And we are moving on in terms of the case, Dr. Habermas, for Christians believing in
the resurrection, the literal, physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus
Christ.
Now, we have talked about hallucination.
We've talked about there's 12 historical facts that have been accepted by all
critical scholars.
And we've even gone down to four.
I'd like to come back to a couple of those.
One is some people doubt that Jesus actually died on the cross.
In other words, Tony brought up at the beginning of the program, we haven't got a
date for His birth.
We haven't got a date toward the end.
What about that?
How do we know that Jesus actually died on the cross?
Let's start with that.
Do we have any other sources outside of the New Testament that nail that one down?
Well, I think on the case of crucifixion, you have data coming in from a variety of
angles.
First of all, medical data.
You have critical data from scholars.
You have extra biblical data in a wide variety.
I said earlier that John Dominic Cross and Marcus Borg, co-founders of the Jesus
Seminar, both said that the fact that Jesus was crucified is as sure as any fact
in the ancient world, certainly in the life of Christ.
Why do they say that?
Well, medical facts, real briefly, in a Journal of the American Medical
Association article about 15 years ago, and there's many other dozens of medical
articles, death by crucifixion is essentially death by asphyxiation.
The centurion or any other person standing at a crucifixion does not have to have an
EEG or an EKG.
If you're hanging low on the cross for any amount of time, studies from volunteers
actually show a cutoff point of about 12 minutes.
If you're hanging low for any amount of time, you're not faking your death.
And you've got the problem of the spear in the side, which is in the Gospel of John,
but which is confirmed from two other sources outside the Bible, one Roman,
one Christian, that they did these things, that they offered a coup de grace.
You've got David Strauss's critique, a famous critique, who said that if Jesus
got off the cross and he was alive, you have a horrible problem because if he
shows himself to the disciples, you've got the problem that he's living,
but he's not raised.
And if they didn't believe he's raised, there's no Christianity.
Now that's some of the medicine.
I told you about Borg and Cross.
And why do they think that?
Well, there's a lot of reasons.
And I think they take the Gospels very seriously here, but the extra biblical
data that you asked for, of the 17 extra biblical non-Christian sources within
about 100, 150 years of the life of Jesus, 12 of them, roughly two-thirds,
mention the cross and all kinds of details.
And also, Paul's our number one scholar here.
Give me a couple of them.
Give me a couple of the outside sources.
Outside sources, Tacitus mentions the fact that Jesus died on the cross.
He said Pontius Pilate was the Judean procurator.
He said that Tiberius was the governor.
You have Lucian, the famous satirist who called him a crucified sophist.
You've got Marabar Serapion, who tells his son to emulate Jesus, who gave his life
and so on.
Josephus and a passage that although it's disputed, virtually everybody believes the
portion about the cross there, that he died.
And Josephus also mentions Tiberius Caesar.
So this is all right there.
You've got some Gnostic sources that mentioned these things.
You've got Thallus and Phlegon, two scholars that mentioned that the
darkness surrounded the world when Jesus was crucified.
So there's a bunch of them.
And you've got Paul, that we both consider the best source here.
Paul mentions the crucifixion of Jesus on several occasions and says that's his
major preaching point.