126 | You’ve Optimized Everything… Except This

Patrick: Welcome back to the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast. This past weekend, millions of people around the world celebrated Easter. Maybe you went to church, maybe you heard the story. Maybe you’ve heard it your whole life. But for most people, it stays in the category of tradition. Something we acknowledge without ever really examining.
Patrick: And at the center of Easter is a claim that if true changes everything. Not symbolically, not emotionally, but factually. So today we’re going to step out of tradition and into investigation. We’re going to look at the historical data behind the resurrection of Jesus. And by the end, you’ll be left with one question you can’t avoid.
Patrick: If it’s true, what do you do with it? And the reason this matters is because this isn’t just a historical question, it’s a personal one. You’ve optimized almost everything in your life, your business, your investments, your health. Your calendar, your network, your AI agents, you measure, you track, you refine, you make decisions based on data.
Patrick: You don’t leave the important things to chance. But here’s one [00:01:00] area that even the most disciplined, high performing people tend to leave unexamined. Not because it’s unimportant, but because it feels uncomfortable and not urgent. We have more pressing things to get to, and that’s the question of what is actually true.
Patrick: Not what is useful, not what’s practical, not what helps you cope or perform, but what is true? Because if something is true, it has implications whether we like it or not. And today I want to take you into a question that if you follow it all the way through, leads you to a place where you can’t stay neutral.
Patrick: The question is this, what do we actually do with the resurrection of Jesus? Now before you tune out and assume this is going to be some religious conversation, let’s think about it differently. What if we approach this the same way you would approach a business decision, an investment in acquisition, or any major life decision?
Patrick: Not based on emotion, not based on tradition, but based on evidence. Because here’s the reality. If the resurrection of Jesus did not happen, [00:02:00] Christianity collapses completely, not weakens, not becomes less relevant, it totally collapses. But if it did happen, then it’s the most important event in human history and it’s not even close.
Patrick: So what I want to do today is simple. Let’s treat this like an investigation. Let’s look at the data and we can ask what we actually know. And then let’s follow the conclusion wherever it leads. Because at the end of this, you may not like the implications, but you at least know whether you’ve actually examined it.
Patrick: Now, when you begin to look at this, something surprising happens. You don’t start with a group of people who were confident, bold, and expecting a resurrection. You start with the exact opposite. You start with a group of men and women who were afraid. They were confused, they were completely defeated.
Patrick: Their leader had just been executed, one of the most brutal ways, imaginable, crucifixion. Now the word excruciating is derived from the Latin, excruciating meaning out of the cross or from the cross. [00:03:00] So this wasn’t a great way to die. It was a terrible way to die, and Jesus is crucified.
Patrick: And with that, everything they thought was going to happen was over. These were not men and women positioning themselves to launch a movement. They were hiding, they were scattered. Peter, one of the closest to Jesus denied even knowing him. This is how the movement begins, and then something happened. And this is where the data starts to get very difficult to ignore because within a very short period of time, these same men and women became completely different.
Patrick: They became bold. They became out in the public, proclaiming this good news. They were unwavering. They began to proclaim, not that Jesus was a great teacher, but that he had risen from the dead. And they didn’t just say it in safe environments, they said it in the same cities where he was executed. In front of the same authorities who had the power to kill them, and many of them were killed not for believing something helpful, but for claiming something specific that they had [00:04:00] seen him alive.
Patrick: Now, people will die for things they believe are true. That’s not new. But people will not, and do not willingly suffer and die for something they know is false. And these were. The people in the position to know, and it wasn’t just them. You have James. James was the brother of Jesus, who during Jesus’ life did not believe in him.
Patrick: And yet after the crucifixion becomes a leader in the early church, what explains that shift? Then you have Paul, not a follower, not someone on the fence, a direct opponent actively persecuting and killing Christians. And then suddenly he becomes one of the most influential voices in spreading the very message he was trying to destroy.
Patrick: So now you’re left with a question. What explains that level of transformation? Not in one person, but across multiple people, across different backgrounds with different motivations. Something happened and whatever it was, it was powerful enough to take fear and turn it [00:05:00] into conviction to take opposition and turn it into belief.
