Welcome back to Knowing the Truth with Pastor Kevin Bolling. Information regarding the resources referenced on today's program can be found at www.knowingthetruth.org. Now here to continue with today's program is Pastor Kevin Bolling. Welcome back into the second half of the Knowing the Truth radio broadcast today. Next up on our list is a discussion with Jay Warner Wallace about his book called Cold Case Christianity. It looks very interesting. The subtitle of it is A Homicide Detective Investigating the Gospels. Jay Warner Wallace is a cold case homicide detective He is now an author and a case maker is the way it's listed out on the website And by the way, when I say the website, let me give it to you right here up front because it's very well done It's got a lot of information on the website. You can watch some Videos out there. There's some podcasts out there resources and More information about the author than I can share with you at the beginning of the broadcast today. The books are out there and so forth. So that website is www.coldcasechristianity.com. That's www.coldcasechristianity.com, and you can go out there and find out about his books. The one that we're talking about primarily today is Cold Case Christianity. He's also got another one out called Alive, A Cold Case Approach to the Resurrection, which, of course, in this time period that we find ourselves in, is going to be certainly an important book as well. With that, Jay, I'm going to go ahead and refer to you as Jim, if that's okay, but Jim, welcome to the Knowing the Truth radio broadcast today. Thanks for having me Kevin. Yeah, of course. We called me Jim. That's great. Okay, Jim Tell us a little bit about how it is that you came to write a book like this give us a little bit of your background and and Why you said, you know, this would be a great approach for us to use in looking at the the Word of God in general Well, I was a very committed atheist until I was about 35 and during that time I was pretty skeptical and actually I I think pretty obnoxious to my Christian friends who I was working as a detective with. I was working investigations, working mostly robberies at the time. By that time, at least, I had done a number of interviews and had started working a number of investigative cases, so I had some idea of how to assemble cases, the nature of evidence. Many years prior to that, although I'd been very skeptical and very disappointed, with the Christians that I knew who, if you asked them simple questions, especially the police officers that I knew who were Christians, if you asked them questions about why they thought Christianity was true, they, for the most part, gave the kinds of answers that we would never accept as officers, the very non-evidential kind of answers. And if you probed them too far, they really became rather quiet about how it is they came to this truth claim. So I was often disappointed that the Christians I did know seemed to be so unable to So, for example, you might hear things about their relationship with Christ, their relationship with God. They felt that God answered prayer. Now, at this time, Kevin, I had my dad had remarried when I was very young. He had a second wife. He's an atheist. And I wasn't really surrounded by any Christians growing up. But but his second wife became a Mormon. And so I have six brothers and sisters who are all raised LDS. And so I started to hear responses from my Christian friends that were very much like the responses I got from my Mormon family. very much the same approach to determine whether or not this was true, to determine whether or not that set of scriptures was authoritative or reliable, very much the same approach that my Mormon family would approach me with. At some point, I got interested enough. I was invited to church for many years. I always said no. My wife would go very rarely and would ask me to come. Of course, I was more than happy to go as an atheist. My dad had been doing that his entire adult life. So I felt like, hey, you know, I can go as an atheist, as long as you don't expect anything more than that. But I stepped foot in the first evangelical church I'd ever stepped foot in, for anything other than a funeral or a wedding, at the age of 35. And the preacher there, the pastor, was able to pitch Jesus in a way that intrigued me, just in terms of his ancient wisdom. Not so much about any claims of deity. I would have rejected all that. Any claims of the miraculous, I would have, of course, rejected. You feel like, hey, you know, I was more than interested in ancient wisdom that is from Buddha or Baha'u'llah or, you know, Socrates or Plato or Jesus. And so I purchased my first Bible and started to scan through it, just looking for the kind of proverbial wisdom of Jesus. But the problem, of course, is those are embedded in the Gospel accounts, which to me, as I read through them, I realized, hey, these are folks who clearly believe they saw this stuff. It's not just a set of Proverbs. It's actually a claim about history. And that's very much like any claim about history, if it's a criminal event or if it's a historical event that's non-criminal. I mean, we could apply the same kinds of techniques to this. And so that's exactly what I did. And there's a lot of processes that you might use in working cold cases that I think are very applicable. I mean, cold cases are events in the distant past. We have no living eyewitnesses. good forensic evidence. If we did, it wouldn't be cold. So you've really got to put the case together in a different way, using how you come to understand the value and the power of circumstantial evidence. And when you put together a cumulative of cases, you