Did Jesus Really Rise? Unpacking the Resurrection Evidence

Speaker 2 (00:00.718)
Welcome to this edition of At the Mic. I'm your host, Keith Malinak, and we've got a Thursday deep dive that I have been looking forward to for a very long time. judging by your comments, you have been too. So thanks for tuning in. I really appreciate it. Okay, before we get started, I want to thank, as always, Gabby for creating the Instagram page, At the Mic Show. She...

created this thing and has just added stuff all the time. Please go and follow there, subscribe, whatever it's called on Instagram. And thank you, Gabby, for all of your hard work over there. And thank you to Hero West, who's always making sure that we get everything posted. Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, Rumble, atthemikeshow.com has everything there. I appreciate both of those individuals. OK, so last week, if you missed it, we did the

Roswell UFO cover-up deep dive with Donald Schmidt. Many of you asked because he said I can come back and finish this, you know, because we had so much more to get to. That has been scheduled for August 14th, part two of that. We're going to get into some of the patents that followed the Roswell UFO cover-up. And that is August 14th. If you missed it, all the shows are pinned to the top here on Twitter at Keith Malinak and of course, YouTube and Rumble. So please go and check those out. Spotify, iTunes, already went through it, right? Now, my guest today,

was actually featured as episode number 17 back during the original way we used to do the show where we did live stories, right? I would have people come in and sit down and he's a coworker of mine over at the Blaze, my day job. And his name is Steve Dase. And it was such a fun interview. It's episode 17. If we're over on YouTube, you want to check that out. Great conversation. However, that was several years ago. And in that time,

my guest, Steve Dase, has not only does he do his show every day on the blaze, but he is now a bestselling author. He is the writer of an excellent screenplay that one of the very few movies that I went and saw immediately. See, it's not many movies that I go and see right out of the gate, but that one was definitely one of those. And it was so great, Nefarious, if you haven't seen that.

Speaker 2 (02:19.264)
And I just, don't want to spend any more time doing this intro here. I want to get Steve on the show here. Hello, Steve Dase. Thanks for making time, sir. I appreciate it a lot.

You bet, Keith. Thank you for having me, man. How are you?

Absolutely. I'm great. I tell you, I reached out to you, I sent you a text about a year, not a year, maybe eight months ago. And I said, hey, if there was one topic that you wanted to do a deep dive presentation on, where you wanted people to just walk away believing that it couldn't be anything, right? And normally on the show, we're talking about, like I just mentioned last week, the Roswell UFO cover-up.

And I leave it open to my guests. What is something you want to sell people? in fact, at one point, I'm going to have Stu, Glenn Beck's executive producer. Stu Bergeer is going to come on here, and he's going to try to convince me that it's OK to have all these chemicals in our food and drink and all that stuff. So that'll be fun. So I leave it open to the person, the guest, and you, without hesitation, responded that you wanted to talk about the resurrection. And so right then and there, I said, my gosh.

Let's schedule that for the Thursday before Easter coming up, the next Easter. And here we are on Maundy Thursday, and Steve Dase is my guest, and I'm looking forward to you talking to us about the resurrection of Jesus Christ,

Speaker 1 (03:43.832)
I as well. mean, think it's literally only the most important discussion in the history of humanity. And I think it's because what there are several things that set Christianity apart from every other religion and belief system in the world and in the history of the world. But one of them is that Christianity is the only religion in worldview that begins when that objective truth claim. doesn't.

It's not predicated on a creed. It's not predicated on a dogma. And as much as you know, Keith, I'm a biblical worldview guy. It's the, you know, to use a Star Trek term, it's the prime directive of my show every day, but it's actually not even predicated on the Bible. Christianity is not predicated on the Bible. Christianity is predicated on a supernatural fact being true or not. And that is, did God supernaturally intervene? Did God the father supernaturally intervene into human history?

in order to raise his dead son back to life. Did that happen or not? Period. If it did, and only if it did, do you consider the creedal doctrinal claims of Christianity. Only then. If it did not, then there's no point in considering it.

And by the way, I'm not the only one making this case. In fact, I'm plagiarizing it, Keith. The Bible actually makes this case. St. Paul says himself, if Christ was not raised from the dead, our teaching and preaching is in vain. We're all fools, morons, idiots, adults. We're all still dead in our sins. All right. That is the fundamental confirmation. Now, here's the thing, though. It's not actually the fundamental fact of history that matters the most. The fundamental fact is the incarnation. Right.

I mean, in fact, the term antichrist that your audience is going to know very well and going to know it from left behind books and a lot of, you know, that kind of stuff. But the term antichrist is actually specifically used, not used in the Bible until towards the end of the New Testament, when the apostle John uses it to refer to people who deny that Christ, that God came in the flesh, that Christ came in the flesh. All the songs we sing at Christmas time, Emmanuel, God with us. All right.

Speaker 1 (05:57.39)
You know, Hark! the Herald Angels sing, glory to the newborn King, Mild he lays his mercy by, and born so man no more may die. All these various Christmas lyrics are all about the incarnation. All right, so God came in the flesh, God the Son came in the flesh, entered into human history. That is the fundamental fact of human history. No other faith or religion or worldview makes this claim that God entered into human history, took on human flesh,

and chose to live as a mortal while also fully being God at the same time, and then was risen again. All right, so those are the two fact claims. Was there a person named Jesus Christ? History does not deny that there was. It used to. Then we had this science, well, skeptics used to try. Then we had this science at the turn of the 20th century called archaeology, and they don't do that anymore.

