 everyone and thank you for coming by tonight. We've got a awesome discussion slash debate coming up. We did have some last minute technical difficulties. We couldn't get Gavin on without him dropping out for some reason. I'm not 100% on what's going on on his side. But Jonathan, as well as Nathaniel and Brinton thought, you know what, this might even give us more room for discussion. So please let us know out there if there's any problems with the audio or anything because obviously James the Great's not here and it's me filling in. So please let us know on that. But also, I just want to let everybody know or remind everybody that this is a place that anybody can come no matter their background, no matter of your walk of life. We want to make sure that everybody feels welcome here and that everybody is included. With that being said, please hit the like and subscribe button if you like these types of conversations. And what we're going to do is we're going to start off with a format of five minute openings for each contender. And then we're going to jump into an open discussion. And then we'll go into Q&A. So if you want to have any questions, please tag me at Converse Contender. Thank you so much, Tiago, for that. And I'll just kick it over to Jonathan to start us off. Well, thanks so much. It's great to be here. I'm looking forward to Sparice's engaging discussion. So I'm going to go through the argument I presented in the debate at the weekend also on this channel. I don't think that the argument was engaged with. So I'm interested to present it again this evening to see whether my partner's discussion can do a better job of refuting it. But I presented the argument from what I call Messianic Convergence, which is where we see various instances in the Gospel biographies of Jesus' life where there's a striking correlation with the Old Testament in a way that is unlikely to be the product of mere coincidence, but points rather to design. And since we have a good, strong historical support for the incidence in question, it points to the hypothesis of divine design rather than human design. The strength of evidence for a proposition is best measured in terms of the ratio of two probabilities, namely the probability of the evidence given by hypothesis and the probability of the evidence given the false suit of that hypothesis, so the negation of the hypothesis. So the ratio may be top heavy, in which case evidence favorites are hypothesis. It might be bottom heavy or neither, in which case evidence favors neither hypothesis and we would not call it evidence for or against your hypothesis. Bayes theorem is a mathematical tool for modeling our evaluation of evidences to appropriately apportion the confidence in our conclusions to the strength of the evidence. So dividing the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis by the probability of the evidence given the annulment of the hypothesis gives you what's referred to in probability theory as the Bayes factor. And the Bayes factor is a measure of the strength of evidence and indicates how many times more likely it is that you will observe this evidence given your hypothesis true than if it were false. For instance, a Bayes factor of 100 indicates that your evidence is 100 times more likely if your hypothesis is true than if it were false. And this form of reasoning is used routinely in this forensic science. For instance, the presence of the defendant's fingerprints on a murder weapon may be taken as evidence for the hypothesis guilt over the hypothesis of non-guilt because the probability of the defendant's fingerprints being on the murder weapon is much higher on the hypothesis that the defendant is guilty than on the hypothesis that he is not guilty. And so I seek to present a positive confirmatory argument for the veracity of the Christian gospel by looking at various striking correlations between the events in Jesus' life and the Old Testament scriptures. And the argument can be summarized in syllogistic form as follows. Premise one, the correlation between events, origin of the gospels, either scripture as a product of human design or divine design. Premise two, it is not the product of human design. Conclusion, therefore, it is the product of divine design. So just to summarize a few examples, we can discuss in more detail as time permits. The fact that Jesus' death coincides with Jesus' peace of Passover, given the theological import of that, that fact I think is more probable on the hypothesis of divine orchestration of history than it is on the annulment of that hypothesis. Second one is the selection of the Passover lamb, which according to John chapter 12, Jesus enters Jerusalem five days before Passover. And according to the Exodus in chapter 12, the Jews were to select their Passover lamb and bring it into their homes five days before Passover. And so you've got another coincidence there. Another one is Jesus being the first fruits. In 1 Corinthians 1520 Paul says of Christ, he's the first fruits of those who fall in the sleep. And Jesus, of course, was raised allegedly on the day following the Sabbath, following Passover, on which they fell at the feast of first fruits. And even if you don't accept the resurrection as an historical event, nonetheless, the evidence I think is quite compelling that the original Christian proclamation was that Jesus had risen from the dead and appeared on the third day following his death on the Sunday, the feast of first fruits, and given the theological import of Christ being the first fruits from among the dead, the first race to glory and immortality, that again is a striking coincidence. Even the name Jesus itself is significant. The name itself means Yahweh is salvation. And ties in also with Zechariah 6, where you have an individual who's a foreshadow of the Messiah, given the name of Yeshua, as specifically said to be a foreshadow of the coming Messiah. A final example is the fact that Christianity becomes the international global religion that it becomes, because in various passages throughout the Old Testament, Zechariah 6, for example, and LSF 42, and has just in Zechariah and so forth, and Daniel indicate that the part of the Messiah's job description was to bring a knowledge of the God of Israel to representatives of all nations of the world. That is highly improbable on the hypothesis that Jesus is not the Messiah, especially given the persecution of Christians up until 313 AD, where he had the eternal land, which made Christianity legal. But the probability on the hypothesis Jesus is the promised Messiah. The probability of that happening is approximately to one based upon those predictions in the Old Testament. And so it's a cumulative argument, not when you have multiple lines of evidence that's cumulative according to that conclusion. So I'll finish with that. Thank you. All right. Thanks so much for that. We'll kick it over to Nathan get us started on their side. Sorry, I was, pardon me, I was a little parched. All right. So first off, thank you so much again for having me on here. I really, I really feel like I'm a detriment to the channel. So this one's on you. And Jonathan, it's good to see you again. And Brent, it's good to meet you. Is Christianity true is one of the most important questions I believe we can currently ask. It's currently the world's largest religion with 2.3 billion followers, comprising just over one third of the world's population. It has led to the creation and demise of enormous and powerful empires led to the creation of Islam and many Christian cults and shapes much of our world's politics. I would contend there is no person more person more important historically than Jesus and no belief more important than that of Christianity. But is it true? And how would we know? New Testament scholar Kersop Lake provided a path when at the turn of the 20th century, he said, the first task of the historical inquirer is to collect the pieces of evidence. The second is to discuss the trust, trustworthiness and meaning of each separate piece. And the third is to reconstruct the events to which the evidence relates. Now using this method as well as the four point approach utilized by Bart Ehrman and many other current historians, in addition to searching for independent attestation, dissimilarity and contextual credibility, one should have an open mind and honestly accept where the evidence leads. Well, does the evidence lead us to Christianity? Is it true? I contend the answer is a resounding no and I will lay out my argument quickly and conclude with two points. One, Jesus most certainly existed and he was apocalyptic Jewish rabbi in the first century Palestine. Two, his followers thought he was the Messiah, but Messiah doesn't mean then. Messiah didn't mean then what Christians take it as now. It simply meant anointed one. The Gospels may have considered Jesus the Son of God, but that was not unique. Both David and Solomon along with the nation of Israel were all called the Son of God. The only canonical writings we have about the life of Jesus are the four Gospels. Irreconcilably contradictory anonymous texts written 40 to 65 years after the death of Jesus from authors who were not eyewitnesses and did not receive their information from any of those who claim to be eyewitnesses. There are zero texts written concurrent to the life of Jesus or the disciples, which is certainly odd considering the feats they were supposed to have accomplished. We have no original documents, only copies of copies of copies which have been translated over and over again. The Gospels were written in Greek by Christians likely not living in Palestine, evidenced by the fact that the author of the book of Mark gets basic Palestinian geography wrong. Joseph of Arimathea is central point and at least the end of the passion narrative, if likely never even existed. Believing one sees something and actually having seen it are not the same thing. I believe I can show that Jesus never claimed to be God and his disciples never believed it. We have no evidence any of the disciples were martyred for their faith and really no evidence at all for most of them after they ran away because they're Messiah. The only one they thought would be the king of Israel and rule over the 12 tribes of which they thought they would be lesser kings was taken in change by Jewish priests something else which would have not happened. The trial by Pilate would not have ever happened the way that the Gospels portray it and I contend that every single historian states that to be the case and I could go on and on and on but I will conclude or I will close with two conclusions. First there is simply no evidence Jesus was even laid in a tomb but more over that he rose from the dead and Paul said without the resurrection Christianity is dead. The disciples and women even give this away because they believed his body was stolen and my final conclusion today the person who was best suited to be the next president of the United States suspended her campaign and Elizabeth Warren I'm still with you persist. Thank you. All right thanks so much Nathaniel for that. All right Brenton your last stop man give us your opening and then we'll go into the open discussion. Sure though I think I should add off that I'm a Bernie Bro. If you make it I'll vote for him. As long as she bends the knee I'm going to be happy. All right so anyway I'm going to jump into my thing but just for those of you who don't know my background I am a writer playwright in New York at Seven Productions produced I'm working on a novel I have a comic book out Snow White Zombie Apocalypse there's a successfully funded Kickstarter we're about to break $7,500 to fund the next issue of this drawn by Luana Vecchio so if you can check it out push us over that line link should be in the description but let's get on into this because I am also a Buddhist with Sokogakkai International have been since 2014 and I am a former men's leader from Harlem after I aged out of the YMD district so the question of this debate is is Christianity true and that to me speaking as a Buddhist is potentially a very interesting question but not in the way that some of you might expect usually these types of arguments tend to either be an examination of the historicity of the Bible or they tend to be an indictment or defense of various miraculous happenings described within the thing about these kind of questions and these kinds of stories is that from the perspective of a Buddhist like myself I can tell you we aren't really that impressed by miracles if you read the various sutras they are full of miracles and miraculous happenings in the Lotus Sutra for instance the 16th chapter known as the Lifespan chapter the Sutra describes how Shakyamuni Buddha as he preaches his final teachings towards the end of his