Revving Up - Ep 23: Eyewitnesses to the Resurrection

RevvingUp_David: you ⁓ you you you I love the beat to that opening intro music there. So the one that comes with the video is, is really sharp and percussive. And then the second one is more of a Chuck Mangione kind of feel to it, that little thumping bass and everything like that. Welcome to Revving Up with David Ross. I am your host. am so thrilled to be here. I am two weeks delayed. Equipment problems, life and some other stuff. I am here. That's just going to leave it at that. I try to record ahead of time so that when situations like that come up, I'm not caught short. I was caught short, so I do apologize for missing one cycle. And this one's actually about a day late by the time I finally get it posted. But we're here and we're ready to get started and continue on with what we've been talking about here in the past. So if you go back to the last three lessons, we've been talking about this discussion of truth. And so we started off with that one. What is truth? Is there truth? Can we know that there's truth? And came to the conclusion that there is absolute truth. Truth is true for all people at all times. And we of the Christian faith know that truth is not just a concept or a theory, but truth is a person and his name is Jesus. And then from knowing that there was truth, we established four postulates, right? And four things that we just take to be true. Number one, God exists. Number two, He is good. Number three, He is sovereign. And number four, our purpose flows from Him. So we spent some time exploring that rules of logic that bring us to that conclusion and away we go. And from those four postulates, we can put forth the theorem that if those four things are true, then God must be communicating with His creation. is a speaking God. How can we have purpose if we don't know what that purpose is? How do we discover that purpose if he's not able to communicate with us? We communicate among ourselves. We share thoughts and ideas. I transfer ideas from my brain to your brain through communication. It is not unreasonable to think that God would be able to do the same thing. So how has he spoken? One way that he has spoken is through a written word. It was oral at some point, but it got written down. We can go back and again, those last three weeks kind of dive into that. And we looked at the text and we determined that the words that I read in the Bible are an accurate transmission of what the original writers wrote all those years ago. We took a look at the care and meticulousness with which the Old Testament was preserved, counting letters, words, phrases, all that stuff like that. and the way they preserved those texts. And then from the New Testament, we derived that because there are so many copies of so many of those manuscripts, all those manuscripts are gone, but there are thousands and thousands and thousands of copies of what was originally written. So we can do textual criticism and we can come to the conclusion of what was originally written is what we have in our Bible with very few exceptions. There's a couple of things that appear to be added by somebody little bit later, but none of the things, you take out those questionable ⁓ handful of things, none of the fundamental doctrines of the Bible are impacted by that. So we have accurate text. But we still want to go a little bit further with that. And so that's what we're going to do today. But following that, we looked at some truths that come out of the Bible, because the Bible just kind of mentions them in passing, but they turned out to be scientifically verifiable. And they're phrased in such a way that, again, that's not a scientific document, but you could derive the truth from it. Again, Job said that the earth is suspended on nothing, which went completely against anything the ancient world thought about what the earth sat upon. And then we find out later that, yeah, it really was. The life is in the blood. The universe had a beginning. It is being stretched out or it's expanding. And then the fact that all of the archaeological evidence that we've ever uncovered in that part of the world has only validated and approved and affirmed what the scriptures had said. does that prove it's the Word of God? Not necessarily, but what that does prove is that it's accurate within the context of that. Again, the scientific statements are not necessarily scientific in nature, but they point out observational truths about the universe and the kings and the places and the people and the things and the cities and all the stuff that happened that's described in the Bible. we have archaeological evidence that that indeed was what happened there. And so if you put those things together, we have an accurate recording of the realities we can validate. And from that, I believe it's a safe step to say the things that we can't necessarily validate that speak of eternity and things of the spirit are also true. We have the Word of God. And again, the reason I believe that this is the Word of God, that the Bible is the Word of God, is the fact that it speaks truth to me about my fallen condition. It speaks truth about the only solution for my fallen condition, for my sins, and the fact that when I do what the Bible tells me to do, that I get the results that the Bible promises me that I will get from it. Right? And so that brings us to today's topic. I'm going to step back into the New Testament today, and I'm going to be taking a look at it and What I can gain if I can find validity in what the New Testament records and come to the knowledge and belief that it is telling me the truth about this man named Jesus Christ, then in a sense I get validation of the Old Testament quote-unquote for free because this man Jesus Christ affirmed the Old Testament. He quoted from the Old Testament the other writers of the letters and books we have in the New Testament also quoted from the Old Testament. Jesus said that his followers would capture these things. If we believe what it says about Jesus, if we come to an understanding that this Jesus really was God in flesh, then not only can I trust the New Testament, but I can trust the Old Testament because Jesus said, have come to fulfill everything that you find in the Scriptures and the prophets. Everything you find in the Old Testament, you can find in me and I affirm everything that was there. All right, so we're going to boil down into that. And so I am borrowing this from a book. I'm not going to necessarily quote it directly, but I highly recommend J. Warner Wallace's books, starting with Cold Cased Christianity. He was able to put a lot of these concepts I've had in my mind for number of years and put it down in a way that really made it tangible for me. So he's got Cold Cased Christianity. He's got God's Crime Scene. And I'm drawing a blank on another one. He's got several other books out there. Dr. Turek and others have helped him with it. So he's just a phenomenal way of looking at it an interesting way of looking at it So the and so from that I'm going to derive some of the teachings from that primarily cold case Christianity So again, these are things that I've that I felt to be true or known to be true for me for many years But it presented in such a way that I think it's just a really good way doing that