Reading the Bible Like a Detective

Cold Case Christianity

God’s Crime Scene

Forensic Faith

Announcer:

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture, brought to you by Dallas Theological Seminary.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Welcome to The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, Cultural Engagement Manager here at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. Before we get started, I'd just like to invite you to subscribe to the show and to leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps out the show and helps other people discover the show as well. Well, our topic on The Table Podcast today is reading the Bible like a detective. How can somebody who thinks like a detective, has a critical mind, begin to approach the Bible, questions about God and Jesus? Well, today we have a special guest with us. He is J. Warner Wallace, coming to us from sunshiny California, coming to us via Zoom. Jim is a homicide detective in LA County. He's also an adjunct professor of apologetics at Biola University, my alma mater. Thanks so much for joining us today, Jim.

Jim Wallace:

Yeah. Glad to be with you. You're right. It is a nice day here in Southern California, but that's every day, right, so-

Mikel Del Rosario:

It is. It is. God bless you guys. It's 34 degrees right now in Dallas, feels like 25.

Jim Wallace:

Oh, really? Wow. Okay.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah.

Jim Wallace:

Sorry to hear that.

Mikel Del Rosario:

I'm missing the missing the Golden Coast there. Well, Jim, many people know you as someone who helps people think through tough questions about the faith and really strengthen the faith of so many Christians. But it was not always the case. In fact, there was a point in time where you were a committed non-believer, a skeptic. In fact, the kind of atheist that a lot of Christians probably weren't too excited to run into. Just give us a little background on your background, just as we begin to set the table for our discussion today. What was it like for you before you became a Christian?

Jim Wallace:

Yeah. Probably sarcastic is a better word than skeptical. I think maybe that just is born out of working in an investigative profession where so many people are either trying to lie to you or convince you of something that's untrue or represent themselves in a way that is not actually accurate. This happens a lot in our investigations and our interviews with suspects. Many of those suspects that we were taking to jail back in these days, I was 35 before I ever got interested in examining the gospels, a lot of those folks would say they were Christians, would even have a certain language which we have come to understand as the language of the church. They would use this language when talking to us as non-believers.

Jim Wallace:

I was part of, at the time, an undercover investigative team, and there was five of us, and some of my best friends on that team were like me. We didn't believe that Christianity was true and we would sit and listen to these things. Maybe one person's in the interview, and the rest of us are monitoring it by way of a camera or by way of some other device, and we were just laughing and joking and being sarcastic about the response of the alleged Christian when being interviewed by one of us on unbelievers, right? So a lot of it was just a sarcasm that grew out of a sense that I was raised up in the '60s and '70s when we had just touched foot on the moon. This is the Star Trek generation, the first version of Star Trek, the first generation of Star Trek, in which we all thought that all the answers would eventually come to us by way of science.

Jim Wallace:

I was one of those people who was raised that way, so I really did not believe that there was any need to step outside of naturalism to get an answer, and anybody who would do that and then, when pushed, could not sufficiently justify why they were doing that, we just mocked. So a lot of that was the sarcasm is probably more than skepticism there, right? But my wife was somebody who was more open to wondering, especially how should we raise our kids. We had young boys at the time, and we're thinking – I wasn't thinking this, but she was thinking, "Do we teach them a moral ethic that's more traditional and maybe rooted in a religious system, and, if so, do we start to take them to Sunday school? How do we do this?" I was just not interested in anything more than being a willing participant in whatever it is she wanted to do, even though I did not think any of it was true.

Jim Wallace:

We had a history in our family. My dad is not a believer, and he would be more than happy to take you to church because it might be good for you. So he would even attend church as a non-believer, and so I was willing to do that, too. But the first church we happened to step into, the pastor was clever enough to describe Jesus in a compelling way and in a compelling way to a guy who's not interested in sin or forgiveness or salvation. He simply said that Jesus was uber smart and that provoked me, not personally, but just in the general presentation, to want to see what is it that he thought was so smart about Jesus of Nazareth, and that's really why I bought the first Bible. It's still sitting on my shelf back here. It's just a pew Bible. I bought it just to see what were the words of Jesus that this guy thought was so compelling?

Jim Wallace:

That really is what started this whole thing for me, and I thought that everyone who becomes a Christian must do a similar process, right? You're going to investigate these claims to see if there's any good reason evidentially to believe they're true. Well, of course, that that's not actually how people usually become Christians. Early on, I will tell you, as somebody who was investigating the claims, it struck me as odd that I didn't meet anybody else who had done a similar thing. Even those people we would meet who were in the church didn't seem to understand or know what the history of the documents were, how to test them, how to even know they're true. A lot of people I was meeting were accepting these just on faith, which I get it. Listen, we can talk about that later. But the point is, for me as a skeptic, I had to really fight with that, the idea that, “This is the way in. Do I want to be in?”

