Was Jesus God? Part 1

00:00:00] Gina: Hello, and welcome to the Logic of God podcast. I am Gina. 


[00:00:20] Ben: I am Ben.

[00:00:21] Cody: And I’m Cody.

[00:00:22] Gina: And today we are going to be talking about our fourth assumption, and that's just going to get into who is Jesus according to Christianity. 


[00:00:31] Ben: Okay, so when talking about who Jesus is, obviously it's tough for any of us to address it with any degree of separation, of neutrality, but doing it the best that we can. 


[00:00:42] Roughly 2, 000 years ago, there was a man who was born, his name was Yeshua in Hebrew. We refer to him as Jesus. His parents were Joseph and Mary. He was born in the city of Bethlehem. As he got older, in his early thirties, he started his ministry, where he preached about the kingdom of heaven. There were a bunch of different things that he talked about, but one of the more famous things that Christians believe is that he specifically said that he was either equal to or was God. 


[00:01:11] The Sanhedrin, the religious leaders of the time, brought him in for questioning. They talked to him about that, questioned him about it, and he verified that was his stance. The Sanhedrin. So, that was, in Jewish law, akin to blasphemy, and blasphemy law said that he could be executed for that, so they had him executed. 


[00:01:28] That was done through the Roman authority at the time, through Pontius Pilate. He was whipped, beaten, tortured. He was crucified. Which was the form of execution that they used where he was put up onto a cross. Nails were put through right beneath his palms into the wrist area and into his feet. And the ultimate way you die through that is through asphyxiation. 


[00:01:50] But after that he was buried in a tomb owned by one of the religious leaders, Joseph of Arimathea. And after a full day, on the morning of the next day, Or rather, not left there, so he died on the, right before the evening on one day, there was a full day, and then the morning of the day after that full day, it's reported by a number of women who went specifically to visit his tomb that he he was gone, that the tomb had been opened, that there were some angels that were there, and told him that he had risen, and he reportedly appeared to a group of twelve, as well as many other people who learned under him, but specifically to rather eleven people, because one of them betrayed him and he's dead. 


[00:02:38] But there were a group of eleven people, the eleven disciples, and Jesus appeared to them after his death, and they went out proclaiming that he was brought back to life, and the religious authorities at the time claimed that these men had stolen his body from the grave that was empty, and one thing led to another, and we get to the modern time, and we have Christianity. 


[00:03:04] Gina: Can you cite your sources? 


[00:03:08] Ben: Oh my goodness, there are so many. The main one is the Bible there, but there are some other things that you could cite potentially. Tacitus is one of the, uh, the Roman sources as well as Josephus, but we'll get into that in a little bit. 


[00:03:21] Cody: Can we trust what the Bible says about him though? 


[00:03:26] Ben: So yeah, I mean, obviously we're a little biased in that area, but I've been talking for a while. What do you guys think? 


[00:03:32] Cody: Yeah, so Whether we decide to believe what the Bible says or not, we got to put together the base of how the Bible was, or what else, rather, it was used for historically, and the historicity of the documents that comprise the Bible. 


[00:03:53] I know there has been a lot of confirmations throughout history. I want to say there's thousands of references that use the Bible as a base rather than some of the other documents, like you have some of Plato's works. You only have, you know, A couple mentions of the work outside of his own, and then the Bible itself has lots of different references that it pulls in and is verified and scrutinized in many more ways. 


[00:04:25] Ben: Yeah, I agree. One of the reasons that we can have as much confidence in the Gospels at the very least, much less the epistles and the rest of the letters that make up the New Testament, is that, for one, There's four Gospels. There's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For a lot of people, they assume that all of those were written by the disciples. 


[00:04:45] In truth, only two of them were. And that would be Matthew, and John is still disputed to this day. There are a lot of people who are very adamant about the fact that John definitely didn't write Matthew. The book of John, but generally, I'd say like 70 percent of people do accept, yes, he was the writer. 


[00:05:02] It's just when he wrote that is the contested thing. Mark is a gospel that was written by Mark and Mark was a disciple of Peter, one of the apostles. And so, He compiled pretty much everything that Peter had told him about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and he put that together into the Gospel of Mark. 


[00:05:25] Luke is actually one of the most interesting ones, in my opinion. And that's because Luke wrote both the Book of Luke and the Book of Acts, and he wrote those as letters to a Roman official named Theophilus. As far as I know, we don't know exactly who Theophilus was. I don't know if you've I don't know if you've heard Gina. 


