from the city of Rome. What's interesting is that Josephus and Tacitus don't record this event. It's only recorded in two places Suetonius, who says they did that because of Crestus, which might mean they were fighting about Christ, uh, and Luke in Acts 18.2.

SPEAKER_03 15:32

So technically that's not something recorded in only one place, and therefore unhelpful in demonstrating why one should have confidence in a single source claim.

SPEAKER_15 15:41

A lot of times Luke makes these kind of offhand things, and they're 100% historically accurate. Colin Heemer's book, The Book of Acts and the Setting of Hellenistic History, goes through that a lot.

SPEAKER_03 15:50

Indeed. Anchoring a story with known historical details is a great way for an author to lend verisimilitude. I don't talk about it much, but at one point I wrote an officially sanctioned sequel to the movie The Usual Suspects. And the first few issues were published before it was all cancelled due to cast and coup controversy. The point is, part of that story takes place during the Iran Contra hearings in the 1980s. And I added Verisimilitude by following the chronology of those events and even pulling in direct quotes from the official transcripts. That made my Kaiser Sose story seem even more real, but it didn't make it real. There's a growing list of scholars like Richard Pervo, Steve Mason, Robin Faith Walsh, and CJ Cornthwaite, who make a strong case that the author of Acts similarly had read or even had handy a copy of the works of Josephus before he penned Acts. CJ has a whole series of videos on this topic that I'd encourage you to check out. The author of Acts is not a careful historian.

SPEAKER_15 16:52

And yes, the author of Acts copied Josephus, and no, it's not possible that Josephus copied the author of Acts. So I think I have good evidence in that also Luke it was a traveling companion of Paul.

SPEAKER_03 17:04

I think that's very clear. Many scholars reject that Luke was a traveling companion of Paul, as do I. So while I'm not saying it's impossible, appealing to this particular interpretation isn't going to be a good anchor for proving a resurrection. You'll want more than a disputed interpretation. Also, Luke knowing Paul doesn't help validate anything in the Gospel of Luke, because Paul was not present for any of those events. I could grant Luke as a traveling companion. I don't, but I could, and it wouldn't help validate the resurrection appearances. And that's it for Trent grounding acts. Again, I think Acts may well be the least correct of all the New Testament books. And this quote mine, an appeal to a tangential historical detail, and an appeal to being the friend of someone who wasn't there for the events, isn't gonna be enough to raise the bar for anyone who doesn't already think that the book is reliable. And Trent also mentioned the letters of Paul. Does he defend those, or at least define which letters are from Paul? That especially groups of people seeing this as recorded in 1 Corinthians. That's the extent of the defense. Alright then. I guess we can move on to transecondary quote facts, even though accepting them relies entirely on the unmade case for the New Testament.

SPEAKER_15 18:19

Might as well start with these alleged group appearances. So, for example, I I've seen, I I've watched in debates where uh Wayne Lane Craig or Mike Lacone or others are, you know, we'll talk about you know, how do you explain these groups of individuals, groups of disciples, claim to see the risen Jesus and groups of, and especially groups of people.

SPEAKER_03 18:38

I don't need to explain group appearances until such time as you've demonstrated group appearances. I had a bit of an infamous written debate between myself and Dr. Andrew Loke on this very topic, which at the end of the day amounted to nothing but I've asked Mike Lacona and Gary Habermass to defend their appeal to group appearances when the notion fails to meet their own criteria as a minimal fact.

SPEAKER_14 19:02

If you're only going to count appearances to single individuals to get away from groups, I don't think that's fair. And the earliest account, well, I think it's fair.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

I mean, you I mean when we talk about answering hallucinations, one of the the correct responses we give, group appearances. Right. So isn't it fair? It's fair for someone like Paul Air or someone to say, well, what percentage of scholars today in in the field would grant the group appearances? So when in answer to Paul A then, um name some skeptical scholars who would say they would grant that there were groups of people who had experiences they interpreted as a risen Jesus appearing to them.

SPEAKER_13 19:45

Sure. Um Ed Sanders groups together, people.

SPEAKER_14 19:52

Ed Sanders and he's a nonbeliever. He just called himself a liberal. I don't know where he is. What about non-believers?

SPEAKER_15 19:59

The fact that we have all this different evidence for not just individuals but groups cross-referencing it.

SPEAKER_03 20:04

What different evidence? There's the second-handed best hearsay list that Paul passes along, but can't attest to other than that he heard it, and there's the gospels. That's not all this different evidence. Alex decided to channel his best Dale Allison impression on this one.

SPEAKER_07 20:21

So you take the appearance to the 500. You just ask any question and you don't know the answer. Who were these people? Were they in the south? Were they in the north? Were they in Galilee? Were they in Jerusalem? How many of these people knew Jesus really well? How did they see him? Really? How did they see him? Uh 500 people, that's a lot. Now it's got to be an approximation, but did was there a receiving line?

SPEAKER_10 20:48

Was there a jumbotron? I mean, most pressingly, Paul says that Jesus appears to 500 people as above 500 people, probably more than possibly above in a visionary experience. That's something else. Uh, and people say, look, this is our only source. But you know, Paul says some of these people are still alive. So if you were in any doubt, you could just go and ask them. I mean, people often say this. They say, you know, those 500 people, some of them were still alive, so you could have gone unchecked. How? You're just gonna like walk to Jerusalem, which has tens of thousands of people at minimum in it, and just start asking around and see if anyone's seen the risen Christ. How many no's would it take before you said, okay, maybe not then? In other words, I I have I I have no idea why Paul says that Jesus appeared to 500 people. We don't know that Paul was there, he probably wasn't. He says he's passing down something that was passed on to him, which says that it's an early creed, but we're not quite sure where that creed ends, because Paul inserts himself at the end of it. But we don't know where he's heard it from. We don't know who these 500 people are, we don't know why they were gathered, we don't know how many of them believed, we don't know if any of them were counted. We don't know anything about this kind of event.

