As we come to the end of the Easter season Trent helps us learn how to better defend the Resurrection with help from Justin Bass, author of The Bedrock of Christianity: The Unalterable Facts of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, it’s the Easter season, which means we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. I know it’s hard sometimes to feel like we should be in a celebratory mood when you have this pandemic sweeping the globe. For many of us, we haven’t been able to go to mass in weeks, if not months, have been starved of receiving Christ in the Eucharist. It’s a lot to get people down and I felt down.
But at the same time, we should remember that what has given Christians so much comfort in the face of unimaginable despair and evil, whether it’s pandemics of the past or wars or famines, is the knowledge that God has achieved the victory for us through Christ’s Resurrection. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ truly is the bedrock of our faith. Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain.”
So we need to celebrate this. It should give a joyful smile to our face to know Christ is risen. As we say, in the Eastern churches, Christ is risen, indeed He is risen, indeed He is risen. As we’re going to celebrate that fact and not just celebrate it, but learn how to defend this bedrock element of our faith with an author, a friend of mine who wrote a great book on that called The Bedrock of Christianity: The Unalterable Facts of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.
His name is Justin Bass. Justin has a PhD from Dallas Theological Seminary. He currently lives in Amman, Jordan where he serves refugees through an NGO and is professor of New Testament at Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary. He is the author of the book, The Battle for the Keys Revelation 1:18 and Christ’s Descent Into the Underworld and the author of the book we’re talking about today, The Bedrock of Christianity, a wonderful defense of the Resurrection that I was happy to give an endorsement to serving right on the back there.
I just want you all to know if you’re listening, if you see my name on a book endorsing it, I really do believe in that book. There are some people out there that if you go to them, they’ll give endorsements a dime a dozen, but some people have come to me with books and I’ve chosen not to endorse them because I didn’t think it would serve the body of Christ well, but this book certainly does. I’ll give endorsements to anyone who I believe the book is worthwhile, even if they’re not Catholic, which our guest today is not, but he is a friend in Christ, a brother in Christ, working together to defend a common element of the truth that Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox share, which is the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Justin, I’m glad you’re here on the Counsel of Trent podcast.
Justin Bass:
Man, thank you so much for letting me come on. That was awesome introduction. Amen brother.
TH:
Amen. Before we get started with talking about the book, maybe you can explain to our listeners, we have a funny backstory as to how we’ve interacted as Catholic and Protestant apologists or scholars working together in these different areas that we came together to put our heads together. I think you were debating Richard Carrier or Dan Barker, one of the two. Then we got to fortuitously meet in person. Which debate brought us together to put heads together?
JB:
Yeah, I can’t remember which one was first. I actually debated both. I know you debated both and especially the Richard Carrier debate setup was very similar on your side, just as mine. I was invited to a atheist kind of conference. It was called Mythicist Milwaukee, this atheist group, and they invited me out. So I was in this bar pub, you full of about 200 atheists and I think there were four Christians there and debating Richard Carrier on the Resurrection.
So it’s kind of similar to your debate, your excellent debate with Richard Carrier that I saw on the existence of Jesus. So I can’t remember which one it was first, but yeah, it was through our mutual friend, Josh Schwartz that I got connected with you because I wanted to get some wisdom from you because you did such a good job in those debates. So I wanted to just get some wisdom from you on prepare preparation and things. So yeah, that was a great connection.
TH:
It was. Then what was really funny for the two of us was that we finally met in person in Jerusalem. So that was just like two years ago. I think you were the one that recognized me and got my attention because I was leading a pilgrimage group in Israel. It was my second pilgrimage to Israel, my first time being a leader of a pilgrimage. So I went and took people and it was a wonderful trip. I can’t wait till we can do pilgrimages again in the future. It was great because we went over Easter and some people said, “Oh, I don’t know if you want to go to Israel during Easter, It’ll be crowded. It could be crazy.” I thought, “Hey, it’s the perfect place to be.” So I remember we were in Jerusalem during the Triduum during Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday.
