Behind the Scenes with Craig Keener (The People, Books, and Events that Shaped His Life)

all right friends you are in for a treat we are here with one of the leading new testament scholars of our day written a ton of books commentaries on the historical jesus on biblical books written a fascinating two volume set on miracles multi-volume commentary on the book of acts but today we're going to have one of what we call our behind-the-scenes interviews i've got some questions for for dr keener and if we have time we'll take a bunch here uh from you as well about his life about the books that influenced him about his marriage we're gonna hear some untold stories from dr craig keener so first off dr kinder i really appreciate you coming on the show it's it's my privilege to be with you well you're too kind and i'd love to start with your story to faith because i think it's fascinating and interesting love to have you tell the audience how you went from being an atheist to a believer yeah yeah that that was that was marvelous it was totally unmerited on my part i i thought christians were uh it sounds awful to say but i thought christians were stupid and i made fun of them but there were some questions i didn't make fun of because i knew they were actually serious about their faith but it looked to me like you know i just kind of dismissed them as anomalies instead like 80 of the people in this country claim to be christian but they don't live like it makes a difference if i really believe there was a god that made me i would give god everything wow it doesn't look like they're serious so why should i why should i take them seriously but then um you know the stakes are kind of high i did i didn't know about pascal's wager yet but but i did understand that the stakes were kind of high because if i was wrong i mean forever is a long time so even if it's just a one or two percent chance i didn't want to stake all that on you know what if if i'm i i wasn't sure that i was right 100 sure and plus i was exploring a lot of different religions and philosophies just reading about them but one day a couple guys dressed in uh you know black suits and uh white white shirts and ties and very very conservative uh walked up to me on the street and they were out preaching they were fundamental baptists and they asked me if i knew where i was going to go when i died well that was rather a concern to me but i made a joke out of it they said that probably either heaven or hell because i assumed they were probably christians and that's what christians believe but they didn't laugh they started saying well you know you know how you can go to heaven rather than hell and so i you know i ended up arguing with him for about 45 minutes but you know i was trying to be respectful because they seemed to be serious about what they were saying but finally i said look you guys can you show me i mean you're just giving me stuff from the bible that says how to be made right with god can you give me any other evidence and when i saw that they weren't going to give me any other evidence i said okay i have a question for you where did the dinosaur bones come from okay you ask a stupid question you get a stupid answer they weren't paleontologists and neither were they trained in apologetics they said the devil put them there to deceive us wow and okay but these were the only people who are out witnessing you know so god works through whoever i mean they were they were the ones who were obedient in terms of sharing the faith i mean there are others i mean i suppose if i showed up at the church i'd hear but anyway i said okay you guys i'll see you later that was that was it for me i started walking off and they said basically you're hardening your heart against god and it will become harder and harder until you become incapable of repentance now a year later i did track them down wow and they they said we thought you were one guy who'd never get saved but that afternoon as i was walking home i was so convicted by the holy spirit wow i wanted a different kind of evidence but he gave me the evidence of his presence and it was so overwhelming by the time i got to to my room i was just so overwhelmed with the presence of god it was like how are you going to tell god that you don't believe in him when he's right there it was overwhelming i never experienced anything like that before and finally you know my knees buckled up from under me i cried out god okay i don't understand they said that jesus died for me and rose from the dead and that makes me right with you i don't understand how that works so god if you want to make me right with you i'll believe it if that's what you're saying but if you want to make me right with you you're going to have to do it yourself and all of a sudden i felt something rushing through my body like it never felt before i jumped up so fast i was like what just happened nothing just came inside of me was that god or christians also they believe in gargoyles maybe it was gargoyle i didn't know anything about christianity really uh not much i mean i treated the trinity and cargills but so i figured okay well i always said that if i ever believed there was a god i would i'd give my life to him so i guess it better and if i want to be a christian i'd better find out what that entails so i found a pocket new testament back then gideons were allowed to give those out in school and yeah i couldn't it took me a while to find it but once i found it i you know dusted it off and started at the beginning and and a couple days later i walked into a church figuring that all these christians they they've been right all along and they know something that i didn't i was scared though that they could look at me and tell that i've been an atheist so long and they really looked down on me but they they didn't have all the superpowers i thought that they would [Laughter] some may have had certain gifts but they they didn't they didn't tell me go away