Introducing Frank Turek and Mike Licona

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 1002

Mike Licona [00:00:00] Sa.

John Dehlin [00:00:30] Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is October 16, 2018 and I am very excited for today's topic and today's guest. Many of you will remember that a few months ago I interviewed Dr. Bart Ehrman, the author of Jesus Interrupted and several other books Misquoting Jesus, God's Problem Forged, How Jesus Became God. And we spent an hour talking to Bart Ehrman about his scholarship on the New Testament and, you know, his findings, his research and his beliefs on things like, you know, was there historical Jesus, Was there a person named Jesus who existed, you know, how did you know his view of how Jesus came to be viewed as divine or the son of God who wrote the New Testament, how the New Testament was put together, whether or not there are contradictions in the New Testament, especially the four Gospels, how the New Testament was assembled and changed over time, and, you know, kind of his thoughts on the historicity of these sorts of things and on a belief in Christianity overall.

John Dehlin [00:01:46] And it was a real Honor to interview Dr. Bart Ehrman. He's world renowned and got a lot of good feedback about it. Some of the feedback I got was from believing Christians. And they basically said, hey, there's another side of the story. Bart Ehrman is one voice. But there are a lot of credible scholarly voices out there who believe differently than Barth and who see the Bible differently than Barth and who have religious beliefs differently than Bart, and you should have them on as well. So that's what we're doing today. I have a dear, dear listener named Emily Robbins. She is the one who lined up our interview or helped line up our interview with the South Mountain Christian or community Church in Draper.

John Dehlin [00:02:30] That was a good experience. And she was the one who reached out to me most and said, hey, if I can get a couple top notch, thoughtful sh scholar or apologist for Christianity on Mormon stories, would you interview them? And I said, absolutely. So it took her some time to find the right people and it took us some time to get it scheduled. But today I am really excited to have two gentlemen on this podcast, Dr. Frank Turek. He runs an organization called Cross Examined and I'm going to have him talk, tell you about himself in just a second, what his organization is. And also Dr.

John Dehlin [00:03:10] Mike Lacona. Mike is a New Testament professor and scholar at Houston Baptist University and he's a New Testament scholar in his own right. Both of these gentlemen are sought after around the world for their scholarship and or apologetics. And we're going to give them a chance to make their case for a belief in Christianity in 2018 and to respond to Bart Ehrman's podcast, because as I understand it, they've listened to it, they're familiar with his works, and they're going to make their best case. Now, I'm going to warn everybody, my goal is not to argue or to try and represent Bart Ehrman to Frank and Mike.

John Dehlin [00:03:51] I'm not qualified to do that. And generally on Mormon stories, our focus is not adversarial debating sort of stuff. So if you're expecting some sort of hot debate, that's not what we're going to do. But I will ask questions, I'll do my best to sort of follow up and represent some of the things that I remember from my interview with Bart. But also we're doing this live and we've got 64 people joining us live so far. We would welcome listeners to post questions and comments and I'll do my best to integrate those throughout the interview. But we're going to do about a two hour interview and we're really excited to have these guests here today.

John Dehlin [00:04:33] And of course, thank you, Emily Robbins, for making all this possible. So without any further ado, I'm going to ask each of our guests to kind of introduce themselves. And the first person I'm going to ask to introduce himself is Dr. Mike Lacona. So, Mike, welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast.

Mike Licona [00:04:52] Well, thanks, John. A pleasure to be here with you guys. I'm 57 years old and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and now my wife and I live in the Atlanta area. Our two kids are down here as well and my son's a firefighter and my daughter and her husband live little way from here. They both have Asperger's, but great people. And my son in law has a podcast called the Deeper Waters Podcast. Very smart guy. So happy to be here.

John Dehlin [00:05:26] And tell us just a little bit about your scholarly, your background. You know, people think, oh, Bart Ehrman, University of North Carolina, he's a New Testament scholar. He knows the real deal. He values science and intellect and logic and thought. So give us your sort of academic bona fides or bona fides or whatever it's pronounced, just so we understand that you also have a scholarly background.

Mike Licona [00:05:52] Well, I became a Christian at the age of 10 and of course at that point my epistemological processes weren't fully matured. And when I went to college, I was a music major. And then I just fell in love with the Bible and really grew in my Christian Faith and a lot of time in prayer. Got in graduate school for a degree in New Testament studies and wanted to be able to read the New Testament in its original language. Was loving it. But then one day I just started asking myself whether it was true. Fell into a period of serious doubt that lasted for several decades.

Mike Licona [00:06:28] I went did something I never thought I would do. I did a PhD in New Testament studies. I focused on the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, writing a 20 page double spaced paper with a few footnotes. It was a mayor for me, grad school. But my dissertation ended up being over 500 pages, single spaced and more than 2,000 footnotes. It's about three to four times the size of an average doctoral dissertation. And during that period I engaged in, what was the topic, whether Jesus rose from the dead.

Mike Licona [00:07:03] It turned into a book that has subsequently published titled Resurrection of A New Historiographical Approach. So John, what I wanted to do was approach the resurrection of Jesus through the eyes of a historian using the same tools that a historian would use to see if it would come out, you know, if the resurrection of Jesus looked like it could be verified historically.

Mike Licona [00:07:27] When you verify something historically, you don't do it beyond all doubt. You just go with the explanation, the hypothesis that can explain the data better than any others. So that's what I wanted to see. And during that time I engaged in several public debates with leading scholars to see how they would do. One of those was Bart Ehrman. And Bart and I have subsequently become friends. I like the guy and we get along quite well even though he's wrong.

John Dehlin [00:07:59] Have you guys ever like, debated or had a public conversation?

Mike Licona [00:08:04] Oh, we've had six debates. Six. Five of them were live. And then two years ago we had one that was a written debate. Most of them have been on whether Jesus rose from the dead. Two of them have been on the historical reliability of the Gospels.

John Dehlin [00:08:22] Okay, so you're familiar enough and sort of appear enough with Bart Ehrman that in six different venues at least, you guys have had either live or written, you know, exchanges or debates.

Mike Licona [00:08:37] Yeah, yeah, we go at each other in a very collegial, friendly way. And yeah, we have a good time together.

Credentials and Background in New Testament Scholarship

John Dehlin [00:08:45] You were telling me before the show that there's some global society of New Testament scholars that you're part of. I just want my audience to know that, you know, that you've got as much legitimacy as Bard or, you know, comparable. So I don't want you to be bashful. So tell about the membership in that society or whatever it is.

Mike Licona [00:09:04] Yeah, I don't share it with too many, to be honest with you, because I hate folks with egos. And I mean, I never want to come across as having one, but, yeah,

John Dehlin [00:09:16] you can blame me for this.

Mike Licona [00:09:17] Yeah. Last year in August, I was voted into membership in the Society for New Testament Studies. Bart's a member that has been already a member for some time. He's been in the field longer than me. And so that is like an elite organization that you can't apply for.

Mike Licona [00:09:35] Two of its members have to nominate you. You have to do several groundbreaking research literature, scholarly literature that it's anticipated is going to have a lasting impact in the field of New Testament. Not all the scholars in this are Christians like Bart Ehrman. He calls himself an agnostic atheist.

Mike Licona [00:09:56] So I had my big dissertation published, which is over 700 pages in the form, and then I had a book published by Oxford University Press last year on Gospel Differences and. Approach to Gospel Differences. And because of that, I got voted in. And if you have anyone that objects to it, any one of its members and their total just a little over 800, then you're denied membership. So if you get membership in it, you're considered a serious in the field.

John Dehlin [00:10:31] Okay, great. Well, it's a real honor to have you on Mormon Stories podcast, Mike.

Mike Licona [00:10:37] Oh, thanks, John. I appreciate it.

John Dehlin [00:10:39] Okay, Frank, tell us about your background.

Frank Turek [00:10:43] My background, John, is I was brought up in New Jersey, so by law, I was Catholic, and I went to Catholic high school, but I left there not really knowing who Jesus was. I knew there was a God, but. And I always believed in God, regardless of Catholicism.

Frank Turek [00:11:00] And I went off to college, then into the Navy, and I actually came to faith when I was in the Navy reading Josh McDowell books. Evidence demands a Verdict. More than a Carpenter. I said, wow, it seems like the New Testament documents are reliable, that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

Frank Turek [00:11:17] Then after the Navy, about a year after I got out of the Navy in 1992, I met a man by the name of Norman Geisler who was starting a seminary here in Charlotte. And I didn't know he was at the time, but he was at the time, kind of the Michael Jordan of apologetics. And he invited us to come down to Charlotte and attend the new seminary he was starting. So we did. And one thing led to another. I found myself doing presentations with Dr. Geiser, and we wrote a couple of books. One of the books is called I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.

Frank Turek [00:11:46] I've since written some other books. Another one's called Stealing from why Atheists Need God to Make Their case. And about 11 or so years ago, 12 years ago now, we started a ministry called crossexamine.org and what we do primarily is we go to colleges, high schools, and churches and present evidence that Christianity is true. Based on the book, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. And we do TV and radio. We're on the NRBTV network, and we do radio on the American Family Association Network, and all that they can see on our website, cross examine.org I have a wonderful wife. I have three sons.

Frank Turek [00:12:20] Two of them are in the Air Force, and one's an intel officer, so he's reading your email right now. And the second son is a KC10 pilot, which means he refuels other planes in flight. So what he does is he flies up to 30,000ft every day, and he sits around and he passes gas and he gets paid for.

Mike Licona [00:12:42] So.

Frank Turek [00:12:43] And the third son is an engineer here in Charlotte. So that's my story. We have one of them married, no grandkids yet, but my wife is getting impatient.

John Dehlin [00:12:53] All right, we got a jokester on our hands. Mike. Frank. Welcome to welcome to Mormon Stories podcast. It's great.

Frank Turek [00:13:06] Thank you. And. And let me say one other thing, John. And I said this before, but I want everybody to know that your interview with Bart Ehrman was amazing in that you covered seven books in one hour. That has got to be a record.

John Dehlin [00:13:19] Yeah, I got some grief. I got some grief. No, no, that was good.

Frank Turek [00:13:22] You know how to keep a guy on track.

John Dehlin [00:13:24] Well, Bart wouldn't give me more than an hour. You guys are giving me two, so I appreciate it. Okay, so I'm going to ask both of you. You know, I grew up in a. In a Baptist town in Katy, Texas, and I spent my high school years sort of defending Mormonism against angry, you know, Baptists that thought Mormonism was a cult. I'd love to hear each of you just talk about your, you know, do you have any experience or impressions about or with Mormons? Mike, let's just ask you first. Have you had any background or history or experience with Mormons or Mormonism and if so, what has that been? I'm just curious.

Mike Licona [00:14:05] Yeah, I would say I'm basically saying,

John Dehlin [00:14:08] are we a cult?

Mike Licona [00:14:09] No, it depends how you define cult. I would say as a sociological cult. No. A theological cult. I would say yes. So not like a Jim Jones or Branch Davidians or anything, but I'd say that the theology of Mormonism is quite different than the apostolic Christianity, in my opinion. So my first real exposure to it would have been probably 1995, maybe a couple years earlier. And I ran into a guy from Indiana. He and his wife lived in Virginia beach at the time where my family was. And we struck up a friendship. He was a former Mormon bishop, and he and his wife were just faithful Mormons.

Mike Licona [00:14:59] And, you know, again, we developed a friendship, and he knew I wasn't a Mormon, and I. And he knew that I knew that he was. And we both knew that we wanted to talk about this at some point, but we didn't know when. And so we developed this friendship until we both were assured that we loved and respected one another. And then he broached the topic one day, and he asked if I'd be willing to talk to some Mormon missionaries. And I said, sure.

Mike Licona [00:15:24] And I said, but I don't really care about everything that Mormons believe until I know that Mormonism is true. So what I will want to focus on is evidence, because evidence means a lot to me. So that's what I will want to discuss with them. So he said, fair enough. And so they prepared for that and invited me over, and I came over, and so they shared some stuff. And then they challenged me to read the Book of Mormon and to pray with an honest, sincere, open, sincere heart and open mind. I agreed to do that because I wasn't threatened by truth. I've always felt that truth is.

Mike Licona [00:16:07] Well, I shouldn't say always, but I do believe that truth is something we should seek with sincerity and that we have nothing to fear with it. What we have to fear is that our biases will be so strong that they will blind us from seeking and discovering truth, and it may cost us eternity. That's my greatest fear. And I realized I had biases. So I prayed with a sincere heart, Lord, if Mormonism is true, I want to know it. I want to follow it. I read through a significant portion of the Book of Mormon, and then I also contacted Mormon scholars at BYU out in pro.

Mike Licona [00:16:44] People like Dr. David Johnson, who's a Book of Mormon archaeologist in North America, specifically up in Palmyra, New York, and also John Clark, Dr. David Clark, John Clark, who is a Book of Mormon archaeologist in Central America. Again, both of them are professors at byu, and I'm checking with them what the Mormon missionaries are telling me. And they're saying that what the church was telling them was wrong. That although we could confirm that peoples actually lived in Central America and North America during the times that the Book of Mormon was allegedly written.

Mike Licona [00:17:23] There was not a shred of archaeological evidence that would confirm that those peoples specifically were Book of Mormon people who had come over from Jerusalem in 600 BC. So I shared that with the Mormon missionaries and it just, it's like, whoa. It shocked them. And then I looked into it further about the Book of Abraham, the Pearl of Great Price, and just discovered Joseph Smith was a charlatan. He had no idea what he was doing when he was translating the Book of Mormon or the Pearl of Great Price. He was a false prophet. And I ended up writing a little book that went out of print.

Mike Licona [00:18:00] They can download it on my website. It's called Behold, I Stand at the door, Knock. What to say to Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses when they knock on your door.

John Dehlin [00:18:11] All right.

Mike Licona [00:18:11] That's my experience with Mormonism. I've always found them to be very pleasant people.

John Dehlin [00:18:17] Well, I hope we haven't lost our Mormon, our believing Mormon listening audience, but it's important for you to just kind of state your background and, and I appreciate that. And for those of you who are still believing, Mormons, don't drop out just because Mike feels that way. Today is not about Mormonism. Mostly it's about Jesus and God in the New Testament. So anyway, Mike, thank you for sharing. That's really useful and interesting and I'm sure for some validating, depending on who you are. All right, Frank, any interactions or history with Mormons or Mormonism?