come to a conclusion about what happened, say, 30 years ago on the night of this murder. Well, the same set of processes, I think, can be used to look at, examine, as much as you can, the clams of Christianity. Well, let's take a look at some of those processes. In section one of the book, you talk about learn to be a detective. And I know our time is limited, but maybe you could say a little bit of something about each one of these 10 steps that you point out in the first section of the book. For instance, number one, you say, don't be a know-it-all. What do they learn there? Yeah, I think part of it is you have to control your presuppositions. And I think what I would have said is that as a philosophical naturalist, as an atheist, I would have had a presupposition that nothing supernatural is true. Nothing supernatural happens. There are no miracles. There are no people who rise from the dead. You can't walk on water. These are things I would have said out of hand or impossible to be true. Now, if what we're examining, though, is a case in which we're asking the question, does the supernatural exist? God, we can't enter with the presupposition that the supernatural doesn't exist. We have to at least suspend our presuppositions long enough to look at the evidence. to see if that's in fact the case. That's very common in criminal cases also. If you can't walk in thinking you know what kind of a suspect would account for this evidence before you even look at all the evidence or the first little piece of evidence, you think, okay, this is the kind of suspect we're looking for. It's not always the case. And I've even provided an example of how I was fooled once by, by that kind of presupposition. So you have to be very careful. And I think that the big takeaways that for people who are, We've been looking at the same evidence for 2,000 years. Lee Strobel, who wrote my foreword in the book, and I have a very similar background. What is different about Cold Case, I hope, is that I'm able to give you not just what's the evidence, but how is it you ought to look at the evidence. What is it we do? What's the process we use when we look at evidence? I think one of the more important chapters in this book is really understanding the nature of what people refer to pejoratively as evidence. You hear a case on the East Coast or on the West Coast and someone describes it on TV and says it's going to be tough to try that case. It's just purely circumstantial. It's just a circumstantial case. Well, the reality of it, of course, is that all criminal cases, the vast majority, are just circumstantial. We don't always have eyewitnesses who can come in and say, I saw him do that. That's called direct evidence. But anything else falls into what we call indirect evidence. And this is how we make cases. Indirect evidence is also called circumstantial. And what we're really saying is, hey, could I ever know something to be true with something short of a living eyewitness that could be cross-examined? And if we said, no, I've got to have a living eyewitness that can be cross-examined, well, most skeptics, when it comes to religious claims, would say that that witness. If somebody was to testify about something, they wouldn't trust that witness anyway. But the reality, of course, is we've got an event that's so far in the past, we don't have any living eyewitnesses. And I hear a lot of people say, well, you couldn't trust the Gospels. These folks are not available for cross-examination on the stand the way they would be on a criminal trial. Well, of course they're not available. But if that's the case, you couldn't trust any historical record because you wouldn't have access to the original eyewitnesses for cross-examination. We clearly have to have a different standard. for historical events than we have for criminal cases, or you wouldn't really be able to trust anything past, say, your grandparents because you have no one to ask. That's the problem, I think. We have to be realistic and understand how evidence comes together. That's why I try to give them the book as a template and then turn a corner with it in the second half and say, hey, if this is how we process evidence and how we work evidence, do we have anything like that? supporting the Christian worldview, and if we do, what does it really tell us? What's the most reasonable inference? Now, but again, Kevin, it's going to require us first to suspend our presuppositions against the supernatural, because that's the very thing we're trying to investigate. We can't go in with that presupposition. Right. I come from a presuppositionalist viewpoint, you know, when I talk about apologetics, but I do see the value in looking at the evidence. And I make this case especially a lot of times around the time of the resurrection when we see the reaction of the apostles as one of the strongest pieces that I point to. as to that these men and women were willing to die for what they saw and what they were claiming. And so this tells us something. So you give 10 different parts of this process. Let me just read it for our listening audience, because I know we're just not going to get a chance to go through all these. But the 10 parts here are, don't be a know-it-all, number one. Two, learn how to infer Think circumstantially. Test your witnesses. Hang on every word. Separate artifacts from evidence. Resist conspiracy theories. Respect the chain of custody. Know when enough is enough and then prepare for an attack. I just want our listeners to understand that this is going to be a thorough course, a mini course, in how to be a detective, and this is just learning to be a detective, just section one in the book, so