#293 Jeremiah Johnston - Codex Vaticanus, Book of Enoch and the Resurrection of Jesus

Dr. Jeremiah J. Johnston is a world-renowned scholar on the Historical Jesus, specializing in archaeology, ancient history, and the New Testament. In 2026, Dr. Johnston became the only academic invited to present evidence for Jesus and the Resurrection at the World Economic Forum in Davos—bringing the Gospel into one of the most influential global stages. His evidence-based approach bridges rigorous research and compelling communication, making the case for faith both intellectually credible and spiritually transformative. He is the author of The Jesus Discoveries: 10 Historic Finds That Bring Us Face-to-Face with Jesus, which highlights top archaeological discoveries corroborating the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus outside the biblical record. Known for his evidence-first, no-nonsense style, Dr. Johnston powerfully confronts myths and cultural skepticism while offering hope and clarity in an age of confusion. A hands-on scholar, he uses authentic and replica artifacts; such as the Shroud of Turin, crucifixion nails, the Titulus Crucis, the Pilate Stone, ossuaries, early New Testament papyri, Dead Sea Scroll facsimiles, and Roman coins. to bring history alive in vivid detail. His passion is showing how fresh discoveries, like the Shroud’s fading image, inscriptions mocking early Christians, and coins tied to Gospel events—continue to strengthen the historical case for Jesus Christ. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Go to https://drinkag1.com/SRS to get an AG1 Flavor Sampler and a bottle of Vitamin D3+K2 for free in your AG1 Welcome Kit with your first AG1 subscription order—only while supplies last. Head to https://Superpower.com and use code SRS at checkout for $20 off your membership. Unlock your new health intelligence. 100+ biomarkers. Every year. Detect early signs of 1,000+ conditions. #superpowerpod Sign up for BetterHelp and get 10% off at https://betterhelp.com/srs #ad Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide. Dr. Jeremiah J. Johnston Links: LT - https://linktr.ee/_JeremiahJ IG - https://www.instagram.com/_jeremiahj X - https://x.com/_jeremiahj FB - https://www.facebook.com/ChristianThinkersSociety Website - www. ChristianThinkers.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:04Shawn Ryan?

  Dr. Jeremiah Johnston, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Sean.

• 1:10Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. It's an honor to have you. And, you know, I, we've been looking at you for a long time. And I just thought this would be the perfect interview for Easter. So we do a Christmas interview, Thanksgiving interview, Easter interview. We embrace all the holidays here. Absolutely. And, and so we really try to do something really meaningful, especially on Christmas and Easter. And the shroud of turn is something that I've been interested in for a long time. In fact, our mutual friend Lee Strobel, I believe, is the first time I've, first person that brought it up to me. Right. And I was just fascinated, so thanks. So thank you for coming. Absolutely, and he has risen, brother. That's right.

• 1:54Shawn Ryan?

  You want to start with a prayer? I would love that. How about you lead it? I would be honored. Perfect.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Jesus, you're King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And what we're about to discuss has utterly transformed my life. I pray for every person watching and listening that they would find the hope that the tomb is empty, that you're alive forever, and so we can have a living, undying, undiminished hope. I pray, Lord, that in this conversation, I can minister to Shawn. I pray you'd bless him and meet him at his greatest point of need right now. And Father, we pray that as we share, we would know, Lord God, that it's not by might, it's not by power, but it's by your Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts. So we start now by just giving you the glory and asking you to bless this conversation, especially at this wonderful Easter season. And Lord, we say, "Come soon, Lord Jesus."

• 2:45Speaker 03

  And we quote John 14:19. "You said, 'Because I live, you will live also.'" So thank you for everything you're gonna do. We know that this conversation's gonna impact the world. We're excited about it. In Jesus's name, amen.

• 2:58Shawn Ryan?

  Amen.

• 3:00Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:04Shawn Ryan?

  So let me give you an introduction here. Dr. Jeremiah Johnston, president and founder of Christian Thinkers Society, and serves as a pastor of apologetics and cultural engagement at Prestonwood Baptist Church near Dallas, Texas. PhD from Middlesex University in the United Kingdom, where you completed your doctoral residency at Oxford. An elected member of Studium Novi Testamenti Societatis, the most prestigious New Testament scholarly guild in the world. Author of 15 books, including Body of Proof, The Seven Best Reasons to Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, and the brand-new release, congratulations.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:48Shawn Ryan?

  Books right there. The Jesus Discoveries. Ten Historic Finds That Bring Us Face to Face with Jesus. Examine ancient manuscripts with your own hands all around the world. You're married to Audrey. You're the father of five children, children, including...

• 4:06Shawn Ryan?

  Triplett Boys.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Haven't slept in nine years since that.

• 4:09Shawn Ryan?

  I was one, I got two and I haven't slept. And, uh, and I already said this, but, uh, you know, Lee Strobel, uh, I believe you consider him a mentor.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  A dear friend.

• 4:20Shawn Ryan?

  I do too. And, uh, Lee is awesome. In fact, there's his.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  I saw that.

• 4:24Shawn Ryan?

  You saw the book up there?

• 4:26Speaker 03

  I saw his swag up there.

• 4:27Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. And, uh, and yeah, once again, this is, we're releasing this on Easter and, uh, I just, I mean, it's, it's all about the resurrection.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 4:38Shawn Ryan?

  And so this is really the perfect episode for that. But, um, so before we get too into it, I found out you spoke at Davos at the, at the World Economic Forum.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:51Shawn Ryan?

  How the hell did you get invited to that place? I mean, that's one of those places where, I mean, I probably shouldn't say this, probably get blasted, but.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Uh, I've been blessed.

• 5:01Shawn Ryan?

  Jesus just doesn't get mentioned much at the World Economic Forum. In fact, I don't think there's very many people over there that believe in him.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Well, you did a really great show, uh, recently with The Exorcist and he mentioned the Antichrist quite a bit. And my wife let me know at Davos, I was giving the gospel to all the people that are going to work with the Antichrist someday.

• 5:20Shawn Ryan?

  Pretty much. That's, that's what I think.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Um, I was invited by, uh, Rich Strombach. He leads the USA House. So he brought the administration there, Trump, the State Department, 80 heads of state were there. And it was started in 1971 by of course, the corrupt Klaus Schwab. They just replaced the current president for being in the Epstein files as well. So they're without a president. And Mr. Strombach, who is a dear friend, had seen my material on the resurrection of Jesus. And he had a conversion in 2026. He used to do, I mean, Vanity Fair covered rich. I mean, he'd do billionaire hot tub parties. I mean, he's Mr. Davos himself. He's a connector. But he had a conversion. He had an experience with Jesus Christ in 2022 that changed his

• 6:02Speaker 03

  life. So he sent me a message and he said, I want you to bring the gospel and the evidence and the receipts for the resurrection to Davos. And so Gillian Tett, editor of Financial Times, provost of King's College, Cambridge University, interviewed me at USA House. The Washington Post sponsored that our session, if you can believe that. It was shocking to me. You can watch it all on YouTube. And I gave all the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. And I made this point, because these are crypto CEOs, some of the best businesses, and also some of the most corrupt people on earth. I learned at WEF that it's really not governments that run the

• 6:43Speaker 03

  world. It's these multinational companies that run the world, not governments. But I wanted to make it clear that this idea of forgiving debts, this idea of free enterprise, these ideals that built Western civilization come from one event horizon, the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. That message rehumanized humanity, ideas of loving your enemies, forgiving debts, that didn't come from Marxism, that didn't come from socialism. Of course, they're all looking at me like this. I said, that the event horizon is the resurrection of Christ. Wow. So they invited me back next year.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Are you serious? I was just gonna ask, how do you think they took it? You got an invite back? They want me to run the whole faith section for next year. They have a faith section? Now they do. So I felt like Paul on the Aropegis. If you've read Acts 17, if you've been to Athens, some mocked, but some believed. How did it feel? I mean, did you? I had more. I had, well, how did it feel? First off, I have a chapter in one of my books, Why I Don't Feel My Faith, because my feelings betray me all the time. I had to just keep following truth, because I had more demonic spiritual warfare on me that week than I've ever had. I gave three presentations at WEF and could not wait to get home. I'll bet. What kind of spiritual attacks? Do you want to talk about any of that?

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Anxiety. Yeah. Wanting to deliver, wanting to get done and make sure that I said everything I wanted to say for the Lord, and understanding that this is the first time in 55 years Jesus has ever been mentioned at the World Economic Forum, and just the weight of that. But greater is he who's in me than he who's in the world, 1 John 4:4. So I later watched it, I don't even remember answering the way I did, it was just the Holy Spirit.

• 8:36Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. Well, I would say, mission accomplished if there's a faith sector at the World Economic Forum.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Everyone needs the gospel. No one is beyond God's reach. That's the thing. Even the people at WEF, they all need to hear the truth of the gospel.

• 8:50Shawn Ryan?

  Man, good for you.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Well, praise God. But I wanted them to know, these ideas, these amenities, you know, I drove here in an awesome rental car, I stayed at a nice hotel last night with air conditioning. These amenities that we enjoy in free enterprise have not always been there. They come out of a worldview, and they come out of the cut and thrust of the resurrection. And that's why the conversation we're having right now is so important for people to get what rises and what falls. What are the stakes of what we're talking about? This is not some kind of religious exercise we're doing, just because it's a holiday and it's Easter. What rises and falls, the stakes of if Jesus rose from the grave, is the greatest X-factor the world has ever known.

• 9:33Shawn Ryan?

  Love that, love that. Let's talk about the shroud.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:39Shawn Ryan?

  What is it? I know, you just, we have it right out there. You just ran me through the whole thing. And it is, I mean, it's breathtaking. It's, I mean, it's like, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:54Shawn Ryan?

  You know, for most of us here. And, you know, can you just talk about what it is? And, and, and I'm sure we're probably going to overlay some of the stuff that we just talked about in there.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:05Shawn Ryan?

  But, but I just want to, let's do it again.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Okay. I've got some gifts for you. Can I begin with the gifts? Is that all right?

• 10:11Shawn Ryan?

  Sure.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Do you mind? Because I wondered, because it goes right with the shroud. I am gifting you, Shawn. Let me hand this to you. I want you to take this. That's connected. What you're holding in your hand is a replica.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Of the spear that pierced our Lord's ribs through rib five and six. John's Gospel accurately records that blood and water spewed out. And that is an exact replica of a Roman spear. Can you imagine that being thrust through rib five and six? And the signature of that wound I just showed you is on the shroud of Turin. You can actually see it. It almost looks like a figure eight blood pool. It's postmortem blood. The blood is already separating because it's dead blood. And that is a gift for you to always remember that he did that because he loved you so much.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Man. And the weight of it too. And of course, would have been sharper. Yeah. Wow. Thank you. Absolutely. And I'm not done. My spiritual gift is giving. So also, one thing I love about your program and love about you in particular is you are addicted to truth. And you're willing to share the truth no matter the, no matter the cost. I have huge regard for you for that because so many people are weak, especially people in the Christian faith are so weak. They won't, they won't come on your show. They won't speak boldly for their faith. And so I have in my hand a facsimile of the most priceless New Testament fragment on earth. But there's a reason. I'm not just giving it to you because it's priceless.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  I'm not just giving it to you because it's the oldest. I'm giving, giving it to you because of what it says. Now, I first, this is called Papyrus 52, P 52. The Gothic P just means papyrus because it is clearly written on papyrus paper. This was found in the dry sands of Egypt, of course. It would last 2,000 years. But this is the conversation, Sean. So this is the oldest that we have. It's dated to 125 AD. And if you know when the Gospel of John was written, the Gospel of John was written in the 90s. So that I'm talking about the autograph, the one he actually wrote. So this is a copy of that that was likely circulating when John's Gospel was circulating. And what this records, and I find this fascinating.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  This is the, and here we are in Easter for an Easter broadcast. This is the conversation, and it flips around because again, it's written on both sides, the recto and the verso. Can I read it to you in Greek? Yes. This is the conversation Jesus is having with Pontius Pilate. And you remember, he asked Jesus, what is truth? And Jesus responds right here. Ek tais elathius. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice. And that is the oldest fragment that we have of the New Testament. I've visited, I've studied it. It's in the University of Manchester. It's in Manchester, the John Rylands Library. So we had this made for you in this frame, but I'm giving it to you because I have such, and I join millions of others.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  I echo what they say. Thank you for being fearless about seeking truth. Thank you for asking all the hard questions that nobody else will. I know the price that you pay for that in your family. So I hope that this will inspire you because truth never dies. Jesus, I spell truth J E S U S, by the way. So this is for you.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Man. Those who are of the truth hear my voice.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Thank you, absolutely. Of course, Pilate was the first postmodern relativist because he doesn't use the definite article. He said, what is truth? And that's where so many are today, and that's why your program is so important. Thank you. I'm not done yet. One more gift. One of my favorite quotes is, "The truth is like a lion, set free and it'll defend itself." Exactly. Last gift for you, and this is an ode to my time in Oxford. And this is a chapter in Jesus' discoveries. This is, and you gotta say it like you're a snob from Britain, okay?

• 14:39Speaker 03

  We Americans would say Magdalen College. You gotta say it like you're a Brit. Maudlin College. This is where C.S. Lewis taught, and of course, all of his colleagues hated him because he wrote popular books, you know. This is, this is the criticism I get. You know, we academics, we write for dozens, you know, the 12 people in the world that care about our specialty, but now we write all these. I've, I've taken from Lewis, you know, Lewis comes to Christ and averages one book a year for the next 30 years of his life. And remember, he writes that wonderful book, The Screwtape Letters, and I don't know if you remember who he dedicated the book to. I don't. Tolkien. And Tolkien, of course, the author of The Lord of the Rings, was actually offended.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  He thought, why is this lowbrow, non-academic book that's going to make no impact being dedicated to me? Well, of course, then it makes Lewis a wartime celebrity in America, The Screwtape Letter. So Lewis taught at Maudlin College. That's why I'm sharing all this. This is the, I've just given you the oldest fragment. This is the second oldest fragment, which I held in my hands for the first time in 2009. And the shame, and I want to get into this, the shame about all these fragments is so few people actually ever see them. When I signed my name to see it, I was like the second person in a year who had seen this. No kidding. So this is called the Jesus Fragment. I have a whole chapter of it in the Jesus Discoveries. This was found in 1901, and it's called the Jesus Fragment because this

• 16:03Speaker 03

  is the first New Testament fragment that we have that actually has the name of Jesus on it. It's the earliest witness to Matthew's Gospel that we have. And again, speaking of Easter, this is the conversation of what we call the words of institution. This is the Last Supper. So all of this is germane to what we're talking about, and it's dated to the second century. So my last gift for you is P64, or what we call the Jesus Fragment. Wow. Man, thank you. Oh, my pleasure. This is amazing.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  And that's the size. That's an actual facsimile, these amazing scraps,

• 16:49Speaker 03

  found in the dry sands of Egypt, literally in trash heaps that are now priceless. Wow. But I've got more cool stuff. We're gonna do all kinds of show and tell. Yeah. People gotta watch this whole broadcast and then share it with everybody. I'm, you got something right next to you right now that nobody in the world has, which I'll share later. So, back to your question about the shroud. You said, "What is the shroud?" What is it? Okay. Well, I used to be the biggest, I used to be the biggest skeptic of the shroud. So, I did my PhD on the resurrection of Jesus. What they call a 93,000-word Uberliferrangs Gesichter of Resurrection. That's German for "A History of Resurrection Belief in the Judeo-Christian Motive." So, I have traced belief in resurrection from the earliest parts of Hebrew Bible,

• 17:33Speaker 03

  through late Second Temple Judaism, through the InterTestamental period, through the New Testament, and then where it finds its fullest expression in Second Century Christianity. So, I'm an expert in resurrection belief, okay? I'm already putting you to sleep just explaining that. But that's my academic pedigree. In that entire training, where at Keeble College, I would attend Faculty of Theology, I defended my thesis to Professor William Telford, who began my Viva, you know, everything's in Latin in Oxford. He began my Viva by saying, "Jeremiah, let me just get one thing straight. I've read your whole, every other word he's saying is Latin, and I'm not sure what he's saying, but he was complimenting it. But he said, "I have to ask you one question.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Do you actually believe the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus happened?" And he paused, and he said, "Or is that just imaginative storytelling?"