Jim Wallace:

Is this something that I could test in the same way I test other criminal cases, eyewitnesses, and that was really the early struggle with this. I didn't know anything about apologetics. That word was foreign to me. That branch of literature was foreign to me. So it wasn't as though I read a lot of apologetics books to mine out the evidence. It's that I had to start from zero and do an apologetics enterprise without understanding exactly it had already been done by many people before me. So it just was a journey I took on my own.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Wow. That's amazing. So going from a person who was interested, at least enough to go to church and observe as an outsider, you were intrigued by the claims of Jesus or at least the way that your pastor presented the claims of Jesus as being actually a smart person, which is sometimes a novel thing to think about, that Jesus is the smartest person who has ever lived. If he's knowledgeable, why not learn from his wisdom? So, hey, what can it hurt was your perspective at that point. As you began to look at the Bible because you were intrigued, how did your training as a police detective play into the way you were reading the Bible?

Jim Wallace:

Well, initially, it wasn't as though I said, "Okay, I've got this template that I apply to this." It just becomes such a part of your thinking process that you instinctively apply the template in a less than organized fashion. In other words, it wasn't like I said, "Well, huh. These are the ways we do" … I already was doing that with my eyewitnesses. I already was instinctively applying the template that I had been applying for years, and so I just instinctively applied it to the claims of the New Testament. Then, at some point, I said, "Okay, I've got all this metadata, this ton of data." Then I organized it in a way that I describe in Cold-Case Christianity. This is a book that I wrote that just describes my own process.

Jim Wallace:

So I was looking at these four … there's a bunch of questions that we encourage jurors to think about as they're examining eyewitnesses on the stand to determine if they're reliable, and I will tell you that that process is helpful. Here's why I say that. Understanding the rules of evidence, when it is you get to what we call beyond a reasonable doubt, is so important because I'll hear people say all the time that they need absolute certainty or there's this issue that's hanging them up when, in reality, a similar issue in a criminal trial would not have kept them from rendering a verdict. But when we get to spiritual issues, issues that make demands on our own moral behavior, then, suddenly, we set the evidential bar so high that nothing could ever jump over it, that no claim could ever pass this high evidential bar, and that seems to be the bar that we want to keep it in place.

Jim Wallace:

So I knew coming into this that in the most heinous criminal trials I'd ever worked, murder trials, in which the standard is as high as it's ever going to get in any kind of trial based on criminal behavior, that the standard was not beyond a possible doubt. The standard was still beyond a reasonable doubt, and that's a much lower bar than beyond a possible doubt because you can never, ever make a case beyond a possible doubt, and that's one of our jury instructions. Judges tell juries all the time that the reason the bar is lower is because I can make a possible or imaginary claim against anything you think you believe. So I can create possible or imaginary doubt, even though there may not be reasonable doubt.

Jim Wallace:

So a lot of it for me was when I came to those issues that some skeptics will hang up on, I realized that in the context of how we assessed cumulative cases, those issues should not prevent me from rendering a verdict, and so a lot of that was helpful, was to apply that process. And, look, I was interested in ancients. I was. Not for their alleged deity, but if Buddha said some interesting things, if Confucius said some interesting things, if Baha’i Law said some interesting things, I'm more than willing to listen to them. I always felt like ancient human wisdom that has been vetted by the mistakes of thousands of people over time, when it arrives to our ears, it probably has some value because it's been vetted by time. So I was always willing to listen to ancient wisdom, but I never considered any of it to be from the mind of God. I just felt it was like, "This is what happens when you bump into enough things. You can tell others how not to bump into them." That was the kind of wisdom I was interested in when it came to Jesus.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Now, you mentioned a four step template that you describe in your book. Give us a quick rundown of what that is and how you applied that to your investigation of the Bible.

Jim Wallace:

In California, there's 13 or … I can't remember exactly how many questions we asked. I've listed them all in Cold-Case. I don't know if you knew us or not, but for every kind of case that's tried across America, judges present instructions to juries to help them deliberate. So if you're working a robbery case, there'd be a specific set of instructions that might be … really, it would apply to your type of robbery. If it's a conspiracy to rob, then you would have some additional instructions relative to conspiracies. Well, almost all these cases will have instructions specific to eyewitnesses if eyewitnesses are involved in the case, and the list will be different depending on the state, but it always breaks down into four major categories, and they may be worded slightly differently but you'll see, if you look through them, yep, these four categories are there. They are, number one, is the witness really there, or is he just pretending to be there? Can you confirm in some way that the witness was present to see what it is he said or she said they saw?

