 Hey everybody, today we are debating whether or not the Romans should have disproven the resurrection and we are starting right now. Big debate as tonight we have two special guests and you could say that we are in the middle of their journey as we'll describe in just a bit but want to let you know if it's your first time here consider hitting that subscribe button as we are very excited to have you here and for many more debates to come we want to let you know we're a nonpartisan channel. No matter what walk of life you come from we really do hope you feel welcome and we as a channel being nonpartisan never make any sort of statements it's really up to the debaters and then it's up for you as the audience to explain who you found most persuasive. And with that we are going to get started. This is going to be a lot of fun folks and the reason is this is a really special debate this is something we've never gotten to do before but with this debate came an opportunity where basically Dr. Richard Carrier and Jonathan were already doing their debate and this was in the written form which I've linked in the description and I'm going to give Dr. Carrier a chance to explain that and about that in just a bit but it's basically you could say we're kind of in the sequel and so if you want to get to enjoy the prequel and get to kind of delve deeper into these issues which I highly suggest you're able to do that by clicking on that link in the description which is just under the speakers links and so if this is your first time hearing the speakers well great news I put their links as well in the description box so that way you can hear plenty more from them and with that want to let you know that today's format given that this is kind of the sequel in a way will be different and kind of a new variety I like the kind of spicing it up is what we'll have is basically introductions in just a moment where I will ask the speakers if they'd be willing to share with us we'd love to get to hear what they've been doing at their blog or website or YouTube channel and then we'll give after those introductions a chance where Dr. Richard Carrier will basically explain the you could say the prequel story behind this debate and then we will do their closing statements so that'll be five minutes at the very start and like I said this is the sequel and so following those five minute closings we'll have 50 minutes of open dialogue which I think people really love the open dialogue and then question and answer which will also be 50 minutes so if you have a question feel free to fire it into the old live chat if you tag me with at modern-day debate makes it easier for me to get every single question in that Q&A list super chat is also an option in which case you could make a comment toward one or both of the speakers of course they would get a chance to respond to that comment and we ask that you be your regular friendly selves for whether it be a question or comment and with that want to kick it over we will start going from left to right with Dr. Richard Carrier it's a pleasure to have you on Dr. Richard Carrier I have like I told him just before we went live I said I've been listening to Dr. Carrier's debates for a good number of years and so we are very excited to have you Dr. Carrier if you'd like to share what you've been up to at your website we are all years. Yeah so yeah my web which is Richard Carrier.info you can find out all things about me my curriculum v time my biography and but also I write articles in both philosophy and ancient history religion and other topics ancient science included various other odd things and you can get all my books I have multiple books you can check those out there also at my site and I'm also teaching courses every month I'm doing an online course on various subjects in philosophy and history and I'm offering multiple courses every month so I just put up I think blog posts for the one I just added for the roster in July which is ancient atheism so if you want to like study who were ancient atheists what kind of arguments did they use how did people think about atheism in the ancient world ancient Greek Greek and Roman world join that course and come in and learn stuff about that but I also teach science and philosophy of free will and counter apologetics and debate and numerous other topics so people who are interested in taking a course from me PhD in ancient history intellectual history who's published on a lot of these subjects welcome to come join in so that those are the things that I'm basically doing on that blog articles books and classes absolutely well that's excellent and like I had said folks both of the speakers are linked in the description where you can hear or read plenty more and with that we'll kick it over to Jonathan thrilled to have you back Jonathan glad to see you and what have you been up to um well thanks for having me back and that's a pleasure actually being to sit down with Dr. Carrier this evening as for myself you know over the last three three and a half years I kind of form my own apologetic channel actually putting apologetics to 2d and 3d animations depending the reliability of the New Testament and engaging on historical topics from the Anglican perspective you bet with that we are very excited thanks for sharing that Jonathan we will go into this portion where Dr. Richard Carrier will give sign up kind of some of the background in terms of how this is the sequel that we're getting to kind of continue this journey on with them and so thanks Dr. Carrier if you want to fill in the crowd just catching them up yeah um well Jonathan and I have done this before well we didn't do the video part but Jonathan organizes these debates comes up these interesting concepts that are side ideas they're like important but they're issues that usually don't get debated directly so like previously we debated specifically on the long ending of Mark the authenticity of that and we did a long written debate exchange of entries on that and then he had the idea of doing this specific debate which is to debate whether the Roman Empire the Romans Pontius Pilate etc should have and would have investigated the truth of the resurrection and should have and would have refuted it unless it had been true and that's the position that Jonathan takes and then as an ancient historian and a unbeliever I'm taking the contrary to that and so we did just basically two two posts each on this like he did an opening statement on my blog I did a written response he did a response to that and then I did a final response to that so it's just four articles of roughly 2,000 words each and then we decided we would wrap it up with Jonathan's idea to do it in live format like this so we can get to Q&A and just talk it out and so on and so I think it's a neat idea and so I'm like kind of looking forward to how it works out absolutely well we are honored to be a part of it and so with that we will go into these closing statements as I had mentioned this will be five minutes from each speaker and I'm trying to remember who will go first if you guys can help me out with that so sorry about that it makes sense for Jonathan to go first okay well thank you Dr. Carrion so why weren't the rulers of the Roman Empire able to falsify the resurrection of Jesus with Caesar on the throne Rome ruled the modern world and stationed a representative of its power in the capital of every province as a reminder of the empire's authority it was the duty of these ruling officials to administer Roman law and execute the will of Caesar Jesus stood before a court of this governing strength charged with high treason because he had claimed to be a king the arrest of Jesus by order from the lieutenant of Caesar instigated by the suggestions of the president and members of the Jewish Sanhedrin had much more magnitude than just a simple common offense charge it's important to understand the context of Jesus's public perception he was characterized as a teacher and was a highly influential leader of multitudes in Galilee as well as citizens in other districts Jesus ambassedly brought conflict to the political and religious landscape throughout the area he appeared in the capital city of Judea and hurled denunciations against the constituted authorities of the whole Jewish polity Jesus claimed to be the only proper authority over the conduct of human relations in every sphere of life an authority greater of that than a political leader he chose a band of men and train them under these ideas while envisioning a new kingdom for his followers all this had gone on for three years in the face of an opposition that warned admonish rebuked and threatened him from the highest sources of his government Eusebius histories reports that in the aftermath of Jesus's death the account of Jesus's resurrection was becoming famous throughout the empire and was the subject of general discussion all over Palestine this is consistent with Tacitus's writings of Christianity which he associated with the destructive superstition that had originated and spread throughout Judea and had fallen on Rome this undyingly places the account of Jesus's resurrection on the empire's radar the circumstances of Jesus's life death and resurrection were too well known and controversial to be ignored by the government whether a cleastical or political this explains why those seated at the court of the emperor like Vestas, Felix, a gripper and others opened up an investigation following the same procedural precedent modeled from Rome's investigation of the Bacchus Colons in its interrogation of Paul it's of great interest here to note that after the final overthrow of Jerusalem when the ruins were held by a garrison of Roman soldiers this patient commanded the strict search to be made of all who claimed to set from the house of David in an effort to cut off all hopes of restoring the royal house of the Messiah this shows what the great Roman emperor Vespasian thought of a Jewish king and the possibility of a hope of one in the Jewish mind 40 years after the rule of Pilate and Tiberias Emperor Maximum II went on to publish forged memoranda Pilate and Jesus in 311 AD throughout the empire this action is a manifestation of that same goal to achieve a similar end for Christianity which demonstrates the ramifications of Jesus's resurrection and the impact it had on Roman society yet no credible counter narrative to Jesus and the resurrection despite the empire's able rulers, conversant historians, and executive control of the surrounding area the empire was surely familiar with the works of Ferotis and Plutarch which establishes knowledge in the ancient world of how similar supernatural claims like that of Aristides and Romulus could be easily explained away in a naturalistic way. If the resurrection were only a hoax it seems very strange that there is not a single credible record or tone from the ancient world providing a naturalistic explanation for the expense events that transpired in Judea. The probable reason why the results of the investigation were not recorded unless Justin and Tutuion's report is correct is because the outcome would not be pleasing to the emperor which would not be favorable to the well-being of his subordinates. With that I turn over the time to Dr. Carrier. You bet thank you Jonathan all set for you Dr. Carrier. Yeah um well I think it's this argument and for people who want to go into further detail both the Jonathan and I have written up a lot more about this so like we're going to get we're going to summarize it here but there's a lot of like scholarly citations and details and other things in our write-up so people who want to really dive into this can go there um for myself this I'll just quickly summarize what my response was which um was essentially that the Romans actually didn't care about beliefs the first thing that we need to make a distinction of is this idea of policing beliefs was a later Christian idea once once Christianity took over the empire they're the ones who connected belief with behavior and tried to control behavior by controlling belief the Romans never made that connection they they didn't care what you believed they were at this point in history in the Roman empire they were highly tolerant of all beliefs they didn't really care what you believed as long as you behaved correctly so they were more interested in behavior and that mostly meant just obeying the law and paying homage to his to Caesar to the proper authorities and um so consequently the going around claiming that Jesus was wrecked from the dead they didn't care about that uh and we see that in fact Sheffield's own bible confirms this the book of acts shows no one ever actually investigated this claim uh least of all pilot like he's a no show in the entire book of acts um numerous court hearings are depicted in the book of acts however and both Jewish and Roman and always they these hearings the way they're depicted they reveal that the only claims being made were about interpretations of scripture and reports of visions and that's it those are the only claims and all these hearings rule that well there's nothing we can do about that like the Romans said we're not interested in this that's a religious squabble between you guys I don't see any legal issue here for us to deal with and the Jewish court kind of had the similar idea the Sanhedrin said well I don't know maybe an angel or a spirit spoke to this guy we really can't find anything wrong with that and so there's no further investigation done the book of acts consistently shows this they just weren't interested in this coming uh they they were more interested in behavior than anything else and that's what they were trying to control they didn't connect the two uh for that um we've got multiple examples of that by the way so uh already you know like I think that the argument's kind of dead in the water from that point on but even later examples confirm this uh Jonathan mentioned um Domitian for example Domitian does not investigate the resurrection claim he's worried that maybe somebody's claiming to be a king of the Jews finds out that they're not they're just a bunch of rabble with weird ideas and he just dismisses them he's he doesn't even do anything about it uh so he doesn't he doesn't investigate he doesn't even ask about the resurrection claim he's not interested in it uh when we get to plenty the younger he'd never even heard of it uh finally he interrogated uh two deaconesses to try and figure out what it was they believe and as soon as he heard the silly things they were saying he stopped this investigation immediately said this is just a ridiculous superstition I don't even see why I'm continuing with this his only interest was are you paying homage to the emperor are you assembling without a license from the state those are the only things he cared about it was behavior not belief so he wasn't really concerned about that when we get to Justin martyr we have the account of rusticus who prosecuted Justin martyr the issue of resurrection never comes up in that uh dispute it's only the legal assembly and homage to the emperor those behavior is the only thing uh Justin himself doesn't bring up the resurrection doesn't bring up any evidence for the resurrection uh doesn't cite any documents pertaining to the resurrection rusticus doesn't ask about it it just doesn't come up like it wasn't a relevant issue legally for the moment so they just weren't concerned about it um there's also of course no evidence that any records from pilots tenure even survived into the second century for a variety of reasons those records appear to have just been burned lost basically aged out it's a hundred years uh so even if pilot had done anything it's clear no one knew what he did uh the only thing we get is uh references to the so-called acts of pilot which we actually have extant excerpts from which are clearly a christian forgery they're they're not they don't even look like official roman documents they're just a fawning repetition of miracle stories in the gospels um so we we can't authenticate any uh acts of pilot we can't authenticate the contents of them we can't authenticate that there was any reference to this claim uh in them at all and so we don't no one knew anything about it by the time you get to the second century so there really isn't anything to sustain us now when we get to