So highly recommended cold case Christianity J Warner Wallace former atheist science detective and he applied the rules of evidence to what the Old Testament says and the New Testament says about Jesus and we get an interesting conclusion. what it really boils down to, if we're going to look at the New Testament and we're going to talk about the New Testament, the fundamental question that needs to be answered that we have to come to a conclusion of either being true or false is, did Jesus rise from the dead? That is the key question every person must come face to face with at some point in their life. When we start talking about the man Jesus Christ and we look at his teachings and what he is life and what happened after his death, burial and resurrection. If he is who he says he is, nothing else matters. If he is not who he says he was, then nothing else matters. That is the key question for our faith. and for humanity is did this man named Jesus rise from the dead? If he did, then we should seriously consider his life, his teachings, and what he told us about the purpose of that act of sacrifice on the cross. Because we're told in prophecy that sacrifice of this Messiah was for the healing of the nations, for the cleansing of our sins, and the fulfillment of all the types and shadows of the ceremonies we find in the Old Testament. If he did not rise from the dead, then we, as Paul said, are of all men most miserable and it doesn't really matter too much what we do with this life that we're living. Okay, so there's a lot of ways we can approach this topic. So, J. Warner Wallace, former atheist, he was a cold case investigator. So, he was a policeman. So, his job was to go in and look at cases that had not been solved for sometimes decades or cases that had a conclusion. but new evidence came to light or there's some question about it several years after the fact. And so he was having to do forensic analysis of what was there many, many years in many cases after the case was long over and try to figure out by looking at the statements, looking at the court records, looking at the trial stuff, looking at the evidence and try to figure out what the real truth was based on that. And so in the process of doing these investigations, Many times he had to work from an absence of availability. For example, maybe the witnesses that were in the trial have passed away or they're not able to be found. And so you can't re-interview somebody that's dead to try to get another perspective on it, right? He had some cases where the evidence got lost. And so when you think about that, he's trying to solve crimes based on the historical record as it was written at the time that the trial took place. He can't go back and interview the witnesses, and he can't go back and find the, necessarily find all of the evidence in the same state that it was in at the time that the hearing in the crime and all that took place, and yet still try to come to the actual truth of what happened. And then if you think about that, that's exactly what we have to do when we start analyzing biblical texts. Okay, I've got to go back, I've got to read the witness statements of people that I cannot interview. Some of the evidence has been lost to history. then I've got to try to piece together what actually happened based on what we're able to read today. And so as part of this, he ended up picking up the Bible and he began with the Gospels. And when he read the Gospels as a trained investigator, he stepped back and was taken a little back because he had a very low view of Christianity at the time. And when he looked at the writings of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as an investigator, As a policeman, he said, these are not fairy tales. These are not myths. These read as an eyewitness testimony. I have read eyewitness testimony from court records. I'm looking at eyewitness testimony. And so as he began to dive into it, he began to investigate the claims made by these men. He looked at everything in totality. He becomes a Christian comes to believe in Jesus. And so he wrote these books based on his experience as an investigator. So, ⁓ that's not a hard read. and he covers a lot of ground kind of ancillary to the topic at hand. How to examine evidence, you know, what tools that the opposing lawyers are going to use with the best evidence you have and stuff like that. Excellent read, highly recommended. And so what I'm going to do today is try to just take the one part of the ⁓ cold case Christianity and look at the gospel story. Are the gospels eyewitness testimonies and why we can reasonably understand that what they wrote was trustworthy, factual, And they were motivated by the proper things to do what they did when they wrote these things down. Okay. So we have the tools of logic, right? Well, something can't be both true and false at the same time, all this stuff like that. And another tool available to investigators is this idea called abductive reasoning. Now, if you've read Sherlock Holmes, you've heard of deductive reasoning, right? You deduce from the facts something about ⁓ what actually happened. Abductive reasons kind of a corollary to that. Abductive reasoning. is a logical inference that seeks the simplest and most likely explanation for a set of observations. It is often described as inference to the best explanation where conclusions are drawn based on the best available evidence, but without guaranteeing certainty. Okay. And so the example he uses in the book, and I'm going to walk you through that right now, is this. You walk into a room and you find a dead body on the floor. Little gruesome. Again, the guy's a detective, right? So we have this dead body on the floor. Person's dead. They're lying face down. And so when you first walk in the room, you can have any of a number of possible explanations as to what happened here. Right. ⁓ The person could have died from natural causes. The person could have died as the result of an accident. The person could have committed suicide or the person might've been murdered. Right. That's one of kind of the four big categories. This stuff could fall into natural death, accident. intentionally killing themselves or somebody else killed them. And so as you begin to examine the evidence, you can start coming to a more logical conclusion of what's happening. So for example, if we, you know, not only do we see the dead body, but we also see a pool of blood. Okay. If you die of natural causes, there's, I don't know, I can't think of any situation where you would have a large loss of blood at that moment. Right. So when I look at the large pool of blood, what I can do is I can eliminate the fact that maybe this was natural causes. I still don't know exactly what happened, but I think I could rule out natural causes because that's not something that typically happens as a result of that, right? And then we dig a little bit deeper and we study a little closer and we find out that this person has a knife in their back. ⁓ okay. So probably... Not an accident. You don't typically accidentally fall face down with a knife in your back and you know, stab, you know, fall against a knife and, know, that's probably not what happened. Right. So now you're down to possibly suicide, a little weird to try to do it in your back, but who knows? But