Not even the great heretic John Dominic Croson that you still see on all the History Channel, know, gobbledygook specials. He doesn't even deny that Christ existed anymore. No credible historian does anymore, all right? So therefore then, since we all now agree that he did live and exist, the question then becomes the question that he asked St. Peter, whom do the people say that I am? That's the central question, all right? And Christianity says that he was God in the flesh, God the Son in the flesh.

entered into human history, that's what we call the incarnation, that's what we celebrate at Christmas, and then he was resurrected from the dead when God the Father intervened in the human history to roll the stone away and raise him up out of that grave physically, not spiritually, not mentally. The same physical body that was laid in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb after he was murdered is the same body that walked out of that tomb on the third day. That is what's called the resurrection.

and then therefore we call today Easter or Resurrection Sunday. Those are the two tent poles of Christianity and were the only belief system that begins with did these facts occur? Weigh the evidence yourself and make a determination. And it's a little bit like, you know, we used to play Monopoly when we were kids, Keith, you know. If you don't think that God entered into human history and if you don't think that Christ was risen from the dead, then do not pass go, do not collect $200. Just move on. There's nothing to consider here. All right. And you're welcome to immerse yourself in arguments with

Speaker 1 (08:16.782)
non-messianic Jews and Muslims and Hindus and other various pagan religions that are out there and hash it out with them. But if he did, if he did, it is then and only then that you fully begin to consider the rest of what Christianity claims.

Okay, I have four accounts of it bookmarked here in my Bible. And I just, I should have looked this up. Shame on me, bad Christian. How many witnesses did we have that saw Jesus after the resurrection?

Hundreds of witnesses dead. Hundreds of them dead. Yes.

Yeah, and I heard you mention on your show today, which is a great show, by the way. It follows Glenn Beck. Thank you. You talked about Thomas, doubting Thomas. Right. I mean, this was a physical resurrection.

Thank

Speaker 1 (09:14.03)
Correct. mean, Thomas says, listen, not unless I can put my hands or my fingers through his nail scarred hands, okay? Well, I believe. Well, that is exactly what he got the chance to do. And again, now, some people are gonna say, well, hey, that's the Bible account. So of course the Bible account gives an account that reaffirms the Bible. This is actually a very fair criticism, for example.

It's what we call in philosophy. And that's the world I come out of, by the way. right. Long before I was involved, long before I got converted, Keith, I was involved in political science and philosophy. Those are the two things that I read on and studied the most. And that led me down into studying things of the occult and UFOs like you were just talking about and all those kinds of things before I became a believer. So I'm very well versed in a lot of those, a lot of those topics. And I have way more of a background.

Frankly, studied, until I was 30 years old, I studied the Kennedy assassination way more than Christianity, okay? So I come out of that kind of line of thinking. what we call, there's a thing in philosophy we call circular logic or circular reasoning, okay? And I'll give you a great example of it. Islam would be circular logic and reasoning. For example, if you ask a Muslim why the Quran is true, they will say, because it says so.

And then if you ask the Muslim, well, why does the Quran say it's true? They will say, because it is. Okay. Now you'll notice though, there aren't like major archeological excavations to confirm the facts of Islam. You know why? Because to question Islam is death. To question the Quran is death. Right? There is no test the spirits like what you see in the scriptures. There is no discernment. It is circular logic. You do what the Quran says because the Quran says so. And then of course they can't agree on what it says. And Christians of course have historically disagreed for

thousands of years too. in this case, Muhammad, who could not read or write, he was a known illiterate. And the word Quran means recite. He claims that an angel came to him in in a cave, the angel Gabriel, by the way, you'll just see Islam is essentially a Walmart knockoff, facsimile bastardization of the Judeo-Christian narrative. It takes a lot of the same names and tropes and just kind of twists and turns them. And so instead of the angel Gabriel showing up to Mary and said, blessed are you and the fruit of thy womb,

Speaker 1 (11:36.008)
I either be angel Gabriel comes to Mohammed in a cave instead and shouts recite or Quran in Arabic that's what it means and that the the great miracle of the Quran is that a man who could not read or write was given this word these words of heaven from the angel Gabriel sent by Allah himself or the problem is there aren't any immediate written records of what Mohammed thought it's all stream of consciousness you ever tried to read the Quran it's written in a very stream of consciousness style there is no textual

criticism of, know, archives of actual letters like we have going back to within decades of when we think they were written, for example, in New Testament, none of that chain of evidence exists in Islam. Two groups emerged, Mohammed had no heir. He had lots of wives, including a child bride, lots of illegitimate children. He left really no heir. And so two groups of people lined up to claim that they were his successors. You know them today as Sunnis and Shias.

And each of these groups wrote their own kind of follow-up books. You know them as hadith, but there's actually several hadiths, right? There's not just one hadith, there are several of them. And it's these hadiths that are kind of the clarifications, additional writings and prophetic sayings.

from Allah to further clarify. Well, you know, when Muhammad says in the Quran that you need to die a martyr's death, what does that look like? It's the Hadiths that talk about smiting people at the neck and things of that nature. All right? And so this is just incredibly different than the system of Christianity, which invites skepticism, in fact, dares you into it. Some of the greatest skeptics of all time end up becoming great followers. One of the founders, so Mr. think it's Albright was his name, one of the founders of archaeology.

He got into archaeology, wanted to disprove Christianity, so he took the book. You said you got your Gospels right there. He took the Gospel of Luke because Luke was a first century, claimed to be a first century scientist as a man of medicine, a doctor, right? And so he decided he's going to start digging the Gospel of Luke. And by the time he got done, he became a Christian, okay? One of the great apologists of the 20th century, Josh McDowell, grew up in a home with a drunken, abusive father.

