Transcription
If you're writing in the first century in the Egyptian area, these are the most popular names for Jewish men. None of those are in our well, only one Joseph's pretty popular in our New Testament accounts. But it turns out the most popular first names for men in the area of Palestine are these names, the names that appear in our Gospels. So it appears that the Gospel authors, at least, know what people are called in the first century in the region in which they're writing. And that's why you don't have any names except for the big ones in the Gnostic Gospels, because they don't know what they were calling people over there. These are all false, false Gospels, these Gnostic Gospels coming out of Egypt. Usually, when it comes to cities, they will only mention one city, Jerusalem. Why? Because that's all they knew from over there in Egypt. Yet the Gospel authors writing in the region early knew all the names of the cities that were in the region early. Why did they know? Because they're writing them in the region early. This kind of simple thing confirms something for us.
There's another way to go. What if I had another eyewitness, an ancient eyewitness that wasn't a Christian? What did the pagans, the non-Christians, say about Jesus in the years closest to the life of Jesus? Well, I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll look at a few of them and we'll write down what they're saying over here. Now, I want to just launch something at you for a second. If I'm going to step out of the light, sorry, I have to do that. If there's a robbery occurring, a bank robbery, and you're a witness to it, and I come over here and I rob this teller, and I reach across the counter, I say, "Give me all your money." And then I ask you later, "What happened?" You say, "I reached across the counter, he said, 'Give me all your money.'" Now, what kind of corroborative evidence could I find at the counter to confirm her eyewitness account? Fingerprints. I should find a palm print in the direction that she says I leaned. And if I found that palm print, that would be corroborative evidence of what she said in her eyewitness accounts. But would the palm print tell me anything about what I said? Would the palm print confirm I had a gun? So it turns out corroborative evidence is always a fraction of the overall case. Make sense?
Now, let's say I interviewed this suspect, uh, a week later. I said, "Dude, I know you were in that bank." "I wasn't in that bank." "I got videotape of you in the bank, stupid." "Well, I was in the bank, but I wasn't doing a robbery." "Really? I saw you walk over and write a demand note on the counter over here." "That wasn't a demand, that was a deposit slip." "Okay, then you came over to the teller and gave her the..." "And you started yelling at the teller." "Oh, I was just upset, I forgot my ID, that's why I ran out of out of the bank." Now, has this guy confessed to doing a robbery at the bank? Has he? No. Am I going to use his statement though in court? Uh, yeah. Why? Because he has backed into a set. He's admitted he's in the bank at the time of the robbery, doing everything the other witnesses said were part of the robbery. He wants to redescribe it, he wants to call it something else, but he's given me a lot of facts that I'm going to use against him. Inadvertent statements that I'm going to use against him. Makes sense?
Something happens in the first century with these guys. They are not Christians, they don't believe it's true, but they back into certain claims that I'm going to write on this wall for you. Here's Thallus, for example, in 52 AD. "On the whole world, they pressed the most fearful darkness." This is at the point of the crucifixion. "And the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down." This darkness, Thallus, in the third book of his history, calls it, "appears to me without reason, an eclipse of the sun." So here we have a guy who's not a Christian, who's saying that that darkness that occurred at the resurrection, it wasn't supernatural, it was just an eclipse of the sun. But in order to back into that statement, he has to give us certain facts that he agrees are true. Apparently, there's a guy named Jesus who was lived and then was crucified, and at his crucifixion, there was an earthquake and darkness. Now, it's not for why you Christians think it was, but he has to back into this. "I'm in the bank, but I'm not doing a bank robbery." Do you see what he's doing here? So we know this about Jesus. Even if we had no other evidence about Jesus, just from the statement of Thallus.
Tacitus does something similar. The historian who's not a Christian, who's talking about the destruction of Rome by Nero, he says that, "Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for by for their abominations called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberias at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus." And a most mischievous superstition. What could that be? A mischievous superstition? H. Thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Kind of like Los Angeles. So the point is, he's going to offer that some things here that he thinks are true. He's not a Christian, not a believer, but he's confirmed certain facts. He's confirmed that Jesus was called Christ, and that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. His followers persecuted. He's even confirmed something. I won't go so far as to say there is some kind of mischievous story out there. What could that be? The resurrection. We may have the very first non-Christian account of the resurrection, at least being reported here, that the people were talking about this as early as 56, 65 AD.
Here's Marabar Sarahan, who is an Assyrian philosopher writing to his son about three philosophers. And he talks about, um, Socrates and about Pythagoras. "Or the Jews, who he says, murdered their wise king after that their kingdom was abolished. God rightly avenged these men. The wise king lived in the teachings he enacted." Here's a reference to Jesus. He's calling him the wise king. Apparently, he, the Jews, caused his death in some way. Filon says this early on, quoted by Origin in the 13th or 14th book. He said, "In his chronicles, not only ascribed to Jesus a knowledge of future events, but also testified that the result corresponded to his predictions. And Jesus, while alive, was of no assistance to himself, but that they arose after death and exhibited the marks of his punishment and showed how his hands had been pierced by nails." These guys don't believe this is true. They're just reporting what they're hearing from others. But here's my point. If you lost every piece of Christian literature ever written by anyone, and all you had were the, uh, remarks and reports of non-Christians in the first hundred years, here's what you'd know about Jesus. Not bad. It's touchpoint corroboration, and that to me is powerful. That's a lot of information. Make sense?
So we test our eyewitnesses. And as I tested the eyewitnesses, I think as much as they could ever be verified, these are reliable. Let me just say this to you about that. If there were no miracle accounts in the Gospels, nobody would distrust them. No serious historian. If Jesus was just a guy who came and preached the Sermon on the Mount, that's all he ever did is preached the Sermon on the Mount, no serious historian would ever doubt the existence or or validity of the Gospel accounts. They are only doubted because they contain supernatural elements. How about this? Are they honest and accurate over time, or have they changed? Here's a guy we put in jail. He was also on one of our Dateline. I should put a Dateline, um, preview up here for this case. But this guy killed his wife in 1981. And he told everybody that she ran off abandoning their small children, five and eight years old. And Carol, he said, "Just left." And everyone believed him. Even Carol's family believed him. We had no physical evidence because we believed him. In 1981, we took a missing person's report. We didn't work it till 1987. Six years went by. When we finally decided this was a murder, we called the family and said, "Hey, did she come home, right? She came, I mean, clearly you would have called us if she never came home." And they said, "No, she never came home." "What? You never called us?" They believed she ran off for six years, disappeared, no financial record, never shows up again anywhere. As now in the 2000s, really? Yeah. We opened the case. We had no physical evidence, not a single picture of the crime scene because he had moved. We never worked it as a homicide, it was a missing person's case without a single piece of physical evidence. They convicted this guy in four hours. Four hours. Keith Morrison said, "This is the one case, Jim, I don't believe you got right." No one believed it. He confessed though at sentencing. So we know he's the killer. And the reason why we convicted him was because he changed his story over time. He had one story in '81, he had one story in '86, he had one story in '96, he had one story in 2012, one story in 2014. You change your story over time, adding details that didn't exist prior, you're probably lying to me.