• 18:27Speaker 03

  And I said, "Professor Telford, thank you for the question. David Hume said, 'Wise men choose probabilities.' Without a doubt, I believe Jesus physically bodily rose from the grave. I can't believe it otherwise. The evidence compels me to believe it." And he sat back. This is a Bible scholar. And he said, I don't see it that way. Let's start your Viva. And he later passed me with commendation. So in that entire history of being in Oxford, three years, I was conditioned that the Shroud was a Catholic relic with no scientific backing that was 700 years old, based on a carbon 14 dating.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  It turns out, when you look at it, the Shroud of Turin is scientific proof of the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I believe that based on the evidence in the 102 academic disciplines that have studied over 600,000 research hours in it. I believe that because I'm not irrational. Wow, wow. So I went from skeptic to believing in it based on the science. And here's what I like to tell people. How long did that take? That took three years for me. Three years? Because I had to do the research. A lot of us were YouTube smart. We know a soundbite, but we don't know the substance. And so I would call up the scholars. I've

• 19:46Speaker 03

  flown all over the world. I've met with the physicists. I've met with the mathematicians. I've met with the world's elite scientists. Sean, they don't have a theological axe to grind. They're not pastors. They don't want it to be true. They're just following the evidence where it leads. And that's why when I meet with Bruno Barbaris, and by the way, the irony of his name is not lost on me. I mentioned that in the Jesus discoveries. Bruno Barbaris, sounds like Barabbas, who Jesus took his place on the cross. Bruno Barbaris is a mathematician. He's seen the Shroud over 100 times in Turin. It's in Turin. We should mention that. It's in northern Italy. You can fly into Milan, take the train an hour, see the Alps, beautiful, enjoy a train ride, and all of a sudden you're in Turin,

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Italy, where the Shroud is at the Saint Giovanni Cathedral. So there's Bruno Barbaris. He takes all of the information that I just showed you on the cross, the wound patterns, the crown of thorns, and he assigns as a mathematician a probability to it. And Bruno says, Jeremiah, there is a 1 in 200 billion chance it is not the historical Jesus. 1 in 200 billion? Billion, based on his mathematical probability. And so then I asked him, because you know, people are dumb and sometimes you have to ask questions to bring your audience along, or they just need to hear it a different way. I said, "So Bruno, are you saying that you

• 21:08Speaker 03

  believe that this was the Jesus of the Bible who was crucified and who this image is?" He said, "Yes, how can I not believe that? The probability compels me to believe." He put his hands up like that. And so the shroud is mentioned in all four Gospels. All four Gospels tell us that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, two members of the Sanhedrin, ask Pilate for the body of Jesus. Pilate is shocked that he is so quickly dead. We can talk about the brutality of crucifixion later if you want to. And this was an amazing act of courage and faith, because according to Jewish tradition, if the Sanhedrin condemned a criminal to death, it was on the Sanhedrin to bury that criminal.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Jesus is not buried honorably, but he's buried properly. Does that make sense? He's not given an honorable burial, burial, he's given a proper burial. And Joseph of Arimathea, who is a wealthy man, has a linen shroud of fine linen. He didn't go out to Walmart. You know, Walmart or Target wasn't open on Friday afternoon before Shavat and Passover, okay? He had already purchased this for his own death planning. In fact, he said, "Better yet, we'll use my family tomb." So they wrap, a lot of this was just expediency, because according to Jewish burial traditions, which I'm an expert in, you had to bury on the day of death before nightfall. This is Shavat, and this is Passover. That's how we can date.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  We can talk about how we can date the crucifixion. We know the exact date of it. So they wrap Jesus's body in this fine linen shroud, which is called sendin' in Greek, according to the Greek New Testament. Then they use a thonia, that's another Greek word, strips. So they wrap the whole body with a, with fine linen, one continuous sheet, and then they wrap the feet and the hands and probably even the face, just to, so your body, just to protect your, to dignify the body. They place that 200 feet away in Joseph of Arimathea's family tomb. He's in the tomb for 39 hours, Sean. And then something absolutely miraculous and powerful happens.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  According to my other friend Paulo de Lazaro of a Neo Laboratories outside of Rome, the amount of energy it would take to see what I just showed you on the shroud, an image that is superficial. It's only point oh two microns thin. We could shave it off, Sean, with a knife. That's how superficial the image is. Science has proven it's not paint, it's not pigment, it's not dye. There are no brushstrokes. It doesn't absorb like the blood does. Why? The blood was there before the resurrection. This superficial image is there. Paulo took five years. Of course, I've met with him, interviewed him.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  And Paulo says, Jeremiah, it would take 34,000 billion watts of energy, traveling at one fortieth of a billionth of a second, to change the chemical makeup of a fine linen shroud to leave that image. And he said, we don't have that power on earth. So a nuclear event happens on Sunday, April 5th, 8:33. And that's why I tell people the Shroud of Turin is not a death cloth. It is a resurrection cloth. And better yet, it is an itemized receipt of how much Jesus loves you, Sean.

• 24:34Shawn Ryan?

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• 25:19Shawn Ryan?

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• 26:31Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean by a nuclear event? What do you mean by that? You mean he just dissipated out of the?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  That is a great question. What I mean by a nuclear event, I'm saying that in short form because according to the physicists, the amount of energy it would take because there's no pigment, because there's no dye, because there's no paint, science has proven and published that. We, science has to ask, how is this image there? And there was a chemical change to the shroud that if it would have been lasted longer than 1/40th of a billionth of a second, it would have just, it would have scourged, scorched, it would have just burned up, it would have been gone. And so what for the physicists watching, this is called.

• 27:18Shawn Ryan?

  Did you say 1/40th of a second?

• 27:20Speaker 03

  A billionth of a second.

• 27:21Shawn Ryan?

  1/40th of a billionth.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Of a second. So it was a cold power that, I mean faster than a blink of an eye, 1/40th of a billionth of a second, but it was the amount of energy. Thirty four thousand billion watts. And he has a weapons clearance, Paulo de Lozaro. So he works with one of the most powerful lasers on earth. And I actually have, they grew fine linen. They grew a sample. It took five years to get a first century model of a shroud. And they would beam their lasers and they were only able to change a postage size stamp. Size. You just looked at a fourteen by fourteen, three by seven, full shroud that has an image on it.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  We don't have that power on earth. So here's how I like to put it. If the big bang created the earth, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was the big bang that resurrected and redeemed the earth and you and me. Wow. That's what I mean by a nuclear event. It's the best way to explain it. And so I've met with the scientists, you would love this, from Sandia Labs. I've met with the scientists from Los Alamos Laboratories. No kidding. The Jet Propulsion Laboratories. These are the greatest scientists on earth. So in the shroud, one of the really fascinating things that I've not been able to share on other shows is we have to ask, like, what kicked off the scientific exploration of the shroud? Do I have a minute to share this?

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Absolutely. This is unbelievable. In nineteen seventy six, two physicists are at Sandia Labs. Eric Jumper and John Jackson. They're at the Air Force Academy. They're physicists, they're professors. They have an VP8 image analyzer. Have you ever heard of a VP8 image analyzer? I have not. Okay, a lot of people haven't. This is where the nuclear bombs are being developed and with more precision. The VP8 image analyzer is designed to study what happens to the surface of the earth after a nuclear explosion. It actually looks at depths of the light field, topography, all of that.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Well, this guy has a VP8 image analyzer and he takes a photo of the shroud from nineteen thirty one, the Henri photo. I had mentioned, we'll talk about the different photos that have been taken of the shroud. So he doesn't have the actual shroud. He just has a photo of the shroud that he puts through the VP8 image analyzer in nineteen seventy six.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Shaun, they are blown away because there is a 3D encoding on the shroud. There is a topography, almost a holographic nature to it, that shows depths of light, even where there shouldn't be, where the body wasn't even touching the shroud. Then they put a picture of like their grandchildren through it. It's a distorted image. No other image on earth has 3D encoding that is holographic in nature. And that is what kicked off the scientific study in 1978.

• 30:29Shawn Ryan?

  A picture? Just a picture?

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Just a picture. Incidentally, here's a cool factoid.

• 30:34Shawn Ryan?

  So was that picture a miracle, or could you, I mean, the whole thing is, right?

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Any picture would have done it. Well, yeah.

• 30:39Shawn Ryan?

  Any photo, so we could take one right now and it would do the same thing?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would do the same thing with a VPN. There's YouTube videos. You can watch Peter Schumacher, a great YouTube videos to watch him doing this, where he can show the depths of light, the topography. And that's where I'm so thankful we have this time because sometimes I don't have time to get to this, how wild this is, how unique it is, how unbelievable. How I explain it is, it is a natural effect, the shroud is, of the supernatural event of the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus. And science proves that. We're not talking in some kind of theological Christianese right now. I'm quoting physicists. And so that happens in 1976, which the whole world sees and says, what is this?

• 31:25Speaker 03

  We cannot explain how a 2,000-year-old burial cloth has 3D information encoded in it that looks like a holograph. This is like something out of Star Wars.

• 31:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  So two years later, in 1978, the STIRP team, the Shroud of Turin Research Project, comprised of 33 scientists, they go to Turin, Italy. They have approval to study the shroud for a little over 100 hours. There's pictures of them literally sleeping on cots. So they take pictures of it. They get pollen spores. They get all of the samples. And they look at it, and their minds are blown away. Barry Schwartz, who I talked to on the phone, he's now dead. He was a Jew. And he came to believe that the shroud was authentically Jesus. No kidding. And it took him 17 years, Sean, after taking the photo in 1978. So he tells me this firsthand.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  He says, Jeremiah, we're down in the lobby of the hotel having drinks and just laughing, thinking, man, we got a free trip to Italy out of this deal. Give me 15 minutes in the scientific method and we will prove the shroud is a forgery. After 15 minutes and after one day, no one was laughing. They slept next to it. They said, we can't explain this. But what got Barry, and so Barry gives the TED Talk on the shroud. So I called literally the TED Talk on the shroud was given by Barry Schwartz. That's how I got my replica. I acquired my replica of the shroud from Barry Schwartz. God bless him. But what turned him and convinced him was the blood type. I just showed you that there is blood all over the shroud. Do you want to know what the blood type is? What's the blood type?

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Type AB blood. What's the significance of that? The significance is if there was ever a priestly line of blood, it would be type AB blood. The fewest amount of people in the world have type AB blood. It's Semitic. It's only 6% of the world's population. It's human blood. And what's even crazier is I have a chapter, but actually a chapter contributed at the end of the book by my friend scholar Doug Powell. We have the face cloth of Jesus, which I can get into if you want. It's in, it's been in Oviedo, Spain. It's called the Sudarium. That's another Greek term. Face cloth that wrapped the face of Jesus. Guess what the blood type is on the Sudarium that's been there since the seventh century? AB. AB blood.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  So if you're a medieval forger, how are you going to know about AB blood? How are you going to be able to? You would have to kill someone, Sean. You would have to torture them. The hematological reports, you're getting me, you're getting me all excited now in this conversation. The he, it gives me chills to this day because it does take your breath away. The hematological reports that have steadied the blood. The peer reviewed journals show that Jesus, who I believe is the man of the shroud. He was experiencing high levels of ferritin, so much so that he was experiencing organ failure before he even got to the cross. His creatinine was off the charts. It is a miracle he even made it to the cross, based on the demonic flogging that he experienced.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  And so, all of this is there. There's a criminologist by the name of Max Frye, and he takes pollen samples from the shroud. And do you know what he finds out? There are 58 pollens on the shroud. Thirty-eight of them are from Jerusalem. They only bloom in springtime during Passover. The rest of the 20 pollens follow the provenance of where the shroud has been for the last 2,000 years.

• 35:01Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yes, according to Max Frye. So 38 of the 58 pollens on the shroud only bloom in springtime. We know Jesus is crucified. It's the best established fact of the ancient world on April 3rd, AD 33. Sean, if we cannot believe that Jesus was crucified under Roman crucifixion, based on the sources and evidence, we shouldn't believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. Jesus' death and resurrection is the best evidential fact established from late antiquity, and the evidence bears that out.

• 35:37Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Wow. Man, that is... I want to go back to the nuclear.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Yes, please.

• 35:50Shawn Ryan?

  So... So how... I mean, they didn't lift the shroud up. It was a nuclear event in 1/40th of a billionth of a second.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  1/40th of a billionth of a second, correct. According to the businesses.

• 36:08Shawn Ryan?

  And then he's out.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:10Shawn Ryan?

  Where does he go?

• 36:11Speaker 03

  So this is what happens. Early Sunday morning, the women are coming to the tomb. We know from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, again, this is April 5th, and what's cool about our broadcast this year, Easter Sunday happens to be April 5th. So, we're talking about the exact day. Man. 2032, 8033. Probably not a coincidence. I'm here to blow your mind, by the way. So, I'm here to blow everyone's mind, because the truth of the resurrection should blow our minds. So, the women are going there. We know, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, that sunrise on that Easter Sunday would have been a crisp morning in Jerusalem. The women are hurrying to the tomb. Why? For Jewish burial traditions, Jesus was buried with such haste. He dies at 3:00,

• 36:53Speaker 03

  sundown 6:00 PM. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus only have three hours to get his body off the cross, to get it buried and to get it in the tomb. So, they did not have time to complete the bodily washing. That's why the women are going to the tomb Sunday morning. Sunrise is at 5:43 in the morning, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on Sunday morning, April 5th, AD 33. They're going there very, very early. They're shocked because the tomb, which would have weighed 2,750 pounds, the stone cover, I've seen of similar one right down from the King David Hotel, where Mary Omne was buried. It wasn't good to be one of Herod the Great's wife. He loved to kill his wives. One said it was better to

• 37:38Speaker 03

  be Herod the Great's pig than a member of his family, because he was such a paranoid person, would kill his family. So, rich tomb covers are like that. They're hard to move. The women of this day would have been 4'11", 90 pounds. Remember, they're worried, Sean, who will move the stone away for us? He's married, Jesus, it's kind of shocking. He's buried in a rich man's tomb, a new tomb. This was Arimathea's tomb, Joseph's. They get there, the tomb has been, cover has been blasted away. And I think that's part of what happened. I think the energy, this nuclear event, that brought Jesus's physical body back to life, just... Blew the tomb door wide open. And so Jesus emanates, I want to make this very clear because I had to understand this.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  I'm thinking to myself, okay, I'm trying to understand. Does he raise from the dead and then like Lazarus have to take off his grave clothes? Like what, no, his body literally emanates through the shroud. So the shroud, we've actually created this in AI. The shroud would have just like, just kind of collapsed. And he would have looked down and seen the shroud, walked right out of the tomb. And he starts with all what we call the appearance tradition. This is the eyewitness appearance tradition. So we have empty tomb tradition for Easter and we have appearance tradition. We have two lines of witness of the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus. Of course, he appears to the women first. And Sean, this is what I write about in my book.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  If you and I wanted to event, to invent a religion, if we wanted to write the resurrection story, the gospels, we never would have written it the way it's written. Cause everything about it is humiliating and embarrassing.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  I actually give a paper, if the, if the gospel writers invented the story of Jesus, one that would have been culturally acceptable, they did a terrible job. So Jesus appears to women because remember Jesus will rehumanize people. This is the beauty of the gospel. Everybody watching now, right now, whatever you're going through, Jesus will rehumanize you. He will give you a hope that never dies. First Peter 1:3 says that because of the resurrection of Jesus, we have a living hope. And that's something I need right now. I need a living hope. I don't need something that I can vibe. I don't need anything that I, I need as a crutch. I need a living hope. And there's something about the fact of the resurrection that gives us hope. The Greek word for hope is el peace.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  It's used in the Greek New Testament a hundred times and it's always tied to the fact, not the feeling, to the fact of Jesus's resurrection. There's something about the resurrection that energizes us. So much so that 1 Corinthians 15:58, after 57 magisterial verses on the resurrection, Paul says, therefore be strong, be vigilant. Why? Knowing that your labor in the Lord is not in vain because of the resurrection. Everything we do for Christ matters.

• 40:34Shawn Ryan?