[00:05:46] Gina: Yeah, he was the great uncle of Sam. 


[00:05:49] Ben: Oh. 


[00:05:49] Gina: No, I have no idea. I'm sorry. 


[00:05:51] Ben: I was gonna say, Sam doesn't sound like a Roman name to me. It's very Roman. It's so very foreign. Oh my. But yeah, so, he was writing it to Theophilus to provide a full account of Jesus life. And he was very thorough. For the people who actually read that gospel in the original Greek, the Greek that he uses is It's drastically different from most other Greek sources that you see. 


[00:06:18] It, it's written very much as an official document. It's written very eloquently. It's written very precisely and specifically. Luke is very intentional about all of the details that he provides. And there are occasions where some people like Bart Ehrman, who is, uh, one of the more famous critics of the, of the New Testament, will point to individual details and say, no, that's wrong, that, yeah, that's completely different, so he'll point to times or places and say that couldn't possibly be, or names of specific officials and say that couldn't possibly be. 


[00:06:52] And that's something that's been going on for a long time, and there are multiple points at which Luke has made an assertion about the name of an official. or the name of a location, and it's turned out that he was correct. I can't remember the exact name, but I remember that he makes a reference to a tetrarch of a specific area, and it turns out that the assumed tetrarch that we had for records was wrong, and Luke was correct in the naming of the tetrarch of a specific area. 


[00:07:19] So, Cody, kind of going off of what you said, there is the fact that these Documents are varied, they're from different authors, and they all gel fairly well together, but one of the really big things is that there are early church fathers like Polly Carp and Justin Martyr who make references specifically and quote directly from the Gospels. 


[00:07:41] And then there are additional Church Fathers. So the Church Fathers, Justin Martyr and Polycarp, they're from the 2nd century and late 1st century. So, like, very late, like, year 90, year 100, year 110, year 120. And that's not very far off from when Jesus was alive. In fact, Um, there's an overlap between their lives and the lives of the disciples. 


[00:08:08] I believe Polycarp was actually a disciple of John. And John was the last of the disciples to die. I believe he's the only one who died of old age. So, moving on from that, you have kind of this family tree branching off of different people in those first three centuries who constantly are referencing back to these first four Gospels. 


[00:08:29] And there are some people who try to make the argument, look, it's all arbitrary. We don't really know what the books of the Bible should be. We don't really know what the New Testament should be. The reality is we all kind of knew already prior to the, what was it, the Council of Laodicea? No, what was it? 


[00:08:47] What was the council? Yeah. Sorry, the Council of Nicaea. Yeah. So there was a point which is generally attributed, attributed to be the point where we got the modern Bible, and that was the Council of Nicaea. And prior to that, we basically knew already what all of the books of the Bible for the New Testament were going to be. 


[00:09:06] Cody: And that was around 300. 


[00:09:08] Ben: AD, correct? Correct. It was around that time. I wish I had written down the actual date. That probably would have been a good idea, but prior to that, the reason that we ended up with the four gospels that we did is because they are referenced almost in their entirety by the series of church fathers that led up to that council. 


[00:09:26] And if we lost all copies of the Bible right now and only had access to the writings of that, we could entirely reconstruct the, the four gospels completely in their entirety. Just from the quotations of the early Church Fathers. They were quoted so often, and so specifically, that ultimately all four Gospels were just repeated. 


[00:09:49] Just from quotations from other people. We don't really have a lot of analogs to that. We do have snippets throughout history of people who quote books that are no longer with us, but we can't really reconstruct those books based purely off of quotations from other people. So, I would say that's one of the biggest things that at the very least is an argument for the four Gospels. 


[00:10:11] Because, that's just not something that we have. That's not something that you find at all in history. It's one of the most widely covered events, covered by both believers and unbelievers. It's covered by people like Tacitus, by people like Josephus, who, there is some argument about his covering of Jesus, because it is believed, and I do actually agree with this, that there was kind of a tweaking of what Josephus wrote to make it more pro Christianity. 


[00:10:41] But there's another version that was found that was written in Arabic, which seems more close to what someone like Josephus would have written. So we have an idea of what it is Josephus believed about Jesus. But regardless, there's people pro, people not sure, people against, people violently against. 


