Wesley Huff Gives Historical Take on The Death and Resurrection of Jesus

The jogan Experience because of this claim that they say they saw Jesus resurrected like there's something different that goes on there that they're like this is a miracle right dead people don't usually rise from the dead so what is your personal belief when it comes to the resurrection what do you think HP do you have a belief or do you just try to interpret the text and try to see what is the message well I think so as a historian I do think it is a historical question you have a guy who objectively lived he

objectively died and then individuals close to his inner circle claim that they see him not dead right again this is a highly unusual activity highly unusual right so but it's hard when you're dealing with illiterate populations you're dealing with thousands of years of time you're deal dealing with an oral tradition and then you have us sitting here talking about it m in 2024 trying to figure at the end of 2024 trying to figure this out literally the end yeah last couple days it's um it's very difficult for anybody who thinks of themselves as an intelligent

person who's secular to even entertain the possibility that someone died and come back to life and I get that um but we've already talked about the fact that we don't think that the only thing that exists is matter and motion we as in you and I right like we believe that there's something else going on in this world that's a little bit crazy there's something else and and that to I think exclude that I think excludes something that that you're kind of putting blinders on for and you do have I mean you're right in terms

of all of the these ancient conventions and the ways that things were spread around and but the gospels are written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses and they're written in this period of time where you have groups of individuals who could have fact checked those things so how do you fact check someone coming back from the dead well if you how many people saw his body right well Paul says that 400 people saw him all at once 400 people saw the crucifixion no saw the resurrect resurrected Jesus yeah 1 Corinthians 15 Paul says that Jesus

appeared to the disciples and then he appeared to 400 people all at once I mean if we read the Gospel of Luke and the gospel of um or Gospel of Luke and acts so same author wrote These both documents uh he says that Jesus was walking around teaching them for 40 days after he was resurrected from the dead and so these are written within a time period when you have people who would have seen Jesus's Ministry who were there say at something like the feeding of the 5,000 who could have been able to verify or

um debunk some of these things that are being said and you go from a bunch of scared guys who cuz Jesus wasn't the only MH uh Messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the Messiah right there were a number of individuals both prior to and after Jesus but they die and the movement dies with them do you think it's possible that he didn't die and do you think it's possible that they thought he was dead because that does happen um there was actually a case very recently where a guy was about to be harvested

for organs uh the they thought he was dead and uh this guy started moving again and came back to life it's very very bizarre case because uh his family had been told that he was going to be harvested for organs they were prep preparing for that this guy comes back yeah I mean we know a lot about Roman crucifixion and we know and and we know that they they did their job well yeah and so in fact if you look at say very skeptical biblical Scholars like non-believing um atheist agnostic Christian Scholars they will say

if we can know anything about Jesus like they'll cast a doubt on a lot of the things that we read about in the gospels in terms of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth they'll say one thing we can be sure of is that he died by crucifixion under pontious pilot because we have not just multiple attested documents that we refer to as the New Testament but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards and talk about the fact that you have this guy and it's mocked within earliest Christianity so one of our

earliest in fact not one of the earliest depiction of Jesus on the cross is called the Alexa menos grafo and it's probably from the the end of the first century and it's a uh it it depicts a an individual with their arms raised in an act of worship worshiping a man with a donkey's head who's being crucified and right beside it it says Alexa menos worships his God in Greek whoa and it's mocking right because crucifixion was for the lowest of the low it was for like slaves in fact if you were a Roman citizen

you were banned from being crucified who wasn't that got crucified upside down Peter why was it because like regular crucifixion wasn't good enough for him or what was he what didn't deserve it because Christ had gone through it well so the story is that they say we're going to crucify you and he says it's like too big of an honor to die like my Lord and they say well we can fix that oh Jesus um shut your mouth buddy listen the ran were pretty brutal oh yeah but this is why we know like we have

it's interesting we know a lot about crucifixion but crucifixion was seen as so disgusting um I believe it was Cicero who said that like the word crucifixion shouldn't even be on a Roman man's lips wow I mean the word excruciating right X is uh off of in Latin and Cru off the cross so that's where we get that word is because this was designed to humiliate and it was designed to be as painful as possible there was actually a really uh good article done by jamama the Journal of the American Medical Association which was done

by a number of um I think it was in the 70s the early 80s it was done by a group of uh biblical Scholars and then medical professionals and so they looked at the conventions of what we do know about Roman crucifixion and then they looked at the descriptions in the gospel to try to figure out okay if we could diagnose how Jesus died how would he have died and so they basically came with this idea that it's he probably exfix to death um you kind of drown in your own blood um but the the

chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion I think are are narrow to none and the chance of him appearing 3 Days Later completely fine I mean you don't if the first thing you do if you survive a crucifixion and then you go and you find your disciples the first thing you say is not you know peace be with you it's get me to a hospital right do they have them back then no not Al are we um entirely certain of their measurement of days um so this is an interesting question because of the differences uh between