  That's beautiful. Man. Where are we going from here? I'm just, yeah, you're just going, so I'm along for the ride here.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Well, so the shroud, what I want everyone to know, 102 academic disciplines have studied it, and the reason that I say it is an itemized receipt of how much Jesus loves us is because financial terms are used Easter weekend. The scriptures say that we've been ransomed. It says, "We were bought at a price," and oh, what a price it was, the blood of Jesus. It says, "We've been redeemed." It says, "We were bought." These are all financial terms. I don't know if you remember, Sean, the last word of Jesus on the cross. We hear it in his native Aramaic tongue, "tetelestai." That's a financial term, paid in full.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  And so, when I look at the shroud, when I study the brutality of what Jesus did for you and for me on the cross, I am stunned. It's an itemized receipt of how much Jesus loves us. It brings to mind Romans 5:8, "But God," and this is what people don't know because they don't know the Greek New Testament, it is written in the continuous present tense. Romans 5:8 says, "But God continues to show his love for us, and that when you and I were sinners, he sent his best, Christ, to die in our place." That's the beauty of the gospel.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Jesus is treated as if he lived your life and mine, so God can treat us as if we lived the life of Jesus. That's what we call grace. It doesn't make sense. It's too good to be true, and that's why it's good news. That's why it's the gospel. And so, what a demonstration it was. And what I want you to know, Sean, what I'm praying, praying and was praying this morning, is that I want you personally to have a new understanding of how much Jesus loves you. Because that's what it did for me. It took my breath away. We all need reminders. Does God really love me? I mean, I've sinned for the 7,000th time. You know, what Paul said in Romans 7, the things I hate to do.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  And this is what I printed on my golf balls, by the way. I do what I hate. I don't do what I want to do. I print them on all my golf balls. Romans 7. But that's Paul's frustration, right? We're still sinners. We need forgiveness. And we need to be reminded. And if we're not careful, Easter can be so, oh, it's another Easter. Easter egg hunt, gonna go to church. No. You have to be reminded of how much God loves you. And so I brought something that I want to hand you. Now, when I was at the World Economic Forum speaking, people were looking at me weird. And I was wondering why. And I didn't realize that I had punctured my hand with the crown of thorns. So I'm sitting here speaking, lecturing, and I have blood dripping down my hands.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  So I want you to be careful. Okay?

• 43:43Shawn Ryan?

  I thought you were gonna say, you have all this stuff, and they're all wondering where your statue of Baphomet is.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  We are so influenced by medieval Christian art, unfortunately. The effeminate Jesus, the meek Jesus, the weak Jesus, the Jesus with no beard. He's not a Jewish Jesus. We don't realize how influenced we are by medieval Christian art. Jesus was a man's man. He traveled over 20,000 miles in his ministry, probably weighed 180 pounds, physically fit man, 5'10" to 6 feet. By the way, we have tombs with much taller men from the first century. So these people that at me of, oh, that's too tall for Jesus. No, actually, in the tomb of Jehoanah, and we have someone who's taller than Jesus, who was crucified. So in medieval Christian art, I don't know if you've seen this before,

• 44:38Speaker 03

  but we see this crown of thorns, and it's like a wreath. It's like a sweatband, something you'd wear working out. And we think, oh, that's cute. No. The Romans wanted to humiliate Jesus. Not only is he crucified completely naked, but the Scriptures tell us that they fashioned a crown of thorns. And this is a crown. This is a helmet. This is truly a dome, a cap of thorns. And this is what puts it beyond all doubt. I'm an expert in Roman crucifixion. We have one exemplar of all the crucifixion examples that we have from antiquity. We have only one exemplar of someone that was crucified with a crown of thorns, and that's Jesus of Nazareth.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  These are three-inch Bethlehem thorns, Shawn. They're extremely sharp because when they dry, they're as sharp as nails. So I'd like to hand it to you, and I just want to describe it to you while you process it.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  The Scriptures say that, "Sacrifices and offerings you did not require, but a body you prepared for me." And this is a replica which matches, because we have 30 to 50 puncture wounds on the head and the scalp of the crucified man. I often joke with people, "Yeah, try it on, see if it works." It definitely does. Those wounds, those are Bethlehem thorns as sharp as nails. And this is what was thrust on Jesus' head. I want to make sure and remind you, Shawn, of the chronology. Jesus is first flogged. He's beaten, well, I have the flagrum here, I'll show you, 700 times.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  Then they put the crown of thorns on his head. Pontius Pilate stands up next to Jesus. Remember, his wife warmed him in a dream, have nothing to do with this man. And yet Pilate says, "Echo homo," in Latin, "Behold the man." And the crowd, full of Jews, began to yell, "Crucify him, crucify him, crucify him." They want him dead. Keep in mind, they had just seen Lazarus raised from the dead. This is why the most dangerous place you can get is to stop seeking truth. That's why I love your program. You show us truth no matter the cost. They put this on him. And can you imagine the humiliation, the pain?

• 47:09Shawn Ryan?

  This is so nasty, I don't think humiliation would even be in my mind.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  But you know what I see, Sean?

• 47:15Shawn Ryan?

  It's so painful.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  I see love.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  Because it should have been my head. In that crown. But it wasn't. I have four sons. I would die for them. I certainly wouldn't give them for anyone. And yet the Bible says, "Jesus loved me so much when I was at my worst. God sent his best for me. Who put his head in that crown that I deserved." And that is the beauty of the gospel. That is the beauty that the gospel sets us free of our sin. And we live on purpose, for a purpose, because we know that this life is not what we're living for. We're living for the new heaven, the new earth, the resurrected king.

• 48:05Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Tell me what you're thinking, holding that.

• 48:12Shawn Ryan?

  I'm thinking about how bad this would, how painful this would be.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  And I know you know pain.

• 48:19Shawn Ryan?

  Stuffing it on their head, on his head, you know, like just...

• 48:22Speaker 03

  You know violence, you know pain. I want to get your impression of it.

• 48:29Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, look at that. You know how much force they would have to do just to get that around your head? I mean...

• 48:42Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Now...

• 48:57Speaker 03

  I have something very cool to show you. Because this is Easter weekend. I've just acquired this.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  This, Sean, is an actual crucifixion nail from the first century that was used to execute criminals of Rome.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  And when you hold it, I want you to do what I've done. I want you to put it at your wrist. These spikes are interesting because they were so valuable to the Romans. They were often reused. It'd be like if you could reuse bullets to kill someone, they would reuse these again and again. Far more valuable than the criminals they executed. It's amazing what a man can do to another man in violence. And when I look at this, I see an excruciating instrument. That's, by the way, that term "excruciating," Latin, is from crucifixion, the cross. But I want you to notice something. I mean, can I hand you this? I want you to hold this.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  As you're holding that, I want you to notice that it has a square shaft. So without a doubt, that's first century. This was unearthed in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the Syrian province of Rome. We have 21 different evidences of individuals being nailed to the cross. The top of the nail would have been square at one time, but it's been hammered so much into its victims, it's almost been circularized. But Sean, if you look closely, do you notice how there is a bend in the nail? Do you know why that is? Why? The Romans wanted to minimize movement that maximized torment on the cross. So if they were crucifying you,

• 50:39Speaker 03

  they would often adjust the nails while you were on the cross just to inflict greater pain. So after crucifying, I don't know how many victims, this nail, this iron spike, over time, begins to wilt even under that pressure. I want you to put it against your wrist and just imagine, and I want you to let some scripture wash over you. Think about the Messianic Psalm 22, verse 16, "They pierced my nails and my feet." David sees that prophetically a thousand years. Of course, this is before crucifixion was even

• 51:19Speaker 03

  invented. We see this in Isaiah 53, and you're holding in your hand a nail. And you know what struck me as I, as I researched this? The nails that Jesus died with were probably, they had probably been used on other people that did deserve it. These were nails that had been used to kill others, but he was not deserving of death. There's DNA on it. There's rust and his sinless blood. And here's the beauty of it. Those nails did not keep Jesus on the cross. His love for you and me kept him on that cross.

• 51:55Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean by that?

• 51:57Speaker 03

  Jesus could have called down a legion of angels at any moment, but he wanted to go to the cross. The Bible says in Luke that he set his face like flint to go to Calvary. This was no accident. Jesus came and he gave that message, the greatest mission, message, "I have come to seek and save all who are lost." He said, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men to myself." And he was lifted up in a torturous way. So no, the nails, people think that kept the author of life up there, but no, it was really his love.

• 52:39Shawn Ryan?

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• 53:21Shawn Ryan?

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• 54:05Shawn Ryan?

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• 54:12Speaker 00

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• 54:43Shawn Ryan?

  You know, when you were describing all the, all the, the Shroud to me. You talked about how they did the feat.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:51Shawn Ryan?

  Could you go through that now?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Yes. This is very important. May I have it back? So.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  I love the Passion of the Christ. Actually, I just showed it to my triplets who are nine. Mel Gibson got so many things right, but not everything is correct. You know, the new one, the new one's coming out next year. Bro. They're filming it right now. Yes. So, and again, Holly. Resurrection. Yeah, and I love that. And I love Dallas Jenkins, The Chosen. I have no problem with creative license, but people need to know that's just an approximation. They don't realize, and that's why this conversation needs to be shared. People need to know the brutality of what Jesus went through for us. There was no pedestal that He was standing on. My friend Scott Stripling, the archaeologist, who endorsed my book, The Jesus Discovery, has proven and shown that the victims,

• 55:44Speaker 03

  forgive me for holding up my foot, they were crucified through the calcaneus,

• 55:50Speaker 03

  directly through it. So if the cross is in the middle, they essentially straddled the cross, and the nail goes through the calcaneus, all the way through, and pins Him to the cross. How do we know this? We have, in the Israel Antiquities Museum, we actually have the heel bone of poor old Jehoanin, John, Jahan, Johnin, Jonathan, who was crucified under the reign of Pontius Pilate. They had to get him buried before nightfall, Shawn. They couldn't get the nail out of the, out of the, out of the calcaneus, out of the heel bone. And so finally, they just said, forget it. It's nightfall. Just bury the nail with the heel bone

• 56:33Speaker 03

  and throw it in the ground, and throw it in the tomb. So in 1967, we unearth the heel bone with a wood washer. I have a photo of it that we can show your audience right now that very few people in the world have seen. There's a olive wood washer showing that, yes, they straddled the cross. So we're actually talking about four nails. Talking about one, two, three, four. So. Through the heel bone. Through the heel bone, through the calcaneus. And that shows you what experts they were, because our heels are very brittle. These men knew how to crucify you. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion, they perfected it.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  And so when Jesus dies, yes, He dies by asphyxiation, but based on the hematological reports, He also died of a massive heart failure.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Which is interesting to think about, the blood loss, heart failure. Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit. No one takes my life from me. I give it willingly. But people need to understand the brutality of it, and this shows that. There's something else, because we can get so callous. Can I show you something else? Of course. I've just acquired these. Romans loved to gamble. Gambling was a huge issue in the first century. And I don't know if you remember in the all four gospels record. So these executioners, they've got Jesus on the cross. Never mind, it's about to go dark for three hours. They're about, you know, the rocks are getting ready to cry out. An earthquake's getting ready to happen. The veil's getting ready to be torn into.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  All of this is lost on them. They're so jaded to crucifixion. And so many Christians can get very desensitized to it. I want you to hold in your hands first century dice.

• 58:25Speaker 03

  Those are dice unearthed in Jerusalem. Now, I'm not saying those were the dice used at Jesus's crucifixion, but these are dice from the first century. They're made from bone. We were at, we were in the drive-through of Canes the other day. My, my triplets and I, and Jack's, my triplets said, Dad, these stink. So, son, they're 2,000 years old. They're made from bone. But do you see the numbers punched on them? Yeah, they're, they're. Exactly. It's the same as today's dice. And so I want you to think about that. The Romans who had just nailed Jesus, the author of life, to the cross, are sitting there gambling. You remember what they're gambling for? His clothes. They want his, his tunic. They want his fine linen garment.

• 59:10Speaker 03

  And they're gambling, they're casting lots with bone, with bone dice, just like what you're holding in your hand. And again, it reminds me of the cost of what Jesus went through. And how for some people though, Sean, no evidence is enough for them to believe.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Man.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  So Judas betrays Jesus, and I want to show you something else. This is very important. He is betrayed for the price of a slave. Judas, 30 pieces of silver. Have you ever held a Tyrian silver before? A piece of Tyrian silver?

• 59:57Shawn Ryan?

  I don't believe I have.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  So this is 14 grams. This was also the temple tax. So I want to explain it to you, but I want you to hold it. This is a full 14-gram shekel. Hold that in your hand. Extremely valuable. That is not a replica. So there's two things that are important here. Number one, that was the currency of the temple. So if you and I were going to pay our temple tax, we would have to go change out whatever currency we had into Tyrian silver that was made in Tyre, and we would have to pay our temple tax. Now, I don't know if you travel internationally, but like the worst place you can change money at is like the airport, you know, like the exchange rates rip you off. Well, that times 100 is what was happening on the southern steps in Jerusalem. And so Jesus comes through and he overturns the tables because they're ripping everybody

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  off. They're doing ridiculous currency exchanges, but that's the currency that you had to pay your temple tax in. That, incidentally, is also the silver piece, 30 of which were paid to Judas to betray Jesus on that Easter weekend.

• 1:01:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  And you feel the weight of it. So we know that this was in circulation at the time of Pontius Pilate in the 20s AD.

• 1:01:11Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I don't know where you want to go from here, but what I'm interested in is what was the, what was the final thing that made you a believer in the shroud?

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  That's a great question.

• 1:01:28Shawn Ryan?

  How many years did you say?

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  It took me three years to go from a complete skeptic because I thought it was a Catholic relic, not an artifact. And it's very important, the shroud is an artifact, and it is an artifact of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, and nothing outside of the Bible does that, which is fascinating.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  What took me from skeptic to believing that the shroud is authentic because I'm not irrational is the fact that the greatest scientific minds in the world cannot explain or replicate how there is an image in the shroud that coinci- that coincidentally matches with one-to-one correspondence, the exact way that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified.

• 1:02:21Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 1:02:24Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you talk, you had talked to a bunch of scientists though through that, for that three years.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:02:28Shawn Ryan?

  So what was the fight, what was the last thing that you're, you, you, it was obviously a challenge for you to believe, you know, and so that's, that's, I mean, I would like to talk about the whole journey, but the final, the, I'm just curious, the final thing, what was?

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  So that's really interesting you should ask this. So my pastor, Jack Graham, challenged me to speak about what I was learning at our Friday morning men's Bible study, and my son was there, Justin, and he really clued in because this kind of, what we're talking about in your program right now, evidence for our faith, reasons to believe, this is what's going to reach the whole next generation. They want to know tangible proof in, in understandable terms, why Jesus is the greatest evidence person of late into itiquity, why Jesus' death by crucifixion and resurrection is something we should believe is the best established fact of the ancient world. And I saw my son clue in on it. So whatever it took to, you know, my, my greatest passion in life is passing on faith to my children, a true faith.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  I can't believe for them, but I can put them in proximity to believe with all the power that I have. So I shared that day at the men's breakfast, and at that point, Sean, I was like, no, I don't want to put my academic reputation on the line, but let me just share with you what I'm learning so far. I was hedging myself a little bit. Fast forward to just before the Hamas attack, October 7, I'm in Jerusalem. Sean, I've been in more tombs than any guests you've ever had, and probably any person you've ever met. I have filmed in more tombs than anyone else I know in the world. And I've filmed in the tomb of Lazarus in Bethany, I filmed in the tomb of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, I filmed in the garden tomb, I filmed in the tombs, Emmaus and Neapolis, I filmed in all kinds of tombs.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  I know tombs, I know death chambers, I know how people die. I had a day off in Jerusalem. This is just days before the October 7th attack. And I heard about this shroud museum that my good friends at Athonia put on at Notre Dame, not in Paris, at Notre Dame in Jerusalem. And I walked through the exhibit. Nobody's there. There's not a guide. But guess what? The Holy Spirit is good at his job, it turns out. And the Holy Spirit was with me. And I walked through the exhibit, just like these things that I'm showing you. And do you know what it was? What? When I saw the helmet of thorns, it literally took my breath away. It was like everything I had learned, my PhD journey,

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  everything I had learned about Jewish burial traditions. It all came to that moment. And I thought, this is authentic, based on the evidence. And it physically took my breath away. Wow.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  We say with the writers of the New Testament, what manner of love is this? There's no equation for it. And that's what was transformational. And so now, this message, this itemized receipt of the shroud of how much Jesus loves us, we've taken this message around the world. If you would have told me then, you'll bring the shroud with you to WEF. I had the shroud with me at WEF. And people are stunned. I had Oswald Boateng, my dear friend, who's like one of the finest designers in the world. I said, oh, you like linen? You like garments? Let me show you Jesus's burial garment.