So on Good Friday, every what’s great is actually I’ve noticed this in the past few years, every Good Friday I’ve had has been a gloomy and rainy one. So I’m always appreciative when Good Friday as gloomy weather to it. So we were there and we gathered to do the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday in Jerusalem and I was there with my group. I think we got there like two hours early at the first and second Station. Then there, you were just running right in there because were you starting to do your work in Jordan at that time?
JB:
We were all being yelled at.
TH:
That’s right.
JB:
I remember you were being yelled at. I was being yelled at. We were all not in the right place for some reason. I don’t know what was going on there.
TH:
They yelled at me. [crosstalk 00:05:32] they yelled at me and they said, “Father, Father get your people together, Father.” I’m like, “I’m not a priest. They’re not doing anything wrong.”
JB:
Yeah, that’s funny. I had to go to some of the places in the Middle East. They would get my card and they would put my profession and my profession was always priest. So I always enjoyed that. I was a priest when I would travel to different places in the Middle East.
TH:
Right.
JB:
I had just to Jordan, I think the year before that, and that was our first Easter though, that we had celebrated in Jordan and we got to go over to Israel right there during Easter. One thing I loved about it, it was just our family and we actually joined a Catholic group that was doing the Stations and they did the leader of that did an excellent job leading through. So that was such a wonderful experience, but just the way people were pressing in upon us, how busy it was, it felt like you got a little taste of what it was when Jesus was there. It talks about how people were just pressing in the crowds trying to get to him. So it was a very cool experience.
TH:
Yeah. When I’ve taken groups to Israel, I’ve said to them, “You might feel a little disenchanted when you get to the Old City because it’ll feel very commercial and touristy.” I said, “But take it as an opportunity actually, that it would have felt very similar actually to the Apostles when they entered Jerusalem with Jesus. The streets would have been crowded. There would have been people yelling at them like, ‘buy this spice, buy this. You come over here, buy this …'”
There’s different things being sold, but that same crowded, touristy, commerce feeling, it would have been the exact same feeling for the Disciples. Even the feeling of like going to the Holy sites and feeling like everything here has gotten kind of commercial and touristy. Well, that’s kind of what Jesus did when he drove the money changer side of the temple.
JB:
That’s exactly right.
TH:
You just got to get … having that same feeling. So let’s talk then about your book, because this is something, of course, in my conversion experience, I was kind of a deist in high school, then became Christian and became Catholic. So I have a strong affinity to mere Christian apologetics. If it wasn’t for the work of people like Gary Habermas, Mike Licona, William Lane Craig, I would be neither Catholic nor Christian. So I love when people put out there and this is something that I’ve tried to do myself in the Catholic world, because I feel like for a long time, we’ve been kind of leaning on Protestants to give us good apologetics on the Resurrection.
One day, I think I’m going to have to do my … it’s always hard. I got to find the right niche for a book on the Resurrection and yours fills an excellent gap in that you have big thick treatments. You have Mike Licona’s 500-page monster dissertation defense of the Resurrection. And then you have other more popular treatments of it. Like The Case for Christ in Lee Strobel’s book. But yours, what I like about it, and you can tell me more about, I want to hear what motivated you to write at The Bedrock of Christianity. It’s a nice balance between a popular treatment, but because you narrowly focus on those bedrock, unchanging historical facts of the Resurrection, you can go deep and engage the scholarship while not losing the lay person. So was that kind of in your mind when you were thinking of writing this book?
JB:
That’s exactly right. In fact, Mike Licona is a friend of mine and I think his book’s one of the best books ever written on the Resurrection. I actually, I kind of ranked them recently and put that out there because of all the ones I’ve read since preparing for this book and I put N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God at number one as the best. I put Licona in the top five, but all those books, like you said, are our 500 page, the N.T. Wright book is 740 something pages, excellent books, but really hard for just the lay person, the everyday person that’s going to church, to be able to get through those tones [crosstalk 00:09:22]
TH:
I think N.T. Wright, it feels like he must write books in his sleep-
JB:
It’s amazing.
TH:
… given how much output that he has. So but that was out there and you wanted to do something different.