SPEAKER_03 21:48

Sadly, from my perspective, Alex chose to posit natural explanations for group appearances, rather than pressing Trent to first demonstrate that there were group appearances.

SPEAKER_10 21:58

The experience of a bodily risen. Christ by multiple people all at once is definitely something that would be unique in history. You don't get group hallucinations of that kind of physical kind. You do have inexplicable group uh visions of, I think, equally inexplicable events, which I'll give you some examples of. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_03 22:17

But I see no reason to grant that there were group appearances. Another detail that doesn't even meet the threshold for Gary Habermas's minimal facts, but that Trent will defend because it's in the Gospels, is the existence of an empty tomb. He starts with the classic, why invent a story about guards of the tomb if there wasn't an empty tomb that needed explaining?

SPEAKER_15 22:37

Yes, but just because there is an apologetic, it doesn't follow that it's a hollow defense or con artistry or trying to defend that which is false. Like Matthew very clearly describes an apologetic polemic that had been going on between Christians and Jews for some time about debating what happened to Jesus' body, with the Jews of his time arguing that the body had been stolen, and then the Christians saying no, it wasn't, and because there were guards and other things like that, which which shows that the apologetic there does show there is a there is a missing body.

SPEAKER_03 23:11

This just means that first century people often did the same thing I'm frustrated with Alex for doing, granting as much of the narrative framework as possible for the sake of argument, and debating the explanation rather than disputing the underlying claim itself. Ancient historians regularly preserved stories of omens, prophecies, portents, and divine interventions that they themselves probably could not verify and sometimes explicitly doubted. Pagan critics of Christianity argued that Jesus worked through demons or sorcery rather than bothering to first establish whether the miracle reports were historically reliable in the first place. We see the same thing today. Some Christians interpret UFO reports as genuine demonic encounters, rather than first asking whether the underlying reports are accurate.

SPEAKER_08 23:56

These are demons, they're interdimensional beings that are masquerading and parading as though they are they are aliens.

SPEAKER_03 24:02

That someone jumped immediately to an explanatory rebuttal that grants the premise does not tell us the premise deserved to be granted. Matthew was written 50 years after the death of Jesus and a decade after the destruction of Jerusalem. The people the newly crafted guard story sought to convince were in no position to independently verify an empty tomb. At least on this point, Alex attacked it both ways. He's both skeptical that it happened and provides some solutions granting that it happened.

SPEAKER_10 24:33

I'm not going to say that the body was taken. I'm not going to say I don't even know if there was an empty tomb, but if there were, the idea that it was taken either by a grave robber or by the burial party of Joseph of Arimathea is exceptionally more likely to me than that Jesus rose from the dead. Again, I won't say it didn't happen. I just want to say that that's a skeptical scenario, which seems to me perfectly plausible.

SPEAKER_03 24:51

Unrelenting and without a hint of irony, Trent let the other eye-rolling empty tomb apologetic drop. And you can probably say it with him.

SPEAKER_15 25:00

But like in Mark and the other gospels agree with this, the first witnesses are women, and women's testimony in the ancient world is incredibly low value. It's basically below a criminal's, uh, which I think speaks to uh the fact that it that it's it's historical. Even more so the idea that you have Mark and Luke describing this. If you were going to make up the whole gospel accounts, pick Peter, Paul, Philip, pick somebody more notable. I see a lot of signs that point towards uh a sober uh historical account of just describing things as they happen. Which served as a Pavlovian bell for Alex.

SPEAKER_04 25:32

Alex, I saw you perk up when Trent mentioned the the women witnesses argument. Did you have anything to say to that?

SPEAKER_10 25:38

So much. I'm actually surprised to hear this come up. I know that this is a common sort of apologetical motif, but to me it's it's it's clear as day. You know, women discover the empty tomb, um, which means that you know it must be true because women's testimony wasn't worth that much, and so why would this be invented? There are a few things to say here. Firstly, who knew where the tomb was? The women were told that the disciples had fled at the crucifixion. Could they have brought men along with them? Well, the we'll we'll get to that. I mean, maybe they could have done, but we know that they weren't, that we know that they weren't at the crucifixion, and we know that the the that they'd that they'd fled. And so, in keeping with the theme of the disciples fleeing, afraid and their cowardice, they wouldn't even know where Jesus was buried. Of course it's going to be the women who who like it's like a narrative conclude. If the story said that Peter went to the tomb, the question would be, well, how did he find out? Well, Peter does eventually go to the tomb. Why is that? Because yes, women discover the empty tomb. They have no idea what's happened. And what's the first thing that they go and do? They go and get the men to come and verify it for us. Right? They run to the men and they say, Oh, we don't know what's happened. They're these, you know, as as the early Christian uh critic Celsus says, they're these hysterical women and they they they don't know what they've seen, and they and they run to the disciples, and it's the disciples who come and verify it for them. So I mean it's an instant verification, right? But like in other words, if this were some apologetical motif, yeah, that that might it might be that that's that's why they have them go and check.

SPEAKER_04 26:58

But does that apply better to Matthew, Luke, and John than to that original kernel of the account in Mark?

