Matthew McWhorter on the Lost Knowledge Behind Scripture and the Eyewitness Case for Christianity
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There's no Christian telling me come be Christian.
There's no church telling me this is the right book.
I'm basically converting myself through my own reading of piles of books, conflicting with each other, giving me these different stories, different scriptures to read, etc.
So it is kind of a lawyer just piling, you know, pouring his way through the evidence and trying to find out what is really true.
So it's kind of a strange journey.
That's why God kept me around was just to do this.
Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, and today we've got a really great guest for you.
First-time guest joining us.
He is the author of just an extraordinary book you want to check out.
It's called Canon Crossfire, and it's about the early works of, well, what became Catholic doctrine or Christian doctrine and much more.
His name is Matthew McWhorter, and he joins us today to talk about his book and the things that we need to know about even some of the lost scriptures and the Apocrypha and the book of Enoch and so on.
So welcome, Matthew.
It's great to have you on the show today.
Thank you.
God bless.
Happy to be here.
Well, God bless you.
I'm so happy that you're here because I got into trouble with some people by asking questions about the origins of the Bible and the edits in the Bible and the lost books of the Bible and the Apocrypha and so on.
So I'm so glad to have you here to help answer some of our questions.
Can you give our audience a little bit of background of who you are and how you got into all of this?
Yeah, so let's go way back.
My mom named me Matthew Mark McWhorter.
So I am actually named after the Bible.
But my mom had gone to Catholic schools.
My grandfather had been Catholic.
And she, you know, comes out of that and she basically just hated the nuns.
So my entire childhood exposure to religion was just that my mom hated nuns, never prayed, never read the Bible, never went to church, never cared.
I, you know, was academically successful.
So I go off to the Ivy League, become a big shot lawyer, and working.
I'm in my 40s, and suddenly I have a massive heart attack and cancer right at the same time within 30 days of each other.
I'm very lucky to be alive.
But I was living a very shallow life at this point.
Life was good and easy, and I didn't put a whole lot of thought into it.
So for the first time in my life, I'm faced with my own mortality.
But because I wasn't religious, it wasn't some sort of religious epiphany.
It was simply, well, gee, the lights might go out soon.
So I better read those books that I've always wanted to read.
And that included a couple different things, like these books I was named after, Matthew, Mark, and the Bible.
But it also included, you know, cowboy western stories my grandfather had left me and I'd never bothered to read.
It was just these books were on my list.
I wanted to read them.
So I go on to Amazon and I said, you know, Bible, but let's buy a Bible.
And I discover that there are so many different Bibles.
There's a Catholic Bible, which is, you know, at least consistent on the books.
There are Protestant Bibles, which can differ on the books.
There are Orthodox Bibles and the Orthodox are completely different on which list of books they accept depending on which churches you're looking at.
So there's just a huge variety.
There's three umbrella Bibles, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestants, but even within two of those, there's many others.
Then you get into what translations you should be reading.
And then for any major denomination, there's commentaries that walk you through each line of the Bible explaining it.
And for the Catholics or the Baptists or the Lutherans, you'll find dozens of commentaries from each one of those.
And I didn't know what to buy.
So being the kind of person I am, as you can see behind me, I bought them all.
So I buy just gigantic piles of books.
I go to every bookstore I can trying to find them.
And I'm just trying to get what is the right Bible that I'm supposed to be reading that I was named after.
And that starts me on a weird journey of trying to find out what the right Bible is at the same time that I'm now reading the Bible.
So I start with Matthew chapter one.
And since I didn't know what else to do, I just read it across Matthew chapter one across every single version of the Bible that I owned.
All of these, you know, it's over 100 Protestant commentaries in the Bible alone.
Just reading all of those, and then I would move on to chapter two the next week and read right across all 100.
It took me five years to read the New Testament and find out what it said.
But you have all the different versions of it.
That's great.
And that's actually a good place to start.
It's so fascinating.
Everybody reads, you know, a lot of sentences, everybody's going to read the same, right?
But anytime there's anything to talk about, they'll see different parallels.
Yeah.
They'll look at it differently.
They'll analyze it.
It was so fascinating.
I got so interested in it.
And that's what ultimately will make me Christian in the end.
But that was part of the journey was just reading across all those and just learning so much.
So I'm so glad that you brought this context to our conversation here because I hear from sort of simple thinking people that there's one Bible and God wrote it and you should read it.
And there's only one Bible.
And I'm like, wait, no, hold on.
Wait a second.
First of all, there's what, 66 books in the commonly accepted current Christian Bible, but Protestant one.
Protestant one, right?
But then the Ethiopian Bible has, I think, 88 books in it.
Something like that.
And then you'll get very strange ones.
The Syrian don't accept all of the New Testament, for example.
Okay, right.
You know, there's a lot of them, and that's old school.
I, again, I'm just going to bookstores, right?
So Amazon.
I find cult Bibles, you know, actual true criminal cult Bibles.
I find Bibles of people who believe in reincarnation.
So they take what we would say is a full Christian Bible and they just start pointing out everywhere where they can misinterpret it, I would say, as reincarnation.
You'll find craziness out there when you start asking the question of, okay, what Bible?
Well, right.
And then the claim that God wrote the Bible, it turns out historically, that's not true at all.
It was written by men.
It was edited by the priesthood.