[00:10:59] Tacitus was not a fan of Jesus, not a fan of Christianity. But, And then you have the sources that are from the 1st century, from 2nd century, from 3rd century and covered from so many different angles, covering the reported events like the sky turning dark and earthquakes happening. We have specific historians that wrote only about that. 


[00:11:20] We have people who we only know about. because there were rebuttals from people we do have to the stuff that we don't have. So there's an instance of the historian Julius Africanus, who was in the second century, who's writing a rebuttal to a different historian who's specifically addressing, and this, he's addressing a piece that was written in the first century during the time of Christ. 


[00:11:42] And that guy was saying, well, yes, there was an earthquake and yes, the sky did go dark, but I mean, that could have just been a solar eclipse. And Julius Africanus kind of makes the point, well, we know when solar eclipses are supposed to happen. So what, is this just a spontaneous solar eclipse? So all that is, I know I'm kind of rambling here, but the point is that we have a very good reason to trust what it is the Gospels say. 


[00:12:11] And I do think that a lot of Christians try to give ground here. They try to say, okay, let's, like, as much as I love Gary Habermas, he came up with an argument called the minimum facts argument. And he basically says, look, this is all the stuff that everyone agrees on. If you are Jewish, if you're atheist, if you're Christian, if you're Arabic, these are all the things that we can more or less agree on. 


[00:12:34] There's value to that, but I think that concedes far too much ground, and I think that we have very firm ground, grounds for saying that the New Testament as it is, and especially the four Gospels, are reliable, and we shouldn't have any issues with using them as actual historical resources. 


[00:12:51] Cody: Yeah, and those have been proven time and time again by atheist sources, proving that the Bible is historically accurate. 


[00:13:01] Still happens on a daily basis, but a lot of the things that go into that too are also the, how it's been muddied through translation and that has also been disproven. And that tends to be one that a lot of people go to is that you have this. telephone effect where somebody tells a story, somebody tells a story, it changes a little bit, and so on. 


[00:13:23] But the Dead Sea Scrolls were kind of a good validation of this when those were found, and fragments are still being found to this day that just prove that there's not been much deviation. And the manuscripts through the old translations and the copying through the years pre modern era, now you have Certain translations that add quite a bit of wording and change the original intent quite a bit, and that's a whole different argument, but early translations and early copies are so close to the originals that you can rely on those sources. 


[00:14:01] Gina: Well, I mean, we were in Israel a couple of weeks ago, and when we were in Israel, we were faced with a lot of archaeological evidence of scripture being true. I mean, we went to the ancient town of Shiloh and saw the tabernacle structure that, uh, You can still see the footprint of, to the exact specifications that are in the Old Testament. 


[00:14:22] You can still see the temple steps and the places where Jesus stayed, like in Peter's mother in law's house, where she was healed. So it's hard for me, as somebody who's seen those things and known that they're real, to really refute. What scripture says outside of all of the evidence that you guys have just shared, I mean, we have archaeological evidence of the exact places where Jesus taught, healed, lived, and while they don't have his name written on them, they're true to what scripture says as far as where he was, when, and why. 


[00:14:56] Cody: Okay, so we can get past that point. Jesus did exist. He was a real human being on earth, but did he really perform the miracles in the Bible? 


[00:15:08] Ben: Yeah, so there are a lot of people who kind of, you know, take umbrage when you start referring to miracles. Obviously, the greatest miracle would be Him rising from the dead, but there are other miracles that are referred to throughout the New Testament, like Him healing the blind, healing the sick. 


[00:15:23] walking on water. And so from an atheistic perspective, especially, there are a lot of people who just say, well, all of those are impossible. And they're provably impossible because we understand the way the natural world works and the natural world doesn't allow for any of these things to happen. So. I'm kind of interested to hear your guys rebuttals to this. 


[00:15:44] What do you think would be a good way to address someone who would come to you and say, Look, I just don't believe in miracles to begin with, so obviously I can't be a Christian. 


[00:15:51] Gina: You're looking at me. We had our brief conversation before we started about miracles. And my opinion is that miracles are subjective. 


[00:16:01] So if I had a miraculous event occur and Cody was like, that's not a miracle. Like, well, I know what I experienced. I don't know how to prove it to you. So, it makes it challenging, because when you look at scripture for the examples of Christ's miracles, you have to believe that they were real, and the Bible doesn't have lies in it. 