SPEAKER_10 27:03

Oh, certainly, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh it certainly does. I mean, going and finding the men, of course it does. Um, but like another thing to point out is that like this might be a bit of a silly thing to say, but people often just sort of assume that ancient writers are stupider than we are. Like we sometimes think and I by the way, I'm not saying that this is made up, but I'm saying if you want to argue that it's not, and you say, well, you know, they wouldn't do this, like, because isn't it so realistic that they'd have this feature? Doesn't it make it all that more believable? Do you think ancient authors would have been clever enough to think about themselves as well? You know, like it just seems to me, in other words, that like the reasons that we have for thinking that it might be historical are things which could have occurred to somebody who was trying to come up with it. But I think it's it's clear as day that it would be the women who would discover the empty tomb, because they're the ones who knew where it was. They were the ones who were following Jesus throughout his passion, they were the ones who saw where he was buried. And then, as I say, the first thing they go and do is grab some men to go and verify it for them. So I don't know if this is as sort of feminist a story as all of which is valid.

SPEAKER_03 27:56

There are also other things to say, if I may skim them briefly. First, a huge theme of the Gospel of Mark is subversion of expectations and having the disciples being the last ones to know what's going on. For example, the first person to recognize that Jesus is the Son of God is a random Roman centurion. Having lowly women being honored first is very on brand for the literature of Mark. Second, women were a huge influence in the early Jesus movement if Acts and the letters of Paul are to be believed at all. Christians typically wear this as a badge of honor about how progressive their religion was about women leaders. Perhaps a woman's testimony may not have played well in a court of law, but they weren't going to court to try to win converts. Women talking to other women is at least half of how the religion spread. This was not embarrassing. Third, no one at all in the stories actually were convinced by the women. Not until the menfolk went and checked for themselves. So this aligns both with Alex's narrative points and the misogyny of the day. Fourth, the criterion of embarrassment is always a shaky argument. Because we, in a different century, in a different culture and region, are not in a position to identify what would or would not have been embarrassing. Embarrassment is culturally contingent. Not to mention that including embarrassing details about oneself is a known tactic to make false stories seem believable.

SPEAKER_08 29:22

That principle we talk about of embarrassment. I've known some guys who who would include embarrassing things in their lie. I have known guys who in order to be perceived as Yeah, because they want to be more persuasive with me.

SPEAKER_15 29:35

Enough on that for now. I agree with you. The argument who would die for a lie is a horribly bad one. It's a horrible argument because uh Muslim suicide bombers do that all the time. The Tamil Tigers, there's people who die for things that are a lie all the time. The greater question is who would die for something they that they know is a lie?

SPEAKER_03 29:54

And this is the question that landed me on Trent's podcast a few years ago.

SPEAKER_15 29:59

Today we're gonna talk about the argument who would die for a lie. All right. So uh Paul has addressed that uh on his own channel and is engaged with the evangelical apologist Sean McDowell on that question. Uh I've also engaged in his work, he engaged mine. And I have a very strict rule on Council of Trent Podcast. When somebody rebuts one of my rebuttals, I don't do any more rebuttals because that would be an endless nightmarish loop. Instead, I'd rather just chat with the person. So here he is, Paul. Welcome to the channel.

SPEAKER_03 30:32

Let's see if that conversation has helped Trent improve his arguments here.

SPEAKER_15 30:35

So for me, the martyrdom or the risk of martyrdom for the apostles, and I disagree, I would recommend for our listeners get Sean McDowell's book, The Fate of the Apostles. It's an published by Rutledge, is an academic study on the fate of the 12 apostles. And he puts in very high historical confidence we can know that at least Peter, Paul, and James, the brother of Jesus, uh were martyred.

SPEAKER_03 30:59

Of those three names Trent gave, only Peter is one of the twelve. James the brother and Jesus and Paul joined the group after Jesus' death. Maybe. The important thing is that leaves 10 of the original twelve, recall that Judas unalived himself, who have insufficient evidence for being martyred. Unlike when I started my YouTube channel, most sophisticated apologists now will grant this. But for some reason, they're still allowed to get away with their secondary claim.

SPEAKER_15 31:25

What I said was also we see in Paul's own writings and in Acts, there was a willingness to be martyred. And my point would be that the these apostles go out, they don't seem to do it for any kind of earthly reward, like we might see with someone like Joseph Smith. They do it for the fervency of communicating this message. The the risk of martyrdom is something that is an argument for the sincerity of one's testimony.

SPEAKER_03 31:51

My complaint, and it should be everyone's, is that we also don't have sufficient evidence that any of the twelve beyond Peter and John were even out preaching. You seem to be relying very heavily on the first five chapters of Acts as your evidence that the apostles were outdoing anything.

SPEAKER_15 32:15

But Paul But Paul in his letters also talks about meeting with the other apostles in Jerusalem, talking about the message being spread. So Peter going to Jerusalem.