It was sometimes censored, rewritten by kings or the pope or the Vatican or other organizations.
And Jesus never writes a word except in the sand, and then it disappears.
We don't even know what he ever wrote.
But that's the only incident in the entire Bible where we find Jesus showing the ability to write.
So the idea, you can claim that it's divinely inspired, but that's what the crazy guy in the asylum down the street says, unless you can prove it, right?
Right.
And so that's what led you to deeper investigations into the origins of the ancient writings.
I mean, even Old Testament writings are such a critical part of this, right?
So tell us about your investigation.
Yeah.
So again, I'm, you know, I'm doing all this reading.
I'm finding Christianity fascinating.
I tell everybody it explains the universe so much better than all the psychology and philosophy and scientism stuff that I was reading.
And so I become very interested in this, but I keep asking myself, well, is this just a nice story or is it true?
And part of that is it true led me into, you know, Lee Strobel's case for Christ and all these books trying to prove that Christians have, you know, true eyewitness apostolic testimony in the gospels.
The true apostles who walked with Jesus Christ wrote these particular books, not those other books that the heretics and others were saying had been written.
These ones are the true authentic ones, and we can prove that.
And so I get very fascinated in that question.
But at the same time, I'm also asking, what is the true Bible?
And is Christianity true?
So I have two different questions at the same time.
And I start realizing that Protestants in particular are dealing with the same evidence from two different sides and telling me two completely different stories.
So when they are looking to tell me that the New Testament goes back to the true apostles, they point to a certain pile of evidence, what a lawyer would call authenticating evidence from the early church that shows that this was handed down from the true apostles.
When we go out to these other books that the Catholics accept, the Orthodox and the Orthodox accept, they're called the Catholic books because Catholics accept them, but the Orthodox also accept them.
They're just our different books that only the Orthodox accept and not the Catholics.
But these Catholic books, they say, well, that evidence is no good.
Don't rely on it.
And I'm looking at these two cases at the same time, saying, guys, that's the same evidence.
In one case, you're telling me to rely on this and base my faith in Christianity on this evidence.
And on the other one, you're telling me that evidence is no good and I shouldn't read those books.
What am I supposed to do?
It's the same evidence.
And that's the crux of my book, why it's called Canon Crossfires, looking at these two questions at the same time and looking at that same authenticating evidence.
What is it that people say that these particular books were truly taught by the actual physical apostles who walked around with Jesus?
Let's take a look at what that is and see how the case stands.
Wow.
Okay.
So that's really interesting.
And I love the fact that you have a background as an attorney because what you're talking about really is chain of custody of the evidence.
I think God kept me alive through all of the medical problems and stuff just so that I would be in this weird position of writing this book.
Because I think how weird it is for my journey.
There's no Christian telling me come be Christian.
There's no church telling me this is the right book.
I'm basically converting myself through my own reading of piles of books conflicting with each other, giving me these different stories, different scriptures to read, etc.
So it is kind of a lawyer just piling, you know, pouring his way through the evidence and trying to find out what is really true.
So it's kind of a strange journey.
And I truly, I honestly think it was kind of, that's, that's why God kept me around was just to do this.
That's yeah, that's really interesting.
And I'm glad that you're able to fulfill God's mission for you right now in doing this.
Let me give out your website too.
The website's the same name as the book.
It's canoncrossfire.com.
And of course, canon is not the weapon, canon.
It's C-A-N-O-N, canoncrossfire.com.
And let me say something slightly heretical here, but it'll be a conversation starter that's related to all this.
Throughout my life, I never needed to read the Bible to see God's hand everywhere around in life, in nature, in divine inspiration, in everyday miracles, in food, in sprouts, in seeds, in trees, etc.
It has always baffled me that people needed some book evidence to recognize the existence of our creator.
Does that make sense?
I mean, I understand the words you're saying.
Not at all what I experienced.
I was the opposite.
I didn't see God in anything, right?
I just didn't care, didn't see it, wasn't looking for it, and didn't spot it when I should have.
And it was only through the book sort of opening my mind that I then started to see it.
So there's sort of that initial open-mindedness to God that I was raised without.
And I take it, you were raised with, that sort of can change your view of it.
So to me, the book starts me on that open-minded journey, but I'm still asking, is the book true?
But I'm at least now starting to see, well, wait a minute, the explanations that I used to say of like, well, that, you know, to pick one, that people always act out of self-interest or whatever, like human beings almost never act out of self-interest.
We can barely see it when we it's staring us in the face.
You know, and another aspect, as a writer of a book on religion, I come out, you know, it's like a coming out party.
I show people that I've come out, I've read these books, I've done this.
The incredibly hateful reactions I have gotten from people just telling them, Hey, I looked into something and wrote a book and all of a sudden, like, oh my God, and where does that come from?
Right.
You know, to me, that's a sign that's the demonic, right?
I mean, well, see, I experienced the same thing too when I started asking questions about some of the origins or some of the missing books of the Bible or some of the different stories, even in our, you know, our current standard Christian Bible in the New Testament.
You're going to get different stories of what happened from, you know, different apostles, different characters.
They have different points of view of what happened, even with the crucifixion, right?
So as a lawyer, that's actually somewhat reassuring.
That's what eyewitness testimony looks like.