Speaker 1 (13:44.206)
Was dared by some fellow students he met in college to challenge Christianity and he's like I can disprove and debunk this pretty simply and he went through and did a whole bunch of research and all the research he did ended up becoming one of the greatest Christian bestsellers of all time called evidence that demands a verdict and then the follow-up work more than a carpenter and he went on to work for Campus Crusade for Christ for 50 years as their chief apologist and wrote many bestsellers and gave all of the royalties away to the ministry for the advancement of the gospel

So Christianity invites challenges, right? And Christianity invites engagement. After all, we worship a God who became a man. He wants to be known. He wants to be accessible. All right? He wants a dialogue. He wants to engage. Most of all, he wants a relationship, right? So sometimes you'll hear people say, well, Christianity isn't, it's not a religion, it's a relationship. Well, it's a religion of relationship. It is a religion. We have creeds, we have dogmas, we have morals, have...

We have doctrines, we have expectations, but ultimately it begins with a relationship that really begins not with what we must do for God, like every other religious system, Keith, but what God through Christ has already done for us.

Well, what are some of the... Okay, so if you have a skeptic, one of the things I've always heard without any proof is that the disciples stole the body. What would you say to someone who made that claim?

Well, then where is it? I mean, there's no plot of land in the world that has been more archeologically excavated Keith than the Holy Land has been. So I mean, then where is it? is it? mean, why hasn't anybody, here's the thing too. Why hasn't anybody come forward then with any form of a fabrication or something? Where then is it? know, one of the things that I think we often do wrong in these exchanges.

Speaker 1 (15:37.454)
You know, St. Peter says to always have a ready defense for the hope that you have. the Greek word that Peter uses there is the word apologia. And then from that is where we get the English term apologetics. It doesn't mean you're apologizing for Christianity. remember my kids asked me that. If it's true, why are we apologizing for it? What we mean, though, is we can defend it. We can defend it against challenges. And so we need reasons to defend it.

Having reasons, being willing to defend something is not the same as being on the defensive. Those are two totally different things, okay? And so, what you see in the gospels, for example, is often when Christ is asked snotty questions, he will respond with snotty questions. For example, hey, where do you get this power to forgive sins from? His response? Well, where did John the Baptist get his power to baptize from? All right, in other words, show me yours, I'll show you mine, okay? He often does this. What we call today the Socratic method.

when the rich young ruler comes to him and says, what must I do to be saved? He goes, what do you think you must do? That's how we begin a dialogue. That's how we make a connection and persuasion can take place. Right? And so if you want to come at me with the challenge of the disciples stole the body, well, then where did they put it? That's my counter. Number two, if they know they stole the body, do you know what happened to the disciples? 10 of the 11 were brutally murdered. The 11th, the reason that I didn't mention the 12th is because he hung himself. That would be Judas after betraying Jesus.

10 of the 11 were brutally murdered. And then the 11th, John, who ends up writing the final gospel and then the book of Revelation, they tried to boil him in hot oil. And when that didn't work, they just left him to die on an island called Patmos where he just lived out the rest of his days in isolation and died there. So they gained nothing from this. No one gained anything from this. There was, and I know the Catholic Church traces its papacy back to Peter.

And I understand why they do that theologically, but historically there's like never a moment where like Peter is given a, you know, a head, a headdress and a scepter and a robe and put on a throne in the Vatican. No one got any, my point is no one got anything from this, Chris. No one got anything from this whatsoever. They got no reward from hiding this body at all. All they got was persecution and brutality. So what would be the, so they're the dumbest people who ever lived then.

Speaker 1 (18:00.17)
Even though they, so simultaneously they're the dumbest people who ever lived, while they also ended up being the founders of the greatest human reform movement and philosophical religious movement in all of human history. That doesn't make any sense. So that one doesn't line up.

Right, okay, so obviously that is one that I've heard now as far as they stole the body. But when I was looking before we went live here today, I went to Grok and I asked, know, hey, what are some things that skeptics of the resurrection say? And the stolen body came up. And then there are three other, I guess, items, theories. And let me see here. I had not heard of any of these.

Okay, okay.

I've never heard of the s-

I'm very familiar with this one theory.

Speaker 2 (18:50.52)
So let me just read what Grok says, some argue Jesus didn't actually die on the cross but was unconscious or in a coma, later reviving and appearing to his followers. Thoughts?

If the Roman soldiers, if you know anything about Roman legion etiquette in these days, if a Roman soldier prematurely took someone for crucifixion off the cross, they were getting executed next. All right, that's number one. So number two, you see there's a moment there where they stick a sword through Christ's side in the gospel account. What comes out? Water, okay? All right, they're signifying that he's dead, Jim. He's dead, he's gone, all right?

Wow.

Speaker 1 (19:30.862)
There's nothing left there. right. And so if this is by the way, also was the penalty. If you were a Roman soldier put guard over something like a tomb and or something that you were to guard and it was defiled, was stolen from under your watch. That was also death. All right. So the swoon theory has been branded about before. No one credible really goes with that any longer just because it violates all forms of

of Roman practice. Not to mention, the tomb that Jesus would have been laid in was behind a 2,000-pound stone. That's typically what was about a one-ton stone is what was rolled in front of these kinds of tombs. then, where was the airflow, air supply? It's a tomb. So what did he do in there for the next couple of days then? You see what I'm saying? mean, none of it adds up, all right? The preparation of the body,

for burial or any of those things. They had to rush to do those things to get home before the Sabbath under Jewish custom. Okay. There's just no way between Jewish religious authority who was adamant about making sure that this execution occurred, Rome, who was just adamant about executions as a general rule, no matter who it was. Okay. I mean, that one just doesn't pass any merit at all to even a cursory study of Roman military policy and etiquette at the time.