you used to be an atheist that was good so you said school were you in high school junior high how old were you at yeah i was 15. um you were okay yeah but if i i know i know people think uh he was 15. he wasn't he wasn't a very convinced atheist of 15 but they don't know like the backstory of all that and uh i mean i was reading plato at 13 and actually plato was one of the ones who started getting my attention to question my atheism because i know you had a like a 12 year old on a while ago so i i did yeah i think who can think ahead of their usual age range but yeah but plato got me thinking about questions of life after death and even though he didn't really answer the question satisfactorily he asked some some of the right questions i i think i've been an atheist at least since nine i remember at nine wow i'm asking if i believed in life after death uh or maybe i asked her anyway i didn't believe in it and um my mother was an agnostic at that point so at nine years old an atheist 15 years old you became a believer how did that change the trajectory of your life like were you what were you planning on doing at that stage and how did you decide that you wanted to become a professor and a writer well the career change didn't come right away i wanted to be an astrophysicist oh wow nothing wrong with i mean it's great to be an astrophysicist to ross for example is a great astrophysicist um i i i knew that was one place you could look for truth and i wanted truth and yeah god has revealed himself in nature and there is truth to be found there it just wouldn't have saved me but you know i started reading the bible i developed a hunger for a scripture the little kids in sunday school they knew more about the bible than that i did that you know they've been pleased with it or were being raised with it i should say you know i i didn't know anything um but i found out if you read 40 chapters of the bible a day you can get through the new testament once a week or through the bible once a month wow so quickly i started you know trying to catch up with those kids started immersing myself in the bible and somewhat some of it of course i didn't understand and some of it i misunderstood i had i've studied greek mythology a lot and okay we i studied ancient mediterranean ancient or eastern cultures things like that everything except except the bible you know from from antiquity you know that that part of the world from antiquity so sometimes i i mean i i was reading plato into romans eight that was that was bad you come up with gnosticism if you do that um on the other hand i was reading ovid's metamorphosis into acts chapter 14 and actually that probably was the right background for that but then i was reading a greek the greek mythology of dupilian and pyrrha into the flood story in genesis 6 through 9 and thinking oh no they borrowed this from the greeks not knowing rick's story uh it's actually much closer to the babylonian story or whatever but anyway uh and plus you know if if there was going to be a flood you'd think that maybe a few different cultures descended from there would remember it but anyway i was uh yeah i had a lot of growing to do but um the bible was the place to look yeah so so you were 15 your mom's agnostic you became a christian what happened when you told your family when you told your mom what was the response to that well my my parents you know we didn't really discuss religion they weren't they weren't against religion they they wanted everybody to have their own choice what they believe but um i was kind of radical for jesus and so they thought it was an occult because i mean it was a complete change you know it wasn't like just read an article in the encyclopedia about determinism and come out and said i'm a determinist or some of the other things i went through were a few days later i'd be exploring something else this was like complete change and direction in my life uh no i don't want to freak freak people out i left out a part of the story these are going to freak people out too much if i uh i haven't told you which thing i'm thinking about right do it please i want to hear now i'm curious just just so you all know sean is not responsible for this he didn't know dance [Laughter] that sunday and everybody was nice to me and they invited me back for the evening service and so that night i went i went back for the evening service and the pastor the people went forward for prayer afterwards and i really didn't know what prayer was supposed to look like i thought you're supposed to close your hands and roll your head you know so i was looking around trying to see how you're supposed to do it and the pastor tapped me on the shoulder i told him that morning that i'd become a christian and he said are you sure that you were saved and i said i don't know i don't know if i did it right and so the pastor led me in you know the traditional sinner's prayer you know on the way as he was leading me there was like so what happens to people before jesus came what happens to people who never heard heard the gospel you know asking all these questions that are you know people debate that hard hard questions and he said we'll deal with that later let's deal with this first so he led me in that and i felt the same overwhelming presence of god i felt two days before and all i could do this time i didn't try to cut it off all i could do was just in awe of god's greatness all i could do was just thank him and praise him but i knew i didn't i didn't know the words adequately it would be worthy of him and so you know you know i i was like god you have to give me the words even to praise you and and he knows lots of languages that started coming out in another language that went on for like a couple hours i think it was wow wow and just i experienced a joy i'd never experienced before now again i know this is not what happens to everybody sure to me is just such a seminal event in my life existentially i didn't know