Welcome back everyone to the second session of our Lexio Bible study on Jesus,

where we're looking at the biblical and historical evidence for Christ.

In our first session, we looked at the modern theory of the anonymous Gospels,

and the idea that the stories about Jesus and the Gospels are kind of like a kid's game of telephone.

And we looked at the fact that there are really good reasons, just from a historical perspective,

for doubting that way of looking at the Gospels.

In particular, we looked at the internal evidence that the Gospels were in fact written by

and always were attributed to two of Jesus'

apostles, Matthew and John, who would have been eyewitnesses to Jesus, and also to companions

of apostles, Mark the companion of Peter, and Luke the companion of Paul. And in that first session,

though, we were just really kind of focusing on some of the key elements of internal evidence from the books themselves.

In this session, what I want to do is go to the next stage and look at the external evidence from ancient Christian writers known as the early church fathers.

Now, the early church fathers are fascinating to study. I don't know about you, but when I was

growing up and kind of starting to study theology and study my faith, I kind of assumed that the

only writings we had from ancient Christians were the New Testament, that that was it. We had these 27

books and then we didn't have much else until, maybe St. Augustine wrote the confessions.

And I wasn't really familiar with these ancient Christian writers from the first and second and third centuries that didn't make it into the New Testament.

Writers such as Papius of Heropolis or Justin Martyr or Ironaeus or St. Clement of Alexandria or

Tertullian, these early Christian writers who were living in the second century and who were either

disciples of the apostles themselves or disciples of people who were disciples of the apostles.

In other words, second, third, and so on generation Christians.

But these writers are very, very important for answering the question, who is Jesus,

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