JB:
That’s right. I wanted to take a lot of their excellent arguments and put it all into one, in a kind of a one stop shop, but only focused on the things that everyone agreed on. So like in Licona’s book and N.T. Wright’s book, they spent a lot of time, like for example, on the empty tomb, which I think there is powerhouse evidence for the empty tomb. But unfortunately, for some reason, many of the more skeptical and atheist, agnostic, even some Jewish scholars, liberal scholars don’t accept the historicity of the empty tomb.
So for example, I’m not really focusing on that because it doesn’t reach that high bar of 99% of scholars agree on this. So I want to just focus on what does everyone agree on that’s actually professionally teaching, where I bypass, of course, people just on YouTube comments and Facebook posts and things like that are denying Jesus’s existence, the people who follow a Carrier and that type and those mythicists.
TH:
Well, but even Carrier himself, it sounds like you’re restricted to academics who are teaching at accredited universities, because for me, people can get PhDs if they just plunk down hard enough and get through their dissertation. But it’s like, have you impacted the field enough for a university to recognize your scholarship and want to pay and back it? So I think you’re right. It’s important that in this field, there are people like independent scholars, even who have PhDs, who get out there and put forward stuff that that is pretty fringe. Whereas, but when you look at, because I’ve said before, yeah. I think I’ve said the number of scholars who teach at accredited universities that deny the Resurrection of Jesus, I think I could count them on one hand, not even more than one hand.
JB:
Yes.
TH:
So [crosstalk 00:11:23] Go ahead.
JB:
Even Carrier, he has a running list and I think it’s less than eight and even of that eight, only three of them are actually professionally teaching. Even of those three, they will not themselves call themselves a mythicist. So they don’t align themselves in the mythicist crowd. They basically just have these real strange views of the origin of Christianity that has Jesus in a different mold of historicity. But they still don’t fall in the line of mythicism. So it’s literally counting on your fingers for sure.
TH:
So that’s why I love your approach. So just to re-summarize it for our listeners, some people will think, well in order to prove Jesus rose from the dead, you will say, “Well, I got to prove the Bible’s true and the Bible says Jesus rose from the dead.” We don’t have to do that. This has also been called the minimal facts approach coined by Mike Licona and Gary Habermas, which is, “All right, let’s start with the historical facts everybody agrees on. We all agree-
JB:
Common ground.
TH:
Yeah, common ground. Sorry about that, common ground, here. We’re going to start with, all right your … this kind of goes back to John Meyer from Marginal Jew. So he is a Catholic priest who has some heterodox views I should warn our listeners about, but he wrote a good treatment of the historical Jesus, at least from that kind of liberal mindset in his four volume series of Marginal Jew. In the first book, he talks about what could you know about Jesus if you locked an atheist, a Christian, a Jew and a Muslim scholar all in the Harvard Divinity Library and you can’t come out until you give us what you all agree about who Jesus is?
So what this minimal facts approach does is say, “All right, what are the things we all agree … ” You leave Carrier and the other mythicists out, “We all agree He died on the cross and then people said that they saw Jesus rose from the dead.” So it seems like your approach is trying to say, “All right, these facts, we all agree. Even if you’re an atheist, you agree with these facts.” Where do the facts point to is the ultimate explanation of them? Is that the approach you’re taking?
JB:
Definitely. It’s definitely not novel. As you know, it’s well before Habermas and Licona as well. When you back to Justin Martyr, you go back to even John Chrysostum, one of my favorite little true teases that I read from the early church that I quote a little bit in the book is histrocities on his discourse against the pagans and the Jews. He basically lays out his approach. He says, “Hey, I’m not going to try to argue with miracles. I’m not going to try to argue with the divinity of the scriptures. I know you don’t believe that. So I’m going to argue with things that you cannot deny, like you can’t deny the sun’s in the sky.”
TH:
Right.
