Transcription
Is it indisputable to you that Jesus Christ existed?
Jesus Christ actually existed, actually walked this world, did predict his own death and resurrection, and then if you could have a camera running on the tomb in and around 33 AD, that an actual Jesus would have walked out on the third day after his crucifixion and burial.
Now again, to play devil's advocate. Um, in this powerful interview, Piers Morgan speaks with Wes Huff, a Christian scholar and the vice president of Apologetics Canada, asking rapid-fire questions about the historical Jesus, his claim to be God, and the evidence for his resurrection. Wes answers with brilliance and boldness, tackling some of the most difficult questions skeptics have ever raised about Christ.
What's interesting about your perspective on this from your history and your studying is that you believe a lot of the New Testament is unarguably factually true.
I do. Yeah. And I think that that's demonstrable from the actual evidence that we can look at.
Is it, I mean, is it, is it indisputable to you that Jesus Christ existed, for example?
Oh, definitely. So, I think we can say pretty unequivocally that a character, a first-century Jewish itinerant rabbi by the name of Jesus of Nazareth did walk the dusty streets of first-century Roman-occupied Judea. I think that even the most skeptical scholars will grant that if we know very little about Jesus, we know that he did exist and that he was crucified in and around the beginning of the first century under the overseeing of the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate.
Jesus Christ actually existed, actually walked this world, did predict his own death and resurrection. And then if you could have a camera running on the tomb in and around 33 AD, that an actual Jesus would have walked out on the third day after his crucifixion and burial.
See, and that is the crux of this, isn't it? Is that whether Jesus of Nazareth was resurrected really goes to the absolute essence and heart of Christianity because obviously, if he was, then that isn't a miracle. And then everyone that believes in Christianity and what it all stands for and Jesus and everything would feel validated by the fact, well, how else do you explain it? So, it's at the crux of it.
From the text of the New Testament, then, where is the actual hard evidence? It's for you as an historian that that actually happened.
Yeah, I think we do, Piers, have a historical question in terms of we have an actual character who we can demonstrate that lived, and then we have that same character being demonstrated in multiple independent and cross-referenced sources. Chief of which we call the Gospels, you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But just because those are religious texts now doesn't necessarily negate that they are historical texts. You know, these were independent written sources that come from the timeframe.
If we want to know about someone from the ancient world or history in general, we go to the earliest sources, preferably eyewitness sources. And I think that's what we have within the Gospels. So, we have a character who lived, who died, and then a character who was said by an early Jesus community to have been resurrected. And the accounts of that are not just kind of scant. They're not kind of seeing Jesus off from afar as some sort of apparition or something like that. What we have is the case of instances of the early Jesus community saying they walked with him, they talked with him, they ate with him, and this happened over the course of, as Luke in his combination, the Gospel of Luke and Acts says, over the course of 40 days. This wasn't a short event. And so there were as many as, you know, Paul says, up to 500 witnesses who took part in this event before his ultimate, you know, resurrecting, going to the ascension to the right hand of the Father.
The counterargument is that Paul the Apostle wasn't there for the resurrection himself. And there's no other reference really, other, I think, than 1 Corinthians chapter 15. There's only one other reference to the fact that 500 people witnessed this. Does any of that in your eyes put more doubt on it?
I don't think so. Because I think when we look at something that we can try to historiographically explain, we look at the various explanations and then we account for the data. So, you're correct in the sense that 1 Corinthians 15 is the only place that's mentioned where we talk about these 500 witnesses who saw Jesus all at once. However, when you corroborate those with the accounts that we find, particularly in Matthew, Luke, and John, I think it does explain, especially when you have the instance at the ascension in Matthew and Luke, that those 500 people could have been the individuals on the mount when Jesus ascended.
Even the fact that we have one instance of this being spoken about, and then we can look at the individuals, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and then others in the New Testament documents that talk about the resurrection of Jesus, that, you know, even James, the brother of Jesus, in the Epistle of James, referring to his brother as "our glorious Lord," a title that is attributed only to the God of Israel, Yahweh. Um, so I think we have to explain these particular instances where we don't just have people who are friendly to this happening, but we have individuals who are actually hostile. In James, the brother of Jesus, who the Gospels tell us that Jesus's family was actually very hesitant in how public Jesus's ministry was. Um, then we have, likewise, Paul, who started his life as a persecutor and that has a radical 180 in terms of him then going on and writing the majority of, um, holy scripture within the New Testament.
Now again, to play devil's advocate, um, the argument against it goes, look, all these witnesses were likely to have been pretty primitive, mostly illiterate people. Um, eyewitness testimony notoriously is unreliable. It's the least credible evidence in a courtroom these days, for example. Uh, and since the historical method doesn't deal with miracles, um, it's ridiculous, people say, to base any history on it. And even Matthew's Gospel tells us when Jesus appeared in front of his 11 disciples, some of them doubted. To which people say, well, if even not all his disciples believe this, why on earth should we?
Yeah, I think there are a few things going on there in terms of the historical method and how we actually evaluate things. We only have witness testimony. You know, you do have, um, something, uh, that's very different than a courtroom in a modern legal setting, right? Uh, even something like hearsay. Um, well, all of ancient history in one sense is hearsay, but that doesn't apply when we, when we apply it to the historiographical method. We need to use the same standards that when we would look at something like, say, the biographies of Tiberius with Valerius Pertinax, um, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassiodorus. When we have multiple instances of reporting on someone's life, we look at both the things that they agree on and the things maybe where they have a differentiation in detail, and then we try to the best of our ability explain some of the different instances that are going on.
