Audio only:
In this episode Trent breaks down Wesley Huff’s recent defense of the resurrection on the Joe Rogan Experience.
The Myth of Protestant Bible Martyrs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj6iVUKK_m0
Dialogue: Is Luke’s Gospel reliable? (with Godless Engineer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4dCB0Bwskw
Transcription:
Trent:
How do you show the world’s most famous podcaster that Christianity is true? That’s what we’ll talk about today as we examine Protestant Bible Scholar Wesley Huff’s recent appearance on the Joe Rogan experience. I also want to talk about what Catholics can learn from Protestants when it comes to defending the foundational truth of Christianity, namely Christ Resurrection from the dead. Before we do that, please don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you want to help us continue to redesign our studio and create our new mobile studio for dialogues with non-Catholics, please support us@trenthornpodcast.com. So Wesley Huff is a Protestant Bible scholar and Christian apologist who is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College. He recently had a debate on the Bible with Billy Carson, who is an idiosyncratic thinker who is the CEO of four Forbidden Knowledge Incorporated, who also appeared himself on the Joe Rogan Podcast in the past year.
But Rogan’s podcast often has guests who pedal nonsense, some of which is about Christianity. So it’s refreshing that an actual Christian was able to make a compelling case for Christianity on such a huge platform. Now, I didn’t agree with everything Huff said and I strongly disagree with parts of the show that made it seem like the medieval church opposed vernacular Bible translations. If you want to rebuttal to that, see my episode on the Protestant Bible martyr myth linked in the description below. So while I disagreed with Huff on those points, I did appreciate his defense of Christ resurrection. I feel like how St. Paul felt concerning people preaching Christ who St. Paul didn’t agree with, he wrote in Philippians one 18. What does it matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true, and in that I rejoice. Now I’m not saying Huff is like the people St. Paul was criticizing only that even if I don’t agree with Wesley Huff on some of the things he said, and as Joe Rogan interview, I’m still grateful that Christ was artfully proclaimed on such a large platform. So let’s take a look at some excerpts from the interview and see where we can extend some of Huff’s argument and answer Joe Rogan’s objections.
CLIP:
The crazy thing about Christianity where you have this Jewish itinerant guy who’s walking around first century Roman occupied Judea, he’s making some pretty audacious claims, claims to be God himself, and then he predicts his own death and resurrection and then his disciples are, they think it’s over. They’re like, he’s dead, we’re done. And then they go from 11 scared men because Judas committed suicide, scared men in an upper room to completely overhauling the Roman world in only a couple hundred years because of this claim that they say they saw Jesus resurrected. There’s something different that goes on there that they’re like, this is a miracle, right? Dead people don’t usually rise from the dead.
Trent:
This has also been called the minimal facts approach to defending Christianity and it’s popular with scholars like Gary Habermas and Mike Laona. It was also what helped me become a Christian 23 years ago. Basically with this approach, you don’t have to start with your foundational premise being the Bible is inspired or the Bible is completely reliable and it says Jesus rose from the dead, therefore, Jesus did rise from the dead. That approach carries the large burden of proving the Bible is true and completely reliable, and that involves defending it against an almost endless onslaught of critical scholars who attack the Bible. It’s a difficult task, which is why I criticized Dinesh Desa for trying to do that in a recent debate with Alex O’Connor in my episode on political Christianity. A similar problem arises when you try to prove Christianity is true by appealing the Messianic prophecies that Jesus fulfilled since you have to then answer a lot of historical objections to the idea of Jesus fulfilling those prophecies.