life on holy eagle peak he gathers together all the Buddhas that ever were and ever would be as well as various figures from Chinese and Hindu mythology and before this assembled host the Buddha raises his hands and out of the earth there emerges a giant treasure tower made of the seven kinds of gems I'm talking emeralds rubies sapphires all of them glinting and gleaming in the sun and then the Buddha raises his hands higher and both he and the tower begin to fly soon his audience follows and as cherry blossoms rain down on everyone from the water dragons to the devil king of the sixth heaven they are all together drawn up into the air with Shakyamuni Buddha and once they reach the altitude the Buddha opens up the tower's only door and within waits the Buddha who was Buddha before Shakyamuni was Buddha and together this pair preaches the ultimate and final teachings to that assembled multitude the ultimate and final teachings of Shakyamuni now did this sermon in the air literally happen I don't know good I mean Shakyamuni could have been magic the man who was originally named Siddhartha Guttama could have through meditation and lengthy practice tapped into some form of psychic energy that we don't yet understand and may never understand he could have also utilized some form of trickery like a stage magician or even stumbled upon some ancient alien technology to accomplish this feat but besides being a visual on par with the latest Marvel movies and an experience slightly above the latest Marvel movies what does that actually say about the value of his teaching I mean it's great for getting people's attention but more important than that is what you actually say when you have their attention and what they take away from that from what is said what is important is not the act itself but what the act communicates and its effect the lifespan chapter is considered the beating heart of Mahayana Buddhism and that's not because the Buddha may have had this power but instead the fact that this chapter is taken as a metaphor for everyone's own inherent Buddha nature the critical thing about this story the real truth of the Lotus Sutra is the realization that we and by we I mean every one of us me and you and everybody here we are the treasure tower that is our true nature that our true nature is in fact something so beautiful and glorious and seemingly impossible as a giant glimmering tower of gemstones emerging from the earth and taking flight that's what's important about the Lotus Sutra it's not a chronicle of a cool guy who did literally awesome things but a work of great art and and staggeringly insightful philosophy that points human beings to as close as it can to the true nature of reality not the everyday world that we see but the real world that is obscured by Maya by illusion the illusions that come along with being the sort of creature that possesses individual consciousness ultimately religion and religious practice is distinct from both history and science religion has very different goals and very different strengths and weaknesses and it speaks to a unique part of us that is exceptionally difficult to pin down and quantify as a Buddhist I see religion and religious practice not as a collection of esoteric truths or a series of moral and ethical commands backed up by the threat of supernatural violence but instead as a practical method for the cultivation and maintenance of faith which at the very least is crucial for human psychological health and material success and if I am to exercise that faith muscle that my practice builds I will say that at most faith is a necessary component to a vehicle that generates enlightenment for the good of all sentient creatures so if you ask me is Christianity true then that is the lens by which I am going to answer the question the true test of any religion is does it inspire its adherents to live better lives does it successfully build faith in a healthy and harmonious way that leads its practitioners in their communities to better and more correctly to a better and more correct understanding of the universe their place within it and their relationship to each other along with this planet the other species on this planet that inhabit it and at the end of everything their relationship with ultimate reality if a practice can answer that in the affirmative that's a true religion to me as opposed to the cultish worship of what is essentially a real-life superhero and I look forward to this dialogue helping me to determine the answer to that question at least in a limited capacity thank you all right thanks so much for that Brenton so I guess we'll jump straight into the open discussion I just want to remind everybody if you have a question for the q and a please tag me at converse contender not modern day debate that way I'll be able to see it and go ahead and get it and put it in for the q and a section if you have any super chats we'll push those to the top of the list and just thanks everybody for being here don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe if you haven't already that lets James know that these are the type of debates that want that people want to see and so if you like this type of format go ahead and hit that like button that way that we have some some positive feedback and since uh jonathan's by himself tonight if I if I hear something from the other side that I might think uh oh that's an interesting question uh for them maybe I'll throw that in as well but I don't think jonathan will need it so jonathan with that you've heard the other side why don't we jump straight in with you absolutely so um I would be interested to hear um how the other side would interact with the argument I possess to make an statement taking from there I'm sorry uh I think he means to interact with your opening statement is that correct yeah okay do you want to take that one Nathan or I mean I'm not gonna talk about Bayes theorem um people use Bayes theorem to show that Jesus never even existed as well so it just shows that it can lead to whatever you want it to lead you to um so the one one thing I'd say on that is that people also use uh deductive arguments to establish all sorts of wrong conclusions but that doesn't undercut the validity of deductive syllogisms yeah and yeah it can't lead you to the Bayes theorem can lead you also to again as somebody in the chat but it can lead you to showing that Jesus never even existed it doesn't lead in your what you're gonna say is that he that carrier and I don't agree with him but what you're gonna say is that people like carrier using it the wrong way exactly and he would say you're using it the wrong way and and guess what both I can both of you be right no but as the same as the same with deductive arguments that he garbage in you're gonna garbage at the same thing applies here yeah yeah you would say the same thing to you yeah and so we have to actually evaluate them on the the arguments on a case-by-case basis yeah I actually I think that uh just uh I don't agree with Carrier's conclusion but I I I don't use Bayes theorem to try and figure out whether a person rose from the dead or not I didn't argue well I in this particular argue in this particular argument I didn't know it's what does it take for Christianity to be true the only the only way and Paul said it very specifically right he said it only takes one thing for Christianity to be true um he I think that the resurrection of Jesus is strong evidence for Christianity true but I think there are other arguments as well in addition to the resurrection argument if Jesus never rose from the dead is Christianity true no okay I is it is is the resurrection is the resurrection of Jesus the most important piece of that yeah I'd say so I don't agree with many apologists though who argued that that if if Jesus rose from the dead and that proves Christianity because I think that I mean what's the theological import of the resurrection we only we only know that from the Gospels what Jesus said according to the Gospels and so I think that we need to make an argument for the robust reliability of the Gospels as well as the case for the resurrection which I kind of challenge you to do I kind of want to quibble with the I like I remember you said that and I actually now I know why I wrote down Paul and I tend to have issues with Paul in general from what I remember from my religious studies but I would actually contend that Christianity is not necessarily untrue if Paul if the resurrection didn't happen what's really important to understand is like okay so one of the concepts that we have in the nature and Buddhism and this comes from the fourth chapter of the Lotus Sutra is what's called expedient or skillful means and if you read a lot of like Hindu texts especially like the Upanishads and a number of other like very early like the Vedas you'll find that these stories are constantly contradicting each other and like the Upanishads tell like eight stories of the creation of the universe eight different mutually exclusive ones the point is not to point at like this one story here worked or this one or they all happened at once the point is is that when we're talking about something like ultimate reality when we're talking about the universe like taken as a whole it's something that human brains can only get so much around even with you know as impressive as they are so a lot of the times what these are pointing at is the point in the direction of the truth so what they would say is like with a skillful means for instance they compared it to imagine for instance you've got a family living in like a big mansion it's an older mansion the children have lived in there their whole lives have never even gone outside they have no idea what outside even is well one day the mansion catches fire and suddenly the dad sitting there like oh my god the mansion's on fire i've got my kids right here what do i do how do i get them out the door they don't know what fire is i can't explain this to them so he goes hey kids hang on you see those toys you're playing with right here well i'll tell you what if you go out that door right over there there are toys just like that and there's so many more of them and they're way better and the kids immediately get excited they get up they run out and the father follows them out and the house burns down and they're like they come out and they're like whoa dad you know what the heck what's going on these toys aren't here you lied now yeah he told them something that was untrue but that does not mean that he lied what he did was he employed skillful means that got them to do a thing that was important in a specific time and specific place so if you're talking about you know the experience of the resurrection are you talking about Jesus the historical figure you know there is a lot to be taken from that whether or not there is magic involved and similarly you can almost see that Jesus from the way he talks about it it's very possible that he had it what was called a satori an enlightening experience where he saw the universe in a way that other people tend not to in their normal consciousness and of course someone coming from Jesus's background who experiences a satori would express that in terms that he understands which is the Jewish uh Hebrew traditions of of the Near East so I'm not necessarily sure that you can really say that it's not true or maybe you can say it's not true if there's no resurrection but I'm not sure that that is a relevant question if that makes sense I think it's very relevant because without resurrection there's no Christianity I agree that's a that's a basic tenet of Christianity um right and uh for several reasons first of all Paul says so verse 15 says Christ is not in resolution that we're still in our sins okay the speed teller all meant to be whispered Jesus himself says so um in various passages in the gospel for example um in John chapter two when the Jews confront Jesus after he cleansed the temple and asked him uh what sign to show us the privilege or to do this he says to show this temple and the three days already developed speaking about his body in his resurrection from the dead and so he and various other passages as well in the gospel Jesus says that the resurrection from the dead is God's vindication of Jesus's messianic and divine credentials in uh in act 17 Paul Paul says that uh you've got a seven day when you address the world in righteousness by the man he's a quantity he's given assurance of this to all people by raising him to the dead so the resurrection is is crucial for Christianity yeah but I mean also keep in mind the man spoke in parables constantly and he you know what you also have right there is if he's talking about like why I have this authority and he's saying I'm gonna can you give me the quote exactly