Now, I, I would say, you know, to the accusation, well, these are just, uh, ancient illiterate people. And that's what C.S. Lewis referred to as chronological snobbery. You know, just because people are ancient neither means they're stupid nor that they don't know what's going on. And what we have in terms of this event is really, um, early on after Jesus's death, we have an explanation of what if the resurrection didn't take place. The 11 disciples are hiding in the upper room. They're scared. They're aware of other messianic movements in the ancient world. Individuals like Simon Bar Kokhba, who claimed to be the Messiah, when his movement was squashed. So when he died, his move, his, sorry rather, when he died, his movement was squashed. And so I think we have to look at, okay, what explains these 11 scared disciples then going on to not just proclaim that Jesus did rise from the dead, but actually went to the point of risking their lives in persecution. And some of them did die for that proclamation.
And so I think it's not outside of the realm of possibility for history to actually be able to evaluate this evidence and say, "Okay, we have these questions. How then do we explain something like an empty tomb?" Or even Jesus's disciples go back, and the account of, uh, the Pentecost happens in Jerusalem. So Jesus's disciples go back to the scene of the crime in the town where people would have saw him crucified, and now they're proclaiming he's resurrected. Well, why would you go back to the place where people could have actually known what actually happened? Especially if you're trying to be disingenuous or dishonest. And then that's where it happens. And, and, you know, Stephen is the first martyr. That also happens in Jerusalem. That would have been a warning shot across the bow for the disciples if they wanted to continue on proclaiming these things. They would have realized that this is controversial both in Jewish circles and in Gentile circles to be proclaiming these things, to be declaring Jesus as Lord. You know, one of the earliest confessions of Christianity was "Jesus is Lord" when the society was saying "Caesar is Lord." And so there were risks politically, there were risks religiously, and yet the disciples go on to proclaim these things even to the detriment of their own lives.
What do you say when people say, "Well, look, there are parts of the New Testament that allude to Jesus of Nazareth having been the Son of God, and then there are parts where he appears to be God himself." How do you counter that argument that there's inconsistency there?
Yeah. So, "Son of God" is a title that is reserved for not differentiating Jesus from God. You know, in John's Gospel in particular, we have instances where Jesus is referring to himself as the Son of God in a way that actually has the Jews picking up stones to stone him. And when he says, you know, "What are these good works are you going to stone me for?" They say, "Not for your good works, but because you call Jesus your Father, making yourself equal with God." And, you know, Jesus then, he doesn't say, "Oh, no, no, you've misunderstood me." You know, my Muslim friends like to point out that there are multiple sons of God throughout the Bible. David was referred to as a son of God. But what's unique is that despite there being sometimes, my Muslim friends like to say, "sons by the tons," despite that reality, that Jesus is not claiming to be *a* son of God, he's claiming to be *the* Son of God in a unique way that not only puts him on equal footing with the Father, but in this monotheistic context of ancient Judaism, actually ascribes to himself honors, attributes, names, and deeds that only God himself has the right to hold. And so the Jews throughout the New Testament, throughout Jesus's, uh, ministry and his goings-on, they aren't confused by the things he says. You know, when he, uh, at the beginning of Mark's Gospel, when he forgives the sins of a person, their response is, "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" And they're exactly right. Only God can forgive our sins. And so Jesus is in his kind of answer saying, "You know, I'm doing this so that you know that the Son of Man can forgive sins." That's not a correction. That's a reframing in saying, "Yes, you're right. Only God can forgive sins. That's what I'm doing. Who does that make me?"
I've seen Ricky Gervais on various talk shows. He's one of the world's most famous atheists. And he says, "Look, there are 3,000 gods. If you add them all up from all the religions, um, you know, who's to say yours is the real one? And what about the others then? Do they not exist? Are they not real gods?" In other words, his position is, look, you can't all be right unless there are 3,000 different versions of a supernatural spiritual being overseeing us all. What do you say to him?
Yeah. Well, I, I think it's a rather foolish argument in that competition doesn't negate objective reality. So, say we're using a courtroom analogy. If, um, someone was convicted of a crime here in the city of Toronto, where I live, and he stood before a judge and he said, "Uh, really? You think I committed this crime? Do you know how many people are in this city? We have three million people in this city, and you think I'm the one who did the crime? Really? Out of all the, you know how many people are in Toronto? How many people are in Ontario? How many people are in Canada? How many people are in North America? You really think that given the amount of people that are on this earth, I'm the one who committed the crime?" You know, we wouldn't then look at the judge and say, "Well, that's a good argument." You know, have you really thought about how many other people are around who just because this particular individual you think committed the crime? Really? Well, no. We don't just arbitrarily, you know, pick someone. Or, in the case of Christianity, pick a god. We believe that the God of the Bible is the true God based on the evidence of not just what we find in the Bible, but, you know, the fine-tuning of the universe, of the morality, of the objective reality of this world, and the fact that we are, Piers, people who operate with morals, with meaning and intention, and have intrinsic worth. But we look at these things, and we don't arbitrarily pick Yahweh, the God of the Bible, over Zeus, Zeus, and Thor, and Allah, and Buddha. We do it, I would argue, based on the concrete, publicly available evidence that points to the truth claims that I would argue Christianity answers in regards to the ultimate questions we have.
This is the very question every human must face. Was Jesus real? Did he truly die and rise again for the sins of the world? What hangs in the balance is eternal life or eternal separation from God. In a culture clouded by doubt and distortion, Wes Huff stands as a voice of clarity, answering with confidence, humility, and scholarly precision. His words remind us that faith in Christ is not blind belief, but reason anchored in truth, history, and revelation. When all the evidence is weighed, it leads to one undeniable conclusion: The tomb is empty, and Jesus Christ has risen.
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