there was a biblical name for that experience and i know not everybody believes in it that's why i'm saying don't blame sean he's not the one let me ask you this if this makes sense you know my father was setting out to disprove christianity wasn't an atheist but was an agnostic and the experience he said that made it he knew it was true was not the evidence it was when he went to his father and unplanned just said dad i love you and i forgive you and it like spontaneously came out of them that's when he goes holy cow it's real god has changed my life is that what it was for you it wasn't so much the evidence was it that experience that just solidified it like i know this is real or am i reading something into your experience i met jesus that was that was what changed my life totally i wanted influence but i didn't know where to look for it and it was actually a pastor of a different church that was near the high school i i stopped at different churches i i talked to pastors i learned from learn from them from a lot of different christian traditions and this pastor with me a book called evidence that demands a verdict are you serious oh my goodness i mean there were there were other other books too that one was really helpful because evidence i really i still had a lot of questions left over um often they say with conversions from a sociological perspective you kind of get socialized into it through relationships well that didn't happen to me mine was sudden and i and i had a lot of questions that still needed to be answered now i was answering them from uh you know at a different starting point now but i still and and there were some people who like they didn't believe you were supposed to ask those kind of questions but i could only suppress them so long sure even reading the bible it raised questions to me because you know the first time reading through the gospels you know i read matthew it's fine everything's great i read mark wait a minute this happened before jesus got crucified and rose again at the end of matthew how often is this going to happen they said okay this is the word of god so i'm thinking i'm thinking quran like word of god like it has to be dictated it wasn't understanding that god inspired the different authors and so you have multiple gospels coming at the same events from different angles and so you get a like a 3d more of a 3d picture 4d pic or whatever so a lot of the stuff i'm doing now actually responds to some of the seminal questions i had starting off as a as a new christian wow with no background almost no christian background whatsoever um i say almost because i did know people who were christians and i you know again i'd heard of the trinity i heard jesus died sure and those things like that so craig given that you had such a dramatic experience have you had seasons of doubt in your life like maybe when you went to duke seminary and probably learned a lot of stuff that challenged you have there been seasons of doubt you've wrestled through sure um actually duke wasn't wasn't as much as some of the other ones and early on i struggled um i found i found evidence but i didn't know enough yet and so i kept uh kept searching but but the relationship with god really helped me because i found i could bring the questions again i could ask him questions and he would he would actually give me answers he would you know if i wanted to know what about this he would he would bring to my mind something in scripture and um and sometimes i'd ask him questions when maybe the answer was more abstract or something but he would he would give me answers and initially i threw out all the stuff i'd had before because i said it had led me a strength so i threw out greek philosophy i threw it definitely throughout greek mythology but eventually i saw some of it as helpful for understanding that the context in which the new testament was written and yeah and so how they contextualized for their audience and i still needed the jewish background but um but i mean even now there'll be seasons where i'll think of something or think of an objection i'll think okay well what what's a good answer for that and i'll pray and the the lord will lead me to a good answer so wow not always instantly sometimes but i think we often don't understand how much we think our mind and our emotions are completely separate compartments but they really there's really a lot of overlap i think a lot of neuroscience has shown just how integrated a lot of our circuits that's not the right way to put it you know some of the things that didn't make sense to me didn't make sense to me because of the view i was starting with sure once you accept a worldview the christian worldview actually made sense of a whole lot of things that i couldn't make sense of before i had i had platonic idealism on one side i had empiricism on the other uh pure pure pure naturalistic you know uh just matter nothing else on the one side and i thought that that could explain the the universe but it couldn't explain myself my own consciousness as a sentient being so i went to plato for that but you know never the twain shall meet they there was no way to reconcile them from a christian worldview where you have an infinite god who who made us in his image oh it makes sense even before i was a christian i got to the place where i said you know immortality would be great that plato talks about but we are finite and and you know he talked about you know the pre-existence of the soul but i i couldn't see that and so with us being finite it seemed like the only way we could ever have eternal life back when i spoke of immortality the only way we could ever have that would be if an eternal and infinite being cared about us enough to give it to us and why would that being care about us i mean if if there was an infinite being he'd have to be infinitely loving oh that would be the best of all worlds guess what he is he is definitely loving wow oh i love that thanks for