that you understand how thorough you're going to be able to understand this process when you get a copy of this book. Now let me just remind the listening audience very quickly that we're talking with Jay Warner Wallace about his book, Cold Case Christianity. You can go out to his website at www.coldcasechristianity.com in order to get a copy. Also, we have the phone lines are opened up, 1-888-660-WLFJ. That's 1-888-660-WLFJ. Be happy to take your question or comment via the phone line if you want to call in quickly during the broadcast today. By the way, that number, again, is a toll-free number. It's good nationwide, 1-888-660-WLFJ. That's 1-888-660-9535. Be happy to take your question or comment that way. Jim, as we're looking through this, then, rather than me going down the list and getting you to comment on every one, let me let you pick out just one out of the rest of those ten that you think are the most egregious that Christians would overlook when looking at the evidence. Yeah, I think one of the things I really enjoy talking about when I travel around the country on this is how we reason through something and determine that something is reasonable. You know, every possible piece of evidence that could be dug up. Can we make a decision when we have unanswered questions, for example? This is something we do every day in criminal trials. There's no such thing as a complete case in which every question is going to get answered. They just don't exist. You're never going to have that. We even talk to jurors before we begin to make sure they understand that there will be some modest limitations that we can provide for you, especially when... By watching television, you might think that there's any number of crazy CSI scientific approaches we could take, much of which are purely fiction. We've got to really help people to see what's reasonable. One of the things I try to teach in the book is something that we all do intuitively, whether we think about it or not. It's called abductive reasoning. We use this. It's also called inferring to the most reasonable inference. And really, this is something we do every day. But how it applies in criminal scenes is when you walk in a room and you've got a person lying on the floor who's dead, there's four ways you can die. Only one of those is a homicide. The other three could be natural, accidental, or a suicide. We've got to look at the evidence in the room and then make a decision about which of the four possible explanations is most reasonable in light of the evidence we see. So if we walk in and we find that someone's been stabbed in the back multiple times and there's bloody footsteps leading away, Well, we can safely kind of cross off suicide and natural and accidental, and we can infer that the most reasonable conclusion is that he had been murdered. And we do this all the time, even with our kids when they come home and they offer us an excuse of why they're ten minutes late. We start to look at the evidence, and then we kind of assess what the possible explanations are, and we decide which one's most reasonable. Well, we do the same thing when we look at the Christian worldview, for example, in the resurrection. We have Easter coming up, and that's kind of what Alive is. Alive is just one chapter of cold-case Christianity on the abductive reasoning issue, and we try to produce it in a way that you can give it away as a tract. The idea is, hey, if you've got a question about Jesus and the resurrection, this little booklet should help you be able to make the case to your friends. You can learn it, and then you can give it away. price to give away like a tract. It's very small. And so the idea here is that we would take the same abductive reasoning approach to the resurrection. We know that there are several pieces of evidence in the room. We've got an empty tomb. Very few people would deny there was an empty tomb. We've got the fact that Jesus, you know, even the most skeptical historians like a Bart Ehrman would not say that Jesus never lived or he wasn't crucified. So we have a crucifixion of Jesus, an empty tomb, And like you said, we have the utter transformation of the original eyewitnesses who at least claimed they saw the risen Christ. Not to believe it's true yet, but they at least claimed it. If all we have were those three little pieces of evidence, and there's lots more, but if that's all we had, then we could look at the possible explanations. I think I provide like seven in the book. only one of which is the Christian explanation. So we're going to go back and forth between the evidence and the explanations and see through this process of abductive reasoning which one is more reasonable. And it turns out, Kevin, if you just will drop any presupposition you have against God's existence, against the supernatural, then this becomes the most reasonable inference. Every other explanation has five, six, seven problems in making the case. Our explanation has one. Now, as an atheist, I would have said that was the deal killer. The problem is that it requires us to drop our presuppositions toward the supernatural, and I was unwilling to do it. But when you stop and think about it, that's the whole investigation. That's the thing we're trying to figure out. We can't walk in with this in our hand. We have to put it aside for a second to look at the evidence. Then you realize, wow, that's the one thing that's keeping you from from ever embracing this reality, and it seems to be the lesser of many evils, considering all the other alternative explanations. I should tell the listening audience that as you're reading through these explanations of the process of being a homicide detective and