Huff acknowledged Joe Rogan’s point but noted that, minutes before, the two had been discussing the miraculous origins of the universe and how a materialistic philosophy is not adequate to explain the world. “We’ve already talked about the fact that we don’t think that the only thing that exists is matter motion—we as in, you and I, right?” Huff said. “Like, we believe that there’s something else going on in this world that’s a little bit crazy.”
“There’s something else,” Rogan concurred.
“You’re right in terms of all of these ancient conventions and the ways that things were spread around, but the gospels are written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses, and they’re written in this period of time where you have groups of individuals who could have fact-checked those things,” Huff said.
“How do you fact-check someone coming back from the dead?” Rogan asked. “How many people saw his body, right?”
“Well, Paul says that 400 people saw him all at once,” said Huff, citing 1 Corinthians 15, which mentions 500 people seeing Jesus after his resurrection. Also, Huff said, the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts writes that Jesus was teaching his followers for 40 days after his resurrection.
“These are written within a time period when you have people who would have seen Jesus’ ministry, who were there, say at something like the feeding of the 5,000,” said Huff, “who could have been able to verify or debunk some of these things that are being said.”
Moreover, before they started spreading the news of Jesus’ resurrection, the disciples were “a bunch of scared guys,” Huff said. “Jesus wasn’t the only messianic figure who arose and claimed to be the Messiah. There were a number of individuals, both prior to and after Jesus, but they die, and the movement dies with them.”
“Do you think it’s possible that [Jesus] didn’t die?” Rogan asked. “And do you think it’s possible that they thought he was dead? Because that does happen.” Rogan went on to describe a man who was presumed dead and whose organs were about to be harvested, but then he came back to life.
“We know a lot about Roman crucifixion,” Huff replied. “And we know that they did their job well.” Even “very skeptical,” non-believing scholars agree that Jesus “died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate,” Huff said, “because we have, not just multiple attested documents that we refer to as the New Testament, but Roman and Greek and Jewish writers refer to that claim afterwards…and it’s mocked within earliest Christianity.”
“Crucifixion was seen as so disgusting,” said Huff, that Roman citizens were banned from being crucified. “Crucifixion was for the lowest of the low.”
Returning to the topic of whether or not Jesus could have survived his crucifixion, Huff said that Roman crucifixion was so brutal and thorough that “the chances of Jesus surviving the crucifixion, I think, are narrow to none,” much less the chances “of him appearing three days later completely fine.”
