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Uninvented with Mike D'Virgilio
84 Plays2 years ago
Have you ever heard someone dismiss the Bible "because it's just a fairy tale"? Or maybe that it was basically invented by the early Church to peddle their religious fiction? But if either of those were true, would the Bible be what it is today? Today's guest on PEP Talk introduces us to the myriad reasons why the Bible would be impossible to invent.
Mike D'Virgilio's latest book is Uninvented: Why The Bible Could Not Be Made Up, and The Evidence That Proves It. He has a B.S. in Communication from Arizona State University and an M.A. in Systematic Theology from Westminster Theological Seminary Philadelphia. He has worked in public relations, sales, and marketing for over three decades. His first book was an exploration of apologetics for parents called, The Persuasive Christian Parent: Building an Enduring Faith in You and Your Children. He also blogs on apologetics and a variety of topics at mikedvirgilio.com.
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Transcript
Introduction of the Podcast and Hosts
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, everybody, and welcome to pep talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. Now I am neither Andy Ballester, nor am I Kristy Mayer. I am Gavin Matthews from Solus and we are not being joined by Kristy this afternoon. She is busy with her day job down in London, but we are, I hope, joined by Andy Ballester. You there, Andy?
00:00:28
Speaker
I am, I am neither Christie Mann or Gavin Matthews, so at least we all know who we are, this is good. So yes, I am coming to you from the other end of the country today, having just got back from Scotland, actually, so you and I have to go, they want me for a couple of days doing some stuff in Aberdeen. And there we are, back in our respective home environments, recording a podcast, but here
Meet Mike de Virgilio and His New Book
00:00:47
Speaker
we go.
00:00:47
Speaker
or delighted that we are being joined by Mike de Vigilio. Now, help me with pronouncing your surname. How do I say it properly? You almost did, T. Virgilio. Almost. How close was it? Virgilio. Very close. D. Virgilio, yes. Marvelous. Now, you are amongst the elect because you are joining us for a second time as a repeat guest on Peptoog.
00:01:07
Speaker
a blessing. It's like, wow, you're having me back. I must not have totally blown it the first time. Yeah, exactly. You just had so many heresies. We thought we'd give a second job. Your bio describes you as an author, a writer, a businessman, a husband, a father, and now a grandfather as well.
Mike's Journey to Christianity Through Apologetics
00:01:27
Speaker
Is that correct?
00:01:27
Speaker
Oh man, yeah. Little Eleanor, she's nine months old. Fantastic. And your latest book is called Uninvented, How the Bible Could Not Have Been Made Up and the Evidence That Proves It. That's quite an intriguing title for a book. So what set you on the path of writing a book with a title like that? Well, I became a Christian a long time ago when I was in college and was exposed to Francis Schaeffer as the God who was there.
00:01:56
Speaker
I was exposed to apologetics, which basically just means defending the Christian faith. And it was incredible because I realized the only reason I believed in Christianity is because it's true. And then I learned that there's all this evidence and in every kind of philosophy, I think that it really can prove to be true. So in my early Christian life, I was involved in that and got away from it. And then 2009 got back into apologetics.
00:02:26
Speaker
read and listened to a lot of stuff. And I was shocked how there's been this explosion in resources for apologetics for defending the Christian faith. And one of the themes that I read as I was writing my first book, which is called The Persuasive Christian Parent, was this idea of uninvented, which is not a real word. I made it up for the book, but that things could not be invented. It's all over the apologetics literature.
00:02:51
Speaker
And it just made so much sense to me. And it was, I'm so impressed with it that after I got there with my first book, I said, I have to write something about that. Cause that's, and I think most Christians don't really see the book is for lay Christians. It's for people not into apologetics or philosophy or whatever. They just, just everyday Christian who's loves God and.
00:03:12
Speaker
wants to share their faith with others. Yeah, so. So, on that note, it's interesting you say it every day, Christian, because one of the things that we've, we've actually learned that so much like you were passionate about apologetics, it's very, very helpful. But we know there's people who don't know what that word means. So, you know, if listening to this podcast, you know, you're like, well, I heard that word. What is it? We always explain it in terms of persuasive evangelism. It's evangelism with a bit of persuasion behind it. But look, Mike, I want to pick you
Debunking the 'Made-up Bible' Theory
00:03:37
Speaker
up with the title. So you said, you know, unintended, you know, this got the Christian message, the Bible couldn't be made up.