using that process then to look at the Scriptures itself, that Jay Warner Wallace builds in other cases, homicide cases. For instance, you just pointed out that one, if you were to walk in the room with a knife in the back and so forth. But other ones like that are woven into the way that he explains these principles. And so for folks that like a good murder mystery, And I want to see how that relates to what he's talking about. You're going to get a lot of that as you go through the book as well. Section two deals with the subject of examine the evidence, applying the principles of investigation to the actual claims of the New Testament. And so he does this then in four or five chapters. here in the second half of the book. Were they present, he asked? Were they corroborated? Were they accurate? Were they biased? These types of questions, then, are asked as they examine the evidence of the New Testament claims. Say a word, if you would, please, about that section of the book. Yeah, sure. This is one of the ways we have to... I mean, this is a claim that we're being offered on the basis of an account written down, supposedly, allegedly, by the ancients who actually saw Jesus. Now, if that's the case, we've got to test it, because I would never accept an eyewitness account or a witness account of any kind without testing my witnesses. I mean, you'd be a fool to take someone's word for something and put them on the stand just to have the defense team beat the tar out of them in front of your jury. So I think we have to be very careful about putting witnesses on the stand. So we use a template that we actually offer jurors. Usually here in California, we have 14 questions in the jury instructions that are allowed to be considered by jurors as they're listening to eyewitnesses on the stand. And I would use the same template. It breaks down into four large categories, as you mentioned. And so we're really asking simple questions. Was the witness really there? Were these documents written early enough to have been written by eyewitnesses? If they appear for the first time 150 years after the event, then they're not really eyewitness accounts. You might argue, well, they contain some oral tradition. Well, OK, fine. But really, the further you get away from the account, the more likely you have a lie or error or exaggeration because there's no one still living who could tell you you were wrong. So the closer we can get the accounts to the actual time of the events, the more reliable they're likely to be. Two, you have to think about, well, gosh, every eyewitness, I'm going to corroborate in some way. Now, corroboration does not mean I have a video of everything the suspect did. Sometimes it's one small piece, a fingerprint that corroborates that he was there at least. So that fingerprint won't tell me a lot of detail about what he did while he was there. It might tell me something, but not everything. It can't tell me, for example, what he said. So corroboration has to be recognized that all corroboration is always going to be limited. But do we have that kind of corroboration for the accounts? Of course, I'm offering. evidence from archaeology, evidence from ancient non-Christian accounts of both Jewish non-Christian accounts, pagan non-Christian accounts. I'm also offering internal evidence of geography and the use of proper names, proper nouns in the scriptures related to the region. So there's lots of ways to kind of corroborate the touchpoint corroboration of the accounts. And the third thing is going to be, hey, have they changed over time? I was always suspicious that Somehow, this account started off with the simple Jesus as a sweet guy who teaches some wise things, and by the time you get 300 years later, this guy's walking on water and rising from the dead. It's just this kind of elaborate legend that starts to grow around Jesus. So can we check that? Of course we can, because there's a chain of custody over the years in which this story is transmitted, and we can stop and see what the thing says, from the very first set of believers to the very first set of their students, all the way through history. And the last thing, of course, is Is there a bias on the part? Is there some reason? Can you say, look, bias is all about motive. Are these folks motivated by something? There's only three motives behind any crime, only three motives behind any sin. If they're lying, it's only for one of these three motives. So it's pretty easy to assess somebody to say, well, look, Are they properly motivated to tell me a lie? It's not that hard to assess. So I'm looking at those four areas. Those four broad areas are how we, as best as we can, how we judge eyewitness reliability. If these Gospels pass in those four areas, then we really have to kind of consider, What do we do with it? What do we do with the story of Jesus if it passes in every possible way you could possibly examine it? I was somebody, Kevin, who like you, I kind of share a mix of definitely lean more toward evidentialism because of my job, but I also understand the power of presuppositionalism. Your presuppositions will dictate everything. So I look at this and I say, okay, what I just needed as an atheist I needed somebody to knock down the walls that I had constructed before I would ever give you a hearing. And so once I give you the hearing, then of course lots of other issues come into play. How God works in our lives comes into play. how God works in our minds and our ears comes into play. The point is that I had constructed a bunch of junk in front of that that I needed to have knocked down. This investigation helped me to knock that stuff down. That's what I hope to do with