SPEAKER_00

Well, hello and thank you so much for downloading episode 441 of the Speak Life Podcast. My name is Thomas Thurgood, Media Producer at Speak Life, and uh Happy New Year! To kick us off uh in this brand new year of the Speak Life Podcast, we're going to bring you some more content about the two episodes of the Rest is History podcast presented by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Because on that podcast, which is a very good podcast, recommend you uh check it out and listen to the two episodes that they did on Jesus recently um Jesus Christ the History and Jesus Christ the Mystery. In those episodes, they effectively take a fairly sceptical historical approach, uh just looking at the life of Jesus and and seeing what they make of it. At the end of last year, we released on our YouTube channel and on the podcast a conversation that Glenn had with Peter J. Williams from Tyndale House about the historicity of the Nativity story and other aspects of the New Testament. What we're going to bring you today in this episode is Glenn Scrivener, just kind of giving some of his own thoughts. If you'd like to watch it as a video, it's actually on our main YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash speaklifemedia, as a Glenn Scrivener Reacts kind of video. And while you're at it, you might want to check out our New Year uh video, the first ever New Year seasonal video that Speak Life has done. It's a poem by Glenn Scrivener that we recorded in New York in Times Square, so that was a real uh joy to make that. Okay, well, without further ado, over to Glenn Scrivener.

SPEAKER_01

Hello, I'm Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life, and this is a yes and reaction video. Uh, we are saying yes and to Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, who host just the best podcast going. The rest is history, is certainly my favorite podcast, and I think I've listened to the great majority of its 288 episodes and counting and have loved them. Uh, I knew Tom before he was famous, well, before he was uh podcast famous anyway. I first met him in 2019 when he graciously gave me an interview regarding his wonderful book, Dominion. I've spoken to him a number of times since then, and you can see all the interviews we've done with Tom Holland in the description box. He has been nothing but supportive of me and my writing. He uh endorsed my book, The Air We Breathe, which is basically Poundland Dominion, really, and I am nothing but grateful to Tom and 100% positive towards him and these episodes, which I think will get people thinking in a lot of helpful ways. This reaction video is me saying yes, and to the rest is history's latest pair of episodes, which are about Jesus. Episodes 287 and 288 are entitled Jesus Christ the Mystery and Jesus Christ the History, and as you'll see, I thoroughly enjoyed them and learnt lots too. If you want to know the thrust of both those episodes, I can do no better than play you Tom Holland's final words of summary at the end of episode 288.

SPEAKER_02

But I don't think that you need supernatural explanations to explain Jesus and the emergence of Christianity. But having said that, you know, I think there are lots of reasons why one might choose not to believe in God and specifically perhaps not believe in the the Christian understanding of God. But I would say that the inadequacy of the New Testament as source would not be one of them that I would adduce. So I come to this from studying both the origins of Islam and from studying the classical sources. And the the closer up I get to them, the the more you know, I've c I'm pretty impressed by actually how much evidence there is for Jesus.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, so got the parameters here. He doesn't think you need a supernatural explanation for the extraordinary dominion of Jesus and his church. You don't need to believe in God to explain all that. But on the other hand, if you're going to reject Christianity, then saying the New Testament is bad history is not a good reason. There might be good reasons for rejecting Christianity, but calling the New Testament bunk is not one of them. Tom, having considered the ancient world and Islam, is really quite impressed by how much evidence there is for Jesus. So for all the keen Christians like me, we'll be disappointed because Tom says you can explain the whole thing naturally. And for all those who reject Christianity on historical grounds, they'll be disappointed because Tom is really quite impressed by the historicity of Jesus. Those are the bookends of where Tom lands on this question. But in this episode, I'll be going through the second uh instalment of the Rest Is History podcast, number 288, and we'll summarise number 287 along the way. Do listen to both episodes and do subscribe to The Rest Is History, my favorite podcast. Uh here we go with Dominic Sandbrook summarising where we are up to.

SPEAKER_04

Having set the scene in our previous podcast, we are going to try to reconstruct as best we can, as historians, as skeptical historians, I suppose it's fair to say, the life of Jesus, aren't we? So we think he existed. We definitely think Jesus existed. You established that in the previous episode, all these references, all the uh the Roman references and so on.

SPEAKER_01

So episode 287 had Dominic asking, was Jesus cooked up by Paul or others? Was he a fiction? Was he a fairy tale? And Tom says emphatically, I don't think any historian, any credible historian, thinks that. And then Tom looks at extra biblical sources for Jesus. Uh he looks at people like uh Josephus and Marabas Serapian and Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius. Some of these sources are from nearly a century later, but as Tom and Dom say, this is the constant challenge with sources in the ancient world. Then they look at the New Testament, but there's a glaring omission in this first installment. When they go to the New Testament, they go to the Gospels only. They don't go to Paul. Which is surprising to me because most people think, and I know Tom thinks, the letters of Paul are earlier, and actually his Dominion argument is based on the writings of Paul, and he plays a massive part in the thesis of Dominion. And in our 2019 interview, Tom said that emphatically.

SPEAKER_02

It's very strange. It's very strange, and yet clearly it it's drawing on um elements that are deeply infused throughout Jewish scriptures. And the person so far, you know, we we our earliest source is Paul. So you look at Paul really for that answer because we don't have anything earlier. And you get, I mean, there that there are from Paul's letters, you get the sense of two very strange things that that Paul seems to think have happened, and which a historian is not qualified to rule on. But one of those is Paul clearly has no doubt that Jesus has risen from the dead, and in some way is a part of the one creator God of Israel, and what's more, everybody else he's writing to seems to accept this for granted as well. I don't need to tell you, Paul is an incredibly argumentative writer, and all his letters are essentially arguments, but he's not he never has to argue about that. He's always taking that for granted. Uh and the second thing is that Paul seems to think that that Jesus, this criminal who suffered the death of a slave who in some way is God, has appeared to him personally and has told him to to to go and and and and preach this. So that's very mysterious as well.