Frank Turek [00:18:52] Yes, I probably haven't had as many interactions as Mike has had, but I went to a seminary here in Charlotte that dealt with different worldviews. And so we studied Mormonism a little bit. And I've had some interaction with Mormons over the past couple of decades. I'll never forget one. I was having dinner with a gentleman who had hired me because I was doing training for businesses for many years and he was a Mormon. He was telling me a little bit about his faith and he seemed to indicate that Mormons were polytheists. And since I've done some research, that seemed to be the case. And so I talked a little bit about the fact that it appears that space, matter and time had a beginning out of nothing, which means the cause must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful.

Frank Turek [00:19:41] To create the universe out of nothing personal. In order to choose to create and also intelligent, because you have to be to make a choice, you got to be intelligent. Turns out also this universe is fine tuned. It seems like that all goes back to one being. And so I asked him what would be the Mormon Belief on that evidence. This is scientific evidence. There's philosophical evidence. The universe had a beginning. And he just said, well, we don't go back that far. That's all he said to me. And I thought to myself, what do you mean you don't go back that far? That's where the evidence seems to point, that there's one cause, one creator, one immaterial being that brought this all into existence.

Frank Turek [00:20:15] And the thing that maybe you can help me with, John, because I never understood. The issue with the golden plates, and maybe you, being with your background in Mormonism, can explain it to me. Why do people think that golden plates are miraculous? Because obviously you can make golden plates if you have the right materials. It's not like something has come down from heaven necessarily, if it's gold. So I never understood that. Why that seems to be some sort of confirming miracle for Mormonism.

John Dehlin [00:20:49] It wouldn't be golden plates in and of themselves be golden plates delivered by an angel.

Frank Turek [00:20:55] But how can you show it's delivered by an angel?

John Dehlin [00:20:58] I guess the same way you could show. I mean, I would. I'm sure a secular person would say the same way you could show Jesus was resurrected.

Frank Turek [00:21:06] Right. But if Jesus is resurrected, if everyone knows he's dead and then he's resurrected, there's no human being that could do that. But somebody could make golden plates. Any human being could make them with the right material. So I'm just trying to understand the Mormon position. I'm not trying to push back at all. I'm just trying to.

John Dehlin [00:21:20] The Mormon position would be any time if it was a roll of toilet paper. If an angel delivered would be miraculous. If it's an angel delivered.

Frank Turek [00:21:30] Oh, sure. If an angel delivered. That's the big if. I understand.

John Dehlin [00:21:33] And I think Mormons would say the book that was produced from the golden plates is so spiritual, so theologically and doctrinally and historically complex and sophisticated and powerful. I think most believing Mormons would say the miracle of Mormonism and of the gold plates and of the Book of Mormon is the impact that it's had on millions of lives in a positive way. And lately the church would say the miracle of the golden plates in the Book of Mormon is how many people it's brought to Christ. Now, that's something that's kind of relatively, I would say, new in terms of what the church's messaging would be. But more and more, believe it or not, the church seems to be trying to emphasize Christ as the central purpose of the church.

Frank Turek [00:22:22] Yeah, it seems similar to the Muslim view That the Quran. Look how beautiful the surahs are, they'll say. And so therefore, no human being could create this kind of surah, this kind of subjective test. Is it similar to that? Would you say? Is that the. Oh, sure.

John Dehlin [00:22:37] There's this idea that Joseph Smith was this uneducated, ignorant farm boy yokel. There's no way that an uneducated farm boy could produce such a sophisticated book that is so powerful, that has chiasmus, that has all these different societies and civilizations and language structures. Yeah, there's a whole line of Mormon apologetics built, a whole library of books and articles talking about how miraculous the Book of Mormon is.

Frank Turek [00:23:07] Well, let me echo something Mike said. I agree. Most Mormons I know are great neighbors, great people. But I agree with Mike that when you look down at the evidence, it's lacking for what they believe, particularly with regard to Joseph Smith, and certainly with regard to the idea that there are many gods and that God is physically a man. God the Father is physically a man. That doesn't comport well with Christian theology, philosophy, or scientific evidence.

John Dehlin [00:23:34] Well, that's cool. And maybe we can circle back to Mormonism. Today, the focus is on Christianity in the Bible. Right. So let's dive in, and I'm just going to go through these seven points that we talked about with Bart, and I'll give each of you guys your best take. Maybe. I'll always start, if it's okay, I'll always start with Mike, and then I'll have Frank add color. Is that okay?

Frank Turek [00:24:00] That's right. Yep, absolutely.

Did the Historical Jesus Actually Exist?

John Dehlin [00:24:02] Okay. So the first question I asked Bart was, did the historical figure we know as Jesus actually exist? And I'm going to just say my best memory of what Bart said is that Barth leans towards saying, yes, there was a historical figure, you know, who we sort of associate with Jesus or whatever. And in his experience, that's not a very controversial position. In other words, my memory of what he said is that there are a lot of secular scholars and religious scholars who are sort of in agreement that there was a historical figure named Jesus who lived around the time the Bible says and who taught things comparable to what is mentioned in the Bible, and that there might even be evidence that he was killed for his beliefs or even crucified.

John Dehlin [00:24:57] And that someone would be a scholar, a New Testament scholar, would probably be in the minority if they held the position that there was no such thing as a historical figure, you know, that we. That we know as Jesus. So without any further ado, Mike, what's your understanding of the if of the consensus, if there is one. And what's your best understanding of the evidence that would support that position?

Mike Licona [00:25:25] Well, I think you summarized Barth pretty well there, John. He probably holds a stronger position even than the way you articulated it. So I mean, he's on record, I think in one of his books is saying that Jesus death by crucifixion is one of the most certain facts of the ancient world. And Barth's actually, as you probably know, he's written a book on the existence of Jesus.

Mike Licona [00:25:47] It is not a subject that is a live discussion amongst New Testament scholars and historians. In fact, probably the leading scholar who proposes that Jesus never existed is Richard Carrier. And before him it was pretty much just a discussion that took place amongst Internet atheists.

Mike Licona [00:26:09] But then Richard Carrier came along, legitimate scholar, legitimate degree in ancient history from Columbia University, and he's written contending that Jesus never existed. But by Carrier's own count, at least the last I heard a few months ago, including himself, there were only eight scholars in the entire world who would say that Jesus did not exist.

Mike Licona [00:26:34] And there are actually more scholars who deny the Holocaust than there are who deny the existence of Jesus. And so those of us who are in the field, actually just when we hear someone say Jesus never existed, it's just kind of crazy. It's.

Mike Licona [00:26:50] I mean, you think of early contestants on the old show American Idol and you know, they come in and they just, they have no talent at all, but they get on there and they're so confident and everybody's kind of rolling their eyes and laughing underneath. That's how scholars typically view those who deny the existence of Jesus. Because there's so many different sources that mention Jesus.

Mike Licona [00:27:14] Not only the early Christian sources, but you do have some non Christian sources like Josephus, Tacitus, Lucian, Marabar, Serapion, and in order to explain those away, Jesus mythers have to go to great lengths and torture the text and produce just ridiculous things in order to try to explain them away.

John Dehlin [00:27:39] So let's flip to the positive. So those authors you just mentioned and others, what would have been written about the historical Jesus? What, what, what things have been written and what are those sources and who wrote it and what did they say? Just, just kind of like a three minute of what people would have written.

Mike Licona [00:27:57] You got Josephus is probably the earliest and he's a Jewish historian who writes at the end of the first century. He grew up, he was born like seven years after Jesus died. And he grew up in a, in a famous, a Jewish family where In Jerusalem, the very part where the disciples are proclaiming Christ his father is a popular priest named Matthias in Judaism. So this is something that interests Josephus. And he basically, in his Antiquities of the Jews, book 18, section 3 or 63, he mentions. And it's a disputed passage, but the majority of Josephus scholars will acknowledge that he mentions that Jesus was this wise man who went around teaching, he got followers from Jews and Gentiles, that at the instigation he was known as a worker of amazing deeds, that at the instigation of the Jewish leadership, Pilate crucified him, but his disciples continued and remain to this day.

Mike Licona [00:28:55] So that's like a toned down version of what we find in the actual Greek text of Josephus Tacitus. Oh, Josephus mentions Jesus in an undisputed text, book 20, section 200, which he mentions Jesus who was called the Messiah and was the brother of James who was stoned.

Mike Licona [00:29:16] And then you've got Tacitus, a Roman historian at the beginning of the second century, and he mentions Jesus being crucified or suffering the extreme penalty by Pontius Pilate. That Christianity was checked for a moment and then it broke out again in Judea, where it started and spread throughout, everywhere, even into Rome.

Mike Licona [00:29:35] That's pretty much an undisputed text. You've got Lucian of Samosata in the middle of the second century. He mentions the crucifixion of Jesus in Palestine. Marbar Serapion is a prisoner, we're not exactly sure when he wrote end of the first century or sometime in the second century. And he mentions Jesus's execution. So I mean, there's a few non Christian sources that are relatively early that mention him. There's the Jewish Talmud, but it's pretty unreliable and just. And it's late enough that it's based on hearsay and some of the things going around.

Mike Licona [00:30:08] But then you have multiple independent early sources based on eyewitness testimony there in the Christian writings that people like Ehrman, skeptics like Ehrman and others say we can know about Jesus. In fact, he says the best sources about Jesus are the New Testament Gospels.

John Dehlin [00:30:24] Okay, so let me ask you just to clarify, is there anybody who a contemporary of Jesus who wrote about Jesus, or is it everyone? Are all the writings we have about Jesus, were they written after Jesus died by people who actually didn't know or see him personally or live in the town or around in the area when Jesus was alive? Does that make sense?

Mike Licona [00:30:54] Yeah, well, I don't know of anything that was written while Jesus was Still alive. Okay. But we do have some literature that was written by those who knew either those who knew him or written by those who knew those who knew him. So, for example, we have a guy named Papias who's writing probably somewhere between the years 98 and 109.

Mike Licona [00:31:19] And Papias said he heard personally from a disciple of Jesus, a minor disciple of Jesus named John the Elder. He had heard personally from him that Mark had recorded in his gospel the what he had heard from directly from Peter.

Mike Licona [00:31:39] So that is our first witness to who wrote the gospel. So you have Papias, who said he who. Early, very early, right around the year 100, let's say. But you know, early into the second century, he said he had heard from one of Jesus disciples, probably, you know, so now we're backing into the first century who. This disciple of Jesus said that Mark wrote what he had heard from Peter.

Mike Licona [00:32:06] So that's pretty good. And then the majority of scholars today, without giving all the reasons, majority of scholars today, even skeptical ones, say that John's Gospel, they don't believe it was written by John the son of Zebedee, but they are willing to say that it was either written by one of Jesus's minor disciples or that whoever the author was, he received his information from one of Jesus's disciples, perhaps even John the son of Zebedee.

Mike Licona [00:32:35] So you have at least two gospels for which the majority of scholars believe they're based either on eyewitness testimony or those who knew the eyewitnesses. It's rooted in eyewitness testimony.

John Dehlin [00:32:47] Okay, so if somebody were to kind of in a dismissive way say, well, you don't have any firsthand accounts, so that's a weak argument. As a scholar of antiquity, what would your response to that be? Even taking out the religious context, you know, are there historical figures taken out of religious context that we all sort of like, assume exists, and we all know they don't. We don't doubt their existence, but, you know, we have similar sort of distance in terms of confirmation that they actually existed as historical figures. Do you understand my question?

Mike Licona [00:33:22] Do you believe Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March?

John Dehlin [00:33:27] Yes. I don't know, but. But let's just say you don't know

Mike Licona [00:33:31] if you believe he was assassinated on the Ides of March.

John Dehlin [00:33:33] I mean, that's a common understanding. But, you know, the Internet all the time says commonly held things that actually aren't true at all. So I'm open to the fact that. But that's my understanding. Let's just say that.

Mike Licona [00:33:43] Okay, so I don't think you'd find a single classicist today who would, who would doubt or historian who would doubt that Caesar was assassinated on March 15, okay, in 44 BC. So we have a number of sources who attested it. Appian, Cicero, Dio, Livy, Nicolaus, Plutarch, Suetonius and Velias. The only testimony that's even close there to being an eyewitness testimony is Cicero.

Mike Licona [00:34:15] And the way his letter that he mentions this in, he doesn't even say he was there. So he would have been alive at the time, but he doesn't say he was there, but it's just assumed that he is. That is the closest thing we have to eyewitness testimony, something written by an eyewitness on the assassination of Caesar. So what we're looking at, and Plutarch, greatest biographer of all antiquity and of the 50 biographies that he wrote that have survived, he's eyewitness to very, very little in it. And most of them he's reporting things that are more than 100 years removed from his own lifetime. Same thing with Suetonius, the greatest Roman biographer.

John Dehlin [00:35:04] So, and that's basically what I'm asking you to, you know, for people who aren't really into history or you know, classics or ancient stuff is, you know, what I'm asking you to basically confirm as your opinion is, is that pretty, I mean, and I think the answer is so many scholars agree with you. Ann Barth, think what you're saying is that's pretty good evidence for ancient documentation, the evidence for Jesus. You're saying it's really good evidence even though it's not contemporary per se.

Mike Licona [00:35:35] What we have for the Gospels. I mean, you're talking the majority of scholars today. Now Bart said on your show that most scholars think that the Gospel of Mark was written around the year 70. Well, he's wrong with that. I've actually done a study with the assistance of my son in law, Nick Peters, and we found 76 critical scholars since 1965. And actually there are more scholars who think that Mark. Critical scholars who think that Mark was written before the year 60 than there are that believe that he wrote after 70. The majority of critical scholars today think mark wrote between 50 and 70.

John Dehlin [00:36:15] We're going to get to that in our third question about who wrote the New Testament. But, but you're saying Mark is an example. You see some of these New Testament gospels as having been written maybe earlier than what Barth claims. Is that what you're saying?

Mike Licona [00:36:28] Well, Mark Certainly, yeah. And I would say this. All of them, all of them are written within living memory of the eyewitnesses. In other words, there were eyewitnesses who were still around when all of them, even the last Gospel John was written.