uh there's very there's lots of them in the gospel right right just give me the one you were using is what I'm talking about yeah and John chapter two verses uh 18 and 19 so the Jews said to him what sign do you show us we sing she's answered destroy this temple and then three days I will raise it up Jews then said it's taking part six years to build this temple and you will raise it up in three days but he was speaking about the temple of his body when therefore he was raised to the dead his disciples remembered that he had said this and they believed the scripture and that what the Jesus spoke yeah but I mean honestly that sounds like you could take that a number of different ways you could take that the way of literally saying I will literally raise this temple as if he's making a boast that he's not actually going to do or you could take it as people imposing a pattern on his speech afterwards I mean a great example um of that is like um have you guys ever done this this thing and anybody at home draw any organic shape just anything not a circle not a just like any kind of like blobby thing and you can turn that into a face with only a single point um just pop a pen in one little dot bam you have a face because you have an eye the human brain goes and imposes structure on what is essentially chaos so I I'm not sure that you're saying like Jesus said my evidence is uh I will recreate this temple and then he dies and then he comes back and they're like oh oh he meant that I'm just not seeing that that is necessarily like I don't even understand how that's supposed to demonstrate that he has that authority especially not in that moment the the the illusion or reference to three days is also associated to many many passages in the Gospels where Jesus claimed prediction by the resurrection so for instance in uh in Matthew chapter 12 verse 40 um Jesus says her justice to end it was three days and three nights in the bell of the great fish so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the land of the earth uh he's yeah he's not talking about himself there and I would actually contend that um that in the Gospel of John that he never actually said that either um Gospel of John no I don't I don't think I don't think Jesus ever said destroy the temple and he'll raise it in three days I would argue that he did so here's the yeah of course you would you're a Christian you think the Bible is true I don't think well let's look at the evidence um so um if we go to Mark 14 58 okay if we go to Mark 14 58 um this is what Jesus is at his trial before the high priest campus and Paul's witnesses set forward and they say we heard him say I'll destroy this temple that has been with hands and in three days they'll build another not me with hands what does Jesus say are you gonna let me finish what does Jesus say let me finish yeah even about this their testimony did not agree um also in Matthew 26 61 you see the same thing in Mark 15 29 you see he's on the cross and passes by passing by mocking him saying hi you're the one she said you destroy this temple who built who does come down from the cross now if you're the son of God um now notice that um she uh that nothing in Matthew or Mark gives us a pretext for that allegation against Jesus uh Jesus uh and uh and so it's kind of an unexplained illusion there uh there is a new backstory or pretext provided to us in synoptic gospels as to what Jesus said um but it seems not something that's that's um a fabric a fabrication out of whole cloth but rather more like a garbled version of something Jesus was likely said especially in view of the three days reference which is often associated with Jesus' resurrection predictions when you over to John 2 18 and 19 as I alluded to earlier we see the pretext for the accusation uh but not the later mature representations and it's just an accusation notice that Jesus did not say destroy the man-made temple that's been with human hands and build another one not made by human hands rather he said he was speaking about his his resurrection so you've got an undesigned coincidence there between the synoptics and John that John provides the original statement but not the later uses of accusation synoptics gives the later accusation but not the original statement so there you have independent support yeah or he could have been talking about I will rebuild the temple with telepical power I'm not sure that so this like you're talking about a lot of coincidences where things line up in the text with other things in the text and that's just how humans tell stories I mean that that's how I work as a writer where you will see uh recurring motifs in my work and sometimes they're motifs that I intend and sometimes they're their motifs that come in it doesn't necessarily say anything about the work other than the fact that I'm either really cool and brilliant or also you know I've spent a lot of time working in various motifs and running gags and references so if you're seeing recurring things happen I mean I don't see how that's evidence for anything necessarily being literally true but again I will also say that I don't think necessarily it's important that it be literally true for for reasons I've already gone into the example I just gave is an instance of what I call undesigned coincidences which is where you have a question that's raised by you have multiple accounts concerning an event an actual question is raised by one account which is answered incidentally by another account so in that case you've got the question raised by Mark and Matthew namely well did Jesus actually say this what did Jesus say to give rise to this accusation John gives us the original statement which then explained Matthew and Mark thus pointing to the veracity of both or in points to a writer putting uh structure onto it you know because again the human brain we don't grab everything we have specifics uh spotlight consciousness where we can't write literally everything that's happening all the time so that's why that's why it points to truth so the fictions are not why I'm confused why it points to I just want to why does that point to truth because fictions are not like this when you have multiple authors and one raises a natural question which is explained in passing in a non in an undesigned way that that is evidence for the veracity of the account I mean no not necessarily because first off there can be a coincidence where second of all it can be purposefully added by a writer or an editor later on and write evidence for that well I mean again you don't need to provide evidence of absence you need you would need evidence that this so a coincidence is just the brain imposing a structure on what it sees um you know again there's a beta main off phenomenon are you guys familiar with this no okay so their main off phenomenon is um someone will hear something very odd very out of line or maybe a certain sequence of numbers or something and they're like oh okay and then suddenly they'll start seeing that sequence repeat around them like frequently for for weeks or whatever so for instance say someone sees um you know the number 15116 and they see that on their computer and then they walk into the thing and they see that and then they get a text message from 15116 it's not that what's happening there is that their brain they've they've encountered 15116 over and over and over again but because of selective attention they ignore it until it becomes known to them and then suddenly they start recognizing the pattern because we humans are patterns seeking creatures um so again like I would say large coincidences can be compelling and they can be an idea that maybe we should look into something more but I I don't see them as in any way being direct evidence of something if that makes sense Nathan what do you think about undesigned coincidences does it add to the credibility of a historical narrative I can but you'd have to have additional evidence is built into it like in the book of mark when they ask him if he said those things what does he say Jonathan what is his response uh he's not asked that at all no when he when he mentioned he said you're gonna build it up in three days or tear down and build them three days what's his response to them Jesus is not reply yeah what is he doing Matthew it's the same it's a parallel can't oh now mind you now Matthew is copied 95 from mark so it's probably not a good idea to go there um you know what that's the thing so you have john written 20 years after Luke and he just happens to say it this is also the only now mind you it's the only gospel where Jesus actually claims to be god as well so no it's not yes it is I have been over an extensively you can't help but interrupt can you like Jesus it's the most legendary account it adds the most pardon me bullshit um it's got super Jesus in there Jesus literally walking forward instead of instead of uh uh you know Judas walking up and kissing him on the cheek or lips or whatever I don't really care do what you want bro uh uh instead he walks up and he's like yo I'm Jesus and they all fall down you know because he's he's got like divine powers in the book of John right and he's staying he's like bench pressing the cross in the book of John right now all the this these these divinic type of things that are added in the book of John are simply ways to make it so that he's more actually actually divine these things uh these things that that happen he doesn't even respond or ever say in any of the other gospels or the apocryphal ones outside of Peter he never even actually says any of things any things like this so why should we think that he actually said it and because it's only in one gospel right he doesn't respond to the charges in the other ones so you made a lot of false claims and that's oh name one yeah you made quite a number uh for example you claimed that the gospel of john c only gospel that indicates the deity of christ and that's just fine no it's where g the only one where jesus claimed to be gone that's false too no it's not oh i'll give you i can give you multiple examples i can give you one um go ahead okay i'll give you one example um and there's so many picked wrong no i know there's so many it's why i made the claim that if you know i know there's there's four gospel there's four verses in the book of john where he claims to be god other than that there's zero in the entire gospel in the gospel of john wow there's no there's only there's only four of them in the gospel of john which is i am i am the father of one before abraham was i am uh if you've seen me you've seen the father right i mean there's one more there's the only places where he ever says i'm god okay i could point it more but let me go to why don't you get to it okay let's get to the synoptic gospels um so map ejector 11 this is when john the baptist has sent disciples to jesus to ask him are you the one we're expecting or should we look for another and jesus answered them go and tell john what you here and see the blind receiver site the lean walk left her cleanse and the dead pure and the dead are raised up and the poor hope he needs to preach them and bless this one it's unappended by me so um john so the context here is john the baptist has sent disciples to jesus that's not really the one we're expecting and so what is so as they went away what did jesus say to the crowd concerning john he says what did you go into the wilderness to see a rigid by the wind what then to go out to see a man dressed in soft clothing behold those who were soft clothing are in king's houses what then did you go out to see a prophet yes and tell you in more than a prophet and then verse 10 pay attention this is he a fictitious written behold i send a messenger before your face he'll prepare you the way the formal um and so he's he says that john the baptist is that messenger from malachi three verse one that was sent to prepare the way for yahweh not yahweh for the messiah the apocalyptic messiah well now let's go and read it then malachi three no i'm not going to read malachi three you gotta stay in this not you gotta stay in the gospels bro jesus jesus never comes out and says i'm god except for the book of john i just gave you an example no he did not say i'm god i'm divine the only time he ever says that in the book of john not in those exact words but it's strongly implied because he no yeah it's strongly if it's strongly implied why didn't he say it why didn't mark actually come out and say or or marry you i'm god i mean i i would go as far as to say he doesn't even necessarily say it in john um let's let i'm sorry uh let's let john finish that that point because i think he was trying to to link um what was being said about christ said about himself there with a prophecy about uh the yahweh in the old testament so okay absolutely