SPEAKER_01

Tom even said that the creed that is recorded from 1 Corinthians 15 is incredibly early, and he seems to agree with me that it's from a few years after the first Easter. And what Paul delivered to the Corinthians, he says in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, was of first importance, and we can sort of date that in terms of a sort of a creedal form to perhaps within a few years of the case. Yeah, it's incredibly early.

SPEAKER_02

I mean it's incredibly early.

SPEAKER_01

And he says it's according to the scriptures, put to death according to the scriptures, raised on the third day according to the scriptures. So he's saying it's in total continuity with the God of Israel, and it still is the same. So it's a rupture.

SPEAKER_02

I mean it's a rupture, it's strange, it's it's baffling.

SPEAKER_01

Now I can understand why Tom takes the route that he takes in the podcast because it's a well-trodden path. Historical Jesus scholars will often begin with the classical sources and then the archaeology, and then they'll imagine that those are the default authorities, and that the Bible has to fit those givens, and it doesn't really treat the Bible as a historical source. And then often they just go to the gospels. But the whole time, the best and the most explosive evidence for Jesus is hiding away in plain sight. The earliest and best evidence for Jesus, and for his death and resurrection, and for his exalted identity, is all in Paul. But usually the historical Jesus scholars they go to the Gospels, and in episode 287, Tom says, at the macro level, the Gospels accord with what we know of the ancient world, both the historical sources and the archaeology, and he talks about why the four evangelists are canonical, why they are the ones that are listed in the scriptures. They are the ones put into the canon of scripture for good historical reasons. Thank you to Irenaeus for that. So that was the first installment. That was episode 287. And then in the second installment, episode 288, Tom goes immediately to what is, I think, a really important argument for taking Jesus seriously. Let's look.

SPEAKER_02

So on the on I mean, on that question, did he exist or not? I think when you read the Gospels, you have the definite sense of a remarkable teacher. So simply on the basis of the parables that he tells, the stories, they are the most memorable stories ever written. They are incredibly powerful and effective. His teachings are, you know, they stick in the mind.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And so the question is, well, where where did these teachings come from? If there is no historical Jesus, if there is no person that they derive from, then we have to assume that basically they emerge from kind of assorted traditions that they were put together by the gospel writers. And if you think about, you know, you tell a writer you've got to come up with um a figure who in 2,000 years' time will be seen by millions and millions of people across the entire world as both human and divine, and he will have been seen as such for 2,000 years, that would be a tough ask. It would. Especially if you get a committee to do it. Oh my god. Exactly. You get four people doing it. I think that's right. So it seems to me that that is a much more improbable explanation that it was just made up than the fact that it does derive from someone extraordinary. And also the fact that he is an extraordinary figure is what explains why he comes to be seen as what he was. Right. Um so to that extent, I'm not skeptical.

SPEAKER_01

This is a brilliant argument made often by Peter Williams, who we're doing a second episode with this week. Peter Williams is the principal of Tyndale House in Cambridge and a world-renowned scholar of the New Testament and the ancient world. It's he is often saying, uh, look, there is undeniable genius in the teaching of Jesus. There's enough genius to have remade the modern world, to recalibrate the moral assumptions of billions of people and found civilizations. Then the question is, what is the origin of that genius? Did it come from this historical figure, Jesus, or did the apostles invent it? That would be more improbable, I would say. I've got a scene in my book, uh The Air We Breathe, where I just imagine what it would look like in the writer's room if somebody came in and said, Okay, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, I have a job for you. Uh I know you've had no training or prior experience, but we need you to write the most influential works in literature. As for the timing, we'll have to move on this, uh we'll have to move on this, unfortunately. It would have been better to wait a couple of centuries before inventing our legends. That way none of Christ's contemporaries could contradict our story. But we are where we are. The Apostle Paul has forced the pace, writing his letters to churches around the Mediterranean. He's been preaching Jesus as the promised Messiah, and heaven knows why, but all these people have believed in God on a cross. The story seems to be working, so now we need you to fill in the details. Please can you write the origin story for our hero? Paul's letter gave the bare bones. We want you to put warm flesh on them. Are you up for it? It won't be easy. We need this to be the life and times of the greatest figure in human history, God but also man, sinless but fully alive, pure but with profound depths, the judge of the world, but with bottomless compassion, the fulfillment of all Jewish hopes, but with a global appeal. A man in time, but a man for all times. We need a hero with heart-melting kindness, yet steely determination. We need him blasting the self-righteous and befriending sinners. We need sublime ethical teaching to fall from his lips, the kinds that build civilizations. We need extraordinary miracles from him, the kinds that would have been noticed and therefore could be contradicted by the generation to which you're writing. We need a credible narrative, uh a credible narrative arc whereby he remains impeccably righteous but is nonetheless condemned as a blasphemer. And we need it all to stand up to scrutiny, scriptural, theological, geographic, linguistic, literary, and historical. It needs to be believable both near and far, now and later, for those who've lived through these times and for all generations to come. Got it? Now get to work. So that's what it would take to cook up the story of Jesus. And both Tom and Dominic have uh a chuckle at the implications of how improbable it would be to have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John be the geniuses that come up with this material. Surely it is more probable to think that the source of the genius is Jesus himself. So that is where we're up to uh in the podcast. But before we conclude that Tom thinks that every detail of the Bible is inerrant, uh Tom goes on immediately to say that he doesn't think the birth narratives of Jesus happened historically. Boo hiss.