opening up about about your story there's so many things here i did not know so uh those of you who just chimed in we are here with uh dr craig hener one of the leading new testament scholars of our day and we're just exploring the people and books that have shaped his life and his background story so you are married you have a unique marriage you are white and your wife is black i've never met your wife but we live in such racialized times right now two questions the first one is just can you tell us how did you meet your wife and then second i'd love to know in just kind of the cultural moment we're in given the uniqueness of your marriage is there something you would want the church to know that maybe we could do better in terms of race relations the way jesus wants us to so let's start with how how you met your wife uh this book uh talks about it that's trevos on the cover except i had hair back then even on the top of my head anyway um i was doing my phd at duke at that point and the in in new testament and medin was an exchange student from congo in central africa and we both met through university christian fellowship they were starting a graduate chapter we were both involved with the undergrads too but we but also the graduate chapter and she was quite lovely but i wasn't really up for a relationship at that point i was still smarting from some wounds from earlier and so um but we got to be really good friends and i'd share christ with somebody and and they'd say oh medina musunga told me the same thing i'm like okay she's fired up for jesus she's witnessing to people which is how i got saved so i value it very highly but i i think we participate in international bible study together and so forth well she went back to france to finish her phd there she she had just been in the us for years she was doing her dissertation in african american history so i helped her to the country and study americans and in the long run she got one but uh she she went back she finished her doctorate we kept in touch writing each other i was always happy to hear from her and i was praying that god would give her a good husband and she was praying that god would give me a good wife she went back to congo in the midst of a civil war and she uh the civil war that was going on when she got there eventually ended but then some years later she was caught up in another civil war wow the last letter i got from her before she couldn't send me any more letters it said pray for me i know you pray for me anyway but please pray for me now my cousin was just shot dead my father and my brother just narrowly missed being shot dead wow we've been told that the troops that are gathering outside the city have orders to start killing the educated people first and she said i don't know if i'm gonna live or die by the time the letter reached me because it somebody had to take it out of the country and mail it to me by the time the letter reached me her town had been burned down and i didn't know she was alive or dead so you know sometimes i'm slow at making decisions i had been fond of her before but and and we had actually discussed our interest by a letter before but um anyway i i i was like lord if i had not been so slow what if i had married her she wouldn't be going through this but she'd be panicking about a little bit anyway but i felt like the lord said to my heart that he knew how much i cared about her she was one of my closest friends knew how much i cared about her and he would do what was best for gloria what was best for me and i felt like also he said that someday we would minister together um no i i assumed that that was what she told me before that if i ever came to her country she'd translate for me in french so i mean i didn't i didn't get any big ideas from that but um i was praying for frantically and you know meanwhile she and her family were fleeing in the forest any given time one of them was close to death with sickness um sleeping out you know malaria that was huge because they had no protection from the mosquitoes she would often be walking like 10 miles through snake infested swamps and fields of army ants she'd have to pick them off her body the ants not the not the snakes just just to get food for the family it was a horrendous situation water was contaminated everything anyway so 18 months later she finally is able to emerge from the forest after the war and were finally able to reunite and we decided not to um not to be so slow about making our minds we're old enough to be married by this point so yeah we we got married and it's been pretty wonderful wow that's that's an amazing story those of you just listening to this uh dr craig keane has written it in his book impossible love the story with his wife i've read a lot of your books have not read that one now i'm super intrigued but let me ask you she's from congo you said you're from the states in our time right now where there's so much racial tension is there just any thoughts or reflections or insights you would speak into the church from your unique experience yeah you know when i before we before we got together in fact even before we were friends i i was part of an african-american group on duke's campus and then i i was ordained in an african-american church and at the time i was like boy it'd be great if the bible really spoke directly to racial reconciliation but i think it doesn't but once i started really grappling with it it was like it's all over the place i mean in the new testament it wasn't black and white that wasn't the issue in the ancient mediterranean world but jewish gentile that was an issue and and that was a barrier that god himself established so if he would someone is just about that how much more would he some of this just every other barrier in history in human experience and so you know i started you know preaching and teaching from that but you know you see also how he's made us all one body in christ it hurts it hurts jesus the same