SPEAKER_03 32:27

But in Jerusalem, he names individuals, right? He says in Galatians 1, he meets with uh Peter and James' brother of Jesus. And in two, John, in Galatians 2, John is also there when he comes back. Um so again, I I would say that uh me as a skeptic, I need to actually account for uh those three individuals. But do I actually part of the argument in general like that you make in is like group appearances and and the group of them sort of acts as this uh guarantee. And when you want me to build uh a house of defeating uh methodological naturalism on the sincerity of some people, right, it is reasonable for me to say do you have more than one uh ideologically motivated source that says they even were doing this thing. And that doesn't seem to be the thing that is shining through. There isn't some non some other source that I can go to and say, aha, that's what Bartholomew was up to, that's what Matthews was up to. You know, if it's um I well I can't build I can't build a house on that foundation. That foundation is too shaky. For me, they disappear from reliable history. If I'm willing to call acts reliable history, which I'm not specifically, but if I'm counting it, they disappear in chapter five, either from preaching or from being behind the scenes washing communion cups. I'm not sure what you think they might have been doing. Uh, and nor were they necessarily in charge of whether or not they were still being associated with the ministry. Let's if let's say some of them went back to fishing, right? They they had enough, they threw up their hands, they got called into the Sanhedrin, they said the Sanhedrin said, stop it, so they said, Oh, let's go fish. Um the church that doesn't mean the church didn't continue to uh use their names because they were you know still part of the eleven. This isn't an area where I know you like to say that the Christian community is tight-knit, but that doesn't mean it's immune from people saying, Oh yeah, Bartholomew's totally on board with us, but you can't reach him. Other than some vague unnamed groups in Acts, which again I reject as reliable history, the evidence for preaching is shockingly no stronger than the discounted evidence for martyrdom. In most cases, it's the same sources. So why are people granting that the 12 ever believed or that they were out preaching? If it's just Peter and John, and that's all we can confidently say, then it's a lot easier to imagine that one had a vision and convinced the other by his testimony. You know, the same mechanism by which all of the billions of Christians who followed came to believe.

SPEAKER_15 35:22

Right. So what I said, and I've been continually saying, is that it is not the martyrdom of the apostles per se that that proves Jesus' resurrection or anything like that. What we are trying to do is we want to establish uh the sincerity of testimony. I can grant that those who preached were sincere. Demonstrate how many were preaching. But what I'm showing is that the the early proclaimers of Jesus' resurrection, who would have known whether it really happened or not if they just simply made the whole thing up. Uh, so so Paul and Peter and the original apostles, that they're willing to endure uh threats to their lives.

SPEAKER_03 35:59

Peter and Paul were sincere. Who are these others you're citing? These mystery people who are said to have seen the risen Jesus and put their lives on the line to talk about it. Who are they?

SPEAKER_15 36:09

Even though we've quibbled about the martyrdom stuff, I think most critics do not believe insincere. They would go with sincere. And then do we say, okay, sincere, they they did see something or they didn't see something. If they saw something, was it really there? If Jesus did not rise from the dead, it becomes much more difficult to explain why James, who didn't believe, converted, why Paul, who was a persecutor, converted, and why all of these scared and frightened apostles boldly proclaim this truth.

SPEAKER_03 36:37

Not to be the dead horse, but the notion that there were more than two scared apostles who later boldly proclaimed risen Jesus is just the story element of the gospels, which Trent didn't do enough to validate. As for James, the brother of Jesus, it's not entirely clear that he ever was some kind of skeptic. Again, we need the Bible for this. John 7.5 says Jesus' brothers didn't believe in him, and Mark 3.21 says his family thought he was out of his mind. But scholars like John Painter say that the Greek should be translated associates, not family, and your Bible probably admits this in a footnote. And the quote, unbelief of the unnamed brothers, is the same unbelief that the Gospels use to describe Peter and the other disciples at various points. And no one calls them skeptics. John 2.12 has Jesus' brothers traveling with him after the Cana wedding. Acts 1.14 places Mary and the brothers among the disciples right after the ascension with no editorial comment. And the Gospel of Hebrews, a text Gary Habermas himself cites as early and useful, depicts James at the Last Supper. So was he a skeptic? And skeptic or not, why might James convert? In the honor shame culture of the first century Judea, crucifixion cast a stigma on the victim's entire family. James, as the eldest surviving male, would have been obligated to restore family honor. So if there's suddenly a movement gaining ground that honors your family rather than shuns it, that's an easy group to join, if only pragmatically. Outside of the movement, James was the brother of a crucified criminal. Inside the movement, he was the brother of the Messiah. He could be Joshua to Moses. And it worked. He became the head of the church, bossing Peter around. When the high priest Ananus had James executed out of political envy, Josephus records that law-observant Jews who had nothing to do with the Jesus movement were outraged. Their complaints to Roman authorities were so sustained and credible that Ananus lost his position. James had built a reputation for piety and fairness that crossed religious lines, earning himself the nickname James the Just among non-Christians. So whatever version of faith he was promoting, it was indistinguishable enough from Judaism that Torah observa Jews mourned him and Romans avenged him. That is not the resume of someone whose life got worse by joining the movement.

SPEAKER_15 38:57

Not just his followers, but also a persecutor who showed no signs of guilt or remorse, but simply had this interaction with Jesus.

SPEAKER_03 39:10

Already assumes a conversion happened, some kind of shocking 180-degree turn. But for decades now, the Paul in Judaism school of scholarship has noticed that Paul deliberately echoes the prophetic call language of Isaiah and Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible to be a light to the Gentiles. They called those commissions. Those men didn't convert from Judaism, and nor did Paul. He remained Torah observant his whole life. He merely thought he found a new correct form of Judaism, no conversion. Trent casually throws out that Paul showed no signs of remorse, so that he can hand wave away any explanations involving guilt-driven psychological crises. But the literature on moral injury tells us that perpetuation-based trauma doesn't look like conscious guilt, but instead manifests as compulsive performance of righteousness, escalating aggression, and an inability to stop proving yourself. The clinical profile of perpetuation-induced traumatic stress centers on shame and moral conflict that's entirely different than the trauma of victims. Paul was attacking fellow Jews, whose only offense was a theological variance, people he should have recognized as pious and innocent by any reasonable standard. Scholars like Gerard Ludemann, Martin Hengel, Carl Jung, and Gerd Thiessen each have used different frameworks, but all arrive independently at a picture of Paul whose violence was generating irresolvable internal pressure that he wasn't consciously processing. For me, the moral injury model explains Paul's change very well. What was his inciting incident? Paul was a man forged in Jewish mystical traditions that deliberately cultivated altered states of consciousness, fasting, prayer, sleep deprivation, rhythmic chanting. These are documented techniques for inducing visionary experience, and Paul alludes to all of them as features of his own practice and that of his communities throughout his Christian ministry. There's no reason to assume Paul's vision was purely spontaneous. It may well have been deliberately sought. Whatever the ultimate nature of his vision, it resolved a tension that had been building for years. It gave a mission to a man who needed one. And every theological move he made afterward, justification by grace, atonement, his compulsive missionary labor, the community organized around erasing distinctions he once enforced, those all map with striking precision onto the clinical stages of moral repair. This alternative requires only that Paul was who his letters say he was.