SPEAKER_02

However, there are obviously aspects of the story that I am skeptical about, uh, and and I think pretty much anyone familiar with uh, you know, the the basic details would be sceptical about. And very, very sadly, and I hate to play you know Scrooge and the Grinch rolled into one, but I think all the Christmas stuff is is most unlikely to be true.

SPEAKER_04

Okay, this is very poor. This is very poor, Tom, and very disappointing.

SPEAKER_01

He hates to be a Grinch. Uh Dominic calls it uh a very poor Christmas performance. Um, but we've decided that we're going to tackle Tom's objections to Christmas in an episode all by itself. I'm gonna talk to Peter Williams from Cambridge uh in another episode, and we're gonna discuss Tom's objections and Luke chapter two and Matthew chapter two, and we'll talk about is it really insane to think that the uh that Mary and Joseph would have to go back to their uh hometown? We'll get into that with uh Peter Williams. But uh for now, let's dive back into a key point that Tom makes about Jesus, um, and that is his self-understanding.

SPEAKER_02

But the thing that is manifest in the Gospels, and as far as we can tell, is something that is taken for granted by everybody who becomes a Christian as early as back as we can trace the evidence, is that Jesus has, to put it mildly, a very elevated sense of his role. Right. So he he is making incredible claims about himself.

SPEAKER_04

But he's not not claiming. Am I right in thinking, Tom, that he is not explicitly claiming to be the Son of God? That's not something he goes around saying.

SPEAKER_02

I think it's not clear. One of the telling things in the Gospels, I think, is that Jesus in his parables and so on, where he portrays kings, seem to be allying the role of the king with himself rather than with God the Father, if you want to put it like that.

SPEAKER_04

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

And he's preaching the coming of the kingdom of God, and we'll perhaps come on to what he means by the kingdom of God. But he is I mean, I think I think I think that he is claiming quite high things for himself because I think otherwise it's impossible to explain why his followers come to assume the these things about him. So so um I I guess the two really salient pieces of evidence for that would be that that he summons, according to the gospels, twelve followers, twelve disciples, and these approximate to the twelve tribes of Israel, and that the twelve tribes of Israel will be gathered at the end of days by God. So this seems to be what Jesus is doing. And the other thing is that Jesus is executed for claiming to be the king of the Judeans, he is claiming a kingly role. Now, whether that is as God's deputy, whether it in some way it's caterminous with God's rule, impossible to say. But the seeds of what will become the Christian understanding of Jesus' role, I think, from the evidence of the Gospels and from the evidence of Paul's letters and the the the trace elements of pre-Pauline teachings within his Paul's letters seem to derive from Jesus himself.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Oh wow, did you catch that? It was a subclause within a subclause. Like in the subclause, he mentions the teaching of Paul, uh, which I would have thought deserved more than a subclause here, or a passing mention later in the episode. But he then, as a subclause within a subclause, mentions trace elements of pre-Pauline teaching. Uh, what is he referring to? I think surely uppermost in his mind is 1 Corinthians chapter 15, written in the very early 50s AD, which begins with a creed which was given to Paul when Paul was first converted. This is what we spoke about in 2019 in my interview with Tom. Uh but let's read 1 Corinthians 15 for you. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, that's Peter, and then to the twelve. After that he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appor he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. So in this pre-Pauline uh formula, Jesus is Christ, that is, he is the Jewish Messiah, his life, his death, and his resurrection are all according to the scriptures, he is the fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible, and he definitely rose bodily and appeared to people who were still alive at the time of Paul's writings. As testimony to Jesus, this is early and this is exalted. And that's a problem if you think that the exalted teachings of Christ are later embellishments. But no, the trace elements of pre-Pauline teaching are incredibly early and incredibly exalted. Like the hymn that's recorded in Philippians 2 that says Jesus is in very nature God and will judge the world. The earliest stuff we have about Jesus considers him in the most exalted terms. And Jesus himself seems to have this very exalted view of his own identity and authority. As Tom and Dominic will discuss, uh, there were some other preachers of the end times in the first century AD, people like John the Baptist. To be that kind of apocalyptic preacher was fairly distinctive, but not completely unique. What was absolutely unique about Jesus was that he considers himself to be the judge.

SPEAKER_02

And I think that that's what makes John the Baptist distinctive. That's what he's preaching, and I think that's what makes Jesus distinctive. And what makes Jesus even more distinctive is that he is laying claim to the role of the judge in this day of judgment, as far as we can tell.

SPEAKER_04

I mean, that is the implication of the parables. So normally when people tell you the end of the world is nigh, they don't then say, and I will be the person who, you know, divides people into sheep and goats. No. Um they they give that role to somebody m more potent than themselves. But are you saying Jesus is explicitly saying, and I'm gonna be the one who chooses heaven and hell or whatever? Well, on the ev on the evidence of the gospels, and and of course you know they're not gospel.

SPEAKER_01

The gospels are not gospel. Okay, or by that I assume that Tom means, in his view, they are not always historically accurate. Um of course there's a much more basic sense of what gospel actually means. In the ancient world, a gospel is what you publish in order to bring good news of a new ruler to the world. Gospels are the sort of thing a Caesar Augustus would publish to let the ancient world know there is a new emperor and a golden age has dawned. In that sense, the gospels are gospel, aren't they? They they proclaim the king of the kingdom, and crucially, Jesus in the gospels proclaims himself to be the king of the kingdom. He is the judge. Um but I interrupted Tom. He was answering Dominic's question about whether Jesus is going to judge all people. Tom continues.