Okay, let's see, this other one is, again, I've not heard this one either, wrong tomb theory. Another theory posits that the disciples went to the wrong tomb, found it empty, and assumed it was a resurrection. Hell, I could handle that one. I could rebut that one. Explain the hundreds of witnesses after the...

Correct, correct. Explain the Roman centurions then. Explain why the stone was... What rolled that stone away? Right? I mean, again, we're talking about a large, heavy stone that is in front of a burial tomb like this. So what was the force that rolled that away? How did that escape the visage and the supervision of the Roman centurions? I mean, and again, I go back to the question I asked before. If you think it was the wrong tomb, then where...

Speaker 1 (21:48.762)
is the body. Where is it then? Where is it then? Where's the claim of here lies Jesus Christ? You know, it's fascinating, I mentioned Islam. I don't know how much of your audience realizes this, but Jesus is in the Quran. Mary is in the Quran. And depending on how you interpret certain passages, certain surahs of the Quran, Mary is actually mentioned in the Quran more as the mother of Jesus, even more than she is in the gospels. Okay? Well, in the Quran, for example, here's the...

Here's the thing, the Quran doesn't agree with any of this either, because the Quran teaches that Jesus wasn't even crucified. Then after the Jews came to arrest Jesus, al-Auf tricked the Jews and gave them somebody else as a substitute, and that Jesus kind of went off on his merry way, and that, and some eschatologies or end times philosophies within Islam teach that Jesus is the 12th or final Imam that will be sent as basically an angel of Allah's vengeance.

starting with Christians and their polytheism teaching that God has no son. If you go to the Dome of the Rock, which is built upon the site of the Temple Mount, where we're beginning with Solomon when he built the temple, and then until you had Nebuchadnezzar, and that temple was destroyed about 579 BC with the judgment of God via Nebuchadnezzar against the Jews for going down into the valley of Benhinn and Ertopith.

and throwing their babies into the fire to Molech. And that's when the temple was destroyed and the Ark of the Covenant was lost. And then under Zerubbabel and Nehemiah and Ezra, about 60, 70, 80 years later, they were allowed to return and build a new temple or what's called Second Temple Judaism. And then that temple, except for a wall from the extension that Herod the Great built,

when he was trying to curry favor with the Jews who did not appreciate him as their ruler because he's what was called an idiomian, which is kind of a half breed, meaning he was a Jew but descended from Esau and not from Jacob. Okay. And so he was trying to curry favor with them. And so he did a lavish retrofit or refit of the temple and laced gold into the stones. Only one wall of that structure remains. And it's a wall of the structure that Herod built. You know it today as the Wailing Wall or the Western Wall.

Speaker 1 (24:08.846)
the rest of that entire temple of that original structure built by Zerubbabel and Ezra and Nehemiah, that entire rest of the structure was lost to history in the second judgment that happened in 70 and then was completed in 110 AD. And so this place has been through lots of different excavations, lots of different rulers. We have lots of different historical records of this place then. Where's the body?

Yeah, and that is a good point about the Bible. Not enough people, in my opinion, refer to it as a history book because it truly is. Okay, one more theory here from the doubters. Mass burial. Some skeptics claim that Jesus's body was disposed of in a mass grave as was common for crucified criminals and the empty tomb narrative was a later invention.

So this actually is a far better attempt at the first two, because at least it has a basis in fact. It is true that for a commoner such as who Jesus would have been considered, that they would have just been thrown into mass pits and mass graves after crucifixion. Now we have a few problems with this theory though. Even though he was considered a commoner, he was also held up at the Passover as someone that was a choice for the Jews to choose to have his sentence commuted. Okay. And so

Then we also know that a member of the Sanhedrin, a Pharisee, right? So there were Pharisees that believed Jesus was, that Yeshua was Messiah. From church tradition, we know that some of these Pharisees actually ended up becoming members of the, and leaders in the early church. One of them was Joseph of Arimathea. He's a member of the Sanhedrin, he's a Pharisee. One of his contemporaries is someone else that is mentioned prominently in the New Testament, Nicodemus.

And it is to Nicodemus that Jesus gives the famous John 3.16, okay? For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whom shall ever believe in him will not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but so that through him the world may be saved. Right? So Joseph of Arimathea, a very wealthy man, had a tomb. These were very expensive, only for the very wealthy. Now, people are going to say that the counter evidence I just provided to the idea of a mass grave all comes from the scriptures. They would be correct.

Speaker 1 (26:24.398)
But here's the thing, that's more evidence than there would be for their counter theory. There's literally no evidence for their counter theory. There's just none. Because if that's the case then, then if that's your counter theory and you have no firsthand evidence to this, all right, and so therefore the only evidence we're gonna argue is circumstantial. And I'm acknowledging that it is true that the Romans would take common criminals, commoners, and just throw their dead carcasses into mass graves.