okay, we've got a lot of blood. We've got a knife in the back. And then if you find multiple stab wounds, ⁓ That's something somebody can't do because you're going to die at some point. You can't keep stabbing yourself if you're dead in the back. Right. So when you, when you come to that point that you looked at all the evidence and it's kind of piled upon each other, as you took each piece of evidence and you compared it and core correlated and collated with the other evidence, you come up with the best reasonable conclusion as to what you're looking at. We're looking at a murder scene. So that's abductive reasoning, right? The simplest and most likely explanation for a set of observations. Okay. Enough about dead guys. We're going to move on. But as the, as you're doing an investigation, as policemen are doing an investigation, as you get more and more evidence, you're able to come to a more rational and a more reasonable solution. As, as you go through that progression, you can see which piece of evidence guides us to the most plausible explanation. Okay. Now we still don't know much about this person, right? Was it, what was the motivation? ⁓ who could have done it? ⁓ you know, maybe there was a note left behind that says he had it coming. ⁓ okay. Then I now know that somebody did do it and they had a reason to hate this person so much that they did that, right? So add that to the stack of evidence. Not only are we looking at a murder, we're looking at a murder motivated by hate or antipathy toward this person, right? And so forth and so on. And so when we're going to start looking at evidence, we have to look at several things about the evidence and several things about the truth. Here's some guidelines that detectives use, but we can also bring to a study of the scripture, the New Testament in particular. ⁓ Truth must be feasible. Okay. ⁓ If I'm looking at a person that a crime that's been committed, I could walk in the room and say, well, I think an alien did this, right? Somebody beamed down from their UFO and they did this and they left. Okay. Possible, but not highly possible. Probably not. Right. ⁓ If the person that, that you think did it can be verifiably proved. to be in Miami at the time the crime took place and the crime took place in Austin, Texas, then that person, no matter how much you might want them to be, is The, it can't be the, the, can't be the, the perp, right? He, ⁓ he, he was, he was in Miami. He could not have committed a crime in Austin, Texas. It's gotta be feasible. Number two, it's gotta be straightforward. If all of the evidence points to a single person that actually did the crime, then probably that was the person that did it. Probably acting alone. Right. So I don't need to go looking for a conspiracy of multiple people where there's not any evidence that there were multiple people involved. Right. So it's straightforward. The truth needs to be exhaustive. Okay, the person that most completely explains the evidence is probably the person that did it, right? So I may have some person that meets several pieces of the evidence, but not all of them, right? The guilty person will typically account for most or all of that. So exhaustive. The truth also must be logical because I've got to present this to a jury. And the jury's got to take a look at the evidence and hear what's put in there. so other people are going to examine this evidence. And if a rational adult with a rational mind examines the same evidence, they should come to the same conclusion if it's good evidence in leading that. Right. So it's got to be logical. Right. So other candidates that might, you might have in mind if they have a lack of motive or they have an alibi or whatever, then they're not going to be your one that did it. And finally, the evidence, the truth needs to be superior. Okay. One person will be more tightly explained by the evidence than anybody else. Hey, their fingerprints were there. They sent an email the week before that they hated the person's guts. And then he was having an affair with his wife and he stole money from his business and so forth and so on. You know, all of that stuff ties together. He rented a car at the same time. There was same color car that was seen at the crime scene on down the list, right? When all of that evidence is put together, the person it points to the most, that's the best answer. That's the superior answer. That's the one we're going to run with. Okay, so now let's turn this to Jesus and the resurrection. Okay, so when it comes to the resurrection and when we're looking at the resurrection, there is... Let find it here. I've got notes I need to look at. When we look at the evidence of Jesus and the resurrection, I apologize, I had my notes and I got lost in them. If we look at the historical record and we take all of the scholars, all of the historians of the day that are not necessarily part of the Bible and the historical record and what happened in Jerusalem in that time, at a minimum, history tells us these things. Number one, there was a man named Jesus who died on the cross and he was buried. Number two, the tomb in which he was placed was found empty and nobody ever produced his body. Number three, the disciples and followers of Jesus Christ believed they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead. Finally, number four, the actions of these disciples, their lives were transformed following this alleged resurrection. observation. We know that from history. Historians of the time talk about this sect that started saying that they'd seen this resurrected Christ and began acting in ways and doing things that were counter to their own benefit as a result of this claim that they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead. So now we start looking at the evidence that can discount those things. So either Jesus rose from the dead or he didn't, right? Let's take a look at some of the reasons that we can believe that maybe they weren't telling the truth. Maybe this wasn't really the case when we start looking at the evidence out there. So one of the first things that we hear is the fact that maybe the disciples were wrong about the fact that Jesus died. Okay. Maybe he didn't die. Maybe he just fainted. Maybe they just thought he was dead, but he really wasn't. And then when the coolness of the, of the tomb, He comes to himself, he comes out and they convince themselves that it was a miracle. I think this one's pretty easy to disprove because if you look at the evidence, you look at what crucifixion does to the body, if you look at what Jesus went through leading up to the crucifixion because he was tormented and beaten and a bunch of stuff happened to him before he went to the cross. The beating that he took and you look at what the historians said of that beating. and the amount of blood loss that he had. He was not able to carry his cross up the hill. They had to bring somebody else to do it. He was so weakened and in loss of blood, lack of food, lack of water, dehydrated. He was almost dead before he got to the cross. And then they hung him on the cross. And that is one of the most cruel ways to kill somebody. And you talk about what happens to the human body when it's hung up on a cross. And the, the, happens to the systems of the body. And then the fact that a spear was shoved into