SPEAKER_02

But on the evidence of the gospels, yeah, Jesus is constantly pro provoking confusion. He's provoking confusion among his critics because he's laying claim to all kinds of things, and he's doing all kinds of things that Judeans shouldn't do. He's hanging out with tax collectors, he's hanging out with prostitutes, all this kind of stuff, he's hanging out with the lowest of the low.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

But his disciples are also confused, and this is uh arising from the fact that he is claiming an absolutely unheard of authority. But the further strangeness is that this authority, so so you know, there is this long tradition going back to the Enlightenment that Jesus was actually a freedom fighter, that he was a rebel. And in fact, it goes back even beyond the Enlightenment. It goes back to so in the time of Diocletian, just before um Constantine, there are skeptical pagan philosophers who are saying that Jesus. Jesus was a rebel, that he took to the hills, that he was a kind of bandit at the head of rebels. So that is a tradition. But based on the evidence of the Gospels, this is not the case at all. And had Jesus been a rebel, again, it's hard to see why he would have been enshrined as Christian tradition enshrines him. The Gospel writers, Paul, the people who exist before Paul. Because the one thing that you get again and again and again throughout the Gospels is that Jesus is proclaiming what he calls the kingdom of God. And this kingdom is not one that is founded in military exploits. It's not one that is founded in the kind of the appurtenances of power. So what Jesus is doing is he's announcing the presence, the immanence, the near arrival of a kingdom that has no political substance whatsoever. And its authority is something that can be felt in the heart. It can't be experienced as something that is upheld by soldiers or courts or laws or judges or anything like that. So basically, what he's doing, he is preaching the idea of a kingdom of virtue. And this is such a momentous idea. We live with the effects of that in 2022. This idea that there is a kingdom of virtue that transcends the churn of politics. It's such a potent idea. And you know, if it doesn't come from Jesus, then where does it come from? Are the gospel writers just making it up? I mean, it seems improbable. And so the likeliest explanation, as far as I'm concerned, is that it does derive from Jesus. You know, on the principle of Occam's razor.

SPEAKER_01

So the judgment that comes is to bring a kingdom from out of this world, and 2,000 years later, we are living with the consequences of this idea. That's why elsewhere Tom calls Christianity the most disruptive, the most influential, and the most enduring revolution in history. And here's the remarkable thing. Jesus understands himself in those terms. It's quite rare to think of yourself as the Messiah. It's even rarer to get other people in your lifetime to believe that. It is out of this world to get multitudes to believe this, even after you've been declared a condemned criminal and executed in Godforsaken agony. That is a big ask. So Dominic now presses into Jesus' messianic uh self-understanding. And this is interesting.

SPEAKER_04

If he is proclaiming himself the Jewish Messiah, that is an explicitly political claim, isn't it? It's not just a kind of theological supernatural claim.

SPEAKER_02

We go back to the strangenesses of this idea of the kingdom of God, that that he is situating the kingdom of God beyond the dimensions of, as he sees it, earthly kingdoms. So, you know, he goes to the temple, and in the synoptic accounts, it's after that that he's brought this question by the Pharisees who are trying to trip him up. Should we pay taxes to Caesar?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And he asks for a coin, and he can do this because in Galilee there are no Roman coins, but in Judea there are. And he's shown the coin and he says, Whose head is that? And the Pharisee replies, Caesar. And so he famously replies, render unto Caesar what is Caesars, and render unto God what is God. And this is it's a brilliant repost, but it's also an acorn from which a mighty oak will grow. It's it and that oak is you know it's the secular tradition that we inhabited. I'd say that oak is your book dominion, Tom. Pretty much, pretty much. And and this is a kind of you know, this is an incredibly radical, subversive, and yet poetic teaching. It's not the teaching of uh of a revolutionary, it's not the teacher of someone who is raising the sword against the Romans or anything like that. But it is the teaching of someone whose concept of a kingdom that transcends earthly power will have this stupefying, I mean, kind of an impact so profound that it's almost impossible to measure. Its impact has been so overwhelming that we don't even recognise it for what it is. And this is where it begins.

SPEAKER_04

To play the skeptic again, though, Tom, is it not possible that that would that is a detail inserted later on precisely because the early Christians want this creed to thrive in the Roman world? So they put in this detail which is unthreatening, ostentatiously unthreatening to Roman political order.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, that is that is one perspective that you could bring, but I think that that is reflective of someone who's been steeped in the study of 20th century political propaganda or the way that things are marketed. Right. Because why would Christians be risking their lives to preach something that they were simultaneously faking? And the other thing is that that formulation, render unto Caesar, I mean, it's brilliant and it's subversive. Yeah. Who would make it up? I mean, who would come up with that if not someone who was a brilliant preacher and had a very, very weird understanding in the context of the age of what power was? And it seems likely to me that that person was Jesus, because that's what the gospels are claiming, and that's what the evidence of of how he comes to be reverenced by his followers after his death is pointing to, rather than that it's some you know, slimy uh PR guy trying to trying to market his new, you know, this new cult to gullible romance. The Peter Mandelson of the thing. I mean, that seems a very, very 21st century perspective that does not, I think, correspond to the evidence.

SPEAKER_04

I've let myself down, I've let you down, I've let the podcast down.

SPEAKER_02

You've let God down.

SPEAKER_04

I have done, right. And on that note, I think we should take a break while I try to recover my composure.