[00:16:23] So, I don't know, I don't have a good rebuttal for that, because I do believe that miracles are kind of in the eye of the beholder, but just because somebody says that's not a miracle doesn't make it not a miracle. 


[00:16:39] Cody: And for me, the miracles, I get the hesitation for atheists and some skeptics to be leery when a Christian says, Oh, I prayed because my keys were lost, then I found my keys. 


[00:16:51] To me, that's not a miracle. I wouldn't dub that as a miracle, but for me, the miracles are anything that breaks the laws of nature, laws of physics. And uh, goes against that. So, and then the ones that we read in the Bible, I think it goes into, we set the foundation of believing it's a historical document and it's accurate. 


[00:17:15] Why would we believe that it's accurate about some things than the other things that these very thorough, Ben talked about Luke, Very well educated, respected guy. Why would we take some of what he says then for the rest? Oh, this is hogwash. 


[00:17:33] Ben: Yeah, so I do think we do need to establish exactly what we mean when we say miracles. 


[00:17:38] And I do think that when an atheist is specifically bringing this up, and I do think it's legitimate because there are a lot of Yeah, hokey things out there. There are a lot of people who will say and do very strange things and claim it. 


[00:17:51] Gina: I like the guy that smacks people with his sport coat. Oh, 


[00:17:54] Ben: bam, 


[00:17:54] Gina: bam. 


[00:17:57] Ben: Yeah, so, to be clear, there's a very good book specifically on miracles written by Lee Strobel. And Lee Strobel, if you're looking into apologetic people, Work generally, Lee is absolutely one of the best people that you could possibly look at because even if his work isn't like 100% explorative into everything, he'll point you to additional work and additional sources that can help expand even more on what he's written about. 


[00:18:24] Cody: Oh yeah. And he, Scott books on stuff. We've covered the case for Christ, the Case for Faith. He's got the case for miracles. He's got 


[00:18:30] Ben: the case for the resurrection. But yeah, the book specifically the case for miracles is very good. And in that he outlines. It's a pretty solid definition for what could, pretty much everyone could agree with is a miracle. 


[00:18:44] And I do agree to an extent with Gina. I do think that God intervening generally in someone's life, you can consider a miracle. It's the creator and author of all things. Changing something even if it can be done within the bounds of reality just for you and that is An astounding thing an astounding mystery a beautiful thing all in of itself and whether or not it's done Breaking the laws of physics or not I'd say that it's just as important, and it's just as impactful, if not more so. 


[00:19:18] But, the thing that Lee gives as a definition that I think everyone could agree with, and we wouldn't have to argue semantics at that point, would be a temporary suspension of the laws of physics to, that God does, to allow him to display his power and his love and his authority. So, yeah, a temporary suspension of the laws of physics, I think, is a pretty acceptable thing. 


[00:19:42] So the question is, do those happen? And the trouble with addressing an atheist's perspective on this is they will only accept a naturalistic explanation as to how a miracle can happen. And if a miracle is by definition an exception to nature, you can't prove it. By natural means. I'll give an example. 


[00:20:05] There was a woman named Barbara, and for the life of me, I'm sorry, I can't remember her last name. I do, I recognize I say this a lot. But there is an instance that Lee writes, I think, both in his book, and then he's had interviews with this woman, oddly enough. She's a woman who, back in the 1980s, 


[00:20:19] Gina: Barbara Snyder. 


[00:20:20] Ben: Barbara Snyder. Thank you. I was gonna, that was gonna really bother me, but yeah, so Barbara, when she was much younger back in the 1980s, she had multiple sclerosis. She had a deflated lung. She was wheelchair bound and she had a hole in the neck that she had to plug in order to speak. And it was a hole that she breathed through. 


[00:20:38] Her muscles were horrendously atrophied. I think she could only move one arm. And there was no hope that she would ever get better. She was slowly getting worse over time. And it was basically expected that she was probably going to die within a few years. And there was one day where she and her family were praying and she heard a voice and it said, get up. 


[00:20:59] And it was a man's voice and she could hear it behind her and she motioned for someone to plug the hole in her neck and she said, I think Jesus just told me to get up. And so she tried to get up and she was able to stand up and the muscles in her legs were restored. She was able to move her hands. Her lung was reflated and she went to church and she just strolled down the aisle and everyone was Going crazy and praising God and she went to the hospital that she'd been to so many times and They thought that they were seeing a ghost I think one of the doctors was interviewed and he said yeah, I thought she was dead and I was seeing her ghost Just walking toward me. 