my mistake john it's fine thank you so malachi chapter three uh says behold my behold i send my messenger he'll prepare the way before me and the lord and he ever says hat adon which said well they have the use of yahweh hat adon or the lord to me seek will suddenly come to his temple and the messenger of the covenant whom you don't like behold he is coming says the lord of hosts so um here we have the messenger the forerunner who said prepare the way for yahweh himself to come to his temple and jesus says that guy is john the baptist and he's preparing the way for me so how much clearer do you want it to be he never says he's preparing the way for me not even one time he never says preparing the way for god right for that i am god he never says that and in fact when he we look at dissimilarity which i know you're a fan of um i know i know because critical historians and scholars use it you're not a fan of it um i when we can look at that and say would they have added these things later and that's obvious what was added in the book of john because these are the things when you look at mark and matthew especially because matthew is not even a source it's a copy uh it's very specific that jesus is a man who is the messiah and the messiah in jewish which we explained to you in the last debate that we had myself and a jew uh said messiah doesn't mean god right and you you understand that right uh the title messiah in itself means anointed one yes which means god well it doesn't mean the word doesn't mean god but the old testament's predictions concerning the messiah indicate that he is to be god so the messiah was the messiah is to be god according to the old testament yes oh you better tell the jews yeah i did you tell the jews but fair enough man no you told the jew and he told you were f***ing wrong and i i if you recall the debates um i totally refuted him on that no you didn't wasn't able to defend it no you didn't he told you that the messiah doesn't mean god it means anointed one they called they thought the messiah was going to as i so let's say that the messiah wasn't no this the messiah was going to unshackle the chains of roam and he was going to become the king of the jews not a god the king of the jews and we even know this because in every piece of first century polemics in palestine what we see is that every single one of them thought that jesus gained his divinity when he rose from the dead and not a single second before that that's what we get and that's why they were even having the the uh the the conversations by some of us follow apollos some of us follow peter some of us follow paul no that's not what my controversy was about i'm sorry oh oh it's not okay it was about rhetorical skills no it's easy can i can i can i hear real quick because there's a conversation thread that i don't want to lose if that's all right um so um nathan uh you you said that the times that jesus refers to himself uh as god the um i the he was seen the father has has seen me can you give me those three quotes again real quick sure i've got them written down uh because i think it's important to know what i'm talking about um yeah uh it's in john eight fifty eight truly i tell you before abraham was i am john ten thirty i and the father are one john fourteen nine the one who has seen me has seen the father and john seventeen twenty four father i want those you have given me to be with me where i am and to see my glory the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world okay so there there's another interpretation there that would jump out to anybody that is familiar with uh eastern philosophy and also uh to anybody who's familiar with hinduism um and that is is the so especially you know buddhism grew out of hinduism and hinduism holds essentially that everything all that there is you can almost consider it a kind of like pantheism is uh brahma and the world that we experience is the maya of brahma the magical power of brahma the or or i guess like the stage in set dressing so you know if you go with like um how shakespeare said all the world's a stage and men and women are merely players uh the hindus and the buddhists would go further to say not only is all the world a stage and the men's men and women are merely players but also uh the men and women like are the set dressing and the rigging and this and the audience and the director uh that literally like the stuff the actual physical stuff of the universe of physical reality is brahma that is the the manifestation of the godhead so Jesus could very easily and a number of people who have enlightening experience satirists that you see um you can find monks will have them after a long periods of meditation and study uh sometimes people will have them after taking certain psycho reactive drugs and sometimes they just happen for no reason whatsoever they talk about like instantaneous enlightenment where uh you know you see the moon in a dew drop and bang um the process of essentially ego death where you stop identifying mentally just with yourself and your ego and suddenly you're identifying with everything around you now it's very easy that Jesus could have had one of these experiences and when he's coming to speak to his disciples and to people and saying look you know you're it and i'm it and you have seen the father you've seen brahma you've seen if you've seen me you've seen it but also if you've seen literally anything else it's kind of like how some people will say um you know i am the reincarnation of Siddhartha Guttama yeah so so does everybody else stop putting on errors if that makes sense so you know i can see how he might have been telling the truth there but also not claiming to be god in the kingly sense because let's face it like the early christian church it was very different but as it grew and as it got um absorbed by Rome and especially Constantine the figure of christ was associated very strongly with the figure of Zeus and the figure of the king and so we get sort of this relationship where uh our relationship to god or the ultimate uh reality or whatever is the relationship of a child to a grandfather or a servant or like a vassal to a lord um and i i i feel like that is a way that people can express ultimate reality like when they're living in that political system but as we grow beyond it we realize that you know it the what is being expressed is not literally that if that makes sense that's uh i i never heard that perspective of that before um no i don't know is it is it is it possible that both christianity and buddhism are true yeah absolutely jonathan no i knew that was going to be the answer i'll just figure out that did you did you want to add anything to that to uh brinton's last claim if not i have to introduce uh no let's see what you have to say all right so uh maybe uh so just help me because the the topic is going to be is christianity true nathan and brinn i just want to know is um is if all these um inconsistencies in the text that you guys see or or at least nathaniel um would or those would those make it so that christianity is not true or is there deeper issues that uh like like if if you set up all night and you found that oh everything in the text is completely accurate right then would you say it wouldn't follow from that that christianity is true and then i guess that might help us get back toward is christianity true or not rather than is the gospels or the gospels reliable sure that makes sense uh yep absolutely um so i am i i can say with with an incredible amount of confidence that the gospels are not reliable um but the gospels could be completely wrong and more than they currently are and even more irreconcilability contradictory and christianity could still be true jesus could have still you know done some crazy stuff i don't i don't i i don't use the word magic because magic is just an illusion it's supernatural that we actually talk about um that that stuff could be true and people wrote legendary accounts about it which is what i think the gospels uh are and then of course they mean the gospel of peter which was included for a very long time and was maybe after the infancy gospel of uh of james the most popular gospel in the middle ages um all of that stuff oh yeah i think you said a lot of things aren't true but you've been wrong about the rest of me so i'm just gonna wish cannot which canonical list has the gospel of peter the uh i i have to look i am sorry well there's not any of them the migratory and fragments the earliest that we have yeah it's not present there it's not present in the athnation canon which canon is the president i again i i don't have in front of me and i apologize but i'm happy you're wrong there is no canon you're like the you're like the most condescending prick are you aware of that well hang on hang on you've you've kind of gone after him pretty hard too well no i've never been a prick to him no no you haven't but you you haven't been a little aggressive you can yeah aggressive is one thing all right but um well yeah there's aggressive in the there's passive we got passive aggressive up here we've got aggressive so why is it why why isn't um why isn't uh the gospel of peter true right it is is a good question to ask because it includes sorry it includes many of the same claims of uh of the the four canonical gospels many of them but uh it is the it is the stone rolling away right while peter is there the stone rolls away the the well it's doesn't say angels but the metaphor is obviously there go in they carry jesus out right he's walking um you know the cross the metaphorical cross comes out behind and and then yahweh calls down from from heaven he calls down and says hey you go talk to everybody that was dead and give him the gospel which is where we get the idea that everybody can be saved even if they have never heard the gospel so that wasn't included all of that could be wrong which by the way i i i think that it is and yet christianity could still be true um because things could have happened that they didn't write down this we're talking about oral traditions here where they're an incredible amount of of inconsistencies from one person to the next um and to answer the question if it would be compelling to me um if we were to find accounts that were written concurrent to the life of jesus that did not copy one another like the three synoptics um that that are not contradictory and that don't have a particular goal in mind i think that that would be very compelling to read it it would that mean that it's true no but it'd be very compelling um and then to research that and i think that that's the intellectual honesty that's necessary while we are researching this because i think that many times we research these things and we have our own opinion on it and whether it's apologetics or counter apologetics we look for it that way and i think the most important thing if that evidence were presented that if we had that that we we should say this is this is compelling at least yeah can i can i jump in on and answer the question because i'll have a very different answer here um i i would say i would agree that everything could be not true and christianity could still be true everything in the gospels could be false i will also say that 100 of everything in the gospels could happen the way it happened and christianity could still be false um again like what we're looking at here is a fantastical account and if the fantastical account happened okay we have evidence of a fantastical account we don't have evidence of a god we don't have evidence that um you know uh jesus was anything other than something that was really really powerful and able to do things that we don't understand so again i a lot of the times um we have sort of relied on this because of this sort of western enlightenment tradition um of you know trying to essentially squeeze religion into science and making it you know making the two of them work together um and i can understand that impulse because of the type of culture we're in and because of where we're coming from but the the fact is these two things are operating on two completely different levels um factuality i i don't really care too much about that i care more about what jesus taught and its effect on his followers and does it actually lead to what he suggests that he leads to now you know we might talk about uh salvation for instance salvation from death um and this is a pretty compelling thing uh somebody comes back from the dead okay but imagine if we had the technology to literally do that if there's a brilliant scientist that figures out a way to create a machine that brings people back from the dead or brings himself back from the dead is that man suddenly god i i don't think he is i think he's just a guy that figured out a way to bend or break the rules