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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Most Christians assume the story ends with leaving earth for heaven. N.T. Wright says the New Testament tells a different one: resurrection, new creation, and God coming to dwell with his people.

In part 2 of our conversation, Wright walks through what actually happens between death and resurrection, why the ascension means Jesus reigns rather than departs, and how salvation stretches to the rescue of the whole creation. If he is right, death, grief, and the church's mission all start to look different.

New here? You can start with part 1.

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Did Jesus actually rise from the dead? The resurrection is a historical claim, and most people have never heard the evidence historians evaluate. N.T. Wright walks through the case and explains why the standard skeptical alternatives keep falling apart.

Wright, one of the world's leading scholars on early Christianity, covers why women as the first witnesses is a detail nobody would invent, what resurrection actually meant to first-century Jews, and why the differences between the gospel accounts strengthen their reliability instead of undermining it. Get Surprised by Hope and God's Homecoming.

This is part 1 of the conversation. When you finish, listen to part 2.

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The resurrection isn't a theological idea. It's a historical claim. And most people have never heard the actual evidence historians evaluate.

NT Wright, one of the world's leading scholars on early Christianity, walks through the case, and explains why the standard skeptical alternatives keep falling apart. Get Surprised by Hope and God's Homecoming

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Matthew and Luke don't give us the same family tree for Jesus, and the census in Luke has been called a historical invention. So why would anyone still trust the birth narratives?

New Testament scholar Caleb Friedeman compared them against 95 other ancient biographies, and the pattern he found runs the opposite direction from the legend theory. In this conversation he lays out the four marks of historical intent ancient biographers left in their birth stories, why two differing genealogies don't add up to fabrication, and the detail in Luke 2 that quietly points to Mary as his source.

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For decades, scholars have claimed that ancient birth narratives were never meant to be taken as history. Then one scholar went and actually read the ancient biographers, and what he found in their own writing doesn't fit the story we've been told.

New Testament scholar Caleb Friedeman compared Matthew and Luke to 95 other ancient biographies and found the average biographer wrote 360 years after his subject's birth, while the gospel writers worked within decades, close enough to talk with people who knew eyewitnesses. He also walks through the two genealogies, the census in Luke, and why two accounts with different details are not the same thing as a contradiction.

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