[00:21:32] That's a reasonable response and there's documentation for this. There's This woman's medical history. She very clearly had multiple sclerosis. She very clearly had atrophied muscles. She very clearly had a hole in her neck that she no longer had. How do you give a natural explanation for any of that? A lot of the times the response is, well, it's spontaneous remission, or it's all a lie, or it was all fabricated. 


[00:21:59] All of those are statements of fact. You don't have proof of that. All we have so far is proof that it did happen. And the only way you can respond is to say, well, all of that's fabricated. Why would you say all of that's fabricated? Because it's impossible. Why do you say it's impossible? Because miracles aren't possible. 


[00:22:17] And why are miracles not possible? Because they're not physically possible because of the laws of nature. It's a continuous loop. It's constantly referring back to itself, and there is no way you can possibly prove it if it does exist. 


[00:22:33] Cody: Gotta love circular arguments. 


[00:22:37] Ben: I find there's a lot of that in atheism. 


[00:22:38] It's a lot of referring back to the central assumption. And just as we have assumptions for Christianity, which is why we're doing these first few episodes about our assumptions here. Every single path of logic has a series of assumptions that you rely on. And atheism relies on the central assumption that everything is explainable through the natural rules and the natural laws we observe. 


[00:23:00] And the problem is that you can't actually prove that. Because there, if there is something beyond the rules and the laws of nature, and unfortunately by definition there has to be because prior to the universe those laws didn't exist, but we'll leave that aside. There's no way for you to prove or disprove something beyond the laws of nature using natural rules itself. 


[00:23:21] Now there is a way to indicate that there's something and that's through empiricism. You can investigate things. You can find information. Evidence for some sort of supernatural thing happening. Something that could not possibly be explained through the laws of nature. Just like with Barbara. There is no natural explanation that exists. 


[00:23:38] Aside from aliens came down and decided to heal her body spontaneously through technology we don't understand. But at that point, you're getting into really weird territory that no one's gonna take you seriously for anyway. 


[00:23:50] Cody: No, it's funny because we're going to go back there when we talk about the resurrection. 


[00:23:53] Ben: Oh boy. I'm looking forward to that conversation. 


[00:23:59] Gina: I just had, this is totally off topic, but it's funny because I just had a relative reach out to me on one of my genealogy websites. And I help adoptees sometimes find their biological families. And this lady wanted help finding out who her grandmother's biological family was. 


[00:24:15] So I found some old family stories online and there was this lady writing about this girl's grandparents and how they had seen aliens and all of this. crop circle stuff. So it's been on my mind lately as a, as an interesting interpretation that people have to miraculous events. 


[00:24:35] Ben: I don't know about all that. 


[00:24:37] And the thing is, I'm hesitant to dismiss Kind of, kind of, kind of addressing that and keeping in with the idea of miracles. I'm hesitant to completely dismiss anything like that. Like just because someone says, Oh yeah, I was, I was visited by aliens and they took me out and then they done probed me with all kinds of weird instrumentation. 


[00:24:55] It's like, yeah, okay. That's weird. It doesn't mean that didn't happen. It does. There could be other explanations and oftentimes it seems there are, but it doesn't automatically mean it didn't happen and it doesn't mean that there isn't something there to look at. So, looking at, going back to Barbara, it doesn't mean that there isn't some other explanation. 


[00:25:14] It doesn't mean there isn't something else that could possibly account for what happened to her. The thing is that, from an atheist perspective, it's all just swept under the rug. It's all ignored, it's all eye roll, whatever, it doesn't count, it doesn't matter. If you're going to try to discern the real truth, whether or not there's something beyond the physical world or not, this is at the very least an indication. 


[00:25:37] That something could be. And, contextually, it seemed to be in response to prayer to God. And not to just any God, but to a specific God. Doesn't mean it's the God who responded. It doesn't mean that it is God who responded. It doesn't mean that it is a supernatural thing. It does indicate that. It is an argument. 


[00:25:58] And the good, the best way to address that argument isn't to say that it doesn't count. 


[00:26:04] Cody: No, yeah, just to write something off is bad, but just to play the devil's advocate here. A lot of the response I hear from Atheists says, we can't explain it now, but we will be able to in the future. 


