Ben Shapiro STUNNED by Historical Evidence for Jesus

from from a Jewish point of view we don't believe in the Divinity of Christ I think that there you can make an argument that the the gospels which were written he was just a prophet signif no no no we don't even believe he's a prophet what do you think he was what do you guys think I mean I what I what do I think he was historically I think he was a Jew who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans and got killed for his trouble just like a lot of other Jews at that

time who were crucified for trying to lead revolts against the Roman and got killed for their trouble so he became Legend in story and it became a bigger and bigger deal as time on yeah he had a group of followers and then that gradually grew and then you think Resurrected no that's not that's not a a Jewish belief okay so at this point in Ben Shapiro's life he holds that Jesus he's not a great teacher or Prophet but that he is a mere common criminal and not even a month later after appearing on The Joe

Rogan Experience making the statement he interviews William Lane Craig a great Christian Theologian on the Ben Shapiro show and this is one of the rare instances where Ben Shapiro really he gets humbled and he loses the only other time that I've seen it this bad as when he went up with Andrew Neil on BBC so we're going to look at this clip and see how he dissects this argument and then we're going to talk about it on the back end let's get into it what is the proof that Jesus was who he says he is

in in the gospels well first we need to establish who he thought he was when you look at the religio historical context uh of the life and Ministry of Jesus I think you can show that among the historically authentic words of Jesus were claims that he thought he was the Jewish Messiah that he believed himself to be the Son of God in a unique sense that set him apart from Jewish Kings and Prophets and finally that he thought that he was the son of man predicted by the Prophet Daniel to whom God would give all

Dominion power and authority so he had this radical self- understanding of being Messiah Son of God and the son of man and at the trial scene before the Sanhedrin in Mark 15 all three of these titles come to a head when the high priest asks him are you the Messiah the Son of the blessed one that is the Son of God and Jesus says I am and then virtually quoting from Daniel and you will see the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven and seated at the right hand of the power and at

that point the high priest rips his robes and says you have heard the blasphemy what more witnesses do we need and Mark says they all condemned him as worthy of death and that enabled them since they didn't have the ability to carry out capital punishment to deliver him over to the Roman authorities by slandering him as a pretend tender to be king of the Jews and therefore a a political figure who could be tried for treason and Sedition and crucified so from the Jewish perspective this this narrative has some some holes in sort of Jewish

philosophy uh the The Narrative begins with the idea that Jesus appears in front of the Sanhedrin and then claims to be the Messiah well there's nothing actual criminally in in any of the tractates that say that if you declare yourself the Messiah this is actually a punishment a punishment offense there many Jews including Bara who have declared themselves Messianic figures the real Gap here is that in the gospels Jesus's vision of himself as the Messiah is completely different from the prior vision of what the Jewish Messiah is and is actually outside the scope of how

Jews describe the Messiah or really have ever described the Messiah the Messiah in Judaism has always been a political figure who is destined to do certain things restoring the Kingdom of Israel uh re maintaining control that Kingdom uh bringing more Jews back to Israel all of these things are considered sort of political things that the Messiah does but the idea of the Messiah as embodiment of God is something that's foreign to Jewish religious philosophy going all the way back to the beginning so even the idea that the Sanhedrin would be questioning him in those terms

and would get from that that what he means is I am God which would be a much more punishable offense presumably that be actual blasphemy that that's it's it's an oddity I think you're absolutely right in saying that Jesus understanding of the Messiah was radically different from the prevailing um cultural understanding of the Messiah among the chief priests and the common people and he didn't meet their expectations indeed that's what helped to get him crucified being the Messiah you're right in and of itself isn't a Blasphemous claim but to claim to be the Son of