This is why William Lane Craig says Arguments from fulfilled prophecy are the worst arguments for Christianity, although Gavin Orland has a good video defending these kinds of arguments, so check it out if you’re interested in that particular argument. In contrast, the minimal facts approach to the resurrection starts with basic facts that even skeptical scholars, scholars who deny that Jesus fulfilled prophecy or deny the Bible’s general reliability, minimal facts that even they agree about specifically that there was a guy named Jesus who had a ministry in first century Judea and he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Only the fringe of fringe scholars deny Jesus existed, but even these scholars agree that Jesus’ immediate followers claimed that Jesus had gloriously risen from the dead. Even skeptical scholars admit, it’s an historical fact the apostles at least thought they saw the risen Jesus gard Ludeman denies the resurrection but says it may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ and non-Christian scholar. Paula f Fredrickson says the following in a documentary about Jesus,
CLIP:
I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That’s what they say, and then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that’s what they saw. I’m not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they saw, but I do know as an historian that they must have seen something,
Trent:
A Christian using the minimal facts approach to defending the resurrection is thus able to spend more time showing why the supernatural explanation of Jesus’s actual resurrection is a superior explanation of these minimal facts than other natural explanations which you’ll see happen in Huff’s interaction with Rogan.
CLIP:
So what is your personal belief when it comes to the resurrection? What do you think? Do you have a belief or do you just try to interpret the text and try to see what is the message?
Well, I think so as a historian, I do think it is a historical question. You have a guy who objectively lived, he objectively died, and then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead,
Right?
Again, this is a highly
Unusual activity,
Highly unusual,
Right? But it’s hard when you’re dealing with illiterate populations, you’re dealing with thousands of years of time, you’re dealing with an oral tradition and then you have us sitting here talking about it in 2024, trying to figure it at the end of 2024, trying to figure this out.
Trent:
I tell Rogan that the challenge is not how long ago an event happened in history, it’s the distance between the source recording the event and when the original event happened. They’re two different things. Some events that are said to have happened recently in the past are actually doubtful because the first source that described that event comes much later. In contrast, some events in ancient history are very certain because we have multiple independent sources testifying them shortly after they happened, even though those sources were written a long time ago. Events like the Great Fire in Rome in AD 64, and this is the kind of evidence we have in the New Testament with the gospels coming just decades after Christ resurrection and St. Paul’s citation of a creed in one Corinthians 15 that has been dated to within just a few years of Christ resurrection. I will say though that Christians need to be careful about overstating their evidence for Jesus.
For example, I’ve seen memes calling Jesus, quote, literally one of the most well-documented figures of antiquity, which isn’t true because ancient Roman emperors had better documentation for their existence in antiquity than Jesus had. Although Jesus was still well-documented for the era, or there are Christians who say, we know the apostles sincerely believe Jesus rose from the dead because all of the apostles except for John willingly died as martyrs. The problem is that many of the apostles martyrdoms come from late historical sources, so not all of them can be proved with critical historical analysis. Although St. Peter, St. Paul and St. James have the best historical sources, and for more on that, I would recommend Sean McDowell’s book The Fate of the Apostles. Instead, as I show in my previous episode on the martyrdom argument for the apostles sincere testimony, we only have to show the apostles were willing to suffer and die for proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus in order to prove they sincerely believed in Jesus’s resurrection, and there’s plenty of evidence for that. The point is that we have good evidence for Jesus, so Christians shouldn’t weaken their case by overstating the evidence that we do have.
CLIP:
It’s very difficult for anybody who thinks of themselves as an intelligent person who’s secular to even entertain the possibility that someone died and come back to life,
And I get that, but we’ve already talked about the fact that we don’t think that the only thing that exists is matter in motion. We as in you and I, right, we believe that there’s something else going on in this world that’s a little bit crazy.
There’s something else
And that to I think exclude that I think excludes something that you’re kind of putting blinders on.
Trent:
It’s easier to make a case for Christianity to those who reject atheistic materialism or mere matter in motion. As Huff says, if you think that’s all the world is, then it’s going to be hard to accept that God raised Jesus from the dead through a miracle over another alternative natural explanation. But if you are open to the idea of God existing and intervening in the world, then something like the resurrection becomes more of a live option for you. So Huff is doing a good job here of making God or at least anti materialism part of the background knowledge in his discussion with Joe Rogan, and this makes it easier for Rogan and many members of his audience to accept miracles as explanations for weird events. This has also been called the classical approach to apologetics and it’s represented by William Lane Craig in the anthology five Views on Apologetics.