I'm acknowledging that it was also part of, it's also a known fact of history at that time, that wealthy people of various persuasions, Jews included, did have tombs the likes of which Joseph of Arathaea has claimed to have owned and given to Christ. So we both have circumstantial pieces of evidence here right now, right? Correct, so far, right? Okay. Well, then you would look at, all right, in terms of which circumstantial piece of evidence is more true based on what happened after that

claimed event took place. All right. So this is now the following steps after youth say that they just threw Jesus's body into a pit. A group of Jews who had been hiding out suddenly come out of hiding and in broad daylight challenge their fellow Jews to repent under the threat of constant death and under the watchful eye of the Roman government. They continue to do this all throughout the Roman Empire until they are all captured at some point in time.

murdered, massacred, martyred, or as I said earlier in the case of the Apostle John, who I love, keeps calling himself the Apostle Jesus love. He's like, I get the last word. All right. Left for dead on an island of Patmos. Okay. So they did this knowing that Jesus's body went into a mass pit. Right. These are the dumbest people that ever lived. They're the dumbest people that ever lived. Not to mention generations that came after them.

We literally, listen, you want evidence for the resurrection? Let me give you, I think about the best piece of evidence. We literally changed time. We changed how we mark time. There are a few things more fundamental to human existence than time. We changed how we mark time on the basis of a belief in this event. Generations did this long after these events are said to have occurred in the very first century. Let me give you another great piece of evidence.

Speaker 1 (28:47.822)
All right. And this is hat tip to a good friend of mine, Mark Driscoll, I'll make sure I don't plagiarize him on this. All right. The church. The Church of Jesus Christ is the longest standing religious organism movement in all of human history. It it withstood numerous, it withstood Demetian, Diocletian, Julian, Nero. It withstood the Soviet Union. It withstood all the great, it withstood Hitler.

It withstood all of the great conquerors of antiquity, and yet it is still here. Voltaire once famously said that he looked forward, he was going to outlive the Bible and live to see the day that the Bible was no longer relevant and Christianity was gone. After Voltaire died, the French Bible Society purchased his home, and they've been printing Geneva Bibles out of it, brother, ever since. All right, so for that legacy to come,

out of throwing a body into a mass grave that was never recovered or proven otherwise, you're left again, this is what I love about Christianity and what a lot of people don't like, there isn't a middle ground here. You're left with either, this is the greatest con ever pulled or the greatest story ever told. And there's nothing in between, brother, nothing.

No, absolutely. And for me, the biggest evidence for me has always been the fact that the horrible deaths that the disciples suffered after the fact. And surely one of them would say, OK, look, please, don't crucify me upside down. I'll show you the body.

Right. Now listen, let's be fair. People die for what they don't realize, but people die for terrible causes all the time. Japanese pilots jumped in planes when it looked like they were going to lose World War II and became kamikazes. So we cannot say that people don't knowingly die for a bad cause. People knowingly die for a bad cause all the time. They just don't know it's a bad cause when they're doing it. OK? And so if the disciples had hidden the body,

Speaker 1 (30:53.76)
If they had mistook the whole thing and went to the wrong grave, if the body was thrown into a mass grave, okay, then again, these are the dumbest martyrs of all time because they're the only ones that did this knowing it was a lie the entire time. It doesn't line up and it doesn't make any sense.

So earlier I mentioned, look, there's four bullet points from Grok here. That was just the explanation of the empty tomb. Do you want to go through some of these post resurrection things as well and have some fun with this?

We can. I've never done this through Grok. There's probably things I've never heard there. So I'm fine with it. ahead.

Okay. And this is why I love Steve so much. There was zero prep. There was a couple of texts six or eight months ago, and then we connected and went live. So he has no idea what I'm throwing at him here. Okay. So this is under the heading psychological or hallucinatory explanations. Skeptics propose that the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus were the result of hallucinations, visions, or psychological phenomena experienced by grieving disciples.

This is often supported by comparisons to modern day visions of deceased loved ones. Explain it to Thomas, right? I can handle some of these.

Speaker 1 (32:06.094)
Yeah, there isn't a 2000 year old church of psychic phenomena that people then turn to that to get out to be freed of the bondage of their addictions, of their afflictions, of the holes in their heart, of their broken relationships. Because you have to go again to the,

You know, a pretty wise guy once said, Keith, you know a tree by its fruit. Okay. If you look at the overall fruit, let me give you a piece of fruit. There's no such thing as Western civilization or the United States of America without the resurrection never happens. That's a fact. Never happens. Never happens. Never. Or at the very, at the very least you have to acknowledge that without enough people believing that it happened, Western civilization in America never happened.

For all

Speaker 2 (33:01.07)
all go I don't know where you're going but I would contend this guy is about to be mentioned no Martin Luther.

Luther. right. I mean, that there is there. By the way, the History Channel, since you mentioned Martin Luther, but before it decided to become the ancient aliens channel, right? The History Channel in 1999 did its top 100 people of the millennium. Number one was Martin Luther. Number two, Johannes Gutenberg. Why Gutenberg? Because he invented the printing press.

And that's, if you want to know the difference between, Luther was not the first person to challenge Rome and call it back to reform. And reform for the reformers, by the way, really meant returning to the apostolic Augustinian era of the church. The reformers, all of them, even though they disagreed at times, they all held St. Augustine, for example, in a very high regard. I mean, Luther himself was an Augustinian monk. That's what he was in the church. He was an Augustinian monk. All much of Luther's teachings.

honoring Mary without venerating her, for example. Luther believed in the saints. That's why some of you may go to St. Mark's Lutheran Church or St. Luke's Lutheran Church. But Luther thought, and many of the Reformers did, that the church had lost its way through a century or so of political machination and wanted it to return to the Apostolic era. They held the Apostolic fathers in high regard.

They wanted it. They held Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, probably the most prominent Christian theologian in the post Bible canon era in the history of the church. They held him in in high regard. And so yet so but what was the difference between Luther and previous reformers? Well, Luther had a printing press so he could get his message out to the masses before the church could kill him. People like John Wycliffe, they didn't. And the History Channel said that those were the two most impactful people of the last millennium. Why? Why?