the third century the romans start getting more concerned because christianity had grown to a large enough length that it was large enough size not a large enough adherence that they were seeing it as a political problem more than they did previously and that's when they start getting more and more involved in trying to suppress christian doctrine and so forth but before that they didn't see an issue with it uh they were only concerned about behavior whether you paid all much to hit caesar whether you were assembling without a license from the state and that that was just it uh so i mean ultimately what they said in the end is if it's just visions and interpretations of scripture i don't know what to do with that like there's nothing we there's no further investigation to be done um and so they left it at that and that's kind of what it was and in a sense you know jonathan says they didn't leave a record of any naturals to explanation in fact they did uh it's in the book of acts it's like well he just had visions and he maybe he's crazy he just had you know maybe he hallucinated or dreamed of these things um and he's got like you know crazy tinfoil hat readings of scripture or something like that that's their naturalistic interpretation of it and there wasn't anything further they could do about it there wasn't any way to prove or refute uh those statements because they're all subjective in the head of the person involved and paul in the case usually uh so that's my position on this and i go into more detail with citations and so on uh and examples and evidence in the written portion of the debate you bet thanks so much and with that as mentioned that written portion of the debate link debate link is down in the description box waiting for you folks so you can check that out and with that we will jump into the open conversation so gentlemen thanks so much and the floor is all yours yeah well uh well i guess one of the first things dr caria um in your latest uh rebuttal uh to my response you had mentioned that there was no evidence any real acts of pilots uh have ever been mentioned or would have been mentioned now uh you just allow me a moment or two i mean uh during the first uh roman empires i mean there were acts of the senate acts of the city the people of rome and other cities and acts of governors of provinces um satonius tells us you know that julia seizer you know very first enactment after becoming consul was that the proceedings both of the senate and the people should day by day be compiled and published uh file out speaks of the acts of memoirs of alexandria set to colloquia at the emperor red um and and then we have these reports from justin and tertulia and what's interesting about justin's uh petition is he's addressing the emperor empanias his sons the roman senate and he's actually quoting the prophecies laying out the facts concerning jesus's life death and resurrection and in just one apology he refers three times to the acts which were recorded under panches pilot as indisputable evidence of his assertion that jesus had fulfilled these prophecies and we see the similar type of language in tertulians written apology that he advocates for the divinity of jesus on account of his life his death and his resurrection and he points to the roman records for confirmation of these facts in the second book of his apologetics and he says that he tells the magistrates that all was this was reported uh to tie barriers at that particular time yeah i mean that's what they believed and claimed but there's no evidence that they actually had access to any such records there's no evidence that those record the real ones ever survived when we get these references to like tertulian for example we can tell he's referring to a christian forgery not the actual court documents or the actual act of the provinces because for example tertulian specifically says that the acts of pilot that he's talking about refers to the scene where the soldiers divide the garments of jesus which is actually a lift from the psalms and appears in the gospels but true or false that's a detail that would never be in a report on this subject it just wouldn't be relevant it's only relevant to christians who have a particular sacred history and so what we have is a reference to an acts of pilot that is defending christian sacred history as written out in the gospels that's a christian document and we have an example of it we actually have a surviving in the gospel of nicodemus we have a surviving excerpt from what was this acts of pilot that tertulian and justin are referring to and it's clearly a fawning christian uh invention it's it's clearly not anything that looks like official correspondence from the romans doesn't act like it doesn't look like it it looks like just some christian made up a document claiming to be by pilot that basically had vindicated everything in the gospels is all true and so on but there's no way to verify that that's actually real that that wasn't just me and so i don't i don't see any way to verify that any real acts of pilot had survived in the second century i mean it was a hundred years rome's archives had burned multiple times in the intervening period very little would get sent from the provinces anyway um like if you had the acts for example the acts of the prefects of the provinces it would have a line item saying that jesus was executed for treason but it wouldn't have many details like that's it that's the acts were just like this is the stuff that happened it's not detailed reports the only time you get detailed reports is when there's a major uh sedition that they have to deal with like a rebellion or something and actually military action had to be taken uh riots had to be suppressed or something like that then you would get some sort of record but even that might not get sent to rome uh if it was easily dealt with pilot was doing this all the time he couldn't flood the emperor with you know documents about things that he's already taken care of but we don't have any evidence of any of this either like it might have existed like there might have been records of pilot dealing with christians in some fashion um acts doesn't seem to know of any he never mentions pilot being involved at all uh the only record acts refers to is a letter from claudius lyceus that doesn't mention any of these things at all it's just talking about there's some people trying to kill paul they had some sort of weird religious dispute i don't know what the deal is uh and he's he hands it on to the next uh side and in fact he ends up to the next level or the the um prefect was actually completely willing to just let paul go and he even says like i don't see any issue here i'm gonna let you go except you paul appealed to caesar so now i'm like formally required to send you to rome simply because you filed the petition to do so but otherwise we're gonna let him go like there wasn't there wasn't any further investigation of that so um even if we believe acts is has any sense reacting to this it doesn't seem to have known of any kind of roman investigation of this stuff either one way or another we don't have any record in the second century confirming that any of this stuff survived the roman records from paul's pilots tenure that anyone could consult them that the christians writing about them even knew actually had ever seen them and so on so this is just pile of conjectures on top of each other can't get us to probable conclusion it's it's conjectures in conjectures out so um that's the problem i have with uh with that approach to trying to reconstruct history that way now castles in his writings uh he does report that you know he was privy to records uh he tells us in his annuals that i find in the records of the senate that ansias serilis could designate uh or consul a designate gave us his opinion that a temple should be built to to neuro divine as early as possible out of the public funds and elsewhere i failed to discover either in the historians or in the government journals and uh believe he's referring to the act that the prince's mother and tonia bore any striking part in the ceremonies although in addition to a grip arena and drusus and claudius his other blood relations are recorded by name and we see this in satonius as well the writing into the second century and they're referring to ancient documents uh what's interesting about satonius is he does offer evidence of consulting acts of this kind that he had recourse for in writing his histories and satonius also establishes such acts and registers were available outside of rome particularly at antio for this is where satonius learned a day in the place of the birth of caligula about which there were other uncertain reports that he puts on and he speaks of those acts of public authorities that he particularly references when he says i myself find in the gazette that he first saw the light at antio and he's and he speaks of good well what you're what you're talking about is called the act of sanatis uh so it's it's the acts of the senate that just basically just declared rulings of the senate and the actual official things that they did like the census for example so you would find a record of births in the act of sanatis now the act of sanatis was was like a uh how do you describe it it was like an encyclopedia it was published it wasn't a wasn't a government document that sits in archives it was actually like a set of encyclopedias that would be published and you would be find it in every library in the empire but it would only include these like line item things that would only be at the senatorial level like what councils are doing what how money is being spent where uh for example uh where people were born and who who's who and who's connected to who uh who's executed and for what like that will be in the act of sanatis but it doesn't have these detailed records of investigations and things like that it didn't have that kind of information and you find that they never reference it for that kind of information it's only for the sort of bare bones line item stuff it's more like a almanac more than anything um and because it was published it was actually released and it was be available in all libraries uh you'd never lose it because you'd always the copies could always be restored so for example when demission uh presided over the burning of the archives in Rome and the libraries were lost there uh he sent scribes to alexandria to the library of alexandria to basically replace all the books to copy their books and bring them back and restock the library Rome so that's where they probably the act of sanatis that sotonius himself was reading probably came was a copy from the one from the library of alexandria for example um but it would it would not contain these minutiae like these little investigations and things like that it would just be line item stuff if anything it might not even include the execution uh you know extra ordinance the execution of non-citizens would probably wouldn't even be mentioned uh and jesus wasn't a citizen so like you would probably only have execution lines or the dispositions of citizens and mind you there's millions and millions of people so there's no way the act of sanatis included uh death records for the entire population so uh at most you would have incidental related details dealing with citizens but again we don't have any evidence that the acts uh that the act of sanatis contain the kinds of things that you're talking about much less specifically the thing you're talking about but no one no one knows of this we don't have any reliable reference to this being the case um romans never referenced plenty has never heard of it when he's doing an investigation uh he has to ask deaconesses what they believed he never had no idea what they believe he even had to ask trajan right all the way to rome say i don't know what these people believe help help me out here uh so it's not as if he could go check the act of sanatis and confirm what christians were clearly it wasn't in there uh he didn't have any sources to tell them so he had to ask christians what they believe so um this tells us one way or another this kind of information just wasn't available on state records certainly by plenty's time if ever now it's now if we uh look at pilot um it's interesting that the renowned historian uh george ronaldson uh who's done publications on the translation of the history of herodotus and the great five monarchies says it seems certain that pilot remitted to tyberius in account of the execution of our lord and the grounds of it to which justin martyr more than once eludes and which was deposited in the archives of the empire uh well you know you know one of the things that i was kind of interested in hearing the thoughts on is the relationship of pilot and the jewish uh community when he had come into the area because uh he came in and there was a tenuous relationship that filo tells us about uh pilot's command coming over uh and assuming command of the area um which uh filo reports caused pilot great concern uh there was a fear that filo reports that uh an embassy of jews were gonna report back to tyberius and send an embassy and particularly reports on uh and bring charges against his administration which when we look at the gospel accounts of presenting pilot as a sort of uh looking to set jesus at liberty sending him back to herod seemed like he wasn't invested in buying in on the charges and due to the nature of the relationship that the jews had under uh tyberius's administration would it make sense that pilot given in his past tenuous history with the jews would report to pilot this type of activity that had occurred this is a really good example proving my point so here you have a big concern that gets raised so filo himself was the ambassador who actually went to caligula to report this stuff um and tastis records that pilot actually got convicted uh so he actually ended I think committed suicide or something um because he was going down for this um but notice that's precisely what we don't have any evidence of for christianity there even the book of acts never mentions any such dispute any such issue when we get the the hearing with festus and felix and or the hearings multiple um there's no dispute about pilot mishandling this case like that's just not the issue when filo went to when filo went to caligula he had a litany of legit complaints that were major public issues violence against the jews and so on christianity wasn't on a list uh this is right so like that's not even on the list of complaints they had they had nothing to do with uh filo I mean pilot didn't have to defend himself on the christianity issue he had to defend himself on all this other stuff uh which josephas records like josephas records a lot of this stuff that got him busted basically um disregarding the treaty with the jews primarily and causing unrest uh so that was that was the stuff that was going on but that's precisely the kind of thing we don't have for christianity in the tenure of pilot moreover we're talking about embassies people had to go to caligula to present these things they weren't in any kind of reports that pilot was sending back uh they had to go there and talk about it in person pilot eventually had to go himself and defend himself in person so uh this this is exactly the kind of thing that did happen in the ancient world and it's precisely the kind of thing we have no evidence happening with respect to christianity uh and the disposition relating to pilot why do i have one question you'd mention ralinson ralinson yes um it is what's the data of that it sounds like 19th century but i yes uh he he's an aglican so uh my five uh does come out again at george uh ralinson but what's the date of the publication when did he flourish 18 believe it 19th century in any case though right yes it is 19th century yeah that's so there's a lot of this bad history from the 19th century um so uh i wrote an article you can find online on my old blog it's also in my book hitler homer bible price but it's history before 1950 why we can't trust history before 1950 now there's some history we can trust before 1950 but a lot of it the methodology was just terrible and 19th century was the worst uh so you have to like look at more modern historians what is what is using more modern methods more reliable methods what is their