The classical approach is also used by people like Peter Craf and myself to present a two-step approach to defending the faith prove God exists and then prove God revealed himself through Christ in his church. A slightly different approach is the Evidentialist method which says miracles contain enough evidence to prove both that God exists and that God has revealed himself through a particular religion. Gary Habermas, who is an evidentialist writes the following evidential, may be characterized as the one step approach to this question in that historical evidences can conserve as a species of argument for God instead of having to prove God’s existence before moving to specific evidences. The two-step method, the Evidentialist treats one or more historical arguments as being able both to indicate God’s existence and activity and indicate which variety of theism is true. Now, I still prefer the classical method to evidential, but I will say both of them are far superior to Presuppositional apologetics, which is also defended in that anthology.
Presuppositional says that the only way we can understand the world is by first presupposing Christianity is true, and so that is how we know Christianity is true. William Lane Craig writes, as commonly understood, presuppositional is guilty of a logical howler. It commits the informal fallacy of Petitio principle or begging the question for it advocates presupposing the truth of Christian theism in order to prove Christian theism. Now I understand making an argument that says the objectivity of things like mathematics, morality, or logic can only exist within an objective divine foundation. This is similar to presuppositional, but these kinds of arguments only prove that God exists, not that Jesus is God or that Jesus rose from the dead. In order to prove those truths, you’d need not just philosophical evidence but historical evidence beyond mere presuppositions that prove the unique truths of the incarnation as opposed to claims by competitors like Islam, Buddhism or a simple deism that denies divine revelation. So I’d say West does a good job in this part of the interview of building upon prior common ground that rejects strict materialism and opens the door for Jesus to have a divine identity which huff goes over when discussing the postmortem resurrection appearances of Jesus and the strangeness of the Jesus movement surviving Jesus’ death when all other Messianic movements collapsed after the death or exile of their alleged Messiahs,
CLIP:
Do you think it’s possible that he didn’t die and do you think it’s possible that they thought he was dead because that does happen. There was actually a case very recently where a guy was about to be harvested for organs. They thought he was dead, and this guy started moving again and came back to life. It’s very, very bizarre case because his family had been told that he was going to be harvested for organs. They were preparing for that,
And
This guy comes back,
Yeah, I mean we know a lot about Roman crucifixion
Brutal,
And we know that they did their job well, and so in fact, if you look at say very skeptical biblical scholars like non-believing atheist, agnostic Christian scholars, they will say, if we can know anything about Jesus, they’ll cast it doubt on a lot of the things that we read about in the gospels in terms of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth. They’ll say, one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate because we have not just multiple detested documents that we refer to as the New Testament, but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards and talk about the fact that you have this guy and it’s mocked within earliest Christianity. So one of our earliest, in fact, not one of the earliest depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the Alexa Manto, and it’s probably from the end of the first century and it depicts an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship worshiping a man with a donkey’s head who’s being crucified and right beside it it says, Alexa mannos worship his God in Greek.
Trent:
I’m glad Huff brought this up because it also refutes the claim that the earliest Christians thought Jesus was just a wise teacher or even some kind of angelic being when the first Christians clearly believed Jesus was God incarnate. I’ll put on the screen the actual graffiti where you can see the clear mocking elements, though it has been dated closer to the end of the second century than the first century. As Huff noted in his interview, the of Christ being a victim of crucifixion can also be seen in an early Greek witness to the crucifixion called Lucian of Samo Sada. He was a second century playwright who thought Christians were gullible ignorant fools. In his work, the passing of para Grina, he says that Christians quote have sinned by denying the Greek gods and by worshiping that crucified s himself and living according to his laws.
