How to Confidently Defend Your Faith || An RTTB Apologetics Session

Tired of conversations that stall at “that’s your truth”? We map a simple, humane path that starts with Jesus, honors real questions, and ends with a clear invitation to take the next step. Our framework moves in a logical sequence—objective truth, the existence of God, and the reliability of the Bible—so you always know where to begin, how far to go, and when to come back to the heart of the gospel.

We walk through a five-minute way to share the core message using the Romans Road, then dig into the most useful reasons to believe: the Kalam and Contingency arguments, the Moral argument, and a suite of Design considerations that include information in DNA and our deep pull toward the beauty of creation. Along the way we show how two quick questions cut through relativism and bring the conversation back to reality without sounding combative or cold.

From there, we turn to whether Scripture deserves our trust. Acts reads like lived history—names, titles, routes, local slang, and nautical detail that match what historians know. External historical sources such as Josephus and others corroborate people and events. The New Testament’s manuscript evidence is both abundant and early, and archaeology keeps surfacing anchors like the Pilate inscription and Caiaphas’s ossuary. Prophecy adds cumulative force, and the empty tomb remains the unavoidable center of the Christian claim.

If you’ve ever wanted a clear, kind way to engage friends who have honest doubts, this conversation gives you a roadmap and the words to use. Start with Jesus, answer what’s actually asked, and return to Jesus with a genuine, hopeful ask. Subscribe for more verse-by-verse studies, share this with a friend who’s asking big questions, and leave a review to help others find the show.

Chapters

• 0:16 Why Apologetics Matters
• 2:12 A Three-Step Framework For Defense
• 4:54 Evangelism As The Backbone
• 8:41 Start With Objective Truth
• 12:07 Cutting Through Relativism
• 17:42 Arguments For God’s Existence
• 33:56 Moral, Beauty, And Evil Arguments
• 39:24 From God To The Bible’s Reliability
• 45:52 History, Manuscripts, And Archaeology

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:16

We hear reasoning through the Bible normally do verse-by-verse Bible study. So if you're not one of our regular guests tuning into this, then I would just refer you to the bulk of our materials, which are chapter by chapter, verse-by-verse Bible study. We provide materials on our website where your small group or your church can use these materials to teach. Go through books of the Bible. That's our bread and butter. That's what we do most of the time. Today we're going to have a special topic and we're going to talk about defense of the faith. The field of study that deals with defending the faith is called apologetics. And there's a great number of verses, sometimes ignored, where we are not just suggested that we defend the faith, but the Bible actually commands us to give reasonable answers to those that may have questions. We do it to encourage the church, we do it to refute error and to protect the flock from false teaching. I have done a number of years of study of apologetics. And what I want to do today is to help those of you that may be struggling on how do we defend the faith? How do we go about answering people's questions? The field is so large and so full of information. Where do we start? How do we do it? So what I want to do today, one is I want to provide a framework for using all the apologetics. If you have a framework where you can plug in the information, then whenever you're speaking to someone, you'll know where to go about starting with them. And you start where they are. You don't want to give people information that they already know or answer questions that they may not have thought of yet. So that's one thing is to provide an overall superstructure or a framework for how to defend the faith. And I'm also going to give you a very simple evangelism technique that you can use. And that's really where we start is with evangelism. Then I'm going to spend a good bit of time explaining some defense of the faith, some apologetic arguments, if you will. How do we reason our way towards God and how do we talk about the Bible as being true? Now, the question really is how do I do apologetics? How do I defend the faith? Because oftentimes people, especially in the apologetics community, we end up with a head full of facts, but how do I use it on a regular basis? How do I use this with people around me? There's a way to do it properly, and then there's a way to do it improperly. And we want to do it properly in a winsome manner, as uh 1 Peter 3.15, yes, defend the faith, but do it in love. That's the real key here. So, how do we defend the faith? There's a really a three-step model that I want to bring up. If you understand these three steps, then you'll find that any question or any bit of information on defending the faith falls into these three categories. The first one is that there is objective truth in the world. Objective truth is something that's apart from me. It's apart from what I think and what you think. Objective truth is just true for everyone. We have to believe that before we can really get to the question of whether God exists or not. And we have to