Solving the Case of Jesus with Homicide Detective J. Warner Wallace
Homicide Detective J. Warner Wallace joins Kyle and Joel to talk about how he investigated Jesus' death as a cold case detective, his journey to becoming an apologist, and more cool cop stories. J. Warner Wallace worked as a cold case homicide detective before finding Jesus. Once he retired from police work he went on to become an apologist and author. His latest book is "Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World That Rejects the Bible." Go to Inkl.com/bee to get an additional 25% off a year subscription Kyle and Joel find out how working surveillance played a large part for J. Warner's journey to becoming a Christian. J. Warner goes into what reading the new testament was like for him. Kyle asks the tough questions such as if J. Warner has fired his gun or if he likes Jesus. Joel takes the role of book promoter by constantly bringing up J. Warner's book. J. Warner comments on the Kyle Rittenhouse case and why it was a bad idea from the beginning. In the Subscriber Portion, Joel finds out if becoming a Christian changed J. Warner's police work. J. Warner talks about his views on finding an audience. Kyle sparks a great topic with police profiling and some probable causes for it. As always we end the conversation with the ever inspiring 10 questions.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Who done it?
Jesus.
That's who done it.
That's what Jay Warner Wallace explores in his book, Person of Interest.
It's like a murder novel or a true crime podcast, except Jesus is the murderer.
Or something like that, right?
I bet you want to read it now, don't you?
So this guy's a cold case detective who kind of looks at the evidence for Jesus from that perspective of like you don't have eyewitness.
Well, I guess we do have eyewitness accounts in the case of Jesus, but you don't have, you don't have, if you were not to have the scriptures and you were not to actually have the word of God and the eyewitness accounts, how could you reconstruct what happened in Jesus' life?
Yeah.
It's kind of an interesting way of looking at apologetics.
Yeah.
He does like the Bible, though.
It seems.
Yeah, yeah.
He doesn't throw away the Bible, but it's a compelling idea to be able to tell people that you can just look at history and what happened in history.
And there's plenty of evidence just by itself for Jesus.
There's lots of blood.
There's plenty of illustrations and little stick figures and stuff, which is really cool.
You kind of read this a bit, didn't you?
Yeah, I thumbed through it.
You thumbed through it.
He had some cool stories about being a detective.
We got some cool cop stories, which is always great.
Yeah.
He got beat up by a woman with a broom once.
Yeah, and that was in the subscriber portion.
Stick around.
Jay Warner Wallace.
Here he comes.
The same flannel top and the same loafer type shoes.
Dude, have you seen those commercials from?
Oh boy, this is it.
It's happened.
Is it progressive, the one that has the commercials around your parents?
Oh my gosh.
When I watch those commercials, I'm like, we stop ourselves in conversation now.
Susan was hitting me.
That's from the commercial.
Because I realize that I'm doing that.
Of course, I am my dad now, but that's a whole other issue.
But yeah, I see what you're talking about.
It's inevitable.
Oh, you're dressed in the California business attire.
Hey, these are leather vans.
Okay, so I think they count as dress shoes.
Very nice.
They count as dress shoes.
I have suede ones, and those are my like.
That's close enough.
We had a Christmas party, and the attire was supposed to be, what was it, formal?
Semi-formal, I think.
So for me, that was jeans, vans, and a sports coat.
Oh, I know.
When someone says a California guy, you ought to go semi-formal.
That's our starting position.
That was the formal.
What is semi-formal?
I mean, no shirt, but a jacket.
Basically, that's right.
We were watching a movie last night, Crazy Stupid Love.
I think it's, is that what it's called?
Steve Carell.
Yeah, Steve Carell.
And he was talking about how he's dressed.
And he starts off the movie, he's dressed pretty frumpy.
Like me.
Ryan Gosling character is going to dress him up and get him looking sharp, right?
And I thought that was just so funny because I looked at him.
I thought there was nothing wrong with the way he's dressed.
I don't see anything wrong with the way he's dressed, but apparently the world does.
So you believe in God?
On occasion.
It depends on the day.
That's the next question.
If the next question's bad, I might just deny them altogether.
Yeah.
Are we recording right now?
Dang.
This is happening, man.
We're just interviewing.
This is how you guys start.
That's what it is.
Yeah, I'm just going to take you through the way of the master.
So have you ever seen it?
Okay, good.
Yeah.
No, I'm not going to lie to you right now.
That's for sure until you haven't.
You ever do any of that street preaching?
Go out and...
You know, I have.
We did it.
Not that way.
Not the way that Ray does it.
Yeah, I think he does a great job with that.
But we used to take students to Salt Lake City and to Berkeley on these immersive trips.
And a lot of that ends up being like, at some point, you're not preaching the gospel like he would, you know, in front of like an open-air preacher, but you're definitely having conversations.
I'm always going to ask questions.
I'm always more comfortable asking questions.
But, you know, cops are bad about crafting questions that are more probative, that might reveal something you weren't intending to reveal anyway.
You're kind of like backing people in.
So you take them into the interrogation room, turn the light on.
Yeah, it's not quite that bad.
But I don't think I've ever done an interview with anyone that I haven't charted out.
I was just, I'm looking to write another book and it's based on a real case.
And so I kept my case files.
So I'm going through all the case files and I realize that for every kind of every interview, we have a transcript and a recording.
But there's also a strategy sheet before every interview.
And I forgot, yeah, we used to do that every single time.