JB:
So one of the things Chrysostum argues with is really my fourth main bedrock fact, which is this movement that has gone on to take over the world. How did these fishermen go on to overturn the Roman Empire? Chrysostum was sitting there in a great place because people didn’t know really what was going on in the rest of the world. So they looked around and everybody’s Christian, this crucified Nazarene somehow, he died and then this movement arose. It has overcome the Roman Empire. The Caesars are now being baptized in the name of the crucified. How did this happen? So that was, for example, his argument. So I really liked those approaches where you just take something that cannot be denied and then take them down the road and the evidence to follow the evidence where it leads. I think it leads to the risen Christ.
TH:
I would definitely recommend people to read the book, The Bedrock of Christianity to get the full treatment. So I want to talk about sone of these bedrock facts and how we know that, and even an atheistic scholar should agree, “Yes, I agree in this fact and how it points to the Resurrection of Jesus.” Let’s start with that fact you just mentioned, because it’s one that not a lot of people put forward immediately. A lot of people will say, “Yes, Jesus died. He died on the cross. He appeared to his disciples. He appeared to skeptics like Paul.” We’ll get to those shortly. But then there’s another bedrock fact that every … even the mythicists have to agree on this one.
I always find it funny though, that if you took the mythicist position literally enough, that Jesus never existed, you could use it to argue that there were no Christians in the first century because my favorite one is people will say, “Well, look at this scholar, doesn’t … this … 47, 82,” the number grows fantastically and inaccurately. They look at all these ancient authors who did not mention Jesus. So therefore there was no Jesus. Well, these ancient authors like Strabo or Calcaneus or … there’s a list I think one of … this is the Remsberg list from John Remsberg. He’s a skeptic from the early 20th century. There was a guy, Michael Pachlonic, Pachlovich, I forget, he’s a skeptic. He tried to grow the list to like a hundred ancient authors who never mentioned Jesus. Well, those guys never even mentioned Christians at all. Does that mean there were no Christians in the first century, but obviously-
JB:
Or Pontious Pilate or countless other historical figures who we know existed.
TH:
That’s right. We did not get-
JB:
When you go even go down, I remember going through that list when I prepared for the Carrier debate, and it’s hilarious because even some of the examples are like the smallest fragments that we have from these ancient writers. It’s like, “Are you kidding me? So from this paragraph, you’re saying, Oh, it didn’t mention Jesus. So of course, Jesus didn’t exist.” It’s just foolish.
TH:
Right because you’re saying that these ancient authors, this … we have a parchment of Juvenal, the Roman satirist and Jesus isn’t mentioned here. So therefore the man could have never possibly mentioned Jesus, because 99% of documents from the ancient world have been lost.
JB:
That’s right. It’s amazing how much we do have of Him. We have Him in Josephus. We have Him in Tacitus. We haven’t been plenty of the younger, we have Him in Lucian of Samosata. We have Him all over the place for the first hundred years, which is really, I would say, unparalleled at least for someone that’s a peasant, for someone that’s some sort of ruler or Caesar, or well known figure of the time. We’re talking about a crucified man from Nazareth, one among tens of thousands that were crucified at that time. So how many of those have we never, ever heard of?
So it’s incredible that we have as much evidence that we do about Jesus. I show even in the book that when you look at just written accounts, when you talk about the biographies of Jesus, our information about the historical Jesus in our biographies is even better than Tiberius Caesar and closer to the time. We have of course, coins and we have other evidence of Tiberius Caesar that we don’t have Jesus, but as far as written accounts, our written accounts are far greater and more reliable than we have of Tiberius Caesar.
TH:
Here’s when we compare historical evidence for Jesus, the best comparisons would be to other teachers of his time like Gamaliel, Hillel.
JB:
Exactly.
TH:
Like if you look, Simon bar Kokhba, or you look at rabbis that made an influence. There’s far more evidence for Jesus. I think what’s important here you alluded to this, and this goes to this bedrock fact, there were thousands of people who were crucified. There are half a dozen Messiah claimants at least recorded in like the works of Josephus. Why is it an important bedrock fact that Christianity grew and prospered during this time period in a way on parallel to other sects?