conclusion and that's why i cited ff bruce uh in our debate um where he points out that pretty much all historians today agree the acts of the pilot that justin and tertelinger talking about are fordries there's no such document uh at least none that was known to the romans that actually was in the roman archives and certainly there's no evidence to establish that there was and so that that's the modern consensus view of historians on this um rolandson you're citing a 19th century basically anglican apologist historian um who's been completely overturned by modern historians using modern methods um so uh so that's i have an issue when when people do that i i run into like even jesus methodists who do the same thing and try to build their case on 19th century historians and i take them to task for that because it's it's these are terrible historians that are making a lot of mistakes um and so i i don't give them uh the rope on that either nor nor can i on this side as well so um no i don't think we can cite rolandson as an authority anymore on this he's citing an opinion that isn't based on sound methodology whereas bruce's opinion actually is based on sound epist... methodology you can you can go look at the actual things the things that tertelinger and justin say and it's clear they're referring to some sort of fawning christian uh endorsement of the gospels that's something that was written after the gospels um and in the name of pilot it's it's one of many forgeries christians actually engage in forgery quite a lot we have tons and tons of examples uh so um so we can't rely on that we would need uh better evidence of someone having access to a real document uh and if we just don't so that that's unfortunately there's no nothing further we can do historically with that well i i want to talk about the the change in administration that we see from typerius who had this kind of relationship with the with the jews to uh the administration that changed uh with claudius coming on um and i know we had uh some discussion on satonius's comments that you know reporting a disturbance amongst the jews once again claudius administration different than typerius in his relationship uh and we have an event where uh satonius is reporting that the jews are being agitated and breaking out in riot and when we see in claudius's administration different than typerius's i believe this is in alexandria though right so you're talking about the alexandrian riots no i'm talking about the expulsion of jews uh from rome oh the expulsion of jews from rome got it okay right so continue yeah now i know where you're at okay i guess uh um so when we look at that obviously typerius's administration is different than claudius's and obviously there's a disruption here and uh we have satonius's account that associates this disturbance that caused the expulsion from the jews uh from a certain crestess and you know here i'm trying to understand what other because if if we follow the trajectory of christianity the spread of it and the message that they were spreading throughout the empire yeah poll going to all these different cities and causing all these disturbances with the jews i mean who else would we associate uh satonius's reference to christus with if it wasn't the arrival of christianity in rome with the christians well i mean there's two things to say to that i mean one is uh it's it is exactly what satonius says uh that there was uh a rabble rouser by the name of christus in rome instigating riots uh and um the response to that was to get rid of the jews or ban them from the city now there's uh there's an issue where dio cacius uh qualifies that it says it wasn't all the jews there's only certain ones um but dio knows what christians are and so he doesn't mention christians in his account satonius doesn't mention christians in this so satonius knows what christians are he talks about them being persecuted under nero so satonius clearly had no idea that this account had anything to do with christians so the only way to explain it as having to do with christians is that the account has gotten so garble by the time satonius got a hold of it that the christian connection was completely lost and he had no idea he was confused as to who christus was or what the riots were about or any of this so we can't really use that uh for anything even if it connected to christianity but it probably didn't it probably had to do with messianic judaism in rome unconnected with christians and that's how the book of axe portrays it uh the author of axe doesn't have any knowledge of christianity causing it it just mentions that the jews were expelled from rome and so some of them started hanging out with christians in other provinces but it just it doesn't the author doesn't seem to know that there's anything to do with uh anything to do with christianity with regard to that expulsion so we just there's not really anything we do with that um and then even if we go through conjecture or conjecture stack them up and like try to reconstruct some possible scenario that christianity is connected there we can't get a resurrection investigation out of it like what was the right what were the riots about um what specifically and did the romans care about that clearly it's a good example where claudia's the solution is just get them out of the city he doesn't investigate anything he doesn't care it's like you guys are misbehaving your behavior is intolerable leave uh and that that's basically what you did in a rumor it should be pointed out that roman emperors did this all the time uh there's many incidences where they ban philosophers from rome and uh they get pissed off at someone uh doing some particular group doing something they ban them from rome but they let them come back in later uh and so it's it's kind of almost more like a symbolic gesture kind of like making people sit in the corner uh essentially um so we have a lot of examples of that happening but in this particular case we can't connect it to the resurrection claim we can't connect it to anything to do with pilot we can't connect it to uh any kind of investigation uh there's just not enough there there this not it's too much garbled information it's too big we can't do anything with it unfortunately so i i want to talk a little bit about um because i i know i in my uh regional response i talked quite a bit about uh the baculae now you know what interested me about levy's account of the baculae is uh we we get a background in how the roman empire the republic at that time uh was conducting its investigation so we look at another uh cult in the eyes of the romans at that time we see a very unique procedure uh that they go about uh the councils uh the councils at that time the highest officials in the republic uh go out there they have contacts in the area uh that they were able to get information from which actually leads them to gather a witness who had been part of these i don't know local nightclubs that we would experience today and maybe some of us would even join but what we see there is the councils are coming out they have their vegetable their vegetables i apologize for my association there um but what we see there is uh they have contacts in the area that new people who were involved they brought uh a woman who had seen it knows where they were and it's interesting that they already had reports of you know information that they had available when they came uh to that meeting so the council already had information that he's questioning the witnesses pellet on so when i take this over to ex and when we look at what's happening now under a changing administration from tyberius and claudius uh and moving into a different administration of the roman empire we see this very similar pattern or trend with uh festus uh meeting with poll and he has king agrippa uh there who obviously uh knew the area uh of jesus's ministry and you know what we see here is actually an interrogation that looks very closely with what was happening in the baculae now luke obviously would not know of a roman investigation just like we wouldn't know if the fbi was investigating us so why would you not uh see the similar parallel that gives us the background of what's happening in acts with high officials meeting with poll who was just a lowly roman citizen i mean he wasn't a patrician uh coming back and having this big interrogation with them that's that's another example that proves my point uh so if you look at the the bakai the punishment of the bakai the policing of the bakai this is second century bc in the context this is a time when everything foreign was was suspicious the romans were suspicious of everything foreign so to the point that they were even like considering outlying greek doctors uh philosophers and stuff they didn't like greek knowledge coming their way they definitely didn't like greek uh secret societies coming their way uh and in particular the the only thing they investigated with the baknalia was who was doing it who was who was joining these cults who was secretly a member of it so how high up was the infiltration they were they were seeing it as foreign infiltration into the senate uh and it's all behavior it's not belief they didn't investigate the miraculous claims that the bakai had they didn't investigate the religious doctrines they didn't investigate the religious claims they were only interested in behavior are you a member of an illegal foreign secret society and that's it uh that was what concerned them and we actually know this like not only from livi but we actually have inscriptions from the senate the original senatorial decree uh from the senate itself so we actually know what concerned them and it wasn't beliefs they weren't interested in that and so that makes my point is that pilot also will react the same way like he doesn't care about beliefs he only cares about behavior and by pilot's time foreigners were not feared in that sense like there was a wide acceptance and tolerance of foreign cults uh they were romans were adopting them left and right admitting them to status within Rome uh and not interfering in religious beliefs and religious wobbles so uh things have changed by that point but even in the original bakai and i only a senate investigation it was only behavior not belief so it's not a good analogy for your point it's a perfect analogy for my point is that the romans didn't care about beliefs that this wasn't wasn't the thing that they did and the other thing you mentioned that that how would luke know about the investigation that's an astonishing claimant and kind of threw me for a minute so you you have two possible things here you either axe is completely making up all the court hearings that it depicts which i'm sympathetic to i think probably he did but that doesn't help your case right if axe is making everything up uh well then all bets are off uh but if those hearings if axe is basing those hearings on any kind of information that's attempted uh whether oral or some sort of written source or whatever they very clearly show there was no investigation and yet they would have done it had there been a dispute over the resurrection as an investigable issue it would have come up in these court trials uh paul would have to defend it um paul would be attacked with it uh there we would hear the discussions of it instead we've been the exact opposite we have roman official saying i'm not interested in investing in this this is a religious squabble doesn't concern our laws go away basically it was it's the way the romans continually do it even the sanhedrin was well we're a little concerned that maybe he defiled the temple but otherwise his beliefs like maybe an angel or a spirit spoke to him that's literally what the sanhedrin says like we don't find anything wrong with this guy in terms of that so like in terms of belief even the sanhedrin didn't really care uh as long as he wasn't defiling the temple as long as he wasn't doing things that violate jewish law and and so the disputes were always over those technical details it had nothing to do with the resurrection um so there's two two ways if you look at that you can throw it all out as all fiction in which case we have no information and therefore there's nothing to stand on or axe is pretty powerful evidence showing and i assume you believe axe is a historical reliable source so i think you're kind of forced to accept that axe definitely shows the romans weren't interested in investigating this didn't investigate this there's no investigation that occurs um and much less any result of it and the christians aren't boasting of the results it doesn't come up and so uh and even i should say not just that doesn't come up i want to reiterate they even axe specifically has roman say i'm not interested in this like i don't even know how to investigate this what do i do with this vision the scriptures i can't work with this uh and and we're to the point of letting paul go they let peter go uh like there's like the they're letting people go left and right they have nothing really substantial to get them on um and paul confirms that uh paul confirms that peter was in drislam for decades uh clearly they never got anything on them not even false they couldn't even get them accused uh convicted on a false charge apparently uh so we know that i mean this this is evidence against your thesis is what i'm saying uh and the only way to get around that is to declare axe fiction not reliable history but then you've kicked out all foundation now we have nothing we have no record of what happened at that time none of it survives uh and so then we can't do anything on nothing we can't build any thesis on the complete essence of information yeah regarding uh luke and axe now it is interesting and i think you know maybe you agree not to agree i think most would say that axe comes after uh obviously luke and obviously the the same writer uh of axe would be consistent with the writer that we find in luke it obviously references uh at the very beginning of uh of axe you know the older publication which in that publication and it does give testimony to uh the empty tomb uh the resurrection of price and it kind of opens up uh that prologue of axe one with it now what's interesting about uh uh the hearing between uh between pol and vestis and uh a grip up is why would vestis respond in the matter he did if pol was only referring to a spiritual metaphorical resurrection and the reason why i say this is because you know in axe you know the Athenian philosophers at the room of his hill when they catch their judgment on pol's preaching of jesus and the resurrection um responded in a very similar way that uh vestis did because vestis why would they have to even care to brought pol there uh if they were only believing in spiritual deities or means or what axe axe says why right the the jews tried to uh well first of all they tried to kill paul they actually tried to have a band of assassins to try and kill him uh and that precipitated this the romans got involved and said why is this going on and then there was this religious squabble and then the romans are trying to figure out like i don't understand why you guys are trying to kill each other i don't get it and so uh they bring paul in um and sort of sit on the case for a while because it clearly had calmed down the violence part of it and that's really all they cared about but when the jews came to accuse paul all they had to accuse him of was violating uh basically the uh defiling the temple which which paul claimed he didn't do um that's the only actual legal issue that keeps paul at trial and then it's paul who tries to make it all about the beliefs um but the jews aren't making it about the beliefs and the beliefs paul himself says are based on i'm i have a special insight into the secret meanings of scripture and i have spirits talking to me and that's literally all he has and so infested us here's all this is like you're insane paul like you're you're you've just given me tinfoil hat readings of holy books and you're talking about you're talking to ghosts and spirits and stuff like i i don't know what to do about this and it even says like i would totally let you go because i don't see you've done anything wrong but you appealed the seizures so i have to have to move your case up um that's the reaction that's that's what we get and so that's why festus