Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Boundless Bible. My name is David Shapiro, hey, I'm Javi Marquez and I'm Jason Holloway.

Speaker 1: 0:11

Yes, Welcome back to the Boundless Bible. I am really excited about today. I know I keep saying that, but today is one of those unique guests that I'm just really excited about. When I think about apologetics and a name that I've heard quoted by so many other apologists, this man is the name that keeps coming up. He's the one who's being quoted over and over again. He's the expert in asking questions. To answer a question, this is Greg Kokel and we welcome you, Greg, to the show. Thank you so much for showing up and being part of the show Well.

Speaker 3: 0:42

I'm looking forward to our conversation. Gentlemen, Thanks so much for the invitation and that was a very sweet introduction. I've never had anybody introduce me like that before, so I hope all the references that you heard were creditable ones, good ones but not always the case, I know. But thanks for having me on board.

Speaker 1: 1:00

Our pleasure Pleasure is always Just before we start. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your organization and who you are, and all of that?

Speaker 3: 1:07

All right. Well, I was not raised a Christian. I had to qualify that I was raised in a Christian denomination as a young man or as growing up. And then, when I became a teenager, I realized, well, this is not for me, and all the kids in our family left. And then it was during the Jesus movement, about six years later, in the early 70s, that the Lord got a hold of me, and he's had me ever since. Or I've had him or we've had each other, however you want to put it, and it's been quite a ride. It's not always been easy, but it's been real. So, very early on, I was committed to the idea that not only that Christianity was true and when I say true, I mean true in the way that gravity is true. And sometimes now, when you talk about religious truth, you have to qualify it that way, because people are thinking of your truth, my truth, and everybody's got their own truth. And I said, no, that's not the way I'm thinking about it so that it was that Jesus was real, that God was real and that the characterization of the world and reality that we find in Scripture is actually accurate. And so I, very early on, not only saw it that way, but I wanted to communicate it that way to other people, and so this is Jesus' movement time.

Speaker 3: 2:21

In the 70s I was in Southern California.

Speaker 3: 2:23

The first church I crossed the threshold of was Calvary Chapel, costa Mesa, so that was the epicenter of the entire Jesus Movement.

Speaker 3: 2:34

It wasn't the church I went to on a regular basis, but that was the first one I went into for a conference Not a conference they didn't have conferences and they had concerts and it was amazing and that period of time was great and I began walking with the Lord very aggressively and learning from others who discipled me aggressively and had all kinds of adventures.

Speaker 3: 2:56

But about 20 years into my own walk with the Lord and doing all kinds of things working overseas and working behind the Iron Curtain with Christians there and living in Thailand, working with Cambodian refugees and blah, blah, blah as I was thinking about the way the conversation seemed to be trending between Christians and non-Christians in a crazy culture and getting crazier, I realized that the conversations were first of all too shrill, crazy. Or I realized that the conversations were first of all too shrill. Secondly, pretty shallow on both sides, even on the Christian side, the Christians had the truth, but they didn't explain it well, it seemed to me and we have the best things to talk about and to think about and to explain about that we could do better, and so I had a master's degree in apologetics.

Speaker 3: 3:44

I was just beginning to work on a second master's in philosophy under JP Moreland, who you might know of and a bunch of his colleagues over at Talbot, and that particular tool really began opening my eyes about how I can think more carefully and communicate more carefully about the truth of the Christian view of reality. And so I started an organization with some help with some others, right in the mid-90s Actually it was 1993. So now we're 32 years old, with the goal of providing more depth and less shrillness. You know, I think of it actually as it's either Shrell or it's shallow and or shallow or silent People were just silent.

Speaker 3: 4:35

They just didn't know how to come up against the challenges of the culture more carefully about their convictions and to be able to defend classical Christianity and classical Christianity and Christian ethics sorry, in the public square, you know as you engage people, but in a winsome and attractive way.

Speaker 3: 4:58

So that was really the heart of it and over the years, like I said, I've had lots of adventures, you know, and God has prospered our efforts. We have 20 people on our team now and four or five speakers traveling and communicating and building up what we call ambassadors for Christ, who have knowledge, which is an accurately informed mind, and wisdom, which is an artful method. That's the tactical questions that you're talking about, david and also an attractive manner, which is the character element. So that's really the heart of it for me, and it's I mean, that's a thumbnail sketch of what we're about. If people want to know Stand to Reason, the acronym is STR, obviously, but that's our website, strorg, and there's tons of stuff there that people can find and read and watch and listen to that will help them develop an ability to be an attractive, thoughtful Christian ambassador. That's what we're after.

Speaker 1: 6:01

Perfect. Let me throw a question your way that somebody might ask if they are in the field and they're starting to learn about how to defend their faith. If somebody says to them, hey, I'm spiritual but I'm not religious, what would your immediate response be to that?

Speaker 4: 6:24

that said that Now I wasn't in a position to get into a long conversation because she was sticking a needle in my arm and I was on the way to surgery right.

Speaker 3: 6:29

And I had just offered some thoughts just to get the conversation going, and she said well, I'm spiritual but not religious. And I just said to her well, of course you are. God made you that way so that you could know him. Now, that's a statement. And, david, you know and maybe, fellas, you're familiar too that I usually like to lead with a question, but I didn't have time to listen to the answer because I was going to be going down shortly and under the knife. But in any event, I might have asked tell me what you mean by that? I've heard lots of people say that before. They're spiritual but not religious. I mean, some people only think religion is kind of a spirituality and spirituality is religion. How could you be one and not the other? That would be my question.