That's what we were supposed to do.
Yeah, we might have had notes before we started this interview, right?
Some idea of where the heck we're going.
Are we taking notes on this?
We got to do that next time.
Yeah.
So what was your name again?
Well, my big question is, I guess, I just, I wanted to kind of hear your story because I'm always very, I think the stories of people who become Christians as adults are always very compelling, especially someone like me as someone who was raised in the church, grew up in it.
We always kind of end up having those moments where you have to evaluate, you know, is my faith real?
Is this just something I was conditioned to, kind of brainwashed as a young child?
And you kind of have to, you have to answer a lot of those questions.
Whereas you, you know, you were an atheist, total non-believer, a detective, a cold case detective.
Can you kind of take us through that story?
Well, I was raised in Los Angeles County and back in the 60s and 70s.
I just never bumped into anybody.
I had no friends who were Christians.
My mom was raised as a cultural Catholic.
So I would, like if it was Christmas, we would go to a Mass.
I just wanted nothing to do with it.
And Mass is like church.
Yeah, you know, like church.
And you're there in Mass.
I think that's why I call it a Mass.
I'm not sure.
But I'm heresy jar material.
You got to have dollars ready for the heresy jar.
You know what?
I brought dollars actually.
I should probably just give you a 20 right now before we start.
Then I'm good to go.
Yeah, they're good to go for the whole talk.
So I just didn't have any interest.
And to be honest, I was pretty much a sarcastic person anyway.
Okay.
Kind of a natural skeptic.
Yeah.
I always say if you're working as a detective, if you assume everyone's a liar piece of trash, you will.
I don't say crap on this.
Yeah, you will basically eventually take someone to jail.
But if you assume everyone is telling you the truth, no one ever goes to jail.
So you assume the worst in people until proven otherwise.
And when I would meet a Christian, there were like two I can think of on our agency.
And I can think of the conversations I had with these guys.
They were lame.
I mean, they just really could not, they just didn't seem like they could defend what they even knew why they believed what they believed.
And so it was really easy to mock them.
You know, you could take an approach.
And I was pretty much hammered down on all that stuff with these guys.
I don't want to, don't even bring it up.
If you bring it up, I'm going to spank it.
And then you better be able to defend it.
And I didn't feel like they could ever really do that.
So I just was not interested in it.
And then we met a bunch of folks.
I tell stories all the time.
I remember I watched a guy do a bank robbery in Lakewood at a home savings.
This guy was a bank robber.
We picked him up.
He was a drug addict.
We finally figured out where he was living.
I was working on a surveillance team.
I watched him do the ball.
Well, I was working on a surveillance team at the time.
So we would follow bad guys.
That's kind of your job is to stop that, right?
Well, yeah, usually.
But this is usually what happens.
Say, for example, we get a bank robbery and we get a guy and he's in a white compact car.
Last three numbers of the plate are this.
So you start running the plates combinations and you end up with five cars that are small models and you got to find, they're all over Los Angeles County.
So you go out and look for them and you find that two of them are white.
Now, you don't know what you got here.
So you start sitting on those cars to see what is the person coming out to the car look.
Well, we get somebody who matches the description of the bank robber.
We're thinking, this could be our guy.
But we don't know yet.
Now, we could just arrest him and ask him, are you the bank robber?
That probably isn't going to go well.
So what we do is we just watch him do a bank robbery.
And now we've got him in custody for the one we saw.
That's fallible.
It's not going to take as well with like murder.
No.
If you see anything like that, you'd take somebody to jail.
So I remember I was watching this guy in a bank robbery and they got him afterwards.
We're in plane cars and he drives away and he's really hinked up about looking in his rearview mirror.
And so he spots us and then the pursuit is on.
We have no, you know, we're in a plane car, five plane cars and a sergeant.
But we ended up crashing this guy and taking him to jail.
And on the way back, he tells me that he was, you know, how he got saved, his whole story.
And that was it for you.
You were like, oh, I'm like, this is so typical, right?
We get out of the car.
I mean, I tell my partners right away.
This whole story is converted to the story, you know.
And then we just start mocking that guy mercilessly behind his back, right?
Because I think this is all Christians.
Every Christian I know is either a hypocrite or a canton.
Yeah.
Lame word bank robber.
So I just had no patience for it.
But my wife was, I think, you know, she definitely was, she believed in 18 years we were together, we never had this conversation.
Never.
Never brought it up.
But the last two or three years, she was like, we should probably, you know, we had kids.
We should want to raise our kids with some kind of beliefs.
No.
I mean, I wasn't raised that way.
I said, if you want, I mean, I'll do anything for her.
So if you want to, I'm happy to go.
And I don't think she, she was, she would have said she believed in God, but I don't think we didn't have the Bible.
She'd never read a Bible.
So whatever she was catching was really cultural.
But so we went to church and pastor was a very huge megachurch.
Pastor was seeker sensitive.
So he's throwing Jesus in a way that most people can catch him.
Now, you might not be there for long because at some point you're going to dig deeper into what you find out about Jesus.
And these kinds of places are like harvest crusades.
Right.
So what was your posture like when you're first attending the church for the first time?
Well, a friend brought it up.
You're standing there with your arms crossed, like waiting to catch this guy.
A friend who had been asking me to go to church with him, and I played in a cop band with this guy.
Hang on.
Let's back up.
Yeah.
Yeah, we had a cop band.
We had a cop band?
Yeah.
So I was.