his side and blood and water flowed. They burst the, the, the wall surrounding the heart. That's where the blood and water came from. Pierce the heart, the blood came out. The fluid was the, the fluid from the lungs and also from the, the cardiac cavity there that surrounds the heart, you know, that he was his, his heart was punctured at the end of all of that. He was dead. Right. They, they were not mistaken. that he was dead when he went into the cross. Jesus did die. He died a brutal, bloody, horrible death. Okay, so we dismissed that one. Another story that gets circulated around what the eyewitness testimonies say, maybe the disciples lied about it. Maybe he didn't rise from the dead, but they just said that he had risen from the dead. And again, if you start thinking about that and you look at it from a a perspective of a detective and you start looking about conspiracies. Conspiracies have several factors that have to be in play for a conspiracy to have any legs and to last any amount of time. You need to have a very small set of conspirators. They need to be able to have ways of communicating with each other and keeping the story straight. And they've got to be able to do it over time. And they've got to be able to avoid too much pressure for it to happen. Okay. The best example of This one, you can point to the ⁓ story of Watergate. So go back to the 1970s, we have a break-in at the Watergate facility from some operatives of the Nixon campaign at the time, and they agree that they're going to keep the stuff hidden. And that conspiracy did not last a year. We go from July of one year to August of the next year, Nixon resigns from that. So that conspiracy fell apart very quickly, and it was a handful of people under just political pressure. When you look at what the disciples went through after they saw that happening, you would have to have a large number of people maintaining this conspiracy under tremendous pressure, even pressure of losing their life, which many of them went to their graves saying they saw him risen from the dead and refused to recant that testimony even under that pressure. They had no way of communicating. How could a conspirator that wanted to tell the lie in Jerusalem be able to sell the same story to somebody that they crucified in Rome. How did they never saw each other, never met, but they're both telling the same story? How did that communication happen if this was a conspiracy over that time? So the disciples did not lie about the resurrection. They went to their graves talking about the fact that he rose from the dead. Another possible conspiracy theory or another theory is that ⁓ They were delusional. The disciples after the death of Jesus wanted him to be alive so bad that they began to see, you know, they see a guy walking down the road from half a mile away. It's, ⁓ that was Jesus, you know, or they, hey, I spot this guy that kind of looks like him in a crowd. That was Jesus. You know, they're going around trying to have this hallucination or wishful thinking or something like that, right? But when you look at the resurrection stories in the New Testament, They're not the rantings of a few individuals under murky circumstances. They all saw Jesus in a variety of ways and in a variety of circumstances and the odds of them all being hallucinations were pretty low, right? Because we saw the ladies, Mary saw him near the tomb. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus talked with him and walked with him for a length of time. In Jerusalem, he was seen. He was seen in a closed room. He was seen by a group of, according to Paul, 500 people. Probably at the time he resurrected, he ascended into heaven right before the outpouring of the Spirit in the book of Acts. Right? They saw him on a mountain. They saw him in large crowds. They saw him by the sea. The disciples sat with him around the fire there at the sea where he'd prepared breakfast for them. And he had that beautiful story with Peter. you do you love me feed my sheep, right? And so they all saw him in these circumstances. They were not mysterious. They were not murky. They were clear. There were very visible, tangible things that proved to them beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man that they were dealing with was the same man that they had seen so brutally beaten and die just a few days ago. So there's some other possible counters to the narrative, but at the end of the day, what we can derive from this, and if you put all the, again, all the evidence together, stacked on top of each other, we can come to the conclusion that the disciples accurately were reporting the resurrection of Jesus in what they wrote, not only in the Gospels but also continuing into the book of Acts. ⁓ You know, they just weren't distorted later, they were not fooled by an imposter, they weren't influenced by limited sightings, right? They saw the resurrected Christ. Okay? So when we think about eyewitnesses, and we call the disciples eyewitnesses, we look at the Gospels as an eyewitness testimony, some things we need to know about this. If you're going to have an credible and a reliable eyewitness, there are just four criteria you can use. Were they there? Okay? Have they been honest and accurate over time? Can they be verified? And do they have an ulterior motive? Are they telling me something for gain of some kind off to the side? Now, one thing that we have to be clear on is that eyewitnesses will not agree on facts. All facts. They just don't. If you have four people and they're all telling the exact same story with the exact same points, You probably have a collusion and coaching to going taking place there. Because in any circumstance, in any situation, everybody's going to see something different. I had a prime example of this. This is from my college days. I'm in the psychology class, psychology 101. Professor comes in and he starts his lecture. This was at Texas A ⁓ very conservative campus. Here's this professor coming with long hair and sandals. I always remember him. forget his name, but I always remember what he looked like. He starts his lecture. And about 10 minutes into his lecture, a guy comes from the back of the room, comes down the left side of the auditorium. He's ranting stuff about the bourgeois capitalists. And when he gets down to the very front of the room, he pulls something out of his ⁓ pants, out of his trouser belt. And then there was a shot and the lights went off. Okay. And so lights come back on, professor stands back up because he'd fallen to the ground at that point. He basically, it was a Saul stage. said, you have just witnessed a shooting. Write down everything that you, that just happened. And we were sitting in the room seconds after this event took place and we all started writing down what we saw and what we observed and nobody had the same story and nobody got all the facts right. Now think about an eyewitness that sees something happen and then two weeks later they're they're giving their statement or hours later they're giving their statement or days later they're giving their statement or you find a witness that you haven't been able to track down and you find him three weeks later and they're going to tell you the story. They're not going to get all the facts right. They're going to disagree on some of the