JB:
Yeah, I think that this is specifically I really want to credit N.T. Wright on this. I think he’s really one of the ones that launched this argument better than I’ve seen anyone and maybe you’re an originator of it, which is comparing the Jesus movement with all these other movements that are talked about in Josephus, in the new Testament and [inaudible 00:19:08] Alexandria, the Simon bar Kokhba revolt that was really the last of these Messianic type movements, but there are really about 14 of them that I’ve counted that are very similar to the movement of the Nazarenes, the movement of the Christians that follow Jesus that they had some sort of charismatic type leader.
He probably claimed to be King or a Messiah of some sort. He claimed to maybe even do miracles. He sometimes they would predict a destruction of the temple, but in all those other cases, they would fight against Rome. Then when their leader died, the movement would just disappear. The movement ended. There are no followers of Simon bar Kokhba, you’re not going to fall. When we’re able to sit in Starbucks again, you’re never going to be sitting by a follower of Simon bar Kokhba or Judas the Galilean or Fudist or any of these guys that had huge movements at the time. So why is it that 2 billion plus follow the crucified Nazarene and why did his movement even continue?
It should have ended Good Friday. I think in the disciples’ mindset, I think, again, I think it’s a bedrock fact from the gospels that the disciples had fled run from Jesus we’re cowering somewhere like Peter, they were weeping, or they were cowering, or they were angry. We don’t know exactly all their mindsets, but they definitely were convinced that Jesus was not the Messiah now. He has been crucified, this movement is done. So something happened. There was some sort of cause of the singularity, which is the movement of the Christian movement, this indestructible movement that’s gone on to overtake a large portion of the planet earth. So there’s a Resurrection size hole in history that needs to be filled if you’re not going to fill it with the Resurrection.
TH:
Right. It’s a fact that stands in need of explanation. I remember N.T. Wright in Resurrection of the Son of God, talking about this, that if, what would we expect of a first century Messianic movement, if its leader is either exiled or killed. What you probably would expect is that you either go home, you’re done. If you tried to salvage it as best you can, you would either try to say that now the mantle has been passed to a family member, so someone like James, for example, who was a relative or kin also called a brother of Jesus in scripture.
So one of Jesus’s relatives or extended relatives, or you might try to salvage it with some kind of talk about how his spirit is in the bosom of Abraham or something, not preaching … preaching bodily Resurrection is the last thing we would expect. So your point is that needs explanation. Oh, one of the things for you to comment on, I think some people, and this will get into our next bedrock fact about the appearances that the Apostles, they had some kind of experience of Jesus. We have to explain what that is.
It’s a common hobby horse for skeptics to say, “Oh, well, those are grief-induced hallucinations, but it’s funny that we think to ourselves from our modern perspective, that if Jesus was killed, your emotion would be, I’d be very, very sad and feel guilty about abandoning him. But if we put ourselves in a first century mindset, I think that the normal reaction Peter and the others would have had, would have been anger, thinking I abandoned my family, my livelihood, and I followed this fraud for one to three years and it turned out for nothing. So I would say it’s a big assumption on the modern mindset. These people would be in a place to have a grief-induced hallucination. They could have been totally mad at Jesus and said, “Good. I’m glad that fraud is rotting in his tomb.” What do you think?
JB:
That’s exactly right. I think we really don’t know. We know that they were cowering. We know Peter wept when he denied Christ three times. We know he was weeping. So he had grief at that point. But as he thought more about it, like you said, I think it’s just as likely that they just started to get angry, that they had left their families for three years plus, and we’re following this man. Then he proved to be, from their vantage point after good Friday, he’s a false Messiah. He’s not the true Messiah. But even better is Paul, because when you deal with Paul, Paul was actively against the Christian faith. He was actually arresting Christians. He was on his way to do that when he believed Jesus appeared to him.