Jim Wallace:

Two, can they be corroborated in some way? And, again, I work cold cases. These are cases from 35 years ago. Sometimes, my witnesses are dead. A lot of times, the report writer who interviewed the witness is also dead. So, now, I've got a report and I've got to figure it is any of this true, and I have no access to the witnesses or the report writers. That's kind of like the gospels. The question then becomes how would I ever corroborate that? What kind of evidence would count as corroborative, especially when I'm working in a generation before the glowing rectangle? So nobody had a high-def camera. I have no video. So it's going to be something less than video. It may just be this tangential stuff. It's the stuff I call touchpoint corroboration, and that's all you really need to verify an eyewitness.

Jim Wallace:

So I'll give you example of that. That means, for example, if someone says, "Yeah, he jumped over the counter and threatened me and pointed a gun at me, and he was wearing a brown blazer," and I find his palm print is on the counter, well, then I can verify that that's true. He did jump over the counter. That's where his palm is. He said he put his palm right there, and, sure enough, there's his palm print. Yet that palm print tells me nothing about whether he had a gun and what he was wearing. So it only confirms a piece of the larger testimony, yet we still consider the palm print a piece of corroborative evidence. So the question then becomes do we have anything like that to corroborate the claims of the eyewitnesses in the gospels?

Jim Wallace:

Three, have they been honest and accurate and their details over time, or have they been changing their story along the way? This happens a lot with people who can't remember the first lie. It's one thing to go back in your mind and remember in your mind's eye how something occurred. But if you just made that up 25 years ago when you first told the story, you cannot return to your mind's eye. You have to hope that you remember the lie in its detail, and that's harder, and so stories do change over time if they're not true. Then the fourth thing is does a witness possess some bias that would cause them to say something that isn't true because they have something to gain out of that? Of course, biases only come down to three things.

Jim Wallace:

There's only three reasons why anyone lies. They're the same three reasons why anyone does any crime, why you've ever sinned, I've ever sinned in any category, why anyone commits a murder, and those are financial greed, sexual lust, and the third is the catchall for everything else, and that is the pursuit of power. That includes when your pride has been bruised, when you've been disrespected, when you think that I'm going to walk into a Walmart and shoot 40 people of a different color. That's in the third category. You really think that you're that important that anyone who differs from you is not important? That's a pride issue. That is a pursuit of power. So that third category catches a lot of stuff.

Jim Wallace:

But those are the things we do to apply, the test we apply to eyewitnesses, and so as I was looking through my eyewitness accounts or these gospel accounts and their claims, I was focused on the same thing we would do if I was working a cold case and I had no access to the eyewitnesses. Now, you might say, "Well, in a cold case, though, you've got a better chance of corroborating." Not necessarily. It's going to depend on the kind of cold case. If that cold case happened in someone's bedroom, that house has been torn down, I'm not even sure how much corroborative evidence I'm going to find of any claim. So it's going to be difficult depending on the … There's a reason why these are cold. They're unsolved murders. Well, there's a reason why they're unsolved. They're lame. They're lame to begin with. They are evidentially deficient. That's why they are unsolved. So a lot of this is going to be similar to the process we use to determine do I have any good reason.

Jim Wallace:

Also, what you're looking for is if the alternative explanation is as reasonable as the prosecutor's explanation, jurors are to render no verdict. I run into this as a not guilty. If there is another alternative explanation that involves the defendant's innocence that is as reasonable as the prosecution, in the end, we need an explanation that we would say is the most reasonable. That means the alternative explanations may have some reasonable elements, but we're comparing it. We're looking for the most reasonable explanation. So understanding the nature of jury instructions and the nature of evidence does help you to minimize some of the things that people get hung up on, and that's the process that I use to determine if the gospels were accurate.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, that's really true. I was on a couple of juries in Norwalk, actually, over there by Biola, before I came out here to Dallas, Texas, and a lot of the things that you're talking about sound very much like what historians do. I'm doing my doctoral dissertation right now on historical Jesus studies and the things that Jesus claimed about himself, and all we can look at, really, are surviving traces of past events. Past events happen even if there are no surviving traces, but the surviving traces that we do have, we can take a look at those in order to build a narrative account of what we believe is the best explanation for these surviving traces, and it's very much like what you're doing.