way it would hurt us if you know we have part of our body being ripped off it hurts jesus when we're divided and if we love jesus we want to to look for unity with one another unity doesn't mean we have to agree on everything unity does mean that we love one another so much that whether we agree or not we're going to listen to one another and learn from one another we don't really have the right even to say we disagree until we've heard the other's perspective and i learned so much when i became part of this african-american church this was in north carolina you know where i was where i was a duke okay in the in the late 80s uh early 90s so it was you know it was it was after the civil rights movement so we we had already come some distance but i thought you know well civil rights movement must have taken care of everything but then i'm hanging around my african-american friends and they start talking with each other about you know somebody called them an n-word that day and somebody did this to them that day and i'm like is this real this is really still going on wow and i and i asked my friend arthur after everybody else had left the room arthur this doesn't happen often does it so he told me about his first college level english class where the teacher after class called him aside and he was the only one left in the room with her said you're not going to pass this class and if you tell anybody i told you this it would be your word against mine so you just need to drop the course it was the first day of class he was the only african-american student in the class wow that blew my mind and so sometimes we don't you know when we say we disagree we don't know people's experience unless we hear them and the the same epistemology in a sense that i need to use as a scholar i need to i need to get everything on the table listen to it evaluate it and hopefully do so charitably i don't have to agree with everything but i should at least be charitable we can at least do that with our brothers and sisters in christ and we can't really listen to them if they can't trust us enough to share their hearts with us because we don't have a relationship so we need to be open to building those relationships and we need to be swift to hear slow to speak and certainly slow to anger that's that's beautiful thank you for for speaking that that's that's well said before i asked you about the people that have most influenced your life and you're like i don't even know where to start so obviously there's going to be a ton of people through different stages in your life but tell us about maybe just one or two people at any season in your life that had a real just kind of stamp and influence on who you are sure if i start with my early christian life my seminal christian life even that might be a lot of people but um my my pastor back then he was a gracious and humble man i didn't know how much to appreciate it at that point because i didn't really have that much to compare that with but he was he put up with a lot from me but he would he would often take me you know when he would do hospital visitation and so on it's kind of mentoring me and he didn't have all the answers for all my questions but he was he was gracious i remember at one point i had a major theological change i shouldn't say major but you know initially i thought okay i just need to believe what my church teaches me because i don't know anything but as i'm reading the bible sometimes i come up with some stuff that doesn't quite fit what i was taught and so this was one of my i dutifully learned all the all the memory verses for this one particular doctrine it's it's not a cardinal cardinal doctrine even for that denomination but but it was one that many people held very dearly in terms of a particular eschatological view and so you know that revolutionized me because i said i need to go back to the to the bible and search everything for myself that was good but you know my pastor he didn't hold that view but he was he was like okay well i had a said i had a professor in bible college who held that view you know it's a it's a it's a respectable christian view there was a guest evangelist who took me aside spent the whole afternoon trying to talk me out of it wow giving all these verse references and with every reference you give i i just go through the context and i say but look look at the context it doesn't mean that he got so frustrated he finally said you need to believe this all the men of god believe this jimmy swaggart jim baker they believe this this was this was the seventh wow oh yeah so you're right i need to believe that but then when i visited another church and heard that nobody until 1830 believed that and like phew i guess i could just believe what the bible says so um but um but my pastor was very gracious very patient and then um actually another person i mean a lot of my undergrad professors influenced me and of course my graduate professors and so on and i could name a bunch of them right now i hate to leave any of them out but if i'm going to leave some out i'll just leave all of them out except one okay everybody knows he was my mentor benny aker was one of my undergrad professors and he's not well he hasn't published very much but the impact he had on his students was tremendous there was a kind of a divide in our bible college between the people who wanted to be spiritual and the people who wanted to be academic you know so the spiritual people would pray a lot and the academic people would study the bible a lot what kind of divide is that that's so silly but anyway why can't you be both so but having having said that i i i was trying to be on the spiritual side but uh but i i would feel the holy spirit speaking to me touching me in these academic courses i mean in in second year greek with benny yaker feel the spirit as we were studying greek grammar of galatians and like wow okay well and as i would be praying and trying to listen to god's voice