CLIP:
Whoa, and it’s mocking, right? Because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low. It was for slaves. In fact, if you were a Roman citizen, you were banned from being crucified
Who wasn’t That got crucified upside down
Peter.
Was it because regular crucifixion wasn’t good enough for him or he didn’t deserve it because Christ had gone through it?
Well, so the story is that they say, we’re going to crucify you, and he says, it’s too big of an honor to die like my Lord, and they say, well, we can fix that. Oh Jesus, shut your mouth, buddy. Listen, the Romans were pretty brutal. Oh yeah. But this is why we know we have. It’s interesting. We know a lot about crucifixion, but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting. I believe it was Cicero who said that the word crucifixion shouldn’t even be on a Roman man’s lips. I mean the word excruciating X is off of in Latin and Cru off the cross. So that’s where we get that word is because this was designed to humiliate and it was designed to be as painful as possible.
Trent:
Huff then describes this article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which analyzes Jesus’ death by crucifixion before saying
CLIP:
The chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion I think are narrow to none, and the chance of him appearing three days later completely fine. I mean, you don’t if the first thing you do, if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples, the first thing you say is not peace be with you. It’s get me to a hospital.
Trent:
The idea that Jesus survived the crucifixion is also called the swoon theory and was only popular in the early 19th century. One of the biggest objections to it was that even if against all odds, Jesus survived being crucified, such a feat would not inspire belief in his glorious resurrection from the dead. Escaping death is not the same as conquering death. David Strauss basically killed the swoon theory in the 18 hundreds when he wrote, it is impossible that a being who had stolen half dead out of the sker, who crept about weak and ill and wanting medical treatment could have given the disciples the impression that he was a conqueror over death in the grave, the prince of life, an impression that lay at the bottom of their future ministry. Huff then goes on to answer Rogan’s questions about sources noting the following about Luke’s gospel.
CLIP:
In fact, Luke prefaces his gospel by saying that he’s right upfront about this. He’s like, Hey, I’m not an eyewitness. Don’t confuse me with an eyewitness, but he actually uses conventional writing. What’s the term I’m looking for? He uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world. So you have a guy named Quintilian who is basically, I mentioned him before, he’s teaching people how to write, and he says that if you’re going to write biography, you need to be interviewing eyewitnesses and you can’t be too far away from the event to be able to write these things.
Trent:
Huff is referring to the genre of beo or ancient biography as noted in Richard Bird’s book, what are the Gospels? These were not like modern biographies that equally cover a person’s life, but instead focus on the most edifying parts of a person’s life, which is why outside of Christ’s birth and him being found in the temple at age 12, we hear nothing about Jesus’s early life before his ministry. The gospels do not resemble ancient myths or allegories, and Luke in particular has a writing style that rivals ancient historians. The prologue to Luke’s gospel is very technical and resembles writing in ancient medical manuals, which makes sense because tradition says St. Luke was a physician. For more on the reliability of Luke’s gospel and its sequel acts, check out my dialogue with godless engineer on the subject that is linked in the description below.
CLIP:
So we have an account of the resurrection. Do we have an account of the denial of the resurrection? Is there an historical record of him just dying and a futal or a rebuttal rather to what they’re saying?
No, the only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are described as gnostics and they’re not necessarily denying it for the reasons we might think they were. They’re denying it because they have incorporated ideas of pagan philosophy where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad. So if Jesus was crucified, let me back up. If Jesus is God,
He cannot have a physical body, so they deny that he actually had a physicality to him. This is sometimes called doism because do Cain in Greek means to seem, so these groups that we describe as the Docetic, they are denying that Jesus had a physical body. He only seemed to have a physical body and they wrote documents later on. So the gospel of Peter, which comes around in second, third, fourth centuries is being written and it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross because he’s not really physical, because he’s divine, and physical entities don’t have physical bodies, so we don’t actually get a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like the gospel of Barnabas in the Middle ages.