Speaker 3: 7:20

Okay, now this is the some who are listening might be familiar with the book Tactics, where I describe a game plan that'll help people to navigate otherwise tricky conversations with a tremendous amount of safety, and one of the reasons they're safety is because we're using questions to navigate, and here's an example of that. I think a lot of Christians might be scratching their head, thinking I don't know how I would prosecute that. Really. Now I'm stuck. Now there's dead silence and I don't know what to say, which is kind of the way you offered it, david. What about people who encounter that? But if we toss the question back to the other person, the ball's in their court and now they can give us more information about what they just said and, at the same time, not only are we learning more detail, which would be helpful to know where to go next, but we're forcing that other person to think about their statement more carefully.

Speaker 3: 8:13

Because this statement I'm spiritual, not religious. This is a slogan in the culture and in a way, it's a good sign, because people are fed up with raw, bare materialism molecules in motion. God, there's more to life than that. This is obvious to everybody who thinks about it, which is why, by the way, they even ask the question. What's the meaning to life? The fact that we even ask the question is an intimation that, deep down, we know that life is made for a meaning. We need to discover it.

Speaker 3: 8:43

Now some people conclude there is no meaning, but they're moving now into this other dimension spiritual but not religious. Now, that's very convenient. I think CS Lewis calls this view kind of all the benefits and none of the price, you know, but at least it's a move in the right direction, and so my first comment, which I actually made to the woman, was meant to encourage her a little bit, but if I had more time I think I would offer that question. Tell me more, and now they have to think more carefully about exactly what they do mean by that particular sentence, and so that's going to be helpful to me to know where to go next.

Speaker 1: 9:24

I won't take up time here just because I want to let them ask questions. It's just interesting. You said the first response was you're spiritual. That's great that you were made that way by God. Offline, I'm going to send you something offline. It's my epistemology that I had written a little while ago and it's almost that exact. I'm going to send you offline. I'll let them ask you some questions, but it's amazing that that was your first response.

Speaker 3: 9:47

Huh, interesting. So we think alike it's a Vulcan mind meld there, david. There it is.

Speaker 2: 9:51

Yeah, you know, I think it's really interesting. I love it. You call it the Columbo method. I think the the the asking questions.

Speaker 3: 9:58

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:08

Columbo tactic. Columbo tactic, yeah, and I think that's really fascinating, because a lot of times people don't know what they believe or why they believe it, they just do. They never take a moment to actually consider why, like one of the things.

Speaker 2: 10:15

When I first came back to the church, I found it interesting that all of a sudden I started realizing you know, I used to say, oh, I have such a problem with the supernatural aspects of the Bible and yet I have no problem saying, oh, the universe is out to get me today. Or you know, oh, karma is going to come back to me on that one. Or oh, you really jinxed that. Like you know, those are three super common statements that literally anybody that I know would make with all seriousness and faith in the truth of them, and yet not realize that they are supernatural statements. And so taking a moment to make people identify their own belief system or their own working mechanics of life system makes them kind of realize that the things that they've been butting up against in Christianity are the same things they should be butting up against in their own lives, and I think that's a big paradigm shift.

Speaker 3: 11:03

Yeah, that's a great observation. I actually have a. You mentioned Columbo, and that's after the actor or not the actor, but the character on TV, lieutenant Columbo, who asked a lot of questions to solve the murder mystery. Many of your viewers may not be familiar with him, but he's a great foil for this particular point, using questions. But you know, in the book of tactics there's a chapter called Inside Out, and that tactic is when we take advantage of the fact that God has built all kinds of things inside of human beings that are made in his image. Right, there's a whole bunch of things they already know, and their language betrays that, but the things they know is favorable to our view, not necessarily to their view, especially if they're an atheist or materialist. And so the way this works is that what God has built into the inside comes out From the inside to the out. That's the inside-out tactic, and all we have to do is listen for it and you've given some characterizations and then ask some questions about it.

Speaker 3: 12:08

Now, do you really think karma is real? There is a sense, by the way, in which we could acknowledge not the religious system in which karma fits, but the cause and effect elements, because we see that in the book of Proverbs. It's a different picture of reality, but they're onto something you know, and one of the things that could be characterized as that cause and effect is our error and the guilt associated with it and the judgment that's going to befall us for the error. Now, of course, that's judgment, but there's an answer to that and that is mercy. Okay, and so we have a different answer than the karmic answer. But that kind of comment provides a foundation where we're both kind of thinking the same in one sense about something, but in another sense we're not. That could be an opportunity for conversation, asking questions of clarification. But people are in touch with this transcendent element, jason, and you're right. They talk about it all the time and when they do, this is an opportunity for us to ask further questions about those things.

Speaker 2: 13:19

I would even go farther and say that one of the things that I had the epiphany or the revelation, if you will when I came back was that you know karma. There's a better answer in Christianity than there is in any of those. Karma works for a reason. Okay, we all know that to be true, because we were built in the image that we were. And to be true, there's no. Who's the judge meting out the judgment? Who is the? You know what is the absolute by which that judgment is even being held as a standard. So you know, if you go, well, karma is going to get me because I did something bad, what's your standard for bad? And also, who's meeting out the judgment for the bad thing that you did. And you realize really quickly there's this like nebulous answer there that anybody who believes in karma just doesn't physically have. And then you just transfer that reality, that truth that we do know that there is some such thing as cause and effect and truth and falsehood, and when you transfer it over, you go wait a second.