reacts that way totally makes sense it's actually one of the most coherent stories uh in the book of acts in terms of how people behave historically it's exactly how a roman magistrate would behave faced with this kind of stuff um so um and that's all we have we don't have that record is is telling exactly the opposite story um from what you need to be to have been told in order to base your case on uh so the documents just don't bear it out is my position on that now the empire obviously under uh maximum drain uh in 311 did attempt to falsify or provide a counter narrative and spread propaganda uh throughout the empire and in in attempt to falsify the resurrection of jesus and spread propaganda against christianity now you did note uh that you know because of the rising tide of christians popularity they were starting to become uh political problems but don't we see the same political problems uh that uh planning reports in vithya uh obviously when tacitis reports on the christians uh he kind of opens that up with you know nero um falsely accusing the christians of setting the fire and if you think about it nero would have needed a big enough group uh to assign uh blame to uh because obviously it would have to be a group that was known uh obviously also it had to be a small enough group that he could get away with it uh right so it's like david koresh right uh if if that was the Mormon church the federal government would have gotten away with raiding the compound of weko the only reason they could like invade the weko compound and act the way they did was because the koresh people were small enough a number um but still locally renowned enough to be a group to target essentially now that there were legitimate uh illegal guns enough they had legitimate like legal reasons but the way they handled it was like completely disastrously bad um but it would have been completely different behavior if it was the Mormon church that they were going after and so this is uh by the time of mech simon um we're talking about like five to ten percent of the population is christian now that's that's serious mojo that's a huge social issue whereas in plenty's time plenty makes clear like he his whole life in his entire legal career and he had one of the most prestigious legal careers across the empire he'd never been president of trial of christians he didn't know anything about what they believed um so he just just sort of knew by report that they were a problem but he didn't even know why uh that's how rare christians were at that point so yeah you could you could do like a witch hunt and like you know single out some christians and scapegoat them um or uh if people start accusing them of illegal assembly you know plenty had to do something about it so he did because he can't have people fill out the law like that but it's clear that they they were so small even trajan says don't hunt these people out leave them be like worried about them it was just you know a sort of fringe foreign cult didn't really bother them they weren't doing anything particularly illegal they mean they were filing a legal assembly they're being dicks about not paying homage to the emperor but even trajan says don't hunt these people down uh because they weren't that worried about them and it was it wasn't until you know christians became a really large part of the population uh that you started getting these attempts to mock and satirize them that's the the the maximum forgery of the acts of pilot is kind of like the total adult the issue it's it's not um attacking the resurrection it's attacking the entirety of christian gospel by making a mock version of the gospel and sort of making fun of them uh and it probably picked all there's a lot of like bullshit stuff that got said about christians throughout the centuries it probably drew it all in there and just threw it all at it and trying to make them unpopular by publishing this sort of fake news version right they're trying to like ridicule christians so that people will not want to be christians or to drum up support for suppressing the christians that's the goal there they weren't really interested in like disproving the resurrection it's clearly couldn't because they didn't have access to any real documents to even address the issue uh all they all they had with the gospels that's the thing is like he all he could do is mock the gospels that was the only sources that were available at the time and we see this even earlier in kelsus kelsus only knows of the gospels he has no other sources for christian or things that had arisen up in a disorganized way by jewish authors and things so um anyway that's that's it's an issue of scale so by the time maximan arises christians are a much larger problem than they had been before uh and so the the interests change but even then they're not investigating the resurrection and couldn't have done by them it's too late right this long too late history for them to have done anything practical about that hey james can i have just one more question on trajan you bet it makes for it is that okay dr carrey yeah true so um obviously planning his letter to uh trajan uh elicit a response now looking at that response and seeing the history of the different administrations on how they dealt with uh christianity up to that time doesn't it seem like trajan's actions seem to indicate that his first goal was to present a preventive revolt and then he was attempting to quell a group that was spreading throughout the empire and may have already infiltrated no tools yeah no actually um so this is where it's important to actually read the context because um this is i took bart airman to task for making this mistake but he conflated a couple letters of plenty we have several letters of plenty only one deals with the christians but there's another one that deals with firefighters societies this is very important this is the context in which what's happening to the christians and plenty's tenure is happening uh and so plenty writes to trajan that says okay i know there are all these rebellions and political unrest in my province and so you've banned societies uh like you're not basically what he said he's not issuing licenses normally you could assemble with a license from the state so you could have so religious groups could assemble and so on if you saw a license from the state in plenty's province it was very uniquely being treated trajan was basically punishing the populace for having for up previous uprisings and saying no associations at all i'm not giving any licenses they must have given some because i'm sure they were still engaged in religious practices and other forms of assembly but those are probably old licenses that were established licenses he wasn't signing any new ones and plenty said well look that your law is actually preventing firefighter clubs from assembling to fight fires in the city and this is becoming a problem um what do we do about this and then trajan writes back and says actually it is the firefighting societies that were like there was a lot of political activism there it was kind of like a cover like unions in a sense were becoming a cover for for political activism it says no so no firefighting societies just you know keep the equipment on hand and and people can assemble spontaneously when there's a fire i'm not going to have firefighter houses or anything like that um and that's his response and so when plenty's dealing with the christians the best he he doesn't know what to do actually he doesn't know why he's supposed to be punishing christians he doesn't even know why they're illegal he writes to trajan is like well i mean i know it's supposed to do something but i don't know why i'm supposed to care about these guys and that's when trajan writes back and says well yeah they just don't don't bother with them um don't hunt them down basically but you know if you get clear evidence of people violating my you know rule against illegal assembly do something about that or you know any kind of like thumbing their nose at the imperial power and things like that so he's not interested in christians as a group actually specifically not interested like that's why trajan says don't hunt these people down he's only interested in people obeying his law to prevent general political uprisings not christian uprisings but just general political meddling is what he's against that's why it's he says the same thing against the firefighter societies as against the christians uh it's not that there's any particular beliefs that he sees as a problem it's that he's worried about political activism and if you let people organize and assemble they get political and i don't want that to happen of course you know this is an oppressive system there's no first amendment constitutional thing here um but that's what he's doing he's doing a typical tyrannical thing is like no no assembly because those become political and i don't like that um but it's clear that trajan didn't particularly see the christians as a threat politically like he's like if they're flaunting the law yeah you got to do something but otherwise i don't particularly it's clear he didn't particularly see them as a threat at that time uh and and so um same as that you know he's it's like he doesn't order plenty to go hunt down firefighter societies either um he just says just don't let them do it uh that's flouting the law and that's the context in which this happened so no it's not really a general concern about christians it's a it's a general concern for the whole populace engaging in illegal assembly and the political ramifications of that um even if you couldn't tie it to any specific political beliefs trajan just wanted to prevent the whole thing all together at least that was his current policy might have changed within a few years or whatever but um that's the context in which that happened so no you actually that the evidence in plenty and trajan is the opposite of what you're saying oh i don't know james if we keep going we do we have a little bit left do we have q and a when what's the schedule i don't know where we're at we can jump into q and a unless you have any last questions we have eight minutes left but no if you uh if you uh if you have them let them rip otherwise we can go to q and a i don't have any questions at this time but jonathan you've got the mic um i uh oh yeah i know we talked about the nazarist inscription um you know i was interested in hearing uh some of your views on the nazarist description because you know as i responded it's you know either a direct response uh seem consistently direct response to the empty grave or a later response uh that we see by the spread of christianity uh starting at the time right around claudius um now now it's interesting uh that some of the proposed theories against that because uh i know you have made the assertion that the roman's had known about circumstances of this kind they would be inclined to investigate and set out to um uh rule it out and bring in the witnesses uh i think it's uh your why did mark uh do the open tune or why did he invent the open tune where yeah would have been compelled to bring in witnesses find out who did it whether they were innocent or not so when we look at the nazarist description it seems consistent with the idea that the roman empire did know about it uh and what we have is a large piece of marvel uh being brought into nazarists uh where obviously uh jesus uh was from uh yeah okay i see where you're we got on this i think we should get people up to speed they may not know what we're talking about um so um i think there might even be a wikipedia page on it i don't know if it's any good i haven't looked at it but um the nazarist inscription is this inscription it's actually a small slab of stone it's not uh marvel it's not large um and it has misspellings and stuff in it so it's kind of crudely executed um there's probably someone privately owned it it probably wasn't it was it contained a imperial decree but it was probably a private person who wanted to erect it and it was written in greek so clearly it was targeting not jewish locals it was targeting greeks uh and uh targeting people who could read as well but um so uh several things um this is an inscription that contains an imperial decree it's non-specific as to who the emperor was which actually means it was almost certainly caesar or augustus actually not tiberius um because it was tiberius it would have his name carved on it but the only caesars who just went by caesar was julius and his adopted son augustus was the only ones that had decrees it just isn't the name of caesar um so it's almost certainly predates christianity by years decades probably um and it has a decree about grave robbing specifically reminding people these are our laws against grave robbing i am demanding that you enforce these laws basically is what it says um and i have a i have a whole article on it at the secular web i have a uh updated version of that article in my book hitler homer bible christ so people want to see with the i cite the scholarship i cite uh there's lots of peer-reviewed scholarship on this all the actual ancient historians like the real scholars who actually published peer-reviewed articles on this all agree it doesn't have anything to do with christianity uh in fact uh it doesn't come from nazareth this is a misconception it was bought in nazareth and in at the time it was bought was early 20th century there were only two antiquities markets in judia there was Jerusalem and nazareth and that was it so everything comes from nazareth or Jerusalem that came out of there from that date if you bought something it came from one of those two cities that does not mean that's where it was found in fact we don't know where it was found uh the fact that it's written in greek uh and assumes people can read greek which is more than even just speaking greek very likely it probably came from the decapolis it probably did not even come from judia or at least it might have come from one of the Gentile cities within judia like sephorus or something um so uh so that's so we gotta get that misconception out it wasn't wasn't uh discovered in nazareth and it probably almost certainly it was not published in nazareth like i can't imagine anyone publishing a greek uh imperial decree in nazareth um but anyway that's that's the consensus is that that's it's we can't establish it it came from nazareth and uh also the content of it is very specifically targeting greek family cult um so ancestor cult so the greeks had particular religious practices involving graves where that was the paying homage and reverence uh literally worship of ancestors you would go to the grave you would eat on the grave and there were even like little tubes you could drop food down for the to the dead to have meals and things like this um and the the law goes step by step uh you to preserve the cult of ancestors which is a greek thing not a jewish thing don't do all of these things and it lists like 10 things none of which have anything to do with uh the christian story except the disturbing of like the removal of bodies but that's that was there had been laws against removal of bodies for years and then years after that that was just a common fact but the fact that the law uh it's just reiterating existing roman laws against sacrilege that involved a lot of details like stealing door doorstones uh switching stones um damaging graves like it's all of there's a variety of different details molesting bodies like not just taking the bodies but like doing things with them uh which is actually prohibition against magic probably uh because necromancers loved corpses it was a big black market and corpse products uh it's very clearly targeting greek populations with greek ideas of how uh grave worship works it would have been sacrilegious to a jewish audience anyway and it's dealing with a wide range of issues that don't connect with the empty tomb story in christianity and there's no mention of christians by the way so like uh it is no mention of like due to a recent terrible event i am just declaring this now it's just these are our laws please enforce them it's basically all it is so there isn't any way to get from the nazarist inscription itself to anything to do with christianity it almost certainly was published before christianity and it's about existing roman