Faith Lab

We trust ancient biographies that were written 450 years after the fact. So why do so many Christians get told the gospels can't be trusted as history?
New Testament scholar Craig Keener (author of Christobiography and a four-volume commentary on Acts) is on the show with us. He was a self-described smug atheist before he became one of the most published New Testament scholars alive, and the path he took to find out whether any of this is actually true is worth listening to.
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Most of us were taught the gospel is a ticket to heaven. New Testament scholar Nijay Gupta says that is not what Paul was actually preaching.
Nijay Gupta is professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary and author of Paul for the World. He, Shane Rosenthal, and Nate work through what Paul's gospel actually was, where "I'll fly away" theology came from, and why he thinks C.S. Lewis got heaven wrong.
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The hardest critiques of the cross target one version of the gospel. The earliest Christians were teaching something bigger.
For a thousand years before penal substitution became the dominant framework, the church proclaimed something wider: that God entered into death to destroy it from the inside. Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Gregory of Nyssa all described it, and their version answers the questions that trip most of us up.
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Most Christians were taught to trust the Gospels without ever being shown why they should. The historical evidence is stronger than you think.
New Testament scholar Lydia McGrew explains what she calls the "reportage model," a case that the Gospel authors weren't just passing along stories. They were close to the facts, trying to get them right, and highly successful. She walks through the kind of evidence that's hard to explain any other way.
🔓 Get the full unedited interview with Lydia McGrew, including her argument that John's long speeches could be real memories and why she thinks Luke's anointing story is a completely different event than the other Gospels describe. https://faithlabshow.com/premium

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Most Christians quietly carry a question they rarely say out loud: after the apostles died, what happened? There's a gap in the story, and in that gap, a worry lives.
One man fills it. He was born 35 years after Jesus, personally knew people who personally knew Christ, and his own words still survive on paper. His name was Polycarp, and the chain connecting him to the eyewitnesses is shorter than you think.
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