facts, right? And so it was just proved that to me in that moment, right? He did not say Boursroi pig. He said Boursroi capitalist I said Boursroi pig because that's the phrase we often hear right turns out It wasn't the guy that was doing the ranting and raving that actually fired the shot He had a co-conspirator on the front row in the classroom that actually shot the cap gun off, right? And so the person that we all thought actually did the shooting was not the guy that did the shooting, right? So we we didn't see this stuff like that, right? So any two eyewitnesses are not a good gonna agree on all the facts, but when you put the story together and you piece it all together from everybody's perspective, you're able to figure out exactly what happened here. They all bring their skills, they bring their personal observations, they bring their perspective, they bring the angle from which they saw the event. Standing behind a person, I'm going to see one thing. Standing in front of the person, I'm going to see something different. I have to get the testimony from people both in front and in back in order to piece together what might have actually happened or what really did happen. And we get that in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. we're getting different views and we're able to piece them together and figure out that we've got something here and we get one detail stated in one of the writers and then we pull a different detail from one of the other writers and when we put those together, we start getting an accurate picture of what happening. One of the things you want to do if you have a crime scene or something that's happened, an accident or anything like that, one thing that the investigators try to do is separate the witnesses as soon as possible. You don't want them talking among themselves, okay, because They started agreeing on facts and the person that saw something that was different from the other people may dismiss it and say, I'm not going to mention that because nobody else saw that. So I must be wrong. No, that may be turned out to be the key case of it. The key piece of evidence in the case, right? He was wearing Reebok sneakers. I happen to know that brand very well. Okay. Nobody else mentions the sneakers. So if they're all talking among themselves, he may go out, the sneakers aren't a big deal. Nobody else noticed it. Right? No, that actually could not be, you know, that. So. And then when you get a late witness, what will happen is, again, the book brings that out. Somebody was, there was an incident took place. He's interviewing a bunch of people. There's a lady standing off to the side. He did not realize that she had actually seen what happened or he would have separated her. Right. So she's overhearing what everybody else is telling him what happens. And when he gets through it, he's about wrapped up. She comes up and says, you know, I saw it too. And so her first instinct was to just tell him the other facts. that everybody else didn't admit or didn't talk about. Right. So a late witness that comes to the scene tends to skip over what they already know is true or already been talked about. And then they just want to give the additional stuff that they happen to see. All right. ⁓ and we see that if you watch the old drag net shows or listen to the radio shows, right? ⁓ Joe, Joe Friday's already having to tell them, just, just tell me the story from the beginning. I understand that start from the beginning. Just tell me exactly what you saw, because maybe there's a detail that you saw or that you forgot about earlier. right? And we get that actually when we look at Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew, Mark and Luke are very transactional. Matthew was first and he's like the first eyewitness and he gets it out in kind of a hurried form. And then Mark puts his spin on it for his audience. And then Luke comes along and says, all right, I've looked at all the evidence from everybody. Here's a detailed narrative in order as to how things actually happen based on all of the stuff I've been able to put together. And then John comes along. And he says, okay, I'm not going to talk about his birth. I'm not going to talk about John the Baptist much. ⁓ Let's talk about Jesus's ministry. And half of the book of John is the last week of Jesus's life. He doesn't bother filling in all the other stuff. Okay. You know, those stories, you know, the story about the feeding of the $5,000. So let's start with the water into wine, John chapter two. Let's start with his first miracle. I'm trying to prove to you that he's God. Okay. You've got the writings of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Let me give you the other details. that you may not have got, Okay, so, you know, he's writing it much, much later. And so he's just kind of filling in the gaps for the purpose of doing that, right? So again, another indication that this was a eyewitness story that's going on there. Another thing we have when you start talking about evidence and testimony and eyewitness testimony is the further you get away from the actual event, the more likely that you're going to get some distorting or some bending of what happened or just flat forgetting, But if people have an ill motive or they're trying to actually manipulate things, they will embellish to the point of doing that. And that's one of the criticisms we have of a lot of critics of the Old Testament. They claim that the deity claims of Jesus and the divinity claims of Jesus and the fact that he was God was late additions into these first and second centuries. know, 8150, 8200, right? Second, third centuries. was when we started making him into God. But if you look at the original close writings, they just said he was a man, but we've embellished it over time. In fact, the Council of Laodicea was when we finally got this version of mythology about the life of Jesus that was finally put together in 363 AD. And so one of the things that you can do when you start looking at the content of the New Testament, we can start bringing things into perspective. So here's how we can start piecing this stuff together. ⁓ The New Testament talks about lot of events. It talks about Herod. It talks about Pontius Pilate. It talks about Caesar. It talks about ⁓ certain events that happened. It talks about ⁓ certain rebellions that had taken place when they're talking about the disciples in the book of Acts and saying, these guys are rabble rousers. so ⁓ Gamaliel comes to him and says, hey, you you remember the rebellion of this guy and how once he died that the whole thing fell apart and there's another rebellion and Jesus mentions the tower that fell at a particular place. So he's talking about particular events in particular places and things that happened and things like that. And so when you look at the New Testament, if it was written later, there are some facts that should have been mentioned if they were writing from a much later perspective. OK, so let me give you three examples. Number one, nowhere in the New Testament, in any of the writings of the New Testament, is the siege and the fall of Jerusalem mentioned. You know, the burning of the temple and all that stuff that happened. Jesus prophesied that this temple is going to be representative of what's going to happen to my