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  Wow. What, where was it found? The shroud itself. Yeah. So the providence of the shroud is fascinating. And I have a wonderful schematic that hopefully I can show in this, in B-roll. The shroud is taken, obviously, immediately. Nobody would have left it. And I'm actually working right now on an article. This is, this is interesting. This might blow your mind a little bit. Now, this is speculative. But we have to ask ourself,

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  In John 20, it says something very interesting in John 20 verse 8. John says that he saw and believed. By the way, 11 times in John 20, we're told people saw things. When we talk about faith, we're not talking about faith in nothing. Faith is only as good as its object. And this is what I love. Edone, this Greek word to see, it's used 186 times in the New Testament. And so I'm hoping that this broadcast opens people's eyes to the amazing enormity of the evidence of Jesus's resurrection. We have 45 sources for Jesus's life, death, burial, and resurrection with over 129 facts.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  In Jesus's discoveries, I show how we can build 65 facts about the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus before we ever open our Bibles. I want people to, I want to unlock this for people, the gravity and the enormity of it. And when I saw that, it all came together for me and it just took my breath away.

• 1:07:16Shawn Ryan?

  Let me ask you a question. Do you think that Jesus wanted to leave that behind? God, that was the whole plan?

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  I do absolutely.

• 1:07:26Shawn Ryan?

  Meant to be found?

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  Yes. And this is what I'm working on. I believe that the shroud was still glowing in the tomb when it says that he saw and believed. I believe there was a resurrection residue on the shroud. Because what else did he see and believe? He says, when he saw the linen cloths lying there, he saw and believed. If you read the whole passage, John 21 through 8, it's very clear. He's looking at the shroud and it says, he saw and he believed. I believed he saw the image glowing.

• 1:08:02Shawn Ryan?

  Who's he?

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  John, John's Gospel. John, remember, there's a footrace, the women in the appearance tradition, you know, Mary Magdalene, she runs back, she says, the tomb's empty. I've seen him, you know, come and see the Lord is alive. I preached this passage three times at the Holy Sepulchre Church when I filmed there. And so John and Peter have a footrace to the tomb. And I love this, right there in the Gospels, we're told that, you know, every runner loves to tell you they're a runner. Have you ever met a runner that doesn't love to tell you they're a runner? I think John was a runner because he said he outran Peter to the tomb. And then he's sitting there waiting for Peter before he goes in. And he goes, he went in, and it's one of the greatest verses in all the Bible.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  He saw the shroud and believed. So you say, well, Jeremiah, did he not believe in Jesus before that? Well, sure he did, but we can believe more. This broadcast right now is strengthening faith, and it's also reaching the most ardent skeptic right now because to not believe in the shroud, you have to not take into account 102 academic disciplines. I flew here on an airplane for this interview. I don't know who invented the airplane. I don't know. I mean, I have an idea. I don't really understand aerodynamics, but man, I understood enough to get on board the flight and fly here. We have so much more evidence for Jesus's resurrection. What is it going to take for you to believe that he rose from the grave and commit your life to him?

• 1:09:27Shawn Ryan?

  That's actually kind of why I'm asking is, are we supposed to have proof? Because it's all about faith, right? It's all about putting your faith-

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  Such a great question. Yes, we need proof. Are we better than the... Let me tell you.

• 1:09:44Shawn Ryan?

  I guess what I'm asking is, I almost feel like leaving proof behind is almost a contradiction.

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not, and I'd like to tell you why. There would be no such thing as Christianity if those disciples did not see Jesus physically alive after he was dead. They had all given up hope. Luke 24:21, remember Cleophas, we think it's his wife Mary, is on the way to Emmaus, a seven mile walk. And they don't realize they're walking with the resurrected Christ, and they're dejected. And they say, oh, we had hoped he was the Messiah, but he was just killed. We had hoped. They'd given up hope. The disciples had scattered. No one expected the Messiah to rise from the dead.

• 1:10:32Speaker 03

  There could not have been a worse talking point to start a new religion than resurrection. No one believed in resurrection in the first century. Even people that say, well, Jews believed in it. They believed in a general resurrection, like way out into the future.

• 1:10:47Shawn Ryan?

  What does that mean?

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Meaning that someday, all Jews would be resurrected by the Messiah. They didn't believe in an individual messianic resurrection. No one saw that coming. 4Q 285, which is a Qumran dead scroll. They talk about, literally, the Jews killing the Roman emperor. Their idea was that the Messiah would come and vanquish a corrupt priesthood, cleanse the temple, and kill the Roman emperor. That was the Messiah that Jews were looking for in the first century. And I think this is why Judas fell out of the boat, incidentally. Nobody expected him to die on the cross. Remember Matthew 16:20? Jesus has just, literally, Peter has just said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus is like, "That's right, I'm gonna go die on the cross now."

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  And Peter rebukes Jesus and says, "No, you're not gonna go to the cross." And do you remember what Jesus says to Peter?

• 1:11:38Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  He says, "Get behind me, Satan." He literally calls him Satan, "Get behind me." It was always the point that he would go to the cross. So these people all give up hope. They go back to fishing. We need to make sure that our faith is not more pious than the first Christians. The first Christians needed proof to believe in. Faith is not faith in faith, Sean. It is faith in evidence. It is faith in the facts of the gospel and a person who completed our salvation for us. It is not... So I really help pious believers that are like, "Oh, I just believe it because the Bible said, oh, well, you're better than all the first-century Christians." They would have given up without proof.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  This is why the Bible says, "He showed himself to be alive by many infallible proofs." There's this word called "incipit" in Latin. You have a scroll over here that we're gonna talk about soon. And you can see that, you know, I've got this beautiful title. I've got this beautiful cover to my book. It was designed, it kinda gives you an idea of what the book is about. Well, scrolls, you had to say what it was about. In the incipit, the first two or three lines had to say what... Because otherwise, I mean, like, that's 24 feet long next to you.

• 1:12:53Shawn Ryan?

  That's 24 feet long?

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, which we'll get to. So it's like, "Bro, you gotta tell me in the first sentence or two if I'm gonna go to the effort to unroll this whole thing, because it takes an effort." And in Luke's incipit, which just in Latin means, here it begins, remember, Luke says, "I wanna share with you, I've put together the evidence of..." And he uses the word "autoptes" in Greek, which is the word we get "autopsy" from. "We were eyewitnesses of these things, so that you can have a certainty to your faith." So that's what the kind of faith we're called to certainty, based on eyewitness testimony and evidence. So let's not think that faith is like something we drum up, or we vibe, or we, "Oh, I just need more faith, man."

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  No, faith is knowledge. The more you know about God, the more you know about the facts that we're discussing for the resurrection, your faith will naturally become stronger. Does that make sense? Does, does make sense. So faith is only as strong as its object. I'm sitting in this chair right now. I believe it'll hold me up based on the evidence. That's all faith is. No one's going to be commended for their amount of their faith. So often, I'm like the dad in Mark 9. Do you remember the dad in Mark 9 who looked at Jesus and said, "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief"? That was enough faith for Jesus to act. That's enough faith for anyone watching right now to say, "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief." Jesus will act in your behalf.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  Because it's faith in Him based on evidence. So that's why I have this ministry called Christian Thinker Society. Jesus said, "Love me with your heart, love me with your soul." He quotes the Shema. But only, only can Jesus messianize Shema. And He says, "Love me with your mind. Love God with all your mind." It's faith in evidence. Okay, that does make sense. What are we going, where are we going next? Well, where we're going next, my friend, is I do want to make sure, I want to, I want to make sure, since this is an Easter episode, that you do understand the flagrum. Can I hand you this?

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  This is a replica of a Roman flagrum. The scriptures say, and it's one of the most overlooked passages in the Gospel of John, it says, "And Pilate had Jesus flogged." And because of our historical distance, we simply cannot appreciate or understand the cruelty, the demonic intimacy. That is rawhide, and those are lead balls fastened to those three cords. That is a Roman scourge. And we know based on the evidence that he was scourged with two executioners. And that is when Jesus endures 700 lashes.

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  700. We have counted on the shroud 372 lashes, but we do not have the lateral sides. So we estimate, and by the way, every part of his body was flogged, including his pelvic region. There's not an area on his body that wasn't flogged. In fact, there's evidence that one of those balls came around the face of Jesus, the man who's crucified in the shroud, and literally blinded in one of his eyes.

• 1:16:19Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I mean, these things are sharp, too, where they put the holes through so they get the leather through there. Then you have this wire holding this up. Was this, I mean?

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  Yes. It could have been bone, too, but we're confident that lead balls are what was used. Barbells.

• 1:16:39Shawn Ryan?

  Would these balls penetrate the?

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, they would puncture, absolutely. And that's where you have the blood, and that's where you see bone. You could probably see bone. It's amazing. Many victims never even made it to the cross when they're flogged. And this is where we know Jesus loses one-third of his blood volume from that flogging. 700 lashes. And that's why Isaiah 53, which is right next to you, says, "By his stripes were healed." Isaiah sees that prophetically 700 years earlier.

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  What do we have here? Okay. Shawn. The Great Isaiah Scroll is right next to you right now. This is a facsimile because the Israelis have not allowed anyone to see it since 1968, by the way, the actual thing, until just recently, like within the last few days. So from since, anyone who's been to Israel, to the Shrine of the Book, and my good friend, Aldo Feu Royman, used to be the curator of the Shrine of the Book, so I know this because I've been there and knew the curator. The facsimile, what you see in the Shrine of the Book, is a facsimile. This is a facsimile that my friends at Facsimile Editions produce in London, and it is, I want you to touch it, it's open to Isaiah 53, that is, column 44 of Isaiah, of the

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Book of Isaiah, and you're looking at chapter 53, which most Jews won't read in the synagogue because it's so prophetically accurate about what happened to the Messiah. That's the entire Book of Isaiah, found in Qumran Cave 4. And this facsimile, from what I know, what we have here at your studio, can only be seen in the Vatican right now. It can be seen at the Bibliothèque, the National Library in Paris. It can be seen at the Museum of the Bible, so we have the same facsimile they have at the Museum of the Bible in DC, and we've got it right here at the Shawn Ryan Studio right now. Holy cow. So the value of it is off the charts. It's 24 feet long.

• 1:18:53Speaker 03

  Of course, it's found at Qumran, 250, it's 200, it anti-dates Jesus by 200 years, 250 years. And that is the oldest witness that we have to the Book of Isaiah, again, showing the stability of the text. The next book that we have of Isaiah is 1,000 years later, and it's essentially word-for-word correspondence. 1,000 years later. And this also shows how long books lasted. So this was at Qumran for 250 years before Jesus. So these apostate Bible scholars who act like the New Testament would have just evaporated. One said, oh, within 20 years, we would have lost the autograph. That just flies in the face of the facts. That's fake, fake news. And so you read from right to left.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  To whom has our report been, to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? And that entire column you're looking at is Isaiah 53.

• 1:19:52Shawn Ryan?

  These are sewn together?

• 1:19:53Speaker 03

  Yes, with linen. And by the way, that's why that facsimile, I think, is better than the one they have at the Israel Antiquities Museum at the shrine of the book. You can feel the linen that, that binds them, the parchment together. And amazing. So if you kept going, you would, by the way, if we kept unraveling it, we would get to Isaiah where Jesus, do you remember when Jesus preaches in his home synagogue in Luke 4? He goes up and he preaches Isaiah 60 and he says, um, you know, I've come to let, to heal the, help the oppressed. And he says, today this is fulfilled in your midst. And he sits down after reading Isaiah 61, 1 and 2.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  He reads all of Isaiah 61, 1 and 2, except the last verse, the day of vengeance of our God. He sits down and he says, this is fulfilled in your midst. And in his own hometown, they want to kill him. Because they immediately knew that he was quoting Isaiah 61, claiming to be the Messiah. So if we kept unraveling, we're at, we're at Isaiah 53, we would get to Isaiah 61, 1 and 2. Isn't that marvelous?

• 1:20:58Shawn Ryan?

  It is.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  Extremely rare, uh, but I wanted to bring that for you to have just an appreciation of the incredible reliability and authenticity of what happened to Jesus and an appreciation. I mean, this is written, Isaiah 700 years before Jesus.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  So that's the great Isaiah scroll.

• 1:21:25Shawn Ryan?

  700 years before.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Before Jesus. And then that scroll itself would date to 250 years before.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  This stuff is fascinating. Well, I'm just trying to up the game. I've got to raise the stakes on any other guests you have after me now. I think you've done it.

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  I'm scared to touch some of this stuff.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  But I want our audience to see, do you realize that archaeology is Christianity's closest cousin? As I point out in my book, Jesus' Discoveries, you know, whereas every other religion on earth, Islam included, avoids any interaction with archaeology, Christianity says, "Test our beliefs against history." If Jesus died and rose from the grave, everything he said is true and validated, is validated in an absolutely devastating text, 1 Corinthians 15:7. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, people should feel sorry for us, but Paul says in verse 20, "But he has risen from the dead." Remember, Paul saw him on the way to Damascus. By the way, can I mention something about the light factor, back to the nuclear moment?

• 1:22:35Speaker 03

  We were talking about 34,000 billion watts of energy for the Shroud image. Every time Jesus manifests himself in the New Testament, he manifests himself with brilliant light. Think about this for a minute. Transfiguration, brilliant light. Everybody wants to stay there. They want to hang out there. Paul gives his testimony. He's on the way to Damascus, and he's going there to kill Christians. And do you remember, he has a vision of the physically resurrected Jesus, and in the book of Acts, it says, "It was brighter than the noonday sun." Do you remember that evidential detail? I have stood in first-century Rome's roads and filmed on them, and it is hot. Okay, you're under the sun. It is bright.

• 1:23:18Speaker 03

  So he sees Jesus, and Jesus is brighter than the noonday sun. In the book of Revelation, the Bible says, "In the new heaven and the new earth, we'll have no need of the sun, because Jesus will give light to everything." Isn't that fascinating? It is. We get just a glimmer, just a signpost of that magnificent light that's left behind. And I do believe, Sean, that there is a new revelation tied to the emergence of technology as we get closer to the second coming of Jesus Christ. In other words, did God plan for this to happen? I think so. I mean, photography is not invented till the 1840s.

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  Sacchandopoeia takes a picture in 1898 and sees the shroud image in its negative. I've actually seen his camera. It was on these big glass plates. The exposures took 14 minutes and 20 minutes each. There was no power in the church, so they had to use generators for the flash photography of 1898. He was a lawyer. He was a Christian. He develops it. And never more appropriately, when he sees the face of Jesus in the negative, which is actually the photo positive, he goes, "Oh, my God." Because he believed he was looking at the face of Jesus for the first time since the apostolic era. Wow.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  You know, why, where is the shroud now? It's in Turin, Italy. It's not in the Vatican. It's in Turin, Italy. It's in a reliquary. That's what they call it. This is kind of interesting. The same company in Turin that develops the materials for the International Space Station built the box, which we call a reliquary. It's a religious term that the shroud is out. So it's totally unraveled. It's in this reliquary that's about 15 feet long by about four feet wide. And it's 99% argon gas, 1% oxygen. And I have news, I have breaking news for your show. The image is fading.

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  What does that mean? The image is going away. Why? Light and oxygen are its greatest enemies. And so this is why the Catholic Church is reticent. This is why they say they're reticent, to show it to the public. This is why during the recent Catholic Jubilee, the shroud was not brought out. We had to look at a video of it, for those that went to Turin. The shroud has not been on display very often. The Catholic Church has never actually come out, and I've published this, this is accurate, and said that they actually believe it was Jesus's burial cloth. They're supportive of it to an extent. I asked to interview Archbishop Rapole when I was in Turin. I was turned down because I wanted to ask, why aren't we showing this?

• 1:26:04Speaker 03

  I believe the shroud is the greatest scientific evidence that we have for the resurrection of Jesus.

• 1:26:09Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, the whole point is to

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  Evangelize.

• 1:26:14Shawn Ryan?

  Why would you hide it?

• 1:26:16Speaker 03

  Why would you not let people see it?

• 1:26:17Shawn Ryan?

  If you didn't believe it was his, then why would, why would, I mean, definitely, why wouldn't you expose it to the public?

• 1:26:23Speaker 03

  Right. And this is where I want to help correct people. People give the Catholic Church a little too much credit. The Eastern Orthodox Church protected the shroud for the first thousand years in Constantinople and beyond. The shroud did not come into Catholic possession until 1985.

• 1:26:42Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm dead serious. I published all of this in the Jesus Discoveries. It was bequeathed to Pope John Paul II

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  upon the death of the Savoy family, and they literally gave the shroud to the Catholic Pope to be the custodian of it. So the shroud technically does not belong to the Catholic Church. It belongs to the Pope himself. I happened to be there at Conclave, which was a unique experience in Turin, because the shroud was essentially orphaned at that point. I met with Enrico, who changes the gas twice a year in the shroud. And even the blood is fading. And so they're very concerned about that. They're concerned about the image fading, but still, why wouldn't you just bring it out and show it? I mean, we have all this technology now. We have lights that are, I mean, there's Ways we can do that.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  And this is where I'm so thankful that your show is bringing exposure. You have the greatest evangelism discipleship tool on earth, the Shroud of Turin, and the public needs to see it. Anyone can do a ChatGTP search and say, "Show me the exact days that the Shroud has been publicly displayed." And they'll be shocked, it's fewer than thirty days over the last several hundred years.