Jim Wallace:

That's right. As a matter of fact, Mikel, that's so … It's a great point you're making because a lot of what I am doing is exactly what historians do. I came out of law enforcement. I had a long career there. We were lucky to work a lot of cases that right away had national attention, so we ended up on Dateline with a lot of these cases, and we really felt like we were doing stuff that, even before I was a Christian, I would have thought this is a calling and this was important work. But what's interesting about it is that you're absolutely right. I stay in my lane, and I describe these in the context of criminal investigations, even though much of what we do in criminal investigations of cold cases, at least, is very similar to what historians do.

Jim Wallace:

But the difference is that there is no channel in which the work … There's a History Channel, but they don't highlight the process by which historians do their work. There is no major character on network TV who is by description a historian, right? But there are entire networks, ID channel, Oxygen now has gone to entirely detective shows. I consult on production companies in New York on criminal shows, and so I watch a lot of criminal shows to see what's out there, just a ton of stuff on Netflix, ton of stuff on all the streaming services. People are familiar with the steps that detectives take because those shows dominate so many networks. So when I can translate this concept into something you've already seen on detective shows, people go, "Okay, I can connect the dots now, I see how that works," especially when we are making … Historians and detectives are largely making circumstantial cumulative cases that draw or lead to a particular inference. That is something that we do, I do for a living.

Jim Wallace:

And here's the advantage you have as a detective. As historians, there is no courtroom in which you can then present your historical cases, see, number one, if anyone would agree with you and, number two, if you can communicate it effectively, and then, number three, you get to interview the jurors afterwards to see where you went wrong. So what's great is that courtrooms are the one epistemological laboratory in which we get to do the work and then test the work and evaluate our failures thousands of times on a daily basis across the nation. So what I love about this process is it teaches you, number one, how to make the case, put the case together, present the case, and then evaluate how you did afterwards. Who gets to do that, except, of course, for detectives and prosecutors?

Jim Wallace:

And so that's one of the reasons why I've tried to keep my work in the language of the thing that I know the best, and it's why I think for the most part, it seems to be accessible. Now, I'm not an academic, and I make no effort to be an … I call academics into the courtroom to testify as experts-

Mikel Del Rosario:

That's right.

Jim Wallace:

… but I'm a casemaker, and that means that I have to sometimes translate what the expert just said because I'm watching the jury and I'm thinking, "They're lost." I can just tell from the expressions on their faces. This guy is doing a great job, but I'll tell the DA, "Take a little break, and we need to come back and translate." You need to ask him, "When you say this, do you mean this?" You have to translate actively for a jury that's going, "What the heck is he even talking" … A lot of this is scientific evidence, comparisons on material evidences, comparisons on serology, blood evidence, or DNA, and it can be confusing. You're like, "What? That one in how many 100,000? What does that mean exactly? How many alleles do I need to match in order to make this comparison?" There's a lot of technical language involved, and so we have to translate for a jury.

Jim Wallace:

Then I think what happens is the prosecutors are incredibly good translators, and I've just watched enough of those over the years that that's what I hope our work does, is that we are taking complex concepts, often that are used by historians, and we're throwing the ball across the plate at 40 miles an hour right down the center of the plate, no curve on it, no spin on it. You can smack this thing easy. That's what we're trying to do with this.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, no, that's really good. Thanks for mentioning that. I was actually going to ask you about this idea of being a Christian casemaker, and I think that really is something that we need to make sure that we're doing when we're talking to people, especially those who may not even have a category for the supernatural or God in their minds, not to just assume people even know what the Bible is and to make these academic kinds of things accessible to where they can actually help people and they can track with you.

Jim Wallace:

Well, let me just rabbit trail on that comment. That's a great comment because you're absolutely right. It's not just that the skeptic does not understand what the Bible teaches, it's that the Christians don't understand what the Bible teaches, and I've noticed this. So I'm on a lot of social media platforms, right? I'm constantly taking work like yours and trying to put it out on social media. I post mostly stuff that's not mine on my Twitter feed, for example, where I'm just posting the work of 800 bloggers that I'm following on my digital device because I follow about 800 bloggers all in evidential Christian apologetics, and I'm posting that stuff on my social media so you can get a … So the only people who probably would be following me … I never post about politics. I post about what is the evidence on two categories, is the Bible true, and should we take it seriously enough to understand how to read it in context and derive the teaching of the master? That's it, that's all I post about.