SPEAKER_01

It's just the best podcast, isn't it? I mean, notice the arguments going on. First, the disciples weren't going to be faking something that they were also staking their lives on. And then, second, it's the question who like where are we going to locate the genius? In Peter, in the other losers and no-hopers who followed Jesus? No, it seems that the genius resides in Jesus. And that his followers basically preserved that for us. So, moving on in the podcast, that the next thing they discuss is Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, not a war horse. And then they get to the death of Jesus, the passion narrative.

SPEAKER_02

And I think that looking at the evidence from Josephus, there's nothing about this narrative that seems particularly implausible. I mean, to repeat, some of the details of the passion narrative I think are garnished, are probably implausible. But the overall sweep of it does seem to be true. And it revolves around this issue that we still don't really know is does the high priest have the power to put people to death, or does he have to get the Romans to do it? Yeah. And the only way that they can get the Romans to do it is to persuade the Romans that that Jesus is actually a rebel. And so that that again is is kind of the bedrock of the Passion narrative. Jesus being handed over to Pilate, who then interrogates him, and Jesus refusing to answer. So I think that again, I I suspect that this is something that is historical, that Jesus accepts his fate, that he willingly accepts his fate. This is something that is emphasized within the Gospels and that he maintains his silence because he's not there to engage in political debate or religious debate with the Romans or with the uh the high priests. Because the thing is that it's not as though the priests, by sending Jesus to Pilate, is sending him to a secular authority. He isn't. Pilate is based in Caesarea, which is the city named after the divine Augustus, the deified Augustus. Pilate is the representative, again, of a kind of distinctively supernatural understanding of the world that to Jesus is profoundly offensive. And so that's why I think he's not engaging with it.

SPEAKER_01

Wow, that that is so true, and I forget that all the time. Um I I learn from Tom Holland. I'm a I'm a better preacher, I hope, because of Tom Holland. Because how often do you just think of Pilate as a secular authority? And you think, duh, there's no such thing as secular yet. The oak tree has not yet grown and given us the fruit of secularism. Um, to an ancient mindset, Pilate is as religious a figure as he is a political figure. In the ancient world, they did not separate religion and politics, and and that helps you read the narrative with Pilate in a in a really different way. Uh, Pilate is religious. He's pagan religious, but he's religious. Um but here's something really interesting. Tom thinks that this Jesus Pilate discourse is authentic. Tom thinks there is something real about that interplay, and I do too. And maybe you do too. But I wonder if we're making that decision based on um historical rules or whether the ring of truth comes to us in a different kind of a way. How are how are our beliefs formed? What is it that we take on trust? Because the vast majority of the things that we know we don't have direct proof of. I'm just talking about in in regular life, you know, we get told things by people we trust. And I'm I'm gonna pluck a finger uh a figure out of the air, but I reckon 98% of my knowledge has come to me from the testimony of another. It's it's testimony that you've had no reason to doubt, and you take it on faith. We all do this, and there's nothing grubby or wrong or lamentable about this. It's life. And we do this with the gospels too. You read you read the gospels, and ge the Jesus of the gospels comes home to you with a self-attesting, self-authenticating authority and truthfulness, and you just go, Yeah, yeah, I think that's real. So uh next in the podcast, Dominic brings up Jesus' teaching on the Last Supper.

SPEAKER_04

But Jesus has already had the Last Supper, at which he has basically implied that he's going. That he's going, and there's the stuff with the body and the blood.

SPEAKER_02

And again, the detail the the the record of this is incredibly early because it's attested to in Paul's letters as something that is already a formula. So presumably this is being repeated maybe you know, years after very, very soon after Jesus' death. And do we know, Tom, where that where this comes from? Where does it where does all this come from? Well, I think it probably comes from from memories of Jesus. Now that doesn't mean that it's exact, you know, they're not taking you know, they're not filming it on iPhones or anything. You it's not an exact transcription. But almost everything that Jesus says, and almost everything more perhaps more pertinently that Jesus does has this kind of striking memorable quality that seems almost designed to enable people to remember it. I don't think that the early Christians seem to have particularly fetishized accuracy in the way that, say, a journalist today might, or a um a historian today might. You know, the disciples have been going around with Jesus, he's got his stump speech, he's got these formulations, he's got these kind of memorable phrases, he's got these memorable stories, and they remember them. And they may not be exactly word for word, they may not be verbatim, but I think the likelihood is that they do reflect the authentic speeches of this man because they have a kind of inherent integrity, they have an inherent coherence, and they are so striking and they're so memorable that if it they didn't come from Jesus, then where did they come from?

SPEAKER_01

New Testament scholars also speak in this way. Like, do we have the ipsissima verba, the very words of Jesus, or do we have the ipsissima vox, the very voice of Jesus? And plenty of people who have a very high view of scripture believe that the Holy Spirit had the disciples record the ipsissima vox, the very voice of Jesus in the Bible, without getting too caught up with the ipsissima verba, the actual words. So, you know, very conservative Bible scholars are kind of with Tom on that. And and as Tom says, if this stuff didn't come from Jesus, who did it come from with its internal integrity and coherence? And then Dominic takes us from talking about the death of Jesus to the resurrection.

SPEAKER_04

But then, Tom, the twist that elevates this above all other stories. The resurrection. And this is something, so going back to what I was reading from E. P. Sanders, he says, he pretty much what you were saying. If you were going to create a fraud, if you were going to make this up, you would at least make sure that the stories matched and that they weren't full of inconsistencies and they weren't so strange and and he stood and and E. P. Sanders says, you know, Jesus, it's very clear he's not a ghost, nor is he somebody who has survived crucifixion and is kind of covered in blood and so in the Gospels, the resurrected Jesus is kind of defined almost in terms of what he's not.