Speaker 2: 14:26

That fits right in with the Christian doctrine and this was a huge opening awakening for me when I realized yeah, when all these universal things that I would have believed earlier, I realized that there was a cause and effect to them. There was a creator-created relationship, there was a judgment, just all of it. I could go on for hours, but I want to hear you talk more than me.

Speaker 3: 14:53

Yeah, well, the karma thing, the way people understand it, at least its fundamental operation, is very mechanical Good goes in, good comes out, bad goes in, bad goes out, or some kind of combination. But how does the karma machine even know good from evil? I mean, that's a distinction that's important because that's a distinction of minds. And also there's this consequence, the idea that you get punished for the bad or you maybe get rewarded for the good. Okay, well, that's the kind of relationship that's characteristically held between persons and not between machines, like the karma machine, as it were. And so I think this is an inadequacy of, say, those views where karma plays a role, like Hinduism or Buddhism or whatever. But we can acknowledge people are onto something, but they're understanding it improperly. Jesus explained it better, you know, and here now we have a person that's involved that we're accountable to. And, by the way, jesus was very judgmental by today's standards if you read him carefully. Actually you don't even have to read him that carefully, just read him. Most people don't, you know. And I mean this guy got himself killed and he didn't get himself killed because he was just all flowing with love and accepting of everybody, or a social justice warrior or whatever, but we can show how this fits together in a way that I think resonates more accurately with our deepest intuitions about the world. By the way, I have a little thought about karma, and this is something that people can bring up.

Speaker 3: 16:35

I was in Madras, india, a number of years ago and they have their local guru or whatever, their Hindu guy, that follow me kind of deal, and I, and he claimed it was on the poster, on the big, big, you know poster, whatever you know, the big thing by the side of the road.

Speaker 3: 16:53

His face was everywhere. I don't remember who he was, but he claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus. Oh, okay, so he thought that that, that that added up something good for him, and other people have made this claim too, in his broader field, you know, and it seems like he could only have one reincarnation of Jesus at a time that's contemporaneous with each other, right, all right, but he thought this is going to make me look good to people. I'm the reincarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. I think it devastates their view Because Jesus, by all accounts that we have that seem to be reliable about how he lived, he was pretty good, he was like unmatchable Right, and so what this guy is saying is Jesus is still in the system after 2000 years and I'm going to think, man, if Jesus could get out, how am I going to get?

Speaker 1: 17:43

out. What are my chances?

Speaker 3: 17:44

Right, that's good, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 17:47

That is funny, that's kind of a crazy thought.

Speaker 4: 17:49

That's great.

Speaker 3: 17:51

But I do think that we're back to that same point, that people who believe in karma, they're on to something, but there's a distortion there and one of the problems with karma is that it's works-based. Is that it's works-based, so how do you know how much karma good stuff, whatever that is, by the way, and this is nebulous good stuff that you do in order to gain the good stuff, to cancel out the bad stuff? I mean, it's very, very nebulous. And you don't want to come back as a cow. You want to come back as somebody a.

Speaker 3: 18:24

Brahmin or something like that. So very nebulous. And you don't want to come back as a cow, you know. You want to come back as like somebody a Brahmin or something like that, so that's nebulous. Now I lived in Thailand. Thailand's a Buddhist country and there's a concept of karma that's part of their religion, and you could actually buy a cage of birds, a cage that had birds in there. They were encaged and you could buy them for the purpose of opening the door and letting them go out. Yes, okay, and this was allegedly decrease the karmic debt. All right, what about the guy who caught the birds and stuck them in the cage? Right?

Speaker 2: 19:01

well he had. You know he had a lot of good karma in the first place. It it was okay.

Speaker 3: 19:03

Yeah, well, whatever you know, Maybe he could say that's good, because he put him in to be like go again, I don't know. But there just seems to be anomalies, obviously, with some of those things, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3: 19:16

Now we can be sympathetic, because there are things that are not only anomalies regarding Christianity from the perspective of non-Christians, they look in and they go man, that's a little crazy. I think there's a lot of those things that could be resolved with a closer look and careful thinking about it. That's part of what we do as apologists. But even so, at the end of the day, there's still loose ends. It's not tidy because life is not tidy. And, david, you talked about epistemology. Epistemology, that's how we know. What we know is not tidy, so we're prone to error and so we do the best that we can.

Speaker 3: 19:51

What I like about the Christian view of reality is properly understood. It fits so well with reality, not just what we see, our perceptions with our five senses, but what we perceive with our deepest intuitions about the nature of reality. You know we mentioned one already that there is purpose. We got to figure out what that is, but this doesn't seem like a purposeless existence. You know, it's a dark moment when people conclude that there are no answers to their deepest questions. That's nihilism, that's nothingism. That's the dark moment. And it's dark because it seems like there should be, for us at least, not for Fido, not for Fifi, dogs and cats or anything else, but for humans at least, and so that's part of what's built in, and I think these are the kinds of things that Christianity deeply resonates. Problem of evil you know, people say well how does the Bible explain this?

Speaker 3: 20:55

It doesn't explain it, it predicts it. I mean, it does explain it but also predicts it, and our whole story is about the problem of evil, starts in the third chapter, doesn't end for 66 books. It's part of our story and our story is not over yet. So these are all things that, to me, are so profound. When you have an opportunity either to think about yourself or have it pointed out to you by a Christian, a thoughtful Christian, that gets people thinking about the legitimacy of the world, the way Jesus saw it Now you mentioned.