Jim Wallace:

So of 180,000 people on Twitter who would follow me, I very seldom will actually go on the newsfeed to see what … You know why? When I go on my newsfeed, no one's talking about Jesus. No one is talking about the Bible. They are largely talking about politics and culture and conspiracy theories and you name it. And so a lot of the problem is that we will identify as Christ followers yet don't seem to be much interested in either the teaching of Jesus or in the manuscript from which we became. That Bible tells us everything we need to know about Jesus, and we don't even seem to be talking about that stuff. Instead, we've politicized everything, including our faith, and so it is discouraging a little bit.

Jim Wallace:

So I think part of the work of the Christian casemaker today, of those of us who are Christ followers, who know we need to do more than just say, "Yes, Jesus is Lord," but we want to be able to make a case for why Jesus is Lord, why Jesus is our savior. We don't do it enough online. We don't do it enough socially. We don't know enough, sadly, about what Christianity even teaches to be able to … Let me give you an analogy that I've been using that might make it easier. Look, you know Brett Kunkle. He's a friend of ours. He's a Christian apologist. He has a website called maventruth.com. Great guy. He is the world's biggest Pittsburgh Steeler fan I've ever met, okay?

Jim Wallace:

So I've watched some of these Pittsburgh Steelers. It's 30 degrees in the stadium, and they are in shorts, completely body-painted, and Pittsburgh colors. You might say, "Well, I'm a fan." They would say, "We are fans, true fans." Well, I'm a fan. I'm living in LA or I live in Dallas, and I watch Pittsburgh Steeler games. "Oh, really? Have you ever been to the stadium dressed like this?" No. "You're not really a fan." Oh, I'm a fan. I'm a fan. I've watched that. I watch every game that comes on TV. I come watch. "Next week, is Pittsburgh going to run a 3-4 defense or a 4-3 defense? Do you know?" Well, I don't know. "How can you call yourself a fan? You don't even know the basic philosophy of our defensive front. Do you know who our right tackle is?" I don't know his name. "Look, you're not a fan. No."

Jim Wallace:

The people who are watching from Dallas are like, "Okay, dude, I get enough Pittsburgh Steeler in my life. I am a Pittsburgh Steeler fan, but I'm not that crazy, okay, where I know every detail. But I got enough Pittsburgh Steeler in my life to call myself a fan. You guys are kind of crazy." Well, I'm afraid sometimes the church looks like that, like those of us who know enough to be geeked out and know what it is that scripture teaches are seen like the people who are naked in stands with the body paint, and everybody else is like, "I got enough Jesus in my life to call myself a Christian. I'm a Christian. Yet I don't even know what Jesus teaches, the major categories, or where to find it." They're kind of like the Pittsburgh Steeler fan in Dallas.

Jim Wallace:

We got to figure out like how do we…if we think, no, it really is about giving, is this the most important truth you could know? And if it is, like C.S. Lewis says, it cannot be moderately important. Okay, then I'm going to be more like probably the Pittsburgh Steeler fan in the stadium who's got the body paint. If I'm just somebody who thinks, "I got enough Jesus. I attend church three to four times a year. I'm not dressed like you," well, I think most of us who are doing this work are trying to help the Dallas Pittsburgh Steeler fan become a better, more dedicated, at least to understand what is it that we say we are, and I think that work is going to be more and more important going forward in our culture.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Very true.

Jim Wallace:

Because that group, by the way, thinks that those of us who are this committed are crazy, and we think that that group that doesn't even seem to care are not really fans. They're not really with us. Now, I'm not sure where the truth is in that range, but, clearly, we would say our work is dedicated to helping people to fall in love and become dedicated and love it enough to want to know what is it the master teaches. What is it the master is about? What is God's plan with the master? All of this stuff we ought to know how to defend, and this is why, if you think about it, so many people who call themselves Christians …

Jim Wallace:

And we've got a friend named Alisa Childers who you know, you've probably had on the show or you probably will, whose work in her book called Another gospel is simply to help people to understand why that if you stop right here at that TV set in Dallas, you might end up in the wrong place because you haven't catechized yourself well enough to even know theologically what is true about Christianity. So I think a lot of our work is trying to make that shift.

Mikel Del Rosario:

And, yeah, for our viewers, I would also commend the books of J. Warner Wallace to you. Cold-Case Christianity, we already mentioned. “Forensic Faith” is a book that talks about helping you be a better Christian casemaker, and he also did another book called “God's Crime Scene,” and this has to do with when he goes to investigate crime scenes. Jim, if you could just tell us briefly, what kind of evidence do you look for when you investigate crime scenes and how-

Jim Wallace:

Yeah, the basic idea … And what I'm trying to do here, Mikel, is to try to figure out how can I pitch this in a way with an investigative principle that is memorable enough for you to be able to apply it to something else? So here, in “God's Crime Scene,”  I'm trying to make a case for God's existence from the evidence in the universe. I'm using a very simple principle, and here it is. At every death scene, not every death scene's a crime scene. There are four ways to die. Three of them are not criminal, suicide, natural, and accidental. I'm not going to be involved as an investigator, only if it's a homicide. How do I tell?