John Dehlin [00:36:44] Okay, really quick, a couple. And we're gonna. We're gonna get you in. Frank. Steve. Shout out to Steve Ottison. He's made the comment any professor in a secular school would disagree with what was just said about the Gospel of John. It's regarded as the least likely to have good information about the historical Jesus. And then my friend Daniel adds, and he's a PhD in classics, he says, bingo. It's the last written that was canonized and very gnostic. What would you say to Daniel and Steve? And we. It's not gonna be a back and forth, but they're asking it. So I just wanted to have you respond.

Mike Licona [00:37:25] I'd say to the first one. He just needs to read the literature actually, because. And that was on John, the first one. I know the second was on John, the first one.

John Dehlin [00:37:36] The first one's on the John that it's least likely to have good information about the historical Jesus. That's what Steve says.

Mike Licona [00:37:45] Well, I kind of understand why he would say that, because is a different Gospel for sure. So the way I look at John, and it's really difficult. Even a conservative New Testament scholar such as N.T. wright would say, I think of the Gospel of John like I think of my wife. I love her, but I don't claim to understand her.

Mike Licona [00:38:07] And so if you talk to Johannine scholars, they have different opinions, but John. I think most would agree that John has taken the Jesus tradition, paraphrased it loosely and recast it in his own words in order to bring out the theological significance of what Jesus had said. And there's nothing wrong with that. John would have wanted to have done that. When he sees the three synoptics probably knew about the Synoptic Gospels and he's wanting to do something a little bit differently rather than just kind of repeat what they had done. So that's the way he writes. He writes. It's kind of like a theological paraphrase of the Synoptic Gospels in terms of the second one. What did he say again about the majority of New Testament scholar or. No, he didn't say that. The first one said that.

Frank Turek [00:38:57] Yeah.

Mike Licona [00:38:57] The second just said, by the way, because John is rooted in eyewitness testimony, either written by an eyewitness or based on eyewitness testimony of one of Jesus Disciples, that's not to say it's unreliable. It's just to say it's not stated in terms of, you know, like word for word. He is paraphrasing and he's writing kind of a commentary on it as well. And the second one said, what was it about John?

John Dehlin [00:39:25] He was just saying that the Gospel of John is very Gnostic. It was the last written.

Mike Licona [00:39:30] It was the last written, but it's not at all Gnostic. I mean, there are some things in it that could be interpreted in that way. But Jesus according, I mean Gnosticism has this kind of goddess, Pistisophia, who is scattered throughout the earth, killed and scattered by her followers. And these pieces of divinity fall into individuals who have a spark. Some of them have a spark of divinity. Frank might have a spark of divinity, but I don't. But Jesus is fully God. He is in John. He is before, he is with God, he is part of creation, he is incarnated and he's full deity as well as full man. So that's not Gnosticism.

John Dehlin [00:40:19] Okay, really quick, Frank, let's bring you in. Is there anything you want to add to this discussion about Jesus actually existing?

Frank Turek [00:40:28] Well, no, enough has been said on that. There's no way you can make a valid case that Jesus didn't exist. Not only do you have eight or nine sources that have found their way into the New Testament, as Mike said, there's about 10 ancient non Christian sources within 150 years of Jesus life that give the basic same storyline. If you add up all the references that the New Testament gives.

Frank Turek [00:40:51] So it would strain credulity, you'd have to have more faith to believe Jesus didn't exist and believe he did exist. And with regard to the Gospel of John, Denver Seminary professor Craig Blomberg went through the Gospel of John with a fine tooth comb and found 59 historically probable or historically confirmed eyewitness details. And we list them all in our book. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. In the book of acts, there are 84 of these details just from chapter 13 to chapter the end of the book, chapter 28. Only an eyewitness could know some of the things that are mentioned there or somebody that knew eyewitnesses.

Frank Turek [00:41:30] And the other aspect to John that in fact Mike and I were talking about this earlier today. John the fifth chapter says there is near the sheep Gate, a pool known as the pool of Bethesda. Well, in 70 A.D. the entire city of Jerusalem practically was wiped out. That pool did not exist prior to 70 or after 70 A.D. why is John writing as if the pool is still standing? If he's writing in 95 A.D. now, he could be writing in 90 or 95 A.D. but it seems quite, quite odd for him to say there is this pool when he would know in 90 AD that the city and the pool have been destroyed.

Frank Turek [00:42:08] In fact, Dan Wallace, who's one of the top manuscript scholars in the world and has debated Bart Ehrman, just like Mike, has wrote a paper after going through hours and hours of research, wrote a paper back in 1990, and he came to the conclusion that he thinks that the Gospel of John is written prior to 70 A.D. in fact, I would argue John, that Luke is written prior to 55 AD because Paul quotes Luke, or it's written prior to 60 AD because Paul quotes Luke in first Timothy 5, 18, and he quotes it as scripture. So Luke is certainly prior to the 60s AD and we all know that.

Frank Turek [00:42:51] Even Bart Ehrman admits that First Corinthians, which has the earliest evidence for the resurrection, the ancient creed in First Corinthians 15, verses 3 to 8, that book is written in 55 A.D. or 56 A.D. but that creed that names all the people that saw Jesus alive actually originates, as Barth himself admits, very early, back to the resurrection itself. So we have. Even if the documents are written later, we have early testimony within those documents which confirm that this comes from an eyewitness source.

How Did Jesus Come to Be Viewed as Divine?

John Dehlin [00:43:20] All right, well, since there's a lot of consensus on this, I think we've covered it, and I think this has been great so far. So let's jump to the second question. Thank you both for that second question that we talked about with Bart is how did the historical figure Jesus come to be viewed as divine, the Son of God? And I'll just say what I remember about Barth's, Barth's sort of position, which is that if you line up the Gospels as we believe them to have been chronologically written in order from Barth's perspective, the tail kind of grows kind of like the fish gets bigger the more times the fisherman tells the tale of catching the fish.

John Dehlin [00:44:07] You have Jesus in the earliest Gospel, and you'll be able to talk more about this, of course, Mike. But in the earliest Gospel, you would have Jesus being more of a wise person, more of a philosopher, kind of a prophet.

John Dehlin [00:44:21] And then by the end, by the last gospel, let's just say it's John. If it's John, he's the Son of God and he's divine, and he's resurrected, but that the story kind of grows with each subsequent Gospel that's written later. Now, tell me, you know, tell me, Mike, do I have Barth's kind of basic argument? Right. And if so, do you agree with Barth or do you not? And if not, how do you differ?

Mike Licona [00:44:49] You know, I'm. I would say the Barth of a few years ago. I would certainly agree with that. I'm not sure where he's at now. He's kind of morphed his position over the last few years, and I think he now thinks that some of the early Christians believed that Jesus was God. I might be wrong on that. Okay, but in his book, How Jesus Became God. But I would disagree with anything he would say about, or anyone who would say that Mark does not present Jesus as God or he presents a lower Christology.

John Dehlin [00:45:22] John, what's the order of the Gospels as you understand them to be written chronologically?

Mike Licona [00:45:28] Most would say Mark was first, and then either Matthew or Luke was next. Most, maybe just a slight majority, would go with Matthew, then Luke very shortly thereafter, and then finally John.

John Dehlin [00:45:41] So Mark, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, maybe. And so you're saying, okay, so what were you saying about Mark, the first that was written?

Mike Licona [00:45:50] I think Mark has every bit the same Christology as John does. And here's why I say that in my recent study on ancient biography and understanding gospel differences. The majority of scholars today, New Testament scholars, think that the Gospels are either ancient biographies or that they share much in common with it. And so we say, okay, well, what does that mean when they're ancient biographies? Well, they have some different rules than we have in writing. And their objective, according to Plutarch, in his Life of Alexander, chapter one, the most frequently appealed to text in all of Plutarch, he says that biography is to highlight the character qualities the main person.

Mike Licona [00:46:32] So in other words, the biographer wants to take those deeds that that person did and the things that he said in order to illuminate who this person is, what kind of person they were. And so when you read the Gospel of Mark, in view of through the lens of ancient biography, some things come out, and it's really interesting. It starts off right in the very beginning, as Isaiah the prophet said, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight his paths. Well, then it's not Jesus preparing the way for God's coming. It's John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus.

Mike Licona [00:47:11] What does that say in chapter one about who Jesus is? And then you come to chapter Two, Jesus heals a paralytic and forgives the sins. And the Jewish leaders say, well, that's blasphemy. Only God can forgive sins. Chapter three, you have Jesus who is casting out demons. And by that he says he has bound the strong man who is Satan. Well, what human can bind Satan? Chapter four, Jesus walks on water. Something the Old Testament says that God does. I'm sorry, he calms the wind. Something God does. Chapter five, he raises someone from the dead. The Old Testament says something only God can do. Others in the Bible did, but they did it with the power of God.

Mike Licona [00:47:50] Jesus did it in his own power. Chapter six, Jesus walks on water. Something Bible says only God does. In the Old Testament, you go throughout the entire Gospel of Mark and you have chapter after chapter that presents Jesus deeds as doing things that only God does. And so that's the Gospel of Mark is showing that Jesus is God's uniquely divine, fully divine son through his deeds. And let's not forget that Paul has every bit as high a Christology as John does. He is. Just compared the kenosis hymn in Philippians 2 with the prologue of John's Gospel, John 1, 1:14. You'll find there's a lot of parallels.

Mike Licona [00:48:30] Jesus is pre existent and he comes down and takes on human flesh. So he's the creator of our universe. So he's the creator. He was serving in the role of God and he comes down to earth. So I mean, all this, it's like there's no evolution in Christology. It starts at the very earliest with Paul, is also reflected in Mark.

John Dehlin [00:48:53] Okay, and Frank, what would you add?

Frank Turek [00:48:57] Well, there's a brand new book by Larry Hurtado, who's a New Testament scholar. It's called Honoring the Son and he's written voluminously on this John. But the sum of the book is the fact that the New Testament, from the very beginning, the believers of the New Testament are the believers of Jesus from the very beginning are saying that Jesus is God. This is not something that develops. I mean that Barth said, well, his followers later put this on his lips. No, they thought he was God from the very beginning. When you go to a text like First Corinthians, you're talking about Jesus and the communion that Paul talks about.

Frank Turek [00:49:39] I think it's in First Corinthians 11, which indicates that they're venerating Jesus God. You look at the text in Philippians 2 where Jesus is claimed to be God. And there's text after text that talks about Jesus being God. Very early on this is not something that developed. This is something that started from the very beginning. In fact, Hurtado makes the point that the very reason Paul, when he was Saul, not a believer in Christ, he was actually trying to persecute Christians. One of the reasons that he probably was persecuting Christians is because they were venerating Jesus as God and so he was going after them for that.

Frank Turek [00:50:23] So this is very early. This is not an evolutionary kind of process that later generations decided Jesus was God. No, this came from in the very beginning of Christianity.

John Dehlin [00:50:34] Got it. Okay. So from your guys perspective, you would disagree that the Christology as you called it, Mike, is different in Mark than let's say in John. And then instead you see Jesus as divine from the very, from, from the very first gospel.

Mike Licona [00:50:54] Oh yeah.

John Dehlin [00:50:55] Is there an evolution? Is there an evolution where at all. Do you, do you see any sense of the tale getting taller and a little bit more, you know, majestic or powerful? Do you, do you see any credibility in that kind of perspective?

Mike Licona [00:51:11] What I think I see the difference between Mark and John is John. John isn't. He does a lot of Jesus deeds, but he has Jesus explicitly stating certain things about his own divinity that we don't find in Mark. In Mark we find Jesus claiming divinity through his deeds.

Mike Licona [00:51:32] So John, of course, as Christianity is going on, they're trying to say how does this all work out? You know, we, we are looking at the unity of God, one God. How does that work with Father, Son, Holy Spirit? And I think they did have to wrestle with that and they continue to wrestle with it after the New Testament was written. But here's a question I think is, I think is pertinent here. If I mean Frank points out how Hurtado says that the earliest Christians believed that Jesus was God in some sense. And we do have Paul who is claiming this. And Paul in Galatians said that he ran his Gospel past the pillars of the Jerusalem church.

Mike Licona [00:52:11] Peter, James and John, to make sure he's preaching the same thing. They were and they certified that he was preaching the same thing. So where did these monotheistic pious Jews get the idea that Jesus was God's uniquely divine son, fully divine, if Jesus himself did not claim these things, I just don't think that you get there. The only way that you get these pious monotheistic Jews who knew Jesus, who walked with him and were saying that he is God's uniquely divine son, is that the only way to get there is that Jesus made such claims?

Frank Turek [00:52:49] Hey John, can I mention one other thing? Please, Frank, Jesus also reveals that he's God in parables. Probably the most famous parable in the Bible is the parable of the lost son or the prodigal Son. If you really look at that text, which is. Which occurs, as you know, In Luke chapter 15, what happens there is some of the Pharisees are there, and they are upset that they're muttering about this man welcomes sinners and eats with them. And then he tells them three parables. We can't go through them all. We don't have time. But, you know, the lost coin, the lost son, and then. And then the lost sheep, the lost coin and lost son.

Frank Turek [00:53:29] And in any parable, there's always at least two characters represented. God is in the parable, and you are in the parable. And sometimes there's a third. If you go down to the lost son, it turns out that in the parable, Jesus is playing the role of the Father.

Frank Turek [00:53:49] And the lost son are the sinners, the people that are open to repentance. And the older brother represents the Pharisees. So if you read that parable, you realize that the reason Jesus is meeting with sinners is because he goes out and he finds lost sinners. He goes out and he seeks people who are lost.

Frank Turek [00:54:15] And that's what God does. Jesus is claiming to be God in those three parables right there in Luke chapter 15. Now, he's doing it in a coy way, but he is inserting himself into the parable. He is representing the Father, and the Father represents God, whereas the guy that goes out and squanders everything are the sinners. And the righteous ones who stay home with their arms folded are represented by the Pharisees. And actually, this parable is misnamed. It's not the lost son parable. It's the lost sons because both the one that went off and the one that stayed behind were lost.

Frank Turek [00:54:53] And only one really repented. It wasn't the one that stayed home. It was the one that truly went out and squandered his father's wealth. So Jesus, in fact, one scholar, Barton paine, looked at 52 recorded narrative parables. And in those 52 parables, he said 20 depict Jesus, in which the Old Testament typically refers to God.