body. know, tear this temple, not one stone is going to be left upon the other, but you know, tear this temple down, I'll be back in three days. So he alluded to the fact that the Jerusalem was going to go, you know, the temple was going to be destroyed. and he used that as proof point that he was going to be resurrected. Now, if the temple had been destroyed at the time they're doing the writing, you know they would have mentioned it because it would reinforce Jesus' claim of resurrection. But we don't have any mention of that anywhere in the New Testament. And we know when Rome destroyed Jerusalem, AD 69, AD 71, right in that timeframe. Luke, in his writing, he talked about some of the other martyrs. He talked about Stephen being martyred. He talked about some of the others that were killed, but he never talks about Paul or Peter and their death. And we have a pretty good idea of when they died. Luke also said nothing about the death of James, which we also know of the approximate time frame of when he did that. The siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple happened in AD 70. The siege of Jerusalem started around AD 67. James, Peter and Paul died somewhere between AD 61 and AD 65 and that's not mentioned anywhere in any of the writings of the New Testament. So what this tells us is the fact that Luke had finished writing before those events took place. Now, Acts was written after the Gospel of Luke. You can tie it together with Luke chapter 1 and Acts chapter 1. Okay? And Paul, in his writings, was aware of what Luke had already written when he started doing his letters. Right? So Luke was written before Paul wrote his letters. And we know when Paul wrote his letters and we can start piecing things together. Okay? So let's take a look at this. Luke, the gospel predated the book of Acts. Paul quoted Luke's gospel writing to Timothy and Paul echoed the claims of the gospel writers. Okay? 1st Timothy. All right? Chapter 5, Paul writing. Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in word and doctrine. For the scripture says, You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain, and the laborer is worthy of his wages." Okay, let's look at that. If you read that in context, you shall not muzzle the ox while it treads out the grain. That's a reference back to Deuteronomy chapter 25. So he's quoting the Old Testament there. The second quote, which Paul calls scripture, for the scripture says, the laborer is worthy of his wages. You are not going to find that phrase anywhere in the Septuagint, the Old Testament, or any other Jewish writing from the Old Testament. You're going to find that in Luke chapter 10 and verse 7 where Jesus is given his disciples instructions before he sends them out. And by the way, the Greek word there for scripture is grafe, which is a term that means it was written down. So Paul says, What Luke wrote was scripture. Luke wrote it before Paul wrote his stuff, right? And we're already back to Paul dying in AD 61 to AD 64. So Luke wrote before that time frame, right? And then Paul is alluding to other phrases or he gives us creeds that have been circulating among the Christians. So if you go to 1st Corinthians chapter 15, for I deliver to you as a first importance what I also received that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures that he appeared to Cephas Peter then the twelve after that he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time most of whom remain until now but some have fallen asleep and then he appeared to James and then to all the apostles and last of all as to one untimely born he appeared to me also so that first part of that is kind of a creed you know Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures that he was buried and he raised again on the third day he's alluding to writings or scripture or phrases that we have there. Now let's look at Paul also in Galatians. When God had set me apart, Galatians chapter 1, when God who had set me apart from my mother's womb and called me through his grace was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. So I didn't go talk to men about this, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those that were apostles before me. I went away to Arabia and returned once more to Damascus. Then three years later I went up to Jerusalem. came acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days, but I do not see any of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother." So what this is telling us is Paul saying, my experience in learning the gospel directly from Jesus Christ happened before I went to Jerusalem to meet with Peter. We see that recorded in the book of Acts, right? And then he also says in Galatians, and after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas taking Titus along also. So we also have that in Acts where he went back to Jerusalem for another confab. with all of those people like that. So what we're basically saying is Luke was the last of the gospel writers outside of John, so John wrote very late in this time's perspective, right? He was writing as an old man, probably AD 80, AD 90. So this is the latest writing, but again, he was filling in the gaps. But if you look at Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Luke was the last of the three synoptic gospels, and he was finished writing before AD 61. at least, and Paul had had many years of evangelism, so Paul was referring to Luke early in his writings and late in his writings. Luke's writings are moved back further, so Luke was writing 8050, maybe even a little earlier in that time frame, and then you had Matthew and Mark preceded that, and Jesus died in 8033, and so we're within years of the actual events taking place. And Paul even alluded to the fact that We're talking about this resurrected Christ. If you don't believe what we're writing, there are people that were there that you can go talk to today. Some of them have died, not all of them. Go talk to the people that saw it for themselves. Right? So we get this piecing together. So here's what we can find out from that timeline. ⁓ First Corinthians was written about AD 55. Paul first tells Corinth about Jesus and AD 51 on one of his missionary trips. Okay. Paul, before he went to Corinth, had gone to Jerusalem and he talked to John, Peter, and James in front of Barnabas and Titus. That was AD 48, AD 50. And then he met with James and Peter before that. That was AD 37, AD 38. And he appeared to Paul somewhere around AD 34 or AD 35. Paul encountered Jesus within a year or two of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. ⁓ And Paul began writing very early on after that. basically what it boils down to, we have. accurate timely writings that took place within the lifetime of the people that saw the events. This was not something at the Council of 320 years later, Laodicea or whatever it is. It is at the early times right after this event happened and we went through that. So again, Luke quoted Matthew and Mark and you know on down the list right so you know Luke probably wrote his gospel 8050 to 8053 right and ⁓ Mark again he was a companion of Peter and his job was to get the news out as quickly as possible he was sat with Peter said tell me the stories let me get them written down and then ⁓ Matthew comes along takes what some of the stuff that Mark