laws and enforcing them locally under roman jurisdictions even maybe under client king jurisdictions but allowing roman influence and decrees and so on so we can't connect to the christianity this is the point uh so no i i don't i don't agree that you can use it the way that you are i know a lot of christian apologists want to use it that way um but the facts just don't hold up we can go into the q and a if you guys are ready but no rush in case you had any other uh questions jonathan well no we could probably talk all night about this i i think one last point that i would like to to make to dr carrier is you know when we look at the the circumstances around the account uh in the gospel publications uh what what's consistent between uh all four accounts is you know the empty tomb um you know joseph of aramatheta we have uh judia uh we have a tomb uh now any one of those events or criteria could be easily falsified like let's say if there was no tomb at all um i mean we're talking about a major city uh in the empire um they list the name joseph of aramatheta uh who would have purchased it obviously would have to have a lot of money to have a tomb uh let alone in a major city like that and you know what we don't find is any counter narrative that would have been easily able to disprove it i mean if there was no tomb there goes christianity uh if there was no person by the name of joseph of aramatheta uh there goes the account and one of the reasons i brought up uh uh ucbius is reporting on hega peasy uh hega cebius's account of demission investigating uh the grandsons of jude is demonstrating this knowledge in the ancient world that you could investigate the relative so even if the accounts haven't were published while after the fact you know the romans couldn't easily or uh the jews could have easily gained access to this information to find out if any of these accounts ever did occur even if the gospels were published 60 70 years afterwards not really uh that's a long time uh i don't know if you realize like half a century more than we're talking about half a century before it gets published the when you have the gospel of mark which is the first time we ever hear anything about an empty tomb um he's publishing not only a life average lifetime later um he's publishing after a major war is completely ravaged the region he's publishing in a foreign language in a foreign land he's not publishing in palestine um we don't even know when anyone in palestine ever got to read a gospel uh they were being published and read by churches outside that area and moreover for about 50 years we have no record of anyone's reaction to the gospels not even to defend them there wasn't like family saying yeah i was there that gospel is correct or like we don't have pro or con we we're not allowed to see what any reaction was to the gospels it just wasn't preserved and we can't make arguments from documents we don't have like we don't know what these people said or what any gain saying that might have been said it wasn't recorded or wasn't preserved because we have no record pro or con i want to emphasize this so it's not that they it's not recorded because they were shocked into silence and couldn't say anything no it's like even the people who could have backed these stories up if they said anything we don't get to hear them either so we don't know anything uh so you can't make that argument um it's not this it's not the kind of situation where it's like 10 years later in the town where it happened someone's going around telling the story that's not what's happening this is a lifetime later you know probably another continent but certainly another province a foreign province and foreign language and greek you know and so on um so no we don't we don't have that and then even if you want to see what was the reaction of the gospels we don't get to see that either because all of that record has been destroyed like whatever reactions that were to these gospels we have total silence on the record so we don't get to see any of that um it's uh to give you an example like you're talking about consistency across the gospels the gospels are redactions of each other so like even even the gospel of john is rewriting the gospels in his own words which is actually how most ancient writers operated the previous the synoptic gospels are just rewriting they're taking the gospel and just jiggering it and just making their own version of it we have other examples of this like the lives of esau in the middle ages we have like the lives of jennivy where there's a version and then someone expands on it and adds and changes and takes away stuff but this is still pretty much nearly identical in many respects and then other versions keep happening so we have like the lives lives of esau was like that um we don't say that the lives of esau are recording history because all of them are consistent with each other we know what's going on it's redaction they're taking a story and they're changing it over time everybody agrees the lives of esau are fiction right uh so so the consistency amongst the lives of esau does not support the historicity of anything in the lives of esau same with jennivy frankly because it's the same story that someone's coming along copying and changing around that doesn't that's not corroboration that's redaction and so um so we don't we don't really get that all we get is we have you know in the 70s maybe at the earliest mark publishes a story about the empty tomb claims no one told anyone about the empty tomb so it's vague as to how he's supposed to even know of it but i don't think mark intends it is history anyway i think mark is writing allegory i don't think he he means you to think that this is a historical fact but um regardless of whether that's the case or not he writes this story and then every version of the empty tomb story copies that one either verbatim or very nearly uh the same and just changes some elements of it adds some things takes some things away so it's just a redaction of the same story over and over again we don't have any corroboration of the story we don't even and i should say we don't have like an eyewitness saying yeah i was there that that's right that is what happened or or actually yeah that was what happened except for this detail or whatever no we don't have that but we don't get to see that so we can't argue that it's history it could easily be fiction and we wouldn't know there isn't any way to access uh that other than to look at internally does this make sense this history i don't think it does i think it only makes sense this fiction but um that's a whole separate that'll be a whole separate debate that's beyond what we're doing here with that folks it's a great time to transition into q&a so thank you both dr carrier and jonathan this has been a true pleasure getting to listen to your guys's continuing debate as mentioned folks their debate had started being a written debate and they were gracious enough to where we get to kind of join in with them during that in which the you could say the kind of the sequel or the last part of it is here on modern day debate so with that want to quick read scott duke thanks so much for your question who said love this particular debate it's narrow in scope and there was prequel material thank you to everyone involved will there be more like this in the future james i sure hope so scott because this is like i said a special one that we've never gotten to do before so steven steed thanks so much for your compliments says james is a beautiful man with a beautiful channel okay well thank you steven next time smokey smokey say thanks for your question let's see it's like i couldn't quite this is a little bit harder to understand if you if you put it into live chat i'll keep an eye on it i'll i'll get that for you thanks so much and thoughtful guy thanks for your compliment they said i love richard carrier and that he goes over every small detail dishonest people would call that quote sophistry educated people would call it good scholarship and research and i know it's uh absolutely appreciated to have the rigor of tonight's discussion as i know that a lot of people have been giving tons of positive feedback so that's just one of many and nice yeah next up oh i did want to say let's see did want to say thanks so much i think it was biker hog thanks so much for subscribing saw that pop up we appreciate you having you here and as mentioned no matter what walk of life you're from folks we really do hope you feel welcome and next up thanks for your question from maya asburns says congratulations dr carrier and i'm a big fan of the channel james well thanks so much for your kindness and absolutely uh big congrats to dr carrier indeed as it's i i've always said i've said i think no joke i'm not just saying this you could ask my friends i've said i was like i think historically dr carrier is one of the toughest and maybe the toughest at least in the english speaking world in terms of debating these topics so this is a real honor and so scott duke thanks for your question for dr carrier they asked is the criterion of embarrassment a valid method of evaluating historical data for any other field than christian apologetics um yes uh except it has to be applied correctly i have a whole huge section on this actually in um my book proving history i actually go into the methodology of it and show like examples of when it applies when we have examples in courts of law too um statements against interest is a similar concept in law so there are valid applications of it but um but they have to be struck there have to be certain facts in place for them to operate uh and the the problem with when we apply it to the gospels usually is what's being attempted um those those please those pieces that you need to be in place are not there and so you give an example um usually it said that uh john the baptist that jesus being uh for the gospels to admit that jesus submitted to the baptism of john uh is embarrassing therefore it must be true but actually when you look at the actual evidence of what the inventor of that story mark is doing with it it's not embarrassing at all it's not embarrassing to mark he invented it for a reason and it actually serves clear functions um there and i've there's been many peer reviewed scholars who made this point i actually cite them and discuss them in their position uh in uh improving history so if you want to go into that and look at that so it's every time that someone makes that claim you start picking at the threads it doesn't hold up uh it doesn't hold up as an example a valid example of an actual argument from embarrassment or one that would hold up logically uh and that's usually the problem with the criteria generally is like either they are illogical or if you fix them to be logical they no longer reply to the gospels or there's no instance in the gospels to which they apply uh and that's the problem that i found so it's not always that the criteria don't apply or aren't used it's that they're misused largely um overused wrongly used and so on in ways that you would never see in other fields of history i i do agree with that oh wow and i shouldn't say never uh there's a great book by uh Huckett Fisher called historians fallacies that i highly recommend people read because it's very entertaining and covers many fields of history and it's just filled with historians making logical fallacies like established pre-reviewed history um so yeah it's not that they that you never see fallacious arguments uh in in all fields of history but typically it's not used in the sort of intensive way that you see it used in jesus studies gotcha thanks so much for that and next up oh are you guys okay with other questions on historical matters such as we do have like one or two questions that are outside of this scope of this debate but they are on for example whether or not there are historical sources for jesus outside of the new testament or would you like to keep it focused on this topic let's say two things one you could stack those towards the end if we run out of relevant questions and the other is like if jonathan has anything to add what i to what i just said about the criterion embarrassment uh he's welcome to weigh in i think yeah definitely yeah the only thing i can see probably one of the more remarkable statements that i've liked used by the ancients is tutulian i think he's quite quoted on this that it's true because it's absurd which kind of carries that idea that uh who would make something like this up now obviously i don't use it in my uh apologetics approach but i i do understand tutulian's legal mind uh when he's making that argument uh so when it comes from him it does sound really good uh but that's not my particular approach that i use you bet and thanks so much for your let's see just came in uh gosh uh they make me read these otherwise they tell me they they want to refund to their superchats see darwin thanks for your super chat who said uh james have you ever thought about modeling i think they like seeing my face turn red i uh you guys are good trolls i like that we have at least benevolent trolls here and yes that's nice yeah thanks for your uh question from bothel guy let's see or comment in this case said i think richard carried the day today as he spent most of his time correcting sheffield but it's a great debate fellas you have a critic out there jonathan you have a fan out there dr carrier thank you for that pun as well and yeah i see what you did there let's see we have another one this one came in from nz pure thanks for your question said ken jonathan explained why he thinks the scripture is a viable source of evidence for itself well you know what we're talking about is documentation uh that was published throughout the the empire um you know even though this just may go into a different it's it's one piece of positive empirical evidence in support of our testimony now i've never come out and said that's the only relevant evidence but it is positive empirical evidence uh supporting our claims uh and in this discussion you know i'm actually moving the discussion uh to show evidence or in a lot of case uh the inability of the roman empire to falsify this narrative as a means from a disinterested source uh to cooperate what the christians were promoting all throughout its empire without a counter narrative to expose it if it truly was a hoax gosh and thanks so much for your question this one comes in from ultra testosterone appreciate it asks what historical evidence is there i'm reading them in order i'm keeping an eye just in case other ones more more central to the topic come in but they did ask what historical evidence is there for jesus outside of the new testament that's that's tricky um so there are references of course uh that we have in extant texts um but what they mean what value they have these things can be debated and whether they're authentic too uh so that's a big topic um the answer is not much uh but the earliest the earliest example of an extra biblical reference that survives or that is in our texts today uh there's a lot of qualifications here uh is the the references in josephus's antiquities which was published around 93 ad the question is were those passages in the antiquities when they were published in 93 ad and then the second question is even if you answer the answer is yes the second question is what what sources did josephus use for that other than the gospels and since he's publishing after the gospels and doesn't say anything that's not in the gospels we can't establish that he had any sources outside the gospel so it it doesn't corroborate the new testament it's just repeating the new testament um and so and that's what we find for the rest of after that you get to tacitists with tonius and so on um we're in the same conundrum we can't establish that they had any sources other than the gospels uh or even that they wrote the things that supposedly they wrote so uh it's problematic let's put it that way it's obviously there's a whole debate we can have on any one of those passages much less all of them gotcha and jonathan if you do want to add you can this is something that we can if you guys want to banter back and forth too i agree yeah yeah you know once again uh you know we see a strong allusion uh a reference in tacitists uh obviously the josephus uh