You welcome. Thank you so much

for joining us. On today's episode, we wrestle through the

question, the really important question of can we trust what the Gospel

writers say about the fact that Jesus tomb was

really empty? My name is Paul Brandis and I serve as the campus

pastor at our Shawnee campus. And I'm Bill Gorman and I serve as the campus

pastor at our Brookside campus. And we are so glad you've joined us today on

the Form Life podcast, where we're all about helping you connect your faith to all

of life. Connect Sunday to Monday. Yeah. And this really

is a Monday question. In one Corinthians chapter 15, the Apostle

Paul says, if Jesus's resurrection didn't really happen, then we are

to be pitied more than all people. And so this really connects

to our Monday lives. And I think we see that as we

get into the episode here with our guests on the episode,

which is such a joy to connect with Dr. Craig Blomberg. Dr.

Blomberg is currently Professor Emeritus at Denver Seminary.

He served there since 1986 and has had an incredibly

distinguished career at Denver Seminary. He received his PhD

in New Testament at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

He specialized in the parables of Jesus and the writings

of Luke Acts. But across his decades long career,

dr. Blomberg has worked in the whole of the New Testament and

has done some very specific work on the Gospel of John,

which has been, of course, our teaching series for several months here at Christ community.

Yeah. And specifically, his work on John has focused on the historical

reliability can we trust these new documents, the New Testament documents,

as historical, not just sort of theological or made up stories,

but actually pointing to events that happened in history. So it's a great

conversation. We're excited to jump in now. Let's do that.

Well, Dr. Blomberg, thanks so much for joining us today. It's a

real pleasure for me to get to have this conversation with you. Back when I

was in Bible college, I got to use many of your works and first

encountered some of your work on the historical reliability of the Gospels.

And so it's just a joy to get to share this conversation

with you today. Thank you for having me.

Well, we know that you have been studying

and writing about the historical reliability of the Gospels and even in

particular have written a whole commentary on the historical reliability of the Gospel

of John in particular, which we and the church have been studying that Gospel together.

So you've been doing that as part of your academic career for many years.

But I'm curious, just as we start this conversation, how did you

first come to trust in Jesus and the reliability

of the Gospels and the hope of the Resurrection for yourself? What's a

little bit of that journey for you? I was raised in

mainline Protestant church, but I really

consider my coming to faith the

experience I had at age 15 when

my best friend in high school invited me to a Campus

Life Youth for Christ Club. And it was really the first time

that I saw kids my own age and even

a year or two older who

seemed to have something different

about them. And they attributed it

to a relationship with

Jesus, not something they recited

in Sunday morning liturgy, but actually made

a difference in their lives. And I

thought, having grown up and being confirmed that

I was a Christian, but I wanted what they had.

So I prayed that Jesus

would give that to me. Wow.

And it wasn't some

overnight miracle, but it was really more

once I realized that

these same friends were avid Bible readers

and students of the Bible,

and they would say they read a little bit

of it most every day, which was not something that

had been part of my experience. And that,

I would say, really began the greatest

amount of transformation in my life.

I had a background that combined

some skepticism for the

full trustworthiness of the Gospels in the domination

I was brought up in, which was not mirrored

in the parachurch movement.

So I continued with

both of those into the college years, going to

a strong academically strong undergraduate

liberal arts college associated with loosely

associated with the church I had been raised in and

discovered consistent and much

more skeptical approach to what

we can know about Jesus. Only a

minority of even the Synoptic Gospels and almost

nothing of the Gospel of John was treated as

reliable. And at the same time I got involved a

Campus Crusade for Christ chapter where the Leader

was well read theologically and

was able to point me to a lot of resources and how

to hunt for resources in a pre internet world that

were very helpful in responding to what I

got in class and the case

for reliability. Little by little won out over what

my profs were trying to teach.

Yeah, that's incredible. And then you did eventually go on

to sort of pursue this in your

graduate work. It's true.

Like many, maybe most all PhD students

had an idea for a

dissertation that was far too broad. And my

supervisor worked with me to narrow

it down to something manageable. And he had seen that I had done

work in my master's thesis on parables and suggested that

would be a good place to continue. But one

of several things that I did then was very much

to address the question of whether we have

to dissect the parables into parts that go

back to Jesus and later theological overlay that

the church subsequently added in.