Speaker 1 (34:57.58)
What now again could can I sit here and improve without a shadow of a doubt. With DNA evidence and Zapruder like film listen folks we literally watch a vapor trail of a bullet hit JFK from the front of the throat on the Zapruder film and there are still plenty of people today who will promise you that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone by shooting JFK from the back OK. Alright, so I don't even think I don't even think 8 millimeter film and DNA evidence would do it.

All right? So if that's the case, then, if that's the case, then we have to, we're left asking ourselves this question. How is it that something built on such a terrible con and why has had such a massive positive impact on humanity for 2000 years? How is it, how is it that Christianity did what Hannibal couldn't, conquered Rome? How? How did it do it?

How is it that Christianity has outlived all of these other systems then? How? How is it possible? Where are the Zeus worshipers today? Where are the Jupiter worshipers today? Where are they? What great society was built by those who memorized Confucius' sayings? What great feat and advancement of humankind was done who contemplate the thoughts of Siddhartha, the Buddha? Where are they?

and yet, and stack their accomplishments and stack their fruit and what they've done is belief systems and worldview up against Christianity. And to quote the great prophet Larry Holmes, they couldn't hold Jesus' jockstrap.

Speaker 2 (36:34.894)
Let's see here. Let's go to mythological development. You ready?

this one ought to be really lame. Go ahead. Yes.

Critics argue that the resurrection story evolved over time as a legend or myth similar to other ancient stories of dying and rising gods. They claim the gospel accounts were embellished to align with messianic expectations or to compete with pagan myths.

Listen, that's entirely possible, except you're left, again, we keep coming back to, well, first of all, I would argue we've got texts that show many years later that are contemporaries of these events. I mean, we have texts of epistles that would go back less than a generation of when the crucifixion is likely to have taken place, probably April 5th of 32 or 33 AD is the most likely scenario looking at the calendar. All right?

There's lots of evidence to suggest these things did not actually evolve over time. Not the least of which would be the disciples all went to miserable deaths within mere decades after the claim of this event. You know why I keep coming back to you have to answer this? Because they don't have an answer to this. That's why. And notice this is a common tactic. Address.

Speaker 1 (37:54.188)
the things that I don't have it, make sure to not address the things I don't have an answer to. I'll give you an example. You see it in our media today, right? We literally have Democrats lining up to make pilgrimages to El Salvador from MS-13 gang member who beats his wife, okay? Notice though that they don't even wanna talk about Lake and Riley. They don't wanna talk about the mother who spoke at the White House yesterday with the story what happened to her daughter. Why? Why? Because those facts challenge their narrative.

I'm here, I'm taking on their positions, right? I'm listening to what they have to say, I'm responding, I'm answering. You know why they don't have an answer to why did the disciples do this? Why did the whole world change? Why? Why is this the greatest movement in the history of humanity? You know why they don't have an answer? You know why they don't want to respond to this? Because they don't have an answer to it. That's why they want to respond to everything else.

You're going to love this one. This one we can just blow right past because the answer is because he's the son of God. From a naturalistic perspective, skeptics reject the resurrection as a violation of the laws of nature.

Yeah. That's exactly why we're all going to church on Sunday. You're you know what? Your terms are acceptable. We agree you win. You're exactly right. It's a violation of the laws of nature, which just goes to prove he's God. He's got power over the laws of nature. Yes.

Let's see, we have a few more here. Skeptics point out that the resurrection narrative is primarily supported by Christian sources which are inherently biased toward promoting faith. They argue that accepting the resurrection requires presupposing Christian theology, making it circular reasoning.

Speaker 1 (39:38.702)
Well, I addressed that earlier. Well, listen, I've not even talked about Tacitus. I've not even talked about Pliny the Elder. I've not even talked about Josephus, who was a Roman-charged Jewish historian who all wrote about this sect of Christians and their teachings and their influences and what they thought of this Jewish martyr from within recent eras. This is written about in numerous other subjects. By the way, if you walked into

most universities today. And let's just say you walked into a, you know, ancient literature course or a ancient history course or a Greek history course or a Greek class and said, you know what, I don't believe Homer wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey. They just look at you like you're a loser and an idiot. Take it for granted. Even though we don't have, we actually don't have any form of chain of evidence within literally thousands of years.

of when Homer was said to have written the Odyssey and the Iliad, and yet we just take them for granted. We just take them at face value. Here we have manuscripts that go back to within decades of when, some estimates within less than three decades of when the crucifixion and the resurrection are said to have taken place. And look at all of the stipulations and trials and decathlons of textual criticism

that the scriptures have to go through that nobody else does. You know why? Because it convicts us of our own sinfulness. And, you know, there was a guy in the late 19th century, I think his name was Ingersoll, if I remember right, Keith. And he used to travel the country and do sellouts of speaking engagements. And one of the speaking tours he did was called The Mistake of Moses.

And he basically said that because of Darwin's theory of evolution now being proven of the true origin of species, that the Bible cannot be true, Genesis cannot be trusted as an account, it's not historical, there was no guy named Moses, there was no such thing as a Pentateuch, these ancient peoples that the Israelites were said to have displaced in this land of Canaan, there were no such people as Hittites, for example, he used to single them up all the time in his talks. And then again,

Speaker 1 (41:58.37)
this modern history came along called archaeology. Indiana Jones came along, started digging these things up. Guess what he found, Keith? Found the old Hittites, brother. That's what he found. And you know why you don't know who Mr. Ingersoll is? And you know why you can't remember his name? And you know why no one's playing his talks or sending you the books that he used to have scripts of the talks he used to give that were to sell out crowds back in the day about the mistake of Moses? You know why? Because he's been mistaken. That's why.