Let's dive into that.
Well, when I first, you know, I didn't want to be.
I'm going to be 30 minutes of this interview.
I didn't want to be a cop when I first was coming up.
I was an artist.
I have a bachelor's degree in design.
I have a master's degree in architecture.
And then at 27, I changed into the career of my father.
So when I got there, though, I felt like it was not really creative.
Like it's hard to be creative until you start working homicide trials.
But early on, when you're working patrol, it's not a creative thing.
You're just handling calls.
So I just needed a way to scratch that itch.
That's interesting.
He was called the police.
Worse than that.
We were called Beyond the Law.
That's terrible, right?
I mean, it's just what it is, okay?
It is what it is.
So is this heavy metal or what?
No, it was all like pop kind of, you know, like, you know, yeah.
Do we have Red Hot Chili Factory?
I mean, our guys play or sing or what we're doing.
But I was his guitar player.
You were the guitar?
Yeah, I was his guitar player, yeah.
And we had some good talent.
And the five of us could play an instrument.
We got together and started this band.
And, you know, we were playing all the time because, you know, we were playing for free.
And we were representing our agency, so every city function, we would play it.
This is wonderful.
We have a guitar here.
No, I'm not going to publicize it right now.
I'm not going to do that.
So anyway, how have we even start talking about this?
Talking about when you first started going to church.
Oh, yeah.
So this guy invited us.
He was a drummer in this band.
And he had been inviting us for a couple of years.
And so I was very self-conscious of what he was thinking of me as we walked in.
Like, I knew he was watching me.
Like, what do you think?
Yeah, exactly.
And I thought, oh, no, this is going to be ugly.
And so I said something about holy water.
And he said, no, don't worry.
I was like, oh, it's going to burn.
And he said, no, don't worry.
You know, he's holy water here.
So we sat and this guy said that Jesus was the smartest.
This pastor said that Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived.
And that's what started all of it for me.
So I wanted to see what was so smart about Jesus.
Wow.
So I bought a Bible.
Pew bubble.
Wow.
Just read it through?
No, I just wanted to get the wisdom statements.
I figured just the red letters would be enough.
Like, I kind of envisioned this would be like Proverbs where you just have wisdom statements.
Then you start reading through the Gospels and you realize, okay, they're actually like, these people want me to believe this stuff happened in this chronological order.
So that's different.
That's different.
Now, that I can test because that's what every, I work cold cases where these are just unsolved murders.
So that means you have a report that's given to you from 79 or 84.
Okay, all the witnesses are either gone.
Some of them are still around, but they're really old.
Some are suffering dementia because now they're in the 80s and 90s.
Your officers are sometimes dead.
But you have their supplemental reports.
So you have a chronology of what happened, but you've got to test it in some way when you don't have access to the witnesses and you don't have access to the report writers.
Well, that's the Gospels.
So I just leaned in with what I knew.
I am actually curious because you didn't immediately start getting to the apologetic stuff as you're exploring this.
No, no.
Did the kind of like the faith come first and then you thought, okay, now I want to go back and reevaluate like no, for me, it doesn't.
No, not really.
I'm too distrusting, I think.
But when I first started, I'm just collecting what's so smart about Jesus.
I didn't really see a lot when I first started.
I'm like, well, I mean, my sarcastic nature is like, well, it's not like Buddha didn't say this.
It's not like I couldn't find this someplace else.
What's so special about Jesus?
But there are places where you start to kind of hop off the trail of kind of standard wisdom where it's said in such a way.
And I think I was using either the NASB or so it depends on what translation you're working with, how poetic this stuff sounds too, right?
So I'm reading it and I'm thinking, well, just at some point, what struck me, the first thing that tickled me, that kind of provoked me, was that these things were not consistent.
And in terms of, I saw variation between the accounts.
How many angels are there?
How many women were at the tomb?
What's the sign say over the cross?
I mean, all these things were different in a way that was within the range I would expect from eyewitnesses because eyewitnesses never agree.
So it was the differences between the gospels that first clued me that, man, this does look like, like if I'm going to make this up, and I've seen people do that, it's not going to have this level of variation, right?
Because it's going to, this is going to provoke a problem later on, right?
Like, why would you leave this this way?
I mean, you could easily reconcile it so nobody would question it later.
So that's, I'm going to test it, I said.
So there's a way to test eyewitnesses.
There's a template.
So I just used the template to test it.
But that took me probably about nine months.
But I was working undercover.
So what was great was I had time.
So if you're working a guy who's a drug addict and he's doing, he's getting high for the first week, you're not really doing anything.
You're all sitting around his house.
You know, you're sitting out in the neighborhood waiting for him to move.
And that means your team got one guy's going to be on the eye for a couple hours.
And most of your shift, you're just sitting.
So I had all my resources.
Everything I was collecting was in my car.
And I would just be reading every day.
I'm just picturing you, like in the car with, like all these books, like were your friends starting to wonder like, what's going on?
Well, so after about I'd say after about six or seven months, I had a partner named Steve who saw something was up with this dude and he low-crawled me.
When I was, I was backed up into a parking lot of a funeral home.
Those are always good places to hide, because if this is a funeral, no one's in the parking lot and no one ever thinks to go in the parking lot of a funeral home.
Oh no, they do.
You just yeah no, yeah.
Well, luckily I'm not working anymore, so I don't really care.
But no, but so I was backed up into this thing.