had written And he kind of pieces together some of it into the Hebrew language and gave a story to that. And then Luke comes along and says, okay, I'm putting it all in some order for you. So Mark probably wrote his gospel 80, 45 to 80, 50. Luke wrote his gospel 80, 50 to 53. And away we go. Right. Another thing that gives us support or belief that this is timely and eyewitness testimony is that there's unintentional eyewitness support. When you piece together eyewitness testimony, the pieces interlock and interweave with each other, and you have to have all the stories in order to see that happen. ⁓ So here's kind of an example. If you read the account just in one of the writings, you're going to be a little confused. Matthew chapter 4. As Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who was called Peter, and Andrew's brother, casting in that in the sea, for they were fishermen. He said to them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. Immediately they left their nets and followed him. And if you just read that by itself, you're going to be taken aback. Okay, so some guy comes walking up to you, you're in the middle of doing your job, says, hey, follow me. And sure, sounds like a great plan. I'm with you and leave behind everything they'd ever known. Right? Follow me. I will make you fishers of men. Immediately they left their nets and followed him. So if you just read that by itself, you're going to think, okay, what's going on here. All right. But if you read the narrative as it comes out in Luke, we fill in the gaps, right? We get the supporting evidence that the other writer left out again, dear, two different testimonies, right? Okay. So what really happened? Well, let's go to the narrative in the gospel of Luke chapter five. Now it happened while the crowd was pressing around him and listen to the word of God. He was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret and he saw two boats lying at the edge of lake, but the fishermen had gotten out of them or washing their nets. And he got in one of the boats, which was Simon's, and asked him to put out a little way from the land. He sat down and began teaching the people from the boat. Okay, so number one, this is that same scene. Peter hears Jesus teach. He's asked to take his boat. There was washing his nets. He says, hey, can I borrow your boat for a little bit? He hears the teachings of this man named Jesus. And he taught the people. And then when he finished, he turns to Peter and says, hey, go back out there and throw down your nets. But he's something so compelling about the teaching of this man. Peter responds, we worked all night, we caught nothing. But I will do as you say, and I will let down the nets. So on the command of this itinerant preacher, Peter and his companions go out. They drop the net. And when they had done this, they enclosed a great quantity of fish, and their nets began to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat for them to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats that they began to sink. So. They see the miracle. Jesus performs a miracle. They have the miraculous catch of fish. He's heard him teach. He's obeyed his command. He's got a miraculous catch of fish. So Simon Peter saw that. He fell down at Jesus feet saying, Go away from me, Lord, for I'm a sinful man. He's aware of his sinful nature in the presence of this teacher. For amazement had seized him and all his commandings because the catch of the fish which they take him. And also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who are partners with Simon. Jesus said Simon do not fear from now on you'll be catching men and when they had brought their boats to land they left everything and followed him now Matthew's narrative makes a whole lot more sense because there's details that we don't hear until we get to the book of Luke He didn't just walk up and say hey follow me I'll make you fishers of men and they left everything they had encountered him They'd heard his teaching they'd seen a miracle and then he had called them and they immediately followed it. So that's the unintentional interweaving of these stories. Here's another example. Okay, when Jesus and Matthew was being ⁓ crucified and being tortured, then they spat in his face and beat him with their fists. Another slapped him and said, prophesy to us, you Christ, who is the one who hits you? And so Jesus is sitting there. And so if you read that by itself, you think, why would they ask that question? And of course, I'm thinking God in flesh is thinking, yeah, your name is so-and-so and you've got you know, so many kids and you're married to this woman but you've been having an affair with this other woman and you know, he knew everything about them and so they're saying, why would they say, tell us who hit you? Well, again, go to Luke and read the same account. Now the men who were holding Jesus in custody were mocking him and beating him and they blindfolded him and were asking him, saying, prophesy, who is the one who hit you? ⁓ now it makes sense when I read Matthew. Matthew didn't mention the blindfold, but he's telling the same story. So I get this extra fill in, the blanks, as a result of reading the rest of the story. So that's undesigned coincidences. ⁓ There's some more. ⁓ In Matthew 8.16, it talks about when evening had come, they brought those who were sick to be healed. Why did they wait till the evening? If I've got somebody that's sick, I'd bring them as soon as possible. But if you read the same account in Mark and Luke, you'll find out it was Sabbath and they couldn't travel and do long distances on the Sabbath. They had to wait till the Sabbath was over and that happens that evening. So after Sabbath was done, now we can do the work to bring somebody to Jesus. Okay. In Matthew 14, we hear Herod tell his servants that Jesus was John the Baptist who was raised from the dead. Now, why would Herod think that Jesus was John the Baptist? Then it turns out if you read Luke in Acts 13, many of Jesus' followers were in Herod's household. He would have heard the stories. Right? And there's some more in there. There's a great one talking about the feeding of the 5,000, how all of the gospel narratives and the synoptic gospels kind of tie together. You can piece together the time of year it took place based on the fact that the boy had a barley loaf, which it was time for the barley to be harvested. And you could talk about the green grass that was there because it was that time of year that the rains would have been plentiful. And you can piece together all the stories and they all interlock and interweave with each other. And you have that one right there. And then in Mark, chapter 15, Mark says, Joseph of Arimathea acted boldly. Why would he say he acted boldly? Well, because in John, we find out that Joseph was a secret disciple who was afraid of the Jews before that point. Right? And so again, piecing together the stories together. And there is more to go, but I'm running out of time. So, you know, there was unintentional white witness support. The names that they used correspond to the names that were common in that region at the time in the same proportion. So Peter was a common name. Simon was a common name. And so if you start looking at how many James, how many Johns did you typically