of nature so we're left sort of at this impasse and once again then we're talking about religiosity we're talking about um essentially the truth of existence of how we perceive it and i i think the most reasonable way to go about trying to establish what the truth is is not trying to make it fit the narrative of a particular book um but to uh to search for that truth through a i guess almost a rigorous method you could consider it like the scientific method but you run into problems with that because of i think there are some inherent um incorrect assumptions uh baked into current materialism that science relies upon and we could go into that if you wanted to but my point is is that i still don't find these miraculous occurrences particularly compelling and i don't think that they're evidence for a god one way or the other well there's certainly evidence in the sense that they are more probable on the goddesses of christianity than on the annulment of the angthoses somebody right i mean you could yeah so yeah very impressive i'll say that so it's not proof in the rigorous mathematical sense i mean i think we're when we're dealing with such questions we want to look at the evidence um and find out where does the balance of evidence and uh the theological import of the resurrection of jesus as being evidence for his messianic and divine credentials relates to the theo historical backdrop or context of jesus of nazareth so um it's not some uh any old job love uh michelinius experiencing michelinius resurrection in the law of history but rather is jesus of nazareth who um who uh and there there is various events in jesus lake which point to him being a messiah various claims that he makes uh we've got the old testament prophecies which talk about the messiah talk about the resurrection as well and as i 53 for example um and so the resurrection thus is something which uh is highly probable on the hypothesis jesus as the messiah but very highly improbable on the hypothesis that he's not and that's why it's strong evidence right being messiah okay so it let i can see how you would consider that strong evidence i will i might say that you could put that in like if this is a court of law and if you could prove it i might say that's evidence in that direction i wouldn't call it conclusive in any way shape or form but well let me ask you something because you're talking a lot about um you know uh this prophecy or that prophecy and i don't tend to find that that's how people think and function so can i just ask you like like why do you believe in jesus like i i'm not saying that in like a kind i i legitimately want to know like why do you believe in jesus what is it the most important thing you find most compelling about this uh do you mean why do i believe she's as an historical person no no i mean why do you build what why are you a christian why are you following i i i'm a christian because i'm persuaded by the public evidence that christianity is true uh and that's a cumulative argument from numerous points of data of which point convergently cumulatively to the conclusion that christianity is true that goes the other way can you point to like the can you point to the the most significant or one of the most significant reasons uh the evidence for the resurrection i find pretty compelling okay why um because we um because of uh so there's there's um so that there's there's a number of condemning hypothesis which report to explain the relative relevant evidence one is the jesus really rose from the dead uh the resurrection hypothesis one is the holist nation hypothesis um or the that's uh i'll um i'll call it the the holist nation hypothesis but i mean the broad category of the disciples were honestly mistaken that this somehow came to believe jesus rose from the dead even though he didn't have a question i i i i think i see where you're going with this and i just want to rephrase the question really quickly just so what do you find so compelling about his resurrection well let me finish uh because i'm getting there um thirdly and there's the hypothesis that uh that the disciples deliberately sent out to deceive people that jesus rose from the dead we can go look at the conspiracy hypothesis and then finally there's that um so so these so these hypotheses or or primarily the hypothesis that the disciples didn't claim people were from the dead and actually that's always your mythical claim so these hypotheses that we contend are usually exhaustive hypotheses um and i think the best explanation of the relevant data is the jesus rose from the dead for one thing um i think we can establish with high confidence that the disciples were at least sincere in their claim that jesus rose from the dead and one of the evidences for that is the fact that they were willing to die as markers um the mark jim and peter and james the lord's brother was particularly well attested there's uh so then the question is okay so so what you're saying is is that the if i may the um belief of the disciples that led to them becoming martyred for jesus that that's something you find compelling about the resurrection is yes good so we have to explain the sincere belief of the disciples what best explains them coming to that sincere belief um and when we look at the resurrection narratives in the gospels which i think are very firmly rooted in eyewitness testimony uh then uh the resurrection claim is poly modal in character it involves not just it involves multiple sensory modes not just science but group sightings group conversations with jesus his contact with jesus eating breakfast with jesus on the shore to see a galley and so forth and also we're over according to acts one it was extended of course for two days so it wasn't just wondering if it was an episode that's something that's very difficult to be wrong about and so it points away from the honest mistaken hypothesis and since there's good evidence against the conspiracy hypothesis it points to the hypothesis jesus actually was dead okay then it's interesting and compelling thanks for sharing that with me um i there is one thing that i want to point out and that's that um we found you know scientifically that eyewitness testimony tends to be unreliable um i'm not saying that that in fact i do think that clearly if they did honestly choose to die for this and if that's being operated but there there clearly was a very strong reaction that they had with regard to jesus um i i don't know if that necessarily indicates resurrection but i totally get that i'm glad you're doing that compelling so thank you for bringing that up so on that very quickly very important um so you're you're right that under certain conditions eyewitness testimony is unreliable especially on details such as when uh there's a weapon present such as a knife or a gun or when the participants are strangers to one another or when the events happen very quickly over a period of seconds or minutes but by contrast the resurrection claim according to the four gospels call is um it's involved with multiple sensory modes not just uh sites but you know physical contact and eat so forth so forth eating breakfast jesus group conversation and it was extended across 40 days so it wasn't a brief and confusing episode and uh and so it it's um i think that yeah well i get what you say i'm there though i that could have easily been added by a writer later on but yeah but my point is um okay so let me go over to nathan here so uh i guess my question is because you used to be a christian correct he all yeah so what what is it that convinced you to stop like what what was the point what was the straw that broke the camel's back and and you know i mean i'm sure you've got a lot of reasons i've heard a lot of it here but i'm just i'm interested kind of just in you personally i guess right here uh there's no evidence that anything supernatural exists or ever has existed okay that's it wait wait can i just get some clarification there you mean no evidence or do you just mean insufficient evidence no compelling evidence i appreciate you asking me getting a clarification on that no compelling evidence right so what what led you to eventually get to that point where where you said that like you know obviously like you know there was a moment i remember uh when i was for the couple of years that i was an atheist um one of the things that like got me to sort of lose my faith in um in christianity was uh i had done a lot of thinking about um the concept of doubt and eternal hell and i sort of occurred to me like if i'm sitting there as a child's father you know is relating to my child my child says i don't believe in you papa i'm gonna say oh really okay you know is that my hand is that i'm not gonna freak out and hit him and banish him or something and when i that hit me i remember like my brain sort of went like click and i was just like oh oh my and so i spent a number of years before i came to my faith as a buddhist so i guess i'm just wondering like like what was the moment what was that what was that like what's the what what's the need that's driving you here as opposed to you know the the intellect i'm interested more in the emotional than the intellectual if that makes sense um it it's important to me that i that i believe things that are true and i find myself that the religions of the world especially the three abrahamic religions are the most important things in people's lives and in the united states of america which is where i live i think that people um you know overwhelmingly accept the christian stories without knowing anything about them um i mean mclatch he just referenced a bunch of stuff that i completely disagree with and i don't know that he can show any historical attestation that anybody was martyred um as far as the disciples anyway or even sol um yeah sorry bro well no i'm happy to go into that if you want well what do you think we keep telling these stories about martyrs or we're seeing them you know they're kind of cross cultural we see them all over the place we all as humans find them really compelling so for for the martyr of peter i go ahead where's where's the earliest one we have two first century sources on the first century are you sure first century yes oh we have two of them are you sure because i'm reading yeah i'm reading right now um are you sure because even the five earliest apocryphal accounts of the goss of the apostles uh the acts of peter acts of paul acts of thomas acts of andrew and acts of john were composed in the second century and that's actually things were refined but we also have two first century sources do we um who are they yeah two people who actually knew peter personally uh who are they um so one of them is clement of rome yeah clement okay yeah section five of the first first first clement didn't didn't he say that peter was killed on account of jealousy yeah he does okay so that doesn't seem like martyrdom to me um as usually interpreted as martin yeah well he wrote jealousy though yeah he yeah it's not martyrdom it's not martyrdom is when somebody you know puts you to a stake or they burn are they and they burn you or they drown you because they think you're a witch okay that's martyrdom perhaps a more uh explicit sort of energy perhaps a more explicit source than is john 21 because john was uh most scholars date john through right 90s 95 c e um and john 21 mentions jesus predicts the head of time he was dead and it's very unlikely that john would have attributed that saying to jesus as not actually happened in the manner that he said uh and so that itself provides strong support for peter's weight so jesus jesus mentions that somebody's going to be martyred before they're martyred yeah and that's evidence for you yeah so but it's not anything because john's god's john's gospel was very was very probably written after peter's martyred that's widely accepted well it's not even necessarily widely agreed that peter was martyred uh well okay let me read the source so this is what it says it says um it says truly so jesus says truly truly i say to you it's been to peter when you were young used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted but when you're old you will stretch out your hands and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go this is an old show but what kind of death he was to wear by god so you mean he's an old guy and he needs to be carried around because he's shitting yeah that thanks for that image but yeah that that seems like a point a more universal point about the human condition the about how our bodies age and and die and you know i mean once again that was one of the first things that sedartha gutama identified when he first stepped foot outside of his palace you know he saw a sick man an old man and a dead man and he's like oh i didn't realize there were