God in a unique sense and then especially the son of man prophesied by Daniel sitting at the right hand of the power that is truly Blasphemous and is sufficient for his condemnation now before we move forward with the question that William Lane Craig is about to ask Ben Shapiro I have a question for you and that is if you were in Jesus's time and you were going to lead a Revolt to create an uprising within the people how would you do it now I whatever your answer is I don't think it would be to claim

to be literally God incarnate in human form speaking to these people because that is just a completely outrageous claim to make unless you have a way of backing it up you might claim to be a great prophet or some sort of messiah in the way that Ben Shapiro is saying and that's actually happened many times in Jewish history which is in itself not a Blasphemous thing but to say that you are literally God pretty crazy to me and I think Ben Shapiro realizes that too but there's some there's some stumbling block in his head that

is keeping him from realizing this inconsistency so let's see what William William Lane Craig is gonna say about this and then we'll talk more in the back end let's get into it now the question I think that is raised by your inter yeah your interpretation Ben is this why should we believe Jesus reinterpretation of the Messiah rather than the one that the chief priests and the people held and I think the answer to that is his resurrection from the dead Jesus resurrection from the dead is yahweh's public and an equivocal Vindication of the man whom

the chief priest had rejected as a blasphemer it is the Divine demonstration that these allegedly Blasphemous claims are in fact true that he was who he claimed to be uh and that therefore I follow Jesus in his conception of what it means to be the Messiah so when it comes to the resurrection why is resurrection proof of divinity so Lazarus is is resurrected that was why I wanted to emphasize the religio historical context before we talked about the resurrection a miracle taken in isolation is inherently ambiguous the proper interpretation of a miracle is going to

be given by the religio historical context in which it occurs and the resurrection of Jesus is not just the resurrection of any old body it's the resurrection of the man who claimed to be Messiah Son of God and Son of Man and who was crucified for those allegedly Blasphemous claims if God has raised this man from the dead then he has I think unequivocally and publicly Vindicated those allegedly Blasphemous claims so one of the counter claims to some of this is that the gospels are written significantly after Jesus Lives even the earliest gospel is written

what 7 dce uh some somewhere in some or 40 years after after Jesus is crucified so what's to say I mean that like most historical events there is some play in the joints here so that this would be the historical argument against the exact veracity of of the Gospel Revelations for example now I think it's important to understand Ben that in order for a historical document to be reliable it isn't required that it be in a contemporaneous of course of course um what I would argue is that underlying the inference to the resurrection of Jesus

are three great independently established facts which are supported by the historical evidence uh and which surprisingly I did my doctoral work on this in Germany are are recognized as such by the majority of New Testament Scholars today who studied the historical Jesus and these facts would be that after crucifixion um uh and burial by a member of the Sanhedrin named Joseph of artha that Jesus tomb was discovered empty on the first day of the week by a group of his female followers secondly would be that various individuals and groups of people then witnessed appearances of

Jesus alive and finally number three would be that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead despite having every predisposition to the contrary the vast majority of Scholars have come to accept as convincing the evidence in support of those three facts not assuming biblical inherency or inspiration but treating the gospels as ordinary historical documents you can show for example that the fact of the discovery of the empty tomb is attested by at least six independent sources in the New Testament some of which are extraordinarily early no

scholar denies that individuals and groups saw postmortem appearances of Jesus the only question is whether you should or could dismiss them as hallucinatory and again nobody denies that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead so these three facts are pretty firmly established and the only question is then how do you best explain them and down through history attempts have been made to explain these facts without recourse to the resurrection like The Conspiracy Theory the apparent death Theory uh the hallucination Theory and so forth and I

would argue that none of these naturalistic theories meets the criteria for being the best historical explanation of the facts none of them is as good an explanation as the one that the original disciples gave that God raised Jesus from the dead and if that's right then I think we have Good Grounds indeed are almost compelled to revise our typical understanding of who the Messiah was supposed to be so we can have the historical argument back and forth obviously and I think that there arguments that you can make I think there are arguments that I can

make but I honestly find them relatively uninteresting is the truth um simply because I'm not sure that we're going to come to any sort of consensus on them no you know on the on the historical argument for example I think it's fairly easy to claim there's there's a sect of Judaism right now uh in which there's a sub small subsection of people who believe that the laich rebbi is still alive right the labure rebi passed away in in the 1990s and there's still people who who treat him as though he is not dead uh they