• 1:27:58Shawn Ryan?

  Fewer than thirty days in over a hundred years?

• 1:28:07Speaker 03

  So, I would encourage the Catholic Church and Pope Leo, who I signed a letter to, to bring it out, let people see it, let people make up their own minds, and not allow the centro, that's the group in Italy that that gives leadership to who sees it and who doesn't. So I'm very concerned about it, and I want it to be shown. And by the way, I want to say this, the Shroud doesn't belong to the Catholic Church. It belongs to the unified church. It belongs to every believer in Jesus Christ. So yeah, it did not come into, and Barry Schwartz made this clear, I was the editor of a journal, academic journal, which I summarize in my book. And Barry made that very clear.

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  It is not a Catholic relic. So many people, especially what you might call Protestants or evangelical Christians, they don't want to know anything about the Shroud because, "Oh, that's a Catholic relic." No, it didn't come into the hands of the Catholic Church until the 1980s. I don't believe the Catholic Church would have ever allowed it to be studied. Remember, it was still in private, family hands in 1978, when the Shroud of Turin Research Project studied it. The family that owned the Shroud allowed it. And that's not my opinion, that was Barry Schwartz's opinion, who I now believe, having met everyone.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  So if you have this great tool, why not make it available?

• 1:29:37Shawn Ryan?

  That's a great question. I mean, I wonder what else they're hiding.

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:29:44Shawn Ryan?

  You know?

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  And why not use it again? So I want to say that, and there are amazing Catholic people out there, like my friends at Athonia, who have great exhibits, who I partner with. I mean, there are people out there trying to change this, but they're all dying, Sean. I mean, I spoke at the annual scientific, it was at the Augustan Institute, the International Shroud of Turin conference. I was honored to be asked to speak and everybody there is much older than us. So all of these scientists are beginning to die and their knowledge is dying with it. So that's why I'm doing everything in my power to raise up this information.

• 1:30:25Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Thank you for what you're doing.

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  Thank you for letting me bring this information. I was a skeptic, I'm not now, and I'm also thrilled that I'm not the only Bible scholar that's believing in it. My Dr. Father Craig Evans, who's the finest Jesus scholar in the English speaking world, he has 700 publications on Jesus, without a doubt believes in the authenticity of the shroud. Archaeologist Scott Stripling, who has the largest archaeological dig in Israel, without a doubt believes that the shroud is authentic. Paul Foster, the greatest Bible scholar in Britain, Bart Ehrman told me that, believes that the shroud is authentic. What's weird though is so many Bible scholars are agnostic about the shroud because they're minimalists and they've never really looked into the data. They stay in their academic silos and they don't get out of it. And so I'm also speaking to all those Bible scholars

• 1:31:12Speaker 03

  out there. Come on, man. Bro, we've got more evidence for the resurrection. We have scientific evidence. And what's cool, so we have traveled, Christian thinkers, we've been on a tour. We did the display at Prestonwood, tens of thousands of people showed up at my church. So I thought, man, like the Braille system, if it works here, we ought to take this everywhere. So whether it's WEF, whether it's Lubbock, Texas, whether it's Nashville, Tennessee, I'm going to be at a great church this weekend with 50 artifacts. We never charge a dime for it. It's all free. People come every day. They can bring their friends and their neighbors. We have pop-up banners. We have a bronze statue of Jesus that is just beautiful. We have what you just saw. We have the actual shroud.

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  Then we have the Isaiah scroll. We have other things as well, and people can see it for themselves. And I've seen children come to faith in Christ, and I have seen the jet propulsion scientist. When we were at Greg Laurie's church in Southern California, he walked there and said, "Everything you said here is accurate." He's working on the Mars project, by the way.

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  How many people have you seen this convert? Thousands. Thousands? I have been in the game in ministry for a long time, and I've been privileged to travel the world. As you mentioned in the intro, I've probably held more Bible manuscripts in my hand than 90% of the Bible scholars alive today. I worked in the Griffith Paprology Lab at the Ashmolean. We can't call it the Sackler Library anymore because of the Sackler OxyContin family. They took the name off it. So, but it was the Sackler when I was there back in 2009 to 12. So, I mean, I've held great Bible manuscripts. I've seen, you know, what you're holding. I mean, it's so inspirational.

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  But nothing like the shroud has ever had the conversion rate ever that I've been part of. It is the greatest discipleship tool, meaning if you've read the Bible a thousand times, you're going to learn more about how much God loves you. But if you're a skeptic who needs proof, like we all do, I wake up every day as a skeptic, and I need to be reminded of God's love for me, and I need to be reminded of the proof of the resurrection, the many infallible proofs of the resurrection. You walk out of there utterly convinced. We were just at an event in Cincinnati. I'll never forget this man weeping, physically shaking, saying, "It's true. It's true. I never, I never saw it." It's a calculation, and it all comes together.

• 1:33:39Speaker 03

  And this data's been suppressed. I want to make this very clear, something I also learned. My friend Tristan Cassiablanca gave his life, you'll find this interesting, Sean. The British Museum suppressed the raw data of the carbon dating for 27 years. So the carbon dating is done in 1988. We do need to mention this because all the people will comment, well, what about the carbon dating? No one should use the carbon dating from 1988 as a reason to think that the shroud is a hoax. So in 1988, carbon dating is done on the top left corner of the shroud.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  I showed you the top left corner of the shroud, the Reyes fragment area. The scientist said, please date it, but whatever you do, don't use the edges. Don't use the fringes. I don't know if you could tell, even on our replica, we actually reinforced it with gaff tape because it's, it's, it's a shroud. It will fall apart. It needs to be patched. And so we know, based under the microscope, that there are cotton fibrils that are weaved in with the fine linen to keep it from just totally, but that, but it's fine linen throughout it, but the, the edges, they had to reinforce. Seven laboratories were supposed to do the carbon dating, only three did Zurich, Oxford,

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  and Arizona. Why seven? We don't know. Then they get up on the chalkboard and they write 1260 to 1390. And one of the guys just sits there like this. Of course, he got a, one of the guys got a $5 million endowed chair immediately, by the way, after this. You can look it up for yourself. Very specious. Why did he get a $5 million endowed chair after 1260 to 1390? Somebody should find out. Someone should do a PhD on that. So they write that. And then the British Museum suppresses the raw data of the carbon dating for 27 years. And Tristan, my buddy, does the, he's a French guy, amazing man, great scholar. He does the equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act to finally get

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  the data, the raw data of, to know, like, what did you test? How did you test it? Do you know what he published? He published, and I want to be technical, the samples they used for the carbon dating are not homogeneous with the shroud itself.

• 1:36:09Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean?

• 1:36:11Speaker 03

  We don't even know if they tested the actual shroud, Sean.

• 1:36:14Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  Yes, Tristan Casia Blanca pointed this out. So in a 2019 Journal of Archaeometry, published in Oxford, people can go look this stuff up. This is not conspiracy stuff. Go be a reader, you know, learn from everyone, but don't let anyone think for you, okay? Go read the 2019 Journal of Archaeometry, where they say, "We can no longer take any value, there is no value to the carbon dating because it was so corrupted, it was so poisoned, they probably, they used a patched sample that is not homogeneous with the shroud that we have." So again, if you're a thinking person...

• 1:36:51Shawn Ryan?

  That's a demonic attack in itself.

• 1:36:53Speaker 03

  It is. Why, why the suppression from the British Museum? Why does the Catholic Church not show the shroud more often? They need to. This is scientific proof of the resurrection. And so I think it's why every time now I mention the shroud, it goes viral. There is, there is a hunger for this information. There is a hunger in the algorithm. People want proof, and that's okay. And we have it.

• 1:37:20Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think, when did we find out that the image on the shroud is fading?

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  I just found that out in Turin last May, when I went and met with Enrico, who changes the gas. I have it on video.

• 1:37:32Shawn Ryan?

  When did they figure this out?

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  I didn't ask when, but he, and again, I haven't checked that. That was the reason that I was upset that they were not showing the shroud publicly. And again, I asked to meet with Archbishop Repole and was declined an interview. So I have this on my YouTube channel, where Enrico says that the blood is fading, the image is fading. I have Bruno Barbera saying there's a 1 in 200 billion chance. I have Paulo de Lozaro saying the 34,000 billion watts of energy. I mean, it's great stuff. But that's where I learned that the image is fading. And so what are we going to do? Just let it fade away before we show it to the next generation? I mean, it's just, I find it odd. It's bizarre. Because it's, you know. But scientists will at me and be like, well, you have to know, you've got, you know,

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  oxygen and light are the greatest enemy. Well, oxygen and light are the greatest enemy of any artifact. Mm hmm. Should we just not show any artifacts? It's, but it's been here for Bizarre. Years. Yeah. It's bizarre. And so it took a family, a wealthy family, by the way, the Catholic Church did nothing for the Jubilee. Um, and the family who, they're incredible. Um, they're an amazing family and I'm trying to remember their name. I apologize. I can't. They put together an amazing exhibit, a private, wealthy Catholic family in the courtyard of Turin, where they created a virtual experience of the shroud because the Catholic Church didn't do anything for it.

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  Explain why bones, bone boxes matter for reading the New Testament. Okay. I love bone boxes. Okay. I don't know what this means. If you go to the, if you go to the land of Israel, if you go to the Mount of Olives, one of the most famous spots, you're going to see the beautiful Mount of Olives. You're going to see the Dome of the Rock. You're going to see the Keydron Valley. You're going to see the Eastern Gate, which the Mooks, which the Muslims, you know, walled up because they know that when Messiah returns, he's going to step foot on the Mount of Olives and go through the Eastern Gate and proclaim himself the Messiah, as he should. So there's bone boxes all over the Mount of Olives, 150,000. A bone box is a box that you put bones in. It's called an Ashuware.

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  And the Jews practice a process, which I point out, because I have a whole chapter, because we believe we have James, the brother of the Lord's bone box. This is another evidence for Jesus outside the Bible. It says, James, the son of Joseph, the brother of Jesus. No other bone box would say who your brother was. And this is incised. It was, it was, uh, it was discovered in 19, excuse me, in 2002. And of course, made massive headlines. We actually have James's bone box. And so here's what would happen, Sean.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  Brothers and I died and you would put me in a tomb. And about a year later, on the anniversary of my death, when my flesh had decayed, you would collect my bones in a process called osseagium. That's Latin that literally just means bone collection. And you would put my bones in our family bone box. Guess how long the bone box is? It's as long as your femur, the longest bone in your body. Turns out the family buried together stays together. And so you would bury me with like dad and maybe a sister or brother. And that process is called osseagium. And so burial was a sacred tradition in Judaism. And so that's why you have these bone boxes. These ossuaries is what they're called.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  I have filmed in the church, the teardrop church on the eastern side of the Mount of Olives with all of these bone boxes. I think it's ground zero for Matthew 27, when other Christians came out of the tomb besides Jesus. And so why that matters for Jesus and for the New Testament helps us understand that Jesus was buried properly in a known tomb. People would have known where he was buried. They mourn the dead for seven days. Shiva, they would worship all first century tombs, by the way, look like my hand. If you enter, you'd put the stone here. You would worship inside and then the niches are where the bodies would be laid. And we actually have James, think about this. James was a skeptic of his brother, Jesus.

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  Do you have a brother by chance? I do. Okay, so I have four sons. What would it take for you to believe your brother was the son of God?

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  It would take a lot.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  People always normally laugh when I ask this. I have four boys. I break up anarchy on a daily basis. None of them think that the other one's a son of God. And this was true in Jesus's day. In Mark six, they literally think Jesus is insane. In Mark three, 21, they take offense at him. They actually accuse him of being a bastard, you know, a son of iniquity. In John seven, verse five, it explicitly says, not even his brothers believed in him.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  So here's what we have to ask ourselves. This is one of the proofs of the resurrection. How do people go from being hostile to Jesus to being willing to die for the belief that he physically rose from the grave? 1 Corinthians 15:7 says, "And he appeared to James." I love this appearance. I could, and I could see it. I want to set it up for you. I could see it in my mind's eye. You know, James has always been humiliated by older brother Jesus. Crazy guy, thought he was a Messiah, got crucified, and James is just working in the wood shop, you know, the stone shop. And all of a sudden, Jesus appears before

• 1:43:03Speaker 03

  him. "Bro, bro, check out my side. They got me good. Check out my wrists." James becomes what Paul says, "A pillar of the church." He becomes the pastor of the church of Jerusalem, which probably ran 10,000 to 20,000 people. Josephus, a first-century historian, tells us in AD 62, "James, the brother of Jesus in antiquities 20, dies believing his brother is the son of God." Why? Because he saw Jesus physically alive after he was dead.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  That's why bone boxes are important, and we have James's bone box. And that's one of the top 10 discoveries in my book that bring us face to face with Jesus.

• 1:43:58Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:44:40Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:45:12Speaker 00

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• 1:45:42Speaker 03

  What other kind of discoveries do you have in there? Dude, magic texts, Jesus's name. Can we talk about healing and exorcism for a minute?

• 1:45:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Okay.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  This is so cool. Um, I've never actually had, this is really fun to talk about because you know, you, you write a book. Have you written a book before? You probably have like. No, I have not written a book. Okay, well, you need to. The whole time you'll wonder like, will anyone ever read this? Does anyone care? Well, this book is already made. No. Yeah, okay. We need to change that. We need your book. We need you in the author space. But what's cool about these discoveries is so many of them have already made headlines. I mean, Popular Mechanics did a story on one of the discoveries of my book, and it was the Jesus Cup. Have you heard of the Jesus Cup? No, I haven't. Bro, Frank Bagio, who I have total permission. All, and by the way, this, this book is so cool because my nine-year-old's looking at it,

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  and there's pictures in it, which was a total labor of love to get these pictures. But I want to show you, I want to hand you this because I want you to see a picture of what I'm talking about. This is so cool, man. So look, can I hand you this book? I want you to see the picture of the Jesus Cup. You are looking, Shawn Ryan, at the earliest artifact that we have of the name of Jesus on it. It dates to 8050. It was just discovered in Alexandria by Frank Gaudio, who was a marine biologist. He does archaeology underwater. And that cup, if I can say it in Greek, if you don't mind, says, "Hokouestes die Christu." Through Jesus, the Enchanter, or the Magician.

• 1:47:25Speaker 03

  Jesus's name is so powerful that it was actually inserted in pagan charms, spells, and incantations. Because His name was known in His lifetime throughout the Mediterranean world. That if you just insert this name of Jesus, demons are afraid and healings happen. And that is a convivial cup. You notice that it looks like one of the handles has been broken off. So this could have even been used as even a paganism. But they literally, "Through Jesus, the Magician, be healed." And so I explain that.

• 1:48:06Speaker 03

  And so that cup, the actual incised cup, dates to AD 50. That's before the Gospels are written.

• 1:48:17Speaker 03

  Wow. And then if you flip a few pages, we have other magic spells that insert the name of Jesus in incantations. If you wanted to give your boss insomnia, you would put a phylactery in his house. And in the name of Jesus, you're going to have insomnia. Or if you wanted a woman to fall in love with you, they would insert the name of Jesus to try to get a woman. The point is, Jesus is made famous because He was a miracle worker and an exorcist. Remember, Jesus could exorcise demons even over long distance. He could heal people over long distance. And so what's fascinating about this, remember Luke 7:22. Talk about someone who needed proof. This is very important.

• 1:49:00Speaker 03

  Again, we cannot read the New Testament with Western 21st century eyes. We have to, you and I, what I'm trying to do is take you on a journey. We're doing experiential archaeology right now. I want you to experience the context, the CIA method, by the way, of Bible reading. Oh, boy. Can I give you the CIA method of Bible reading, since you're CIA? Context and I'm not CIA. Don't start spreading that around.

• 1:49:27Speaker 03

  I'm kidding with you. So CIA method of Bible study, this is so helpful. This is how you always read the Bible. Context, interpretation, application. What's the context? Get me in the world of Jesus. What's the, then I'll know the interpretation. So then I can apply it to my life. That's what you should ask yourself every time you read the Bible. So we're doing context right now. Luke 722. Josephus tells us that John the Baptist is being held in prison at Machiras. The Bible doesn't tell us that. Josephus, the first century historian does. Remember, John the Baptist was the forerunner who literally baptized Jesus. And so that's the Lamb of God. You know, this is Isaiah 40, by the way. We go right to Isaiah 40. It's amazing how much Isaiah shows up in the New Testament.