So the grief hallucination in no way can even be posited. when you talk about Paul, because as I talk about in the book, Dale Allison another great book on the Resurrection, his book, Resurrecting Jesus. He really surveys all the literature on hallucinations. He shows that, for example, never in the literature, do you have someone project an apparition that’s their enemy. That never happens. That’s never happened in the literature. So if that happened in the case of Paul with Jesus, it would be just unparalleled, unlike anything that’s ever happened in all of our literature on these things. Plus you never have someone say that the apparition or someone that appeared to them, like if your grandma dies, there are many, many examples where people believe that they had another experience with their grandmother or something, but they don’t go and look for their empty tomb.
They don’t say that they’re risen from the dead. So why did they say this unique claim that Jesus rose from the dead, and then you can get into also the extended appearances. It had happened to multiple individuals at different times at different places. You have large groups. So there’s just a lot of things that makes it completely unparalleled with all the hallucinations we have on record. So I think that you have to have more faith to believe in hallucinations than the actual Resurrection.
TH:
Right and I liked what you said that even if someone hallucinates Jesus, that Jesus rose from the dead, why wouldn’t you just infer, that many people would infer, like even going back to in the old Testament, when Saul approaches the witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28, has an encounter with the prophet Samuel, but it’s clearly with his ghost or his spirit, not with … he meets Samuel and talks with him, but never says that Samuel has come back from the dead. There was people, even if-
JB:
And they’re not looking for an empty tomb with Samuel and it’s the same with Enoch and Elijah. They don’t believe that they ascended into heaven and kind of like same with the Maccabean martyrs. The Maccabean martyrs weren’t said to be risen from the dead. They were in heaven in glory. Just like in revelation, the martyrs, that are in heaven. They’re praising God and they’re asking him, “”how long, oh Lord,” but they’re not resurrected. This is unique language. This is very specific Jewish language that goes back to Daniel. Many will sleep in the sleep and the dust will one day rise. Some to everlasting shame and contempt and others to shine like the stars. So that kind of Resurrection is what they said happened with Jesus.
TH:
what’s great is I think you actually pin Dan Barker down really well in this and the debate you had with him, because you’re making the point that this is that Paul is a Pharisee, for example, and the Pharisees believed in bodily Resurrection. So when you have people like Barker who are going on and on, “Oh, the first Christians only believed Jesus’s rose. Jesus went to heaven like grandma went to heaven.” You said, “Then look, did Pharisees believe in a bodily Resurrection or not?” He had to say that they did.
JB:
That’s right and Bart Ehrman says the same thing. That’s another thing is that anyone who studies these issues knows when you say Resurrection, this is really what N.T Wright spends almost the first 200 pages of his book dealing with that this specific Greek word has a meaning. And the Greeks knew of Resurrection. They just denied it. You know, the Romans and the Greeks pretty much predominantly denied the idea, even though they understood it, the Jews believed in it, but they believed it would happen at the end of the world, the Resurrection of the righteous and the wicked when the kingdom of God came.
But no one believed that one individual, especially the Messiah would, would rise from the dead in the middle of history and then we’d have the future Resurrection at the end. Exactly what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, Christ is the first fruits and then we will all be raised at the end of the age. That was completely novel. So where again, where did this idea, this unique unparalleled, innovative idea come from? If Jesus didn’t rise from dead, if he stayed dead, where did they get that idea?
TH:
Right. My last question, as we come to a close here, this might feel a little inside baseball for some people. It might not be as familiar. I know a lot of my listeners are Catholic, but not all. By the way, I’m grateful actually for our many non-Catholic listeners to this podcast. I always appreciate your support.if you ever want to leave a rating saying that you enjoy it and want to let others know, be sure to go to Google Play iTunes reviews, to let others know.
But for me, I try to keep aware of discussions and apologetics across a wide variety of fields, both among Catholics, with Protestants, even Mormons and Eastern Orthodox writers to see what’s what’s out there in the field. I know there’s a bit of a dispute among evangelicals related to this approach.
There’s, I wouldn’t say a feud, maybe just a little bit of disagreement between the minimal facts approach you’ve defended in this book that’s championed by recently, Habermas and Licona. Then people like Tim and Lydia McGrew. I love the McGrews. I think they’re wonderful authors. Tim McGrew applies statistics and understandings of probability theory to apologetics in an awesome way that’s invaluable for us to learn about.