Speaker 1: 21:28

it's funny with my epistemology that there's no shortage of people telling me that I have errors. Definitely when you step into the world of apologetics, everybody will happily tell you that you're in error. But let's flip that right into the reliability of the Bible and errors and somebody outside of the religion saying I'm not going to follow it because you're just following a book and it has errors and it was written by man. And I want to just talk a little bit about the reliability of the Bible from your perspective.

Speaker 3: 21:54

All right, maybe some prolegomena, some foundational work on that one. And that is when, oh, it's only written by man. Well, do you have books in your library? So I'm role-playing right now.

Speaker 4: 22:06

Yeah, exactly, do you?

Speaker 3: 22:07

have any books. You read books right.

Speaker 4: 22:08

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 22:09

Do you have books in your library? Sure, do they tell you any things that are true about the world? Yeah, of course. Were they written by men or by God? God, well, they're at my bend, you idiot. I don't believe in books written by God. So, in other words, what you're saying maybe I'm mistaken, you can tell me. Here it sounds like what you're saying that human beings can write books that are reliable to tell you truth about the nature of the world, right? Well, the answer to that is, of course, right. And so just because it's written by man doesn't mean that it can't tell us the truth about the world.

Speaker 3: 22:44

Now I'm giving a talk this weekend in Huntington Beach, other California. It's called has God Spoken, and I'm giving six reasons why it is reasonable to think that the Bible is a book not merely written by man, but its primary source is God to man. So you got two choices either God to man or man. About God, it's either supernatural or natural. So I'm making the point six reasons why it has the hallmarks of being supernatural the authorship.

Speaker 3: 23:16

However, what's interesting when you think about it is the early church wasn't founded on that. The early church was not founded on the authority of the New Testament. You know why? Because there was no New Testament. You know. This developed over time, you know, and in a way that I think is reliable. We can look back on it and say, yeah, the church got it right for very particular reasons, but what they had was a testimony about a man, jesus, who lived and died and then rose again from the dead and this changed everything.

Speaker 3: 23:49

Paul starts Romans there. What is Romans, you know? Maybe 50 AD, and he says declared with power to be the Son of God through the resurrection. Now, that's the fourth verse of the book. You know, by our reckoning it's right there at the opening kind of thing. Galatians was his first letter and Galatians starts with Jesus being the Son of God and raised from the dead stuff that was later used by people who couldn't talk to the eyewitnesses. You had the very same testimony of the people who witnessed it and others who were deeply influenced by Jesus by putting their faith in him, their confidence, their trust in him so early on. We have the account as historically reliable that changed the lives. People understood this event to happen in history.

Speaker 3: 24:42

So what that does for me now in part is that it gives me an option when I talk with people about the truth of Christianity, the truth of Jesus, of Nazareth, I don't have to say the Bible says it, I believe it. That settles it here. It is jot and tittle. Everything's God-inspired. Because I don't have to convince them of the inerrancy of Scripture in order to communicate the message that saves. I just have to give them good reason to believe that the message is a good message, a sound message, an accurate message. And I have two allies. I have the allies of the witnesses that wrote down what they said and gave what they saw and put their lives on the line for their testimony. And the other witness is not external, it's something that's going on inside of them and that is the Holy Spirit that plays a role. All right Now, when I became a believer September 28th 1973, I was not into apologetics, I can't tell you like I can.

Speaker 3: 25:49

With a lot of my colleagues they said, oh, I heard this, then I heard this. Then I realized, oh, my goodness, the evidence is so powerful. Christianity is true. You know, and you might know, people like Frank Turk or J Warner Wallace or other, you know Lee Strobel, and these guys were all converted based on the information, not me, I just had an increasing sense as I was exposed to the truth. My brother was the one who was doing most of that work in my life the gardening, what I call it in my life before the harvest. I just had an increasing sense. This is really true. This is it Now. I didn't get that from reading the harvest. I just had an increasing sense. This is really true. This is it Now. I didn't get that from reading the Bible.

Speaker 3: 26:28

Mark was communicating the truth, the word, but it wasn't chapter and verse, it was the truth of that, communicated in the language I could understand. It's conversational stuff, all right. By the way, that's what happened in the book of Acts too, when it says the word, we're going to preach the word. You know, we're not going to wait on tables, we're going to preach the word. Well, they weren't quoting Old Testament passages, unless they're talking to Jews. They were taking what they knew and they were communicating in language people could understand. You see this time and time again, as the gospel begins to move into the Gentile world and the apostles, whoever's involved is communicating the Word, which is the substance of the gospel, in the language people could understand. We can do that even if a person is not convinced that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.

Speaker 3: 27:15

That, I think, is a hurdle that we sometimes put in front of ourselves. That just creates complication for us. So, in fact, I just wrote a piece with one of my colleagues at Stand to Reason and we have material that we send out at no charge because we have people that help us financially so we can give this stuff away basically every month, send it out to whoever signs up for it. And as we're talking about inerrancy, which we believe in, we just make a point. By the way, don't take this issue on with a non-Christian. We just make a point. By the way, don't take this issue on with a non-Christian. This is an in-house discussion with people who already have a high view of Jesus and God and everything. Then you could put the pieces together. All right, you talk with a non-Christian and if you're trying to argue inerrancy, this is going to invite a tsunami of apparent contradictions that you're not going to be able to deal with. So just sidestep that.

Speaker 3: 28:07

But we do have something we can appeal to and that is this gospel that goes out in different forms. As we explain, it has power. It's the power of God to save and to rescue, as Paul says in Romans 1. So that would be. I mean, I said prologomena, that's the way I'd establish the foundation. Okay, in terms of these things are what I believe.