So a lot of people will tell you that lawyers convert more often than other professions because we recognize that that sort of discrepancy is not a reason not to believe.
It's a reason to think that people didn't make the whole story up, right?
Correct.
Right.
Exactly.
But here's one of the reactions that I've received.
Maybe you've received this and I want to run this by you.
There's, you know, you've talked about so many different interpretations, different factions and groups.
I don't know how many different Christian religions there are, you know, thousands, maybe tens of thousands across the world.
But every single one of them seems to say that if you don't follow our beliefs, you're going to hell.
So, you know, if your belief is 5% different than our belief, you're going to hell.
That never made a lot of sense to me either.
Can you talk about what are the commonalities that you believe have been confirmed that where, you know, even if we're slightly different, it doesn't mean we're going to burn in hell for eternity, things like that.
Yeah.
So I would tell you after all those commentaries, reading through all that stuff, 90% of everything that all these Christians would write, they would 100% agree on every single word.
90% of the remainder is stuff that, well, maybe he didn't say that quite the way I would, but it's good enough.
It's close enough.
So you would find 99% of these books that virtually anybody could read through them and say, wow, that's really inspirational.
That was educational.
I see things from a different perspective.
And not necessarily a denominational perspective, just somebody who went through a different life experience as you and I did.
And you see it explained by somebody else, that sort of thing.
So 99% of these books, I think any, you know, relatively mainstream Christian could read through them and love, love the books, even though it's from a complete, you know, enemy denomination.
It's the 1% that they are fighting over tooth and nail as, you know, theology and disputes, et cetera.
And everyone is convinced that they have the right answer.
If you're, and everyone's convinced that the Holy Spirit has inspired that one right answer, even though he seems to be inspiring two different answers, et cetera.
And it is, as you say, it can be kind of alarming to read what people think on two levels.
You read it, number one, that they think this is a matter that people could be going to hell over, right?
The other guy's going to go to hell because he's wrong.
Okay.
Did you read that other guy and what he said?
And, you know, have you fully thought out what he thinks and why he thinks it doesn't?
And I'm reading both of their commentaries, looking at both of them, saying, you have never read what the other guy said with an open mind and honest to see what the dispute is.
They're just, anyway, it's like you see it.
You can see how people can deceive themselves, but you can also see that there's something else working.
There is a level of demonic activity that's sort of driving people to the instant conclusion that the other guy is a fraud, that he's dishonest, that sort of thing.
I think the devil works even within the side inside the church to drive people to those sorts of attitudes.
I think you're right about that as well.
And yeah, this preoccupation with arguments over details is missing the big picture, which is to help inspire and teach people to live more moral lives and to help others and to walk closer to the alignment of what Jesus himself demonstrated and taught.
And that seems to be missing so often from these conversations.
Yeah, I mean, even the beginning of it, you know, like I would, you know, scholar X or, you know, writer X, who might be a preacher at a church, writes something and he writes it about this guy, Y.
So I don't know who Y is.
So I Google him and I see that he did 47 beautiful, wonderful things in his life.
You know, building church, feeding the poor, you know, missionary to India, blah, And here's Preacher X in the original book.
I then go back to it and he's just castigating this guy as if he's the most evil human being who ever walked the face of the earth because he wrote something the guy didn't like.
You know, like you're not even recognizing that this is a human being who did beautiful, wonderful things.
Isn't that what Christianity is about?
I mean, yeah, we have a disagreement.
We should all be working to resolve it.
But part of resolving that is being honest about who you're talking to and accepting that, you know, he may be perfect and wonderful in a thousand ways, even if you disagree with him on the thousand and one, right?
Right.
Right.
So, well, that leads me to another question, which is where, what have you noticed examples of how scripture has been deliberately, you could say, weaponized or exploited to justify wars or crimes against humanity or grave violations of what Christ taught?
Because we've seen that too throughout history.
Yeah.
And I mean, again, you can see it as you're reading, you know, and this is scholarship.
Like I'm assuming these are guys writing in their study, right?
And, you know, calmly by themselves, surrounded by books, writing some really nasty things.
And you can see how it's used.
It's the preliminary.
It's the first stage of setting off the violence that'll be done by other people because you are calling them a heretic.
You are calling them the work of the devil, et cetera, when the guy might just disagree and see things differently.
And it's just so dangerous to start down that road.
Like that, you've got to cut it off at the beginning.
You got to think about it at the very beginning and stop that wave of anger and hatred that's going to breed out of it and just say, look, let's calm down.
Let's look at these things and discuss them as two Christians rather than as Christian and heretic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's very important.
All right.
Let me ask you about some of the so-called lost books or, and I know the origins are sometimes disputed on these, but what do you know about what's called the Gospel of Thomas?
So there's two different categories of books.
So there are lost books that are Jewish books that Christians accept.
That's really what my book is devoted to.
But there are also so-called lost books that were written by Christians that aren't accepted by today's Christians.
And so then the question is, what is that?
Are those people who wrote them heretics who were claiming to be Christians?
I mentioned earlier that I go to the bookstore here in Ohio and I find books on reincarnation, for example, as Christians who believe in reincarnation.
I would say those are heretics, not in a pejorative, mean-spirited term, but that that is not representing real Christianity sense, and that maybe they're not understanding the full Bible.
There were such people in the early church.
They wrote books like the Gospel of Thomas and other books.