He's the one who was mistaken. He's been proven wrong. All right. But this stuff went on well into the 20th century until one day a shepherd boy was just messing around in the hills there on the Dead Sea. And he walked into a cave. All right. And he's like, what are those? What is this? right. Lord, the entire scientific realm descended upon these caves.

they found these things called scrolls and they became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. And one of the scrolls, these were these were scrolls written by the ascends. They were a sect of Judaism that had moved out to the Dead Sea. Essentially, they were awaiting the coming of the Messiah. They thought, you know, it's funny if you look at what was going on in Jewish and Roman history at the time of Christ, just like there's a lot of speculation about eschatology and end time stuff in our day, there was actually quite a bit of it back then.

were lots of claims of people being false messiahs and things of that nature, okay? So the ascends were the sect. They moved out to the Dead Sea, and one of the things they did is they made sure they were copying the scriptures, they were preparing themselves, they thought messiah was coming, all right? And they were out there roughly 100, 150 years or so before Christ was born. Now, the reason why this matters, if you go back and watch the, well, there's lots of reasons it matters, but let me give you one really good

If you go back and watch The Passion by Mel Gibson, the movie starts off citing the book of Isaiah. All right? All right. He was, and he was, that he took on our punishment, know, bruised for our transgressions, you know, that, that, that, those messianic verses in Isaiah. Okay. That's how the film starts. And then, and then Mel Gibson says that he, that Isaiah wrote these words in the 700s of BC. So,

Speaker 1 (44:18.03)
700 years before Christ. Now, all of your naturalistic scientists say, that's not possible, Isaiah could not have known the future. Okay. So when they dug up the Dead Sea Scrolls, they found an almost entirely intact Book of Isaiah, And guess what, brother? Guess what? It is basically verbatim, the Book of Isaiah that's in your Bibles today. Okay, except for a couple of punctuation marks, something like,

98.9 percent correct, and all the differences are a punctuation mark here or there. Remember, Hebrew doesn't have vowels the way we do, right? Okay. All but none of the actual main narrative points are different from the book of Isaiah or not, which means at the very least. So now you could say, the ascents just made it all up then. You're right, they might have. That means that they at least made up the entire messianic prophecies of Christ 100 years before he was born, 100 years before he would fulfill them. So at a minimum,

At a minimum, you've got to admit that the ascends somehow came up with the messianic prophecies that Christ fulfilled a hundred and some odd years before he was born. Or that's the minimum case you have to make if you're a skeptic. Or you have to explain how it is that Isaiah was able to prophesy these things 700 years before they happened.

I love this. All right, I just have two more bullet points from Grok from the old skeptic camp. Some skeptics note that certain figures like the Apostle Paul provide, I think I'm going to have a rebuttal to this one, provide little detail about the physical resurrection in their writings. see, Corinthians 15 focuses on a spiritual body. They argue, this suggests early Christians may have believed in a spiritual rather than

bodily resurrection with physical details added later. There's a bunch there.

Speaker 1 (46:12.43)
Actually, I would say there's nothing there. Incoherent. Yes, because again, the same... it's funny, they quote the Bible to say Christians only believed in a spiritual resurrection, and yet don't quote all the verses that showed that we actually believe in a physical one. All right? So if we're going to quote the Bible here, then to make a case that Christians do not believe in a physical resurrection, then you probably also believe

that I can identify as Kate Upton's boyfriend, Warren Buffett's wallet, and Dylan Mulvaney can identify as a woman. Okay, you probably believe that too.

And I would say that of all the people to lean on for your evidence against the resurrection, Paul

Yeah, you mean that you mean the guy that left his entire Jewish pedigree behind in order to preach, not just not just preach Christ as Jewish Messiah, but then as a Jew, he had to go to those dirty, uncircumcised, hedonistic Gentiles. He went to them and did it. OK, so so he knowingly gave up. He gave up his high place in the Sanhedrin. He is a rarity. He is both a person of of Jewish.

of Jewish authority, religious authority and a Roman citizen. All right. And he gave up all that pedigree and all that prestige, all right, to live a nomadic life where his life was threatened constantly to not, to then go and preach to the very Gentiles that his religious background told him to never, to completely abstain from. What in the world sense does that even make?

Speaker 2 (47:48.152)
This is, I'm so glad you're here. Cause I would have just been like, really? They went with Paul? That makes no sense at all. And then Steve gives you like so many facts. That's awesome stuff, Steve. The absence of detailed accounts from Jesus's enemies or neutral parties is seen as suspicious as one might expect such a dramatic event to be widely documented. You've already.

I've already cited several other historical examples of contemporaries at the time or shortly thereafter. Again, there's way more cross-referencing for this event, or at the very least for the life of Christ, than there is for really any book of antiquity that we take as authoritative today whatsoever. you know, as long as you're willing to throw out basically everything that we think was written at the time.

about ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Greco-Roman culture that had quite a bit to do with also, you know, inspiring thought within Western civilization. If you're willing to throw all that out too, then I guess we can have a conversation. But notice, notice they never want to do that. This is the only part of it they want to throw out. Notice that.

So is there any other thoughts then on the resurrection and and.