SPEAKER_04 41:38

And Trent, I'm going to give you the final word. What in your mind is the kind of the strongest piece of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus?

SPEAKER_15 41:45

I think the strongest piece of evidence is the uniqueness of the proclamation itself. That uh you would have, and N. T. Wright talks about this in his book on Jesus, that if the apostles merely said, Um, I've seen Jesus in heaven, they might say, Of course, he's he's in Abraham's bosom, he's with all the righteous waiting in heaven. No, I I really felt his presence. Yeah, we we feel them praying for us and and interceding for us. Uh that's not enough to proclaim this uh this fact, this idea of bodily resurrection that was reserved for the eschaton, reserved for the end of the world. Uh, for them to proclaim that boldly and uniquely, I would say what there has to be something.

SPEAKER_03 42:21

First century Judaism was saturated with resurrection expectation. Apocalyptic texts, the Pharisaic tradition, the Maccabean martyrs, the resurrection of the righteous at the end of the age was fully in play. So, when a grieving follower, devastated and grilt-ridden over his denial, culturally primed to treat visionary experiences as genuine divine communication, had a profound encounter with the presence of his dead teacher, the answer was right there. Paul lays out this theology in the famous resurrection chapter. Jesus getting raised was the first fruits of those who had fallen asleep. Specifically, they interpreted Jesus as the start of the general resurrection, which would then complete when he came back, which they absolutely thought would happen in their lifetime. When Trent says there just has to be something, he's just espousing his own incredulity, underestimating what a purely mental interaction actually is. The brain processes hallucinations through the same neural circuits as ordinary perception. There's no internal flag saying this isn't real. Subjects typically rely on social cues for differentiation. Trent has lived his life in a monophasic world, but 90% of societies worldwide are or have been polyphasic. That is, they accept visions and altered states as legitimate channels of divine truth, no less real or valid than information from material observation. Second Temple Judaism was such a culture. So it's not about whether Peter could distinguish between visionary and physical, in the way Trent assumes. And it's also absolutely not about whether Peter was more or less intelligent than a modern Western person. No, it's entirely about how Peter would. Have interpreted a non-vertical experience through his apocalyptic framework, validated by a community desperate for meaning after a catastrophic loss. Trent can be incredulous all he wants, but the words and actions of someone sincerely mistaken are indistinguishable from someone sincerely correct. So he's drawing a conclusion based on vibes, not evidence. This topic ended with what I think was Alex's strongest point of the day.

SPEAKER_15 44:24

But it seems that Paul compares him, and he says in 1 Corinthians 9, have I not seen Jesus our Lord? He compares his encounter to Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15 to these other appearances that are physical appearances.

SPEAKER_10 44:38

I hate to say it, Trent, I think you begged the question. You said, Well, Paul must believe in a physical resurrection because he compares his experience in 1 Corinthians 15 to those of the apostles, which were physical. One man's modus tonen to modus ponens is another man's modus tonens, Trent. Like I could just say, yes, well, Paul compared his experience to those of the apostles. So they were the same kind. And you say, Well, because the disciples must have been physical, so was Paul's. Whereas I say, the only eyewitness account that we have of the resurrection appearance is Paul seeing a vision. And so, yes, if he compares his experience to those of the apostles in 1 Corinthians 15, then I'm led to believe that that means that the apostles' experiences were visionary. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 45:16

If we want to say that the creed demonstrates that Peter and Paul saw Jesus in the same way, were more justified in saying they both had non-bodily visions than to say that they both saw a physical body Jesus.

SPEAKER_10 45:29

Look, it's important to ask, what would you expect if it were true? And I agree with you, the data fits with what would happen if it were true. What I'm saying is it also fits with what would happen if it were not true. And in that position as an agnostic, I'm not going to believe in the resurrection, right? It might not be enough for a Christian to abandon faith. Okay. But I but I believe it I believe it does because I think there are other explanations for it.

SPEAKER_15 45:48

You'd say, yeah, sure, resurrection explains all the data, but so does no resurrection. But I would say no resurrection is not a hypothesis, it is an umbrella under which you would put specific hypotheses that would have to be weighed upon their merits and the data that they do explain. Like my minimal witnesses hypothesis. And that there is no single explanation. Usually what skeptics have to do is they must conjoin different things. So missing body along with group hallucinations. And when you start conjoining hypotheses, that that lowers their probability.