And, you know, some scholars and others will try to say, well, you should aggregate that with the modern Christian Bible and look at all these documents because otherwise what you're looking at is only what these mainstream Christians have told you is Christianity.
Others would say, no, mainstream Christianity was correct.
They excluded the books that were not continuing the true preaching of the apostles.
So how do you resolve that?
And you resolve that by going back and looking at the evidence from the earliest church.
What goes back to the very beginning?
What was the mainstream?
What were people saying about books before you see the Gospel of Thomas in the record?
As you see Gospel of Thomas in the record, and then after as it's starting to disappear and people are moving on from it, what is that conversation going on?
My book doesn't deal with the Gospel of Thomas.
It deals with the Old Testament books differently, but it's the same question.
What did the earliest church have to say about these things?
What did every person in the first 450 years of Christianity, 451 AD is the first schism where the churches break off?
So that's my cutoff date.
I just wanted to know, simple question.
What did everybody ever say about these extra books?
I want to read it all for myself, and then we can start talking about what's true and what's not.
But I want to know what the evidence is before we start that conversation.
What I discovered is that book didn't exist.
I went all over looking for it.
Every bookstore, every scholar, every religious preacher I could find.
None of them had ever seen such a book.
All thought it was a great idea, but nobody had done the work.
I did the work.
I went out and I found every single time that every single early Christian ever talked about these extra books.
I want to know what they say.
That's what my book is.
It lays it out for people.
And then you have judgments to make.
Were these books heretical or were these books part of the mainstream Christianity taught by the apostles?
My own conclusion is that they were taught by the apostles.
And it's the same evidence that authenticates them as for the rest of the New Testament and Old Testament.
But I leave that to the reader.
The question for me is, you know, if you're going to, if we're going to make a decision as to whether the books were mainstream or outside the mainstream, that's the evidence you got to know.
And no one would show me all the evidence.
What I would find, even the very best of scholarship on this, you'll find the best Protestant book giving you a handful of quotes that support the Protestant side and a handful of on the Catholics, the best book that they have will give you a handful of quotes for the Catholic side.
As a judge, the judge would tell the lawyers to roll up your sleeves, go find me all the evidence so I can look at it.
That's what I did.
I found the evidence.
I've assembled it for people.
I show you how I determined what all the evidence is, where I found it.
You can go double check everything I wrote.
No one has to take my word for it.
It's basically just my book report of that research I did for my own decision.
Wow.
Wow.
That seems really important and it can save the reader a lot of time.
Oh, a hundred, hundred times.
If you wanted to redo all of this yourself, you could do it in 1% of the time I did, because I'll show you where to go get it.
Wow.
Okay.
That's the key.
The book is called Canon Crossfire, and the website also is Canon Crossfire.
And our guest is Matthew McCorder.
And so here's, I'd like you to answer this question, which is that there's a natural tendency among throughout history of every institution to protect itself.
And throughout history, also every institution has engaged in censorship and rewriting of history in order to do that.
And this is true among governments.
It's true among modern, quote, science.
So science protects its own narratives by rejecting anything that challenges mainstream science.
I believe it's clear that's also true through the history of organized religion, you know, the Catholic Church, the Vatican, other groups as well, that they have also worked to concentrate power into their institutions.
And that could be one of the reasons why they dismiss some of these older writings, because they lead to more decentralized expressions of spiritual reality.
Do you agree or disagree with that?
It's okay either way.
What are your comments on what I just said?
I mean, conceptually, absolutely.
And, you know, I mean, in arguable, it's happened from time to time.
The question is, where are we now with all the, you know, you go through all of the scholarship that's been done, all of the finds in the desert, all the times that they find scraps of paper in monasteries, et cetera.
What is all that evidence to tell me whether what we now have is that censored version that came through history or an altered version through history or the true original version that's been preserved through history?
What am I looking at?
And that was, again, was part of my quest was I wanted to know what everyone said in the early church so I could look at it and understand that to know whether these books, which are big pieces of that, are authentically part of it or not.
There's a second inquiry as to whether you're talking about individual lines of scripture, right?
You know, there's pieces of books that, you know, notably the story of Jesus and the fallen woman, the woman in adultery, that may be, have been added to the book of John, I think it's, or Mark, I'm forgetting which one it's in, but it's in one of the gospels, but it's it's was added, it was placed there.
It's a question of whether or not it should be separate or in a separate book or whatnot.
So it's a question, it's known to have been placed there, but is it an authentic original story that was placed there by somebody later because they had to put it somewhere in this collection of books that becomes the Bible?
Or is it an inauthentic piece that is added there?
You know, that's a question you've got to look at.
All of that, again, it's all the what a lawyer would call the authenticating evidence.
What tells you what is true and goes back in authentic and goes back to the actual physical people?
And what is just something that somebody made up later?
You will find scholars all over the world telling you that the Bible entirely came later.
Bart Ehrman is one of them.
And, you know, I discuss his theories a little bit in my book as well.
But it's like the counter to that is this authenticating evidence.
That's what you've got to go look at and determine for yourself whether or not you think the authenticating evidence is on the side of the Bible you've been handed.
Otherwise, as you say, it might not be.
You don't know.
Well, I've also learned to distrust some of the translations that I'm curious about maybe examples that you've encountered of obvious mistranslations from original Hebrew or Aramaic or even Latin and more New Testament writings, etc.