I would say that I want to, as we finish this, let's make sure that we don't underestimate and diminish the most powerful evidence, okay? The most powerful evidence is in the testimonies of the lives that believing in this gospel has changed. You know, on our show today, for Theology Thursday, it was just providential, man. mean, we didn't plan it this way, but we're in Romans chat, we're doing Romans line by line, verse by verse on our show once a week.

Speaker 1 (49:27.406)
And it just so happened that this week for Holy Week, we're in the part of Romans 8, where Paul says in verse 11, the same power that resurrected Christ from the grave, his body from the grave, now, a portion of that power is now in you raising your flesh from death to life, just like his was. Okay? And what happens when that happens? Lives are changed, family lines are changed. Here's what I can tell you. Maybe this is the best closing case, brother, that I can make.

I was born to a 15 year old mom. My biological didn't bother. My stepdad was terribly abusive. He thought the great Santini from Robert Duvall was the model to follow for fatherhood. I went to 11 different schools, K through 12. I was estranged from my dad, my biological dad, and I still am to this day. He just doesn't want to really reconnect with me. And I think frankly that my biological family who's

a pretty prominent, or once was a pretty prominent family here in Des Moines. I think they have a lot of shame, Keith, because they're astonishingly Catholic family, and they tried to bribe my mom and grandmother to abort me. They gave them $500 to do that 50 years ago. And my mom tells me the story as a young 15-year-old pregnant girl going to their priest, she wasn't religious at all, going to their priest and saying, isn't this a sin? He goes, yes, it is. So please don't do it. We moved a ton.

I suffered every form of abuse in my home growing up except sexual. But like a lot of kids, you know, got exposed to pornography and all those things way too early because of what was going on in my home.

Explain to me how I went, I flunked out of college, because I spent an entire semester where I didn't even go to a class. Apparently they frowned upon that. I was working in a mail room. My wife's gonna, it's just threatened me for years, Keith, to write an autobiography called, Married a Mailroom Worker, okay? Right? Explain to me how it is possible, given everything I just told you. My oldest daughter, right, who, Anastasia,

Speaker 1 (51:37.57)
who appears on my show a couple times a week. When she was a baby, we only had a two bedroom apartment. And the second bedroom was kind of like my playroom. I kept my porn collection and stuff in there. That's where we put her baby crib.

Now, you tell me there's much more I could tell you about me and where I came from. I don't have a college degree. I never went to seminary.

I didn't make it at a community college and I once worked at a temp agency called Manpower. No, that's not a gay bar, but it probably is somewhere else, right? You explain to me, you explain to me how I went from that to everything you just heard here for the last 45 minutes.

Speaker 1 (52:26.38)
You explained to me how I went from that to the man I am today.

Speaker 1 (52:33.868)
You tell me how that occurred. Because I'll tell you how that occurred. From my point of view, the gospel did. And you tell me what else in this world has that kind of power. And I'm just one of those billions of those kinds of stories that there has been for 2000 years. A scared fisherman who ran from his Lord and hid. And then one day stands up

and says to the people he hid from, you crucified our Lord and must repent fearlessly to their faces. And then on his deathbed says, I am not fit to be crucified right side up like my Lord do it upside down. Where does that boldness come from? The ultimate confirmation of the gospel is the testimony of its impact ultimately, since we weren't there.

We don't have film. We don't have DNA evidence. We have a lot of very powerful circumstantial evidence, just like everything you presented against me, Keith, was all circumstantial evidence too. So then when you're looking at two claims of circumstantial evidence, a lot of this therefore then comes down to credibility.

Speaker 1 (53:56.342)
And then you tell me, you tell me what the source of my testimony is and what the source of billions of other people for the last 2000 years, what the sources of their testimonies are. What's your counter to that?

because I think it only leads you right back to the place of where this conversation started from brother and that's the cross and an empty tomb.

Speaker 2 (54:23.308)
There you go. Steve Dase. Man, I appreciate your time on this and you sharing all of this insight, not only on the historical record, but into your own life. You're an awesome guy. I'm so grateful to know you. If people aren't familiar, Steve does a show, Noon Eastern on the Blaze. You can, I mean, it's a live streamed. mean, it's everywhere.

definitely check it out. I know it's on iHeartRadio if you're if you're not a member of Blaze TV. And I know you've got another book coming out, man. mean, I do.

What's

Speaker 1 (55:02.03)
stay so busy. We've got one more. We've got another book coming out June 2nd. And imagine if the Apostle Paul and Dr. Seuss collaborated on a book to punch Pride Month in the throat. And that's what this is going to be.

hence the June 2nd release.

Yes, yes. Not uncoincidentally, by the way. It's called Richie Meets the Rainbow. We're just beginning to roll out the early marketing for this. So if your audience wants to get an early glimpse at it and to get on the list to see more of it as we little by little, let the more and more people see what's in store. I'm extremely proud of this. mean, we are, there's an old Irish Catholic saying what the devil hates the most is to be mocked.

And we're going to find out just how much he hates to be mocked. We are going to strip him naked in this book, Keith. Strip him naked. It's called Richie Meets the Rainbow. And if your audience wants to go to the website, R-I-C-H-I-E, R-I-C-H-I-E, richiemeetstherainbow.com is where you can go. Richiemeteetherainbow.com.

Awesome. Steve Dase, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. folks, tomorrow, the Friday live stream, Brad and Zay will be here at 3 PM Eastern at Keith Malinak, right where you're at right now. Steve, I hope we do it again sometime. And in fact, I look forward to being on your show. That was just confirmed today. Coming up on May 2nd.

Speaker 1 (56:29.784)
Yep, we're looking forward to it too, so thank you.

Happy Easter. Thank you all for joining us today. God bless.