Speaker 3: 28:24

My convictions are based on, things that happened in history. Now these things are recorded in okay, I'm going to use this term now because, for a strategic reason, they're recorded in the primary source historical documents of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Okay, oh well, that's Matthew, mark, luke and John. Oh, that's the Bible. Yeah, but I don't use the term the Bible because actually the Bible is not a book, it's a library of books and it didn't come together as a book until about the third or fourth century. The other pieces were circulating around, but they didn't bind it together in book form.

Speaker 3: 28:57

I don't want people to just say, oh, bible, all right. I don't believe in that nonsense. I want to say look at the historical material that the historians use to assess what took place there in the first century in ancient Palestine area. Okay, ancient Israel. Matthew, mark, luke and John is what we call them. There's some other sources and stuff, and even Paul and Peter and their writings that make references, but this is really the substance okay these things are. They bear the hallmarks of fabulous history, really good history, okay. And so if they're good history, then we can rely on what they say, which historians do, even Bart Ehrman, for goodness sake, who's a critic of the New Testament. He wrote a book about Jesus from the historical material he had available to him from Matthew, mark, luke and John. Now he doesn't believe Jesus was God. He doesn't believe all of the miracles and stuff like that. But my question is if you can trust the history on other issues, why not trust it on the ones that touch on Jesus, the miracle worker or the incarnate Son of God or the one who rose from the dead? The same kind of test can be applied.

Speaker 3: 30:07

So notice what I'm doing. I'm in the process of conversing with somebody. If I were having this conversation, I'm lowering the bar a little bit. You don't have to believe this is all from God, that's not the point. But at the same time I'm raising the credibility of the texts that are relevant in evangelism, that tell us the important things about Jesus' life for evangelism.

Speaker 3: 30:33

Now, once you become a Christian and you're into discipleship, the details matter, as you guys know, and also the authority matters, because we've seen, when people abandon the authority of Scripture, a high view of Scripture, they start abandoning a whole bunch of things Scripture says that they don't like. Okay, so then it's not God's Word anymore. Their views are not God's views, they're their own views that they pick and choose. Oh, when God agrees with me, then I'm going to agree with then, that's fine. But if he doesn't agree with me, then you know I'm out of here. So then I'm going to agree with then, that's fine. But if he doesn't agree with me, then I'm out of here. So I don't know. David, there's a couple of thoughts regarding your question. Obviously, more can be said, and if you want to ask more questions, I'm happy to respond.

Speaker 1: 31:16

Well, what's interesting is, I end up in this debate quite a bit and one of the things you said was the reliability of the gospels and how early they were written, and that gets a lot of people. They don't understand that, but again, they still use the defense of the Bible. So then they want to know extra biblical sources for that. We could talk about Josephus and Tacitus and Pliny and all of that which people do. I'm the archaeologist, I'm the biblical archaeologist and I go to there were ossuaries, found Jewish ossuaries, bone boxes dated around 50 AD, praying to Jesus for loved ones to go to heaven with him. These are people that at that time it's outside of the Bible. These are Jews who believe that he had the power to bring people with him to heaven. So obviously it's more proof that these stories were not just written multiple times later or you know that we have some sort of gap of. You know what somebody said, what they meant, that this wasn't something.

Speaker 3: 32:08

His divinity was given to him 300 years later, which we hear oh, yeah, david, I've had a long conversation with my team about that just the other day, because we do run into this a lot, and I think this is one of the favorites of Bart Ehrman. This is called a high Christology Jesus being God, jesus being the miracle worker, the one who will come again, who determines where you will spend eternity, and that's an accretion of myth. We're trying to get back to the Jesus of history Now. This was a theme that developed in the late 19th century, as you know, and has been completely discredited as a pursuit. Yet some people are still pursuing that Nowadays, though, they have much more credibility about the Gospels themselves, and now they've got to deal with the content. So, okay, well, john was. Oh, that's the high Christology. Jesus is the Son of God, before Abraham was. I am blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that couldn't have been written early. That must have been way, way, way late.

Speaker 3: 33:05

But the synoptics Matthew, mark, luke oh, those guys just have. You know, this itinerant preacher said a couple of controversial things. You know, maybe we don't agree with everything. Holy cow, you open up the gospel of Mark. I did it just the other day just to verify this point. Mark, by everybody's assessment, was the first gospel. All right. And Mark was look, you've got Luke writing in the book of Acts about Paul still alive at the end of his writing and Paul died around 64, 65. So the book of Acts is, you know, early 60s Before. That was the gospel of Luke and Matthew came before that. So what does Matthew say? Matthew says he starts out the. What is it? The beginning of the account of Jesus, the Son of God.

Speaker 3: 33:50

That's the first line, and then okay, yeah, that's a low Christology, right, and I mean that's what Jesus said in other occasions, that the Jews wanted to kill him for saying because of his blasphemy. That's the first line of the first gospel. All right. The next line is a citation from the prophets about John the Baptist, about a voice crying in the wilderness Make straight, prepare a way for Guess who. The Lord Right. The only Lord that they were talking about was Yahweh. Yet John points to Jesus. So you've got in the very first gospel, the very first lines, two statements of very high Christology.