So I was able to come at that

interest, at least in that one group of Jesus

sayings, yeah, well, as. A church,

I love hearing that story and how that

parachurch organization helps you to come fall in love. With Jesus and

then able to then to use those scholarly gifts that you've been given to

help enrich the church in a number of areas.

And so as we've been thinking about the Gospel of John, we preached

the story of the resurrection in Mary Magdalene's

encounter with Jesus in John, chapter 20. In subsequent

weeks at the time of this recording, we've also been looking at some

of the other resurrection appearances in the Gospel of John to

the group without Thomas and then to Thomas and eventually

to Peter and the others on the beach. But I wonder, as we

think about the Mary story in particular, what are some of the features

of some of that encounter with Jesus and Mary that

would lend us to think this is not someone just making this up,

but we actually have there as eyewitness testimony. Of a historical

event as he does

pretty consistently. When John

does overlap and talk about something that

also appears in one of the other gospels, there's very

rarely more than

three to five words together in common.

And one of those is probably and another one is

the. So it's hard to

make a case for any kind of literary dependence

with John like you can with Matthew, Mark and Luke,

which means that at least at that level,

he is an independent testimony.

And we see that with Mary because all

the gospels have Mary Magdalene and the

other three have some other Marys. At the tomb.

John describes only Mary Magdalene

being there, but when she

leaves to go talk to the male disciples,

she says, we don't know where they've laid him.

She uses the first person plural to suggest that

she was there with others. But this

winds up being an independent account. It's one that

when she meets Jesus, she thinks

he's a gardener.

Some people have I've seen books that

have up to 100 titles for Jesus

in the New Testament and maybe the 93rd

one is gardener. I don't know. I've never looked. But it

certainly is not on anybody's list of

any common way. This is the only place that

happens. It makes Mary

look foolish. There is

a consistent pattern in the gospels of

people not recognizing Jesus when

they first encounter Him in resurrected form,

which makes sense if his body was that transformed

and glorified. But then there also is always a moment of

recognition, and we see that here when he

speaks tenderly to her and uses Aramaic to

call her by name. But it's just

a combination of things

that don't seem likely to be made up if you were trying to put

the best face possible on the story

and make it the most convincing. Peter and John

run toward the tomb, one outruns

the other. It's almost like they're having a race and one

who gets there first doesn't go in, but the other one does, and he

believes. And again, this is not

complimentary it reads

like testimony of people who knew what happened,

not people who were trying to embellish and

put the best front, put the

best foot forward on something. Yeah. And I know

one thing we even looked at in the sermon, I think you point out in

your commentary on the reliability of John, and that account is

even that we know from some of the other gospels a bit of Mary's story

as one who's had seven demons cast out of her.

And so if you want to put the most reliable story out

there, if you're just inventing this, you're probably not putting a woman and you're probably

not putting the woman who's known to have had maybe

in the best case scenario, people view as like some mental emotional

issues. That's right in there, and yet she's right there.

It'd be easy to dismiss this and say, well, Mary,

she's had all this demon possession stuff. She's so distraught over

the death of Jesus, she's just seeing things, hallucinating things, and yet she's

the one that we find as John. Just make that up. And that's

a recurring feature in all four gospels that

women and different ones are named.

There's no contradiction. It's just that the entire list

doesn't appear in all the Gospels. But Mary Magdalene

is the one constant. And you're right,

you wouldn't make up a story with women

as the first witnesses to the empty tomb.

And then if you're going to make up a fourth gospel

and only have one woman, leave it to the one who had the

worst reputation. Yeah,

I wonder about some other just broadly, whether they're specifically around the

Gospel of John's account or just even broader

to all four of the gospels. Just what are some of the features that you

might point out to someone who is a bit skeptical of the reliability

of the so we talked about the women at the tomb,

but what are some other kind of features of these accounts

and even church history that would make us say it seems like something actually happened

here, that this isn't just a made up story or a fabrication.

Well, you find the same kind of

combination of points of contact, even when

you're comparing Matthew, Mark and Luke,

but you don't find the same degree of

either Matthew or Luke very

closely following Mark. So are

somewhere accessing independent information,

even if it's like in Matthew's case,

from his own memory and from his own experience.

When you get beyond the accounts themselves

and you look into the rest of the New Testament,

you discover things like already

early on, when there are still significant numbers of Jewish

believers, they are worshipping

on the first day of the week,

the Sabbath.

We forget sometimes, as Christians meant

Saturday. It was the 7th day of the week. And so

what would have led Jews to abandon

or violate transgress, one of the

ten fundamental commandments in their

religion and change the day of rest and

worship unless something very

specifically and powerfully transformative

could be dated to a Sunday.