get to the question of whether God exists or not before we get to whether the Bible's true. And those three areas are really in this logical sequence. In other words, we could pull out a Bible and explain it to people. But if the person we're talking to says, wait a minute, I don't even really believe in God. So why should I believe your book? Or they say, well, you've got your Bible and uh the Muslims have their Quran. There's the Bhagavad Gitas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, there's all these religious books. How do I know yours is true? And it could be that they're all true. So the question comes in is how do we deal with people, for example, if they already believe in God, then we don't need to use arguments to prove that God exists. We start with evangelism. The diagram I have here shows the beginning and the backbone and the end of when we talk to people is evangelism. We start off with, hey, I have this friend of mine named Jesus, and I'd like to introduce him to you. That's where you start. You start with introducing people to Jesus, and they're going to have questions. One bit of research that I had seen years ago is that for every 100 people you might share the gospel with, about four of them are going to be willing to accept Christ without some sort of evidence or question or proof. So just presenting the gospel, you'll have maybe 4% of the people that will accept it on face value, but the other 96% of the people are going to have questions. There are people that would say in churches, and I've spoken with them, that say, well, we really don't need to defend the faith. We really just need to share the gospel. I would submit, yes, we do indeed need to share the gospel. The reason why churches don't think that we need to defend the faith is because they're not doing evangelism. I can guarantee you that whenever I share the faith, virtually 100% of the time, people are going to have questions. The times that I've shared the faith, everyone has some sort of a question. So you have to be able to answer these questions. And some of the questions are just what does the Bible say? And we're good with those kind of questions. But what happens if they have a question? Well, you've got your Bible, uh, somebody else has their Quran, maybe they're both true, maybe they're both false. How do we know? You have to be able to answer these questions because if you introduce the gospel to a lost person, in between the time you say, May I share the gospel with you, and the time when they say, Where's a church I can join and where can I go get baptized? In between there, 100% of the time, they're going to have questions. This model that we're talking about, where we start with evangelism and then we answer people's questions, we have to end with evangelism too. We have to get around to the point of what I call the ask, would you like to accept Christ right now, right here today? If you can give all the information, you can give all the apologetic arguments and all the data on why the Bible's true, all the history, uh, all the logic. But if you don't get around to actually asking them what's keeping you from accepting Christ right now, then we really haven't done our job as evangelists. That's the job of the evangelist is to give the gospel. And part of the gospel is you're a lost sinner and you need to accept Christ. So the question then comes in is how do we do evangelism? One of the easiest ways I found is to go to them and say, look, the Bible has been very important to me. It's changed my life. The Bible is a very long book, but the basic message of the Bible is very simple. Would it be okay to you if I took five minutes and gave you a quick overview of the basic message of the Bible? And most people, if they're your friend, they'll say, okay, uh, yeah, I'll listen. Oftentimes, if if the person says, no, I don't even want to hear any of it, if they refuse, you just say, okay, uh, maybe some other time, but I'd still like to do it someday if you ever change your mind. And then you come back at some future date and ask the same question. Uh, but a lot of people, most people will say, Yeah, sure, if you got five minutes, go ahead and give me an overview. One of the ways I like to use is called the Roman road. There's two verses, Romans 3.23 and Romans 6.23. If you just remember those two verses, then you can share the gospel with anyone anywhere. You can memorize these, or oftentimes they'll have a Bible handy on a phone or tablet. Romans 3.23, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And you just then merely explain to them that that all of us, I, you, everybody on the top side of the earth that ever lived have sinned and we've fallen short. The next point is Romans 6.23. Because we've sinned, the wages of sin is death. We're separated. But God gives a free gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord. And then if you want to add to that, Romans 10, 9 and 10, if you confess and believe, then you'll be saved. So that is evangelism. And with that, guarantee you, 99% of the population is going to have a question. Well, why is that? And uh, how do I know it's true, or something? That's when the model that I gave you comes into play. And apologetics is the field in defending the faith. It's really just answering questions and answering questions, not just to lost people that