Trent:
The only thing I would add here is that we have indirect recording of early denials of the resurrection in the gospel of Matthew, specifically denials from the Jewish opponents of Jesus’s resurrection. The chief priests, Matthew records the story of guards fleeing the empty tomb and the priest paying the guards off. It says, tell people his disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep, and if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble. So they took the money and did as they were directed, and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day and in the middle of the second century. Justin martyr records how Jews of his time believed his disciples stole him by night from the tomb. Critical scholars say the guard’s story in Matthew’s gospel was an apologetic invention, but even if one granted their skeptical assertion, the story still reveals something that supports the truth of the resurrection accounts in the New Testament.
If a student tells his teacher, my dog ate my homework, she may not believe his story, but she does believe that the homework does not exist. Likewise, all the Jewish leaders had to say against Christians and denying Jesus was to say Jesus was a fraud whose body still rots in his tomb and we know where his bones are because Jewish burial practices allowed for bones to be identified and placed in a bone box up to a year after burial. This shows that when Matthew’s gospel was being written, enemies of Christianity agreed Jesus’s tomb was empty, and so they needed a natural explanation of that fact. Now, the empty tomb doesn’t have as much agreement as the postmortem appearances of Jesus, so it isn’t a strict part of the minimal facts approach, but if you do accept the empty tomb and there are other reasons to accept the empty tomb that I outline in my own book on Jesus, then this confounds natural explanations of the resurrection proclamation that rely on the apostles hallucinating because Jesus’s dead the tomb would be an easy way to snap the apostles out of such an hallucination.
CLIP:
Well, that’s also why it’s so interesting trying to put your mind into the context of people that live back then when you try to interpret what these stories were all about because they did believe in things that weren’t real. So when they talk about this thing that we are supposed to believe is real, when you have all this evidence that they believe things that aren’t true, it’s interesting, right, because you’re now saying, yeah, but this one really was true. Well, there’s so many different things that they thought of and believe that weren’t true.
Yeah, so this graphically is so when we do history, it’s an inference to the best explanation.
So there are probabilities of things that have happened in history where we can say, okay, there’s a higher probability of event A happening and a lower probability of event B happening. So the example I often give is Jonah being swallowed by the fish that’s low probabilistically. Not that it didn’t happen, but that as a historian we got to say, well, there’s no independent cross-reference sources. You don’t have multiple attestation for this particular event. The interesting thing about Jesus is that we have more evidence from different writings in the ancient world than we probably should have for someone of his stature.
Trent:
Rogan’s objection was basically that in the ancient world, people were gullible and they believed in all kinds of miracles, but we all agree that those miracles didn’t happen, so why should we trust them when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus? And I appreciate Huff saying that the evidence for ancient miracles is not equal. There is greater evidence for Jesus rising from the dead than for Jonah being swallowed by a whale or great fish, for example. That doesn’t mean the Jonah story did not happen, just that it’s much harder to prove that story from historical evidence alone than from also adding something else like Jesus’s own words about Jonah to your basket of evidence for the story. However, I would push back against Rogan’s implicit claim that people in the ancient world would believe absolutely anything. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians shows that they denied there was a general resurrection of the dead and they had to be convinced of it.
Acts two 13 says that people dismissed the apostles after Pentecost saying they are filled with new wine or were drunk, not full of the spirit doing miracles, and St. Peters said in his second letter that we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty, which implies some people in his audience dismissed Jesus’ miracles as myths against the idea of ancient people believing anything they heard. The idea of a bodily resurrection before the end of the world was unbelievable from a Jewish perspective. The Greeks also found bodily resurrection, incomprehensible as can be seen in Acts 17 where the Athenians call St. Paul, a preacher of foreign divinities because he preached Jesus and the resurrection. If the Jesus story were made up or the result of grief induced hallucinations, then the apostles would’ve preached that Jesus was in heaven and spiritually rose to be with Abraham, not that he rose bodily from the dead, the unprecedented nature of a glorified bodily resurrection.