00:03:42
Speaker
So let's dive right into that because, you know, I meet skeptics who will go, well, of course, it's made up. That's that's what it is. Right. You know, I don't know. 300 years after the purported events, the church all got together and they just made stuff up. And so the whole thing is fictitious. And of course, you would say that's
00:03:59
Speaker
that claim itself is utterly fictitious. But why can't it be made up? What's some of the things that convince you that the kind of made up explanation for particularly the Gospels but the Bible as well? I mean, why does that not fly, do you think? Yeah, it applies to the whole Bible. The Gospels are especially powerful. Well, I would ask that person the question is how do you know it could be made up? And so,
00:04:23
Speaker
And what it really comes down to, and I use a big phrase here, so it's question-bagging, anti-supernatural bias. And that's the reason they believe it could be made up. I'll get to another reason a little bit later, but to beg the question simply, we think it means to raise the question nowadays, which it does, but to beg the question means to assume the premise. So you don't argue for the basic premise of your ideas, you just assume them and go on. So in this example,
00:04:53
Speaker
The premise is anti-supernatural bias. So they don't believe miracles can happen. They read a miracle in the Bible and they, oh, that couldn't happen. It must have been made up. And that's a complete bias. There's no substance in it because they haven't proved naturalism is true, that the material world is all. And so in the first chapter, I go over the history of biblical criticism.
00:05:18
Speaker
And where that came from, the Enlightenment and rationalism and purism and all that stuff in philosophy. But secularism is the world we live in. And that's just trickled down and everyone believes, of course, that it's made up. But it's, as I argue, I believe it's impossible to have been made up, literally impossible. And there are many reasons for that.
00:05:42
Speaker
Did I catch you earlier on saying that uninvented is a word that you invented? That was a rather beautifully kind of... Don't pun intended, right? That was very nice. I did enjoy that. I think so. Well, what's nice is when you go into Amazon and you put in uninvented, it does unintended or uninvented. But my book comes up first because there's no other word. And I did a lot of searching for invented, Bible gospels, and there's a lot of atheists who've written books that, oh yeah, it's been invented, it's a piece of cake, no problem.
00:06:11
Speaker
One of the things that you pick up in the book is the idea that if someone was going to fabricate something in the Bible, there's no way that in their cultural context they would have put in the things that they put
Cultural Contexts as Evidence of Authenticity
00:06:23
Speaker
in. I suppose most famously, of course, that you hear every Easter,
00:06:27
Speaker
is that if you were fabricating the accounts of the resurrection, you would not have put women as the first witnesses of the resurrection, because back in those very sexist days, the testimony for women wasn't counted in a court. And so if you were fabricating it, that's just not the way you would have done it in that context. But you say this happens again and again, through scripture, things which they just wouldn't have done it that way if they were making it up. What if you could run us through a few of those kind of examples, maybe from different genres of scripture, of things which just jar with the context?
00:06:56
Speaker
Right. Well, I think the overarching idea that makes that so powerful, the argument, is that I write a chapter on the Jewish context of Jesus's world. And it would be very easy in the first couple hundred years of biblical criticism, they all believed it was just basically a pagan, you know, a little bit of history. And in the pagans, a Christian who were not Jews had basically made up the miracle stuff and so on and so forth.
00:07:24
Speaker
But we know that the Bible, all of the text comes from the first century, and they were all Jews. And it would be very difficult, impossible to make up a Jewish Messiah. A pagan one might be not that hard. But the critics who say, oh, yeah, it was fairy, they say myths and fairy tales. And it doesn't read anything like myths or fairy tales. It reads like eyewitness testimony.
00:07:47
Speaker
And so it's the Jewish context that makes it very, very impossible to make up. So I don't know, you just brought up the example of women and you read through the gospels and the men look like cowards and they're backbiting, they're looking for power and the women come off looking a whole lot better, like heroic.
00:08:11
Speaker
And there's very almost nothing negative that I can think of that's said about them. If you're a Jew writing to other Jews in the first century and you want them to believe you, you don't put that in there. You make the guys look like the heroes. But here's a great example is Peter. Jesus, the rock, right? The early church is built on him.
Authenticity in Biblical Portrayals
00:08:31
Speaker
He's the leader and he denies even knowing Jesus three times.