John Dehlin [00:55:18] Got it. Okay. Well, that's both of your best quick takes at question two. Let's go to the third. Who wrote the New Testament? And my summary of Barth's argument is that it wasn't the people whose names are on the Gospels. So according to Barth, John didn't write John, Mark didn't write Mark. Luke. Luke didn't write Luke. Matthew didn't write Matthew. But instead, as I recall, the argument was that different oral traditions were passed down. And one to two to three generations after these traditions were passed down orally, somebody wrote the story down and put and ascribed names to each of those Gospels. So, Mike, is that how you view it?

Who Wrote the New Testament Gospels?

Mike Licona [00:56:17] No, I think that's entirely fanciful thinking and without a shred of evidence for it. Bart will and others will say, well, the Gospels are not anonymous. They don't have the author's name in the preface or anywhere. But, you know, Plutarch, again, he's the greatest biographer of all antiquity, and we have 50 of his biographies that have survived, and his name appears in none of them. And Simon Gathercole at Cambridge just published an article in the Journal of Theological Studies last month, September. And in there he makes. He provides a whole list of names of ancient historians and biographers in antiquity. And you won't find their name anywhere in the preface. And, you know, just to give you some of the more prominent ones, Polybius and Arrian and Livy and Sallust and Plutarch. I mean, none of them have their names in the preface. So if you're gonna say, well, I don't.

John Dehlin [00:57:14] I want to make sure I understand. What I understand is that whatever earliest manuscript we have of, say, Mark. Right. The actual earliest record that there's no. That the date that we have for its having been written is. Is, you know, one to two to three generations after that person would have died. That's what I did.

Mike Licona [00:57:40] Yeah. The titles.

John Dehlin [00:57:42] So. So let's say Mark. Mark is the first written, right?

Mike Licona [00:57:45] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:57:46] So what's the earliest document we have of, you know, of Mark, and how do we know that Mark wrote it versus someone else who wrote it? Who put Mark's name to it?

Mike Licona [00:57:58] Well, first we do have Papias who says that, you know, he heard directly from one of Jesus disciples, John the Elder, that Mark wrote what he had heard Peter say. And you've got several. I mean, you've got at least nine sources, no less than nine sources by the time you get to the end of the second century that attribute the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And it's unanimous now it may not there. Their name may not have been in the title. And what Gather Cole argues in that journal article is that it's entirely irrelevant that their name does not appear in the title.

Mike Licona [00:58:33] Because if that is germane, then you have to say, well, we have no idea who wrote Plutarch's Lives. We have no idea who wrote the Antiquities of the Jews because Josephus name doesn't appear in there. We have no idea who wrote that was what was written by Polybius or Livy because his name doesn't appear there. And of course we know who wrote those because you have people who testify that they wrote them. Now, we may not know how they came to know it. Fortunately we do with Papias. In most cases, we don't know how those people who testified to the authorship came to know that the author wrote those.

Mike Licona [00:59:10] But they do. Back then, they knew who wrote them. And I think Barth's scenario, this swirling oral tradition that's totally uncontrolled, that's the form it had taken after four decades, that's what Mark included. I mean, that that assumes that shortly after Jesus death, his disciples went off on a permanent religious retreat and were never heard from again. But Paul's undisputed letters in the Book of Acts discredit such a position because they talk about the eyewitnesses continue to go out proclaiming the teachings of Jesus and the Gospel for two decades and even longer. And that takes us right up to the very doorstep of when the first Gospel Mark was written.

Mike Licona [00:59:54] So we have good reason to believe in the traditional authorship of the Gospels. Matthew's a little bit fuzzy, but I do think that the evidence suggests that at minimum, he played a major role in the composition of that gospel.

John Dehlin [01:00:09] Is it fair to say that the earliest manuscripts that we have don't date to a time when the various authors would have been alive? Does that make sense, the question I'm asking?

Mike Licona [01:00:22] Yeah, that would be correct. And we would say that as well for just about every other ancient author, with the only exception I'm aware of off the top of my head, would be the Rhys Jeste of Augustus, which he wrote. And we still have some of that. So now we don't have it in his own handwriting. Okay, so we don't have the actual manuscript or anything that he wrote. So yeah, I guess. But it's fairly early. We have stuff. In a few cases, we have fragments that have been preserved that are within a, you know, maybe a few decades, but those are extremely rare. They're only fragments for the most part of about a hundred.

Mike Licona [01:01:04] The hundred, one hundred different pieces of literature, Latin literature from antiquity. Most of those manuscripts come from the 9th through the 16th centuries. So when you look at the New Testament and what we have, we have an amazing richness of manuscript evidence. And even Ehrman himself will say, there's nothing like it in the ancient world in terms of the quality and quantity of the manuscripts that we have for the New Testament literature.

John Dehlin [01:01:33] So just for those who haven't studied this at all, how does it. How does it happen? You know, why isn't it that we have for sure manuscripts written by the hand of Mark or by the hand of Matthew? What would have. How did. How did it work with ancient documents?

Mike Licona [01:01:50] Well, you're. Of course, the originals of the Gospels would have been written on papyri. And unless papyri are stored away carefully like in clay jars in the Qumran caves, they're just not going to last. You know, they're going to last about 200 years is about what they're going to do, being handled and passed around. And that's why, you know, the original Gospels are probably going to be passed around and passed around and handled and read often. And so over time, they're going to start to wear and you're going to have scribes copy them. So we wouldn't expect to have the originals for any of the New Testament literature. Again, we don't have the originals. We don't have the originals for any ancient literature, period. Any of it.

John Dehlin [01:02:38] Okay, so that's kind of an unreal. You're saying that that's maybe a bit of an unrealistic expectation.

Mike Licona [01:02:44] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:02:45] And that if we discard. If we discard all the manuscripts that we don't have an original of by the original hand of the original author, we'd be discarding a lot of everything that we. Basically everything.

Mike Licona [01:02:58] We would be discarding everything from that period.

Reliability and Transmission of the New Testament

John Dehlin [01:03:02] Okay. I wish Bart were here to respond, but he's not.

Mike Licona [01:03:05] But he would agree with me on that.

John Dehlin [01:03:08] Okay.

Mike Licona [01:03:08] He would not agree with me on the authorship of the gospel thing, which I'd be happy to dialogue with him on that. If you want to bring us on and dialogue, I'd be happy to do that with him. Bar Gerard and I are friends. I respect him. I think he respects me. We'll have a spirited but collegial discussion, but I think he's just wrong on that.

John Dehlin [01:03:29] Awesome. Okay. Frank, anything you want to add?

Frank Turek [01:03:32] Yeah, I'd like to mention one thing. That even if you were to dispense with every manuscript from the ancient world, you could still reconstruct what Jesus came and said and did just by the early church fathers. In fact, a friend of mine is a cold case homicide detective. His name is J. Warner Wallace. And before you go to trial, any Evidence from the crime scene has to be maintained uncontaminated, so it can then be analyzed in court. If somebody breaks that chain of custody, then the evidence is going to be in question. And what he has done in his book, Cold Case Christianity, and he's gone through, and he's tracked all of the early church fathers from the apostles onward into the third and fourth century.

Frank Turek [01:04:19] Names that Mike has mentioned, some of them are papias and Polycarp and Irenaeus, people like this. And when you track them all the way into the third century, you get a consistent view of what the New Testament says about Jesus. That he was born of a virgin, that he worked miracles, that he preached sermons, that he claimed to be God, that he was worshiped as God, that he was crucified and buried, that he rose from the dead and he was ascended into heaven. So you get the same basic storyline, even if you don't have the manuscripts. Now, Bart Ehrman famously wrote the book, probably the one that put him on the map, as he said in your interview, called Misquoting Jesus.

Frank Turek [01:04:56] And if you read the book, as you read through it, you're going, wow. Barth seems to be throwing a lot of ambiguity or a lot of doubt on can we really trust the New Testament that we have today.

Frank Turek [01:05:07] But when you read the second edition, John, and you go to the paperback version of the second edition, there's an interview with Bart Ehrman, and in the back of it, he writes this in the interview. It's just going to take me a minute to read this, but it's very critical.

Frank Turek [01:05:24] You may remember that in the debate. I'm sorry, in the podcast he did with you, he said he went to Princeton to study under Bruce Metzger, and he said there were no Christians at Princeton. What he forgot to say was, Bruce Metzger was a Christian. He was the top manuscript scholar of the last century. And that's why Barth went there, to learn from him. To Barth's credit, he went and learned from the best. Now, here is what Barth said in the second edition of Misquoting Jesus.

Frank Turek [01:05:49] This is on page 252. You can check it. He said, bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for getting into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him. And even though we may disagree on important religious questions, he is a firmly committed Christian, and I am not. We are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put into a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement, maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands.

Frank Turek [01:06:31] The position I argue for, and Misquoting Jesus does not actually stand at odds with Professor, Professor Metzger's position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variance in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. In other words, Barth's saying that his entire book was really based on a false premise. His entire book was trying to get people to think that we don't have an accurate copy of the New Testament. But when he's interviewed in the second edition, he says, you know, we really do have an accurate copy.

Frank Turek [01:07:05] And so I'm wondering if the book should have been called Misquoting Ehrman, because to call it Misquoting Jesus is, by Barth's own admission, not the case. And by the way, in order to know if somebody was misquoted, you'd have to know what the right quote was.

Frank Turek [01:07:19] How would you know someone was misquoted unless you knew what the right quote was? You couldn't. So if you push Bart Ehrman into a corner, he will admit that the New Testament documents that we hold today are the same New Testament documents that were written down 2000 years ago.

John Dehlin [01:07:35] Okay, thanks for that. I'll just say, and Frank, you know, I want to find a way to say this diplomatically, but I engage in a lot of apologetic discourse within Mormonism, and there's a discussion around these sorts of things that tries to.

John Dehlin [01:08:00] That tries to stay around the facts, that tries to stay around the evidence, that tries to be as objective and as fair minded as possible. And I think you both are doing that. So I'm not claiming that you're not. But for me, apologetics and Mormonism quickly can slide into, you know, mean spiritedness, nastiness, even ad hominem attacks, attempts to discredit, you know, the authors, et cetera. And again, I'm not saying that you just did that, but I wanted to say that as you started talking, I just started to remember some of my less pleasant interactions with Mormon apologists. And I'm curious whether you guys have that same sort of dynamic in the sort of secular Christian debates, because I don't ever want to do that to Bart.

Frank Turek [01:08:50] No, no, no, I'm not saying that

John Dehlin [01:08:52] you're doing that, but I started to have flashbacks of my interactions with Mormon Apologists. And I want to make sure we don't do that here. Does that make sense?

Frank Turek [01:09:00] Well, if I come across as too strong, this is, this is, this is me. This is how I present. I feel strongly about this stuff because I actually think that the book Misquoting Jesus, by Barth's own admission, if you look at. Don't take my word.

John Dehlin [01:09:17] We heard your argument. We heard your argument.

Frank Turek [01:09:18] Okay. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:09:19] I just want to make sure that. And I'm not even calling you to account, I'm just stating something I haven't stated yet, which is let's try and keep this to the evidence and the facts and not, you know, ad hominem or not.

Frank Turek [01:09:33] Well, I hope I didn't do that.

John Dehlin [01:09:34] No, just going forward, but I think you're adding an important point of view to the conversation, so I just wanted to stick that. Is that okay?

Frank Turek [01:09:45] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:09:45] Okay.

Mike Licona [01:09:45] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:09:46] Okay.

Frank Turek [01:09:47] If I, if I go over the top, let me know.

John Dehlin [01:09:48] Okay. Well, just do your best to self monitor in that regard. That we're just, we're sticking to as best we can, the discussion of the scholarship.

Mike Licona [01:09:57] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:09:58] But, but, but again, I'm grateful for your contributions. I don't want you to feel like I'm like calling you to account, but I just.

Frank Turek [01:10:04] No, that's fine.

John Dehlin [01:10:05] Okay. All right, so I think we've made it clear that you guys. So, so just, just to circle back to you, Mike, is it your position again that Luke wrote Luke, Mark wrote Mark, Matthew wrote Matthew, and John wrote John? Is there anything to this idea in your perspective that Barth advances, that they were written many years after, probably by other people who ascribed names to the documents or authors to the document, but it wasn't originally authored by them. And doesn't he list historical events that were written into the text that would have happened after the various authors died, which to him would mean that they couldn't have written it?

Mike Licona [01:10:51] Yeah, there are some things that. There are some things that he claims along those ways. So for example, the story about the Jewish leaders coming up to Jesus and saying, or like let's say with Nicodemus, right. He comes up to Nicodemus and says, except a man be born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

Mike Licona [01:11:16] And that that term anothen from again or above, it means both, has a dual meaning there, which is not present in the Aramaic which Jesus and Nicodemus would most certainly have been speaking in that language. And so he claims that that whole story about Jesus and Nicodemus talking in John chapter three was invented it never happened. To that I would just simply say, well, he is right that there is no equivalent in the Aramaic. And I would also say that he's probably right that they spoke in Aramaic and not the Greek that we find in John, chapter three. But it doesn't take into account that John is writing loosely, a loose paraphrase.

Mike Licona [01:12:02] And he is restating things in his own idiom, which is Greek, and his own way of saying things. And as we find with Lucian saying in his little book, how to Write History, which he writes in the middle of the second century, as we find Thucydides and Polybius discussing about writing speeches, you can take the speech and you can rewrite it in your own words and show off your oratorial skills. You want to communicate the same message, but you can rewrite it in your own words. And we find Tacitus, the greatest of the Roman historians, doing just this on a speech that I think it was Claudius Caesar who had made accepting people up in Lugdunum, which is current France.

Mike Licona [01:12:48] They have a bronze plaque that they discovered up there, which is a verbatim transcript of what Claudius had said back in the 40s. And then we have Witacidus, how he repeats it. And his speech is longer and it is more ornate, polished, but it communicates the same thoughts. So John could have just taken the as things were recalled in that conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus and recast it in the same sense. So in terms of the Gospels, I disagree with Barth when he says that we have no idea who wrote them. I think we have some decent ideas.