and i'd be asking him something i feel like he showed me something in prayer a week later an acre would say that in his romance class i'm like so you can hear god's voice in prayer and you can hear god's voice in exegesis now you you all think this is crazy because here's this nothing scholar but i'm telling you about my seminal experiences that helped propel me towards being a new testament scholar and and and he's the one who really opened up the world of new testament scholarship for me i mean he said oh there are hundreds of hundreds of articles uh being published every year on biblical studies i'm like wow i didn't know that i thought we just had the bible and and then there were um i also found that some of the things that i found reading the bible some of the people who held those views were scholars and like okay so you can be a scholar and be faithful to the bible you i i know this all sounds so stupid but from where it does and where i was coming from i didn't i didn't know that so it was yeah those things were were very seminal influences in my life and ben aker integrated devotion to jesus and uh exegetical skill and working with backgrounds and so on initially i didn't think we we should use background because i thought if you once you admit that you need background to understand the bible you will have to uh well you'll say you didn't understand it well enough before you used it eventually i realized that's kind of like saying that once you admit that greek and hebrew will help you understand the bible better you're taking the bible out of people's hands by saying they need greek and hebrew no you you understand it more you can understand it better i mean there's things i still don't understand plenty of things and still understand i'm still learning every day so you know but when i was reading 40 chapters a day eventually it strikes me here are things that that say paul takes for granted that his audience knows but i don't know it makes sense some of them i knew because because i previously studied greco-roman world i've read tacitus since gone as a kid but um i read homer but homer didn't help as much as tacitus did but when um you know when i finally realized and it was good for me to realize it because i really felt conflicted about not greeting people to holy kiss and things like that so once i started realizing the value of background i was like okay well let me get one book that will help me understand the background and then i'll just use that along with the bible and i can go out and preach and i didn't find such a book and so i you know just started getting hunger for the background and you know read the talmud read uh of course josephus and pseudopica and all sorts of other things because i really needed the jewish background in particular at that point and then later would read cicero and seneca and so forth get the epitidus and finally you know by the time i'm finishing my my doctorate at duke i'm like this is unrealistic to expect everybody to do all this before they go out and preach what i wanted at the beginning was just one book so that's why i wrote the background commentary yep the new testament volume and happily somebody else wrote the old testament volume because otherwise i would have to go and another phd that would have been hard sure well the first time i met you years ago you sent me your commentary in matthew and your biblical backgrounds book and i've used both extensively you sent me your commentary on john i've used that i'm currently going through your galatians right now looking forward to first peter coming out uh read a lot of your different works so let me ask you this do you have a favorite book of the bible or favorite story in the bible that just resonates with you or you just love the whole thing i love the whole thing i i guess you know revelation is one of my favorite books acts is one of my favorite books right now i'm writing a commentary on mark and right now mark is my okay because it's okay it's a long time to finish but um it's going to be as detailed i think as the acts commentary the four volume not the not the they have a one volume one with cambridge yep but uh this one's for the icc series but i love i love all of it i love exodus i love it it's just where do you where do you stop some parts of it i understand better than others sure right outside of the bible what what books most influenced you by christians ancient books plato whatever it is maybe just one or two or three books that jumped your mind that just really influenced your thinking or your life at whatever stage you you want to mention plato plato was more as a kid uh probably epictetus i like stoics better than plato as a christian but in in my in my early life george ladd was really influential in georgia so his theology of the new testament was really a a major but even even some of his other works were game changers for me i mean i loved yura mia's uh i loved some of the other scholarship i was reading at that time but but lad i could identify with him he was solidly evangelical and he was he was a really good scholar biblical scholar and he was honest i mean he tried he he went with what he found even if it got into trouble with a lot of people he just had a passion for for god's word and for i guess slicing it accurately and there there were others richard longnecker um robert gundry um gordon fee because i was in pentecostal circles at that point well i i had been for a while at that point and and gordon fee was the like the scholar we could look up to especially who was pentecostal you know he emphasized gifts of the spirit and he he was a really good scholar ff bruce of course had influence a lot of the the major uh evangelical scholars of that time i hoard marshall uh but but george loud was the one who oh wow influenced me the most at that point very interesting now now this is going to be somewhat of a a loaded question and what i mean by that is you've written a ton of books