00:08:35
Speaker
Right. He comes up, I'm going to, I'm going to, and he becomes an utter coward in the most important time for his sake. And we know that Theo... Go ahead. No, I was going to dive into a bit to that, to sort of unpack some of this. I think that's, um, I think that's remarkably helpful. I was just going to, as an aside, say that I've just started watching because I'm very, very late to the party. I've just started watching with chosen, you know, which has done, you know, great work. There's popularizing the gospels and accessible. And I was struck in the first episode.
00:09:02
Speaker
that Peter is portrayed as this very impetuous, you know, he's doing a street fighting, he's a bit of a, you know, he's a bit of a ruffian. And to go, I think that catches it really well, because you're right, when you read the Gospels, he doesn't come across as this heroic father of the church, he's amazing, he comes across as somebody who's a little bit, you know, unreliable, first to open his mouth, confident, yeah, certainly bold and confident, but actually also, you know, not totally reliable. And you're right to go, I remember as a young Christian thinking, that's interesting.
00:09:30
Speaker
And the other thing I was going to throw at you and see where you think there's anything in this, you mentioned that idea about legends and myths and fairy tales, because that's often thrown at us, right? And to go, one of the things I remember reading somewhere that's pointed out is that's an absolute category mistake, because myths and legends and fairy tales never have an exact time and date and place and address. They're always like once upon a time in some mystical past.
00:09:52
Speaker
It wasn't until about 200 years ago, actually, that the first writers had the idea of writing historical fiction. The time the Gospels come from, myths and legends look. If you were to ask a question like, what was the date when Odin was hung on a tree? It's a nonsensical question. You'd be adaptable to ask it, but the Gospels have a date and a time and a location. That's very powerful, right? Yes. Here's the point that you're making that
00:10:22
Speaker
is so powerful for evangelism is that the first goal with your non-Christian family or friends is to get them to read the Bible. Because you ask them, oh, they're missing fairy tales. Yeah, written a long time ago. Have you ever read it? And I don't know what the percentage is, but given the state of secular education in America and England and so, very few have actually opened it up. And I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of testimonies over the last few years
00:10:52
Speaker
And so many times, the person who's challenging them says, just go read the Bible. I start with the Gospel of John, but Matthew, I just read an ex-atheist read Acts, and he used the phrase, you know, I can't, this couldn't be made up. He said, yes, that's true. And it brought him to faith in Christ eventually. So getting them to read it, and then educating. Why don't you think this could be true? And then I would tell him, question-making, anti-supernatural bias, I would just say,
00:11:22
Speaker
You don't think miracles can happen. Do you believe in God? Yeah, most, 95% of people. Then do you believe miracles are possible? Sure. Okay, read the Bible, read the Gospels in that light. Don't just reject them because you think miracles can't happen. That's not fair.
00:11:40
Speaker
And I think you open minds when you do that kind of stuff, because you're educating them. Here's why you don't. You could talk about the Jewish nature, depending on how deep you get into the relationship with the person and examples. And God's word, of course, he says in Isaiah 59, will not return to him void. It has power. And the Holy Spirit makes that happen. I use the phrase verisimilitude, which simply means the appearance of being real.
00:12:10
Speaker
and plausible and believable. And the gospels, the whole Bible, it's true, the whole Bible has it in spades. I mean, you can't read it and think it's a myth or a fairy tale. As soon as, like Andy said, as soon as you read it, you'll go, huh, that wasn't, and this is the common theme through so many testimonies, that wasn't what I expected. Or that Jesus, Jesus is, so you asked about different examples and we could go in the Old Testament
00:12:37
Speaker
But Jesus, I have a chapter called the conundrum that is Jesus. And the chosen does it well. But to me, I talk about in the book Jesus of Nazareth, which is a miniseries back in the 70s. And I thought they portrayed Franco Ziffirelli was the director Jesus so well because he nobody got him. He confused everyone. He was an utter conundrum. And, you know, how do you in that that applied to his teaching?
00:13:08
Speaker
as well as his personality. And of course, the miracles, because nobody was expecting a miracle working Messiah like that. They wanted to conquer Rome. It's Davidic King and so on and so forth. So I could go several different directions with that. But the examples are legion, literally. And I just scratched the surface in the book. The goal is to get people to think. I want to divert one thing.