Mike Licona [01:13:29] I hold to the traditional authorship of Mark, that a guy named Mark heard directly from Peter and wrote down what he recalled Peter teaching. I do hold to the traditional authorship of Luke, that he was a traveling companion of the apostle Paul who received his information from Mark as his primary source. And some other sources, perhaps that Q source and some special material that Luke knew from either eyewitnesses or those who knew them.

Mike Licona [01:14:00] I'm not sure what I hold regarding John's Gospel. Over the years, I've held to the traditional authorship that it was John, the son of Zebedee. At this point, I lean in that direction, but I am open to it being a minor disciple of Jesus or someone getting their information from one of Jesus disciples. Matthew's a little fuzzy. I don't really know what's going on there, but I do think, you know, if I were to provide reasons, I could, but I don't want to take up too much time. I do think that Matthew was played a major role in the composition of that gospel, okay?

Audience Questions and Halfway Check-In

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 1003

John Dehlin [00:00:31] All right, we're halfway done, and then I've got some other questions, but you guys are being great, so thank you. So far, listeners, please feel free to post questions or comments. We've still got a lot of people tuning in, so don't hesitate to ask questions or comments. Okay, so let me ask. You know, the evangelical Christians, the Baptists that I grew up with, for example, held to this idea that the Bible was perfect, that it was the inerrant word of God, that unchangeable, mighty, flawless, perfect, etc. And so, you know, they would not agree that there were any flaws or problems or blemishes at all. It was the perfect, unrefined word of God. I'll ask you first, Mike, Is that how you see the Bible? The New Testament?

Mike Licona [00:01:20] I'd be happy to comment on that, but that's probably more of Frank's area than mine. But I'm happy to comment on it, but maybe I'd just rather supplement what Frank says, if that's okay with you.

John Dehlin [00:01:31] All right, Frank, you get to go first on this one.

Frank Turek [00:01:33] Well, I think that we can all acknowledge there are areas of the Bible we don't understand and there are differences, as Barth rightly brought up in your interview with him. You know how many who got to the tomb first? What was the order? He said, compare the resurrection accounts and you'll see differences. And that's true, you will see differences.

Frank Turek [00:01:53] But I don't think that creates any problem for the Christian, because I think that's what you should expect when you see eyewitness testimony. Any judge who has two eyewitnesses, and he comes, these eyewitnesses come into his courtroom and give word for word testimony about all the details. That judge is immediately going to say, hey, these people were in collusion. What they agree on is the overall big picture fact, like there was a resurrection. What they may disagree on, or at least report differently, is who got to the tomb first and in what order. That is what you should expect. You know, I did a little research, John, recently into this.

Frank Turek [00:02:32] Is there a way. Hang on a second. Let me see if I can even do this. I don't know if I can do this. I want to show a couple of pictures, if possible. Could I share my screen for as long as it's.

John Dehlin [00:02:44] As long as it's addressing this question?

Frank Turek [00:02:46] Yeah, it is. It's addressing the question. Hang on a second. Let me just find. Hold on. I got too many things open here. Let me share this.

Apparent Contradictions and Bible Inerrancy

John Dehlin [00:03:02] Okay. I see Titanic sinks.

Frank Turek [00:03:04] There you Go. Titanic. Now I got to find it on my screen. Hold on, I'll read it.

John Dehlin [00:03:10] Titanic sinks 1500. Dye Carpenter picks up 675 out of. I'm reading it for the listeners who are only listening by audio. Right?

Frank Turek [00:03:19] Yeah, I can see it now. Titanic sinks 1500 die. This is April 16, 1912. That's from the Boston Globe. New York Times says Titanic sinks four hours after hitting an iceberg. Oh, they got 866 rescued. The last one had 675 rescued.

Frank Turek [00:03:37] Probably 1250 perished. That's what the New York Times says. The Newark Advocate says that 130 or 1341 lives are lost. So we started with 1500. We went to 1288. Now we're at 1341. And then you go over to the Washington Post, it says, now 1,800 souls are lost and only 675 are saved.

Frank Turek [00:03:59] So I guess we can't agree that the Titanic sank then because we have these different accounts. No, that wouldn't be our conclusion. Our conclusion would be that we can agree the Titanic sank. They all agree that the Titanic sank. They may disagree over some details, like how many people died. In fact, we don't even know today how many people died because there were some problems with the manifest. But the point here is, is that this is what you get when you get eyewitness testimony. You get different accounts. They all agree on the major event, the Titanic sank. They disagree on maybe how many died, and they even disagree on how it sank.

Frank Turek [00:04:39] You know, some eyewitnesses said it broke in two before it sank. Others said that it went down hole. We later discovered through archaeology when we found the wreck that it did break in two. And it could have been that one person who said it didn't break in two, just had a bow shot of it and couldn't see it break before it went down. That may have been just a different perspective, but they all agree it sank. And I guess the point here is, is that all the New Testament documents agree there was a resurrection. They may disagree over minor details as to who got there first and how all this happened, but they agree on the major event. And that's really the point here. If the resurrection occurred, then Christianity is true. If it didn't occur, of course it's not true.

John Dehlin [00:05:19] Okay? And, you know, that makes sense. And I think reasonable people are going to say, okay, that makes sense. I guess the one thing. What if somebody were to say, yeah, but these different newspapers don't claim to be the inerrant word of God, they're basically saying, we're a newspaper operation. We have reporters that are human and they're reporting what they know to the best of their ability. They're not claiming this is God's word and you need to base your life on it because it comes from the master of the universe who's omnipotent, omnipresent, omnipowerful. Does that make sense?

Frank Turek [00:05:57] Right? Yeah. Let me say that it doesn't need to be the inerrant word of God. You're an angel now, John. That's too much, son. Okay, go the other way. There you go. That's better. I believe it's the inerrant word of God, but it doesn't need to be the inerrant word of God for Christianity to be true. In fact, I know it's going to sound shocking for, for some of your listeners, but the New or Christianity is not true because a series of documents we call the New Testament says it's true.

Frank Turek [00:06:32] Christianity is true because an event occurred. In fact, Christianity did not originate with a book. Christianity originated with an event. Christianity would be true if the book never existed. Now, we wouldn't know much about Christianity without these documents that we put in one book we now call the New Testament. But the point here is there were thousands of Christians before a line of the New Testament was ever written.

Frank Turek [00:07:03] I mean, obviously Paul's a Christian before he writes all of his letters. The writers of the Gospels are all Christians before they write their Gospels. The other writers are Christians before they write. Why? Because they witnessed an event.

John Dehlin [00:07:14] Okay, I got that. So if you're using a newspaper to prove your point and the newspapers have errors between them, then it would follow that you're saying that the New Testament can have errors.

Frank Turek [00:07:30] The New Testament could have errors. I don't think it does. I think many of these problems are reconcilable and maybe others aren't at this point. But that's true in the natural world, too.

John Dehlin [00:07:41] And I'm. And this isn't me being argumentative, but I'm just going to be direct. If you look at just the sign above Jesus's cross, it's different across all four Gospels, right? But it can't mutually have been the same. It can't. It can't. You know, it can't have been four different things. It had to have been one thing. Whatever the sign was above Jesus cross, it only said one thing, not four different things. So that alone seems to suggest that the Bible could have words that are wrong, right?

Frank Turek [00:08:16] It could, yeah. It could. You're absolutely right.

John Dehlin [00:08:18] It does that. It does that. It has to. Just that.

Frank Turek [00:08:20] Well, not necessarily, because there may have been partial accounts. If you take everything that was said about the sign, and I'm doing this from memory, I don't have it in front of me right now. But if it may have been that each different person had a different aspect of that sign up there, or maybe there were different signs at different. We don't know. I have to go look. In fact, there's a book that my co author wrote. I have it on my shelf.

John Dehlin [00:08:45] But I'm guessing. But I'm guessing, Mike, you deferred on this because it's not in the purview of a scholarly question, is that right?

Mike Licona [00:08:54] Well, it's more of a theological one. And personally, I'm open to errors being there. It wouldn't bother me if there were errors in the Bible because I agree with Frank. Insofar as if Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true. Period. Even if there were errors in the Gospels. Errors in the Bible. Okay. That said, I would explain. Now, I think really I can only name maybe a handful of items in the Gospels that I think have a reasonable chance of being an error. I don't know if they are or they're not. I don't know that we can know whether they are or not. So I do think the Gospels are historically reliable. I think they're divinely inspired. Do they have some errors in some minor details? Maybe yes, maybe no. It doesn't matter to me.

John Dehlin [00:09:45] In your culture, in your profession, is there a risk to you saying flat out I believe that there are errors in the New Testament?

Mike Licona [00:09:54] Could that there's a risk in my cult, in the evangelical world, there's a risk for saying what I just said. And I. And I've gotten in trouble with many evangelicals. I've been blackballed from conferences and so forth just for saying what I said right there.

Mike Licona [00:10:10] But I'm trying to be honest and take an honest look at this thing. And I tell my students at Houston Baptist University that our view of Scripture should be in accord with what we observe in Scripture, and that we must accept the Gospels and submit to them as God has given them to us, rather than forcing them into a frame of how we think he should have. And if we fail to do this, we may claim to have a high view of Scripture when in reality we have a high view of our view of Scripture.

Mike Licona [00:10:41] Now, in terms of this, the plaque on the cross and the different wording, the way I Would explain. That is, my study of gospel differences takes me to compositional textbooks that were written in the first century by people like Elias, Theon and Quintilian. Theon in Greek, Quintilian in Latin. Afterward you have Athonius and some Hermogenes and some others who wrote compositional textbooks. And basically these included exercises, writing exercises for the elite, children of the elite who were in their teens. It was their secondary and tertiary education, and it would tell them how to write. And you had these exercises on how to paraphrase. And the way you'd paraphrase is you'd add some thought, or it would have to be a true thought, but you could add in order to clarify, to provide more information, or you could subtract in order to abbreviate.

Mike Licona [00:11:40] Or you could change the syntax, just the grammar of things. Or you could change a statement to a question, a question to a command. Or you could take a teaching and change that into a dialogue. And we find all of these things happening in the Gospels. So when it comes to the. What's going on across, I suppose one of them is subtracting, one of them is adding. One of them is just giving us a gist of what it said, whether it's the they were told, do not repeat things verbatim. And Suetonius is sometimes chided for doing just that. He repeats some things verbatim or near verbatim.

Mike Licona [00:12:17] When we come to the New Testament, when you compare how Matthew and Luke use Mark, they stick closer to their sources in a more verbatim manner than we find Josephus or Plutarch or Tacitus or other historians of that day doing. And that's because the good writer in antiquity was supposed to paraphrase and to alter. And I think that could easily account for why the differences on the way the wording on the plaque on the cross is. It has nothing to do with being an error. What we are reading is the gist of what it said. What we are reading is the gist of what Jesus said. It's an essentially faithful representation of what he said. It's not verbatim.

John Dehlin [00:13:02] What about the account of Judas, Judas, Death? I remember being bugged about that when I was studying the Bible in seminary in high school. In one verse, he's hung, in another verse he falls. He's running along a field and he falls and his bowels gush out. I've heard people make the argument that maybe he got hung and then the rope broke and then he fell on a rock and then his bowels gushed out. Is that for you? Do you have an opinion on that? On the death of Judas?

Mike Licona [00:13:37] Yeah. My opinion would be it may be possible to reconcile the two, and it may be one of those items that I could count on one hand that has a reasonable chance of being in error. One of them being wrong.

John Dehlin [00:13:50] Yeah, but I guess none of us know for sure, so. Right. So you can't really take a position, but you're okay if it's.

Mike Licona [00:13:57] If one of them's wrong? I'm okay with that. It doesn't mean Judas didn't die. It just probably means that, you know, some different report was going around at the time and, you know, one of them was chosen by Matthew and one was chosen by Luke and. Or maybe it just wasn't known. I don't. I don't know. But it doesn't change the fact that Judas committed suicide or that Jesus rose from the dead. If Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true, period.

John Dehlin [00:14:29] I think the fear comes when people base their lives on not just the religious text, but on interpretations of the religious text. And of course, we have so many different religious traditions with different interpretations. Even you two don't share the same interpretations of the religious text. And so if you take any core Christian doctrine or things like, you know, something about slave owning or something about women staying silent in the church, you know, if that was God, that's a very different thing than if it was an heir of man. And so I think that's where this really, the rubber meets the road is how reliable is the text being the word of God versus how much of it is potentially just cultural artifacts of the time or even errors. And how would anyone know? You know what I'm saying?

Mike Licona [00:15:25] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:26] Did you understand that concern?

Mike Licona [00:15:29] It's a tough question, for sure. I mean, I've got some thoughts on it, but I'll pass the baton to Frank.

John Dehlin [00:15:33] Frank?

Frank Turek [00:15:35] Yeah. I was just going to say that I think that inerrancy is a conclusion, John. It's not a premise. It shouldn't be a premise, should be a conclusion. The reason that I think inerrancy is true is because I think the documents are reliable enough to tell us what Jesus thought about the Scripture. And Jesus, speaking of the Old Testament, said that it couldn't be broken. He said, your word is truth. He said, why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? He said that to the pharisees in Matthew 15. He said to them, you're in error because you don't know the Scriptures or the power of God.

Frank Turek [00:16:09] He said that to the Pharisees, it would have been odd for him to say, pharisees, you're in error because you don't know the Scriptures, which are also in error. And he promised the New Testament. So it's not like it's an inductive process where we look at every verse in the New Testament and say it's all without error. You just brought up there were questions on some of them.

Frank Turek [00:16:32] What we do is we look at what Jesus taught about it. And we said that. We said that he had a very high view of Scripture. And so I just have a personal policy. You know, if somebody rises from the dead, I just believe whatever the guy says.

Frank Turek [00:16:49] And so if Jesus rises from the dead, I'm going to trust him. It was Augustine many years ago who said that if he said, if we're perplexed by any apparent contradiction in Scripture, it's not allowable to say the author of this book is mistaken. But either the manuscript is faulty, the translation is wrong, or you have not understood. I think if the Scriptures are in error, that's a good way of taking. Or without error, that's a good way of looking at the situation. Is there a faulty manuscript here? Do I not understand the translation, or am I just not understanding something that I ought to understand later if I had more time to research it?