a ton of commentaries that have held sold hundreds of thousands maybe more had a huge influence what are the ways that you try to just keep yourself focused and humble amidst that influence and not lose track of who god has called you to be and what he's called you to do well when i don't keep myself humble there's plenty of things to humble me so my wife she can scrap me up well i mean not physically she doesn't stop you know and the lord certainly i mean you know and when i read the bible i mean it confronts me with things i need to to grow in well if you if you ask the person who's influenced me the most i want to say jesus but then i'm scared people will say well you've got a long way to go to be like jesus but i mean if you know where i was before and how far the lord has brought me uh of course he is the biggest influence but i'm still learning i still have yeah there's plenty to keep me humble and yeah when i'm working on a big project with what i'm working on now it's going to take me years to finish this wow i keep looking at it every day but that that can help keep you humble too when you you look at the people on the front lines and you know i i have some friends who are planting churches and a previously unevangelized region and god is doing just such remarkable things through them so many thousands of people have come to christ god is is doing miracles there to get people's attention for the gospel you know and here i am sitting in front of the computer most of the day you know or or i can take a break from that to read offline it's easier on my eyes easier on my back and so on the near side so i'm always leaning over the computer and yeah there's plenty to play to keep me humble now were you asking about my uh what i have to do to get my work done in terms of my scholarly schedule i i would love to ask you about that that was on my list i don't i mean i don't know how you possibly keep coming out with commentaries in books every six months like what's just give us an inside glimpse of of how this happens i'm not sure if it's every six months but uh and then some of them like the the one going in max commentary it's it's easier i mean it was painful i had to cut 90 percent of the big acts commentary yeah but it's it's at least i already had the research done i just had to trim it was but then for some things back around 1980 which is probably before a lot of my students were born it's kind of embarrassing but around 1980 when i was a sophomore or thereabouts for my greek three paper that's when i started collecting my research on index cards uh oh like i wasn't planning to show them but like wow like you know i have a uh how do i do this hold it kind of right in front of your face if you can yeah yeah then we can see it there you go so um so just collecting it thinking okay this will be useful for sermons this will be useful for you know future papers if i if i write anymore because at the time i was planning to go to bible college two years and then just go out and preach the word had other plans for me ben aker's example actually was one reason because i saw that he was impacting so many future pastors and that i could really fulfill my calling more accurately i skipped my calling but i could uh in terms of recounting it but i could i could fulfill that more fully actually as a as a teacher of pastors and now a teacher of doctoral students as well as pastors and um so i i just started collecting those and initially i had you know maybe i think i had like 109 footnotes in that in that paper uh it's the first time i got an a from ben aker he really hit the standard high you know but then i went to um well i just kept taking notes and just this passion to get more and more background so by the time i finished my doctorate i had seventy thousand index cards wow eventually it was a hundred thousand index cards by the time i finally realized because when i started we didn't have personal computers we didn't have mac computers and so i i couldn't do that and i couldn't afford one all the way through my doctoral work until like well until after my last paper i finally had one in time for my my dissertation wow but that made a huge difference and so eventually i stopped taking the notes on index cards and would just type straight into the computer but gotcha for a few years i was just doing it anyway so i've got what 40 years of research now that i can build on so whenever i'm writing a new you know commentary on a different book of the bible well i've already researched background i've already filed a lot of that background in in the verses for which i thought it would be relevant because you know i would hang stuff kind of in my mind on okay which verses would this be relevant for so what i have to do then is just catch up on the most recent scholarship and work my way through this again i mean i've already worked my way through all the texts in in the new testament for sure in greek and have had already read earlier commentaries but now trying to catch up on the more recent ones and and i have to catch up on the recent ones because now i have friends writing commentaries and really embarrassing when i realized oops i forgot to uh i forgot to read their their commentary i can't read everything though it's too much today yeah that's for sure do you use something like logos bible software now rick mccleary was asking that question i should there's a lot of stuff available on there i i use accordance but that's that's what i've been using since i i first got bible software uh and and it's it's very good for my needs but logos is also very good so recommend either one would you tell us a little bit of what you're working on right now i know you've got this first peter commentary coming out i believe this summer then you mention a book on miracles in the fall so tell us a little bit about about both of those if you don't mind first peter was interesting because uh the the archbishop of canterbury uh