Jim Wallace:

Well, I always put it this way. If I can describe everything that's in the room by the evidence in the room, by staying inside the room, it's probably not a murder. So if there's a pistol in the room but it's his pistol registered to the victim, he usually keeps it in a safe in the corner of his room, the doors are locked, there's no evidence of anyone from outside the room being inside the room, and the injury is such that it could have been self-inflicted. Well, now I can explain everything by staying inside the room for an answer. This is probably a suicide, if he's got a gunshot wound and it started off in the room, ended up in the room, nobody else entered the room.

Jim Wallace:

On the other hand, if that's not his pistol, and it's registered to somebody else, an unknown person, and there's bloody footsteps leading out of a broken door, well, now, the best explanation for the evidence in the room is a cause that's outside the room. Everything shifts to a homicide. It's this inside the room or outside their room approach. I simply set up if we looked at the universe and all the attributes of the universe, can we explain everything that's in the natural realm? All we can cook with is space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry. Can we explain everything by staying inside the room? If we can't, if there are some aspects of the universe that are outside of the space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry, then we have good reason to be looking for a cause outside the room, and that would probably be something outside of space, time, and matter.

Jim Wallace:

That template is simple, and if you simply look at it, I think there are eight features of the universe I describe in the book that cannot be explained from inside the room. So that's why I think this is one of the things I had to do. Believe it or not, that was part of my process, is can I really … Because I had a bias against the supernatural, anything outside of nature as described by space, time, matter, and the impact of physics and chemistry on space, time, and matter, these are the things that I would've said. I'm going to state all answers have to be found there. So I needed to know, if I'm going to jump outside and believe that something extra-natural like the resurrection occurred, I'd first have to believe that it's even reasonable to point to something extra-natural as the because of anything, and that's part of the process. So I wrote those two books just to show you my thought process on my way to becoming a Christian.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. That book, again, is called “God's Crime Scene.” I commend that to our listeners and viewers. Well, Jim, think about someone who's totally new to the Bible who's where you were at, willing to give it a read, a fair hearing, maybe just slightly interested in some ancient wisdom. How would you answer the question if somebody came to you and asked, "How should I study the Bible?"

Jim Wallace:

Well, that's a great question. I think, number one, let's just talk about some simple basics. I started in the gospels, and I think it's fair to start in the gospels. So where are you start and how you start are going to be important. I try to put people in the place where their own experience can tell them something about the truth nature of a claim. So, for example, if you started in the letters, those are great, they're relatively theological, right? They're theological. They make certain assumptions from the gospels that if you don't have those assumptions in place, it's going to lead sometimes to more confusion than it's going to lead to clarity. But the gospels are simply descriptions of narratives, and almost all of us are familiar with this kind of storytelling, this kind of narrative, historical accounts, your kids will say something that happened at school today. You're used to people unwrapping events in front of you in sequences that claim to be built on one another.

Jim Wallace:

It starts with the birth of Jesus. It ends with the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus. So they're relatively straightforward accounts. I say this only because if I was to say, "Okay, I'm going to start reading the Bible. I'm going to start in First Samuel," because that's also a historical narrative, but there are certain assumptions that have to be in place before even this…not to say that there aren't assumptions because let's face it, Matthew, for example, is going to quote how much prophecy from the Old Testament, right? But the reality of it is that the overwhelming nature of the historical narrative in the gospels and the book of Acts are an excellent first place to start.

Jim Wallace:

Now, when I do that, I want to do my best. When we ask jurors to come onboard, we are looking for passionate, interested, smart puzzlers who don't have a significant bias that would keep them from determining something is true fairly. So I'm looking for the same kind of reader of scripture. If you're already somebody who's already made your mind up and you're just there to pick holes in the account, in the end, don't be surprised when you read through the account and find things you can pick out holes. I can pick out holes of any historical account of people 100 years ago or even in my criminal cases from 30 years ago. This is what defense attorneys do so well, is they take those supplemental reports and they pick them to pieces and try to cast aspersions against them so that juries have no confidence in their truth value. So, if that's your goal, trust me, you'll find a way to do that with any account from the past, including the gospels.