I mean, we read it in English and I hate to break it to the audience, but Jesus Christ never spoke English because the language did not exist.
And I got hate for saying that one time.
Wow.
I mean, like, you're off by centuries, people, if you think Jesus was walking around speaking English, you're off by centuries.
So, you know, learn something.
You're off by millennia.
Well, I mean, you could say early English, right?
But I found people have zero knowledge about these subjects, but yet they pontificate on them as if they're experts.
They think Jesus spoke English.
No, come on.
You know, that would, we talked a little bit, I think, offline, but that would bother me less if it was just attacking me because you think I'm of, you know, you didn't do the research to find that out, but they're actually attacking you for going in and looking at it, you know?
Right, right.
Simple question.
Did Jesus teach English?
No.
Here we go.
And they're mad at you for some reason.
Right.
But back to my original question.
What about these translations?
Because sometimes I think, yeah, go ahead.
I was just going to say, I find this question.
I've gotten this question a number of times from people.
And I find it kind of strange given how I did this reading because I found crazy translations of true cults, right?
Like, you know, where the guy is just, frankly, just lying his teeth, lying through his teeth, telling you the Bible said something that totally didn't, but pretending as if he has translated the Bible for his cult members.
Oh, wow.
So I find that stuff, it's like these disputes are generally, I find, fairly minor because I saw that other stuff.
Other people think of them as extreme.
And then, but I also say, you know, I'm a book guy.
So you read the King James Version.
That's a 400-year-old version of English.
So you almost have to translate the English.
True, that's the King James.
You know, like it's, it's language just does not stay the same and can become very inconvenient and hard to understand, etc.
I mostly understand the decisions that go into the English translations.
I don't agree with them all, but I at least understand the decisions by them.
So I'm somewhat more ambivalent than I find other people are about the stuff where they get kind of judgmental about a particular translation.
But like, you know, you can, they didn't use punctuation.
They didn't necessarily break things down by, you know, even there are passages of the Bible that are very difficult to read because they're using the word he said, then he said, then he said, then he said.
Well, the one he is Jesus and the other, he is the guy Jesus is talking to, but they just use the word he throughout.
So it's like it's hard to know whether even Jesus is talking to the other guy.
Like there's a lot of thinking and deciding that has to go into that.
But as you say, I'm somewhat non-judgmental about that.
I'm accepting of translations that I don't really like.
I use the King James Version throughout my book, not because I agree with it, but just because that's the main English language version that people know of.
But I still think that people who don't realize how much goes into translation and don't examine that and see the differences and see how it works out just don't appreciate that the version you're reading is only one person or one committee's view of how you should look at those ancient words, which are not the words you're reading.
Very, very good point.
Or even just a group of scribes who agreed on a way to streamline something.
And in fact, I'd like to set a larger context and get your response on this because it's just like I said, Jesus did not speak English.
He also did not have Wi-Fi.
And what in our world today, everybody is so used to the idea that all information is available easily, instantly, globally at the speed of light, that it's, if you don't really think about it, it's incomprehensible that knowledge was barely, it was hanging on by a thread for millennia.
And before the Gutenberg press, it was scribes.
It was scribes copying, hand copying books.
Can you talk to us about the scarcity of knowledge that existed up until frankly recent times?
Yeah, so just a couple of things as you're talking about.
Number one, the Bible was hand copied, but it was hand copied.
You know, when you look into the evidence, it was hand-copied with care.
Of course.
Yes.
It is amazingly well copied.
So there's more certainty about the original language of the Bible than there is for any other book in the Western world.
But as you say, that depended on individuals in the clutch doing the right thing and copying it correctly.
That was totally an individual exercise of passing it down.
As a book person, I find that kind of fulfilling that maybe that's what we're all doing here is we're all just trying to preserve a tiny little seed of knowledge for the next generation, even though we're swimming in a sea of misinformation online, et cetera.
But if we can preserve the seed, maybe that will help.
But when you talk about the knowledge and what was there and what wasn't, that actually relates to my inquiry, because what you'll find, I had these hundred Protestant Bible commentaries, and you will find Protestant scholars, not Catholic scholars, not Orthodox scholars, not biased people, Protestant scholars saying, well, this particular sentence is a reference to one of these extra books that the Catholics accept, but are not found in the Protestant Bible.
And they'll say, well, that's just a reference.
That's just an illusion.
You know, that doesn't really mean anything.
Don't focus on that.
But wait a minute.
That means that a very expensive book was possessed by whoever is doing the referencing.
That's the evangelist.
Possibly possessed by Jesus because he might be the one speaking in the reference and is somehow known by all of these Jews in the audience listening to the preaching going on.
Otherwise, why is he referencing it?
He's referencing it because they already know what he's talking about.
And how would they know what they're talking about?
Well, it turns out that they get their scriptures read aloud on their one holy day.
I mean, these people didn't work 40-hour weeks.
They're peasants working every minute of their lives.
There's only one time of the week that they would get anything read to them.
That's when something's being read.
It just makes the idea that these references are minor and not important sort of stand out to you.
And then, you know, that was one thing I was thinking of as you were speaking.
But a third one is the importance of preserving this knowledge of dealing with the limited knowledge at the time and preserving that knowledge for future generations is something we sort of take for granted.