this book. God can use all kinds of things, but I knew that the very same approach I took for Christianity. I took simultaneously with Mormonism because they had so many Mormons in my family and the very same process that would give you great confidence in the Gospels will pretty much destroy your confidence in the Book of Mormon. So you have, you know, this approach is actually something you can take to judge any system And I think it does indicate, it paves a road for us, Kevin, all the way to the cross. Yeah, I think that it's a great approach that you're using here. You know, we need to know what we believe and why we believe it, and we can't be afraid of the evidence afterwards. You know, we have to be able to give an answer about what we see there. It should be consistent with what we're saying, and we should be able to show that consistency with what we're saying. I use a simple outline when I preach about the resurrection. I have used it over the years, but I talk about it being, first of all, prophetically predicted. And so I go back and look at that this wasn't something that just happened in a vacuum, but it was actually spoken about before it actually took place. And then I talk about, and this would fit into what we've been discussing, that the resurrection was credibly confirmed by those who were there during that time period, and all of those ways in your book that you look at the evidence and the witnesses and so forth. And then the last point I bring out is that it's been eternally experienced by believers down through the years, that as other people have been brought to that the knowledge of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. They also have bore witness to the fact in their life that believing in that has brought about a massive seismic change in their life now from being, as with your case, from being atheistic to believing in God and trusting in God. I wanted to give you the final word. We only have a minute or so left. I'm so glad you said that. You made a great point, Kevin, because what you just said in that three-point outline is so critical, and the centerpiece of that that has been confirmed. That's something that's so powerful, because look at it this way. Why would I trust that these events actually occurred and fulfilled the prophecies you mentioned first, if I can't trust that the documents are recording real events and they aren't just inventions from people who wanted to make it look like there was fulfilled prophecy? And how can I know, on the third point you made, that this thing I'm experiencing is true? Because there's millions of Mormons today who would say they are experiencing a true experience of God that's grounded in the Book of Mormon. Now, we would say, well, wait a minute. I mean, this centerpiece about how we make a case for what we believe actually ends up impacting your first point and your third point, because we could be mistaken about our experiences, and we could be mistaken about what Scripture points to if we don't have trust or confidence in what's been written in the eyewitness account. So that's what I hope to do with Cold Case, is to provide you a tool set that you can not only judge your faith in Christianity, but you can also measure alternate views. Mm-hmm. He's got a great little tagline here that says moving from belief that to belief in and that's where we're going to belief in and trusting in and resting upon the credibility of God's Word and even beyond that to resting upon the credibility of Christ himself to save your never-dying soul and to bring you into a glorious relationship with our Father in heaven and Excellent job, Jim. We really appreciate your approach. I've got to look on your website here to see if you're going to be in the Greenville area at any time. I am. I'm always in North Carolina, probably more than anywhere else, but I'm always pretty close. So I hope to see you soon, Kevin, and thanks so much for the opportunity to talk to you today. Well, great. When we find out you're going to be close, we've got to see if we can't get you here to the Greenville area. I think it would be well-received by a number of folks here. That would be awesome. Jim, thanks so much for visiting with us today and for putting this together. We really appreciate it. Thank you. We've been speaking with J. Warner Wallace. His book is called Cold Case Christianity. You can go out and get a copy of that for yourself. It's published by David C. Cook. But the website to find out all the information is www.coldcasechristianity.com. That's www.coldcasechristianity.com. And you can go out there to find out, as I mentioned, podcasts, videos, more about the author and his books. Get out there and check it out, especially here before we celebrate the resurrection. You can get a little copy of that book, Alive, that's out there as well. Tomorrow on the broadcast we'll be talking with World Magazine and we'll be specifically looking at the downfall of Doug Phillips from Vision Forum Ministry. You won't want to miss our discussion about that. Remember Jesus said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. We'll see you next time. You've been listening to Knowing the Truth with Pastor Kevin Bowling. Knowing the Truth is the outreach ministry of the Mountain Bridge Bible Fellowship located on Highway 25 in Traveler's Rest. For more information about the church and radio ministry, visit us on the web at knowingthetruth.org. The opinions expressed on today's program are those of the announcers, their guests, and callers, and do not necessarily represent those of the staff and management of his radio network, the Radio Training Network, or Clear Channel Communications.