Jim Wallace:

Bias is going to be an important first thing to remove. That's the first chapter of my book. If you want to think like a detective, you cannot be a know-it-all. You cannot think you know the conclusion before you start. You're going to have to at least suspend your skepticism, put it on the shelf, and try to be as fair as you can. I get it. All of us have an opinion, and I count this as jury selection of one to four, but if you're on the edges of one, totally sold out to the prosecution, or a four, totally sold out to the defense, we're not putting you on a jury. We're only going to put twos and threes on juries. You may have a slight inclination on one side or the other, but you're fair enough to be able to flip the side if the evidence supports the flip. So we're looking for twos and threes. If you don't think you're a two or a three, then probably you're not going to have to get a Bible anyway. You're probably not even interested in reading the Bible, but bias is the first important thing.

Jim Wallace:

Then I would say that as you start to read through this, it's fair for you … I'm a nitpicky … If you look at my Bible, it is completely torn apart, a process that's called forensic statement analysis, and I just use this on the gospels. I was somebody who made notes in the margins, wished the margins were a lot wider, went through three of these Bibles doing this because I ran out of space on the pages to try to draw connections between the gospels. So I think it's a good idea to have an investigative mindset to begin with. An investigative mindset that is stripped of preventative biases is a distinct advantage. An investigative mindset that's driven by your bias does not lead you anywhere positive, either good or bad.

Jim Wallace:

I can make a case for this. Believing is true and not being … I was relatively neutral. I wasn't reading it like Lee Strobel when he was working with his wife as somebody who was a Christian beforehand and it irritated him and he was like, "I'm going to show you this is wrong." That wasn't me. My wife wasn't a Christian till I became a Christian. I was neutral on it. I thought it was just stupid. It was like trying to prove that the Easter Bunny exists. Who does that? Who spends time doing that? Nobody. That's how silly I thought it was. So it wasn't I was trying to prove it wrong. I was just saying, "What's so smart about Jesus?"

Jim Wallace:

As I read through it with an investigative mindset, I started to see that there were places that, if this was a collaborative lie, would have been written differently to make the collaborative lie less susceptible to discovery. As I read through those, I saw the same level of differences between the accounts that are in eyewitness statements of any crime. If you've got five or six eyewitnesses, trust me, they'll never agree on anything, yes, a few things, but not much, and you've got to figure why they disagree. Or what is it I didn't ask that I should've asked? I wish I could go back and ask the authors for clarity in the scripture. We can't do it. So a lot of it is trying to figure that out, and that's what provoked me.

Jim Wallace:

So I would say when I read it, I would start in the historical narratives of the New Testament, those are the four gospels and the book of Acts, and I would read through them. You can read through them in order. I start with Mark because, to me, I didn't want to invest a lot of time in this. If I thought it was crummy, I didn't want to read through all of Luke to find out if it was crummy. I thought, "I'll find out quicker in Mark," so that's where I started. But the reality of it is it provoked me to read the rest, and then as I read through those and through the book of Acts, I'm reading it from the perspective of what is the evidence here.

Jim Wallace:

I'm not a touchy-feely guy. I'm not going to read it and say, "How does this make me feel?" I don't care how anyone feels. I'm just the facts, man. I don't want your feelings. So I'm going to stay with the facts, and that's the way I read it. That does not lead you to Christ. I don't think it will. I think that'll give you believe that. It won't give you believe him. That's another step. But I will tell you that that was the first step for me. Very few people will put their trust in something they know is false first. So the first step is, "Is this true?" Then I can decide if I want to put my trust in it. But I needed to know is it true, and so that was the focus of my reading.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Now, let's think about someone who's maybe one step before that, one step before someone is willing to pick up a Bible. If they came to you and said, "Jim, I've been looking into Christianity only because I'm interested in what makes it different from other world religions, but before I actually pick up a Bible, is Christianity rational," how would you answer that?

Jim Wallace:

All right. So I think that what makes a thing rational is its ability to be tested with the mind, which usually requires evidence to compare and make it. So if I can't make a case to you and demonstrate it alongside a counter case, then how can you use your rational ability to decide between the two cases? What I love about Christianity is it's not just a collection of words. Can you imagine if every gospel was like the gospel of Thomas, just a set of the wise wisdom statements that Jesus randomly strung together in no particular order? Then you'd have to say, "Well, okay, what he's saying is true, but I could probably find that from the lips of Buddha also or something similar. I could probably find similar-sounding ideas or notions from the lips of other ancient sages."