citation is uh highly disputed uh within the community um obviously there's a jewish nomadic sources that uh refer to a jesus as a sorcerer uh and then obviously there's the gospel publication so um you know once again um you know we could probably spend hours on this discussion yeah um you know the the focus here was really on uh yeah you know the the resurrect because yeah and now dr carrier has his views i obviously have mine but uh this could be a three-hour discussion yeah yeah in fact like i can circle it back to our topic um i don't i guess i didn't say this but this whole time in the written debate here i'm operating from just the granted assumption that there was a historical jesus like i'm not even that's not even part of my argument um but i'm fine with like conceding that for the sake of argument uh you know it's that's not a problem for me um and also like i even officially i come to a one conclusion it's one in three odds that there was so it's like it's low but respectable odds anyway uh that there's a historical jesus but um if you change the question from evidence for jesus to evidence of the resurrection now it changes because only the josephus the highly-disputed josephus passage uh the testimonium flavianum only that mentions the resurrection tacitus never mentions it swatonius never mentions it plenty never mentions it the first time we get any outside source mentioning it would be calces and he's clearly just repeating with the god he's he's just ragging on the gospels he got a hold of these gospels and he thought they were ridiculous and he wrote this whole screed against the gospels he has no other sources uh so um so when it comes to like the resurrection claim it's clear there wasn't any outside information it only came from christians uh and and no there was no other way to corroborate or check that and i think that applies to what we were talking about earlier jonathan would say that there must have been some sort of records even though no one quotes them and i'm saying it doesn't look like there even were uh and even if there were they were lost by the time the second century comes around um so so that that's what we're disputing here and that has to do with the resurrection claim specifically so if you just assume historicity and just question whether the what something to do with the resurrection was true then then you get a slightly different answer uh then if you frame it as about the historicity of jesus himself gotcha and next question this is there are a couple of these that are we will uh keep them like central at the same time they're interesting and as other ones that are central come in they had asked and i think this if i remember right dr carrier this is your your doctoral research your dissertation maybe was on it was in roman history am i right okay yeah uh yeah ancient science in the early roman empire perfect and so that must be they know that as well i'm sure because they asked if you have time for a non they said if you have time for this question will you ask dr carrier if he has any favorite books on roman history and they put in parentheses outside primary sources yeah yeah yeah right yeah you mean like scholars scholarly books um oh man i hate questions like this because then like i have a million things in my head and i'm like i don't know where to start so um but so something comes this is very random but it just comes to my head for a variety of reasons is the catapult by tracy real i highly recommend this book it's a thick book it looks scary but she's witty she's british so you know everybody from britain apparently is witty uh and very erudite and the reason i bring this up is uh she talks about the history of the catapult she starts like ancient greece and goes all the way up into the roman period and slightly into the middle ages so it covers some roman history but a lot of and the interactions also between greek and roman history is very important but she covers all angles of the history of the catapult not just the technology not just the science but also the sociology the anthropology uh the politics so her book kind of like touches on every aspect of history of the greeks and romans all the way through but connects them in some way or another to the catapult it's a technological weapon uh and this and she's a really excellent writer that's the other so it's this fascinating her thoroughness in covering all angles of history on one subject and her brilliance as a writer uh i aspire to like i i i'm not at that level i don't think like that's kind of like the target i try to hit and i don't get there but but she's one of my favorite historians because like that's a really impressive achievement she did um and so i mentioned that that's one another one i would mention that intersects with what we're talking about today is robin lane foxes pagans and christians now most people hate this book uh because it seems rambling he just goes from topic to topic to topic to topic and you don't see a through line necessarily if you look at it there is a relevant through line uh but it is kind of like let's just say like sample schmarcus board of roman history that connects the difference in similarities between paganism and christianity and their history together uh and in that sense it's really good it's really informative and it's it's kind of like somebody sits down just tells you story after story after story like a storyteller but with references it's like an actual peer reviewed history uh and it's not immediately obvious how the stories connect but if you if you get the whole of them together you see a picture and that's what he's doing he's like painting this sort of picture where there's like all these little things going on on the picture and you have to see all of it to really get what's going on and so i i recommend pagans and christians by robin lane fox if you want to get a really good sort of feel for uh how christian history looks written through the eyes of a someone who's field is ancient history and not theology for example um usually you don't run into that uh so those are two examples that i would list like probably come up with a zillion more if i kept going but gotcha and thanks so much bobby m a question more central to what we've uh had discussed tonight in particular i remember that when this came up uh i was intrigued and they are too they said you mentioned an article who uh you mentioned an article that says that 19th century history is unreliable do you have the title or the best place that i could find it yeah it's a blog article i wrote um it's uh if you look i don't remember the exact title uh history before 1950 so if you do richard carrier history before 1950 google will probably land you there um the other place you could find it is in my book hitler homer bible christ it's actually reproduced in that book um which has a bunch of other has all my peer reviewed uh papers and history and a bunch of other interesting articles so hitler homer is a great a lot of people really like that book so you might be interested in just getting that but either way you could find it um and in that i explained where i got that was one of the first things i was told when i went to columbia university in my dissertation advisor sat me down one of the first things he said is like don't trust history before 1950 it was like he had this whole explanation is like like this is the first thing you need to understand if you're going to be a professional in our field is that 1950 is kind of like this cutoff between when our methods became more professional and reliable before which was more opinion uh it was more driven by ideology uh and and so on and and it's less clearness methodology uh and so there's a lot of bad history written before 1950 not all of us bad but a lot of it is to the point that if you're going to cite someone before 1950 you really need to double check what you're citing them on with more recent history so you need to be able to back up you can't just rely on someone writing before 1950 gotta be able to back it up with something in later history um and there's some few exceptions like philology and stuff but uh i talk about all of that in the article gotcha super interesting and thanks for your question from big boy who asks where uh were women a trusted source in antiquity and they'd like to ask both speakers oh okay well i'm curious what what's jonathan's take on that i think i think was before we went live jonathan and i were talking about i just did an article on empty right and i have we're having a debate over this well not really a debate but in exchange i say something he says something i say something that kind of thing i just did a blog on that whole question um and so and that's recent so you can go to my blog at richardcarrier.info look down a few entries and you'll find it if you want to get in on that but but jonathan what's what's your take yeah you know once again there was the accounts and mark of uh the women's reporting it um obviously you know we're not reporting it right mark says he didn't report it but yeah yeah so the report is that you know there were women uh that had seen him first now obviously i'm not the expert on this field on uh women's testimony in the ancient world sort of familiar with the argument uh i i did see uh and he writes another in podcast but i'll actually defer to you uh on this isn't that my subject area of expertise on women's testimony in the ancient world it kind of seems like even in modern days uh that that could be questioned and some so but i'll defer to you doc carry a little more insight on this subject yeah so anyone who wants to explore that go find my blog and and the argument hinges for people who might not know what we're talking about i just realized we're talking about the meta level here some some of your viewers might not know i mean um their anti-right made the argument that mark would not have invented women and would not have put them in the story of the empty tomb uh because no one would have believed what a woman reported and they would create a stigma it would make his story less believable he should just erase them or replace them with men would be this the idea that writes idea um and and i've pushed back on this like it right said that by the way in a book and then he had a footnote it was with a bunch of references that were supposed to back him up and i actually went and checked all those references and they don't back him up uh and so that that's what started all on this uh and then i went and i clicked it uh all the literature um scholarship and so on on this and found that the story is the other way around now women weren't uh their judgment wasn't trusted there was a lot of sexism obviously uh the assumption that women couldn't like handle difficult intellectual things was definitely a thing uh and that they lacked professional skill at this stuff and so on but that women could honestly testify to what they saw some simple thing like uh there was no body in the tomb uh that's what i saw um there's no evidence that people would distrust them because they were a woman if they would distrust them at all it would be because the story is ridiculous and they were therefore they wouldn't have trusted even a man having said it right so it's not connected to gender when it came to whether someone could reliably testify the things that they saw especially a very simple fact like that but it was something that required technical skill like whether there's a new moon because like that's actually a difficult astronomical question um there's actually in the Talmud look we don't trust women's testimony regarding whether the new moon is begun because that's a technical issue and we don't trust women to have technical skills um which is stupid but that's what they said uh but that's different right that's different than just saying well i saw the moon was dark is like well that doesn't necessarily mean the new moon started just then right so it's like a difference between judgment and testimony uh and and that i think right kind of like plays an equivocation fallacy between those two i think a lot of his argument is is teetering on that particular distinction gotcha and thanks for your question from coffee zealot asked for richard do you think that the Vatican has the key or the in parentheses hidden documents and books to know the truth of the origins of christianity i i doubt it no i i don't think so i i i think if there was anything like that they would have burned it long ago like it wouldn't still be there right uh if if even so no i i i doubt it i'm sure there's tons of really scandalous things that they have records of uh that they're keeping their archives that no one can look at but there would be things from later history not not the origins of christianity i doubt they have anything that we don't know about they would pertain to the ancient world gotcha even though they sort of claim the roman catholic church a secret knowledge uh that appears to be more agnostic in ideology than actual foundation for empirical documentation that they may have so i think that's where the roman catholic church and obviously i i've used that from an angelic perspective in our history but i think it's more of an agnostic ideology uh or infused uh you know it's more mental than any actual documentation yeah and it's most of the documentation is later too so that get evolved over time and so on it's kind of like the freemasons kind of the freemasons have their kind of like secret doctrine that they pass on within the club the vatican has something like that too but most of it was composed or invented late late middle ages or renaissance and later so uh it's not useful for reconstructing ancient history gotcha super interesting and i that just made me think of a question what just because it's related i have to ask i absolutely have to get your guys's opinion both of you is so in rome outside of the vatican allegedly underneath one of the churches i can't remember i think it's the st pierre basilica outside of the vatican is the name of it and allegedly paul is buried underneath and there's an opening where you can see a i guess i'm not sure what the word of her would be coffin you can see like just the end of it maybe a sarcophagus but yeah thanks and and you can see just the end of it and i'm wondering if you have like a probability assessment of like how convinced you would be that that really is the resting place of paul yeah almost not almost certainly not i mean i i've researched the subject massively and i i've not seen any literature on that so um i would have to check because i don't i know there's a lot of like these these sort of made up pilgrimage claims uh all over the world and so i'd have to check but i think if we actually had access to the tomb of paul that would be all over the literature in in the field and it's just not so clearly no one really believes that's actually legit that makes sense thanks for that john and then you have anything to add yeah well i i think relics as an industry in the in the roman catholic church uh kind of fueled what we see in uh saint peters today i mean uh i mean indulgences itself on their teachings were bringing about mass wealth and as a result you know if you have to pay michael angelo uh for that work so and we see that in the relic tradition uh that they do you have stories of uh saint marx body being uh smuggled out uh you know and covered under pigs and supposedly it's in uh you know venice today in your church uh there's only secret catacombs uh but it's really spanned after the kind of uh you know the roman catholic church went through this interesting history of getting uh during the crusades a lot of this really comes up to get people interested in the holy land uh so i don't know your thoughts on that dr carry have you ever explored that part of history yeah no not generally because none of it can be tied to earlier than the fourth century um and so a lot of that is clearly propagandization um so i and and since it can't be linked to any evidence that ties earlier in the fourth century is generally off my radar not the thing that i'm so interested in particularly uh so yeah i haven't extensively researched that stuff i know some of the the pilgrimage um political stuff that was invented in the fourth century and i know a little bit about that but after that i i don't look up this