• 1:50:11Speaker 03

  Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. But he's having doubts, Sean, like we all do. And here's what I want to tell people. Never shame someone who's having doubts. Sharpen them. John the Baptist disciples come to Jesus. And do you remember what they say in Luke 722? John the Baptist is wondering if you're really the guy, bro.

• 1:50:34Speaker 03

  What does Jesus say? He doesn't shame him. He sharpens him. He said, let him know I'm doing my work. The blind see. The deaf are healed. And the dead necros agiro. The dead stand up alive. And so Jesus, remember this, is known as a famous exorcist and miracle worker. Sean, 25% of the Roman Empire was sick, dying, or in need of immediate medical attention on any given day of Jesus's ministry. No wonder the crowds flock to him to be healed. So he's known as an exorcist. He's known as a famous healer. Where would people go? You'd have to pay for your healing.

• 1:51:18Speaker 03

  You know, if we didn't know Jesus and we're brothers in the first century, we got to go to that temple of Asclepius. That's where we get the, you know, the medical symbol of the staff and the snakes. That's all from Asclepius. You had to pay for healing and do crazy chants. And you mean, Jesus heals people for free? You mean, he doesn't use another name? He just says, come out. Shut up. Demons fear him and he doesn't charge? Wow. That's how he became famous. And so my second that brings us face to face with Jesus is it brings us face to face with a Savior who heals. And there have been more documented miracles in the last 50 years than the previous 300 years combined.

• 1:52:02Speaker 03

  My citation on that is Craig Keener and he's a classicist, dear friend of mine. Two-volume work on miracles. You should have him. He's amazing. And also JP Moreland. We've had more documented miracles in the last 50 years than probably the last 300 years combined.

• 1:52:19Shawn Ryan?

  What's the one that stands out to you the most, if there is one?

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  I have two. May I share two?

• 1:52:31Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:52:33Speaker 03

  My wife and I couldn't get pregnant for five years. And God blessed us with five kids. I think people prayed too hard because we have triplets now. So that's a miracle. And then secondly, my dad, who's my best friend, was within days of dying. He went from being fine, running, and he was calling me, "Dad, your face is red. You don't look good." And I have one of these concierge doctors. I travel all the time. When I need meds, I need them now. So it's like, Dad, you need to talk to my doctor. He had stage four lymphoma and was within days of death. And his doctor looked at him and said, "Well, I think you're going to die, sir."

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  And I won't tell you what I said in my mind, but I said, "You're fired." I transferred my dad to the Med Center in Houston, and I saw God heal my dad of stage four cancer.

• 1:53:27Shawn Ryan?

  No way.

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  And he's doing amazing now. And he had days to live. I don't know if you've ever been in a situation, this was odd for me, I hadn't been, where doctors tell you not to leave town? Because I was living in Dallas, you know, and I'm in Houston with my dad. And they're saying, "You can't leave. You may not make it." And I saw God heal my dad.

• 1:53:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:53:48Speaker 03

  So I've seen miracles in my own life. But the greatest miracle of all is the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus. That's what they all emanate from.

• 1:53:56Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:53:59Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 1:54:06Speaker 03

  Let's talk about coins, stones, and governors. Okay, let's talk about everybody who wanted to kill Jesus, shall we? Right. So I have here, and by the way, I have some cool friends like you. I have a good friend named JR Bizzle. He's like a treasure hunter. I'm gonna shout out to him because, you know, finding artifacts is not easy. You know, there's, there's not a manual on this. You have to make sure they're authentic. Sometimes you've got to get them through Zurich. For different reasons, and it's just an interesting world of antiquities. By the way, like ISIS made a hundred million dollars selling stolen artifacts on the black market. I don't know if you knew that. I didn't know that. Yeah, in fact, when I was a professor in Canada.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  At Acadia, I had a CBC reporter who was embedded with ISIS clandestine. And she sent me a picture of a Jewish magic book. It had a bunch of Jewish spells in it, had a mummified bat that ISIS had stolen and was trying to sell. So the whole antiquities market is challenging. You've got to, this where you need experts like me that can check authenticity. So I have here some coins that I want to show you of all the people that tried to kill Jesus. Okay, I've Herod the Great, I have Augustus, I have Tiberius, and I want you to hold these in your hand. Because here's why coins are important. Let me just show you this, this is so amazing. You call them the, the social media of the old world or something, correct?

• 1:55:33Speaker 03

  Coins are the social media of Jesus's world. I love this because if you and I went back in time right now, we don't have a reel. We don't have a feed to tell us who's in power or who the local deity is, the local god. We don't know who's enslaved, we don't know who's in charge. And so all I had to do, if I got some money in my hand, I could immediately say, oh, okay, Augustus. Oh, okay, Tiberius, oh, that makes sense. I want you to hold the, these are gold Ariuses. Check these out, these are legit. These are very expensive, not cheap. And what's fascinating about them.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  Is those Augustus is the Roman emperor who Luke names. He is emperor when Jesus is born. We know that from the Gospel of Luke. Tiberius is the emperor who crucifies Jesus of Nazareth. Now, Shawn, this is what is so cool about doing experiential archaeology. So, right now, you're looking at the social media of Jesus's day. If you look at the Tiberius one, it literally says in Latin, Tiberius, "Son of Augustus, Son of God." On the backside of the Tiberius coin, I don't know if you can make it out. Pontiff maxim, can you kind of make that out around the circle? Pontiff maxim of the Tiberius one. Pontifex maximus.

• 1:56:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:58Speaker 03

  What does that mean in Latin? High priest. So, when I open up the Greek New Testament, which I have Codex Vaticanus here, I'm going to show you in a minute. When I open up the Greek New Testament and I read the first verse of the Gospel of Mark, which was the first Gospel, "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." Do you realize if you and I were in town in the first century, there was only one Son of God, and it was Tiberius? To say anyone else was the Son of God would be to sign your death warrant. And Mark comes along and he says, "In arcane, euangelion, the beginning of the good news

• 1:57:42Speaker 03

  of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the true Son of God." You talk about a seditious thing. That's how he started his Gospel, bro. It was like, no, Tiberius isn't the Son of God. And then you flip the coin and you see he's called the High Priest. Wait a minute, no. According to the New Testament, Jesus is our great High Priest. According to Hebrews, he ever lives to make intercession for us. Jesus is the true Chief Priest, not Tiberius, not Caesar. The word Gospel is a Roman term. It's not a Christian term. We literally hijacked it. If you wanted to hear the Gospel in the first century, we'd see something like nailed to a tree. This is the Gospel of Tiberius or Augustus. This is an important good news announcement.

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  No, the true Gospel is that Jesus died, according to the Scriptures, that he was buried and on the third day rose from the grave, as the Scriptures say.

• 1:58:37Shawn Ryan?

  Are these originals?

• 1:58:38Speaker 03

  Yes, that's why they're so expensive. So that's gold aureus.

• 1:58:43Shawn Ryan?

  Twenty-seven B.C. to eighteen.

• 1:58:45Speaker 03

  So that was in circulation. Yeah, those are not replicas.

• 1:58:48Shawn Ryan?

  A.D. fourteen to thirty-seven.

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  Right. And so now, we're gonna keep going here. Now, this one is so cool. I just got this. I haven't had a chance to. All right. So, do you remember the passage when Jesus says, "Render to Caesar with Caesars"? Remember that? "Can I hand you an actual denarius?" So that's an aureus, that's gold. I want you to compare it. Hold on to these. This is a denarius, silver.

• 1:59:16Shawn Ryan?

  Also of Tiberias.

• 1:59:17Speaker 03

  Okay? So, what's cool about that, Sean? You're holding in your hands a, from the time of Jesus, in circulation, a denarius. It's denarian plural, denarius singular. And that has the likeness. Do you remember Jesus holds it up? And he says, "Whose likeness is on this?" And the crowd says, "Well, Caesar's." And that would have been Tiberias, literally. And that one is really nice. Props to JR for finding it to me. I don't know if you noticed, it has almost like a green hue to it, like a rim. It's got, it's very, very valuable. And that is from the first century reign of Tiberias, because that's Tiberias on it. Here's the message.

• 2:00:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's, that likeness is Tiberias. But do you remember what the scripture says? "You and I, we are made in the image of God, not Tiberias. So render unto Caesar with Caesars, but give me," this is Jesus talking, "your life." Isn't that powerful?

• 2:00:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

  Sure, pay your taxes to Caesar. Give God your life, because his likeness, my likeness, is stamped on you.

• 2:00:29Speaker 03

  Jesus was a great teacher. I want to hand you something else. This is so cool. I just got this, bro.

• 2:00:38Speaker 03

  Can I hand you something else, Shawn?

• 2:00:39Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:00:41Speaker 03

  We're doing experiential archaeology. Hold this.

• 2:00:45Shawn Ryan?

  Again.

• 2:00:46Speaker 03

  Not a replica from my antiquities dealer, Zach, in Jerusalem. I want you to look. You're holding a Roman needle. Okay? Do you remember Jesus? Now, I want you to hold it vertically. Do you see the circle there?

• 2:01:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, right here.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  Yep. That's called the eye of the needle. Have you heard when Jesus is asked, "How can anyone be saved? How can we be forgiven?" Jesus says it's easier for a rich man, or he said it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And they ask, "Well, then who can be saved?" He said, "With man, it's impossible. With God, all things are possible." And he's talking about the miracle of grace. You can't earn it. You can't deserve it. He paid the debt that we could never pay for a debt he did not owe. And you're holding in your hand the eye of a needle. Isn't that powerful?

• 2:01:47Speaker 03

  We put our place, now we're doing CIA. We're putting ourself in context. We're interpreting it right now, saying, "There's nothing I could do. A camel can't go through the eye of the needle. I am desperate for what God has done for me already. This is why I spell the gospel done, D-O-N-E." It's not religion. It's not ritual. It's faith and trust in an event that happened 2,000 years ago. Jesus' death and resurrection on the cross.

• 2:02:22Speaker 03

  So when he said rich man, he was, he was talking about everyone. Everyone. Because. Why did he use that? Well, rich, because there was a lot of health and wealth prosperity gospel in the first century. If you were, this is why people didn't believe Paul was an apostle. He had so many problems. If you read 2 Corinthians 1, Paul is like, you know, I have the sentence of death within me. I don't even want to go on living right now. This is why we can be honest about our pain. We don't live in our past, but we learn from it. We can be honest about our suffering. Paul had so many problems that they accused him of not really being an apostle because how can God be with you? You have so much adversity in your life. Because in Judaism of that time, only the righteous were blessed.

• 2:03:04Speaker 03

  If you had adversity, do you remember when they bring the, this is a perfect example, John 9. Teacher, who sinned this boy or his parents that he was born blind? John 9, 3. Yep. Jesus says neither, but that the power of God could be made manifest among you. And so there was a lot of health and wealth gospel, which I detest to this day. And Jesus is saying, if a rich man can't pay for it, nobody can. Only my grace makes it possible.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  Wow. So this is why context, you know, we have so many, heresy happens in some churches every Sunday. Give me Jesus in no context or the Bible in no context, and I immediately become a heretic. That's why my job is to build all of these portals to the past. To help us have a greater exegetical precision, so we can apply it to our life more easily. This is where the bone boxes are important. I don't know if you remember the part in the gospels when Jesus says to the young man, he wants to stay and bury his father. And Jesus is like, no, you need to follow me now. The dead will bury their dead. Remember he says that? Like we haven't, because of our historical distance, like, wow, that's kind of rude, Jesus. Let him bury his dad. No. He was wanting to wait a year to follow Jesus.

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  So he could collect his dad's bones and put them away. He was delaying his obedience. The only reason we know that is I just gave you the context of archaeology. Oh, now I get it. He was using that as a delay mechanism. And Jesus is like, no, today is the day of salvation. You need to follow me right now. Doesn't that help? It does. It does. Where are we going next? Dude.

• 2:04:49Speaker 03

  I haven't even started yet. This is amazing. This is a true story. Okay, I gotta tell you this. I love stories. Yeah. Um, I've met so many awesome people with the shroud. And I have a really good friend, Bob Chitwood. So he walks up to me one day. And he said, you know, I got into buying gold during COVID. And he said, I bought some gold and can I just show you this coin? Cause I had just bought a Herod bronze coin. Um, that is a bronze coin of Herod the Great from 37 B.C. He was the first one who tried to kill Jesus and it's bronze. It's not gold, but it says Herodu Basileu of Herod the Great. That's an important thing I need to tell you. All of these coins are in the genitive, meaning they literally belong to the king. We're just kind of passing them back and forth.

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  Literally this coin is his. You just get to use it as currency. That's an important point. That's where Jesus wants possession of us. He wants our life. That's a little footnote. So I'm, I, I think I'm cool because I'm handing Bob my bronze coin of Herod the Great. And he hands me this. This is nicer than what they have at the Hagia Sophia. Okay. This is the amazing Roman solidus from the late seventh century. This is a solidus that has 200 points of congruence, correspondence, comparability with the face of the man of the shroud. I want you to look at this. So Bob hands me this.

• 2:06:20Speaker 03

  I said, Bob, that looks just like the face in the shroud. He's like, oh my gosh, how did I not notice that?

• 2:06:28Speaker 03

  Look at that face and tell me if that does not look. And so Alan Wagner, as by the way, I've noticed I keep citing myself. I talked, and by the way, I have a whole section in the Jesus discoveries. This is the first coin that ever had the face of Jesus on it. And it matches the face of the shroud. And again, this is 700 years before the carbon dating. Okay. So what was their source material if the shroud didn't exist? And there's 200 points of congruence. And Alan Wagner from Duke University proved that. Remember sketch artists, like if you've committed a crime, they do a sketch? This goes way beyond what's accepted in the court of law to compare the face on this

• 2:07:10Speaker 03

  Justinian Roman solidus with the face of the shroud. So again, it's just yet another, we've talked about pollen. We've talked about the correspondence with the gospels. We've talked about AB blood. We've talked about the VP8 image analyzer. We've talked about the corruption in the data, the suppression of the carbon dating. And now I'm showing you the social media of the late 600s, which is the coin, the Christ solidus that matches the face of Jesus in the shroud. How much more proof do you need?

• 2:07:44Shawn Ryan?

  What is this on the back here?

• 2:07:46Speaker 03

  That's actually Justinian. That's, that's his humility. He's saying, Christ is Lord of all. I'm just his servant. He would later die. And by the way, he's facing the Islamic conquest at this time, big time, where Islam is killing every Christian they can. And the late 7th and early 8th century, the Umayyad dynasty then puts together the Quran. Of course, that falsely claims Jesus was not crucified in Ia4, Surah 157, Surah 157, Ia4. So that's very important to point out what he was facing culturally. And this is where he was also likely protecting the shroud from Constantinople. And he was bold enough to put Jesus on, on the money and say, no, Jesus is Lord of all,

• 2:08:31Speaker 03

  not the caliphate. Pretty epic, isn't it? All these stories. And yet, all I'm doing is guiding you by the hand. And right now, we're not, last I checked, we're not in some kind of Christian trance. We're not privileging these things. We're looking at these critically. We're looking at these through the lens of history. We're not doing Christian history. It's like the Battle of Franklin. I used to live in Franklin, Tennessee. And what do we know? How do we know about the, the Battle of Franklin? Bloodyest five hours of the Civil War. Six Confederate generals are killed. Well, we have evidence and we have eyewitness testimony. We have more evidence and eyewitness testimony that Jesus rose from the grave than we do the Battle of Franklin.

• 2:09:14Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding. Is that true? What about all the bones and?

• 2:09:19Speaker 03

  Belt buckles and helmets and bullets and... Eyewitness testimony. We have an embarrassment of riches of 5,800 fragments and manuscripts of the New Testament. We have all of these archaeological finds. We have actual testimony from the eyewitnesses who were hostile to the events. It is on the same level as even the Caesars. That's what I'm trying to get people to understand. We have early eyewitness testimony of Jesus. We have 45 sources for Jesus of Nazareth that prove over 129 facts

• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  about Him within, and I'll use Bart Ehrman's skeptical, within 100 years of the event.

• 2:10:07Speaker 03

  Sheesh. So yes, it is true. Roger that. Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes.

• 2:10:15Speaker 03

  I think people are finding that out every day since COVID. That's right. But, but, wow. What's this book here? Oh, my gosh. So... Is this, what is this? This is, I cannot wait to show you this. Can't believe what I went through to get it.