these three things and all of us kind of go through a similar process to that as we age and grow like my son is you know he's nearly two and he didn't know anything about death he doesn't know anything about old age he doesn't know about sickness and he knows old age and that he's encountered it with his um elderly relatives but even then it's it's not there so i feel like a lot of the time these religions are tapping into universal things about the human condition and um essentially giving fantastical life to them uh to just describing them in such a way where it is true to the emotions of the person who has encountered them um you know figuratively true i suppose as opposed to literally um i agree with that i've written before before we get too far into the archetypal beliefs let's let me just say this before we go forward is that we've already been going over an hour so uh we want to take questions yeah yeah i want to i want to try and jump into q and a but what i want to do is i want to give you guys a few minutes to just maybe two to three minutes to wrap up and then we'll jump into q and a since uh jonathan's here by himself will let him go last for instance why don't we start with you and uh just give us like maybe two minutes or something like that one to two minutes and just say what your final thoughts are and then we'll jump into q and a tag your questions at converse conceder and i'll ask him i mean one of the things that i um when i said i wanted to come in here and try to get my head wrapped around whether christianity was true or not through this process here um one of the things that i have come to realize about religion as i have uh grown older um is i've begun to very much embrace um i'm not a marxist but marx's concept of man does not man makes religion religion does not make man um oftentimes i find that people's spirituality is an outgrowth of who they are and what they need at a specific time um and that the oftentimes i will see a projection i don't think there's a single human being on the planet that follows their scripture 100 percent i think they think they do but ultimately we all pick and choose and sort of decide so if you want me to answer the question of is christianity true i would really have to ask which christianity um both which christianity in the sense of the various denominations but also which christianity uh within somebody within each person's heart um i would also say that um one of the things and i've been a little more convinced of this is i have been lately thinking of uh jesus as a possible bodhisattva uh throughout the and you know that people can look that up if they want to understand what that term is and i think in a lot of ways um what he experienced sounds a lot like an enlightening experience and it would make a lot of sense as a bodhisattva coming from a non buddhist culture um and there if anybody does want to look into i can find the exact quote in the lotus sutra um but there are specific things that uh shakumuni says directly related to that the final thing that i want to end on here is um i wanted uh there is a in the janist faith uh there's a story i don't know if you guys have all heard about but it's five blind men in in a room trying to describe an elephant and one man finds the the uh the trunk and says oh it's it's a giant snake and the other person finds the feet and says oh you know it's a huge um beast and another person finds the tail and says no it's it's a tiny you know uh fly um i think in a lot of ways the act of religiosity and the act of organized religion is a collective effort to discover the truth through many minds and the thing about minds and individual consciousnesses is these things can only hold quite so much so uh those are my thoughts and then i had a final thing that i had a question that i wanted to ask for um john was it john john yeah so john nitrin daishonin the monk that um originated uh my sect of uh nitrin buddhism um they attempted to kill him twice and um on the second time that the japanese emperor attempted to have him assassinated um because they didn't like what he was saying um they he approached a buddhist shrine and um said to the um deity at that shrine you you know they're about to kill me i am the number one promoter of the lotus sutri you better do something and as they sat him down to execute him a comet streaked across the sky and the uh would be assassins and executioners got so frightened they tossed down their weapons and left uh sure that uh what they were trying to kill was a buddha now you've previously used supernatural occurrences um and um the the willingness uh to undergo martyrdom as a means to indicate divinity so my question is is that would you consider that proof of nitrin daishonin's divinity and if not why is that different so i'm not familiar enough with the history on that to comment intelligently what i'll say though is that uh the willingness to suffer and die as a martyr is is strong evidence that would argue for sincerity doesn't necessarily to hear your beliefs are true but it does suggest that you're sincere in your beliefs um and so that's all i i use that for um on the supernatural occurrences thing you need to provide evidence for their the the veracity of those accounts okay so but oh okay i'll just leave it at that okay thanks so much for that brinton we'll move over to uh nathan for his urnithennial for his uh he used to give us one to two minutes closing sure uh i'd like to say first jonathan i was a little heated earlier i said you're a condescending prick i don't think you're the condescending prick um because i am and you're not me all right i uh began this today by giving you know really 10 separate pieces of uh of of you know opposing evidence to christianity and i understand that we didn't get to all of them mostly uh you know because it wasn't we weren't just speaking about christianity uh i still and i think that most uh most critical scholars and historians would say that the messiah the jewish messiah was not expected to be god or a deity at all and so whenever jesus was referred to as messiah didn't mean anything and i believe that that can be shown to the case and i and i uh i was able to even show that in our last debate as well um we agree that the that the gospels uh are the only things to talk about the life of jesus and that they are we agree that they're written anonymously by non uh people who did not see the events happen decades after the events uh which are and we don't have the original manuscripts and they are copies of copies in an oral tradition in which things would been changed and we know that because we have different sources who say different things um we also know that uh that the only place and jonathan even you know alluded to this even it was even able to show this the only place where jesus explicitly says i'm god is in the gospel of john um and that's very important i think because it moves contradictory to the gospel of mark where he is specifically a man and an apocalyptic preacher and the gospel of john is the exact opposite of that he's no longer an apocalypticist and that we can even see that in the contradictory accounts of what happens with john the baptist in the beginning of that book um and we have no evidence that the disciples were martyred literally no evidence and in fact i even show we were ably able to show that uh because when he when jonathan brought up clement uh it was actually about jealousy and we brought up the things about peter it's obviously shown that peter was simply an old man we have no evidence of any all we have is what's known as church tradition and church tradition is nothing more than somebody passing down stories it does not mean the stories are true at the beginning of our debate jonathan said that uh that the christians were persecuted by the roman empire until 313 that simply is not historically factual there was a time for three or four years and that's true by ignatius that they absolutely were but by the treaty of malan or millon by uh in uh in 313 it wasn't made legal because christianity was actually already legal it was simply made as the foundational religion of rome uh the roman empire and as much as jonathan's gonna say historical record shows that to be true so when we look at this um jonathan tried to lay out something with the bayesian bayesian theorem but never actually presented any historical evidence for any of the claims that he made i'm i'm appreciative of brenton and uh and i think that the that the the idea that when he uh he said buddhism and christianity are are compatible with one another if they you know the the things that they uh are purported to bring forward and the things that they say are positive and that they lead somebody to a better source of enlightenment and i would even go to far to say without hurting somebody else please stop it um bad karma and yeah uh and but but as far as as far as i can tell and again we didn't get into a lot of stuff tonight as far as i can tell there's there has no been no additional compelling evidence that any of these things the supernatural things that purported to have claimed uh ever happened and i would even say that it's likely they didn't so thanks again thanks so much for that nathaniel all right we'll move on to jonathan for his uh his closing just give us uh one or two minutes of your closing thoughts all right well thank you um there's quite a lot that i would like to address but i don't have time to it just address a few of the key points that were raised there um he mentioned that uh and none of the synoptic gospels jesus claims to be god um i don't think we should dismiss jon because i think jonathan is an extraordinarily reliable source um but i think that he's mistaken that the synoptic gospels do not present the deity of price or don't attribute set statements to that effect to jesus um i gave one example already from matthew 11 let me give you another example this is from matthew 21 when uh jesus is um triumphantly entering Jerusalem and it says that um when the verse 15 when the chief priest inscribed saw the wonderful things that he did and the torsion praying at the temple hosanna to the son of david they were indignant and they said him do you hear what these are saying and jesus said to them yes have you never read out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you've heard praise now where's he quoting from he's quoting from the book of psalms chapter eight um where we read and i quote uh we read oh lord our lord have you just named on the earth you have sat in worry about the heavens out of the mouth and the babies if this you've established strength because of your foes to tilt the enemy and the avenger but in matthew 21 the praise is being directed to jesus and you know jesus quotes this uh this song from some chapter from some eight um and so i think there's another education of christ deity from jesus words and synoptic gospels um and he uh ethan you also mentioned that i didn't provide it there's no historical evidence for the claims that i made in the opening statement well that's just simply false um the jesus death at paso for example is widely accepted by historians uh in fact it's a testiginal for gospels and the uh the uh passion narratives in the four gospels are independent of one another um in as for jesus enters the tourism five days before passover that's supported by an underlying coincidence if you look at john chapter 12 it mentions the six years before passover jesus death working to bethany he has dinner there with lazuaries samiri and martha and the verse 12 says the next day that would be five days before passover at large credit was comes he's heard that you was coming to Jerusalem and so forth now if you go over to mark mark chapter 11 we can actually count each of these uh these days uh these six days even though mark does not give us that some timestamps if you go to mark chapter 11 mark actually telescopes the narrative verse one when the jr is Jerusalem to bethany and all of jesus the two of his disciples and said them going to build in front of you initially try to go find a cool title which is known as the percentile tie and bring it um so if we assume those things while even the job is correct jesus enters Jerusalem five days before passover um when we get to verse 11 it says he entered Jerusalem went into the temple when he went to write everything as it was already 12 but john is correct i would make it the evening of five days before passover verse 12 on the following day when the king from ethos hungry that would be the morning of four days before passover verse 19 one evening can do without this city that would make it the evening of a four days before passover verse 20 as the past by in the morning filled victory but then the way to assure us that would be the