I, you know, I know you never want to have someone sneak up on you, but he knew how, where I was and how to sneak up on me, and so he snuck up on me while I was reading and then, as soon as he saw what I had in my hands he, he just started dogging me because I knew it, I knew it, I knew it's not a Bible, I knew something.
Yes, not what it looks like.
Yeah, he says I knew something was changing with you and you know, you know let, my language is getting better and you know I'm starting to not be such a jerk and he saw that.
And he, he started.
He says, I know you, you were such a committed atheist, you'll probably end up being a pastor.
Like he saw, the pendulum was gonna swing all the way to the other side and yeah, that was pretty much what happened.
Was there a moment that where you know you're doing all this research, you're kind of on this progression?
Was there a distinct moment that you remember where you're like okay, like I guess I'm a believer now.
Well, so people ask me that all the time.
But but but I didn't understand what the gospel was, even though I began to trust what the gospels said about Jesus.
Like, after I got through all that, I'm like okay, I never way you could test this.
I like what I'm seeing is passing the test, but I don't understand why the why would he die on a cross?
Like, why would God do it this way?
If there's a God, why would he do it this way?
So I asked Susie, because she, you know, I figured she may be what are you learning?
I don't know, I don't know why.
So I just didn't understand what the gospel was yet, because I spent all my time focusing on the accounts in the Gospels.
Imagine, there's no letters of Paul, there's no other New Testament, there's not even the book of Acts where we can see someone preach message.
All you have are the gospels.
It is a little more, I think, difficult to connect the theological thoughts.
And the Old Testament is what's happening.
Right, I'm not going to take that out too, because I'm just focused on these things.
Yeah, there's a lot of things.
So I tell people all the time, you can learn about Jesus and read about Jesus in the Gospels.
That gives you belief that, but not belief in.
Once I started to read the New Testament for what it said, not about Jesus, but what it said about me.
That's when I realized I might need for a savior because I realized it was describing me pretty accurately for exactly who I was.
And that's where I think you make that transition.
So I can tell you where I was when I was, you know, I was working on surveillance in the city of Carson, which is in Los Angeles County.
I think it was a residential burglar.
I remember I was parked against a schoolyard and I was reading through Romans and 1 Corinthians and realized that, oh my gosh, it's like the life.
A lot of people will read Romans and that's where their epiphany occurs, right?
And that's really.
So if you're a lazy person and you like to read a lot on the job.
Yes, yes.
We were allowed to do that.
I always wonder.
What if I had this had happened to me in, say, like 2018, where no one's reading books.
Yeah.
And everyone's distracted by those guys on the team now, they're just watching movies all day.
Movies, cell phone, everything.
Right.
I mean, they've either got their tablet out and they're watching, they're all watching movies.
Like we're distracted by so much other.
There wasn't a lot of options back then.
I mean, I know guys who I had a partner had every guy magazine that used to make the Sports Illustrated.
I mean, all these guy magazines.
And he would have subscriptions to all of them and he would just bring them to work and read magazines all day.
I thought you meant a magazine named Guy Magazine.
Yeah, well, if there was one, he would have had it.
Trust me.
Okay, because that's what he would do.
So I felt lucky that I wasn't as distracted.
Have you ever fired your gun?
Yes, I have fired my gun.
Is it a cool story?
No.
Do you have any cool stories?
Well, you don't, I mean, it's a tragic kind of, it's like, you know, yeah, if you have to fire your gun, it's a highly inappropriate question.
It's not usually a cool story.
You know, it's not.
No, I have, I've got, should I tell this story?
No, I can't.
I got some cool stories, but nothing I could really repeat without ruining myself.
I mean, like crackheads.
We've had a couple of cops on, and we've got some really cool stories about chasing crackheads around.
Well, okay, so a lot of it, some of the best stuff you do is when you're working surveillances.
So we, we've, so we give an example of this.
We had a guy who did a liquor store robbery, and he got a partial plate, a mid-sized car, I think it was silver, like a Chevy, like an old Chevy Nova.
Okay, so we start running the plate, and it wasn't my case.
The case agent is the one guy on the team who's handling the case.
This was not my case.
So somebody else is running a plate, and he's starting to go visit potential cars, and he finds one that's about like a gray.
It's not a Chevy No, but it's close enough to the same body style.
And he's like, okay, it's got one variation in the plate, but it's close enough, you know, because witnesses are going to get something wrong usually.
So it's out in the worst part of Los Angeles in terms of, you know, crime rates.
I mean, it's really hard to work those neighborhoods.
And so we get out there and we watch it for a week.
No one even walks out to the car.
At the end of that week, it's a Friday at 4 o'clock.
We're done.
I'm done.
I think this is a joke.
We don't know this is the car.
No one's even gone to the car.
We're not even sure this is the right car.
And we wasted a week on this.
And it was boring.
It was hot.
It was in summer.
So I remember wanting to give up on it.
It was 4 o'clock on Friday.
We're all in a parking lot except for the guy who was the case agent.
He happened to be on the eye.
He just happened to be watching the car still.
So we're on the perimeter.
We all come together in a parking lot, except for him.
And we're like, all bad mouthing this guy, you know, this is a joke.
The sergeant's even, yeah, we're done.
We're going to go home.
And as soon as we're all ready to call him on the radio and tell him we're going to go home, he says, hey, I got to get out to the car.
First time anyone has seen anyone by the car.
It's a Friday at 4 o'clock.
And we said, oh, geez.