have in the population and you look at the names in the Bible, they kind of work out mathematically. You had ⁓ correct locations, right? They identified exact locations where things took place. You have the non-biblical witnesses that corroborated the Gospels. You got a lot of writings from Tertullius and a bunch of other Hebrew and Roman and other historians that mentioned this Jesus, that mentioned his followers, and stuff like this. Ancient Jewish writers corroborates what was said in the Gospels. Archaeology has corroborated the Gospels. And so, you know, again, we're not going to get every detail. or anything like that. The last thing I'm going to leave you with is the fact that another way that you can understand that a witness is reliable is, they reliable over time? If a witness tells you one thing one day and three weeks later tells you something different, you're going to start questioning what was going on. You're not going to understand if maybe they were telling the truth in the first place. But if you take a look at what not only the disciples wrote, but you look at their followers and the ones that followed after them, The information about Jesus that is written in the Gospels was unchanged from about AD 37 when they first started writing them all the way through. And if you look at the followers that came after the first ones, You know, Mark taught Polycarp and you had Ignatius and Clement and other ones like that. And you read the writings of the second generation, right? So we've got the writings of the gospel writers and the New Testament. And then you've got their disciples and you look at their writings. And if you read the writings of that next generation of ⁓ followers, here's what you'll know. Jesus was born miraculously. He was recognized as God. He taught divinely. He died on the cross. He rose from the dead and he reigns with the Father. That's the second generation. If you take it to the third generation, you can still have the same story, right? So these are reliable over time as you do that. Finally, if you look at motives, if somebody is going to lie under testimony, lie under oath, There's almost always one of three things that driving them. There's financial gain, there's sexual or relational desire, or there's power to be had. And if you look at what happened to the lives of the people that wrote the gospel and all of the followers of Jesus Christ, they got none of those things. Paul went from a position of power to one of being persecuted and ultimately killed for what he believed. He was not telling you something because he was hoping to gain something from himself. He was going the opposite direction from a pursuit of power. None of the disciples made their money and became rich as a result of what they were preaching, something some preachers today could probably gain something from. And the fact that they weren't pursuing sexual or relational desire. Many of the disciples were already married and we have stories of that. They were not doing this to pick up chicks, so to speak, right? And so if you look at their motives for doing what they did, okay, they were not driven by financial gain. They were not driven by power. They were written. because they saw something and they wanted you to know about it and they died going to their grave believing and testifying that they saw Jesus Christ resurrected from the dead. You have critics of Christianity that will come along and say, I don't believe it today because of X, Y, and Z. Muhammad comes along 600 years later and tries to tell us that no, wasn't really Jesus that got crucified. Allah made somebody appear to be Jesus, but Jesus himself was not crucified. You've got people saying it never really happened. You have people saying, and I'm sorry. You're many, many, many years after the fact. If I look at the evidence and I look at the people that were there and I read their stories and I see how they changed their lives, they went from running for their lives, cowering and hiding in a room, shut the door, lock the door. They're coming for us next to then standing in the courtyards in front of powers, principalities, Kings and high priests. Stating the man that you come crucified is the one that made this person whole the man that you crucified is Lord in Christ You need to repent and you need to be baptized in his name and you need to be filled with his spirit. His name is Jesus and Then they stood up to the powers of the day and when they were told that you know recant or die they chose to die They saw something they encountered something and if we read the book of Acts chapter 2 they received something from the promise of this man called Jesus Christ. And they carried that to their grave and they shared that story with everybody that went around. And there's an estimate that for that region of the world, by the time we get to the second century, roughly half the population, if not more, were professing Christians, even though the government was against them, even though it was counter-cultural and everything else. They revolutionized their world because they were willing to stick to the testimony that Jesus Christ did rise from the grave. And I stand here today in 2026, March, and I profess today that Jesus Christ died, He rose again, He ascended into heaven, He has come back as the Spirit, and He is an empowering force in my life today. I was baptized in His name. My sins have been forgiven and I have been filled with His Spirit and I have the power and the enabling will to do the things He wants me to do. Because Jesus Christ did rise from the dead. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and the Gospel writers and the New Testament writers validate everything about this man. I encourage you, if you're not a believer, read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Read them with an open mind and ask yourself the question, did these men see what they saw? Were they writing the truth about this man named Jesus? Cold Case Christianity will help you work your way through that. I encourage you to do that and I think you'll come to the same conclusion that I have. I believe the Bible. I believe the Old Testament is the Word of God. I believe the New Testament is the Word of God. I believe that God's name forever and shall always be Jesus of Nazareth, that He was God manifest in the flesh. He is the visible incarnation of the invisible God. And when I get to heaven and I look on that throne, there's going to be one seated there and it's going to be Jesus Christ. as he appeared on the shores of Galilee in a glorified body reigning and ruling from now and forevermore. And I will be with him in a glorified body right alongside him. And I'm looking forward to that day. Thank you for letting me ramble. I know it was a little scattered at times, but I felt I wanted to share this with you. I've just asked you to openly consider this man named Jesus, because if he is who he said he was, it will change your life. ways you can't even begin to imagine. And with that, I'm going to wrap up today's episode of Revving Up with David Ross. Like, subscribe, all that great stuff like that. I encourage you to do so and I look forward to seeing you the next time around. So join me. I've got some guests lined up. We will get them in the studio soon. Thanks and have a fantastic day.