John Dehlin [00:17:31] Or as Mike was willing to say, maybe there's an error.

Frank Turek [00:17:35] Maybe.

John Dehlin [00:17:36] Yeah.

Frank Turek [00:17:36] Yeah. Unless Jesus is right, then there aren't heirs.

John Dehlin [00:17:40] Because you're saying Jesus said there's no heirs to what?

Frank Turek [00:17:44] To the Old Testament. Okay, that's what he appears to be saying. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:17:48] Okay. Okay, cool. Well, that was all a whole premise to the. The fourth point that we had with Barth, which is that important contradictions exist between the four gospels of the New Testament. And so, Mike, you've already kind of addressed this. Maybe either of you remember the examples that Bart gave in my interview with him or other examples? You could probably represent Bart's, you know, Barth's evidence of important contradictions. Mike, do you, you know, what would you. You highlighted maybe one. But do you know what Bart widow highlighted sort of some of the most important contradictions in. If you haven't already mentioned them. And if so, do you agree or do you disagree?

Mike Licona [00:18:34] Well, I know I've heard. I'm not sure I know what he would say are the most important contradictions. I would think that. I know that I've heard him say about all the differences in the Passion narratives in terms of Jesus's crucifixion as well as his resurrection, you know. Was Jesus crucified at 9am as Mark says, or was it just after 12 noon, as John says?

Mike Licona [00:18:57] Did Jesus carry his cross all the way as John portrays? Or did Simon of Cyrene help him, as the synoptics portray? Did the temple, when he was crucified between two thieves? Did both curse him as Mark portrays? Or did one repent, as Luke portrays? Did the temple veil split before Jesus death as Luke has it? Or was it after Jesus death as Matthew and Mark have it?

Mike Licona [00:19:25] You know, how many women went to the tomb? Was it still light or was it dark out? How many angels did they see? Where did. To whom did Jesus first appear? Where did he first appear? Was it Galilee or Jerusalem? And how long did he stay with them? So these are all certain differences in the Gospels.

Mike Licona [00:19:43] I do think that most of them can be explained. In fact, I found over 50 pages of gospel differences when I was doing my research on it. And I'm convinced that in the high 90 percentile of those can be reasonably explained and probably the probable, not just the plausible, but the probable solution is to understand that the gospel authors are employing compositional devices which was part and parcel of writing ancient biography. Things like compressing an account, displacing one event from one chronological context and transplanting it in another in order to make a certain point, transferring what one person said to put on the lips of another in order to simplify the account.

Mike Licona [00:20:36] Literary spotlighting. When you shine your literary spotlight on a single character, as though that's the only person there when you're aware that others are present. So there's all these different compositional divine that ancient authors were taught to do in addition to these compositional textbooks I mentioned. And when you read the Gospels in view of Those, more than 90% of the gospel differences just vanish. They disappear. When you understand how ancient biographies were written. Now, some of them still remain. There are a few of them that I cannot explain. I just don't have an explanation for them.

John Dehlin [00:21:11] What are the biggest ones that would be, you think, worth mentioning?

Mike Licona [00:21:16] Well, I think one of the biggest ones is the as the location of the feeding of the 5,000, or where Jesus directed his disciples to go afterward. Another one would be the chronology in the infancy narratives. Another one would be where did Jesus first appear to the women after his resurrection? Was it at the tomb with Mary Magdalene, or was it when the women were running back Mary and another Mary was running back from the tomb?

Mike Licona [00:21:41] And I thought I had it understood where Jesus first resurrection appearance was, but I'm not. To the male disciples. But I'm not so sure now. But I do think, whereas I'm open to error when it comes to the location of the feeding of the 5,000 or what happened afterward, the location of that, where they were directed to go.

Mike Licona [00:22:06] I do think that there is some sort of literary thing that's intentional that's going on behind the infancy narratives. Maybe Luke is really compressing things. And the resurrection narratives about what happened to the appearance, to the women and where the first appearance was. My guess, it was probably in Jerusalem, if I had to bet on it. And then they went to Galilee. And that mark followed by Matthew compresses the account and places the first appearance in Galilee. But I'm uncertain. There are just some things, and I think those are the biggest ones, and they don't really change a thing in terms of whether Jesus rose from the dead and appeared, or whether he was born of a virgin or whether he fed the 5,000 and walked on water. But those are ones that I just. I think there are some of the biggest ones.

John Dehlin [00:22:56] And that's. And that's something that Mormonism, frankly, is dealing with. The more orthodox and rigid the theology, the more fundamentalist, maybe we'd say you get, and the more literal then the more rigid the. Proposition becomes. Because if it has to be perfect and then you find flaws, well, then it's either all or nothing. It's either perfect or you throw it out.

Mike Licona [00:23:26] Yeah, but that doesn't follow, does it?

John Dehlin [00:23:28] What do you mean it doesn't follow?

Mike Licona [00:23:30] If it's not perfect, you throw it out. What do we do? What do we.

John Dehlin [00:23:33] That's what, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying that within Mormonism, we're wrestling with that. To what extent do we need Joseph Smith to be perfect and the Book of Mormon to be perfect? Or can the Book of Mormon not even be a historical document? Can it just be, you know, inspired, you know, proverbs or even historical fiction? It's just a very important case. And what I. It's. It's an important question how literal things and how historical things need to be. And I can tell you that the way Mormonism is moving is away from a requirement towards literality and historicity and more and more towards a tolerance for, and even an advocating for more metaphysical, more metaphorical, more symbolic, you know, more. More of a value of myth or, or of, you know, symbolic truth, not just physical literal truth. And it sounds like you guys have some Same dynamics in your tradition.

Mike Licona [00:24:34] Yeah. The difference, I think, would be, however,

John Dehlin [00:24:38] that

Mike Licona [00:24:40] you would have to look at Joseph Smith. His authorial intent. Was he intending to communicate that this was an actual history of what happened here in north or Central America, wherever you want to put it, and what happened? Were the Book of Mormon people supposed to be historical people, and did he mean to communicate the Book of Mormon was actual history? It seems to me, from what I've understood, that he did, and that would be problematic for Mormons. Whereas these gospel differences, things we're talking about, this is just. I mean, these are compositional devices like we use today. Like, if I. If I told you, if you said, hey, Mike, we only have 28 minutes left on the show, whatever it is, I just pulled that number.

Mike Licona [00:25:24] Okay, but let's just say that's it. Got 28 minutes. And then my wife texts me in the background. She says, when will you be done? And I said, I'll be done. I'll be done in about half an hour.

Mike Licona [00:25:35] Or this is going to take a while longer, or give me an hour. You know, that's not all contradictions, or especially if I'm using idioms like, hey, just give me a second. Well, that'll take forever. Those aren't contradictions.

Mike Licona [00:25:49] If we understand the linguistic idioms and how things are communicated, if we do that with the Gospels, like I said, more than 90% of the gospel differences just vanish.

John Dehlin [00:25:58] Got it. And for you, none of the remaining significant ones threaten the core questions, which are around the resurrection and. And those sorts of things. Frank, anything you want to add real quick?

Frank Turek [00:26:13] Well, I just want to sympathize with what you said about Mormonism with regard to. It's almost like we can take it like a house of cards, you know, if you find one error, then the whole whole thing crumbles. And I think a lot of Christians take it that way, too. That's why I said earlier that there were thousands of Christians before line of the New Testament was ever written. You could be a Christian without even having a New Testament because it's based on an event, it's not based on. It didn't originate with a book. It originated with an event. So even if the book, we later learn has some minor errors in it, and as I agree with Mike, I don't think there are.

Frank Turek [00:26:49] But if there are, even if that's the case, that doesn't invalidate the bigger question that you just brought up, that Jesus rose from the dead. So I think as Christians, we have to communicate to our own community, that inerrancy is a conclusion, a theological conclusion. It's not a premise. You don't have to have people jump over the high bar of inerrancy to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

John Dehlin [00:27:11] Got it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's cool. The last question that. Okay, this is particularly true with Mormonism. So in Mormonism, we're taught that the most correct book, Joseph Smith was once quoted as saying, the Book of Mormon is the most perfect book on the face of the earth.

John Dehlin [00:27:31] And it's also written into what we call our Articles of Faith, historically, that the Book of Mormon is the word of God, but the Bible is the word of God as far as it is translated correctly. And the narrative that Mormons are taught is that because maybe the original manuscripts of the Bible were accurate and of God or God's word, but over time, you know, we're taught that Catholic priests got a hold of it and, you know, Protestants and all these figures in the, you know, across time and through translation, through, you know, people's own different varying ways to translate through handing it down over generations, that plain and precious and important teachings and doctrines from the Bible got lost and perverted.

John Dehlin [00:28:27] And that's one of the main reasons God needed to produce the Book of Mormon, because the Bible had become kind of corrupted. And this. This flies well with. With what we, you know, with what I remember Bart Ehrman saying, which is that the New Testament, you know, was assembled in a way and has been altered over time in a way to where that's introduced error and problems and contradictions into the text.

John Dehlin [00:28:55] I could guess what both of you are going to say, but, Mike, I'll just give you a chance to give a direct answer. What would your response to that be? That the way the book has been translated over time and passed down has introduced flaws and problems. True or false?

Mike Licona [00:29:11] Well, I'd say false, and I think Ehrman would say false. In fact, Ehrman has said false. I don't have the direct quote. I could dig it up if you really want it. But he said that given the textual criticism and the principles that textual critics like Ehrman and Dan Wallace and others go by, that we can come up with a text, he says that most scholars would agree with, that we can come up with a text that is essentially pure, though not, perhaps not perhaps not 100% so pure to what the original said. So even Ehrman, who considers himself an agnostic atheist, who is one of the top textual critics in the world today, according to what Dan Wallace told me, he acknowledges that the text in the New Testament we have today is very accurate to what was originally written.

Mike Licona [00:30:05] The matter of translation is different than transmission, of course. And the manuscript thing is the transmission translation is just taking what the Hebrew and Greek texts, critical Greek and Hebrew texts say and translating them into English. Now, I don't read Hebrew, but I do read Greek. And I can tell you that the English translations that we have today are pretty accurate. Some are more accurate than others, but they're very accurate in terms of getting across what the text in the original language is saying.

Frank Turek [00:30:39] I don't want to risk. I don't want to risk what, Mike?

Mike Licona [00:30:44] Just one other thing then. So good. If the Mormon Church's argument is that's why the Book of Mormon was needed, because the text of the Bible got corrupted over years, and even if since nearly every scholar who studies textual Chrism is going to say the text that we have today is an essentially faithful representation of the autographs, Even if not 100%, well, then the reason for the Book of Mormon according to the Church is no longer needed.

Frank Turek [00:31:20] I don't want to risk my firepower because.

John Dehlin [00:31:22] Why?

Mike Licona [00:31:23] Well, because the text of the New Testament that we have today is essentially what was actually or originally written.

Frank Turek [00:31:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:31:30] So you're saying that the premise is wrong?

Mike Licona [00:31:32] Yeah, I mean, Ehrman would contend that the text of the New Testament is true, and he would say it had been embellished before it got put into the text, which I disagree with. But the argument of the Mormon Church is that the text itself was corrupted. And Ehrman would say, no way.

John Dehlin [00:31:55] But I do think that he made an argument that the way the New Testament is assembled and changed over time introduced error.

Mike Licona [00:32:04] What do you mean assembled? Are you talking about canonicity?

Frank Turek [00:32:07] Now?

John Dehlin [00:32:08] You would probably know better than I would.

Mike Licona [00:32:09] I mean, are you talking about the choice of the books to be put into the New Testament, or are you actually talking about how Mark was passed around and changed over time? What is the Mormon Church actually saying there?

John Dehlin [00:32:22] Oh, I'm more talking about Barth's arguments, which I think you would know better than I would.

Frank Turek [00:32:28] I think he may have said, because I watched it earlier today, John, that as with every book from the ancient world, we're relying on copies of copies and that kind of thing. But he agreed that most variants are not significant. That's why I read that quote earlier in the firebrand way I did, that even he admits that the textual variants don't affect essential teachings of the New Testament documents. I think that's the point you were making Mike. But to relate this to Mormonism, if I remember correctly, correct me if I'm wrong, John. I think Joseph Smith said that he prayed James 1:5 to get wisdom, because James 1:5 says, if you want wisdom, pray and God will give it to you.

Frank Turek [00:33:12] Then he got the wisdom that this new revelation would correct the errors of the. Of the earlier church. But why would he trust James 1:5 if he thinks that the scripture's been corrupted? He appeared to be taking for the

John Dehlin [00:33:24] same reason that Mike would say that he could still believe in a New Testament that potentially had errors. He could say the errors that are in there aren't important and the core stuff still is true.

Mike Licona [00:33:36] That's why.

Frank Turek [00:33:38] Okay, yeah, that's fair. He could have done that. But I think Mike and Bart would agree, and I would agree, obviously, that the New Testament documents have been transmitted adequately. So it hasn't been changed from that perspective. But the other point that Mike made that I want to amplify is Bart may not agree that what the text says is actually true. And that's actually the bigger question. Right? That's really the bigger question. Do we have an accurate copy? Yes. But do we have a copy of the truth or a copy of a lie? And maybe we can deal with that question a little bit.

John Dehlin [00:34:10] Right. You're getting to the core. Did. Did the resurrection happen?

Frank Turek [00:34:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:16] And was Jesus the son of God? Right.

Frank Turek [00:34:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:20] Okay, well, let's. Let's go there. Is that all right?

Frank Turek [00:34:23] That's fine with me.

Recommended Resources on the New Testament

John Dehlin [00:34:24] Okay.

Mike Licona [00:34:25] I do have a quote from Ehrman. I just found it.

John Dehlin [00:34:27] Okay.

Mike Licona [00:34:28] It's a short one, one, one sentence. In spite of these remarkable textual differences, scholars are convinced that we can reconstruct the original words of the New Testament with reasonable, although probably not 100% accuracy. And that quote comes from. Excuse me, I'm a 57 year old. So that comes from his book the New A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, third edition, page 481.

John Dehlin [00:35:04] And I was going to guess, Mike, that your response would be maybe some errors get introduced, but no important ones, you know?

Frank Turek [00:35:11] Right.