when uh when the Gospel of John says Jesus died compared to the synoptics because John appears to be using the Roman Convention of count counting time and uh the the other gospels when they describe the the timing appear to be using the Jewish ones and actually if you uh if if you correlate between the two they match up pretty well so the thing is with Jews any part of a day was considered a day so three days and three nights becomes almost an idiom for any part of that day is the day so if on

if Jesus and because they count evening and morning evening to morning is the day um it's very possible that it wasn't like how we would think of 3 24hour days especially if he dies on Friday and wakes up on Sunday so that would actually make it less time than than more time yeah there so it's not like he had recovery time oh no he didn't have recovery time saying that's I'm kind of it's not like it was three days was actually three months oh no no no yeah not like that so the then 400 people

saw him afterwards that's the claim that that Paul makes Paul makes his yeah yeah yeah and how many different people um have some sort of a recollection or a writing or or something that's attribute to them of being witness to his resurrection way of Peter Paul Jude James and Matthew Mark and Luke the thing with Matthew Mark and Luke is that Matthew and Luke or Matthew and John are attributed to direct Disciples of Jesus uh Luke and Mark are not so they are not eyewitnesses within the Jesus community in fact Luke prefaces his gospel by

saying that he he's right upfront about this he's like hey I'm not an eyewitness don't confuse me with an eyewitness but he he actually uses conventional writing um uh what's the term I'm looking for he uses writing conventions of the day that would fit within regular biography that was written within the Roman world so you have a guy named quintilian who is basically I mentioned him before with the um he ex he's teaching people how to write and he says that if you're going to write biography you need to be interviewing eyewitnesses and you can't

be too far away from the event to be able to write these things and um quintilian Lucian and Josephus who are all these very prominent ancient biographers and writers of history uh have a lot of crossover in the way they describe how you should write history with the words that Luke uses at the beginning of his gospel where he says I'm interviewing I wi is and I'm writing up an orderly account and so he's saying you know I'm going to use these methods that are expected as good history of my day I'm not an eyewitness

so I'm going to try to find the people who are eyewitnesses and I'm going to try to encapsulate this within a document that communicates um what is being written so we have an account of the Resurrection do we have an account of the denial of the Resurrection is there an historical record of him just dying and this like a refal or rebuttal rather to what they're saying no the only ones from the ancient world that deny his resurrection are groups that come on afterwards that sometimes are uh sometimes are described as gnostics and they're not

necessarily just denying it for the reasons we might think they were they're denying it because they have incorporated ideas of uh Pagan philosophy where they believe that the spiritual is good and the physical is bad so if Jesus was crucified he if so let me back up if Jesus Is God he cannot have a physical body so they deny that he actually had a physicality to him um this is sometimes called dotism because Doane in Greek means to seem so these groups that we describe as the do docs they are denying that Jesus had a

physical body he only seemed to have a physical body and they they wrote documents later on so the gospel of Peter which comes around in you know second third fourth centuries are is being written and it has Jesus kind of chilling on the cross because he's not really physical because he's Divine and physical entities don't have physical bodies so we don't actually get like a concrete denial of his resurrection in that way until you get things like um The Gospel of Barnabas in the Middle Ages which is a it's actually the document that Billy brought

up to me in the conversation we had is the evidence that Jesus was never crucified the Gospel of Barnabas well Gospel of Barnabas is 15th century it paraphrases Dante's Inferno it's not an ancient document so but in the ancient world no nobody really had that big of a problem with these kind of Supernatural claims more the more of the kind of skepticism was why you would worship a crucified individual to begin with wow so they were less surprised that he was resurrected or or that you would you would worship a crucified like teacher was just

seen as silly because it's so humiliating to be crucified yeah yeah and and that like um a God would let himself go through this right like what what do you what are you talking about in fact uh the ancient world didn't really have a problem with Supernatural events um there is a an ancient writer who mocks Christianity and he particularly mocks Christianity in saying that of of course Jesus did Miracles because Jesus had a childhood in Egypt and he goes all those Egyptians are magicians anyways so he just learned the magic when he was a

child so he actually confirms incidentally two things that the narrative in the gospel is where it says that the Holy Family fled to Egypt during the reign of Herod um he corroborates that he actually thinks that happened and that Jesus did Miracles he just attributes the Miracles to Jesus being a traveling magician anyways and you know anybody who lived in Egypt knows some magic that is what's really fascinating that the mindset of the people that lived back then was that whatever was going on in Egypt was so crazy that they had to be magicians yeah

yeah but everybody believed in Supernatural events like there's no such thing as like a secular work in the ancient world even Plutarch who's one of the most famous biographers in the ancient world he wrote 90 biographies of which 60 still survive today he was a priest of Apollo so like he's already assuming right that the gods exist that crazy things are going to happen in the world and um so they they didn't have a problem with people doing Miracles or crazy things happening or well that's all also why it's so interesting trying to put your

mind into the context of people that live back then when you try to interpret what these stories were all about because they did believe in things that weren't real so when they talk about this thing that we supposed to believe is real when you have all this evidence that they believe things that aren't true yeah it's interesting right because like you're you're you're now saying yeah but this one really was true right well there's so many different things that they thought of and believe that weren't true yeah