You have things like the apostle Paul highlights

where cursed

is one who hangs on a tree.

The death by hanging had already been determined

by various Jewish rabbis to be similar

enough to the posture of crucifixion that

it was taken for granted that if

someone was crucified, that indicated that they had been cursed

not just by the Roman government, but by God himself.

Wow. Deuteronomy 21 23.

Paul acknowledges this, but then that's

not a defeater for him,

because he says, Paul was not cursed for his

own sins, but for the sins of the world.

But again, why would you make up a

story that would cause you so many problems

in that direction? There are little things you find,

like there's not a single account

that actually describes

the resurrection. You have Christ

being put in the tomb. It's sealed.

Women come the next morning, they're even discussing who

will roll the stone away for us. They don't have to,

it's gone. A guard that had been set there

to prevent that from happening,

we read, were like dead men. They were so shocked by what

happened. They were I suppose today we'd say

catatonic and that's

all well and good, but how did Jesus get out? Did he

push the stone away? Did he now have superhuman strength?

There's a couple of angels that show up. Did they do the

job? Was Jesus in there already? Still in there?

Had he already come out? None of that is ever narrated,

although there is a famous apocryphal gospel, a Gospel

of Peter, that does add a little bit,

but the canonical accounts are very

restrained. Why is

it that Jesus, of all the messianic,

pretenders, the first century Jewish historian Josephus

lists more than half a dozen, all of

whom were executed, and in the cases

of insurrections, their men

massacred, why was it that only

Jesus followers continued?

What was so different?

Yeah, those are really good. And I wonder,

even as you kind of go back to that framing of why

don't we have more about the actual moment of the resurrection itself? We don't get

that narrated. You would think if this was the movement, that the moment you

were going to found your movement on and you were going to make up the

story, you would narrate that moment. Right. You would have full

description of that. And yet what we find is that we just

have what people actually saw and we are left wondering,

we don't know what that moment was like, which doesn't seem like a feature that

you would have if you were constructing a story on

your own. You'd want to have that be this victorious moment that you have all

this detail on. That's really good. Well, I wonder and we've talked a

little bit about some of these already, maybe, but I'm

curious if someone's listening to this podcast

and they're at their workplace or they're with

fellow students at school, that kind of thing. What are some popular explanations

that people give and maybe even some that

your professors back at the liberal arts college that you went to

as an undergrad to why we can't trust these accounts,

or what are some of the things that people might say? Well,

yes, but I read this Dan Brown book.

I read this, whatever it might be.

What about this? How can you answer that? What are some of the common

kind of myths or misunderstandings that you hear about that and what might

be some ways that we could, as followers of Jesus,

helpfully respond to those? I think, today,

and it's not always been this way.

I've been doing this long enough to watch different trends

in different decades. But I

think today the most common reply

for those who don't accept the story is,

well, we know it can't happen.

Resurrections are scientifically impossible.

But that still leaves you having to explain how

such a story arose. And the

typical answer is that there

are other accounts of various kinds

of people who did

not die or were said not to have died,

or who died and then were seen

alive again. In the Hebrew scriptures

you have way back in Genesis, Enoch,

who, as the King James puts it, walked with

God, and he was not for God took him,

leaving almost every question unanswered.

Elijah is caught up into heaven in a chariot.

Elijah and Elisha both raised to

life people in their day, though presumably

they went ahead and died again later,

just like those that Jesus brought to life. But when

you move into the Grecoroman world,

what is often called an apotheosis,

a deification becoming a

god, that was an honor

that people believed was bestowed on leading

emperor, famous general,

a wonderful philosopher,

religious leader after their death.

It does not actually include a bodily resurrection.

It's simply the spiritual

ascent, but sometimes in

visible form, like people say they

see a ghost. And there

are a variety of these kinds of legends.

So surely this

was a way that Jesus followers,

given the culture of the day, wanted to honor

his legacy and concoct this story

of a resurrection, and therefore we

take it, for what it's worth, just another myth.

And so if someone kind of came

bringing that argument and saying, yes.

He. Was raised in their hearts or in their imaginations, they viewed

him as God. And they sort of told these stories to kind of capture this

sort of feeling that they had about him as this great figure who

maybe kind of in some spiritual way or metaphysical

way overcame death but didn't literally rise from the dead. And we

just need to take this. How would you respond to

those claims or kind of that initial kind of framing

of it? Well, I think it's important.