Okay.
So we all race back into position.
And now we start following this guy.
Well, he picks up two of his friends.
And now he's driving from like Los Angeles to Hollywood.
And there's a Dodger game that night.
And it is bumper to bumper traffic on the Harbor Freeway.
And it's like miserable trying to follow this guy because you're either, you know, you're trying to keep a car's distance between them, but it's hard to, if he moves, you got to move and everyone's got to move.
And you don't want to get it from him because then you're going to lose.
We keep, it takes an hour to get from central Los Angeles into Hollywood.
We follow him into Hollywood and they start driving slow by liquor stores.
So they're definitely casing.
And then they pull around a corner of one of the liquor stores.
They hit the residential neighborhood.
They stop their car.
They pop the hood.
They take off the air filter cover and they pull out two guns, two handguns.
They put them in their waistbands.
They put the filter back down.
They close the engine.
And then they start walking around the corner and they go into this liquor store.
And we're thinking, these could be toy guns.
It's often the case.
It's a toy gun.
But we're thinking, they're going to do a robbery right here in front of us.
And sure enough, they don't do the robbery.
And we're thinking, they come out and they get to their car.
We've got to jam them right now.
We know they're good for the robbery.
And it's such a crowded night that night.
They got to the car before we could, because we had one guy come off their car and watch them do this, go into the liquor store.
And unfortunately, this is back when the radios were so terrible.
He can't communicate to us.
He comes back out.
We got to stop him.
Well, now we can't, we lose him.
So we ended up having to spend that entire weekend sitting on that car, get back to that, we race back to the place.
The car is back at the house.
It's empty.
So now we sat on that car all weekend long.
And they fucking did a robbery the next day, the next Monday.
And it was two different guys.
Different guys.
So they're using the same car, but different guys.
So we thought at first, if they come back to the car, we'll just take them to jail.
We've seen them with guns.
But no, it turns out, and they were a toy gun.
But it turns out that it was two different guys.
See, like police procedural TV shows, they never cover those kinds of cases.
Well, in the end, we had to get a car for a week and like nothing.
Yeah, no, we're thinking in the end, all we need to do is make sure it's the right.
But other problem was, too, when they came out to the car, because you're using the same car, but it's different guys, they don't match the description of our suspects.
So like, we're really thinking, how do we, how do we, but it ends up they ended up doing a robbery on Monday and we, so no one got hurt, and they went to jail.
As the editor-in-chief of the Babylon B, I have to keep up with the news all the time, which is super depressing.
It sucks.
But, you know, we got to do it.
So maybe you have to keep up with the news too for whatever reason.
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So, a lot of boredom, like a lot of boredom punctuated by like, okay, now I got to get out of my relaxed state and jump into action.
I kind of feel like that's like every job.
Yeah.
In some ways.
Well, so which part of the boredom or action is right now for you?
Is this the boredom part or is this the action part?
Yeah, right.
I don't have to, I don't like his tone.
So I guess, do you want to talk about the book?
We could talk about the book.
No, not really.
I'm curious about this because it doesn't look like, it doesn't look like a Christian book.
It has blood on the cover.
I know, right?
You got the shiny book.
This is really cool.
Yeah, I was really disappointed.
I was waiting for the murder novel.
If you read the book, you'd see that it's actually based on a murder novel.
Not a novel, but an actual case.
I'm curious, like, why did you make it look like this?
It's a cool look for a.
Well, okay, so a lot of it is.
Are there books about Jesus out there right now that make the case for Jesus?
I think so.
There's a couple of them.
Yeah.
So I kind of feel like I don't ever want to write a book that's already, somebody else has done a better job.
They've already written the book.
So I'm trying to write things that maybe will come at it from a slightly different angle that maybe people hadn't thought of.
So here, what we did, we took a pattern.
I've had a couple of these cases where a guy kills his wife, gets rid of her body.
There's no body.
Reports are missing.
Oh, we had a fight.
She ran off.
She never returns.
25 years later, I get the case.
There is no body ever recovered.
They didn't even bother to take pictures of the crime scene.
They thought it was a missing person.
So there's not a single piece of property booked into the evidence room.
So what do you have nothing?
Zero.
So how do you tell a jury, how do you make a case for this?
I know he killed her, but how do you make a case for this?
Well, I always tell people: if I've got nothing in the crime scene, I'm going to, that's the day an explosive event occurred.
A bomb went off that day.
If he did kill her, I'm going to make the case by showing you that every bomb's got a long fuse that burns up to the detonation of the bomb.
And after it explodes, there's all kinds of shrapnel and debris all over the blast radius.
So I'll make the case from the fuse and the fallout.
And I'll tell you exactly what happened on that day from just the fuse and the fallout.
So you're kind of starting at the edges and working on it.
Yeah, it's a time, what's a timeline, right?
So you know that something is building.
He's preparing.
He's getting the weapon in place.
He's going to do a bunch of stuff prior to the murder to meet a deadline.
And then after he does it, his behaviors, usually what happens is these guys will get rid of all their wife's property, even though supposedly she just ran off.
Within a week, they've moved in their girlfriend and all of her property is gone.
You're acting as though you know she's not coming back.
So that kind of behavior is part of that fallout behavior.
So we can demonstrate that to a jury and make a case.
I've done a couple of these.
That's right.
All husbands who have this idea, business partners, this is not going to work.