JB:
Unparalleled, for sure.
TH:
Oh, it’s so good. So they actually have their own case for the Resurrection that was in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. That’s uses, I think, uses Basie and probability theory to argue for the Resurrection, similar to what Richard Swinburne does, but the McGrews seem to be arguing that you can’t just rely on minimal facts. You need to establish more of that the gospel appearances are reliable to get the full case. What are your thoughts just on kind of that disagreement or is it … what do you think?
JB:
Yeah, I liked the way you phrased it. I think it’s just a healthy disagreement among believers trying to get the best, what’s the best powerhouse approach to bring the Resurrection and bring all the evidence to the table with an unbeliever. I liken it to the debates that have happened in the past with presuppositionalists and evidentialists. You have your Douglas Wilson and his followers. I think Douglas Wilson is probably the best at defending and using the presuppositional approach with an unbeliever.
I thought he did excellent with Christopher Hitchens, especially if you watched that documentary they did, where they traveled the country. I thought Wilson really destroyed Hitchens, but William Lane Craig, when he debated Christopher Hitchens using clearly the more evidential approach, I thought he, like his one atheist said, he spanked him like a disobedient child.
So I think both approaches are excellent. My approach is more definitely leaning towards the evidential approach, but I’m like, hey, you need to adapt your approach to different people. So my thing is pick your best method and go and make disciples of all nations. We shouldn’t be having any kind of foolish controversy between believers on the exact right method. I think ultimately, we need to just go to the unbeliever and use whatever the best method is that we use. I would say I use the maximal approach to put it that way. I will use everything if I’m dealing with a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon or a Muslim. I’m going to be quoting from John. I’m going to be quoting from everything.
But if I’m going to sit down with Bart Ehrman, and I quote, John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am.” See, there you go, Jesus claimed to be God. Bart Ehrman is going to say, “Well, Jesus never said that.” So I have to go with Bart Ehrman, like when I debated him, I had to go to what he agrees Jesus said, which he agrees Jesus did speak about the son of man. And so I go there and say, “This is how Jesus claimed to be God. In that Jewish context, he claimed to be the son of man. So what did he mean by that?” So again, it’s the common ground approach. I find that to be the most persuasive, but I think Christians critiquing one another is no problem. But I think if we’re spending more time on that than we are reaching the lost, I think then we have a problem.
TH:
I Corinthians 9:22, “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.” So I definitely, definitely understand and appreciate that. Justin, where can people get a copy of this wonderful book?
JB:
On Amazon, I actually just saw it today because I did an interview with the with Lexan Press and they actually said, “Available at Barnes & Noble.” I didn’t know that. I haven’t been to Barnes & Noble with the COVID situation, but it sounds like it’s at Barnes & Noble. You can just type it in Bedrock of Christianity, by Justin Bass at Amazon. You can get it on Kindle as well on Amazon. So that would be the key places, I think.
TH:
Well, that’s good. So if you live here in California, where I am, where we’re doing a phased reopening, you could either order the book online at Amazon and have it delivered to your door or order it at barnesandnoble.com and have it delivered to your door. Or our governor was so gracious. You can now order the book barnesandnoble.com, drive down to the Barnes & Noble bookstore and they will bring the book out to you at the curb. So it’s depending if you feel like going for it. That was the big like, “You can go to the curb now.” So one day we’ll have normalcy. Hey, Justin-
JB:
Trent, you are welcome here in Texas. Anytime you want to come, come on.
TH:
Sounds more and more appealing every day. So and you guys have a beach too, so I’ll have to think about it. You got more tornadoes.
JB:
Not as good as y’all’s. Not as good as your beaches. [crosstalk 00:32:54]
TH:
That’s true. Yours is more like a big bathtub, but it’s-
JB:
Yeah.
TH:
It’s all-
JB:
Y’all got the best beaches.
TH:
Yeah, but it’s all good. But hey, thank you so much for being on the show, Justin. Everyone else who’s been with us, thank you all so much. I hope this book blesses you all and that you have a very blessed day.
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