Faith Lab

Our best source on Alexander the Great was written 450 years after he died, and historians trust it. Mark was written about 40 years after Jesus. So why are the gospels the only ancient texts we're told to doubt?
Craig Keener, author of Christobiography and one of the most cited New Testament scholars alive, walks through the historical case: why the gospels are ancient biography, what living memory does for reliability, his documented miracle research, and how faith survives real doubt. He also tells the story of how he left atheism. Find more of his work at craigkeener.com.
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Most of us were handed a gospel that works like a ticket to heaven: believe, die, fly away. New Testament scholar Nijay Gupta says that was never the headline of what Paul preached.
Gupta is the Julius R. Mantey Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary and the author of Paul for the World. He joins Shane Rosenthal and Nate to 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. The short version: Paul preached newness of life and a renewed creation, because we were made for heaven on earth.
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The hardest critiques of the cross, like "he was only dead for a day and a half" and "anyone would take that deal," all target one version of the gospel. The earliest Christians were teaching something bigger.
In this solo episode, Nate traces the first thousand years of Christian thinking about the cross: Irenaeus on Christ reliving the human story to get right what Adam got wrong, Athanasius on why a deathless God dying is the real scandal rather than how long it lasted, and Gregory of Nyssa's fish hook image of death swallowing divinity and choking on it. Together they form the Christus Victor vision, a framework that answers the questions the guilt-and-payment model struggles with.
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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 lays out what she calls the "reportage model," the case that the Gospel authors were close to the facts, always trying to get them right, and highly successful. She walks through the two big categories of evidence, from name statistics that later fiction writers could not fake to undesigned coincidences, the subtle puzzle-like fits between Gospels that are hard to explain any other way.
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After the apostles died, did the faith survive? One man nearly answers that question by himself. Polycarp was born around 69 AD, just 35 years after Jesus, personally knew people who had personally known Christ, and his own words still survive on paper.
This episode traces the chain link by link: Irenaeus remembering the old bishop who taught him in Smyrna, Polycarp's letter to the Philippians written around 110 to 115 AD, his friend Ignatius writing the same faith from a different city, and the day an 86-year-old man chose death in a Roman stadium over cursing Christ. If Christianity was invented later, Polycarp is the problem with the timeline.
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