I actually tried in what I just said to

be as faithful to the way

some people who hold that view would phrase things.

But what is often omitted are

the details of some of these, particularly the

Grecoroman parallels.

What is it that you

have the whole ISIS

cult and her husband Osiris,

and you have the god Mithras being caught up,

blended in Roman and Egyptian mythology

put together. And there are people that say,

well, they talk about death and resurrection.

Well, they do annually.

And the death comes as the god

is hacked into pieces in the underworld and

then reassembled the next spring and allowed

to come above ground when the weather is nice. Or maybe that's what makes

the weather nice. You have

to say, is that really a close parallel?

Romulus, the co founder of Rome 700

plus BC was was said to have been

seen ascending into heaven. Well,

yes. Anybody still around who

you can interview who can verify that when

you look for a parallel account

of someone who was known to

have genuinely died?

No debate about that.

And claims of being seen,

heard, touched, felt, presumably smelled

in bodily form.

And the reports of these are written down

in documents within

the lifetimes of people who

knew what happened, and some of them believed

and some of them didn't.

Now, there are actually zero parallels

in the history of the

world and of its mythology and its legends and

so on. And even if you were to say,

well, there's always first time for everything,

it really would be a more plausible theory

if Jesus had been a Greek

or a Roman, if he had been

born in Athens, for example. And then his

message, little by little, traveled and finally made

it as far as Israel and Jerusalem,

where they didn't believe in mere

spiritual immortality, but had this

crazy notion of a resurrected body. Well, okay,

then. Now it fits perfectly. A story that

probably was originally about the spirit

of Christ living on has become embodied.

But that's not the direction the development went. It began

in a place where people knew and believed in resurrection

bodies, but they had no expectation

of a resurrected person

ahead of time before the resurrection of all people at the end

of the age. And then they had

the difficult task of taking that message to other

cultures where the same belief wasn't

shared. If it wasn't a central and

genuine foundational part, let's just jettison

that so we can make it easier for others to believe.

Yeah, just from a mythological

standpoint, you're making it harder to bring this message to the echo Roman world

by having a resurrected physical body there. And I

know Nt Wright, in some of his work on the resurrection,

just even talks about the vocabulary of resurrection means

bodies, that there's other language to talk about ghosts or spirits or

if you wanted to talk about it like that. But to use the language of

resurrection. You're talking about physical bodies

with that vocabulary. That's right.

Richard Carrier, in some of his writings, who's not

a biblical scholar, he's a mathematician, but he's one of

the perhaps most outspoken skeptics

of our day and speaks and writes a lot,

simply starts off his discussion with the resurrection.

And to his credit, at least, he's candid and

honest about his definition. He says, I will use the

term resurrection for any

account of a person, ancient or

modern, who is said to have

been seen in any form apparently

alive after his apparent death.

Well, yeah, that covers everything from ghosts

to goblins to zombies to battles.

Yeah. And it muddies the water and

makes it impossible to see what the uniquenesses

are of the gospel accounts. Yeah.

Well, this has really been very helpful, Dr.

Blomberg, to think through some of these pieces. And I just

wonder as we wrap up here, if there's anything else that you'd like to add

that we haven't touched on yet in this conversation about why we can

trust the accounts in the gospels on

the resurrection of Jesus in particular.

A very different kind of point,

but I think it's an important one, is that

you have, starting right within the New Testament itself

and carrying on to today an

unbroken stream of millions

of people who would say that the

resurrected Jesus has in

sometimes small and others remarkable ways,

transformed their lives. Now,

this is not to deny that conversion to

any religion can have that experience.

Conversion to atheism can have that experience.

The point is more that we

are talking about people who

were the least, the last,

the lost, the social outcast, the nobodies.

For 300 years,

there were only a handful of well

to do people in the Christian church. The church was

not in any position or place of power

in the Roman empire. The first Christian

emperor wouldn't come until Constantine, well into the fourth century.

And so these were people who were persecuted

for their faith. And yet when famine

and drought and plague and other disasters came,

they were pretty much the only ones who risked

their own health and lives to care for the suffering,

irrespective of whether those were suffering

fellow believers or not.

As you continue through church history,

people really in America don't

do enough with history, I'm afraid. We need

to learn how. It was Christians who were at the

forefront of the convictions that led to the study of

modern mathematics and modern science and law

and human rights and education

for the down and out and humanitarian

aid and disaster relief work.