SPEAKER_02

The sense you get is that they are struggling to explain what it is that they've experienced. And again, I have no doubt that they did experience something. Now, what that experience was is a totally different question. That's beyond the remit of a history podcast to discuss. But it does seem to me a basic historical fact that they must have experienced something because again, it's why otherwise would they have believed what they believed? Yeah. And and the thing is that the the resurrection in itself is not what proves to them that Jesus is is the Messiah and in due course the Son of God. That seems to be rooted in what Jesus himself had taught. But the fact that he rises from the dead seems to them to have suddenly things that Jesus had told them made sense and it kind of clicks. Now, of course, there are all kinds of other theories as to what might have happened.

SPEAKER_01

I have no doubt that they experienced something. I think this this is vital. As Tom said to me in 2019, there was a seismic event in the first century, the reverberations of which are being felt today. There is this incredible rupture that we're still feeling the effects of. It's like the Big Bang, you know. Yeah. We know what the Big Bang is because we see an expanding universe. We see this expanding thing called Christendom, and yeah. There is something. There was something. And do you feel comfortable that the letters of Paul that you're you're hanging that something on the letters of Paul?

SPEAKER_02

I'm hanging them on the letters of Paul. But Paul's letters are, if you like, our first reader on the uh, you know, the the seismeter.

SPEAKER_01

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

Uh it's the first great jag that that lets us know that something's but it's not in itself the uh the earthquake. I would go so far as to say I don't think that anything resembling Christianity would have happened had that first generation not believed that something spectacularly odd had happened. I think that that seems to me an irrefutable historical fact. What that odd thing was, how it's to be explained, you know, not for me to say.

SPEAKER_01

So that's the seismic event that happened, but the disciples' report of the resurrection is not the seismic event. Paul's letters are not the seismic event. The disciples' proclamation of this is the spike res you know registering on the seismograph. What was the seismic event itself? It was something, but what was it? And Tom in the podcast goes through a number of alternative theories. And he isn't particularly enthusiastic about any of the alternatives. He says, you know, maybe the disciples stole the body, maybe Jesus didn't actually die, maybe he was never crucified, maybe there were mass hallucinations or magic mushrooms or whatever it is. But for whatever reason, people started believing that Jesus rose, that something happened.

SPEAKER_02

I would say, for whatever reason, probably to do with what Jesus himself had taught before his death, and some strangeness, something weird that happens after it, whether the body gets stolen, whatever. I mean, we don't know.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

People very, very early on think that Jesus has risen, that he is the Messiah, and pretty quickly they're coming to the conclusion, you know, they're making very, very exalted claims for Jesus that he's included with God as a kind of recipient of the cultic devotion of early Christians.

SPEAKER_04

Because people are not worshipping him during his lifetime, is that right? They're following him, but they're not they don't think he's God.

SPEAKER_02

If the gospels can be relied upon, they seem unsure as to who he or what he is. They just know that he's something very well, the special one. But at some basic level, they must know he's the carpenter guy from Nazareth. So, you know, no prophet is has honour in his own land. This is Jesus quotes this. So yes, I mean maybe people who he's grown up among are less inclined to pay service to all this kind of mad stuff he's coming out of. If you were playing football with him in the reign of Augustus, you're less likely to Yeah, exactly. So look at the earliest Christian text we have, yeah. Uh which is probably the first letter that Paul writes to the Thessalonians. In that, Jesus is hailed by Paul as as Kyrios, as Lord, and that's a word that is also applied to God uh by Greek-speaking Judeans. Um he is described as the Son of God. Paul is is saying that Jesus will come and he will he will rescue the the elect, he will rescue the saved. And this is a tradition that you also get in Mark, who is the earliest gospel, probably, um, where you know he says that people will sit the Son of Man will come in in clouds, you know, with power and and glory, and he will send the angels out and he will gather up the elect, and and you know, it's all going to be tremendous and hurrah.

SPEAKER_01

So, yes, Tom does get to Paul in these podcasts, and even the briefest look at Paul shows us early and exalted views of Jesus. This is not something that slowly develops over generations. The earliest stuff we have about Jesus calls him the most exalted things, like Lord and Son of God and Judge of the world. And for Tom, that's not merely because Christ's followers believed him to have risen from the dead. Tom points to three factors in gaining an exalted view of Jesus. There's his resurrection, yes, but before that, there's his death and the way he embraces it as a willing substitute, and then before that, his life and his teaching. So I think it's three things.

SPEAKER_02

I think uh uh undoubtedly the resurrection or people believing in the resurrection is a crucial part of it. I think the drama of his death, which in some way Jesus seems to have embraced, he seems to have knowingly gone to his death, and the way in which it is possible for the disciples and the apostles and his followers to frame it and to see it as the expression of prophecies that are in Judean scripture that had never been previously been understood in that light, that actually God will manifest himself through humiliation and death. I mean, that's the kind of the blinding insight that Paul, for instance, clearly has. It's something that is he sees, he recognizes as having always been there in Judean Scripture, and Jesus' death has has kind of made it manifest. But neither of those things I think would happen had Jesus himself not been the most remarkable teacher. Because I think it's the stickability of his sayings, of his teachings. So Nietzsche brilliantly described Jesus as having had a flair for language that today would see him sent to Siberia.

unknown

Right.