Mike Licona [00:35:12] In the transmission of the text. Right, right. Himself acknowledges that.

John Dehlin [00:35:17] Okay, so this has been great so far. We've got, let's just say, 15 to 30 minutes left. Let's shift gears, if that's okay. And now what I want to do, Mike, is I want to give you permission to take off your scholarly hat, because I want you now to play the role of believer and not of scholar. Okay. Because I'm going to ask you questions not about scholarship. Now, I'm going to ask you both questions about just belief. Is that okay?

Mike Licona [00:35:46] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:35:47] Are you comfortable doing that, Mike?

Mike Licona [00:35:48] Yeah, I don't think they're mutually exclusive.

John Dehlin [00:35:50] Excellent. Okay, so. So let's just start with God, right? I've got this theory, you know, with the stuff that I've been. People that I've talked to and the work that I've been doing to think about it. I've got this theory that man, women, we have these sophisticated brains that allow us to ask these deep questions like, who am I? Why am I here?

Why Do People Believe in God?

John Dehlin [00:36:21] When someone dies, it makes us sad. We wonder what happened to them, if we'll ever see them again. And my best guess, if I had to create a secular explanation for religion, it's that with death, with suffering, with love, with complex human thought, that humans get sad and are unhappy when they just think that maybe life doesn't have some explicit purpose, that life just ends when we die, that I'll never see my loved ones again.

John Dehlin [00:36:51] And so the way religion gets formed is that some wise or even conniving or dishonest person comes around and says, well, I noticed that people around me are really tormented or, you know, are wanting some sort of answer about what happens when we die and what's all the purpose and meaning of this, and why is there suffering and how should I live?

John Dehlin [00:37:15] And so humans rise up to try and answer these questions. And usually they claim that they got their answers from a divine source because the average person doesn't have direct communication with the divine. And so these people claim it. And by claiming it, they get a following, because so many humans are eager to get these questions answered so that they can not suffer as much, but instead have a set of beliefs or theology that makes them feel better. And that's kind of how all religions are born.

John Dehlin [00:37:52] And different leaders arise, having different interpretations, a little bit different doctrine, a little bit theology. Or in the case of. Within Christianity, you have different people with different interpretations of the text. And that's why you have Lutherans and Methodists and Catholics and Baptists and Mormons, because you've got all these different people claiming some sort of divine access and then some sort of privileged interpretation, and that this is where religion comes from and it's why we have so many religions.

Frank Turek [00:38:25] And it.

John Dehlin [00:38:25] And it really goes down to this fact that nobody can really prove that there is a God. The best they can do is either claim to have some experience that isn't replicable, or they can claim to have had these feelings, but then we have different people having different feelings, which then leads to a lot of different people claiming truth based on feelings which isn't replicable. So I'll start with you, Mike. If someone were to say maybe God does or doesn't exist, but there's no way to prove it in any way that's replicable. And instead it's more reasonable using Occam's razor, to just sort of say different people are making up or claiming divine, you know, divine experiences, but in reality none of it's really reliable. What would you say to that general sort of line of thinking, Mike? Do you sympathize with it? Because it sounds like you did for a few decades.

Mike Licona [00:39:27] I empathize with it with some of that. But I would respond and say that there are a lot of fictional accounts of romances. Romance novels, romance movies, 50 Shades of Gray, things like that. Why do we have so many fictitious novels and movies? Does that mean that we cannot experience true romance or that true romance is unattainable because of all the fictitious accounts? No, all the fictitious accounts simply show is that. And you would know this more than me, since you have a PhD in counseling, that romance is a deep longing of the human heart. We just can't seem to get enough of it. And so there are a lot of things, romantic novels and movies, out on romance, and I'd say the same thing when it comes to religion, that most people have a deep longing to know that their life has meaning that goes beyond themselves.

Mike Licona [00:40:31] They have a deep longing, especially when a loved one dies or they get up in old age themselves. They don't want to think that this is the end of things. They want to think that they're going to see their loved ones again, that they're going to continue to live.

Mike Licona [00:40:45] People in countries, even our own, but especially in third world countries where people are unjustly treated, where the politicians and the elite and the rich oppress all the others. And they want to know that there's going to be a reckoning, that God is going to make things just. And so we would expect to find, based on these deep human longings, stories about things like God and recognize resurrections because of an afterlife. But that doesn't mean that when you have an account like Christianity, for which we have really good evidence for God's existence and that Jesus rose from the dead to confirm his claims of divinity, that that can't be true.

Mike Licona [00:41:30] Just because there are all these fictitious accounts that arose and continue to rise based on the longing of the human heart. So that's what I would say in response to that. In terms of actual evidence, that's something that for God's existence, something Frank would know better than me.

John Dehlin [00:41:47] So if I'm going to ask you, Mike, how I, John, how do I know if God exists? What would you tell me to do? I want to know if God exists, but I don't know and he won't speak to me and I can't get any evidence and I don't want to believe somebody else. I don't want to believe just because you tell me, because I. That's how I got into Mormonism in the first place. Right.

Mike Licona [00:42:09] I'd say read Frank's book. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. I mean because they present evidence in their philosophical evidence, evidence from astrophysics and molecular biology. I mean I can give you the evidence, historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. I would also tend to give you some evidence for a spiritual or supernatural dimension of reality, such as some accounts of well evidenced near death experiences. I know there are a lot of them that are bogus or can't be verified, but there are about 200 of them or more that can be corroborated. There's corroborating data and I would look at things like veridical apparitions where an apparition appears to someone and gives them accurate information that turns out being accurate that they could not have otherwise known.

Mike Licona [00:42:59] I would look at evidence for extreme answered prayer and things like paranormal phenomena that has to do with demonic stuff. I could give you some real interesting stories of that. Credible stories. I think the evidence we have of demons. Yeah, if you don't want to call them demons, at least some kind of spirit beings.

Mike Licona [00:43:18] So I think the evidence that there is today for a spiritual or supernatural dimension of reality is so strong that if one really sits down and looks at it objectively, it's hard to walk away and be an atheist and think of yourself as rational.

John Dehlin [00:43:35] I don't understand that. I don't understand that.

Mike Licona [00:43:40] What do you mean?

John Dehlin [00:43:41] I don't understand why the most rational conclusion is that there's a God.

Mike Licona [00:43:46] Well, I just said based on those things for spiritual or supernatural dimension that would seem to overthrow atheism or naturalism.

John Dehlin [00:43:54] But I'm just saying, like you read

Mike Licona [00:43:56] the Resurrection of Jesus, then that really increases the probability of God's existence, don't you think?

John Dehlin [00:44:02] I'm just saying, you read National Enquirer and there's people claiming aliens abducted me and took me up into heaven and of course gave Surgery. And there's. There's so many different people claiming a spiritual witness of their particular religious faith when their religious traditions explicitly contradict the other ones. And so there's so much variability. It just doesn't seem. Relying on feelings just doesn't seem ultimately reliable.

Mike Licona [00:44:32] I agree relying on feelings is not the way to go.

John Dehlin [00:44:36] So feelings.

Mike Licona [00:44:36] I would not rely on feelings.

John Dehlin [00:44:38] But then if it's relying on evidence, why wouldn't everybody just sort of. Why wouldn't most people surround themselves with the most compelling evidence being, in your view, Christianity? Why. Why is. Why is Christianity shrinking as a percentage of the world population?

Mike Licona [00:44:57] Oh, I wouldn't say that it may be shrinking in terms of the percentage of Christians here in the US but it is certainly gaining around the world at amazing numbers, especially as China and India and Muslim countries where the church is being persecuted. It's growing like crazy in some of these countries, what we're hearing from missionaries.

Mike Licona [00:45:24] But in terms of why people look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions, I don't know that everybody's looking at the same evidence, but I would. You know, we said we probably wouldn't talk about politics, and we don't have to. I'll just bring up one thing.

Personal Faith and Evidence for God

Mike Licona [00:45:41] We can look at the same evidence. Take the recent Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Everybody was looking at the same evidence, but their biases really pushed them to one side or the other, typically speaking. And it wasn't necessarily based on evidence that they made their decision. It was based on their political convictions. Now, in some cases, people did.

Mike Licona [00:46:06] They looked at the evidence. In some cases, they didn't care what the evidence was. Okay, but that just shows you how the people can look at the same evidence and arrive at radically different conclusions. And it's because of their horizons, their worldview, their political convictions, their biases.

John Dehlin [00:46:24] Okay, so for you, what. What convinced you that there's a God?

Mike Licona [00:46:30] What.

John Dehlin [00:46:30] What things convinced you that there's a God?

Mike Licona [00:46:33] You know, stuff like what Frank has in his book, some of the scientific evidence for a designer of the universe. I mean, you have radical militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, who freely acknowledges that the universe and life itself really has the appearance that it was designed, that it's the product of a designer. Now he comes up with naturalistic explanations. He prefers that, but he admits it really looks like it was designed. And Francis Cricket, who was an agnostic leaning toward atheism, who discovered DNA. Same thing. He said that it really has the design of life, has the design of being a miracle. It really Appears that way, but he didn't accept that.

Mike Licona [00:47:19] For me, I look at that, I look at the evidence for a designer of the universe in life, and it's the historical evidence for the Jesus, for Jesus resurrection and why I'm still a Christian today. When I look at it as a historian, it's quite compelling.

John Dehlin [00:47:35] Okay, so the philosophical arguments for God. Anything else? Personal witness. You know, in Mormonism, what they do is they get you to read the Book of Mormon and have these discussion with the missionaries, and then you get this warm feeling in your heart, burning in the bosom, they call it. And then they say, see that feeling you're having where you're feeling peace and comfort and tingly feelings and the hair standing up on your arms and you feel this burning inside? That's the Holy Ghost bearing witness that the church is true. That's why you should believe. Is any of your testimony based on that sort of stuff?

Mike Licona [00:48:10] You know, I. I can say that there have been times when I have sensed that I felt intimate with the Lord, that I was fellowshipping with him, that I had really feelings. I felt. Felt really close and intimate.

Mike Licona [00:48:28] But had it not been for the evidence, I would have to say that I would think that I was just convincing myself. But because there is good evidence, in my view, there's really good evidence for the truth of Christianity, then I don't have much reason to doubt the feelings that I have on occasion. But if I had the feelings and didn't have the evidence backing it, well, then, no, I wouldn't trust feelings at that point. Because feelings come and go and sometimes I don't feel close to the Lord. Sometimes I feel like, where are you? I mean, honestly, right now, as we speak, and for the last couple months, I've been going through a dry period.

Mike Licona [00:49:04] I haven't sensed God's presence in my life. And I talked to a prominent Christian theologian named J.I. packer, very, very conservative. And he says he goes through those periods all the time and has through his entire life. So I just don't want to trust feelings. I want to look at evidence. But when I do have those feelings, I think I have a good foundation for them.

John Dehlin [00:49:26] When you do feel those feelings, what are they like?

Mike Licona [00:49:29] Oh, you know, that it's described. My favorite Christian musician is Chris Rice, and he. I think it's like his first or second CD that came out. He talks about, oh, it's one of those days When I walk with you I sense the. I sense the.

Mike Licona [00:49:49] Of angels wings, you know, why, oh, why must this day ever end. And then you come to the next day and it's like, have. Have I gone too far? You know, where are you now? And so it's. I mean, that's the experience of the Christian life at times, but that's feelings. And that's why when my relationship with God, I don't want to put too much weight in those feelings. It's really nice when you have them. It's like, that's where I want to be. I feel like the psalmist that says a single day is better when spent in humble praise than a thousand years of living without you.

Mike Licona [00:50:24] And when I have those days of intimate fellowship with God, it's like, I don't care what else happens. I just love God. I want to remain in this state forever. You know, I don't ever have to leave this house. Just let me feel this way forever. But it doesn't last.

John Dehlin [00:50:43] Hmm. That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing. Frank, how about you? What. What's your belief in God based on?

Frank Turek [00:50:52] Yeah, I'm not a mystical person, John, so I don't often have these feelings that, you know, Mike says you go through dry periods. I do as well. Although there are periods I do feel close to God. But there are three arguments that I talk about in the I Don't have Enough Faith to be an Atheist book. You've heard them before, I'm sure. The beginning of the universe, the design of the universe, and the design of life. And of course, the moral law, that there's a moral standard that must exist in God's nature. Because if there is no God, then there would be no difference between Hitler and, say, Mother Teresa.

Frank Turek [00:51:27] No objective difference. It would just be human opinion, one human opinion against another human opinion. And then I look at other arguments, like the idea that there's an immaterial reality, that we are rational beings. People ask, is there any evidence for God? And sometimes I say, why is there evidence for anything? Why is the universe rational? Why can we ascertain truth about the real world? Why can we come to conclusions in science or philosophy or psychology or biology or whatever we want to talk about? It seems to me because this is a rational world put together by a rational mind. And our minds are built in the nature of the gravity, great mind, so we can ascertain truths about it.

Frank Turek [00:52:06] So I think the evidence for God is stronger than the evidence for Christianity. Why? Because the evidence for Christianity, we have to rely on the testimony of others through these documents that we've been talking about. But the evidence for God is real to us right now. We can ascertain the fact that there was a beginning. We can ascertain that there is design in the universe and design in life, and there's a moral code that we, we know we ought to abide by. And there are these immaterial realities, laws of logic, laws of math, consciousness, all these things that point to a mind.

Frank Turek [00:52:38] And it's true that everybody, regardless of their worldview, either believes that mind came from matter or matter came from mind. Everybody believes in some kind of beginning, some kind of unmoved mover. For atheists, it's the universe. For Christians and other theists, it's God. So ultimately we're going to get back to a first cause. Is the universe the first cause, or is something beyond the universe the first cause? And it seems to me that all the evidence points to something beyond the first cause, something that's immaterial, timeless, spaceless, personal, intelligent, moral.

Frank Turek [00:53:16] And there are many arguments that we don't have time to go through here. But I think once you know that God exists, then if God wants to do a miracle like a resurrection, and he can do so, because if he can do the greatest miracle, the creation of the universe out of nothing, then he can do lesser miracles like a resurrection. Now back to your previous question, John. Why don't more people believe this? I ask. I go to a lot of college campuses and many times atheists will show up and they'll stand at the microphone to ask a question. And there's always one question I ask them and it's this, if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?