• 2:10:37Speaker 03

  Sean Ryan, this is, I think, could be, likely, the oldest Bible that we have. This is Codex Vaticanus. Now, this is a facsimile. You can't hardly see the real one in the Vatican Library, but 450 exact facsimiles were issued and signed by Pope John Paul II on Christmas Day, 1999. And we just acquired the facsimile of this ancient Greek Bible that dates to 330 to 325. It is the entire Bible in Greek, Old Testament, most of the New Testament.

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  I think it stops at Hebrews. Probably we just lost some pages. And we have, and this again, shows the amazing stability of our text. If I opened this and read it alongside your English Bible, there would be very few differences, or what we call variants, certainly no contradictions. I want you to hold this in your hand. Very few people have ever held it. It weighs 16 pounds. Are you ready for this? There we go. Hold that baby and open it up.

• 2:11:50Speaker 03

  Oh, man, this is cool. So, we believe the Catholic Church. We don't know how they came into possession of it, but it might go back to 1450s that we know they had it. They were very cagey about Constantine Tischendorf and others seeing it. And so that's why they finally issued these facsimiles, which, I mean, have the holes in the pages. You can see the caliphons, every, it'll say, "Cata Markon," you know, "according to Mark," "Cata Lucan," according to Luke. So you're holding in your hands a Bible that is dated within five years of the Council of Nicaea, Sean. Do you realize that?

• 2:12:36Speaker 03

  This is the time of Constantine. This is the time that for 300 years, Christians have been persecuted. The bishops have been killed. The buildings have been destroyed. The Bibles have been burned. And this is why we have Constantine's mom, who goes to restore the holy sites, one of the things that came out of the Council of Nicaea. And by the way, this would have been like a martyrs' club. They would have hobbled in there. They would have had scars from the persecution they faced for their faith. And this is Codex Vaticanus, which again, shows us the amazing reliability of our text.

• 2:13:12Speaker 03

  Wow. And there's only 450 of these in the world.

• 2:13:21Speaker 03

  And the sad part about it, why facsimiles are important. So few libraries allow individuals, pedestrians, laymen, non-experts, to see these great artifacts of our faith. And so that's why having it today on the Sean Ryan Show is so epic, so next level. I mean, I don't know of any other podcast that would actually have Codex Vaticanus, signed by Pope John Paul II, hanging out. What are these stamps here?

• 2:13:54Shawn Ryan?

  I don't want to hold this up, I'm scared.

• 2:13:55Speaker 03

  You know what those are? This is hilarious. I'm so impressed that you noticed that.

• 2:13:59Shawn Ryan?

  Are those authent- like some kind of authent-

• 2:14:01Speaker 03

  The Vatican librarian decided to stamp every page of the original Codex Vaticanus. Can you believe that?

• 2:14:11Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 2:14:11Speaker 03

  Yes. Do you remember in Indiana Jones of the Last Crusade, the guy who's like stamping and he keeps hearing things? I often think of that. Yes, can you imagine that? And so it's one of the great jokes in-

• 2:14:23Shawn Ryan?

  Why did they do that?

• 2:14:24Speaker 03

  It belongs to the Vatican. Okay, thank you for stamping every page of the most priceless Greek Bible we have in Christendom.

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  I'm glad you noticed that. It's just, again, one of the funny things about biblical scholarship. So that would be the Old Testament. And then to the right would be the New Testament. It's fascinating. The ending of Mark, which I could find, ends at verse eight, not at verse 20.

• 2:14:51Shawn Ryan?

  Could you read all this?

• 2:14:52Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. So-

• 2:14:53Shawn Ryan?

  How does this, I mean, how does this translate? Have you done that exercise?

• 2:14:58Speaker 03

  I have to, yeah. To do what I do, I have to. So this is written in Greek unshul. These are magiskules. That's again, how we date it. So what I am an expert in is codicology and paleography, how we date manuscripts based on handwriting style. So previously unprovenanced, I can try to find it for you. Previously, like my PhD was in a previously unprovenanced second century fragment called the Gospel of Peter, the Akhmim Gospel Fragment. And so notice there's no chapters and there's no verses and there's no spacing between the words and it's all written in Greek capitals. This tells us how the antiquity of the text. This tell, you know, the chapters don't come around.

• 2:15:42Speaker 03

  I think it's Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in like 1227. He's the first one who actually adds chapters to the Bible. And then we don't get versification of the Bible until the 1500s. So yes, I can read it. And the beautiful thing about it is it's just like the modern English translations that we have.

• 2:16:04Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:04Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. But like, I mean, think about this. What you're holding in your hand, I mean, some of the greatest Christian thinkers of all time would not have even known it existed. They would not have had this. I mean, the King James Bible, which Erasmus put together, is based on the Textus Receptus, which was like six Greek fragments. I mean, it's amazing. This is why I say the embarrassment of riches that we have in the textual tradition of the Bible. This is where I say that if we cannot believe in the reliability of Jesus and the eyewitness testimony, we should not believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. because we have better evidence for it.

• 2:16:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Where did he sign the, where did he sign this?

• 2:16:49Speaker 03

  It's in the Prolegomena, which is the book that came with it. It explains what it was, why it was done, why there are only 450 in the world. They're very difficult to come by now.

• 2:17:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'll bet they are.

• 2:17:04Speaker 03

  Amazing. So this is Codex Vaticanus B. The only competitor as far as maybe is Codex Cyentinaticus, which you can go see in the British Library for free, although a ceiling fell down in St. Catherine's monastery, and more of Codex Cyentinaticus was found in Egypt. So that's, and that one is four columns, whereas you saw that one's three columns. So they're, they compete with each other as far as which may be the oldest. But the point is, we have this amazing tradition. This would be, you know, 200 years before the Gaez, the Ethiopic Bible. I mean, we have, we have just such a great manuscript tradition.

• 2:17:48Speaker 03

  We have a great text basis for our faith that gives us, again, early eyewitness testimony of Jesus. And when I'm doing historae, when I'm doing historiography, I'm looking for early eyewitness testimony, not certainty. I'm looking for probability.

• 2:18:04Shawn Ryan?

  You just brought up the Ethiopian Bible, correct?

• 2:18:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:18:10Shawn Ryan?

  I'm gonna give this back to you.

• 2:18:12Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:18:13Shawn Ryan?

  I've gotta show you.

• 2:18:14Speaker 03

  Can I show you one thing, Sean? This is so cool. All right. Let me see here. Every time a book begins. Oh, this is so cool. It has a start with the color. Yeah, there's the crazy Vatican stamp on every page.

• 2:18:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it is on every page.

• 2:18:31Speaker 03

  I mean, literally, we know it's at the Vatican. Thank you. We understand. Yeah, it's just amazing.

• 2:18:38Speaker 03

  And we have these Colophons on here. They, one of the really fascinating things is called the Nomenos Sacra. These are called sacred names.

• 2:18:49Speaker 03

  You'll often see the first letter and the last letter of Iesus or Christos. And it's like an abbreviation. And they would only put, for like me, it would be like J and H. Jeremiah, my first, first letter, last letter of my name with a line over. And that's a Nomenos Sacra or Nomen Sacrum in singular. There was a sacred name, so they wouldn't write it all the way out just out of deference for the Spirit, God, Jesus, Christ, Curios, the Lord. And that's how we know, oh, they're talking about Jesus here. Isn't that cool? So there's a whole scribal tradition that goes along with this beautiful text. And so, you know, I'm so glad that we're actually going to have this on display over Easter at Prestonwood.

• 2:19:34Speaker 03

  And you can see there's even holes. I don't know if you noticed that.

• 2:19:37Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, I know this.

• 2:19:38Speaker 03

  We don't know how, we don't know how it got there, but it did.

• 2:19:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, just absolutely amazing.

• 2:19:46Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for, thank you for bringing all this.

• 2:19:49Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for letting me show the world this. So this is Codex Vaticanus B.

• 2:20:01Speaker 03

  People need to know how special our scriptures are, that people bled and died so we could have the Bible. So you might want to bring it to church with you. You might want to open it once in a while. It's amazing. If you read the Bible four days a week, it radically changes your life.

• 2:20:18Shawn Ryan?

  I can't remember what I was watching, but it just, it was, um, or maybe it was at, you know what, I think it was at church and I can't remember exactly what they, what he was saying, but that he was talking about, um, like, I think it was like percentage of, uh, like depression, maybe or something. And he, he had it broken downwards if you read it once a week.

• 2:20:40Speaker 03

  Yes, that's accurate.

• 2:20:42Shawn Ryan?

  You know, this, if you read it twice a week.

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  Yep, that's a very real story.

• 2:20:45Shawn Ryan?

  Four times a week.

• 2:20:46Speaker 03

  Was the key.

• 2:20:46Shawn Ryan?

  Was the key number.

• 2:20:48Speaker 03

  That's right. And it only takes 70 hours to read the whole Bible, just so you know.

• 2:20:54Shawn Ryan?

  It's taken me a lot longer than that.

• 2:20:56Speaker 03

  It's alright though, no shame in the game. Like, reading it, you can read the whole thing in 70 hours. And I remember the first time.

• 2:21:03Shawn Ryan?

  Reading it's not the problem for me, it's comprehending what is being said.

• 2:21:07Speaker 03

  That's why you just need to have me back more often, I'll guide you by the hand.

• 2:21:10Shawn Ryan?

  Alright, I will make that happen. But, I wanted to...

• 2:21:17Shawn Ryan?

  The Ethiopian Bible, I've heard about it.

• 2:21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:21Shawn Ryan?

  It sounds like there's maybe some conspiracies around it or something, what is it? What's, what's, what's makes that so special? What, why do people, why are, why is there so much interest in that?

• 2:21:31Speaker 03

  I don't know why, to be honest with you, but I can share some speculative ideas. Those of us that know, that study scripture tradition, know that there are unique and interesting expressions of Christianity all over the world. The Ethiopic and Coptic Christians, which are so similar, and even Syriac Christians, have unique traditions to their Old Testament canon. When we talk about the Bible, we're talking about a library, Sean. And we're talking about a very carefully chosen library. But we're also talking about even a canon within a canon. Let me give you a couple of examples. And if you go to Bethlehem, to the Church of the Nativity, many people miss this.

• 2:22:15Speaker 03

  And if you go downstairs, there's a little grotto. And that is where Jerome, in the late 4th century, translates what becomes the Bible of 1,000 years. It's called the Latin Vulgate. Can make, who knows, like, the manuscripts he would have had in the, in the 300s to work from. But he tried, the, the lingua franca became Latin, it was Romanized. And he is going back and forth with the Pope, because there are these books called the Apocrypha, that the Pope really wants included. And they were important windows, I want to be very clear, into second, 300 years, second century B.C. to 100 A.D., what we call the intertestamental period, right up to

• 2:22:59Speaker 03

  the age of the New Testament. They were interesting windows into that time period, but they're not historical by any means. I want to make that very clear. There was a very interesting Jewish mystical tradition, and that's where we get Jubilees and Tobit and Enoch, the Book of Enoch. And so Jerome is going back and forth with the Pope, and finally they compromise, and he includes the Apocrypha as an appendix in the Latin completed Bible. A lot of people, you might not be aware, the original King James Version that we all love from 1611 actually includes the books of the Apocrypha. It's 11 to 13, depending on how you count them.

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  So it's a library, so that's context, okay? So the Ethiopian tradition is interesting because they include first Enoch, which is 108 chapters, the first 37 of which are called the Book of Watchers. And it gets really into some very speculative ideas about the Nephilim, which is this interesting race mentioned in Genesis 6, which by the way, those first few verses, and you can quote me on this in Genesis 6, is the weirdest part of the Bible. We do not have that much information. Of course, in Hebrew, if you know your Hebrew, naphal is the verb that means fallen.

• 2:24:29Speaker 03

  So that's where we get this idea of maybe they're demons, maybe they're just angelic beings. So Nephilim is the plural noun of naphal in Hebrew. I don't know if that was ever explained to you from a word study. So that's where we get this idea of this sentient race that copulates with women to produce this hybrid race. We don't know anything about it besides the first five or six verses of Genesis. Perhaps, and again, we speculate. And so, fast forward to 300 B.C., okay? So what? I mean, are we 3,000 years later? Are we 6,000 years later? We're in 300 B.C.

• 2:25:12Speaker 03

  We're in this unique milieu of Jewish mystical writing. And the Book of Enoch begins to speculate for 37 chapters about who this race was, who these giants are. And it's really fun and interesting and maybe even perhaps edifying for certain groups. But it's not historical as far as helping us understand. What I would say is this very clearly. First Enoch specifically, which is in the Ethiopian Bible, from a historical perspective, from a scholarly perspective, and from an archeological perspective, does nothing to help us understand Genesis 6 and the Nephilim at all.

• 2:25:57Speaker 03

  What does it say in Genesis 6? That the, essentially that this race, this angelic race, may have created offspring with females that hastened the judgment of God, the flood that we see right after that passage. We just don't know. That's the thing. We don't have to do CIA context interpretation application. That's all we know. It could be legendary. It could be mythology. It could be true. It could be the way that humans raced into sin. That's one speculation, like how did we become such great sinners?

• 2:26:42Speaker 03

  Maybe through this race. But there's no connection between Goliath and the Nephilim. We know now, we have a Hebrew text of First Samuel that's cleared it up. Goliath is four cubits and a hand breadth. He was probably 6'6" or 6'10", which was huge for his day, but he's not 10 feet. He's not 6 cubits. We have an older manuscript that clears that up for us. Okay.

• 2:27:09Shawn Ryan?

  When did Christianity reach Ethiopia? I mean, it's just such an odd location.

• 2:27:14Speaker 03

  Well, actually, and there's a lot of odd, I mean, just to continue, I mean, there's connections with Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. There's thought to even be several from Africa in his, we do know that he had 700 concubines. So there's, there's a lot of apocryphal, mystical, legendary stories that come out of the connection of Sheba with Solomon. There's no history behind it. It comes from the intertestamental period. These are legendary stories. When I lived in Oxford, I took my kid, my daughter Lily and my wife Audrey to Glastonbury. I don't, Glastonbury is like where a big musical fest is. We didn't go to that.

• 2:27:58Speaker 03

  But I went there because there was a legend that Joseph of Arimathea had brought Jesus to Glastonbury in England. You know, it was just a total legend. Yeah. Right by King Arthur, by the way, where King Arthur was buried and the Knights of the Round Table. I mean, different Christian communities developed these unique, legendary, almost fanatical perspectives that are based on their ethnicity, where they're from, what they're facing. And so what you have though, First Enoch was never removed from our Christian Bibles. It was part of the canon or library of Ethiopian Christians because their texts developed in much more isolation.

• 2:28:41Speaker 03

  Because it's amazing there are any Christians at all in Ethiopia after the Islamic conquest. But it's just important to help people understand the concept of canon rule, you know, what we call canon. The Bible is a library and we have to always make sure we keep it. There's genres of our library. There are books, there are biographies, there's poem, wisdom literature, half of the Psalms are Psalms of lament. And so we just need, there's nothing hidden. We're not missing out. Now, when I teach, which I've, again, was a Division One professor for over a dozen years. So do I tell, sure, read them. As soon as you read them, you're going to realize why they're not in the Bible. We need to give first century Christians a little bit more credit.

• 2:29:27Speaker 03

  You know, there's a reason I encourage people to just read them. You'll see, you know, my expertise is what we call extra canonical gospels. And in Oxford, you couldn't call them apocryphal because I was seen as pejorative, that I was privileging the biblical texts. So I call them extra canonical. They get the rivers wrong. They get the names wrong. There's alien things in them. They don't get the language right. I mean, Richard Bacham did a book called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses where he points out that all you have to do is read the, you know, there's like 70 gospels outside of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, within a 400-year period after Jesus. All you have to do is read them and you'll figure out why they're not in our Bibles. The Gospel of Peter has a giant cross, follows Jesus out of the

• 2:30:11Speaker 03

  tomb and starts talking. You have polymorphic Christology in the Gospel of Peter. We have only one witness to it. By polymorphic Christology, Jesus is a giant, the angels are a giant, and you have a hovering, talking cross. And some people wanted to call that the fifth gospel.

• 2:30:28Shawn Ryan?

  A hovering, talking cross.