So I thought, well, Jesus, if you didn't have a New Testament at all, you could still make a case for everything you know about Jesus just from the fuse and fallout of history, even if you had no access to any New Testament manuscripts.
So if you just took that out, you could make the case from fuse and fallout.
And that's what we do in person of interest.
Because I think the impact that Jesus has is really, the problem is that I didn't learn this impact growing up in LA.
At least we weren't taught that.
And so most people have no idea the impact of Jesus on history.
It seems to me that different minds come to God in different ways.
There's different things that attract us.
And obviously, for some people, it is reading the word of God, and that changes their hearts.
And I do think ultimately everybody comes to that point where they confront the words of Jesus and the Word of God.
And that's, you know, that's what that's the Spirit of God working through that changes their hearts.
But here's my thing on this, though.
I agree with you.
Absolutely.
But I have family members, six brothers and sisters who say the words of Jesus on scripture changed my life.
They're all Mormons.
Sure.
So the question then becomes, well, how do I adjudicate between that scripture, which claims to have the words of Jesus, and our scripture, which claims to have the words of Jesus?
And because I knew those Mormons were my family, when I first started looking at scripture, I'm like, hmm.
So I, of course, was presented with the Book of Mormon right away.
My sister gave it to me.
So I read through the Book of Mormon, Doctrines and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, before I read the Old Testament.
What's your review?
You have a comparison?
Which one did you like better?
Yeah.
Well, I knew I got through it.
Most people don't read, who are looking at Mormonism for the first time, don't go through it.
But I had a quad because I had a missionary in our family, and I knew there was a quad out there where they had their entire, so I wanted to get a quad.
And I wanted to see what's in there.
And Pearl of Great Price is the last volume in the quad.
And there's a book called the Book of Abraham that claims to be written from a manuscript that Joseph obtained from a dealer in antiquities.
Wow, it's a bit convoluted there.
Yes, and he has this Egyptian manuscript that he translates into the Book of Abraham.
He says it's the writing of Abraham when he was in Egypt in Genesis.
So he writes this, he translates it into the book of Abraham.
Well, it turns out that that manuscript was then allegedly lost.
They thought maybe it was burned in the Great Fire in Chicago, but it turns up in 1960s in New York.
So now we have the manuscript with the illustrations still on it that he actually included in the Book of Abraham.
He translated it perfectly.
Yeah, and of course, nobody could translate hieroglyphics back when he did it.
The Rosetta Stone had just been translated, but was still in Europe.
So nothing matches.
Nothing is what he said it was.
And when I got to that point, I said, oh, I mean, I'm always researching.
And I said, I'm out.
And so the same approach that I took that for me confirmed the reliability of the New Testament really quickly kind of shredded the reliability of the Book of Mormon and all of them.
So I'm with you.
I always say that you're right.
It's God's, but how do you know which words are God's words?
Well, you know, before you attacked me and interrupted me, what I was trying to say was, no, but I think a lot of people, you know, certainly come to God with their minds being engaged in a way like this.
Or at least that's something that kind of prompts them on that path.
And I know there's this debate about like presuppositionalism versus evidential apologetics.
But, you know, it is cool that there are people, if their minds work that way.
You know, we all know people like that.
They love the true crime podcasts.
Well, look at it this way.
I get in this conversation a lot.
So what are we presupposing?
We're presupposing that the word of God is true.
But what is the word of God?
Because there's two forms of evidence.
There's direct evidence and indirect evidence.
That's the only forms of evidence that exists.
Direct evidence is eyewitness testimony.
And it can be recorded in some way.
Even video evidence would be considered direct evidence.
Like you get to be the eyewitness because the video camera is catching it as the eyewitness.
Everything else, if it's DNA or fingerprints or statements, that's all indirect evidence.
That's also known as circumstantial evidence.
But DNA is circumstantial evidence.
We think it's very powerful, but it's not direct evidence.
And there is no category of hard evidence.
So if we're saying, hey, the scriptures, I presuppose that this is true, well, what you're presupposing is that the direct eyewitness account of the Gospels is true.
Because everyone who writes in the New Testament is an eyewitness.
Even Paul says, hey, I saw this too.
So you cannot escape an evidential approach because the very thing you would, you know, unless you're saying, no, everything that I know about Jesus was revealed to me directly by God in a dream.
Otherwise, you're depending upon something that's going to fall into one of those two categories of evidence.
So you start evidentially.
I'd appreciate it if you'd stop yelling at me.
So, okay, so you talked about the fuse and the fallout.
Yeah.
The event being the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Yeah, the life of Jesus.
And you're essentially, you're proving the historicity of it without the Bible.
So you're just looking at accounts from history and what we know about the world.
Well, okay, so nothing can be done without the Bible.
So people always say, well, that's not foolish to try to say anything about Jesus apart from scripture.
Well, you're right.
But what I'm saying is that the impact of Jesus is such that so many significant aspects of human culture ends up repeating what is known from scripture.
So yeah, it's all going to be based on what's in scripture.
But isn't it amazing that there is not a single other character in fiction or in history that can make these kinds of claims.
So for example, and I look at the fallout, things like art, music, education, science, and world religions and literature.
Those six areas.
No one has had an impact like Jesus of Nazareth.
No one's been written about.
No historical figure has ever been written about as much as Jesus of Nazareth.
And I kind of show how you can look at that kind of stuff.
No one's been painted, sculpted, etched, or drawn.
No one has influenced the history of art.