That everybody involved was so careful to preserve what was originally spoken and pass it on.
And they took that obligation seriously and did it truthfully is something we just sort of, like I said, take for granted.
You actually have to kind of prove that, right?
Were these people fact-based people who were focused on what is true or not?
Were they just passing on a story?
Are they passing on a fantasy, et cetera?
That's another piece of what, you know, when you're trying to look back at what was going on and what is true, you have to consider that and see whether the evidence bears that out.
In the case of religion and Christianity, I think it does bear it out.
But, you know, certainly people were passing on folklore and other stories that they didn't care were, you know, whether they were really true or not.
This is a circumstance where they did care.
We can see that in the evidence.
But then we should also see whether they took the same care with these extra books.
Well, I'm really glad you mentioned the heritage of spoken word, because of course, throughout most of human history, that has been exactly how knowledge was passed on through stories, spoken word.
And of course, those stories then are molded over time.
They get accentuated in certain ways, additional details, et cetera.
But it's very important.
And that goes to the very fundamental question of whether Christianity is one consistent story told from the beginning or is it an embellished story?
And the modern scholarship by atheistic scholars would tell you that it was an embellished story.
So that is what the case for Christ is fighting against.
Oh, that's interesting.
Okay, well, but I wanted to ask you about, I think, a bigger, a global question, because we have so many different religions and different indigenous populations throughout human history, including Native Americans and Aborigines in Australia, et cetera.
And each group always has its own stories of divinity.
And they often have common threads in them.
They don't always, I mean, they're not mirrors of the story of Jesus and the crucifixion and the, and, you know, rising from the dead and so on.
But they, they share a lot of other very common things.
Have you at all studied how your work compares to other global writings or religious narratives?
Yeah, absolutely.
And it includes, I was just reminded of something I did five years ago when I was doing this research.
But there is a crazy book that I have on comparing the narrative in Genesis to the narrative of the Polynesia of a certain island group in Polynesia and their beliefs and going down line by line and noting the similarities and differences.
But you find similarities that can sometimes give you some comfort in terms of how humans have always pursued these questions.
But you have the question I think you're asking, which is, how do I know that this one is true and this one is false?
And part of a huge part of that claim for Christianity is that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, that that sort of validates and authenticates the Christian story as the true one.
Paul himself, I forgot, I think it might be 1 Corinthians, that he wrote that, you know, if Jesus Christ is not written, risen from the dead, then we of all men are most to be pitied.
The Bible itself tells us that the fundamental key to preaching and showing that Christianity is true is the resurrection.
And as I was saying, when I was back, I was a skeptic.
So as a skeptic wondering if this is true, I was reading these books saying, well, it is true because Jesus rose from the dead.
You know, the case for Christ, the case for the resurrection of Jesus, that's what the books are all called.
That's what they're all focusing on.
Jesus is risen from the dead.
I noticed, well, you know, you have some proof for this, but that proof is entirely relying on these gospels as eyewitness testimony.
And the question is, what authenticates them and shows me that those are true, authentic apostolic accounts from the actual individuals who walked with Jesus.
That ultimately is the early church, which says these are the documents passed down to us by the apostles and we're passing them down to future generations.
That is the same evidence that I find those exact same early Christians saying the exact same things about these extra books.
That's where this canon crossfire comes from and where I start wondering, like, what is the explanation as to why, you know, you're saying Christianity versus some other, you know, completely different religion.
I'm saying even within Christianity, what distinguishes the gospels from these extra books, given that the same authentication evidence is used, you know, is available to both, but only cited in the case for Christ for some of them.
These other ones have the same evidence.
And if you don't accept them, well, then that makes me, you know, your case doesn't work.
You admit that those books don't have enough evidence.
So then you can't prove that your books are authentic when you just said that that amount of evidence doesn't prove it.
Interesting.
You're talking about consistency.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And it's consistency of proof.
So as a lawyer, you know, you can believe anything you want.
Your job, though, is to convince somebody else.
So the case for Christ is basically these scholars acting as lawyers, right?
They're saying I could show and prove a neutral judge that the resurrection occurred.
And I'm saying, actually, if you had a skeptical opponent who knew all the evidence that I cover in my book, I don't think you could.
Well, because I mean, yeah, because it's inconsistent, but go on.
Yeah, so about that point, and I'm not someone who disbelieves the resurrection, but there was no direct witness there at the moment.
Like, you know, when he opened the tomb and got up and walked out, you know, it's just like later on, oh, the tomb's empty, you know.
There was no one there at that moment, right?
That's not even claimed.
No.
And, you know, there's other problems.
I mean, if you're a skeptic, there's lots of things you would be pointing out to, pointing to.
There are things that the, you know, believers, and as I say, I include myself, will cite against that.
You know, as you say, they were seen later.
They're, you know, all sorts of things.
You know, I was born.
I don't know if you weren't there, but you would believe I was born, right?
Because you're seeing me later.
It's okay.
Right.
You know, it's all right to believe it.
There's reasons why you should still believe it, even though people didn't see it.
And, you know, the two sides present their case, and then they both rest, right?
And you find out what the judge will opine at the end of it.
But it is crucial to be honest about what the evidence is.
And as you say, it's amazing that people who haven't thought through this case from start to finish can sometimes get very dishonest about what is evidence or not.