stuff anymore because there's tons of it i mean even the ethiopian church claims to have the ark of covenant right so and india claims to have the grave of jesus uh there's there's a grave you can go to this is the tomb this is the actual tomb of jesus he he actually went to india and died here that's uh that's the thing uh so yeah i think even a desa claims to have the uh and i know ucbis talks about a little bit on uh the the writing to uh uh yes yeah um yeah letter to abg Jesus wrote a letter to abgar a lot of people don't know that no it's actually not true you almost certainly did not but but ucbis believed he did and he had the letter so it's an example of christians for making stuff up i think quite a lot ah super interesting and thanks for your question from humbly questioning they asked for mr sheffield could he confirm that his position is that the romans inability to counter the resurrection narrative is proof that christianity is true or i think they're asking if you wouldn't say it's proof would you say it's a significant evidence or the moderate or even light kind of evidence well in in science we don't have proof we just have probability so we're dealing with the weight of the evidence and i kind of view it in the retrospect of you know the state government has all the power it can subpoena the witnesses uh and what we don't have is an indictment or counter narrative against christianity uh it's everything that i discussed in my debate with dr carrier uh convinceable proof no uh is it consistent uh you know from my perspective i wouldn't say yes when uh we look at patterns uh in the empirical data uh a lot of it from what i see it's it swings one way um so from my standpoint it would be consistent with the idea that the empire was unable to produce a counter narrative to the claims of christianity and you know if we look at the history in the sense of roam did convert uh you know it was converting all over the empire so you know from my standpoint they found the gospel truth gotcha thanks and humbly questioning asked another question that i love that they had clicked on the link for your guys's written debate they asked so they said mr sheffield says quote normal court of law in his blog post could he give is i'm assuming is that in the what you guys have talked about or is that maybe a different post um maybe a paraphrase i'm not sure okay they said could he give an example in the last 30 years of a trial where a supernatural claim was successfully defended well well i you know i i think we got to make a distinction between uh you know the constitutional framework that uh the united states is governed by when we look at the supreme court um you know when you look at uh you know the supreme court against the religious church of the indians uh where you know the state of arizona brought up their sort of smoking laws you know the the united states course is based on the constitution so that's how they're governing so when they made the decision that the state of arizona was violating uh the indians right to use uh i think patote uh part of their religious ceremonies and when arizona sent to yeah peyote you know it's um because they felt the supreme court that it infringed on their constitutional right as a church of the native american people they ruled on that not the divine nature of the peyote plant in itself now if they did it's pretty remarkable uh that uh they ruled that the peyote plant was divine because they ruled in favor of their religious practice but that is the roman uh empire uh did not have such constitutional uh constrained to um and i'm a character dr carter agree with me but yeah i view it more as a police state uh where they kind of have uh more power than our constitutional government in terms of investigation they had a similar thing um you know it's a good point and you're right generally uh they had a similar thing so in english common law or i should guess american common law because it's originated in the pennsylvania colonial court before the constitution um it just became common law that you cannot admit spectral evidence to court it's not accepted uh spectral evidence meaning visions and things that aren't considered um religious sources of knowledge rather than secular sources of knowledge uh so you couldn't go in and say well i had a dream that he committed the murder and you can't present that as evidence right uh or god told me uh like that's not visible as evidence um and the roman's had something similar you it was not admissible in court if it was like had visions like that's not pertinent evidence in this court like we can't do anything with that um i don't think we have it the doctrine specifically spelled out but you there we have tons of uh court cases and case studies from the roman empire and we can tell that it that's never allowed um and they even had like there's there's one case it's not directly relevant but it's it's reflects the mindset of the rationalist mindset of roman legal system uh is when the roman emperors passed laws that gave benefits to doctors so they basically got a subsidy like you can claim a subsidy uh from the state to be a doctor and the idea is that you would you would help the poor or provide some services locally um at a discount and so the state would subsidize you and keep you in place so there'd be a doctor in town that's the whole idea and uh hucksters like quacks and religious healers tried to get in on this uh and and the court rules and this became a standard thing in legal textbooks for the ancient roman's is like uh no no scientific med it's either scientific medicine were that you have to be a legitimate doctor with legitimate training uh you can't come in and claim that you can heal people miraculously that does not qualify for the subsidy we don't accept that uh and so that gives you the sort of rationalist mindset that they had like they if you couldn't give them concrete evidence uh they didn't accept it otherwise and they weren't interested in it otherwise um but the other side is true too uh we have the constitutional reason where the courts are actually forbidden to rule on religious uh disputes um they can dispute they can rule on factual disputes that can be independently assessed with with secular evidence uh but they can't text they they can't rule on whether a religious claim is true or false by itself it's not as prohibited the romans technically could do that they just didn't care right so that's the difference between us and the romans were definitely tyrannical and and there was lots of court abuses and sort of like uh definitely an oppressive police state in a sense um but they their oppression was uh on behavior not belief they just didn't really care about belief and that changed once the christians took over and then you have the middle ages and then it's all about belief and then they're very tightly linking belief to behavior like so you have to suppress belief to prevent the behaviors that it causes that's a doctrine that that was really kind of invented by the christians it wasn't the romans didn't think of it that way it was just like can't you just behave let's please just behave we don't care about what you believe just can you just behave uh and and behave meant you know follow our rules was right so it's not necessarily enlightened uh rules but nonetheless that was that was the difference so so there there's parallels and differences there but um the questioner's question is has a supernatural claim ever been defended in court and succeeded and we really can't i mean the answer is no but we can't infer too much from that because modern courts are prohibited from doing that usually um it would have to be like they're fraud cases for instance they're where someone's doing a miracle act and defraud someone and then there's a factual question as to whether they were engaging in fraud um that the courts can deal with but you have that that's a very narrow subject you'd have to specifically be going after them for fraud and then there has to be the elements of the crime have to be there you can't just be going around claiming you can heal people that in itself is not fraud uh at least it's not it's not recognized as such in court so so it's difficult to find an example that would be relevant to i think the argument the questioner wants to make a better analogy would be the randy prize uh there's a million dollars offered for proof of the supernatural for 50 years if it could survive any science you know any legitimate scientific test and no one claimed the prize in 50 years that's much more relevant uh to uh the point i think the questioner was wanted to make gotcha saw you smiling jonathan if there's anything you were you're thinking no no i think it's good and and dr carrier hit it you know the supreme court the constitution for event uh ruling on that that's why in the case on uh native american church they didn't rule on was a peyote plant divine or not but uh they were afraid the state of arizona was in fridging on its right uh which they considered uh their by preventing use of the peyote plant was essentially preventing uh religious practice by the native american church so no it was a good point dr carrier brought up gotcha and thanks maya asburns for your question who asked dr carrier do you think let me know if i mispronounced this vespas uh the spacey and thank you had anything to do with writing the gospels it's the spasian uh oh i i know what they're talking about they're talking about the at will faces okay uh no i don't believe that if you're really interested i do have an article on joseph at will uh on my blog um i think it's a tinfoil hat theory uh the idea is that the christianity was invented as a as a con to try and pacify the jews it was invented by the romans with a roman elite uh and joseph as a conspiracy josephus and vespasian and titus were all in on it uh and and it's it's a ridiculous theory top to bottom but if you want to know more about it and why i think it's a ridiculous theory top to bottom uh i have an article uh on joseph at will on my blog at richardcarrier.info and you can follow up there gosh i i would have to agree with dr carrier on that point right and i think during our debate on the long ending of mark uh that question came up in the comments um yeah it's common um the joseph at will himself has tons of money so he can market it uh like crazy and has it has a large it's had a large following even since longer than him he didn't invent this theory it's it's called the it's ironically called the piezo conspiracy theory but there there wasn't actual piezo conspiracy theory which was a conspiracy to assassinate nero but but there's this other piezo conspiracy theory that that somehow the piezo family was involved in inventing christianity and it goes back to the i think the 19th century if not earlier so it's been around for all this weird theory has been around for a long time um but joseph at will kind of put a lot of money behind marketing and i think that's why it gets a lot of attention now huh okay cool really interesting and let's see i'm trying to picture like kind of piece together what records that this question might be referring to you guys might be able to i feel like always the speakers are able to they're kind of like the engines are running and and so they usually kind of get it better than i do they said are the records of jesus's time considered unreliable or largely missing that's a vague question um so as a general rule uh first century roman era is better documented than any other first century era so china for example or india or persia we have way more documentation from ancient rome on the other side though we have almost none of the documentation from ancient rome from that period so we have a tiny tiny fraction of it so there's a ton more documentation that existed that just hasn't survived um so so that that question is hard to answer depending on where you're setting the threshold as terms of a lot or a little um and with regard to like judia we have we honestly do have very little in terms of what's called textual evidence as opposed to like archaeological textual evidence means people who were in the know writing about it um we don't have a lot we have josephus we have a lot if you count josephus but if you take away josephus we have very little uh and and that's problem because we're relying a lot on one author's biases and limitations and sourcing and things like that so um there's been a lot of recent scholarship kind of calling into question the reliability of josephus but it's not like josephus's it's not the gospels which i think are completely making stuff up that's my my opinion josephus isn't generally doing that he might make up a few stories but generally he's reporting stuff that he can actually source in some fashion or other um and so he's not completely unreliable but he's not also completely reliable either uh so it's a complex question um there's michael grant i think was michael grant wrote a book called uh ancient ancient historians information and disinformation or information misinformation i can't remember the exact title where his whole book he's a ancient historian his whole book is about this problem that there are no ancient historians that we completely distrust but it's not that we completely distrust them either it's complicated and difficult and takes work to try to extract historical reliable information from the sources that we have you bet jonathan if you want anything to add you can otherwise i'll jump to the next question well you know obviously i look at the first century uh you know the golden age of you know some of the greatest historians you know obviously tacitists has always been you know a huge favorite of mine the works of satonius i mean obviously the turn of the first book writing on that particular period um you know we do have historians and given we all have our biases so obviously you're going to see that in their kind of uh theological makeup or their perspective uh or their vantage point their writing on things but i think we have a collection of some excellent historians writing at the period i mean we look at um i mean tacitists and satonius and impliny Josephius as well uh you know bilo provides a lot of information that kind of helps us put together what that historiographic narrative may have looked like so they provide a lot of information on the period uh that i kind of look at some of the greatest historians probably of all time it really sit around that period writing about the first century so those are really my thoughts you bet thanks so much and also thanks for your question we always love these these like these are juicy this isn't a juicy one ah shi-em thanks for your question ask would Dr Carrier debate Bart Ehrman i know they have some differences regarding the new testament yeah uh no i totally would i i've long wanted to um but he won't uh he's been offered thousands of dollars to debate me and has turned it down um and his reasoning is i'm too rude i think is what he usually i'm paraphrasing i'm not that's not an exact quote um but he won't debate me because i'm too rude i i think really that's code for i caught him lying and and said so i think uh and also i use words like sucks um rather than some sort of stodgy elitist vocabulary that means the same thing uh so it's i use a i speak in the public vernacular i think if he doesn't like that uh and um and he doesn't he thinks i mean and so that's he doesn't want to debate someone who's mean uh that's been his excuse that's what he said uh but no yeah he's turned it down he's i think his last offer was like five grand he was offered to debate me and turned it down so gotcha well maybe someday mahshim maybe not soon though and uh thanks for your question from appreciate it brandon irish who asked how do historians prove the gospels were written so far after the resurrection event well okay yeah jonathan you you can get them up to speed on what the mainstream view is why yeah so once again you know there's been a shift you know at least from my perspective and you know dr carey can weigh on in on this too over the last 250 years which i understand coming not only out of the uh the alignment period but out of the german rationalism the tuba in school uh there was an emerging worldview coming out uh at the end of the 17th and 18th century uh that really started to focus