Speaker 3: 34:37

So how is it that these guys are saying this is an accretion of myth over time that you only see in the gospel of John, which must have been late dated. You've got it right there everywhere. Actually, it's all through. You know Mark 2, you know your sins are forgiven you, the paralytic that's lowered through the ceiling. Who can forgive sins? But God alone? Okay, in order that you might know that the Son of man, which is also a divine title from the book of Daniel, has the authority to forgive sins, I say to you arise, take up your pallet and go home. And so that's a low Christology, please. I don't know where they're getting this, to be honest, but every single gospel, even the earliest, has high Christology. Now, if you don't want to believe that, okay, fine. But what justifies you saying, well, every other verse is sound, historically kind of thing. What justifies cherry picking, you know, maybe these things? This is exactly what Jesus said, which is why he was so popular. On one hand, and working miracles.

Speaker 4: 35:40

That helped a lot.

Speaker 3: 35:42

And why he got killed. Because even in Mark, when you look at the trial, yeah, and it identifies the claim that he made, or it should be the high priest says are you the Christ, the son of God? He says you've said it yourself. And he said, okay, I'm tearing my robes, we don't need testimony. Now it's not a capital crime to claim to be the Messiah, it's a capital crime to say you're God in human form. And so now he's committed. And then Jesus says oh, by the way, let me double down, and you will not see me again until you see me coming with power in the clouds, with great glory. Now, that's from Daniel, and they knew what he was referring to. So Jesus was not executed for what he did, he was executed for who he said he was. That's what the record shows and that's a high Christology, from the beginning to the end in the gospel of Mark, which is the very first testimony of Jesus' life.

Speaker 2: 36:44

That's fascinating. I think the other thing, too is, you know, there's a lot of people out there who still doubt the historicity of a lot of these things, and one of the things that I recently read was that there's more written records in history of Jesus than Alexander the Great of Plato, of things like that. So even our listeners, who are listening, who are, you know, not deep archaeologists or deep, you know no-transcript.

Speaker 3: 37:52

He was a man of humble origins and humble means and humble life.

Speaker 2: 37:55

Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 3: 37:56

I'm not speaking just to his character, but to his circumstances, but this magnifies the point that then why is this guy so famous, how did he have such an impact and why it was more than 15 minutes of fame even back then? And that's because of who he was, what he did, what he said and what he did. And so he says these incredible things that just blow people's minds. And then he works works of wonder to verify it. So he says I am the bread of life, having just fed miraculously 4,000 people. He actually did it twice, one to four and one to five, and they were only counting the men. Okay, I'm the bread of life, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes will live even if he dies. Then he walks out and he raises Lazarus from the dead, who stinks because he's been in there for four days, right, and then he walks out, unbind him. So he doesn't just talk, he acts.

Speaker 3: 38:57

And he acts in a way that verifies, in a powerful way, the claim that he made. So this is what puts Jesus, and this is why I think you have a man now who has impacted history more than any individual by a long shot. Just think of it here. I got this. I'm going to grab this little. I got this little cross right here. Okay, somebody gave me this for speaking at their church. They actually paid me too, but this is a little gift, you know, and I get a lot of these things, but for some reason I saved this one, you know, and I love it, because what this represents is it represents an event that split world history into.

Speaker 3: 39:38

Yes, all world history is dated from this event. Now, some people don't like that, so they don't like before Chrysler and on Domini BCAD. So now they say before the common era or after the common era, but still this is the event heralded by this cross that split world history. Well, this fictitious characters don't do that, right? Yeah, they don't impact history like that to.

Speaker 2: 40:11

That is that it wasn't somebody who did something violent, so a person who changed this much of history by being good, by by by being perfect, by being a an example, by being an aspiration to all of humanity, I mean that's that again. That's unheard of. There's no other human in the history of the universe who has created the impact that he has at all period, but even less so by not being violent. You know, you have your Genghis Khans, you have your things like that, but this isn't that?

Speaker 3: 40:40

This is a great observation, jason, and I have a friend who's now with the Lord, tom Gilson, who wrote a book titled Too Good to be False. Too Good to be False is still available, but this is his point how do you create a where, anywhere in literature or history, do you find a character that has such power, at least characterized as having the power? So we're reading this account Wow, he's got this. And then how does he use it? He doesn't use it for his own benefit or to rescue himself when he could have. He doesn't abuse it in his own benefit or to rescue himself when he could have. He doesn't abuse it in other ways, but then, when his own life is in danger, he says look, I can call down a legion of angels. Pilot, you're not in charge. I'm in charge, but I'm going to submit to this because this is what the father wants. So that's your point. So people are interested in Tom's book.

Speaker 1: 41:49

Too good to Be False, and that's now we're looking at the historicity of him. There were multiple people who made that claim but, like you mentioned, greg, they didn't do the action to fit that. They were just saying this is who I am. And once the action fit, then we're focused on Jesus going. Okay, listen, he not only raised the dead, but he raised himself out of the dead.

Speaker 3: 42:13

I think I'm going to believe him. Yeah, he didn't. These other guys had their 15 minutes of fame, you know, famously, and then they're gone, and that's why nobody, except for historians, archaeologists and people are into it.

Speaker 3: 42:20

You can name them, but they're all gone, not Jesus. Now my buddy J Warner Wallace you might know, jim. He used to work for us and he's been a great friend to Stand to Reason for so many years. But he wrote a book called Cold Case Christianity. But he wrote another book called I think it's called the Person of Interest, and what he's describing in that book is the unbelievable impact that Jesus of Nazareth has had in every single aspect of Western life. You know all the songs, every popular. He looks at the top 100 performing artists of all time in Western. You know civilization and they, like 98 out of 100, wrote songs about Jesus and that's just one example he looks at.