you're sharing the gospel with, but part of apologetics is defending the faith to people already inside the church. You'll have people that are Christians, raised in a Christian home, that just have, yeah, I don't understand this. I don't understand how this could be. Or maybe they talked to somebody that gave a question about history of the Bible, or you know, something just came up. So people inside the church and lost people that you're sharing the gospel with will have questions. We just have to know which questions to answer. That's where this model comes in, in the sense that it gives us a framework to know where to start. Within a few minutes of just talking to whoever you're talking to, if they already believe in God, then you can jump down to the end and just talk about why the Bible's true. Or if they don't believe in God, then you really have to understand do they believe there's such a thing as objective truth? Because if you don't, then you can give all the logical reasons why God exists. But if they then at the end of that turn around and say, well, that's nice, but you've got, you know, it may be true for you, but I've got my own truth, and the guy down the street has his truth. So almost never do you start at the very beginning of this like I'm gonna do and walk your way through all these arguments. What you do need, though, is to have all of these in your toolbox, to have them in your pocket. I've used all of this with somebody or another over the years in doing evangelism and teaching in churches. So why do we believe in objective truth? If something is true, then it's true for everyone. There's no such thing as a truth that is true for one person and then false for somebody else. If it's true, then it's true for everyone and it's undeniable. The reason it's undeniable is think of it like this you're having a conversation with someone, and they say there is no such thing as objective truth. And there are people that that talk like this. Their thinking is illogical because all you have to do is ask that statement you just made, is that true for everyone, or is that just an opinion that applies to you? Well, if I say there is no objective truth, and that's something that's true for everyone, then we just made a true statement that applies to everyone, in which case it's self-refuting. On the other hand, if the person says, well, that's uh just my opinion, then it's also could be my opinion that there is objective truth. So the idea of objective truth is really undeniable. There's no way to say that truth does not exist. Everywhere in life, we expect things to be objectively true. If you go and buy a product and the product is labeled as being a certain thing, and you get it home and you open it up and it's something else, then you're gonna say, wait a minute, that's false advertising. They said it was gonna be what I intended to buy. Or if you pay for something and maybe it's somewhat expensive, then you're gonna expect uh to deliver what you bought. So it everywhere in life, medicine, relationships, we don't want to get into a love relationship and then figure out the person had been lying to us all along, or can't trust the doctor whether he's telling me the truth or not. Think of it this way: if if I go to the bank and I go up to the teller at the bank and I say, I'd like to withdraw$1,000. And the teller says, I'm sorry, sir, you only have$3.12 in your account. Well, I can't turn around and say, Well, that's your truth, right? My truth is I'd like to withdraw$1,000. Well, what's the teller going to say? The teller is gonna say, it's objectively true that there's$3.12 in your account. If you don't want to put some more in, then you might want to step out of the line so I can get to the next customer. There's no such thing as my truth and your tooth when it comes to money, finances, love relationships, advertising, court proceedings. So, why is it that when we suddenly get to religion, that it's okay for there to be conflicting things that are all true? And it's really just a way to not have to deal with the uncomfortableness of religion. So it's objectively true whatever a religion says. Now, it may be objectively false for everyone or objectively true, but whichever it is, it's true for everyone. So people, when they make statements about religion, they're either speaking nonsense or they're speaking meaningful sentences. And if they're speaking meaningful sentences, then we can have a conversation about whether it's true or false. Even things like Buddhism, Buddhism teaches oftentimes certain areas of Buddhism teach in this idea of these uh contradictions. They're trying to get you to think through uh the norms that you've been taught all your life. So you'll have statements in Buddhism such as like like listen for the sound of one hand clapping, or things such as this. And they're they're trying to get you to think out of the box. Well, even Buddhism would hold that Buddhism is correct and non-Buddhism is false. Even Buddhism or any other group for that matter would hold that there is a true way, and everything that would disagree with that is false. So there's really no way to deny objective truth. And the way to cut to the chase is you'll get people that have long, convoluted explanations of what could be true, and they're trying to show maybe a very sophisticated method of how