And the entire story of Jesus can be reconstructed from the earliest literature, from the earliest paintings, sculptures, murals, even from the science fathers.
So for example, if you look at the entire history of science, the science fathers, those men and women who founded disciplines in the modern sciences, starting before even the scientific revolution, all the way through today, are overwhelmingly Christians.
They're Christ followers.
All the way from modern biology and astronomy and chemistry, all the way to quantum mechanics and computer languages.
These are more Nobel Prize winners in the sciences are Christ followers than all the other groups combined.
And so if you look at that and you said, okay, what are the science fathers?
They repeat the story of Jesus in their personal journals and in letters to each other.
You can learn more about Jesus from the science fathers' writings than you can from the church fathers' writings.
Wow.
So as I go through there and kind of list what you can know, what other person could make this kind of a claim?
So my argument here basically is rather broad.
Now remember, I wrote a book on the reliability of scriptures.
That's called Cold Case Christianity.
This takes the flip.
So these two things together, I think, are a powerful one too.
But I'm not suggesting you would not do the cold case Christianity.
But if you didn't, this would be enough for you to know everything you need to know about Jesus.
And if there's no other ancient, if there's no other fictional character who can make this kind of claim, it's a reasonable inference to infer that Jesus is something more than a fictional character.
So this speaks to his historicity.
And then second, you're not going to find another mortal human who's had this kind of impact on history.
So it's reasonable to infer he's something other than a mortal human.
So there's actually an aspect of this, I think, if these three possibilities are out there.
One, he's a fictional character.
Would you expect to have this at the end of all this?
Two, he's just a regular guy.
Would you expect to have this?
Or three, he's the God of all creation who enters into his creation.
Well, now this starts to make sense.
And that's why I think that that is a reasonable approach to take for somebody who just wants to see the impact.
It seems like now our culture is almost a bit cut off from that history.
What Jesus did has so affected every aspect from the law that you enforce to our art and our culture and our music.
It's the water we swim in and we kind of take it for granted almost.
That's a great way to put it.
It's funny you say about law because I've done a bunch of these cases.
I had a case years ago.
This is one of the best DAs in the country.
Honestly, I think he's the best DA in the country hands down.
His name is John Lewin.
He just did the Robert Durst case here in Los Angeles, okay?
All my cases, maybe one or two, but almost all my cases were with John.
And I remember we were doing a case from, I think, 1984, and he's in front of the jury, and he is talking about malice aforethought, or in the closing arguments.
And he mentions to them, don't get hung up on this old English expression.
I'm like this dude.
He's culturally Jewish, John.
Has never read the Old Testament and doesn't realize that this language he's talking about is straight out of Leviticus and Exodus.
And it's in the Old Testament law.
As a matter of fact, all of our enhancements in California, like lying in wait, why is lying in wait a death penalty enhancement?
Because it's a death penalty enhancement in the Old Testament.
We just basically pluck those things out and they become part of our law.
So he's making this case and I'm thinking to myself, oh my goodness, he has no idea that this is not some old English vernacular.
This is Old Testament.
So I bought him a Bible and I wrote in it, you know.
I said, it'd be nice if you stop, because you're so ignorant of your own religious background.
How about reading this thing for once?
That's why I wrote in the book and I gave him the Bible and he's never read it, of course.
But he always reminds me, I mean, we're very close friends.
He still has it, apparently.
But he has not read it.
But I think you're right.
We're swimming in this water.
He's swimming.
He's standing on the shoulders of theism and has no idea that he is.
Yeah.
So how do we discover that, rediscover that as a culture or a country?
Like, how do we reintroduce that to people?
Well, I think a lot of it is.
I mean, I try to tell it, and this is why, well, look, a lot of it's storytelling.
We are now in a generation.
I mean, think about it.
Art has always been upstream of everything else.
We think we can solve all these problems politically.
We just got to vote differently.
We've got to be more politically active.
Really?
No, the mind change occurred.
Like, this is why Babylon B is so important.
Because it's not tapping into strict arguments, evidential arguments.
It's tapping into art.
Because that's where all of it, you know, this is why I love the arts.
Because that's, you know, when I was in architecture in 85 to 88 in Santa Monica, the predominant style of art or genre or period of art that we were moving through in architecture was called postmodernism.
And by the time I was done, we were past it.
We were doing post-postmodernism.
Now, here we are years later wrestling with this thing that has been dead in the arts for four decades.
But that's because it's upstream.
And if we don't realize that we're going to change the hearts and minds of every generation, not with our evidential kind of dry fact-based approach, but instead with something that's going to come out of our imaginations.
So as I started to write these kinds of books, I want to be a good storyteller.
And so this book, we trace a story of Tammy Hayes.
She was killed by her husband.
And how do we solve that case using just the fuse and the fallout?
And then we try to turn each chapter toward Jesus because we know.
And that's why I wanted to, I told the publisher, I said, they sent me a bunch of covers.
I said, no.
I want you to think.
More blood.
Yes.
I want you to think about a fictional murder mystery.
That's what this needs to be.
This needs to be, because that's where it's, I think it's in the arts that we are going to change minds.
So the next book, I'm even shifting more into, well, what if we just told a story?
That's awesome.
You know what you need to do?
You need to do a true crime podcast.
Only like I know, right?
Well, you know how hard this is.
The amount of research that you guys have to do just to do as much content as you're posting, it's consuming.
And people don't realize the arts are not just this spontaneous, I just sit down here and it all just spills out.