Make sense just if that was what the apostles encountered when they saw the risen Jesus. I’m actually planning to write a whole book on this subject that explores the differing levels of evidence for non-Christian miracles versus Christian miracles. That’s because when you compare them, you see that the evidence of the resurrection, it’s much different than for other ancient or even modern miracle claims. For example, an Anthony Flu was at one time one of the most famous atheists in the western world. His essay theology and falsification is one of the most widely printed essays in the history of 20th century philosophy. That’s why it’s remarkable that even he admitted in a discussion with a Christian that the evidence for the resurrection is better than for claim miracles than any other religion. It’s outstandingly different in quality and quantity. I want to end this episode now by noting two things.
First approach to Rogan was very helpful. It served as an excellent model for a Christian apologist to present the Christian faith to someone who’s skeptical. Huff displayed a gracious attitude towards Rogan. He wasn’t smug or aggressive, but earnest and just excited about the historical evidence for Jesus. He was also well-rounded in his knowledge and could quote from a myriad of facts related to ancient history and the evidence for Christianity. Rogan seemed to really enjoy discussing those various details. Once again, this is an excellent model for how to discuss the resurrection with non-Christians. And number two, Protestants like Huff are overrepresented when it comes to providing sophisticated defenses of Christ resurrection. Granted, Protestants who don’t debate Catholics but rather spend most of their time on proclaiming the Kma have more opportunities to grow in that subject. You can see this with William Lane, Craig’s emphasis throughout his entire career on proving God’s existence and Christ’s resurrection apart from engaging in many other theological issues.
In contrast, Catholic and Orthodox Christians spend a lot of time addressing Protestant criticisms of the apostolic churches as well as their own opposing arguments. You see this all over Catholic and Orthodox social media where engagement of atheists and defenses of things like biblical reliability or the resurrection seem far less common than interdenominational disputes or intramural disputes among Catholics on things like church politics that ended up sucking up a lot of people’s time and energy. But this focus can lead apostolic Christians to gloss over their duty to defend the original proclamation of the apostles Christ has risen. Or if they do defend it, they don’t address the most sophisticated objections against the resurrection from thoughtful atheists and other non-Christian critics. I’m not a fan of Catholics also sitting back while Protestants do the heavy lifting in proving the foundational truths of Christianity before the Catholics swoop in with the evidence for the church.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with sharing evidence for the church Christ established, but it’d be much more effective if Catholics could present a full complete defense of the faith, all of whose parts are equally rigorous, be it about Christ Church or Christ himself. And one way to do that is to read good defenses of Christ’s resurrection, which as I noted almost all of which are written by Protestants. For an introduction to resurrection apologetics, I recommend Gary Habermas and Mike La Kona’s book, the Case for the Resurrection, and Justin Bass’s book, the Bedrock of Christianity, the Unalterable Facts of Jesus’, death and Resurrection For an Intermediate Approach. I recommend the argument from miracles, a cumulative case for the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, which is available online, and I’ll link below. It’s written by Tim and Lydia McGrew. Lydia McGrew has also done great work with the maximal facts approach that offers some helpful critiques of the minimal facts approach.
I’d also recommend looking into as well. Finally, the best advanced defenses of the resurrection include William Lane Craigs assessing the New Testament evidence for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus and Mike Laona, the resurrection of Jesus, a new historiographical approach. However, the most comprehensive advanced treatment I currently recommend is Andrew LO’s Book, investigating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a new transdisciplinary approach as a runner up, Dale Allison is a moderate scholar who offers thought-provoking arguments for and against Jesus’s resurrection in his book, the Resurrection of Jesus Apologetics, polemics History, whose work you should be familiar with if you want a well-rounded approach to the issue. And of course, my book, counterfeit Christ, finding Jesus among the Imposters. And if you’d rather watch something instead of reading something, check out my debates with Pine Creek and Matt Dillahunty on the reasonableness of belief in the resurrection. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.