00:13:39
Speaker
I initially was going to call it psychological apologetics, but of course nobody would have known what the heck that meant. But when you read the text and the psychology of the people portrayed, it reads so real. They all act. When Jesus is walking on water, Peter's walking on water, they're utterly, they act like real people would be shocked by this and surprised and like, they don't expect it. And there was no such thing as fiction in the first century.
00:14:08
Speaker
If you're making that up, then that's worthy of any 21st, 20th century fiction writer, because it's just genius. And that's why it's lasted 2000 years. Lies don't last 2000 years.
00:14:20
Speaker
Do you think that the most clearly uninvented thing in it all is the crucifixion?
Unexpected Elements Supporting the Bible's Authenticity
00:14:26
Speaker
Because it struck me, looking at this, that if you're a Roman, the hero of the story is not a conquering Caesar. He's a man hanging on the cross. If you're a Greek, that's foolishness. If you're a Jew, that's a curse. What's the hero of the piece doing, dangling on a Roman cross? That seems to be the most surprising thing of all. It is, and especially in a Jewish context.
00:14:50
Speaker
Pagans could not conceive of it either because the cross, crucifixion was the most brutal form of torture and it was an embarrassment and everybody hated it, but it was effective to keep Romans in power. Tom Holland wrote Dominion. I don't know if you're familiar with that book, big book, but it's powerful because he isn't really even a Christian and he shows how ridiculous it is and it's literally
00:15:16
Speaker
There was nothing in Judaism, because I studied the inter-testamental period between Malachi and John, and there was never any inkling of a Messiah who would die as an atonement for sin that just wasn't there. Or he would suffer. Again, he's a conquering king in the line of David.
00:15:39
Speaker
So he's the one who inflicts punishment on his enemies, not the other way around. John the Baptist expressed when he baptized him, and before that, he's got the winnowing fork in his hand, and he's going to judge the sin and all this. And it was just the opposite. So how do you make up that Messiah that you couldn't concede?
00:16:01
Speaker
Literally, there's nothing in their imagination and their teaching and their history that would ever get them to it. That's how impossible it would be to make up. And I can go on because the crucifixion itself, as you said, hung on a cross under God's curse. That was even worse. If he had been stoned, as I talk about in the book, that would be understandable because you get stoned for blasphemy. But under God's curse on a tree, the Messiah?
00:16:26
Speaker
Only a resurrection. Exactly. And of course, Paul picks it up in Corinthians, right? Doesn't he? Talking about the fact that the cross is this, you know, it's lunacy, it's total foolishness to the Greeks and just this incredible stumbling block. I think one of the things I've often wondered with this, Mike, there were almost victims of our own success as Christians because we take the cross so much, it's become a symbol of hope and forgiveness and love. You know, we wear it as jewellery.
00:16:55
Speaker
in a way that you wouldn't dream of wearing a gallows or an electric chair around your neck. And so we've almost before we can explain this to our friends, we've got to remind ourselves of what this actually was and how shocking it was. We've almost normalised it, right? Shocking is the great word because we've lived with 2000 years of it dominating Western culture. So of course, the birth, which is also would be impossible to make up because monotheistic Jews don't make up Yahweh becoming a baby.
00:17:23
Speaker
They just don't do that, right? But it's in the little crash, and the animals, and Jesus and Mary, Meek and mild, and all that stuff. And it's cute, and baby Jesus. And the incarnation's ridiculous in the cross the same way. It's just something we take for granted. And so when someone says he made it up, you realize you're living with 2,000 years of Christian history. And that's the only way you can say it. Then you bring them back to the Jewish world and the Messiah that was expected.
00:17:53
Speaker
And it's really not hard because I've taught my kids, you don't have to really know anything. You just have to know how to ask questions. And it helps to know things, of course, but it's myths and fairy tales that can be made up. How do you know that? Well, I don't know. Well, do you know anything about the Jewish nature of the world Jesus lived in? Well, no. Do you know the expectations of the Messiah that Jews had at the time? No.
00:18:22
Speaker
Well, why don't you read the Bible? So there's three questions. Why don't you read the Gospel of John? And if they're serious, they will. You know, it's beautiful. It's so simple.