SPEAKER_03 46:22

Ah, but your hypothesis isn't merely Jesus rose from the dead. And that explains that. The evidence you provide is that you deem the gospels to be reliable. And the reliable miracle stories in the gospels is a massively conjoined case. Different models of who wrote them, different models about their source of information, different models of stability and oral retelling, different models to explain contradictions and legendary development, different models of stabilizing the text. And that's just the text. It also conjoins worldview assumptions like the existence of the supernatural, a heavenly pantheon, a creator god, and that god's demand for justice, supernatural miracles, and on and on and on. When I say Peter had a hallucination, bought into it, convinced some others, and later an opponent had a change of heart and helped spread it further. That's devastatingly mundane and simple in comparison.

SPEAKER_15 47:12

So you you I would say for people, okay, look at it, resurrection explains it. What other things do explain it, and you'll start to run into problems of starting to squish and ignore the data or compress it. Explain it.

SPEAKER_03 47:24

By it, I assume he means data. But we never did establish what data one is trying to explain. Are we trying to explain how a story about Jesus could come to exist? Or are you trying to force us to explain how every detail about said story is true while simultaneously not being true? That seems to be the logically incoherent task that Trent and every resurrection apologist like him is attempting. Alright, well, I was mostly wanting to cover Trent's side, but I do have some thoughts on Alex's performance, along with the quibble and a complaint.

SPEAKER_10 47:55

What I know is that we've got lots of reports throughout history of people claiming to see some very strange things. I like to talk about Mormonism.

SPEAKER_03 48:02

Ooh boy, did Alex like to talk about Mormonism? In a 90-minute video about resurrection, the panelists ended up spending over 14 of those minutes talking about Mormonism. For my taste, this was a huge distraction.

SPEAKER_10 48:14

And I like to do it for a few reasons. Firstly, because it usually offers a bit of a sort of left field comparison for Christians, but also in this context, I know that Trent has spent a lot of time looking into Mormonism and debating Mormonism. I would like to tell people, for example, that if you pick up any copy of the Book of Mormon, it always begins with testimonies from first the three witnesses and then secondly the eight witnesses.

SPEAKER_03 48:36

So Alex brought this up ostensibly to illustrate that a religion that Trent, and presumably his audience, disagrees with, but that is built in a similar manner, in Alex's view, on eyewitness accounts. And if the analogy holds and the methodology holds, then all Christians should believe in Mormonism, because their eyewitness testimony has more affirming features than Christianity's eyewitnesses accounts. They're firsthand, multiply attested, seemingly more independent. They held up even after relationship fallouts. But this point didn't land with Trent, and it would definitely not have landed with the kind of evangelical that I was for a very important reason.

SPEAKER_15 49:12

So that example I don't think is as compelling to me. Uh the other examples, I think there's really way more disanalogous elements between the resurrection claim. Christians think that whatever the gospels represent, they represent sincerity. So I think Christianity is unique there. I would say that they're very sincere, and so we have to grapple with how to explain their sincere testimony.

SPEAKER_03 49:30

And many Christians are convinced that Joseph Smith and the other Mormon founders were straight-up con artists who were happy to lie and grift. So not sincere. Of course, this example can and should get a Christian to re-evaluate their epistemology of testimony, acknowledge that some testimony is false, and even re-evaluate their opinion that the gospels are sincere reportage. But there's a built-in emotional escape hatch that keeps this example from landing, at least in my view.

SPEAKER_15 49:57

I knew a little while ago, Alex, I feel like the Mormons are like, Alex is almost here. He's ready to be Mormon.

SPEAKER_03 50:03

Yeah, that that happens a lot. An additional eight minutes is spent going back and forth on the historicity of the transfiguration, as Alex brings up a non-standard interpretation of the story of transfiguration.

SPEAKER_10 50:14

I think that a key insight into the nature of the resurrection and the resurrected bodies is the earlier transfiguration of Jesus. Where Jesus takes three of his closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, up a mountain where suddenly his body is transfigured. He's glowing, his robes are said to be whiter than anyone could bleach them, and then suddenly Moses and Elijah appear. Now, whatever that experience, I think, Rudolf Boltman thinks that the transfiguration was originally a post-resurrection narrative that got put earlier in the narrative. Now, why might that have happened? Well, for me, it seems clearly visionary. So maybe there's one that's one reason for not having it as part of these post-resurrection appearances.

SPEAKER_03 50:55

I believe this was intended to be in service of bolstering the idea that the earliest reports of risen Jesus may have been non-bodily experiences, and that the physical elements were added on in subsequent decades to add verisimilitude and anchor a later bodily resurrection theology. But I don't think that point ever landed and valuable time went to a tangent. And an even more minor quibble is the extent to which Alex grants the book of Acts as a source. I too attempt to grant as much as possible when debating a Christian. But I don't volunteer reliability without some caveat. When I do talk about this, I talk about that the disciples disappear from reliable history as of Acts 5. That that is the point at which they disappear from reliable history. Uh, though I am not a strong believer in anything that Acts records as necessarily historically reliable. Uh you know, you've you've discussed before the Bible tells me so before. But we'll set that aside for now. And for some reason, Alex unnecessarily volunteers it a few times.

SPEAKER_10 52:01

And I've heard Trent say before, on the point of the martyrdom of the apostles, to bring it back to the New Testament, we're told sometimes that all of these disciples died for what they believed in. Of course, we have absolutely no evidence that any of them died for their faith, except for James, who James is the brother of John, that is, that's mentioned in Act as being beheaded by Herod, although we're not told why. Both Alex and Trent mentioned deferring to Sean McDowell on his martyr investigation.

SPEAKER_15 52:24

For me, the martyrdom or the risk of martyrdom for the apostles, and I disagree, I would recommend for our listeners get Sean McDowell's book, The Fate of the Apostles.