SPEAKER_02

It's the fact that that Jesus is preaching something very odd, unsettling, disturbing, and yet attractive to his listeners, and that he preaches it in a way that sticks in the mind. You don't have to believe that everything in the Gospels is literally the words of Jesus, is literally gospel, I think, to accept that this kind of body of sayings is so consistent, it's so coherent, it's so distinctive that it's very hard to explain where they would have come from if not from a remarkable figure. And Christians see Jesus obviously as having been a remarkable figure. And so the fact that Jesus was a remarkable figure and that this is what prompted Christians to write about him seems to me the likeliest explanation for it. That's a hunch derived from my reading of the material. There are, of course, a whole range of other explanations that that would be possible. And so, to an extent, that is my formulation of a position that ultimately I'm agnostic about.

SPEAKER_04

So just on other explanations, um, your explanation focuses very much on the personality of Jesus. Is there another explanation which will be focused more on the context, which would be there is a not on supply, as it were, but on demand, that there is a particular context in the first century AD in which people are crave for whatever reason, I don't know, economic, political, people are craving this. And so they almost create it. Is that plausible? I don't think so. Because this isn't a particularly troubled or difficult period for people in the eastern Mediterranean? Not particularly, no.

SPEAKER_02

The idea that uh Palestine was heaving with kind of revolutionary instincts is is one that's been very popular, but I think is not true. Right. We did two episodes on the Judean Revolt. I think it was basically it was a kind of accident. It was it was contingency that prompted it. So then we read back to it. But you know, as I say right at the beginning, there are people who are making you know, Roman rule is pretty brutal, uh, like conditions are pretty tough. There are people who are claiming divine sanction for claims for a kingship. But I think you know, none of the others inspired what Jesus inspired. So there's something about Jesus. That's what you're basically there is something special. I mean, I think that you could, and indeed I have, ex explain, explain the 2,000 years of Western, you know, of history as attempts to answer who Jesus was. Christians have done it and and post-Christians have done it. It you know, it's the question of who he was, and by that I mean more than, you know, was he a real person, but was he, you know, what what what exactly was he? I think this is not a back-projected strangeness. I think the strangeness was hardwired into him. And you don't have to be a Christian to accept that because Nietzsche said that. You know, Nietzsche said Jesus is the strangest person who ever lived.

SPEAKER_04

You mentioned Occam's razor before. I mean, if you're using Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is that Jesus was the son of God.

SPEAKER_01

Dominic Sandbrook comes out as more Christian than Tom in this episode, I reckon. Occam's razor, Jesus is the son of God. Boom. And and you know, even if you don't conclude that Jesus is the Son of God, I think this conversation shows you. It's not silly to believe that. It's not silly to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. It's not. And it's not against the evidence to believe this. If you ask me, you've got to be resistant to the evidence to continue to hold out against this. Tom Mo wants to properly wear his historian hat. And that's a good thing. But that's why he says this.

SPEAKER_04

Well, do historians make that claim?

SPEAKER_02

Do other historians who would end their book by saying No, they don't, because you know, Stephen Jay Gould said that they're a rival magisteria, the magisteria of science and of religion. And I guess that historians would say that there are rival magisteria, you know, religion and history are rivals. Yes. So Stephen Jay Gould said, famously said that they're a rival magisteria, the magisteria of science of religion. And I guess historians would capture it in similar terms that, you know, that history and religion are rival magisteria.

SPEAKER_01

This is probably the biggest disagreement I have with Tom. When you when you look at something like Professor N. T. Wright's The Resurrection and the Son of God, it is a work of scholarship and it is the work of a clergyman. Tom Wright went on to become the Bishop of Durham, no less. And and certainly for N. T. Wright, faith and history were not rival magisteria. And actually, I can't find anywhere where Stephen Jay Gould speaks of science and faith as rival magisteria. What he's famous for saying is that they are non-overlapping magisteria. Rival to me speaks of competition and turf war. Non-overlapping means that there can be peaceful coexistence. Us over here, you over there. And actually the parallel with science is instructive. A scientist who is a Christian can believe in miracles, but that doesn't mean that their explanations for every data set involve the miraculous. Likewise, as Tom says, a Christian can be a historian. And it doesn't mean that they infer resurrections just happening all over the place. But here's the question, can they still believe that on Easter it did happen? And can they do so with good historical data behind them? Surely, yes. Surely. And in the case of someone like N. T. Wright, you can point to 800 pages of tightly argued scholarship. That's pretty impressive. So I don't agree that rivalry is the correct paradigm here.

SPEAKER_02

So Gibbon, um, in the uh back in the 18th century, you know, he he he articulated this very well. He said the theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from heaven, arrayed in her native purity, a more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. I mean, I think that historians do not accept supernatural explanations. They may be Christian. I mean, there's nothing to stop a uh a a historian being a Christian or believing in the supernatural, but I think when they come to write history, by and large, they don't adduce supernatural explanations. Yeah. And I don't think that you need supernatural explanations to explain Jesus and the emergence of Christianity.