Speaker 3: 43:05

You can get the whole gospel, the basic grittiness of the gospel, just by walking around, looking at buildings on campuses and seeing what's written there. If all the manuscripts were gone, so they're. So what kind of man has this kind of impact? Then he makes another observation, because I mentioned western civilization. Yeah, but what about all the other eastern religions and all that? They all want jesus. They're all trying to get Jesus on their team. Okay, so they're pulling him in. Oh, he's one of our gods, you know kind of thing, and it's just, he's everywhere, he's everywhere. So how does a person who didn't exist or a person who is not of the magnitude of the individual that we find in the primary source, historical documents that we know as Matthew, mark, luke and John, how does anyone less than that person have the impact that we see in the entire world after 2,000 years? The answer is no one. No one comes close, not even real people. Not here, javi people Not here.

Speaker 4: 44:12

Harvey, no, I love just hearing you and I love your passion for just the faith and Christianity.

Speaker 3: 44:17

Thank you.

Speaker 4: 44:17

Obviously, you're just a deep well of knowledge. I love Stand to Reason and its passion for equipping believers to think clearly about their faith and engage in others effectively. One of the questions I wanted to ask, and just really maybe something to leave our listeners with, is what is maybe something a misconception someone has about sharing their faith? I know you, stan, for reasons it has to do with a lot about evangelizing and just kind of apologetics. So what is? Something, you see, that is very common, a misconception that Christians have.

Speaker 3: 44:56

All right. Well, this is going to be a little bit controversial with some people and it usually requires some explanation to make it more convincing. But I do go into detail in a companion book to the tactics book called Street Smarts, which subtitle is using questions to answer Christianity's toughest challenges. So David kind of made reference in paraphrase to that, and that is that the most important part of evangelism is not harvesting, it's gardening. And the reason is is because there's not going to be a harvest unless you have a season of gardening in anybody's life, and so most of our evangelism techniques are harvesting techniques. We have books or booklets here's how to get people to pray to receive Christ. Okay, I'm not dissing that, there's nothing wrong with it. I've used them in the past and I can think of a particular track that had an impact on me as I was considering Christianity. And some people make up.

Speaker 3: 45:55

You know their whole ministry is focused on Ray Comfort. I have a tremendous amount of respect for it. I've known Ray for many years. You know he can use that to great effect. He also uses a lot of questions. If you've ever watched his videos, you know when he's on the street challenging people with just tons of questions. So he's very adept at the tactical approach, the Columbo tactic, but when you look in the New Testament, there are no altar calls, nobody's encouraged to receive Christ as Lord and Savior. Ask Jesus into your heart. Those are modern ways of characterizing the harvest, but it isn't the way most people become Christians. And I can say this with authority because when I teach on the tactics material, I talk about this a lot because use the tactical game plan as a gardening tool. We're not given gardening tools. This is for gardening. But I take a poll and I just did it like three days ago with a group that I spoke to whole, and I just did it like three days ago with a group that I spoke to and I want to know how many people here are Christians. And you did not become a Christian by coming forward at an altar call or having someone pray with you and receive Jesus as Lord and Savior. That's kind of the motif we think of, how evangelism cashes out, and my average for any church audience is 75% of the people raise their hand. That means I mean most people. Even now, even with our emphasis on harvesting tools, that isn't how most people become Christian. It's totally different.

Speaker 3: 47:26

Even when I became a Christian, september 28th 1973, when my brother was telling me. He came to my apartment that night, I was a student at UCLA and he started telling me more about Jesus God bless him. And I told him Mark, you don't need to tell me any more about Jesus. Now here's what I remember saying I've already decided I want to become a Christian. That's what I remember saying he tells me. What he remembers is I said I already am a Christian. Oh, wow.

Speaker 3: 47:53

So here's the question. In either case, did my brother Mark harvest me? No, no, I harvested myself. Of course, we know the Holy Spirit did that, but there was no need to pressure me. I did pray a prayer and he guided me in that, but I didn't need a prayer. I had already committed myself and my heart to Christ.

Speaker 3: 48:14

Some people don't remember never prayed a prayer, don't remember when they became Christians, but what matters is what their heart conviction is about Jesus and not when they prayed the prayer. Praying the prayer is not necessary is the point I'm making. Is not necessary is the point I'm making. And so back to Javi, your particular question.

Speaker 3: 48:38

I would say the biggest mistake people make today is they feel like they're not doing evangelism effectively unless they're pressing for a decision, all right, and my point is, even in the early church they didn't press for decisions.

Speaker 3: 48:50

They communicated the word gardening, gardening, gardening, and watch this. When the fruit was ripe, it fell into the basket Right. When the fruit is ripe, it falls into the basket. Now there are people who disagree with me, and I got a tongue lashing from a dear brother whose name you would recognize on this particular issue, but he's a harvester and so this is. He didn't like my approach, chastised me for it. But I'm telling you, when I look at audiences and I tell them this and I give them some gardening tools, man, their whole countenance changes, because I think most of the people in the audience are not harvesters, they're gardeners like me. I'm a gardener, I get it. And just to put a little more sharper point on it, because I tell them I haven't prayed with somebody who received Christ in 30 years, which sometimes they gasp, and I know what they're thinking.

Speaker 3: 49:37

Oh what a loser, you know, kind of thing, because that's the way they think about themselves. No-transcript. Best-selling Christian author. The best, I'm telling you, if I have a choice to listen to any Christian apologist, jay Warner is the one I want to listen to. Okay, just saying.