I'm always amazed as a lawyer how many times people are sitting there telling me there is no evidence for something in the Bible.
The Bible is the evidence.
We have the written record.
That is the evidence.
You are believing contrary to the evidence, which is okay.
I don't believe in leprechauns despite eyewitness testimony for leprechauns, right?
You know, but you've got to recognize that the evidence is on the side of Christianity.
In the case for Christ, the evidence belongs to us.
As long as we can authenticate it, we show that the evidence is on our side.
It's just important that people be consistent, be honest, be thoughtful about how this stuff is argued.
Well, I completely agree with what you've just described there.
And I love the fact that you've gone to such great lengths to systematically look at this chain of evidence to help authenticate this historical record.
Let me give out your book name again.
It's Canon Crossfire.
And that's also the name of your website, canoncrossfire.com.
But I'd like to add that of all the practicing Christians today, my impression and my experience is that very few, extremely few, ever actually attempt to authenticate any of their beliefs.
For most of them, it's simply a matter of, quote, faith, which means I'm just going to choose to believe whatever without having any understanding of where that came from or whether it's true or not.
It's just convenient because that's what everybody else in my church believes, period.
And that's where they stop.
And frankly, I don't respect that.
Of the, you know, I've done dozens and dozens of interviews now, and 99% of the hosts who disagree with me will ultimately say, well, I don't believe that because I believe scripture.
And you're like, well, I'm trying to argue over what is scripture.
You just say, I don't believe that because of scripture.
Like, that doesn't make any sense.
Like you said, it's, I think people, we just live in a society where people have not learned.
You know, earlier you were talking about how things were passed down as stories, et cetera.
People had better memories in the past.
They actually trained their memories.
They used thinking techniques, thoughtful techniques to remember things in a way that we don't bother with.
They would remember a speech.
We've forgotten whatever was said at the last state of the union because if we ever need to know, we'll go Google it, right?
It'll be out there if we ever want it.
They would memorize it in a way we didn't.
It's very similar.
You know, people nowadays don't think from the ground up and they don't go all the way back to brass tacks and build the case up.
So as you say, I mean, I mean, so few Christians, even the Christians who agree with me, have not have almost, you know, universally not looked into this question all the way back to the beginning and done it.
They're glad that I did.
They like that I ended up with their conclusion, but their conclusion was arrived at without investigating.
It is really amazing.
I think it's an epidemic in our society that we're in danger of losing the truth because people don't focus on what is true and proving it.
But that's what you just said is true in every area of life for most people.
And, you know, our neurology forces us to take shortcuts because we don't have time.
And you have to decide what's worth the effort, right?
Yeah, exactly.
You have to decide what issues are important.
This is your immortal soul for all eternity.
What could be more important?
It might be a priority.
Yeah.
But people take mental shortcuts in every area, but there are cues that they follow.
For example, they follow authority or perceptions of authority.
They think that, for example, if the government says this, it must be true, or at least actually fewer and fewer people believe that today.
The government says it must be a lie.
Actually, I think it's more common now.
But they say that you're thinking politics.
I'm thinking as a lawyer, and I am amazed that anytime somebody is accused by a prosecutor, everyone agrees that he's guilty.
Like, excuse me, that is not proof at all.
But anyway, yeah, yeah, no, exactly.
In the court of law, right?
There has to be actual, there's, there's due process, as we say.
There is a process by which truth is supposed to be uncovered, or at least a predisposition to truth in the minds of the jury, right?
If it's a, if it's a jury trial.
But this process, you know, as a lawyer, you're very familiar with this process.
How do you authenticate documents?
How are witnesses authenticated, et cetera?
But the average person in society today has very little familiarity with that process.
And so they can't apply it to other areas.
Yeah.
And to be honest, I see it all the time when these books and evidence are being discussed, but people will say, well, a father said this, like a father named Irenaeus said that the four gospels are authentic.
Okay, good for Irenaeus.
Did you also know that he said this about the book of Baruch?
They only know what he said.
They don't know what else he said, but how that could relate to his credibility.
Another example, people will quote a father named Athanasius and say, well, he didn't like these extra books that the Catholics accept.
He put them in a third category of kind of scripture, but kind of not.
Okay, he wrote that sentence.
Is that the only thing the man ever said?
Was he consistent about it?
When he says this third category, is that identical to the third category that we're talking about?
And it isn't.
On the example of Baruch, he accepted Baruch.
You know, what did his predecessors say?
You know, he's saying that this came down to him from the apostles, but we actually know who his predecessors were.
What did they say?
What did his peers across the empire say at the same time?
What do his successors say?
These are all basic, simple questions that a lawyer would want to know the answers to in order to establish somebody's credibility in a court case.
And here I was reading this stuff and people are like, well, just Athanasius said it.
So therefore, that's it.
And I'm like, no, I want to know what everybody said.
So that's where my research came in is exactly that.
People are way too accepting of these handful of things that someone cherry picks from the fathers to prove a case.
What you really want to know is what everyone said, understand that, and then look at their arguments, and you'll realize that one side's arguments are going to fall apart, right?
That's interesting.
So do you believe that your book then helps further dignify and strengthen belief in the truth of mainstream narratives of Christianity?
Totally for myself.
You know, this is, look, this book is the research I did for myself.