conflicting things can both be true or contradictory things can both be true. I'll give you a simple way to deal with this. And it's it's really simple. You don't even have to really unpack everything they're saying. Just listen to them. And when they're finished, no matter how long, how complicated, how sophisticated their argument is, all you have to do is ask one of two questions. You have to say, all of that explanation you just gave for your view of truth, is that true for everybody in the world or just you? And if it's true for everybody, the way you just explained it, if that's the case that the world is, and that's true for everyone, then you just gave me an objective truth. The other question you could ask is whatever you just explained is the opposite of that true also. So those two questions will cut through a lot of the nonsense that we get with, oh, well, true for you, not true for me, or you know, you you Christians over there, that that's nice for you, you can have your truth, but I've got my truth. No, it's either objectively true for everyone or it's false for everyone, but they can't be contradictory and true too. And these couple of questions will cut through all the nonsense. Is that true for everybody, or is it just true for you? And if it's just true for you, then I can hold on to objective truth without any problem. And if the opposite of your view is true as well, then you just told me a nonsensical statement that doesn't make any sense and I can ignore it. So that gets us to objective truth. And we have to have that before we can get to whether or not God exists. Because if we don't believe that there's an external truth reality out there that I have to submit myself to, and it's just up to me, you and I may disagree on what is true, but whatever is out there, it's out there. And if I just understand it and we come to terms, then one of us will have to change our minds. If we're there, now we can get to whether or not God exists. I've even heard many people say, oh, there's no way to objectively prove God. Well, you can't always prove something to somebody that doesn't want to believe it, but there are logical reasons why we should believe in God. I want to give some here. There's actually a whole series of them. What I want to do now for the next few minutes is to go through and just explain these that I have here very quickly. So hang in there. These are logical reasons why to believe in God. And there's several. Let me go through these one at a time. There's an argument called the Kalam argument for God. And Kalam just means beginnings. So it's an argument from beginnings. It's an argument about causes. And the kalam argument goes like this: everything that begins to exist has a cause. And the universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a cause. And it's it's very intuitive. It's very intuitive simply because most people are going to agree, you look around the room, you look around uh all around creation, everything we see had a beginning point and had something else that caused it to come into existence. And if we say that everything in the universe had a beginning and a cause for its existence, then the entire universe had to have a cause for the existence. And then whatever that cause was, that had to be outside the universe. It had to be eternal, which means it didn't have a beginning. If it wasn't eternal, then it would be subject to the argument. It had to have something else that began it. So there has to be something that's eternal. Whatever this is is also has to be very powerful, not made of matter, because it's made of matter, again, it has to have a beginning. It has to be wise enough to form the complex universe and personal. Because it created things that are personal. So this we call God. So that's the column argument. And it's very solid, very reasonable, very intuitive to the people you might be speaking with. Everything has a beginning, has a cause. And the flaw here that many, even people that should know better, say, well, you're saying that everything has a cause, then what caused God? Well, that's not what I said. I said everything that has a beginning needs a cause. And God didn't have a beginning. Again, the argument, the whole argument saying there has to be something that's eternal. And the something that's out there is what we call God. There has to be something that's eternal, or else all the things with beginnings couldn't have begun. So that's the column argument. The next one is an argument from contingency. And contingency just means a contingent thing is something that is here, but it doesn't have to be here. I am contingent because I am here, but I didn't have to be here. I could have not been here, and the world would have still gone on about its business. So what does this say? The argument from contingency says that everything in the material world is contingent. It's here, but it didn't have to be here. If all beings in the world were contingent, then there'd be a time when nothing existed. And given infinite time, then there'd be a time when something wasn't here. Well, therefore, something exists. If there's something that actually exists in the world, and it's there is contingent things in the world, then there has to be at least one necessary eternal and non-material being, and this we call God. Well, if you want to dive