Frank Turek [00:53:50] And most of the time the atheist will say no. And then I'll say, wait a minute, you claim to be rational and reasonable. If it were true, would you become a Christian? And you say no. How is that reasonable? It's not because the problem isn't intellectual. The problem is moral or volitional. They don't want it to be true because they want to do their own thing. They don't want there to be a God because they want to be God of their own lives. And I get that half the time I want to be God in my own life too.

John Dehlin [00:54:17] How do you deal with the argument that God created us and so God created those atheists, and so if they're flawed, it's because. And God exists, it's because God created them to be flawed. And so that's on God, not on them.

Frank Turek [00:54:33] Well, it is true that God created them. Well, at least initially. If you believe the biblical account in innocence but through after Adam, we've all been flawed, but he's also provided a way of escape, and that's simply trusting in the sacrifice that he provided. So they freely have the ability to choose that, but they don't. Now, maybe the question is more forcefully stated. Why would God create people he knew would go to hell? Is that the direction you're going in?

John Dehlin [00:54:57] Why would God, as a perfect designer, design people who would end up not choosing to follow him or not believing in him if they were designed by Him?

Frank Turek [00:55:08] Well, because what may be logically possible is not actually achievable all the time. Because if there are free creatures, then by definition, God can't force people to love him because love can never be forced. Love is always a free choice. So God creates all people. He ultimately knows what they're gonna do, but he's under no obligation to stop creation after two people if the third person is not gonna believe in him, not gonna trust in him, because they freely don't believe in Him. So God is ultimately just and he allows people to make free choices. With our freedom, we can love and we can only love with freedom. But on the other hand, we can also do evil and we can also reject God. And God gives us the freedom to do that.

John Dehlin [00:55:55] Yeah, and that's, that's. I've had. I've had discussions with others, and we won't be able to satisfy that question here or ever, really. But I do have a problem with the heavens, this idea of sad heaven where some get in and some don't. And this life is your only shot. And if you don't end up believing a certain set of things by the time you die, and you may die when you're 4, or you may die when you're 10, or you may die when youre 20 or 100. Some are in and some are out, some are burning in hell and others are celebrating with God depending on whether they happen to be in the right context to believe and whether they died at the wrong or right time.

John Dehlin [00:56:35] We're not going to be able to adjudicate that here. But that's something that I struggle with, is just what for me is the injustice of that. And then others are going to say justice is whatever God wants. And that feels tautological to me. Mike, do you have a response to that?

Frank Turek [00:56:51] And I agree with you, John, that that is a problem. But the key word you said was justice. And if it is true that God is just, then by definition there's no way he's going to be unjust in the afterlife, there's nobody that's going to wind up in a place they shouldn't wind up. So while we might not be able to figure out how all this works out in the end, we know that because God is just that there's not going to be an injust or an unjust outcome to any of this.

John Dehlin [00:57:19] Well, that's. Well, that's. You know, I think that's actually what Joseph Smith was kind of going for. And I don't mean to invoke him before I ask this question, but. So in your mind, could someone be born in India, never hear about Jesus, never accept Jesus into their heart because they never heard the word Jesus, die at age 10 and still end up in heaven? Mike, what's your answer to that?

Hell, Salvation, and Unanswered Questions

Frank Turek [00:57:40] Yes, because they're before the age of accountability. Now, if they're after the age of accountability, it's logically possible that they could be saved, because that was the case in the Old Testament, that if they just trust in God, they'll be saved. But scripturally, it seems to be that we have to get them the gospel. Now, there's a couple of possibilities here. It could be that people who never hear the gospel wouldn't have believed it anyway. Right? I mean, that's certainly possible.

John Dehlin [00:58:08] I don't like that. I just think, is that possible? It's no coincidence that most Christians are children of Christians and most Muslims are children of Muslims. And I am just not going to believe that somehow, whoever Muslims or Jews or Zoroastrianisms or whatever, whoever they end up being, there's some inherent flaw in who they are that makes them less inclined to accept Jesus as their Savior. What seems factually obvious to me is that you're likely going to believe what your parents taught you for the most part, and that's going to be the best possible explanation for why most the people end up as Christian. Now, that's not everybody, but I'd say most.

Frank Turek [00:58:55] Well, that goes back to your previous point though, John, when what you're basically saying is that people don't truly seek God. What you're saying is that people just believe whatever the hand they're dealt and they don't question anything.

John Dehlin [00:59:07] No, no, no. I'm just saying that the best explanation for Christian belief is having been raised a Christian. And I'm just saying that for me, a theology, the only Christian theology or doctrine that's interesting is one that has some loophole that allows for even adults who die without accepting Jesus in their heart to have some mechanism for Them to get to heaven versus burning eternal hell. Now, Mike, I've been trying to get you in on this. Can I get you in on this? Do you have a response?

Mike Licona [00:59:38] Yeah. In terms of children, I would probably, you know, the scriptures do not deal with it specifically. So I would look at the character of God as he is portrayed in scriptures. I go to numbers in Deuteronomy where it talks about how the Israelites, they were told to go into the promised land and they sent in the spies, Joshua, Caleb and the others, and they came back and all but Joshua and Caleb said that the Canaanites would just crush him, they'd kill him.

Mike Licona [01:00:11] But Joshua and Caleb said, no, we can take them. So the Israelites failed to go. And so God said, well, there's no plan B. You go back into the wilderness, and all of you, except the families of Moses, Joshua and Caleb, you're all going to die except your little ones, because they didn't know difference between good and evil. So God did not hold them accountable if they weren't able to make a moral decision. And I think that that could account for kids, it could account for the mentally handicapped. People like that. In terms of adults, you have Act 17. My view and how to interpret that has changed over the years.

Mike Licona [01:00:54] The way I currently see that happening is when Paul says that God overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he commands everyone everywhere to repent, having furnished proof through raising his son from the dead. The way I read that, as I understand, is if you're truly seeking God and yet you haven't the evidence, you haven't received the evidence for a resurrection of Jesus and heard the gospel, you know, really heard it, and given a good chance for it, you know, he's going to judge you based on what you do with the information you have received. Now, once you get the gospel and you've heard the evidence, you've heard about the resurrection, you've heard about Jesus saying, you got to follow me.

Mike Licona [01:01:39] Come and be one of my disciples. If you know about Jesus, really know about him, and you reject the message, well, then you're lost. What is Hell like? I'm not sure. There's a couple of different views on hell that are held by Christian theologians. All I would know is, you know, I don't know if a person is going to be burning in it like a Dante's Inferno, but at minimum, it's being quarantined away from God's presence, whether it is for all eternity in a conscious existence or whether it's being annihilated and therefore, after a while, and being away from God's presence or a combination of both, I don't know.

Mike Licona [01:02:20] I'm not sure. Let's just say, you know, I tend right now to think it's conscious, eternal existence. I have to admit, I don't like that idea. I'm with you on that, John. So I want to think annihilation. I do think there's some arguments for that from Scripture, some decent ones, but I think the arguments are better for the conscious existence away from God's presence. What that looks like, I don't know, but I don't want it.

John Dehlin [01:02:46] What about this idea of. I mean, another thing Joseph tried to do was come up with this idea of a spirit prison where you can actually be educated and eventually have your mind changed after you die. And I think what he was trying to do is solve this problem because I think his brother believed one thing, his dad believed another, and he just wants his whole family to be together. And so I think he came up with this idea of progress after you die, because I think that there's something to the fact that man, if it's just.

John Dehlin [01:03:20] Let's say there's two people, both of them are going to end up accepting Jesus at age 60. But person one dies at age 20 and doesn't. But person two gets to live till they're 60. And so they do accept Jesus or even just take people who lived a day after Jesus died, who. Missionaries never got to him. The Bible never got to them, so they never got to hear about Jesus. But they were 30. They're past the age of accountability. Like, I just. For me, I'm not going to believe unless there's a theology that allows flexibility.

John Dehlin [01:03:53] That in my mind feels just. And I know that you're going to say, well, that's imposing God on what you want on God, and God doesn't bend to your will. But I'm just saying, if it doesn't seem fair to me, I'm gonna have a hard time buying it.

Mike Licona [01:04:06] Well, I'm with you. I'm with you on that, John. I mean, I feel this. I feel the same way, okay? I have to admit, I feel every bit what you're feeling there. And so I just. I kind of approach this carefully. So it's like right now, when I read the text, I read it and I say, okay, this is. This is what I think the text says. And that's what I'm going with, because I want to be careful that I'm not making up my own Religion. Okay. Yeah. And it's like, even if I don't like the way God does things, he's still God. He's on the throne.

Mike Licona [01:04:39] I'm not. He doesn't. Now, I'm not trying to be flippant there. Okay, yeah, so, but that's why I try to be careful with that. But I did kind of address that with that 10 year old or the 40 year old, like you said, by saying God may judge us according. He may judge him according to the knowledge that he had already received.

Mike Licona [01:04:59] Now, I do think that there is a text in the New Testament that could possibly point to a second chance. And I'm open to it. I just, I think the weight of evidence says no, but I'm open to it. All right, so I'm not saying there's absolutely no chance. I think it's the parable that Jesus talks about how the king brings in a servant who owes him so much money he could never pay it. And the king orders that the guy be sold and his wife and his kids sold into slavery until every, you know, it's all paid. And the guy falls down and he says, please have mercy on me, I will pay back every cent.

Mike Licona [01:05:39] And the king feels sympathy for him and he forgives him his debt completely. And then that same slave goes out and finds a servant who owes him, you know, just a little bit of money and asks him to pay it up. And the guy says, I don't have it, but I'll pay you. And he says, not good enough. And he chokes him and he has the guy thrown into prison. And then the other ones report back to the king would have done. And the king brings the first slave in and says, you wicked servant, you should have had mercy on him just like I had on you.

Mike Licona [01:06:11] Now take this guy and throw him into prison and make him pay until the very last, last cent has been paid. And that might be interpreted in such a sense is with eternal punishment, that we are doing that until every last cent is paid and then we get a second chance. Possible. Possible. That's all it is. I tend not to go with that, but I do see it as a possibility.

John Dehlin [01:06:41] I like it. Frank, does that make you nervous? Are you screaming in your chair a little bit when you hear that?

Frank Turek [01:06:46] No, not at all. Because I feel the same way you guys feel. I just rest in the justice of God. I just know that since God is just in the end, by definition, injustice will not be done.

Closing Reflections and Farewell

John Dehlin [01:07:00] I love it. All right, well, I've got to go run and Pick up my kids. So that means this has to be the end of our wonderful conversation. Mike and Frank, I want you both to know I really enjoyed this, and I really appreciate your willingness. I know you guys have busy schedules. You do important things, and I'm really grateful that you're both willing to come on the podcast. Mike, do you want to plug a website or a book or anything? Just if people want to learn more about what you do and these questions. Do you want to plug anything?

Mike Licona [01:07:31] Sure. Thank you. My personal website is risen jesus.com. i do have a YouTube channel, so you can just go to YouTube and type in Mike Lacona, L I C O N A. And my channel comes up. Plenty of stuff on there. My debates with Ehrman and others are all on that site that channel books. You know, the big book I've written on the Resurrection is called the Resurrection of Jesus A New Historiographical Approach. And that's where I go through philosophy of history, historical method, and then work out on the Resurrection, how that works. And then my most recent book is why Are There Differences in the what We Can Learn From Ancient Biography. And that talks about the compositional textbooks and the compositional devices that I meant earlier. I show how these occur in the ancient authors as well as the Gospels.

John Dehlin [01:08:24] Beautiful. Mike Lacona, it's so nice to have you on Mormon Stories. Thanks for coming on.

Mike Licona [01:08:29] Thanks, John. I appreciate you having me.

John Dehlin [01:08:30] Yeah. Frank, give us some plugs, will you?

Frank Turek [01:08:33] Yeah. Thanks, John. Crossexamine.org is our website, and we do a lot of college events. Next Monday and Tuesday, I'll be at University of Maryland and then Towson University, and people can watch it streaming live. It's I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. It's the name of our book, and there's a lot of Q and A that goes on. So if people are interested in that kind of thing, they can.

Frank Turek [01:08:54] So I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. It's the primary book. There's another book called Stealing From God. Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case. They may find some value in that, I hope. Anyway, my mom does.

Frank Turek [01:09:04] And then I want to recommend a church in your area. I know, you know, because Emily's part of the church there, that South Mountain Community Church. I know the main church is in Draper, but then there, I think they have a few other campuses as well. They're great folks down there. About a third of the people that go to that church are former Mormons. And so if people have questions about Mormonism and Christianity and how they interrelate and evidence on both sides. I highly recommend they connect with the fine folks down there at South Mountain Community Church.

John Dehlin [01:09:38] I love it. I'm also going to throw in a plug for K2. I have a really dear friend and supporter of Mormon Stories who attends a church called K2, which is right around kind of South Salt Lake City area.

John Dehlin [01:09:52] Check out K2. And of course, if you want to check out Sean McCraney. We can't mention churches in Utah without mentioning Sean McCraney. Born Again Mormon, Calvary, Baptist Campus, Christian Crusades. I'm forgetting the name of his church, but anyway.

John Dehlin [01:10:09] All right, gentlemen, thanks for tuning in. It's been great to have you. All of our listeners, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories Podcast. It's been great to have you. Maybe if there's interest, we'll have a follow up where we bring both Bart and Mike and or Frank on to have a discussion.

John Dehlin [01:10:26] We'll see if people are interested and if those are willing, Please comment on mormonstories.org if you have other reactions to this episode, please check us out on YouTube. We have a YouTube channel, YouTube.commormonstories we're on Instagram Mormonstories. We're on, we're on Twitter and please like us on our Facebook page. Mormon Stories Podcast, please give us a positive review, five star review. Please go to itunes and give us a positive review. And if you really value this programming, please go up to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button and make a monthly donation. 10, 25, 100 bucks a month, whatever you can afford. We're tax deductible. We're 501 in the United States.

John Dehlin [01:11:10] Your donations are tax deductible and we'll continue providing you with this great content. We're now over a thousand episodes and we'll keep plugging as long as people are willing to support us. So please check us out again. Thanks Frank and Mike and we'll see everyone again soon on Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care everybody.

Frank Turek [01:11:29] Thank you.

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