morning three days before passover chapter 13 is all about discourse which uses talk to disciples in the middle of all which is which is midway between Jerusalem where he's been all day and bethany was accommodation is for the night so we can assume i think fairly that this is the evening of three days before passover chapter 14 verse one it was now two days before the passover synchronizes exactly as you would expect given the given the veracity of the chronology according to john chapter 12 and so i'll leave it at that all right thanks so much for that johnathan now before we jump into q and a i want to exercise moderator privilege and ask a couple questions myself just very quickly like maybe a lightning round then we'll go to the question so for brinton i was just wondering and this might help out some people in the audience as well so i can recall listening to rabbi zachariah's talk he says that he he spoke with the first female buddha smoke i believe it is that and he asked aren't you you know should you cut off your desires is that one of your principles and she said yes that is one of the principles that we should try and cut off our desires and he asked but don't you desire to see your children and he said her response was that's the hardest part between my life and my religion so my question is um is your branch of buddhism uh that's saying in that same way uh is that one of your same principle do you struggle with that or do you have like another understanding no i i have a completely different understanding it sounds like a monkey you have to be very careful with monks they sometimes take things too far um they can be very authoritarian and she may have also been a theravada buddha there's two different sects thinking of them like i i guess kind of like jews and christians almost or maybe catholics and protestants um so she's definitely not from my sect which is heavily focused on like buddhism for everyday life for everyday people we love our children um so um when he talks about cutting off desires this is actually part buddhism again is a religious practice and it is very important you you have to do it and so when someone who's new who comes into a monastery or to buddhist teachings the first thing they'll do is they come up to their teacher and the teacher says okay you know that they i've got all those problems my mind's disordered and the teacher says okay well you suffer because you desire so try to stop desiring and the student goes okay okay and goes off and then try to stop desiring try to stop desiring wait a minute i'm desiring to stop desiring what the hell then he goes back to the teacher and he says i i tried to stop desiring but i i realized that i desire to stop desiring so what do i do and the teacher goes okay you're good for finding that um try not to desire but not too much just to try to stop desiring as much as can reasonably be expected and this is like the first step on a very very long path um again the practice of buddhism is to bring about a conscious awakening within the person and as a result both the buddha himself and especially buddhist teachers and gurus they will troll the crap out of you nice so yeah but it's for your own good well thanks so much for that Nathaniel my question for you is um you know i think you kind of hinted to this earlier on and i hear this from from a lot of people is um uh john and Matthew both uh scholars say that they seem embellished or at least they seem to have more of a supernatural-ish worldview than Mark and Luke but my question for you is well couldn't that just be because Mark and Luke are Gentiles and Matthew and John are Jews so obviously they're gonna have a more Jewish understanding of some of these things uh the as far as we can tell the Gospels were written by Greek-speaking Christians we don't know if they're Gentiles or not they would have been as possible they could have been Jews living in Rome um but uh they with Mark and Luke we we do know right no we don't actually know we don't know who wrote Mark and Luke we have we have no idea they're anonymous in fact Luke even the author of the book of Luke even says himself that i got this from somebody else who got it from somebody else and i don't even know my own name apparently um i can confirm that also and i this one of the few things i remember from my religious teachings that the four authors are unknown yeah i understand that they're they're attributed uh by early church fathers right but yeah but yeah i appreciate that and so you don't think that they uh that would be one of the reasonings then no i i think what we're talking about are again writings that happened uh um you know 40 to 65 years after this fosed events and you have legendary legendary embellishment that happens in there and now mind you when we talk about in the book of Matthew you know the the the the dead rising a walk around Jerusalem and i i would even attest that's likely metaphorical and talking about and within it with a something that alludes to something that Peter in the gospel of Peter alludes to um but the the the other these are other pieces Luke is supernatural in its own way speaking about you know the birth of Jesus in its own right is incredibly supernatural and it simply is uh which supernatural claim can we actually look at to see if it's if we can provide independent attestation of it um regardless of now the book of john is its own it's my favorite that it made it in the bible um but it's its own um you know own level of legendary and so we look at the gospel of Luke i like to i know i'd like to hear that people um you know like they were writing to the Jews they're writing to the Gentiles i don't i don't think that's true um i i think that they were because again Matthew is 95 of Mark right and they all all the writer of Matthew did was correct some geographical type errors and then add on to stuff that later made it into the book of Mark and specifically the resurrection narrative so i i don't know yeah thanks so much for that i'm going to go ahead and pull up the uh the super chats and the questions from the audience real quick jonathan if there's anything in there that you feel compelled to answer want to do that or make a comment on go ahead uh real quickly um in terms of geographical blunders and Mark what examples do you have in mind he puts a town on the wrong side of the lake uh can you show me i mean i i can find it yeah hold on a second yeah um while they're doing that by the way there was a quick thing i wanted to read at some point i don't know if we have time to do it it's a quote from the load structure that i mentioned earlier if we don't have time it's cool uh to can post it or something later well we we do have quite a bit of um let's go through the questions i i i can i can't stay for super much longer so okay so let's go ahead yeah so let's just try and go ahead and get through some of these um uh brian stevens asked it's a patreon comment thank you so much brian stevens for being one of our patrons you can see at the bottom of the screen um i and the other people that are patrons uh thanks so much for this comment brian says richard carrey uses base theorem showed you this didn't exist people abuse valid mathematics all the time to punish to push the views they want what do you have to say about that john um yeah and you can people have also used uh deductive syllogisms to arrive at false conclusions so garbage in garbage out we the base theorem is a mathematical tool for modeling uh our arguments if you it is very much is very much contingent on what values you brought into the equations all right thanks so much for that we'll try and go quickly through these so that we can uh get get the majority of mem before jonathan goes um let's see next is uh oh uh we got a super chat two dollars super chat from the former lead singer of nickleback steven steen thanks so much for your super chat says gavin won tonight he didn't even need to come thanks so much for that um next we have a question from crazy monk 27 can you ask him why the proof of god why is the proof of god sorry can you ask him why the the is proof of god and not proof of good editing since the new testament was all word of mouth for over 100 years at the least until it was written uh well that's not true um i mean the all the gospels are in the first century so it's and Jesus died around 30 um 80 i would personally say that i would i mean there's a lot of debate about the exact dating of the gospel authorship um authorship i would personally date the gospel of mark to the 50s ad and i would probably date jon pre 70 although that's a minority view i would probably date luke pre 60 um so um and i think that the gospels are very close up to the backs and that they're written by people who either were apostles themselves who were closely acquainted with the apostles all right thanks so much for that uh for nathan steven steen another two dollar super chat thanks so much steven steen for your two dollar super chat nathan you knew he was going to bring up the oscars same as last time says bo pelani pelani polini polini is the best huskers coach of all time which i'm sure you have to disagree with that right um you know what i feel like there uh is empirical evidence that that's likely true at least for anybody that's been alive since 2000 sure all right uh twitch loken 16 thanks so much for your two don't or sorry your ten dollar super chat with no question just support in the channel thanks so much to twitch loken 16 cc's twitch loken everywhere so thanks for that the yato god says converse for brenton what are your views on hinduism as a buddhist i know that you did bring up earlier brenton the vedas and you punish odds so what do you get to say about that i mean i there's a lot to like in hinduism and there's a lot to that i disagree with and understand why buddhism grew out of it um a lot of hinduism is justifying the hindu caste system which is monstrous uh and a clearly doesn't make sense even from the hindu world view and um also i consider it to be a slander of the lotus sutra which is about like one of the worst things you can possibly do in my sect of buddhism so what i would say is i think there's a lot of wisdom to be found in the vedas and there's a lot of important context but in the way that that religion has become politicized um it's it's very interesting but also you really got to be careful with it if that makes sense all right thanks so much for that uh that does make sense so next we have a two dollar super chat from none other than divine disbelief says the atheist one best story came from buddhism that's what i'm good at doing thank you thanks so much for that i feel like that that's a good opinion to take i appreciate it awesome so uh we have another two dollar super chat from steven steen that makes three total scott frost loves jesus uh that's a true statement like that's i yeah he's absolutely a christian so there you go and that means christianity is true by the way because scott frost apparently is like a god in de braska so there you go sure thanks so much for that uh looks like no it looks like that's just a a troll comment toward brinton i'm not going to read that one out thank you brian steven says question is it possible that the writers of a gospel had access to or read the other gospels when they wrote their gospels if so could this have aided in uh desing i'm sorry designing a coincidence i think he's talking about your uh the the uh criteria the criteria that you used earlier of this are not dissimilarity but um uh which which was i think this is right so he's absolutely right i mean it's not just possible but it's it demonstrated that the at least this is not the gospels matthew mark and luke and utilized one another the mainstream view is that mark was written first and matthew was written second and used mark and then subsequent to that and then drew upon mark and possibly matthew depending on which you take and and uh um but i i don't think that undermines at all the argument from undesignalistances because because when we when we look at undesignalistances what we see is relevant independence namely that the gospel authors have their own independent access to the relevant events and details concerning these events for example um in um john chapter six and verse five you have this set of five thousand miracle and verse five says let's go besides that and seeing that mark is going to ward him she is sent to billboard which five persons people need which means you have a reservation in mind the audience why does she's turn the field here in seclusion good john 12 and we learned that he'll shoot a certain tank of the cider mentioned is it only included for context blue chapter nine has the parallel of the feeding of the five thousand miracle uh it doesn't mean to build in that