into the weeds on this, there's plenty of them out there. Look up vertical cosmological argument. Uh it suffers from a sense of abstractness just because that's not how we think generally nowadays. But it's very, very solid saying that if there's anything in the world that is here that didn't have to be here, and the entire world, the entire universe is made up of things that didn't have to be here, then therefore there has to be something that's eternal. Next, we have the moral argument for God. And the moral argument says this all moral laws require a moral lawgiver. And there is a universal moral law, therefore there is a universal moral lawgiver. Moral laws are just that, they're moral. The idea here is this if if we look around, we see things made of matter and energy, and if God didn't exist and all that did exist was physics and chemistry, well, we can't get morality from physics and chemistry. For example, if I go to my kitchen and I mix together vinegar and bacon soda, then I'll get a reaction, I'll get molecules in motion, I'll get a chemical reaction. But what I won't get is to be able to point at it and say, well, that is a morally good reaction, or it's a morally evil reaction. It's just a reaction. It just is. There's nothing there that would give me moral good. And if God doesn't exist, then all we have is a very complex thing like my uh vinegar and bacon soda. Now, the other reaction I just might get is from my wife for making a kitchen a mess all over the kitchen counter, but that's not the same kind of reaction. The reaction that happens all through the universe, the atheists tell us, is just a complex series of chemical chemistry and physics. And if that was true, hence come morality. How do we get moral good? There's a leap from uh is to an ought. So we cannot get a moral ought from just saying something is. We can't just explain how much it weighs and how fast it moves and what's the mass and all, you know, what's the size and get to moral good or moral evil. Therefore, if there is a moral law, if there's anything out there that says that killing innocents is wrong, then there is a moral law giver. And I've always tested this by saying to my audience, if if you just merely give me your wallet, then, or give me all your money, or give me the key to your house and tell me when you're not gonna be home, then we'll test out the moral law because I'll broadcast it on the internet and we'll see whether you think it's evil. Even Attila the Hun may think it's okay to come steal your stuff, but somehow you go over and start stealing his stuff, then he's gonna think it's morally wrong. So there is a moral law that's objectively true, it's universal, and therefore there is a moral lawgiver. There's also an argument from religious need. The argument from religious need goes like this: religious experience is so widespread as to be universal across all cultures and time. If we look at all cultures across time, some sort of religion is almost universal. The only exceptions to this are so rare as to be just that the exception. And most of the time, if you have a culture that doesn't have some sort of religion, then it's imposed by some authoritarian figure from on high, or people are substituting something. They may not call it religion, but they're worshiping either a person or they're worshiping something such as an idea. They they've exchanged and don't call it a religion, but they're idolizing a human being or they're idolizing some sort of a monetary system or something that they're treating with an equal religious fervor as a religion. There's many atheists that worship science as it was a religion. If not, then why do they get so sensitive when you just merely ask questions? They they hold to it with a dogmatic fervency. So religion is so widespread as to be universal across all cultures and all time. Therefore, point number two: no need exists that does not have a true fulfillment. If I get thirsty, then there has to be such a thing as water. If I get hungry, then there has to be such a thing as food to meet that need, or I wouldn't get hungry. So therefore, religion exists. And we're back to the first point, objective truth. There wouldn't be a universal religious need if there wasn't such a thing as a true thing to fulfill it. There can't be contradictory things, so therefore, a true religion exists. Next, we have an argument from design. Every design needs a designer, the universe is designed, therefore, the universe has a designer. Now, this argument is multifaceted, and we don't have time here today to go through all of them, but there's a series of arguments that deal with things such as there was a man named William Paley that came up years ago that said if you're you're walking along and you see a watch laying in the trail, well, you know that watch didn't just didn't get there by accident or nature caused it. Some intelligence caused the watch. There's the argument from biological information. If you look at DNA and some of the other things down inside the living cells, then you've got this huge amount of information. It's more than the physics and chemistry. There's something else there besides just chemical information. There's information. It's a real thing. Then there's an argument for like suspicious improbability. It's technically possible to have these things happen, but the