they call him the Messiah they think that he was the political Messiah uh they have and and they still do that 20 years after his death you know that not proof to me that he is actually alive some of them have experience right so you know especially when you're talking about events 2,000 years ago if people write that down I think there's suff doubt this man's tomb is empty I mean I haven't dug him up so so I wouldn't know but the the claims if somebody claimed 2,000 years from now that his tomb was empty

or claimed 70 years from now that his tomb was empty then yeah that's an important difference Ben the important time Gap is not not the gap between the events and the present um good evidence doesn't become bad evidence just because of the lapse of time the critical event as you just said is the time gap between the events and the recording of those correct events and in the case of the events of the life of Jesus and his resurrection that time Gap is extraordinarily narrow we can push back even before the writing of the gospels

and the Epistles of Paul by Discerning the Traditions upon which they relied when they wrote and some of these go back to within it's estimated five years after Jesus crucifixion um I'm thinking of the ones that Paul transmits in to the Corinthian Church in 1 Corinthians 15 so we're on pretty good ground there in terms of the earliness and the most multiplicity of our sources for the life of Jesus so let's talk for a second about sort of the so from here on out Ben shapir goes on to swiftly change the subject and get away

from this and I think it's very interesting that Ben shapir wrote a whole book with the title you know facts don't care about your feelings but when he was dropped with three really big facts about Jesus's historical Resurrection he just said oh you know I'm not interested in that and so my question to Ben is who else could the Messiah be besides Jesus we can see there's a long list of prophecies in the Old Testament that were fulfilled by Jesus I'll throw it up on screen real quick and there's a there's a passage in the

Bible that make a lot of Jewish people very uncomfortable because it really begs the question is Jesus the Messiah and that would be Isaiah 53 and I'm going to read a section of it to you real quick it says but he was pierced for our transgressions he was crushed for our iniquities the punishment that brought us peace was on him and by his wounds we are healed so the Messiah is someone that is going to Bear the penalty for our sins and his sacrifice is going to bring peace between us and God another section yet

it was the Lord's will to crush him and to cause him to suffer and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin he will see his off spring and prolong his days and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand so the Messiah would also be someone who is resurrected and lives forever and prospers in his life and so that sounds a lot like Jesus to me with the cross and the resurrection and whatnot so what in the face of this strong evidence supporting the intellectual case for for Jesus being the

Messiah what is it that really keeping Ben Shapiro from converting to Christianity and I don't think it's an intellectual thing that's not what I'm seeing here he I mean he just got faced with a banger case from Willi and Lane Craig and he really didn't have much to say about it so I think what's going on here is it's a more a more emotional case there's something deeper happening here and I think it has to do with idolatry I think I really think that Ben Shapiro is making a false god in his head I think

that he thinks that he's a good person and that he doesn't need a savior and I could relate to this I mean most my life I didn't think I need a savior I didn't I always thought I was a good person I mean I didn't think about it too much but the god of the Bible he's he he is a loving God and he loves the world but he's he's just and he's holy and he has to punish us for our sins and God is going to hold an account for us on Judgment Day of

these things and Ben Shapiro thinks oh like his good works are going to save him and make it so he goes to heaven but let's say you murder like three innocent girls and you stand before a judge and you say oh well judge you know I donated to charity and I held the door open for people when they walked by the judge is not going to be like oh okay yeah that's fine I'm going to excuse that he's going to say no like your good works don't save you this is not what's going to get

you to heaven I'm going to punish you based off your crimes not by your good deeds and I think that this is something Ben shapir really struggles with because he doesn't think that he needs that but we all need Jesus we all need that savior that has promised to us I'm going to pray for Ben Shapiro real quick and then close this one out Lord I pray for Ben Shapiro that you will bring him to a place of Godly repentance and to recognize the iniquities that he has had against you and that you continue to

pull him towards you Lord you've given him a platform to reach many people and I pray that you Channel his his energies to work towards your will Lord and to one day have him know how deeply he needs a savior and understand the grace and love that you've given to us in your son Jesus in Jesus name I pray this amen thanks for watching bye-bye