• 2:30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, the cross gospel. John Dominic Crossan wrote about it. So again, we have one witness to it, P. Cairo 10759, which by the way, does include some aspects of Enoch and some other things. So again, you know, these are libraries that traveled together. The church was very intelligent in that they recognized immediately the sacredness of Scripture. So like Jerome would have said in the Latin Vulgate, these books are sacred. The apocrypha is helpful for helping us understand. I want to be very clear. It helps us understand the world in which they were written and appreciated. Bishop Serapion at Rossus read

• 2:31:11Speaker 03

  the Gospel of Peter and his Christian community along with the gospels. So you just have this emergence of unique traditions with some of these different Christian communities. That's all there is. And we've known this forever. And now by we, I mean Bible scholars. So when I hear this fascination with Enoch and giants, there's no connection, Sean, between Goliath or giants today with the Nephilim, which again, is the plural form noun of naphal, to fall. We just don't have enough information. So I'm never going to go beyond the context of what we actually have. And certainly, I'm not going to build my theology.

• 2:31:54Speaker 03

  On Enoch, or on any of these intertestamental books. They were inspiring books, but not theologically beneficial.

• 2:32:00Shawn Ryan?

  I think a lot of people will appreciate that. Cause there's a lot of stuff going on about all of that.

• 2:32:07Speaker 03

  Can I issue a challenge?

• 2:32:09Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:32:09Speaker 03

  All of these people that's, and I'm kind of tired of answering questions. It bores me about Enoch and these books. And I want to say this, if, and I don't mean that like bored right now. I just mean, I get asked this question on every show I do. And if people would take the energy that they use to study these unique, interesting, fanciful intertestamental books, and actually apply that to studying Greek and Hebrew, and what we actually have in the scripture, they would be a lot closer to Jesus and a lot more firm in their faith. For example, we have 138,000 words in the Greek New Testament. Sean, if I got you to memorize just 300 Greek words, just 300, you yourself would be able

• 2:32:54Speaker 03

  to recognize eight out of 10 word occurrences in this Bible right here.

• 2:32:58Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 2:32:58Speaker 03

  That's Quinny Greek. That's, the Bible is not written in hidden esoteric language. One thing that Alexander the Great gave us was this beautiful, common Greek language. And so, man, if you took all the, your effort and took a class on Greek and, oh, hi now, if I just learned 300 words, I'm going to recognize eight out of 10 word occurrences in the Greek New Testament. So take all this energy, and these are like Christian comic books, essentially. Christian Avengers, or whatever, same with the New Testament. They're called pseudopigraphal writings. Enoch, I mean, we actually had to turn down someone for an MA thesis who tried to tell us Enoch wrote the book of Enoch. No. That did not happen.

• 2:33:43Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 2:33:44Speaker 03

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• 2:33:48Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:34:28Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:35:07Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:35:22Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of Vigilance Elite's The Watch Floor, where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters and then aim to leave you feeling better informed than you were before you hit play. Terrorists, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime, not everything is urgent. But this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know.

• 2:36:02Shawn Ryan?

  I've heard...

• 2:36:05Shawn Ryan?

  Is there, is there some rumors that the Ark of the Covenant is in Ethiopia? Have you heard this?

• 2:36:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:36:11Shawn Ryan?

  What is that? Is that true?

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:36:14Shawn Ryan?

  What is the Ark of the Covenant?

• 2:36:15Speaker 03

  The Ark of the Covenant is fascinating. In fact, my dear friend, Dr. Scott Stripling, is the excavator at Shiloh in Israel. The rest of the world calls it Shilo. And this is where the Scripture tells us that Joshua brought the Ark of the Covenant, and it was there for 305 years, according to Dr. Stripling. And so, we have the actual spot. It's being uncovered, it's being excavated. I encourage people to go there and check it out. So that was the home of the Ark.

• 2:36:43Shawn Ryan?

  Currently being excavated.

• 2:36:44Speaker 03

  Currently, yes. They're almost done. I believe they're in season seven. Way to go, Dr. Stripling. And he endorsed my book, which I really appreciate, having his scholarly endorsement as an archaeologist. And the Ark was the meeting place of the people of God with Yahweh Himself. One day a year, on the day of atonement, the high priest would make atonement on the mercy seed. The Ark of the Covenant held the Ten Commandments, Aaron's rod that budded manna in there. And that was the...

• 2:37:13Shawn Ryan?

  What's that?

• 2:37:14Speaker 03

  Manna that had, that had fallen down from heaven to feed the Israelites in the wilderness. Remember, it would go bad, because you had to trust God every day. And so, this was essentially, and then between the cherubim, and you had to have blood on it. This was all symbolically pointed to Jesus of Nazareth. But there's a huge fascination with where it is right now, and I put zero credibility into thinking that the Ethiopian church has it.

• 2:37:45Shawn Ryan?

  What hap... I mean, there's a lot of, it's probably all bullshit conspiracy, but, I mean, what...

• 2:37:53Speaker 03

  There's a lot of fear of opening it, of being around it. Is there any validity to any of that? We should have no fear of it. Jesus is our Savior. All of it, all it did was point to Jesus. Jesus fulfilled it all. If we found it, I would pop it open in a second. I'd sit on top of it. I would, I would carry it around. Like, Jesus is my Savior. It all pointed at Him anyways. That, I believe that's why we don't even have it anymore. It's, it's pointless at this point. Because Jesus fulfilled it in his death, burial, and resurrection. Wow. You think they're gonna find it? No. But it's the same, this is where we have to be careful, and I appreciate you having thinkers on your show. This is the same group that says we have chariot wheels in the, in the Red Sea.

• 2:38:37Speaker 03

  Anytime you see that, it's just clickbait. We don't have chariot wheels in the Red Sea from the, from the Exodus. If we did, they would be at every museum in the world. We do not have that. So- Or stuffed at the bottom of the Vatican. Yeah.

• 2:38:52Speaker 03

  Or in the Pergama Museum. It turns out the Nazis were really good at stealing stuff, too. You know, the Ishtar Gate is in Bab- from Babylon that Daniel would have walked through is at the Pergama Museum in Berlin. Roger that. Well, I think that's the perfect way to end this. I have to tell you, though, I want to tell you the seven reasons I believe that Jesus rose from the grave. And I can do it in 60 seconds, or I can do it in 60 minutes. You tell me what you want. Let's just go. Okay. Let's go longer than 60 seconds. Okay, I can do it in 60 seconds. But what I want people to know is, based on the evidence, Jesus's resurrection is the only way that we ultimately make sense of the suffering in our lives.

• 2:39:34Speaker 03

  Romans 8:18, Paul said, "All the sufferings I endure now cannot compare with the glory that will be revealed to us someday." That's the number one reason I believe in the resurrection. Suffering doesn't make sense without it. Number two, Jesus called it. He foretold it. You've heard of Babe Ruth calling his shot, Joe Namath calling his shot, Muhammad Ali. Nobody called their shot like Jesus did. Jesus was constantly predicting his death, burial, and resurrection. Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:33 and 34. This is where Jesus said, "The Son of Man," which was his favorite self-designation. That comes out of Daniel 7. He uses it 69 times. Remember, Shawn, we only have 89 chapters in the Gospels.

• 2:40:17Speaker 03

  We have parts of 26 days of the life of Jesus. One-third of the Gospels is what this program's been about, the death, burial, and resurrection, at all points to that fact. That energized the church in Acts 17:6 to turn the world upside down. So it's the only way we make sense of the suffering in our world. Jesus foretold it. Jesus also adambraded. He showed he had power over death. Mark 5, he raises Jairus's daughter from the dead. Luke 7, he raises the widow of Nain's son from the dead. And then, of course, John 11, he raises Lazarus from the dead. I've been in Lazarus's tomb in Bethany. Many Christians don't go there because it's West Bank or whatever. I had a great time there.

• 2:40:59Speaker 03

  I got all the way down to the tomb, Shawn, and I literally yelled out, "Lazarus, come forth!" Just because I wanted to be like Jesus. It would have sounded "duro exo," literally "stand up, walk out" in Greek. So Jesus showed he had power over death. Fourthly, this is really fascinating. All of the textual and archaeological evidence authenticate the resurrection accounts that we have in the Gospels. Jody Magnus, who is an atheist archaeologist from the University of North Carolina, when studying the death, burial, and resurrection passages in the New Testament, guess what she says? "The Gospels get it right." Fifthly, this is unique. I just wrote this for, co-authored it with Craig Evans for Macmillan Interdisciplinary

• 2:41:44Speaker 03

  Textbooks on Philosophy of Religion. There is no psychological reason in Judaism to invent the Jesus story unless it actually happened. It is not, as I mentioned earlier, what any of his disciples would have expected. I already mentioned 4Q 285, where it's seen that Jesus would kill the Roman emperor. Sixthly, you cannot explain the conversion of hostile witnesses to Jesus apart from the resurrection. Jesus appeared to those who loved him, Jesus appeared to those who were indifferent to him, and Jesus appeared to those who hated him. Look no further, we've talked about James and then the apostle Paul. The seventh fact is huge.

• 2:42:25Speaker 03

  Everywhere the gospel goes, society is brought freedom, not perfection, but freedom. The gospel rehumanizes people. The gospel brings freedom. Galatians, excuse me, Galatians 3:28 says, and this was seditious for Paul to say this, "That in Christ there's neither Jew nor Gentile, there's neither slave nor free, there's neither male nor female, we are all one in Jesus Christ." He said that when Rome was at its highest, 40% of the empire were slaves. The gospel rehumanized women and children. There's an ancient fragment that I've published called Pyoxi 7:44. It's a love letter written in Greek from Hilarion to his wife Alice.

• 2:43:09Speaker 03

  This is what the world was like before Christianity. People don't realize it was hell on earth. There was something about the X-factor of the resurrection that was a game changer. This is what Hilarion writes, I'm gonna say it in Greek. "Et on enteleia ekbale." This is what he wrote to his wife. Beautiful love letter. And his wife will give birth to their child before he returns home, and what I just quoted in Greek verbatim was, "If it is a boy, keep it; if it's a girl, throw it away." And no one would have batted an eye. You and I would not have batted an eye. That was the first century B.C. Jesus comes on the scene. Let the children come to me. He rehumanizes children. You have literally rescue missions, saving children from the

• 2:43:54Speaker 03

  Christian movement. In one of my books, Unimaginable, I give 12 ways the world would be radically different tomorrow if there were no Christians. And listen, I don't worship Christianity. I don't worship the Bible. I don't worship the church. I worship the risen Christ. I want to make that very clear. But I also want to make it clear, the church is the greatest force for good on planet Earth. And we don't talk enough about what the Jesus movement does. All the idiots get the clickbait. The people that fall, the people that can't keep their life straight. But you know what? There's an army of believers out there doing amazing work. They're the front people in frontline in every time there's a disaster. They want to help people. They want to love their enemies, pray for those who persecute

• 2:44:38Speaker 03

  them, and just be there. My daughter's in Montreal right now, serving Canadians, loving Jesus, freezing her tail off, just to tell people about Jesus with a group from our Christian Academy. This is what is the most under-reported phenomenon, is the impact that the gospel made. And of course, then the eighth reason is the Shroud of Turin. So I've just given you the top eight reasons of why I believe Jesus rose from the grave and why it matters today. Thank you. Thank you. What does the church mean? The church mean? Yeah, what is it? The church is beautiful. What is your definition? Well, it's ecclesia. It just means gathering. It's very similar to the synagogue. The church is the bride of Christ. We will be together for all eternity. We will all look

• 2:45:23Speaker 03

  different, sound different, we'll have resurrected bodies, we'll know each other then. But the church is the bride of Christ. The church is not a building, an edifice, an organization. The church is believers who come together to worship the Lord in spirit and in truth. The church is essential. We don't worship it, but it's essential. There's no such thing as an isolated Christian. We don't, we appreciate internet church, we appreciate online services. But there is a power when we come together collectively. This is where the ordinances of communion and baptism are so important. This is what was crazy about our federal government. I just preached Sunday on religious freedom.

• 2:46:05Speaker 03

  The fact that liquor stores were essential, but churches weren't in New York City during COVID, are you serious? No wonder, you know, it turns out we destroy ourselves without God. I make this point, there's a fascinating book, The Plot to Kill God, about what happened in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution and the communist takeover. They all started to kill each other a lot more. Turns out, if you want to kill people, get rid of a God and get rid of the Jesus in society. It's a lot easier to kill people that way.

• 2:46:36Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 2:46:37Speaker 03

  So that's what the church is.

• 2:46:39Shawn Ryan?

  Love that. Thank you. Thank you. Last thing, I got a hot question here.

• 2:46:45Speaker 03

  Let's go.

• 2:46:48Shawn Ryan?

  People describe hell through near-death experiences, visions, and even movies like games. Movies and games like Constantine, Doom, and Diablo. But what does the Bible actually say hell is? Where is it? And what will it be like?

• 2:47:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so important. The Bible uses hyperbolic language to describe something that is unimaginable. If I were to tell you, I'm from Kansas City, and so I'm a humongous Kansas City Chiefs fan. It's my one addiction in life.

• 2:47:19Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. You're from Kansas City?

• 2:47:21Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 2:47:22Shawn Ryan?

  I'm from Kansas City.

• 2:47:23Speaker 03

  Are you really?

• 2:47:23Shawn Ryan?

  I am. I was born in Blue Springs.

• 2:47:25Speaker 03

  Dude, Overland Park, Kansas, right here. So you're on the Missouri side. I'm on the Kansas side.

• 2:47:30Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 2:47:30Speaker 03

  That's crazy. How random is that? Well, are you a Chiefs fan? I can't, I'm gonna get up and walk out of this interview if you're not.

• 2:47:36Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 2:47:38Speaker 03

  Did you go to Blue Springs High School?

• 2:47:40Shawn Ryan?

  No, no, I was just born there, then I moved all over the place.

• 2:47:43Speaker 03

  So they're actually a football powerhouse. Anyways, if I were to tell you, the Chiefs killed the Raiders. Like, because you know, I hate the Raiders. Um, every Chiefs fan does. You know, I'm speaking in a language that means something different. This is hyperbolic language. We don't have a language to describe what a life completely apart from God would be like. It will be conscious torment. I don't believe that the scripture teaches annihilationism, although some fine Christians do, I don't believe that. Jesus wants you to know that you choose. Lewis gives a great, great book where he talks about the fact that you're on a school bus and ultimately hell is what you decide.

• 2:48:28Speaker 03

  God doesn't design us to go to hell. He designed us to have a relationship with him through faith in Jesus Christ. So anyone right now who wants to become a Christian, they can just say, Jesus, come into my life, change my life. I trust in you to forgive me my sins and give me eternal life. I trust in you to do that. If you said just that prayer and you meant it in your heart, you're forgiven immediately. You have peace with God immediately. Romans 5:1 says, "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ." That's a shalom that never ends. Hell is when people say, no, God, I don't want you in my life. And God gives you what you choose. He didn't create it for you. He created hell for the devil and his demons.

• 2:49:11Speaker 03

  God doesn't want them part of him for all eternity. So hell, is there fire? Is there, is there burning and gnashing of teeth? This is language like when I say the Chiefs killed the Raiders. It's something far worse. We don't have words to describe what absence from Jesus will be like. We have glimmers of it. You can go to parts of the world where people hate God, hate Christians, try to control a people thing. It's evil. And it's what's scary about is, you know, I don't know if you've ever been to a concentration camp. And Audrey and I were just at Buchenwald. And the evil that a man can inflict on another person or a child, that's just a glimmer of what hell will be.

• 2:49:57Speaker 03

  And people are there right now who chose to not follow Jesus. And this is the thing, I can share all of this evidence with you. And there are still people, and this is the most dangerous place someone can get is when you stop seeking truth. Lazarus had been resurrected in John 11. In the Pharisees, the Jews still refused to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. They had resurrected Lazarus in front of them, and they were still wanting to kill Jesus. So for some, no evidence is enough. And so we should all check our heart this Easter season. Am I addicted to truth? Am I willing to follow truth wherever it leads?

• 2:50:38Speaker 03

  Because if I lose my grasp on truth, truly I lose my grasp on God, because God is truth.

• 2:50:45Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I love that. Thank you. I think we should end this in another prayer.

• 2:50:51Speaker 03

  I would love that. Thank you, Shawn. Thanks for having me and thanks for the great questions.

• 2:50:55Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. Thank you for coming. Jesus, we just want to pray that this interview, this discussion, this talk gets to anybody, anybody who's on the fence of coming to you. And we just want to wish everybody a Happy Resurrection Day. And a Happy Easter. And we just want you to continue to be our guiding light and to give us what we need to bring more people to you. Thank you. Amen.

• 2:51:32Speaker 03

  Amen. Amen. Great prayer, and thank you for having me.

• 2:51:36Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for coming. God bless you and Happy Easter.

• 2:51:39Speaker 03

  Lord bless you. He is risen, brother.

• 2:51:56Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching The Shawn Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.