instance of it is so rare. Some of these odds, the intelligent design folks have told us the odds for some of these biological things happening are greater than there are particles in the universe. So, yeah, okay, it's not technically impossible, but it's so suspicious that it really looks like there's been an intelligence monkeying with it. The fact that there's just teleology to begin with. In other words, if if anything in the universe acts towards an end, if anything in the universe acts towards an end, then there has to be a design behind it. Irreducible complexity. If you have a system and taking away any part of that system causes the entire system to fail, then it's irreducible. So there's all these design arguments. Uh, if if you just look up design arguments, you'll see a lot of them. Another one that doesn't always get talked about is the argument for beauty. Beauty exists in many areas of the world, such as art or music or math. Even the mathematicians will tell us that there's certain things that just look well in mathematics. I have to get past 10, I have to take off my shoes. But the the reason why the scientists believe that the earth is spinning around the sun and not the other way around is because the mathematics. Again, it's three-dimensional objects moving in space. You have to assume a fixed point in order to do the math. The math for the sun spinning around the earth is just ugly and cumbersome. And the math to make it work with the earth spinning around the sun is just clean. The mathematicians tell us it's it's just beautiful. So there's music, there's art. As far as just survival, if all that we were interested in was survival, as the evolutionists tell us, then hence cometh art, right? Because we don't need art to survive. We don't need beauty to survive. We don't need beautiful music. Why do we gravitate towards things of beauty? Why do we gravitate towards spending time, money, energy, uh, labor of my life, blood, sweat, and tears to go see or hear or experience something beautiful if it doesn't have anything to do with reproduction? Therefore, there has to be a necessary transcendent source of beauty. And all people recognize and seek out things that are beautiful, good and evil. Just the fact that there's such a thing as evil, again, back to the vinegar and bacon soda on the kitchen counter. The fact that I can't look at that and say, well, that's good or that's morally evil, the fact that I even have the concept of moral good and moral evil means that there's something out there that is morally good. And since evil is really just a lack of good, evil can't exist on its own. Evil only exists as a privation of good. Well, therefore, there has to be a transcendent source of good. And this we call God. All of these arguments, I'm just giving the high points of them. You can go and investigate any of these. You could have an entire college course of all of these. So again, just hang in there with me. I'm giving a high points for all of these, simply because all of these are reasonable things to hold that there is a God. Another one that I would just hold up is the survival of the Jewish people. If you think about what's happened to the Jewish people over the last 3,000 years of history, they've tried to have been wiped out by many cultures, all the way back from the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians came in and did huge damage, took them off into captivity, the Seleucids, the Romans. I mean, the Romans just did horrible things to the Jews. Look up the Bar Kotba revolt and the and the uh attacks in 70 AD. Romans just did terrible things to the Jewish race. The Jewish people, over the course of their lifetime, were removed from their homeland three different times under the Egyptians, under the Babylonians and the Assyrians, and then after the Romans. And the last time, after the Romans, they were without a homeland for 1900 years. Think of that. A people that were removed from their land three different times, one of them being almost 2,000 years, but yet they kept their identity, they kept their culture, and they're brought back to that land. So we add to this just even the times when people weren't actually trying to kill them, they were they were still persecuting them, anti-Semitism. And we Christians aren't innocent here. If we're honest with our Christian history, Christians were being prejudicial and worse to the Jews. Uh the Jews were were blamed for the plague. Uh, then there was the Holocaust under the Nazi Germany. They've been tried to wipe out for literally multiple, multiple times. And even times when they weren't physically persecuted, there were laws there that would keep them from owning land. If we take all these times where the Jews were persecuted, how could any group of people keep its identity, keep its religion for 3,000 years under the face of all this persecution? It really is a miracle and defies explanation if there is no God. So those are all arguments for God. Now, back to our model. Once people believe there's objective truth and they believe that God exists, then we can show them that the Bible is true. And there's multiple reasons for this: history, prophecy, eyewitness accounts. Let's walk through several of these. This particular book here is called The Book of Acts in the setting of Hellenistic History by Colin Hemer, H-E-M-E-R. This