SPEAKER_03 52:33

But Alex just inadvertently granted something that even Sean does not. The martyrdom of James, son of Zebedee, has a lower confidence, specifically because it's only an act.

SPEAKER_06 52:43

I probably would assess James, the son of Zebedee, one notch down. And that's because we have one good source for James in the book of Acts. But I probably put that a little higher than it should be given one source.

SPEAKER_10 53:00

Aaron Powell The whole point is that they need to have seen it themselves. And Paul did not see a bodily resurrected Jesus. Who's the earliest Christian martyr?

SPEAKER_15 53:10

I mean, probably Well Stephen would be the first martyr, and then James's description in Acts chapter 12.

SPEAKER_10 53:17

Stephen, okay, and what what is Stephen martyred for? Having a vision in the sky. He looks up and he sees Jesus stood or sat at the right hand of G uh of the Father, and he's stoned to death for it. Like the the earliest martyrdom story we have is of a vision. Again, granting Acts.

SPEAKER_03 53:32

I see why Alex thinks this will end to a good point for the theme of people seeing Jesus' visions, but this is never counted as a resurrection appearance. So it's easy for a Christian to slip away from. I think the better point from Stephen is that this is an obvious literary creation of Jesus' death, in a way that strains credulity to think that the author of Acts is reporting history, but instead is prioritizing theological points.

SPEAKER_10 53:56

The most obvious persecution that we have first first hand is that of Paul, whose experience was that of a vision. Yes, excellent. The idea of the physical resurrection of Jesus, even if we agree that Peter was persecuted, we don't know what it is that Peter saw. Yeah, we have some like second, third hand accounts from the Gospels, that's if you believe the traditional authorship. But that's not the same thing as saying that an eye that we know for a fact that an eyewitness to a specific event was persecuted for belief in that event. Very good. Even with James, we don't know why he was put to death.

SPEAKER_03 54:26

This is Alex referring back to the very sparse account in Acts of James, son of Zebedee. Let's read it together. He had James, the brother of John, put to death with a sword.

SPEAKER_10 54:36

End of story. Surely, I mean, the most plausible conclusion is that he was preaching Christianity. Herod says that this was pleasing to the Jews when he when he uh when he kills James. But we just don't know the details, at least not strongly about the children.

SPEAKER_15 54:46

Well, Josephus says that he was he was stoned to death for being a lawbreaker, and he's specifically referencing Josephus as the brother of Christ, the one who was called Christ.

SPEAKER_03 54:55

Yes, I understand that. Oh, but you don't understand that, Alex. No one could, because Trent has changed James's mid-topic. Alex was talking about James, the brother of John, and Trent interjected with Josephus's account of James the brother of Jesus, not the same person at all. This second one is the James I discussed earlier, whose life definitely got better after becoming a Christian, despite the abrupt end. Now, I will not chastise Trent or Alex for the James conflation. I myself have made this error in early videos and was given grace. What I think is funny though is that Trent and I predicted this would happen. Disagree. And Sean uh has also lowered his confidence on that one in particular, because the only source for that is the book of Acts. Um you mean the son of the son of Zebedee. Sorry, son of Zebedee. There's so many Jameses, yes, I need to get that.

SPEAKER_15 55:44

That will yes, that's going, and each of us could easily mix up our James's. Pardon me.

SPEAKER_03 55:50

Yes. Uh I absolutely, and I actually, because I'm a little bit torn by that you were accepting that James is the brother of Jesus, and maybe we'll get into that, maybe not.

SPEAKER_15 55:58

Um yes, because there is even among Christians, there is an argument about whether James, the brother of Jesus, is identical to James the Lesser or James the son of Alphaeus. Right. Uh so there are three Jameses described in the New Testament. So everyone will have to bear with us as we sort through our Jameses here. I I do think that James, the brother of Jesus, was uh part of Jesus' related kin. Uh, I in particular hold a view that the Protestant biblical scholar Richard Baucom holds, which is that James would have been Jesus's half-brother, uh, that uh Joseph was from a previous marriage, of course, that's a whole different different subject, but that he was related kin to Jesus, did not believe in him during his ministry, and then uh uh Jesus appeared to him, and then he became one of the apostles. He became um one of them who were preaching this. So in any case, so you agree.

SPEAKER_03 56:56

But I don't I know we decidetrack when I was a Protestant, of course I believed James is also the half-brother, because it was only through Mary, because you know God was actually the father. So it's just weird semantics and we don't need to get into that anyhow.

SPEAKER_10 57:08

But you know, we we don't we just don't know the details of the reasons behind the martyrdom of of this apostle, I think. Although, look, this is maybe a a question for Sean McDowell. I just want to say that on the point of persecution, we need to be very careful about who we're talking about and keep it separate. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 57:26

We need to be very careful about who we're talking about and keep it separate. We've adopted this principle when it comes to martyrdom, but I won't rest until we adopt the same principle for who was out preaching.

SPEAKER_10 57:38

Let's not say, look, we know that the apostles were persecuted because look at the letters of Paul. And we know that Paul was persecuted.

SPEAKER_15 57:43

But it's not it's not just that. We also we also have the testimony in the book of Acts, uh-huh, and we also have Tacitus talking about the Neronian persecution.

SPEAKER_10 57:52

But then that's not firsthand.

unknown 57:53

Right.

SPEAKER_03 57:54

Okay. Alex gave me one small axe disclaimer. I'll take it. And I have a bit of a complaint about the way the unbelievable show is run. I'm incredibly grateful that the show exists because it has brought together a lot of people who might not otherwise, including my two appearances on the show. First with Sean McDowell on the topic of murders.