periodically calls a lambeth conference and they they have uh well anyway the the current archbishop justin wilby was going to do i think it's going to be this summer the lambuth conference for the anglican church on first peter and so um a scholar that he works with invited a bunch of us scholars to come together at lambda palace to discuss first peter and i had a whole lot of background already on first peter i just wasn't up on more recent commentaries so i collected the background i spent about a week pulling that together for my files my electronic files because it was already typed in by that point not everything is and just circulated but then you know after that that conference uh of the scholars i thought there were anglican scholars and uh i'm i'm not anglican but i was happy to be privileged to be invited so i started uh thinking well you know what i've already got this stuff organized now i might as well just go ahead and write a commentary and i just asked my publisher if they they'd like it they said yeah so i went ahead and and did that the the miracles book but well i i mean i had to catch up on that on the reading i'm sorry i sure i cut back and forth i'm actually adhd which makes the miracle that i actually can concentrate long enough to write books but that's a habit now so but also uh with the with the miracles book i i had realized you know people would talk about my miracles book and i'd read claims on the internet both by supporters and detractors that made it clear to me that they hadn't actually read the book and didn't even know it was precisely arguing sometimes yep so uh you know but it's 1100 pages so i thought you know i really needed to write a shorter one sooner or later and the um carl henry center had a a grant where each year they're doing something related to science and um and faith and anyway i got i got the grant to to go to uh trinity international university or semester and my my project was to do an another miracles book that would be more readable for more people so it wouldn't concentrate as much on philosophy or religion which philosophy of religion philosophy of science some of that was the stuff that was hardest for me and doctor philosophy doesn't mean literally you have a lot of training in philosophy sure um but then there were other parts of the book that were really fun and parts that i thought people would really enjoy so i i made certain parts shorter i reused certain parts but for the most part probably 70 percent of the material was new oh since then yeah and once i wrote the book there were more people who were willing to give me medical documentation for their healings and wow which you know before i was just going with the people i knew i didn't know where to look or people that i interviewed and and so on but yeah i have i think a stronger stronger case and some atheists didn't like the tone of the previous book and why but um but i i mean okay former atheist i can understand why it wouldn't sound right to certain people so i'm hoping the newer one will be more friendly to a larger number of readers just they understand up front i'm a christian but here's what i think is good evidence and it's up to them but they what they think but i think it's pretty compelling well i am totally looking forward to that book because we chatted beforehand your book's coming out in october on miracles philosopher jp moreland who we teach together biola has a book on miracles coming out in november so this is a really good sign well we will have you on if you want to come back i would love to talk about that get into the research help spread the word so as many people as possible skeptics and christians alike will pick that up craig i've got a ton more questions for you but you've been super generous with your time really really appreciate you coming on and want to encourage folks i've been reading your commentary on galatians i read the book of galatians it's six chapters not 40. just been reading it each morning all the way through and then i just kind of work through some of the the sections in your book and just thoroughly enjoying it so so grateful for your research your discipline uh all the work you're putting out just really grateful for that and for you coming on and sharing your story has has been awesome those of you still with us uh make sure you hit subscribe we've got some other behind-the-scenes interviews coming up wayne grudem is going to come on soon interestingly enough and we've got some other topics carl truman coming on to talk about his book the rise and triumph of the modern self which is one of the best books i've personally read in probably six months and a whole bunch of other topics so make sure you hit subscribe and if you've ever thought about studying apologetics come study with us at biola may be interesting for you to create craig to know we are fully distanced now in our apologetics program so that's a pretty neat uh neat thing we didn't have before or if you're watching this one i want a little more apologetics training not really for masters we actually have a certificate program where we will kind of guide you through some good lectures and just simple lessons to be certified there's a discount below so last thing tomorrow actually going to do a live q a with my father at 11 a.m pacific standard time i roped him out i was like dad let's do a live mcdowell q a so we're going to bring on two generations do our best to answer your questions that's 11 o'clock make sure you join us if you're available uh craig hang on i just want to say thanks but really appreciate you coming on and everybody thanks for joining us hopefully we'll see you tomorrow at 11 o'clock

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 4,863

Rating: 4.9619045 out of 5

Keywords: craig keener, new testament, commentary, story, life, testimony, ministry, faith, atheist

Id: s3iq3jCDza0

Length: 58min 50sec (3530 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021