I have had friends who have been among

the first responders to the

victims of earthquakes in almost

exclusively Muslim parts of the world.

And one of the things that repeatedly they say is that

the Muslim leaders themselves acknowledge

that it's Christians who disproportionately come from

all parts of the globe to help out. There are no

relief efforts anywhere, like that kind of scale being

organized by Muslims from other countries.

You go to Hinduism, and the

biggest thing Christianity did was to eliminate

in its mind the untouchable class

caste, the Dalit. The vast

majority of believers in India have come from that because the

other castes consider them nobodies. And that's

built in feature of their religion.

Atheism was responsible for 20 million

deaths under Stalin in the Soviet Union and

how many more under Mao and his Cultural Revolution,

pole Pot in Cambodia and so forth.

These things are sometimes conveniently ignored. The Crusades

not to defend them, but are a drop in the bucket

compared to some of the atrocities and genocides of

recent years, disproportionately caused

by communist atheism.

So a little bit of history helps

us see what an amazing difference belief in the

resurrected Jesus has made for individual lives and for

culture worldwide. Wow.

Yeah. Just that incredible impact of this

one person who Christians believe rose

from the dead, bodily, physically, before in time.

A bit of the future resurrection coming back to us from the

future into this present moment and anticipating that,

giving that hope as well. For I think it is that resurrection hope

that Christians have that allows them

to put their own physical lives at risk

for the sake of others, because we have the hope of a

resurrected body one day or so. It didn't make the news

nearly as much as parts of the story.

But it was only a few years ago when a dozen

or more Christians were rounded up in North

Africa by ISIS, when it was still

stronger and all submitted to beheading.

And the last one of the lot may

have been 13 or 14 of them. It was

revealed that actually this was a Muslim

man, I think somewhat nominally Muslim, who had been

captured along with the Christians and

the Captors. Realizing this gave him

the chance to go free.

And his response was,

I am now a Christian because of how I have seen

these my brothers die. How could I live? Go ahead,

cut my head off. Just remarkable.

Wow. It's incredible. It's really incredible what

our brothers and sisters around the world have paid

to remain that hope in the resurrection.

And that story multiplied over and over

again throughout the history of the Church. And the impact that that has had

is yet another kind of reminder, another piece

of this puzzle to say there's something here more

than just myths and stories and imaginings

for people trying to start a movement.

Well, Dr. Blombery, this has been so helpful, and we're really grateful

for your time and not just your time today, but the time of your

scholarship that you've invested and the way that that continues to

serve the Church and for us as pastors who

are accessing that scholarship. So we're really grateful, not only for this time

you've given us today, but for your career and scholarship over the

years. We're really, really grateful. Thank you very much. One of the

things that we always like to do on this podcast too, though, is at the

end, we like to ask our guests and you've had this long career in New

Testament studies and academics, but if you had

a chance to do something different in your life. There's a different Craig

bomberg story where you don't go and get your PhD and

do all this amazing New Testament work. What would you do? What is that

other dream job for you?

I have often thought of what

I would have done because of other things

I was interested at the time.

Which. Is what I thought was the way you were going to phrase things.

I don't know that I have some other

dream now in light of all that I've

experienced, but there

was a time when I never thought

I would live to see my favorite

sports team, the Chicago Cubs, make it and win a World

Series in my life. And there

was a time in my younger teens when a

dream job would have been to crisscross

the country as a statistician for the Chicago

Cubs franchise. Yeah, that's great.

Both Paul and I are both baseball

fans in particular, so I grew up in St. Louis as a Cardinals fan,

so I have to apologize on that.

I'm a Royals fan now in Kansas City, but grew up as a Cardinals fan

in St. Louis. But I love the idea. So did you like the

Moneyball movie and book and the story

of these. And The Rookie and

all kinds of different sports

films? Field of Dreams, of course, is a classic.

Yeah. I've been told somebody

is trying to actually build a stadium in

Iowa, I think in part as a tourist attraction.

That will be a Field of Dreams out in

the cornfields. Well, I'm sure a lot of baseball fans would.

If they build it, they will come. It will be awesome.

Well, Dr. Blomberg, thank you again for taking time

with us today. We're really grateful for you, and we

will have any kind of resources and those kinds of things linked in the

show notes that we've talked about here. And again,

we're just grateful for your time and your scholarship. Great.

You're most welcome. Audio production

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