No, it's a lot of prep, right?
For you to say the things that are really comparing?
Oh, shoot.
I knew we were missing something.
Yeah, but so I think a lot of it is it's hard work.
Yeah.
You know, I'm sure when I listen to Gatskin or any comedian, you know how much time is spent kind of writing down the ideas and then like, is that going to time out right?
I mean, there's a lot of time that goes into what seems to be almost a stream of consciousness spontaneity on the stage.
It's all calculated.
But in fact, it's very well written, you know.
Well, speaking of written, what do you think about Kyle Rittenhouse?
Speaking of it, oh, wow, what a transition that is.
That's good.
Well.
Do you like him?
Well, do I like him?
What do you think about it?
Okay, so when I first saw the case, I know things have changed, but I've only been out of the business now for about five or six years, really.
And I still get to consult on these cases.
But I wonder, you know, things have changed here in Los Angeles, too.
What is a filable case?
And as I've been watching these juries, here's my biggest concern about juries.
Criminal trials are like the last place where we get to test epistemology, right?
We get to test, have we gotten to the point where objective truth is so lost that there is no more, there's no objective set of facts that really occurred.
There's just how I feel about these set of facts.
Will we ever get a jury to agree to one objective set of facts when there are so many different personal experiences encompassing a jury?
And we do a process of jury selection where we try to eliminate people who would allow their feelings to override the evaluation of the facts.
But I wonder, are we getting to a place where we just won't have enough people in the jury pool to do this?
Now, what I've been encouraged by is that, so look, that case, there's no way a DA would have filed that case, in my view, because you can't win it.
Here's the dirty little secret about filings no one wants to talk about.
DAs are elected officials.
Politicians.
They run on their record.
They want to be able to say at the end of four years that I won 98% of all of our jury trials.
We won 98% of our cases or 96%.
It's always in the high 90s.
How do you do that?
We only file about 40% of what they bring us.
We only file the cases that 12 idiots would convict on.
If there's any chance it's not going to win, we're not going to file it.
So in other words, the funnel point is not the jury trial, it's the filing process.
So a lot of these cases, you're just not going to file.
If you think, hey, at some point, one of these jurors, at least one, is going to say, that kind of feels like self-defense.
Like, there's no way they're going to file that case because you might lose it.
Now, here's what it comes down to.
We might be to a place where DAs would rather file a case and lose it if it feels like it's virtuous than worry about whether we win it or not.
My whole career was trying to convince DAs, supervisors, that we could win this case in front of a jury because it's this old, unsolved case.
Nobody wants to touch it.
It's entirely circumstantial.
They think that this one person could hang it.
They're not going to file it.
We're trying to convince them, no, no, this is really solid.
We can do this.
I do all of the visual aspect of the cases before filing to show the supervisor what the jury is going to see.
Wow.
Because I know they won't get it.
The supervisor's going to come out this is a lame case.
Let me show it to you.
Oh, that's pretty good.
So that's.
I think it was filed literally as like a, this is a virtue signal almost or a deep case.
I think that's where we're getting to a point with district attorneys where if they feel like, hey, this is a case that even if we can't win it, I'm liable to gain the trust of an entire segment of the election, the elected population.
So I just don't see how I didn't think that one person might say that seems like self-defense and at least hang it.
It turns out everyone agreed it was self-defense.
So that to me is interesting to see what's getting filed and are juries starting to respond.
And so far, I've been, at least that trial, it seemed like they were limiting themselves to what are the facts of the case, not how I feel about the facts.
Because you might feel like, hey, I don't like it, but these are the facts.
As a cynical guy, I actually, you know, I did see, I sat on a trial once.
I sat on it as a jury, and I was actually kind of cool to see, like you said, there's just an epistemological bent there.
It's like they really do take that seriously of, you know, try to figure out this specific element only.
That's all you're doing.
You're limiting yourself to that.
But still, if there's somebody on that jury who just like, you know, I don't care.
I don't like that guy because he reminds me of so-and-so.
Or I've been around guys like that.
I don't care what he says.
They always are thinking this.
That's the kind of thing you're trying to eliminate on your jury selection, right?
Are you going to start to say, well, to draw parallels because he looks like or he speaks like somebody or you think you know that personality type?
That's where you get into trouble.
You got to limit yourself to just what's been presented to you.
Do you have any evidence of this other than your kind of your intuitive hunch?
Right?
And so this is where I kind of wonder in a culture where almost everyone is making decisions based on their intuitive hunches.
Are we going to get to a place where we can't even do jury trials?
Yikes.
I think you need to send every DA a copy of your book.
I think is what you're talking about.
And most of them would, you know, keep bringing up trying to help here.
We never talk about the guest book.
I know, right?
Well, stop talking about the book.
Give me something fun to talk about.
Well, why don't we move to our subscriber portion?
And it would be 20 minutes of you pitching your book.
Yeah, we'll talk about some more evidences for God and Jesus.
No more pitching books.
How's that?
We'll promise that if we get on the other side of this break.
Yeah, let's do it.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
Watching TV shows about cops.
Stupid.
They're so stupid.
What bugs you?
Why is Colombo the most accurate depiction?
That case went to Dayline right away.
Well, now suddenly your agency is on date.
And it's like, oh, can we do another one?
This has been another edition of the Bee Weekly from the dedicated team of certified fake news journalists you can trust here at the Babylon Bee, reminding you that fake news of the people, by the people,