book is really sort of a heavy book that's written for professional historians, but it's it's a it's a gold mine of facts about the book of Acts, even just a bibliography is worth the price of admission. And he shows in this book that the book of Acts has many, many, many historical corroborations from outside sources, things that corroborate dates, uh details of geography, details of how people acted and religion, titles of local officials, minor officials and major ones. It has a sense of immediacy. If you read, for example, the account of the shipwreck towards the end of the book of Acts, you can almost feel the salt spray in your face. There's a lot of cultural features and idioms. For example, at one point in the book of Acts, the Apostle Paul was being insulted by some local officials. And most of the English translation translate the word babbler. You're just a babbler. Well, the actual original word was a slang word that was only used by the underclass people. This wasn't a term that was used in like the upper crust educated circles. This was a slang term that was used by people as an insult. Well, now the author knows not only educated things, but he also knows slang terms used by one people group in one area. He has names of local officials, things like which way the wind blows at certain times of the year, and what what crops would be shipped out of certain ports at different times of the year, how far it takes to walk from one place to the other, all these facts are there. And one of the terms that Hemmer used was the historical accounts in Acts are what he calls interrelatedly complex. Interrelatedly complex. That works like this. If you have a story and it's complex in several areas of knowledge, the accounts in Acts have details about minor things in the Jewish religion, how much of a hair growth and how long the vow has to take, but in between your time you cut your hair and what sacrifices were done when you were doing a Nazarene vow. The only people that know that is somebody who was very familiar with Jewish details of the religion. They also had details on how the Roman soldiers would react and where their troops were located, and also had details of the leadership, the secular leadership, the town leaders, and also has details of the geography. So you had one person that knows Greek culture, Jewish culture, Roman culture, uh geography of the area, minor officials, major officials, and all of that is wrapped up in one story. And the main story was really just talking about Paul going on this journey and what happened to him. So it's these interrelatedly complex issues are woven into the fabric of the story. Next, we have this book. This is a book called The Historical Jesus by Gary Habermass, H-A-B-E-R-M-A-S. In the historical Jesus, he pulls up what I believe, if I counted right, 40 some odd sources that are outside the Bible, where he can recreate the entire gospel message. Habermas recreates that Jesus was a Nazarene, that he was considered wise, he was killed on Passover, he was crucified by Pilate, he was believed to have risen three days later, his enemies recognized the miracles and called them sorcery, and his followers rejected polytheism and worshiped Jesus as God. Habermas recreates the entire gospel, 150 some odd facts from external sources, some of which were hostile to Christianity. So we have many historical corroborations of the New Testament. There is another book, Josephus, in the history of the Jews. Josephus was a secular Jew that was hired by the Romans to write a history of the Jews. And I went through it and counted more than 45 specific corroborated facts that are outside the Bible in Josephus that are corroborated inside the Bible. And when you mention Josephus, the one or two places that most people think is there are a couple of quotes in Josephus that mention Christ. Ones I'm talking about here are separate and apart from that. What I'm talking about is local leaders. People mentioned in the New Testament are also mentioned in Josephus, such as Herod, King Agrippa, Ananias, Felix, Pilate, Agrippa, and Bernice, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, these political parties, what they taught, Jesus' brother James, Jewish customs, the locations of these events, the theological beliefs of these different people, all of these things, many, many of them corroborated by Josephus and supported in the New Testament. So now we have a multifaceted, wide and deep historical corroborations for the things that are in the Bible. And so you can't just wave a hand and say, well, Have this religious book, the Bible, and it was invented by somebody trying to start a religion. No, no, we have many, many historical facts, and it is unreasonable to say that there are many hundreds of corroborations that are true, but here when it talks about Jesus rising from the dead and Paul speaking the gospel message in a particular town, that, oh well, that's made up. That is unreasonable. Next, we have prophecy, and here's a book, The Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy by Payne, P-A-Y-N-E. I don't know how long it took him to write this book, but he's got 1,817 prophecies that he counted, about 725 of which were fulfilled, and they cross 18 time periods and over 8,300 Bible verses to support them. So again, over 1,800 prophecies, almost half of which