[00:26:19] Ben: Yeah, so there's an argument that they tend to say called the God of the gaps theory, where they claim that Christians will point to something that science can't explain, and they'll say, oh, that's just God of the gaps. 


[00:26:31] You say that because we can't explain it, therefore God did it. Ultimately, it's the exact same thing as saying, well, even if we don't have an explanation, eventually we will, because it's atheism of the gaps. It's science of the gaps. Eventually we will. You don't know that you will. You don't know that for certain. 


[00:26:49] And the reality is, you can typically see when something will have, eventually, an explanation. You can't really tell me. I'm not, I'm not hearing any reasonable rebuttal. To Barbara's story, in a natural argument. Looking at it, with a context, with them praying specifically to Jesus, hearing a male voice behind her, her suddenly being healed, the only natural explanations that potentially could fit that are aliens playing a prank on us. 


[00:27:21] And you can try to make the argument that's what it is, but I find it very rare that atheists actually stick by that argument. They don't actually claim that Jesus was an alien. They don't typically claim that every single instance of a miracle is an alien performing something with technology, because it sounds crazy. 


[00:27:40] And they know it sounds crazy. 


[00:27:42] Cody: So do you think in biblical times to where we are today with science that Christians or religious folk claimed miracles more often because they couldn't explain it and it wasn't truly a miracle? Or do you think that just because something can be explained naturally later that it is any less of a miracle by God? 


[00:28:09] Ben: Well, so sometimes. We'll refer to things that happened in the past and we'll say that there is a specific natural explanation for it. And that's the truth. For instance, an eruption of a volcano. There would have been a time where native people would have looked at that and said, Oh, clearly the gods are angry. 


[00:28:27] Or they would have looked up at a storm and seen lightning come down from the sky and said, Oh, clearly there's a god that's angry. For things that, like that, that were previously thought to be supernatural in nature, Obviously we have explanations for that, but when you really look back through a lot of the claims throughout history, even for things that Herodotus talked about, there aren't very solid explanations. 


[00:28:50] I'll give an example, because this is actually a really big sticking point for me, because a lot of atheists will make claims like this, and they don't actually know anything about the writers of antiquity, a lot of the older, uh, Historians, Ticus mentioned supernatural things, some pretty crazy things. He talked about ants that were out in the desert the size of Labrador retrievers. 


[00:29:09] What? And they would burrow down into the sand and they would bring up gold, and the natives would come in and they would write in as fast as they possibly could, snatch up the gold and run away. And the ants would chase them. And we're talking actual ants. And the claim is that her doesn't know what he was talking about. 


[00:29:27] It was actually squirrels. 


[00:29:34] So, he specifically talks about ants, uses the word for ants, he talks about them burrowing into the ground the size of golden retrievers, bringing up gold. Talks about a process through which the natives would collect the gold and then run away because they were terrified of these things killing them. 


[00:29:51] And you think that's a squirrel? 


[00:29:53] Cody: I just want to know if it is a squirrel, where do I get one? Seriously? I would love to have a gold burrowing squirrel. It takes golden 


[00:30:02] Gina: retriever to a whole new level. I mean, 


[00:30:05] Ben: obviously he doesn't specifically say golden retriever. I say golden retriever because I think it's funny that it's gold ants golden retriever. 


[00:30:10] But yeah, he refers to them being the size of a dog. A chihuahua, or? 


[00:30:17] Cody: Still, an ant the size of a chihuahua. 


[00:30:20] Ben: True. I don't think they had those. And that's typically something that someone would look at and say, Okay, that sounds kind of fantastical. That sounds like a fantastical animal. Something that was made up. 


[00:30:31] But Herodotus references it as if it's real. And for all we know, it could be. And he could be misunderstanding something that I'm not sure, I can't remember specifically if he says he was there and saw it, but regardless, he's referring to something that he believes exists. And you find a lot of that in a lot of the, the ancient writers. 


[00:30:52] They generally believed in supernatural things being possible, and they reference events and creatures and things that seem fantastical at the very least. And so, like, yes, you can say that a lot of things do have explanations. A lot of things don't. A lot of things looking back at what they wrote about seem strange, even today, and you can either try to shoehorn it into a box that fits modern understanding and sensibility Or you accept the fact that maybe there are supernatural things that used to happen. 