SPEAKER_05 58:12

Uh so welcome along to the program, Sean and Paul. Great to have you both with me on today's show.

SPEAKER_02 58:16

And the second with Frank Turek on the topic of popular movies in Christianity. Rather unusual conversation. We've never done one quite like this on Unbelievable. Um, so welcome Frank and Paul to the show. Thank you. And so that's great.

SPEAKER_03 58:27

But my frustration is that since the host is a Christian, more often than they should, they end up jumping in on the non-Christian view being presented, creating a bit of a two-on-one debate with Frank in particular. I thought I had Turk on the ropes on a few things, but Justin jumped in to save him. Yeah, so I don't think like I I would I nod my head to all that, except that we the way that C.S. Lewis could have made determinations is to make predictions and test them and see if they work. Um, and again, I know you need your own senses, so you do have to have um you do have to have some presuppositions. You know, we have to presume that our senses are reliable enough. We have to presume that the universe can be learned about. You know, there are some um that is something else I had to come to. Uh I I wish more non-Christians would agree that there are some presuppositions that we we carry and that we just basically have to. There's some brute facts.

SPEAKER_05 59:17

Um let's leave that there for the moment. Because to be honest, uh, you know, this is the stuff of sci-fi. I've just been watching uh uh funnily enough, uh a whole sci-fi series recently on the question of whether the universe is determined and all the kind of weird anomalies and you know thought experiments that that throws up. But um I do want to return to the central claim of Frank's book, which is that Jesus is the ultimate sort of archetype of all these other heroes, and they're all pointing to him.

SPEAKER_12 59:46

If if they were the ones that disposed the body even in a mass grave, they could have said, let's go get the body and show everybody. This this happened very early. Even Bart Ehrman from UNC Chapel Hill, who's probably the top skeptic in the world today, says the earliest evidence for the resurrection, even though he doesn't believe in the resurrection, is 1 Corinthians 15 verses 3 to 8, which is an ancient creed that he says goes all the way back within a year or so of the of the supposed event.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:13

So that's so I actually had Bart on my channel last week to talk about Gary Habermas saying that very thing, and Bart disagrees. Bart says that's not what he's saying.

SPEAKER_12 1:00:21

Well maybe he's changing his tune because he did believe that at one point. It's an early creed. In fact, there's 41 creeds in the New Testament that go way back to the events themselves. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:30

I would say that that in a way, you know, we've moved into the territory obviously of of debating the biblical evidence and and everything else. Um I I it's it's interesting though that for you, um Jesus I mean, I I I guess you're willing to grant, presumably, Paul, that that Jesus has had a massive cultural influence and everything else. Uh so you're not denying any of that.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:53

I don't think Frank was ready for a Star Wars guy to press him on evidence for Christianity. But the only reason I mention that is that the new host seems to be carrying on the same interference role.

SPEAKER_10 1:01:03

So maybe there's one that's one reason for not having it as part of these post-resurrection appearances. But also specifically, Jesus says after the transfiguration to the three disciples not to say anything to anyone about what they've seen until after he's risen from the dead.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:17

Because they're being given a glimpse of the resurrection body. Is that the same thing?

SPEAKER_10 1:01:20

Well, quite possibly, right? And then they're walking down the mountain, and Mark's gospel says the fact that the first person Paul mentions in his list of people is Peter, the most important of the disciples, who nowhere else is any kind of appearance to Peter mentioned.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:34

I think there's an illusion in in Luke, isn't there? An illusion. There's an illusion to an appearance.

SPEAKER_10 1:01:39

He's risen as appeared to Peter, yes. Yes, sorry, sorry. I mean like in terms of like a narrative event, in terms of like narrat like a narrative event of what actually happens to Peter, right? We don't see this anywhere. They were the ones who were following Jesus throughout his passion. They were the ones who saw where he was buried. And then, as I say, the first thing they go and do is grab some men to go and verify it for them. So I don't know if this is as sort of feminist a story.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:59

And I suppose the sort of social function of women in the ancient world in association with mourning.

SPEAKER_10 1:02:04

I wondered what you I was also going to say, like, you know, who's anointing the bodies, although, of course, in John's gospel it's it's Nicodemus and Joseph Aramathea who's That's a personal annoyance for me.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:12

Let Alex Cook stop interjecting and saving the Christian. Perhaps the most telling part of all was the level of burden that Trent was taking on. At no point was Trent attempting to convince Alex or a skeptical viewer. In Trent's own words, he's just trying to defend his beliefs as non-crazy.

SPEAKER_10 1:02:30

I I think it it fulfills that explanatory datum here very well. I understand what you're saying, Trent. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have enough reason to believe in the resurrection. I'm saying specifically the claim that you have as much good reason to believe that Jesus was alive before the crucifixion as afterwards. Sure.

SPEAKER_15 1:02:43

Hey, I'm willing to dial that I'm willing to trade that one for it's you're reasonable to believe in the resurrection.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:49

I'm willing to make a tra I'll make a trade on that. Trent will take it's reasonable to believe in a resurrection as a win here. Not that it's most likely, just that it's not unreasonable. It used to be positive that the evidence for the resurrection was so strong that on the basis of this evidence alone, one should reject a naturalistic worldview. How the resurrection has fallen. But what do you think? Did you see the debate between Alex and Trent? Who won? How did they do? And have I been too hard on both of them? Let me know in the comments. And Trent, if you end up seeing this, I'd be happy to have more conversations if you like. Thanks for watching. And for more of this former Christian taking a look at the claims of Christians, tap on the thumbnail on screen now, and I'll see you over there. Until next time. Later.