Welcome to the Cold Case Christianity broadcast, the only Christian case making program hosted by a Cold Case Homicide Detective.

Jay Warner Wallace has been investigating cold case murders in Los Angeles County for over a decade.

His work has been featured on Fox News, Court TV, and Dateline.

For more information about Jim's work and the case for Christianity, please visit coldcasechristianity.com. Now here's your host, Jay Warner Wallace. Thanks for joining us at Cold Case Christianity. I'm Jay Warner Wallace. Today we're going to talk about an issue that I visited about a year ago, and I look back at our archives. You can see all of our shows are archived on our YouTube page.

And I think we last talked about this issue, and I showed you a short clip I'm going to show you again today about a year ago. So if you aren't caught up on our episodes, this will be new to you. But I think it's an important issue. Let me tell you why I'm going to cover it again. I got an email from a listener from a watcher of the show who said that she was teaching a Bible study on

the book of Acts and remember that I had dated the Book of Acts in a certain way and wanted to kind of

revisit that with her students and couldn't remember how he did it. She saw me at a presentation at her church.

I get a chance to go around the country and speak on these issues. And sure enough, I was in her church in

Arkansas when she saw this presentation. Now, I'm going to go ahead and review some of that with you,

but I really don't do this in order to make a case for the dating of the Book of Acts. Instead,

I've done some work trying to figure out for myself how early the Gospels were actually written. And why is that

important? It's important to me as an investigator because when I first became interested in the

gospels, I was an atheist, but I did have a skill set as a detective, and I had interviewed a lot

of eyewitnesses over the years, and it developed a strategy taken from the jury instructions

in the state of California which dictate how we are to evaluate eyewitnesses on the stand and there are

four major categories that we evaluate and one of them is simply were the witnesses really there

when they said they were because if they weren't there if? Because if they weren't there, if we can

demonstrate they weren't there, then they were disqualified altogether as witnesses. And I always

thought, well, that's going to be the problem, I think, with the Gospels. Because I'd listened to all

the kind of complaints over the years from atheists that these Gospels are written very, very late,

because we only happen to have, you know, maybe the first complete copy of the Gospels, of any particular gospel, or of the entire New Testament set of Gospels is relatively late in history. So do we think they were written that late? Or do we think we just happen to have, you know, a transmission of a document from a very early date to where we actually have full complete sets.

That was important to me. So the early dating of the Gospels was just one step in this

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