[00:31:26] Maybe not all of it came from God. Maybe there are other forces that work on this world that are not just God. Negative spiritual forces like angels and demons. Well, the demons are the negative, you get what I mean. The point is that There can be things outside of the physical world that exist, and there can be things that act on the world as it is and can alter things similar to the way that God can, and influence things in ways we don't understand. 


[00:31:53] All of that is possible. It's also possible that a lot of these guys were just crazy or didn't know what they were talking about or whatever. The point is that it's possible, and really all you can say looking at it and trying to be objective is, It's possible. Now, how much of it is real and how much of it's not, I don't know. 


[00:32:11] But, for a lot of the things that are specifically in the Bible, going back to the initial question, if you have someone who is dead and has been dead for several days, and then that person is raised to life, that's a miracle. There's a lot of stuff in that vein that's mentioned in the Bible. And I do think that we tend to Even Christians, we tend to look back at people in the past and think they were stupid. 


[00:32:37] So, there are atheists who will talk about the virgin birth and say, Well, obviously Mary had sex with someone other than Joseph. Okay, so you think Joseph was stupid. He didn't know how pregnancy worked. Where Mary is just like, Oh no, God gave me this baby. And he was just like, Oh, okay, since I'm an ancient man, I must be stupid. 


[00:33:00] It specifically says in the Bible he planned to divorce her quietly. That implies he understood how babies were made. 


[00:33:06] Cody: And he didn't want any part of it. 


[00:33:08] Ben: Yeah. But, but we 


[00:33:10] Gina: also know that an angel spoke to him. 


[00:33:12] Ben: That's correct. That was what I was going to get to. very much, Gina. No, you make, you bring up a very good point. 


[00:33:17] The whole point of Joseph accepting what Mary said is not because he was a stupid ancient man and stupid ancient men didn't know how pregnancy worked. Is that he did know that sex makes babies, and the ancient world understood that very well. And because he understood that, he was planning on divorcing Mary. 


[00:33:33] He didn't want her killed or stoned or anything for breaking the law. But he didn't want any part of her. And then an angel came and spoke to him, and he accepted what Mary said. 


[00:33:44] Cody: Do you think that's overlooked more in today's modern society with how frivolous we are with sex? Yes. Okay. I would agree. 


[00:33:54] Because I don't think contextually speaking, understanding that culture that modern society grasps how big of a deal that was back then to have a bastard child from another man and you're going to marry that woman. That was not a common thing to sign up for back then. Well, in Arab countries, 


[00:34:18] Gina: adoption is like forbidden even now. 


[00:34:20] So for a man in Jesus time to raise someone else's son was unheard of. 


[00:34:27] Ben: Yeah, absolutely. He took on not just risk to himself, but he took on potential humiliation if it got out exactly who Jesus was and the fact that Jesus wasn't his son. I mean, he was because he chose to adopt him. And Joseph's part, I do think is underplayed to an extent. 


[00:34:45] Like a lot of honor is given to Mary and rightly so, because she went through a very tough time and it was a big burden that was placed on her. But a very large burden was also placed on Joseph because he didn't have to be there. He could have left if he wanted to. He didn't have to accept what Mary said. 


[00:35:01] He could have divorced her quietly, like he was planning on, and then left her to be alone. But he didn't. He chose to play the part that he did. He chose to honor Mary. He chose to honor God. 


[00:35:12] Gina: And I think that says a lot about God. Because when you're faced with his request or his plan, or with needing to obey him, like he did. 


[00:35:22] I don't really have an example of, in scripture, God speaking to someone with an angel or directly and them saying no, except for Jonah, who ended up going and doing it anyway, and then maybe Pharaoh, but God hardened his heart, so. There's very few examples where people talked to God or an angel and were like, nah, I don't feel like it. 


[00:35:44] Which is, I think, even more compelling when it comes to miracles and, like, Bible stories because if it was so compelling to that person that they dropped everything and changed their whole life and their future forever because of that two minute interaction or whatever, that has to speak so clearly about, like, the character of God and where we stand in obedience to Him. 


[00:36:08] That makes miracles more compelling in Scripture, not less. 


[00:36:11] Ben: I agree. 


[00:36:15] Gina: Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to our podcast today. If you liked what you heard, please feel free to subscribe and share and leave a positive review. And if you would like to connect with us on social media, you can do so on Instagram and Facebook at the Logic of God. You can also send us an email at dot the Logic of god@gmail.com. 


[00:36:37] Thanks again for listening. We hope you have a great day.