this critical analysis or studies on understanding uh the origins and history of the textual formation of the new testament um i don't bower did a lot at the tuba in school um you know uh greysbach had histories as well so there's there's an emerging view that came out of the german rationalism of the late 18th century that has shifted thought uh against a traditional historical perspective of the ancient apostolic churches so obviously the idea that mark was first uh it's coming out of that particular school of thought uh and historically the documentation uh that we have from the ancient churches those that were uh closest to the apostles and the churches you know have a historical perspective different than this modern school of thought and i know uh dr carey obviously uh it's probably going to lean more towards that view and now in our discussion on the long ending of mark uh you know i'm i'm going to take the historical traditional view and so that's really where the swing is it's on which particular school's thought a world view uh do you trust uh the historicity on uh obviously dr carey has his view i'll let me explain uh mine comes from uh you know the ancient uh polity of the apostolic churches so i'll let dr carey explain this yeah in in scholarship the secular scholarship or even liberal christian scholarship dominant mainstream view is uh that everything follows mark because everything copies mark or copies something copying mark so we know relative dating mark is first um there've been some attempts to argue maybe matthew comes first but the argument if you look at like the philological arguments it doesn't really work i i wish they did because matthew coming first would make way more sense in so many ways um but the actual philological evidence really strongly supports mark the mark and priority and that's been that's become the mainstream view now and uh mark in multiple places not just chapter 13 but in multiple places he's writing a kind of response to and sort of apologetic for why the temple was destroyed in the year 70 so we know he's writing after the year 70 and perhaps close enough that that's still an issue that they have to deal with um and close enough that it was still possible to claim that the end of the world could come any time now and still be within uh what was then believed to be a standard human lifetime or maximum human lifetime they thought the maximum age for human was 120 years um there probably never was anyone that but uh that they thought that that was the if you were to say like what is the longest someone could live they would have answered 120 and so they when jesus said the end is going to come within the lives of those still standing they had to have the kind of this wandering jew theology where there had to be some person who is there still wandering around somewhere it hasn't died yet that's the only reason the world hasn't ended so if you put these kinds of arguments together you can kind of conjecture pretty reliably that mark had to have been written after 70 probably before 100 and that's how that's generally the range that's put in and then we look at later authors you have like luke uh matthew's writing after mark and so it's got to be within five to 10 15 years of mark uh luke is writing probably after matthew although that's there's different arguments as to how that dating comes out but luke there's a lot of scholars agree that luke is relying on the antiquities of josephus for a lot of his constructed material the stuff he's coloring a story with and so that puts him after 93 luke is not mentioned by papias and so some scholars think that maybe that puts luke even later than papias so the range is somewhere between 95 and 130 for luke um some scholars argue around 115 i don't know but but generally we say like let's go as early as possible we'll say 90s let's say 90s and leave it at that but that's not like a super secure conclusion it's just like that's most probably no earlier than the 90s beyond that is hard to really be specific we get the first time we get any dateable reference to the gospels is justin martyr and we know that's like roughly 50s and 60s or 150s and 160s and he's referencing what we know is the gospel the protive angelion of james because he talks about jesus being born in a cave which is a later gospel that's not in the new testament um but it's based on the gospel of luke so we know that the gospel of luke predates justin because he's citing this other book that uses the gospel of luke so it's like all these really complicated strings of inference that get us these sort of ranges of dates we know it had the gospels were probably all written before 150 and after 70 and after that it's kind of wishy washy we can't really be certain because none of them actually say when they were written so unlike a lot of other books by the way it's actually kind of unusual to not have some sort of dateable reference in the book not not completely unusual but it was there was often like josephus talks about when he's writing like what date he's publishing on and stuff like that so um so but no we don't have like that kind of information we just have this sort of whiff sort of in infer based on internal and external evidence what the most likely ranges of dates are and that's the mainstream view um i side with that generally um i allow for the earliest possible dates because i like to argue off for theory which means argue from the stronger argument so i like give historicists the best case possible which is the earliest dates possible and then see what conclusion follows but i also i do suspect the gospels might have been written a little later than a lot of scholars think um so i allow the range to be that 70 to 150 um and then i think uh we know or 140 actually i should say 140 because marcian came out with his canon and 140 we think according to other sources we don't actually know this from marcian himself uh and it's clear that he that luke existed then which means mark must have existed then probably matthew so um so we know that gospels had to have been written by 140 possibly even john we're not sure but certainly by then and then the gospels we have were assembled in a canon that was designed to combat martian's canon so it's actually the second canon the first canon doesn't survive we don't actually have it so it's like there was an original bible it was martian's then there was like the anti-martian bible it's the bible we have today um so anyways complex a lot of issues here um we john and i touched into some of this in our last debate if you go back that's a much longer debate had many entries written uh on and each is 1100 word entry me him me him me him it kind of goes back and forth like that on the long ending of mark and you can find that on my blog and you can go through it and it touches on a lot of scholarship the footnotes and things and so if you really want to look at that uh that's one place to go and another one i suggest is my article um three things to know about the new testament or the new testament manuscripts i think they say but um so on my blog you can just look for three things new testament and you'll find it and i just go through three things you should know about the new testament and one of those things relates to this what we're talking about here gotcha thanks so much both of you and last question we won't have to we won't ask you to uh give a defense of whether it be yes or no but the top tier scholarship thanks for your uh question the only reason i say that is just because we were getting close to being out of time we're basically at that limit and they said is the trinity a pagan roman concept and then they shouted ultra test ultra test i don't know if i think it's ultra testosterone abbreviation oh okay i'm confused sure oh oh that's like a reference it's a joke as with commercials but anyway yeah um no jonathan what's your take on that i'm curious well you know it's interesting because throughout the historical writings um and we can see this very early on uh it's especially in tutu union against proxies uh it appears that tutu union is actually responding against a very early subbellious type uh kind of unitarian uh type view of the trinity um where you know there is no trinity uh and tutulian is giving some sort of perspective on that that we're able to see some reference to the tutulian to the trinity in his works uh we know novation um spent some time on this issue uh and obviously uh this was an issue especially we're wrong because uh subbellious was a friend of the pope uh so kind of think that he was in on it as well uh but you know the the major issue really doesn't come up and and for me uh the the trinity uh the discussion with arias being excommunicated or thrown out of the church of alexandria by his bishop alexandria it's really what sparked uh the discussion at nicaea uh on that particular issue now um i i look at the arias as particularly believing in the trinity but uh they understood a time when god did not exist or christ did not exist which would make him uh another god so essentially you created three gods uh subbellious understood it you kind of uh manifestations of god but it's only one um i think the issue in the east and i'd like to hear dr carrier's opinion on this too was a little different thing what happened at the council of carthage in 484 uh by the vandal king when the north african church was responding i i think the issue in the west and the east were a little different and we see different responses coming out of the church uh obviously i know that there's large groups that you know maybe hold to a theological evolutionary development of it but i'd like to hear dr carrier's thoughts coming as well yeah to get to the i'll start with the questioners i think what they're getting at is does the concept come from paganism and i think there might be a confusion as to what trinitarianism means so uh there were lots of trinities in the sense of threes so like the capital line triad was like a foundation of roman empire was the three gods who were the the core gods of rome which was juno uh juno jupiter and mars uh and queerness but uh no it's queerness but um which is Romulus but anyway so there's this capital line triad was kind of like the core three and there's lots of like Egypt has this these kinds of this is not what christianity means by the trinity ironically they mean the opposite of that which is unity uh they mean there's three things in one that it's all once they're the same thing they're not three different things um and so that's a very specific doctrine now the idea that many things could be one thing not specifically three but many things could be one thing is pagan that that predates christianity it was actually the heenotheistic trend that we see all throughout Hellenistic religion uh you see it already in Herodotus but you start to see it in later this idea that oh Osiris that's just Bacchus like they're the same god and so that instead of those being two separate gods they're just instantiations or versions of the same god and people sort of like stacking gods up into one god all right and so that everything is one god but just different visages of that god right that concept of doing that was was definitely pagan it was a huge trend that was going up leading up into the roman empire and by the time of the roman empire everybody was doing it everybody would have understood it um and but that's not specifically trinitarianism actually trinitarianism is kind of a weird doctrine that's born more out of in my opinion politics than than theology or culture um the best account i ever read about this was Bart Ehrman uh he wrote the book how jesus became god and in like the last chapter or two he quickly goes over the council of nicaea and what happened there and how the nicene creed specifically came to be created and he shows very well like very elegantly and quickly that it was politics it wasn't really like they're basically creating this illogical doctrine for political reasons in order to have a sort of litmus test to include and exclude the people they wanted to include and exclude and so they were taking all these different church ideas and combining them into one thus declaring that these churches we accept and the ones who don't drink this kool-aid we don't accept basically is that that's what happened so it's kind of like a really bizarre unique event in history that doesn't really have precedence it's just a weird thing that happened for political reasons in that particular historical circumstance and that's the trinity that's what trinitarianism means when christians will say like some will do but that christian doesn't believe that trinity isn't a real christian so jojoba's witnesses aren't real christians marmens aren't real christians etc um this obsession over that concept of trinitarianism that's nicene that's actually an invention of the nicene council and it's probably unique in history it's just a weird doctrine if you go back like to the origins of christianity we look at paul for example paul understood there this there was there was god there was jesus and there was the holy spirit there these three entities existed but he didn't see them as identical like jesus is a created angel he's actually a subordinate to god and they he god bestows certain powers onto jesus and they can kind of like there's a certain overlap of who they are but they're not identical and the holy spirit is kind of like the body through which god interacts with the world so it's they're not identical but they're also not separate right you know what i mean so that was there then you get to john and you have finally the merger of jesus and god where they're saying well they're the one and the same they've always been since the beginning of time there's actually precedence and judaism for that this idea we see it in phylo phylo talks about the fundamental original man pre adam not adam but it was like this the fundamental and he is described as an archangel of many names it's the creator of the universe is this archangel but phylo talks about it as if it was kind of an emanation of god and therefore in a sense identical with god it's kind of like a part of god it's the way phylo would probably describe it it's like one of the components of god uh and and in a sense also maybe a body through which god acts right so um so it's kind of trinitarian but the holy spirit hasn't been folded in yet so like john isn't john is writing something that fits within jewish theology but it's still not the trinitarianism the nicene pre and you see it evolve over time and and the course it takes is more based on politics and historical happenstance it's not they're not just borrowing ideas from the pagans on this in this case the pagan ideas are very different um there are certain similarities and overlap but they weren't it wasn't like that what the concept of trinitarianism that we're talking about here um that's my view on it that's that's my take on the trinity you bet thank you both and also want to say thank you to so many people thanks for the mods out there appreciate you all of your help it means it means a lot you have no idea and want to say thanks for hanging all of us just watching tonight folks hope you enjoyed it and as i had mentioned before if you don't know about it i have put the links of both of these speakers down in the description and right below their personal links i have put the link to where you can hear or i should say read as they're you could say prequel or kind of the beginning of this debate has started in written form and so you can go there right now in read more so want to say thanks so much doctor carrier and jonathan it's been a true pleasure to have you and thank you question doctor carrier do you still want people to come out to your blog and write comments because yeah on our debates like because that's the rule you want is anybody who has a polite relevant comment posts that's not normally i'm more restricted as to who can comment on my stuff but for our debates yes it's open commenting is just people just be polite and relevant that's all i ask you bet absolutely so we highly encourage you to do just that at those links below folks and want to say one last time thanks so much for our speakers and with that folks keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable take care and have a great weekend