Jim Wallace:

But what's different is the gospels actually make a claim about a singular historical event upon which everything hinges in Christianity, which is the resurrection, and that's what makes it uniquely rational, because in the end you have to have a good reason. Now, I think a lot of people don't even look at it this way. A lot of them just say, "You know what? Jesus changed my life. I had a transformational experience. I didn't know anything about Jesus, but one day I knew some Christians, I sat and I prayed without ever opening the scripture. I prayed and everything changed for me, and that transformational experience is why I'm a Christian." Okay. I know a lot of Mormons who have something similar to say, and that's why they're Mormons. They've had a transformational experience. That's why I don't trust transformational experiences that aren't tested. They're not grounded on something I can test. So that's why I'm hesitant about just an experience, a unique feature, and that would be the opposite extreme, where I come into a system through either emotional or experiential reasons. It turns out you can come into Christianity through rational evidential reasons.

Jim Wallace:

By the way, you could not do that in Mormonism because to take the same approach I took with the New Testament with the Book of Mormon, which I did simultaneously because I have six brothers and sisters all raised LDS, my dad's second marriage, his … My half-brothers and sisters were all raised LDS. They, I think, would've loved me to become a Mormon because then I'm part of the family. The problem is Mormonism cannot be examined in this way. It cannot pass the test. It truly is a matter of trusting something that cannot be demonstrated because the entire 1000-year history of North America described from 600 BC to 480 in the book of Mormon, there's not a single piece of archeological or historical evidence to support any of it. So it can't be tested the same way. That is the unique feature, is its ability to be tested evidentially, and I think that puts it in a different rational category than any experiential entry point in other world religions.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, I agree. You can go into a mosque or a Sikh temple, and you can hear people who have many different kinds of spiritual experiences, and as Christians, we have spiritual experiences, too, but the difference is we have objective historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

Jim Wallace:

That's right.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Jim, just personally for me, just for my personality type, what's comforting about that for me is when I don't feel God or when I feel sad, it's like, well, did the universe stop needing a cause just because I feel sad right now?

Jim Wallace:

That's right.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Did Jesus not rise from the dead just because I don't feel God right now? Things that transcend my mood, these are objective things that are true regardless of whether I even exist, and these are things that we can really cling to, especially in difficult times, such as we're having today.

Jim Wallace:

Well, that's a good point because I tell you something, I always look at it this way. There are many amongst us in every worldview, in every worldview, this could be said, that are here accidentally, that we are here either because either our parents raised us in this system, we don't have control over that, or we got in through some accidental process. We can't even tell you why this is true, but we are here. We happen to be in the right place, yet we don't know why we're in the right place or why it is the right place. We happen to just land here by accident, right? I'm in California because I was born here. I didn't control that. I don't know anything about the history of California, really. I should, but I had never taken the time to really research it all that much.

Jim Wallace:

So I'm an accidental Christian, I mean, accidental Californian. I don't want to be an accidental Christian the same way, and I think that it is possible to be in the right place but you didn't get there by any set of rational processes that you thought about. So this is probably true for Christianity as well. I would say that our endeavor, our enterprise of explaining why this is true evidentially does persuade some like it persuaded me. It also strengthens a lot more, and I think both of those are going to be important.

Jim Wallace:

If we've got young people who start off in the church raised in the church and then eventually leave the church, imagine if all we did was retained every young person who is someday going to leave the church. Do you think we'd have a huge impact? It seems like we spend a lot of time trying to persuade those who are really already decided. The social media world we're living in has so polarized us that it's not that we don't agree. It's that if you don't agree with me, you're an evil jerk who needs to be canceled. That's where we are right now in culture. So what we can do is we can either try to interact with those kinds of people who think we're cancel-worthy or we could actually make sure that our young people who are already in the church right now alongside of us remain there, and I think that work is worth our effort, if nothing else.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. Now, for those of you who are listening and watching, we do have a show on ministering to eneration Z and helping them be equipped with biblical truth, and Jim was on that show with Sean McDowell, so you can check that out in our archives as well. Well, Jim, we want to thank you so much for being on the show with us today.

Jim Wallace:

Appreciate you, man. I follow your work. As you know, I repost your work. I've been following that for years, though. You've been doing this for long before I did it. I remember when I first started doing Christian defense making a case publicly, I found your website, and I thought, "Oh, this is cool." You had the Apologetics Guy. I thought that was really a cool way to approach it. So I just appreciate that we're still connected and that you had invited me on. Thanks so much.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Well, you're welcome, and thanks so much for following my work as well at apologeticsguy.com. Well, we thank you so much for listening to The Table Podcast today. Please do subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and take some time to leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. It really does help out the show. It helps other people discover The Table Podcast and helps us produce more content like this for you. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, and I hope you'll join us again next time on The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture.

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