Purpose of 'Uninvented': Strengthening Faith
00:18:31
Speaker
Because it can't be. And in terms of the book itself, are you primarily aiming at a Christian audience trying to encourage them? Or is it the sort of book which would be suitable to give to a non-Christian person who was interested in these issues?
00:18:42
Speaker
Well, yeah, that is, I think, an important question because I wanted it initially to the lay Christian. I think I say it in there, who isn't involved in apologetics, doesn't know anything about it, but their confidence in the Bible needs to be. Because I never believed the Bible was made up, and all of us who are conservative Christians believe in the inerrancy and the divine nature of the word of God. We don't believe it's made up, but could it be? So in the back of my mind, I thought, well, maybe it could be.
00:19:10
Speaker
But I didn't know anything about, even though I'm a seminary graduate and I'm well read and all that, I didn't know almost all the stuff I wrote about since I've learned in the last, say, 10 years that it can't be. So in that sense, I wanted it to build the confidence of my brothers and sisters in Christ that this book is you can you can bank your life and death on it. Absolutely. But the evangelism just flows naturally. Well,
00:19:40
Speaker
We're almost at the top of the end of our time, Mike. We mentioned evangelism, so that'd be a great question to end on, really. Obviously, you've been researching this for a long time. You're a thinker, a bit of philosopher, a bit of historian, writer. For someone who's listening to this, again, this is great. I'm so glad Mike's on our team because he knows all this stuff, but I'm not an expert. I couldn't use this. How can somebody who's like a regular Joe, a regular Jane,
00:20:05
Speaker
get digging into it. Obviously they can read your book and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. How do they start?
Encouraging Passionate Faith Conversations
00:20:11
Speaker
Because you're practiced in this, but for someone who isn't, where's a good place to try and begin conversations around this? With non-Christians? Yes, with non-Christians, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah, well, you have to, I think we talked about, when we talked about the persuasive Christian parent last time, is that your Christianity has to
00:20:34
Speaker
consume you. It has to be your passion. It has to be the entirety, meaning of your life. And when something's important to a person, they're going to talk about it. It could be sports. It could be hobbies, right? So it has to grab you. So that's an impossible question to answer. I'm sorry. But everyone in their relationships is so different. But my daughter has a relationship with
00:20:58
Speaker
a gal she worked at a school with, and she was with her recently in Colorado. And I say, did you bring up Christianity because she works at a Christian school, but she's not a Christian. And I told her to ask her questions. And so I lectured her after that about how you can just ask questions and you don't have to be offensive or pushy. And if the person's open to it, boom, you start a conversation.
00:21:23
Speaker
What do you think about the Bible? Have you ever read the Bible? What do you believe? What's your worldview? Et cetera. So again, I think questions are just a huge thing. And again, if the person's not open, I sang a long time ago is don't try to teach a pig to sing. It just frustrates you and irritates the pig. So if someone's not open, let's talk about the weather. Let's talk about politics. No, let's not talk about politics. Let's talk about
00:21:50
Speaker
You know, anything I really, I'm not interested in shoving my religion down your, but you know, you're a sinner and you know, you need the living God. And I'm going to probe that. Are you satisfied with your life? What gives your life meaning and hope frustrated and on and on. There's just so many ways to go about it, but it has to be, uh, you have to want to do it. You have to just be, I can't not talk about this. Think about when the resurrection happened. So looking at it psychologically.
00:22:20
Speaker
Peter says we could do no other. It's just coming out of us because he rose from the dead. All of their expectations were overturned upside down and inside out and it took the resurrection to prove it to them.
00:22:34
Speaker
There's no way Jews believe that, right? You alone have the words of eternal life. That's the great conclusion of it all. We've run out of minutes. Sorry, we could talk on and on, but we have run out
Conclusion and Next Episode Teaser
00:22:46
Speaker
of time. I just need to say thank you for joining us again, Andy, and thank you, Mike, for coming all the way across the Atlantic via the wonders of the internet to join us, to talk about this, and invented how the Bible could not be made up
00:22:57
Speaker
and the evidence that proves it. Published this year by Two Pity Publishing, available in all the usual places. Mike also has a website with lots more of his writing and thought on that. You can google him and find him. So thanks, Andy, and thanks again for joining us for a second time on pep talk. We will see you again in a fortnight when we'll have another guest, and we will encourage you further in sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with a world that is lost and needs it. Goodbye, everyone.