Speaker 3: 50:20

But here's what you don't know Jim was in my garden when he was an atheist. Oh wow, he was listening to our radio show and that was a significant factor in him moving towards Christianity. And then I got to know Jim. I mean, I've known him for many years because he started working as a volunteer with our organization, because he respected what we were doing. And I don't even know if he has a spiritual birthday. I should ask him. But there are a number of other people that have told me the same thing and other people in full-time Christian ministry right now have their own organizations. Abdu Murray, the former Muslim, is now Christian. You know he was in my garden when he was a Muslim.

Speaker 3: 50:58

This isn't to wave my flag, it is just to make the point that gardening is where the action is at Garden, garden, garden, and a little here, a little there. Sometimes you have five minutes, sometimes you have 50 minutes, depends what's available, but we're all on the same team, so that the one who reaps and the one who sows, rather, and the one who reaps, can rejoice together. Now, that's a citation from Jesus, from John, chapter 4. And that's the way I see it. I think that's the best advice, javier, I can give to anyone doing evangelism Don't worry about the harvest, do good gardening and the harvest takes care of itself.

Speaker 1: 51:33

Before we sign off, I'll just, I'll let you just know. We just interviewed, actually, abdu Murray and he quoted you. He's one of the ones. No, yes, he's one of the ones that quoted you while we were interviewing him.

Speaker 3: 51:45

Yeah, Just so you're aware you were probably lucky to get him on the camera because he is a huge. Abdu is a huge man. He's got to be 6'7" and he's really big. Well, that's very flattering. I'm glad that you had a chance.

Speaker 3: 51:57

I didn't even know if you knew Abdu. So some people do, some people don't. But I met Abdu at an Evangelical Theological Society big, massive conference, ets, because he wanted to have dinner to tell me the role that SDR had played in his conversion, and so we've been friends ever since, and every year when we meet at ETS we go to a cheesecake factory and have dinner again to commemorate that first one with members of my staff. So it's a good roundup. But that's just to make the point that gardening is, I think, the way to spend your time, and if I've lowered the bar a little bit for people and give them some gardening tools, tactics or street smarts, for example, then they're going to get off the bench where they're sitting because they're scared and get into the garden and do a little spade work, and when they do that, that's going to contribute to the harvest down the line.

Speaker 2: 52:57

What a great answer. You know that's actually something we talk about a lot here too is and maybe this is a good way to kind of like wrap it up is we talk a lot on this podcast about. There's so many sides to this whole thing. There is the academic for those who need the academia. There is the apologetics and the archaeology for those who need that. There's the kindness and care of listening to those in need as well, which actually has very little to do with Scripture and has everything to do with living out, being more like Jesus and having people see the change that it makes in your life and there's. It is still fascinating to me, after coming back semi-recently, that that there's, that there's all of these things available to anybody who's open to them, and the spectrum is so wide.

Speaker 2: 53:49

It's a big garden with a lot of different kinds of plants.

Speaker 3: 53:50

Exactly, it's a humongous garden, lot of different kinds of plants, exactly. It's a humongous garden.

Speaker 2: 53:54

There's so many different ways to garden and I love that. You said that you don't need to be the altar call. We don't have to call people out and say, are you ready to pray yet we need to live it out. We need to be who we say that we are. We need to calmly and fully trust in the truth of it and express that to those who need those questions. And and now I think we've all learned ask more questions than we have things to say, because, because there's so much more value that's sitting inside that person who's about to ask the question than they even realize.

Speaker 4: 54:27

Yeah, so yeah, that's well put.

Speaker 2: 54:31

Well, thank you.

Speaker 3: 54:32

I got it from you. Well, ray Comfort told me once that he'll go to church and people say, can you get us decisions? And he said well, I can get decisions, that's easy. I don't want decisions, I want conversions.

Speaker 4: 54:44

Yeah, right, and that's different.

Speaker 3: 54:46

And conversions take time and sometimes if we're pressing for the decision which, by the way, is historically new the second great awakening is when that really became mid-19th century became a big deal in Western civilization, and before that they didn't have that kind of emphasis. But he said when you think about it, when people are considering a change of view on these kinds, this is huge. This is huge, and so we want to make sure that they are properly informed. You know the price that's involved. You know to become a follower of Jesus, not just to get your fire insurance by saying, make a decision, so to speak, and walking down the aisle. And again, I'm not against that per se, because a lot of people have genuine conversions as a result of that.

Speaker 3: 55:34

But sometimes it produces false conversions too, you know. And then you got to deal with the fallout. Oh, ben there, done that. And that kind of person is really hard to reach, a person who thought he was a Christian but wasn't, and now walked away because it doesn't work right. So I think, taking our time and gardening, gardening as we're able to, I call it putting a stone in someone's shoe, giving them just something to think about, lowering the bar a bit, we as a team, as a body of Christ now, are involved in that tilling, planting the seeds, watering, weeding, as the case may be.

Speaker 2: 56:19

And that all adds up, greg. This has been outstanding. I know I have learned a lot. I know that we have enjoyed this conversation. I hope our listeners have as well. I have no doubt they have, in fact. So I just wanted to personally say thank you for meeting with us. We have very much appreciated your time, your consideration and all of your knowledge. We will be sending people to Stand to Reason. We want them to see what you have to offer. Listen to all that you have. I know there's so many videos online as well, which is a phenomenal resource, so we just want to say thank you for that and thank you to our listeners for having some time to come listen to the great Greg. It's been a wonderful pleasure and we'll see you all next week. Thank you.

Speaker 4: 56:59

Thank you Later.

Speaker 2: 57:03

Thank you, there we go. All right, I think we're done.