context at all but it does mention that Jesus that the event of Christmas cider so the pieces fit together in a way you would expect on hypothesis of historicism um and uh that uh that doesn't seem to me to be at all and undercut by john utilising look if that is the case um because you would expect him to then mention uh the reason why Jesus starts to build just six five namely the build strong cider but that's not mentioned there in that context it doesn't even mention that the cider is a setting of the miracle story you have to do the detective work and so it's the casualness of the illusions and their subtle interconnectedness which i think is the mark of truth in these cases all right can i can i ask a quick it's it's just a quick question all right jesus fed the five thousand a couple different times how come none of the five thousand talked about it ever john well that's just real just real quick well that's an argument from silence number one secondly uh while recently i have to think that any of them wrote anything that would have survived all right thanks so much for that we have a question from philip not a response serving jack thanks so much for your five dollar super chat question for jonathan if you do not believe in the tenants i'm sorry yeah if you do not believe in the tenants of christianity but still follow the moral teachings of jesus will you still be saying no thanks so much for that answer that's a oh nope that's just a trollish statement towards nathaniel we'll skip that one no come on i like come on yeah what he got what he got yeah oh yeah gasser says nathaniel if you can't own a christian if you can't own a christian without getting but hurt that a you problem okay i think sand if you can't get on by christian without getting but hurt that's a you problem hey look look like the only owning that happens here is in the books of exodus and leviticus all right it's five dollar super chat from philip serving jack thanks so much i hope i'm not butchering that name there's some little things above the letters there so i'm sure there's probably some pronunciation there that i'm missing but question for jonathan can you give an estimate for the probability that christianity is true if it is less than 100 percent why can't god 100 prove himself yeah answer that i don't i don't so much like to put a an exact value on it because i don't think humans are like that i don't think that we're super computers they're just crunching numbers i think we can try to model our arguments using base theorem and come up with a kind of a level of confidence that we are justified in proportion to the amount of available evidence i would say that i'm highly highly confident why to be confident beyond reasonable doubt that christianity is true i wouldn't say that i'm confident beyond all that i would i wouldn't say that certain christianity is true but i'd say that i'm certain to the to the same level that would be necessary to establish the court of law all right thanks so much for that uh now we got a serious question this is super chat from steven steen two dollars says nathanu is a former flat earther interested i i'm wearing a nasa shirt i don't know how that it also it also says i need techniques so um i don't know that that's true uh now scott frost is still a christian though so we'll go with the other ones all right so tioga please correct me if i'm saying that wrong says brenton should people with psychosis or delusion or delusion indulge in metaphysical beliefs um yes uh so okay so first off psychosis and delusions um a lot of this is like different people's brains being pathologized by society because really oftentimes uh if you look back in the history of mankind people with quote unquote mental illnesses people suffering from schizophrenia or a number of other conditions um they were held up as like holy people they had insights that the rest of us did not have because their brains work differently and we can even see it today in our culture um because people who oftentimes have dyslexia wind up being some of the most successful entrepreneurs because their brains work differently um so i think that um you know metaphysical ideas um you you know you should be careful with your thoughts you should be mindful of your thoughts you know just like any other mind altering substance uh but you know i i really think that the idea that a person with mental illnesses cannot be spiritual is like these were some of the most spiritual people in the entire world uh for for centuries it's really more the society that grew up around us that says okay you've got to be up at this time work at this time you've got to do this you've got to deal with this it's so highly regimented that things that maybe would not cause as many problems as they do cause many more today because uh you know the the savage world we are forced to all live in all right thanks so much for that jonathan i know we were running a long time so we'll get to the last few here um scott lot thank you so much for your five dollar superchats ask jonathan if we discovered a religion with more empirical evidence than christianity would you believe that one instead um you would need to show me why i am not justified with christianity i mean the evidence for that would need to be overturned or explained in a better way but if the evidence supported another religion instead of christianity then yes i would i would be a follower of that religion instead absolutely i i of course you may believe some part of the evidence and i follow the evidence wherever at least i i have i have a i have a question with that um because people ask me if there was evidence that a god exists would i say that a god exists and i would the answer that is yes that does not mean that i would follow or worship that god though so i don't think that the i don't think the question necessarily was would you follow the religion but rather say that it's true well it depends on the particulars right so i would say it's true absolutely okay i was just wondering because you said you'd you know you'd worship when i'm like all right just wondering like if it ends up being you know like okay you make it fair i had a i had a quick question for jonathan by the way um based on an earlier question when you said um that uh somebody that follows the teachings of christ uh but does not believe in uh you know the divinity of jesus um would they be saved you said no i want to ask you something really quickly because so you've got a loving and just god but also he punishes people infinitely for finite crimes how can you square that circle um i don't claim to know um i i don't um so there's different models uh for instance some people have suggested that people continue to sin in hell and that's why the punishment is eternal other people have suggested that the hell is not in fact eternal the conditionalists most famously john stott um so there's a number of different perspectives on that i tend to be big enough to take on that question okay fair enough for that good answer we've got a two dollar super chat from rapture countdown says atheists that live in a universe i want evidence i think they're supposed to say atheists i think they're supposed to say atheists live in universe i want evidence that the evidence that atheists live in this universe no no i think they're saying that man you guys always just your main claim is just i want evidence all the time so you live in a universe i want evidence i think that's what he's trying to say but i could be wrong so let's move on to center favorite syrabia thanks so much for your two dollar super chat great and generous guest as usual says two guests what would prove each one false not sure about that one either sygephradia so sygephredo sorry um are they asking like what would what would are they asking each of us what would prove like christianity false if if we have it is that the question or it says the number two and then guest as in you're my guest what would prove each one false i'm not sure about that so maybe we'll skip that and you can try and clarify why we asked these last couple questions iron charity or says ask jonathan how long did jesus spend in the tomb does it depend which gospel you read or did jesus do as jonah did like he claimed no it doesn't depend which gospel you read because all four gospels are consistent the jesus rose again on sunday for living his dad so if you spent uh between the friday and the sunday the ten all right well jon doesn't agree with you show me the the book of jon he he is crucified before the feast of the unleavened bread no i just agree with that for this one it says it very specifically no it doesn't it gets it dies it doesn't it says before the feast of the unleavened bread so since that is kind of a long winded thing to get into we have such a short time yeah yeah um i i have heard my relation on this and it and it does kind of take a minute to draw out so maybe we'll we'll skip over that and then maybe one day we'll have net net daniel and jonathan one on one but so um let's skip on we have buck melanoma says the gospels taste like shanny's squirt thoughts i'm not sure exactly what that means but i'm not gonna have the most articulate question askers here i'm not gonna deal with that all right buck melanoma once again has another two dollar super chat thank you so much buck melanoma for your super chat see you a lot as well in comments says squirts thoughts all right so we'll move on um because i don't think you guys have any thoughts about that but susan says tell net daniel susan terpene thank you so much for your two dollar super chat says tell net daniel i'm gonna rub his shiny bald head i've been looking at that all night which uh which one was that is the pg channel sure all right super's horror energy thank you so much sarah for your five dollar super chat sarah asks contemporary historians are silent because the events never happened even alexander the great had contemporary attestation jonathan what about that zinger well we have contemporary attestation of jesus in the sense that we have attestation for people who live contemporaneously with jesus he thought he wrote after his death and uh and by the way with alexander the great the earliest extent i want to use a pen or iran kujak wrote some 300 years after alexander's death um but the the gospels are written by people who are either eyewitnesses or people who are mostly associated with eyewitnesses uh so who are who have a trap record of being stupid reliable so you can't show any of that to be true well i've written and spoken extensively on it so yeah it doesn't mean you're having a yeah all right look like our last question here for the night and we can get on with our lives here geez modern day debate it's a bad yeah um stupid horror energy thank you so much for your other five dollar super chat she calls herself that uh sarah asked mclatchy did you abandon your argument with regard to the gulo gene the gillo's energy which argument is a technical so the um gillo's gene is an argument for human shim shared ancestry which i accept so um yeah so i i'm a proponent of intelligent design but i accept common ancestry all right thanks so much for that and i want to end by thanking each of our guests tonight john the mclatchy go check out the youtube channel check out some of his work you just accomplished your phd in biology is that correct that's right all right awesome man congratulations on that i i certainly uh want to give you props on that because i envy you i also want to thank nathaniel nathaniel you can obviously tell as uh is very well read and i want to appreciate you for being here uh as well in representing the the atheist position brinton as well on the buddhist position as last time when we had you on i think a lot of people wanted to see you back so it's definitely a good thing to have you back on here and representing the buddhist position thanks everybody else who was in the comment section yeah we had like 300 something people watch when we have like 50 likes so how about hitting the light button that way it lets james know we want to see this again so yeah and how about some of you guys if you can run over to the snow white zombie kickstarter we are $50 away from breaking $7500 i really want to see that happen so if you yeah if you can do that that'd be great yeah so we'll take the kickstarter i'll get james to throw that into the description that way you can support um brendon's work there and also nathan uh both of the all their information will be in the description if not tonight by tomorrow so thanks for everybody that's in the chat thanks for all the super chats thanks for all of the patrons like brian stevens and nathan hobson and others uh and thanks again for being here and as usual keep sifting the reasonable from the unreason