All I am doing is giving people a book report for them to use from thereafter.
But it is for my own views.
If you want me to accept that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, you've got to prove it.
And I think it can be proved.
Show a problem with the case and how it could one way that it could be solved.
I leave it to the reader.
There may be other ways to solve the problem of this conflict in the evidence, but the simplest, easiest way to is to accept all the books and say, Well, then, okay, this problem goes away.
But there may be other ways to solve it.
I leave that to the reader.
But to me, you have to prove it first.
And if you can't prove it, then I'm not going to believe it.
As much as I would like to believe it, because of the philosophical type of theological insights of Christianity, or that I feel that it speaks to me, I worry that that's just deluding yourself.
So, to me, I need the proof.
I wanted to look at it.
It absolutely, this is my spiritual journey laid out for other people to see for themselves.
And as I say, it's my book report of the evidence that I researched.
So, if you've never researched it, but want to know what it is, I'm giving it to you.
You can read my narrative as I walk you through it.
I call it jury exhibits.
It's how I would walk a jury through the evidence.
You can read the evidence for yourself because I hand it to you, or you can go to the third level and double-check every single thing I said by going back to the original sources.
And I show you where to go find them and how to do that.
So, okay, I've got a question for you then.
And I'm going to reference the Old Testament.
Some of the interventionism of the Lord in the Old Testament, for example, in Exodus, the hand of the Lord was very active in that time.
And I think a person might realistically wonder: why is God's hand not active in our world right now in the sense of intervening in wars or being concerned with relatively small groups of people, a few hundred people, or some of the scenes that involved Moses and where the Lord would open up the earth and swallow people to punish them for not being faithful or for not having the right incense or something?
We don't see that kind of activism, like God's activism in the world physically around us today, as far as we can tell.
What would you say to somebody who brought that up?
Where did God go compared to where he was in the Old Testament?
So, it's fascinating because these different denominations have different answers, right?
You know, is it possible that there are things like that occurring and you're not noticing them?
Is one answer.
You know, certainly the Catholics would tell you this movement of the sun at Fatima and other things.
Maybe he is active.
You know, I know people who claim to have been miraculously healed.
You know, I've met them myself and talked to them, et cetera.
Like, you know, maybe there is some.
Some people believe that.
Others don't believe that's going on.
But in general, you would find the general Christian story is that God was more active with a select group of people early on in the Old Testament.
He then becomes active as man, as Jesus, at the time of Christ, and then he is active as the Holy Spirit in a more diffuse manner across all of the human race.
So, less of the individual hand of God interfering in Judea and more of the Holy Spirit acting throughout.
And of course, as I say, other denominations like the Catholic Church would say the mystical body of Christ is the church itself.
But that is one of the mysteries of creation: well, first off, is there a creation?
How does God engage with that creation?
And has that changed over time?
And you'll find different answers.
You know, there are people who believe that there are no modern miracles.
There are some who do believe in miracles.
I personally, you know, on a personal level, once I open my mind to God, I see his interactions far more numerous and frequently than I ever imagined.
You know, I didn't believe in any of them.
And now I say, gee, there's a lot of odd things going on.
I now see it.
So I'm more of the view that he is active in the world, just in a different way.
Well, I agree with that view, as I said early on.
And also in my 20s, my life was saved by a voice, an angelic voice in my head that told me to avoid a certain area.
And then an ice-covered tree crashed down just as I would have been under it.
And so I personally experienced an angelic saving of my life.
So for me, that leaves no question.
But for others.
I have something almost, you know, we just come from different backgrounds.
I have something almost similar.
And yet I find myself, you know, once a month, I'll be in a phase of doubting.
And then I suddenly remember that incident.
And I'm like, what, you idiot?
Why are you doubting?
Right.
Well, and I think it's also there's a posture of spiritual openness that has to be present for people to maybe to receive divine inspiration or instruction or 100%.
Right.
So if you're completely closed off to that, you're going to think God doesn't exist because maybe in your world, there is no influence from God because you're just not able to receive that information.
In any case, we're almost out of time here, but Matthew, any final thoughts?
Because this has been a really fascinating discussion.
I've loved it.
But anything you want to end with here?
Just a note that, you know, I wrote this book actually for Protestants.
Every Protestant who's read my book has loved it.
Don't let the title or anything about it bother you.
It is a book about scripture.
It is a question of what is scripture.
How do we prove it?
I walk you through the evidence.
And at that point, you make your own decision.
But the point is that no one had assembled this evidence.
That's why I did this work.
That's why I'm presenting it today.
Wow.
So I hope people like it.
Well, that's really great.
I mean, thank you so much for doing this, Matthew, and also for joining us today, taking time.
And I've really enjoyed our discussion.
Thank you for being open to some of my questions.
The website, folks, again, is canoncrossfire.com.
That's C-A-N-O-N in the scriptural context.
And then the book also of the same name, Canon Crossfire, by Matthew McCorder.
So thank you so much, Matthew.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you today.
Thank you.
God bless.
God bless.
Take care now.
All right.
Thank all of you for watching.
I hope you've enjoyed this interview.
Fascinating subject.
I really love talking with intelligent people who have done a lot of research and to help us understand who we are, where we came from, what's our role or mission in this world.
This is all really important information.
So check out the book for yourself.
And thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams here at Brighteon.com.
Take care.
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