were fulfilled, and they're all documented in this book. So prophecies are a strong support for the truth of the Bible and the inspiration of the Bible. I mean, if you really want to talk about prophecy, try predicting the year or and place of your own birth. That's a neat trick if you can pull it off. So the New Testament just goes on and on with these things. But when it was originally written, how do we know that the copy we have today is aligned with the original? Well, we have earlier manuscripts. We have a 25-year gap versus a thousand-year gap for most ancient documents. We have not only earlier manuscripts, but we have more manuscripts. We have over 5,600 original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, not counting the ones that it was translated into in the early years. Most of the ancient documents have only 10 to 20. We have more accurately copied manuscripts. 99 to 99.5% of the New Testament is copied correctly. We can prove that. And we have more abundantly supported manuscripts. We have early translations. They began translating the New Testament very early into other languages. So we have all of that. We also have archaeology. Here's a stone with Pontius Pilate's name chiseled in it, was discovered in 1961. There's another stone that had King David's name chiseled in it that was discovered in 1993 that placed David and his descendants back to 900 to 950 BC. We have a bone that was discovered with a nail through the heel that was a crucifixion victim. We have the bone box of Joseph Caiaphas, who was the high priest about the time Jesus was living. Think of it. They had the bone box and had the skeleton of somebody that most probably had a one-to-one conversation with Jesus Christ. We also have in the Bible a unity of message. It's a very cohesive story. The Bible has many authors across 1,400 years. We can build a systematic theology that aligns all the books. Just the fact that we can build a theology that all Christians would agree on, namely that God created the world, everybody sinned, sin brings death and separation from God. God judges the world. Jesus reconciled mankind to God. Faith in Jesus Christ is what saves us. Just the fact that we can build that theology across a book that is really multiple books by many people from many different backgrounds across a long period of time shows divine inspiration. The greatest proof for the Bible is the empty tomb. The greatest proof for Christianity is the empty tomb. If people wanted to destroy Christianity, they would have done it very quickly in the weeks following the day of Pentecost when the disciples and apostles were running around talking about Jesus rising from the dead. All they would have had to have done, they knew right where the tomb was, was to go over and produce the body. But there was no body because he rose from the dead. So what that gives us is this model again, this model that we've been talking about, and I went through very, very quickly. You start with evangelism. May I take a Bible and take a few minutes and just give you a summary? And you give them the Romans Road, you give them the gospel, and they'll have questions. And how do you know how to answer the questions? Well, do they believe the Bible's true? If they do, then I can just answer some questions about it. If they don't believe God exists, then they have to go all the way back to objective truth. One of the things that professional apologists fail at many times is that we focus so much on these proofs and these lines of reasoning, and we don't get down to actually asking someone, what's keeping you from giving your life to Christ right here, right now? What's keeping you from accepting Christ in a full sense of the word? So the question, how do I do apologetics? Well, we start with Jesus, we answer people's questions, and we end with Jesus. That's how we do apologetics. And the backbone behind it is Jesus. These lines of reasoning that I'm giving you, these aren't new to me. I've learned these from someone else myself, but they've been around since the very first. The Apostle Paul in Acts 17 used apologetics. Uh the apostle John used apologetics in his epistle and in his his gospel. Uh, all of the writers of the Bible were reasoning towards a conclusion. And there's a rich heritage of deep Christian thinkers across the centuries. So what do we have? We have a nation today that has lost the ability to reason through the Bible. That's why our ministry is called Reasoning Through the Bible. We want to give you the tools to reason through it yourself. And we have these arguments and we have the teachings. Come go with us as we do verse-by-verse Bible study. You can find out more about what we do on our website, reasoningthible.com. If you have questions about any of this, we'd be glad to answer them. Send us a note at infoinfo at reasoningthible.com and follow along with us as we do our verse by verse, chapter by chapter Bible studies. We touch on all these types of arguments. We just mold it into the Bible study, which is what we want everyone to do. That's why we give out materials that you can use in your small group or you can use in your church. So check out our materials, send us a note, and we trust that you will be back here with us as we do our regular reasoning through the Bible. Thank you for watching and listening, and may God bless.