SPEAKER_01

I think the scientific analogy is really interesting. Tom Wright, for instance, N.T. Wright, he gives an argument for the resurrection, one among many, that is basically a parallel to the scientific argument for the Big Bang. Basically, we started to believe in the Big Bang because we observed an expanding universe. Once we knew the universe was expanding, we could wind back the clock and infer what must have happened in the distant past. At some point there was a singularity. There was an explosion, what came to be known as a bang. And you can do the same thing with Christianity, says Tom Wright. You know, we have witnessed the most extraordinary expanding universe of Christian influence, and Tom Holland's dominion is a terrific exploration of that expansion. But go back to its origins. Where was the bang? The bang was in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Something incredibly powerful was unleashed. The disciples saw it and they were changed by it, and now everything has been changed by it. The resurrection is that bang, that injection of spiritual power into the world. But just as at a singularity the laws of physics break down, so when you encounter the one who makes history, maybe you shouldn't be surprised if things don't occur according to ordinary historical processes. Maybe you should expect weirdness. Tom Holland does a great job climatizing us to the weirdness of the Jesus story. So I don't think I'm massively disagreeing with Tom here. I'm just pressing into that weirdness and saying because we respect the weirdness of the singular person of Jesus, that does not have to be seen as something competing with historicity. I think it explains historicity. It explains the historical impact, right? The irregularity of the Big Bang explains the regularity of the universe. And the irregularity of the history maker Jesus rising from the dead explains the regularity of history. What do you make of that? It's a it's a thought. Anyway, tell me tell me what you think about that argument in the comments. Anyway, final words from the guys, and it's an extraordinary end to the podcast.

SPEAKER_02

You know, I think there are lots of reasons why one might choose not to believe in God and specifically perhaps not believe in the Christian understanding of God, but I would say that the inadequacy of the New Testament as source would not be one of them that I would adduce. So I come to this from studying both the origins of Islam and from studying classical sources. And the the closer I up I get to them, the the more you know, I've got I'm pretty impressed by actually how much evidence there is for Jesus. Tom is impressed.

SPEAKER_04

It seems Dominic is impressed too. Is it the biggest story in history? Do you think? Because it's so foundational for our entire understanding of the ourselves and the world, our culture, our literature, uh our assumptions, our moral landscape, all these kinds of things.

SPEAKER_02

So I I remember years when I was at school, we were doing Roman history and a teacher saying, What was the most significant event in the lifetime of Augustus? And so, you know, Battle of Actium or whatever. And he said, Of course, it's the birth of Jesus. And he was saying that not as a Christian, but because that is the most significant event. What happens with the lifetime of Jesus? Had Jesus not existed, I think the world would be unfathomably different.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Right. Shall I end with uh with a Bible reading? Oh, Tom, I'd love that. I really would. Uh I'm gonna end with um the very last verse of the Gospel of St. John. And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written everyone, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. And that would be a problem for us, wouldn't it? It's we finished the podcast.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. And that's it. Amen. Jolly good. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye-bye. Happy Christmas. Happy Christmas.

SPEAKER_01

It's just the best podcast. And and there you have it. Jesus has launched the most disruptive, influential, and enduring revolution in history. The world would have been unfathomably different without him. And consider the source. Jesus is a northern nobody from a backwater called Nazareth. He considers himself to be the king of the kingdom and that his kingdom will take over the world. It will grow like a mustard seed growing into the biggest plant. That was one of Jesus' parables. Or it will grow like a measure of yeast working through a whole batch of dough. That's another parable that Jesus used. He said that the gates of hell could not hold out against his global and cosmic kingdom. World domination is next for Jesus. And within months of Jesus saying that, he's choking to death on a Roman cross. And then three days later, he's being worshipped and proclaimed. And the movement from him, from that resurrection, has taken over the world just as he predicted. It seems to me that Jesus is not just historical, he is super historical. He's history-making. If we play pool, let's imagine we're playing a game of pool, and uh I just kind of bash the cue ball into the seven, right? And then the the seven bounces like off the rail and then hits the two into the four, which goes around three sides and cannons into the six and goes in the far corner pocket, okay? And what do you call it? You call it a fluke. But what if I call the shot first? What if I tell you I'm gonna smash the cue ball into the seven and it'll bounce off the rail and hit the two into the four, which will go around three sides, it will cannon into the six and it will go into the far corner pocket. What do you call me then? I'm a genius, right? Well, Jesus did not just pull off an unlikely shot, taking over the world. Like you've heard Tom Holland. He had that self-understanding from the outset. He's the judge of the world, he's the king of the kingdom, he's the messiah to set the world to rights. He called the shot and he pulled it off. Genius. And when you read the Gospels, you get the sense of his genius. You encounter him, and you find yourself accepting the words of these testimonies, even when it's just Jesus and Pontius Pilate having the conversation, and you recognize the weirdness of it all, and you still think it's true. And if that can happen regarding the Pontius Pilate stuff, or maybe it can happen with the Nativity stuff too. That's why we're talking to Peter Williams. Uh, keep your eyes peeled for that episode. He's a Christian who's also a tremendous scholar of the ancient world, and he also believes in the birth narratives, and that'll be a fascinating conversation. Search for our other Tom Holland interviews. He is terrific in all of them. And why don't you give this video a share? Send it to folks you know, link to it on social media, and we'll see you soon.

SPEAKER_00

Well, there we go. Thank you so much for listening. Just uh one thing to draw your attention to. On the 16th of January at 8 pm, we have our next Speak Life Vision evening. It will be on Zoom, like the last one. The last one went really well, actually. Uh, we had lots of people joining us online for an actually interesting Zoom call. And we talked about the future of Speak Life, we talked about uh engaging with uh the current meaning crisis, and it was just a great opportunity to kind of hang out over Zoom. So we'd love to have you along uh for the next one, which we're calling Blue Sky Monday on the 16th of January. We'll be accompanied by a very special guest, Rachel Jordan Wolf, to talk about some statistics in terms of evangelism in the UK. To sign up, go to speaklife.org.uk forward slash vision. Uh, you will need to go to that link and sign up in order for us to uh give you the zoom details when the time comes. So why not do that now? Well, that's all from me. Thank you so much for listening. We will be back very soon. God bless.