Patrick: That was Paul’s story, and to take a moment and a movement that should have died with its leader and ignite it instead. So before we even talk about theology, before we talk about belief, we have to deal with what caused these people to go from hiding and scared to, in most cases, dying for what they believed.
Patrick: What explains it? So now we have a real question on the table. Something happened that transformed these people. But before we jump to conclusions, we need to ask a more foundational question. Can we even trust the documents that are telling us this story? Because if the documents aren’t reliable, then none of this is matters.
Patrick: So let’s treat them the same way historians treat any ancient text. When historians evaluate ancient documents, they typically look at three things. How many copies do we have? How close are those copies to the original events, and how consistent are they with each other? [00:06:00] Now, here’s where this gets interesting.
Patrick: The New Testament documents, the ones that record the life, death, and claimed resurrection of Jesus. They’re not weak in this area. They’re overwhelmingly strong. We have over 5,000 Greek. Manuscripts and over 20,000 when you include the other languages. And many of these date remarkably close to the original events within decades, not centuries.
Patrick: Now let’s compare that to other ancient works that no one questions take. Homer’s Iliad, roughly 1800 manuscripts, uh, exist and the gap between the original and our earliest copies is much larger. Or we’ve got Aristotle. In some cases you’re dealing with fewer than a hundred manuscripts and again, a much wider gap in time.
Patrick: And yet no one is sitting around questioning where their Aristotle wrote, what we say he wrote. So the point isn’t that more manuscripts automatically make something true. The point is this, if we’re going to dismiss the New Testament documents is unreliable. We’d have to throw out most of ancient history with it.[00:07:00]
Patrick: So at a minimum, we can say we have a reliable record of what the earliest witnesses are claiming. Now, that doesn’t prove the resurrection, but it does mean we have to take the claim seriously. So now let’s move to the next issue. Did Jesus actually die? Because if he didn’t die, then there is no resurrection to explain, and this is where things get very specific.
Patrick: Jesus was executed by Roman crucifixion, and the Romans were not amateurs. They were experts in execution and their reputation depended on it. Crucifixion was designed not just to kill, but to ensure death slowly. Publicly definitively and to cause shame. And before Jesus was even taken to the cross, he was flogged.
Patrick: And this wasn’t a symbolic punishment. Roman flogging was brutal. It involved a whip embedded with pieces of bone and metal designed to tear into the skin and exposed the muscle and tissue underneath. Now, many men didn’t survive the flogging alone. By the time someone reached the cross, they were already in a state of extreme trauma, severe blood loss, [00:08:00] and most cases shock.
Patrick: Uh, not to mention the, the physical exhaustion going through all that. So if you wanna see the brutality of the flogging, check out the movie, the Passion of The Christ by Mel Gibson. Uh, in the Bible, it gives us one line. That he was flogged. In this movie, you get a very clear description, uh, very clear on what it looks like, and it’s, it’s really hard to watch, but it gives you a real sense of what the process was like.
Patrick: So when we talk about crucifixion, we’re not talking about a man going to the cross in stable condition. We’re talking about someone who had already been pushed to the edge of death. Before the cruise conviction even began, and then comes the cross itself. It’s a form of execution that led to death through a combination of blood loss, shock, and ultimately asphyxiation.
Patrick: And the gospel accounts described something very particular that after Jesus had died, a Roman soldier pierced aside with a spear, and what came out of him was described as blood and water. Now for a long time, people debated what that meant until a [00:09:00] modern medical analysis stepped in. In fact, an article published by the Journal of American Medical Association, a peer reviewed medical journal, examined this exact detail and concluded that what was described as consistent with fluids separating around the heart and lungs, a clear indicator that Jesus was already dead, not unconscious, not barely alive, but dead.
Patrick: And when you combine that with the brutality of the flogging and the certainty of Roman crucifixion, the conclusion becomes very difficult to avoid. Jesus did not survive the cross. So now we have our next issue. He died, which means any explanation of what happened next has to account for a dead man.
Patrick: Now, let’s add another piece. The tomb, according to the accounts, Jesus was buried in a known tomb, and very quickly that tomb was reported to be empty. Now, this is important because the resurrection was not being preached in some distant place, far removed from the events that were happening. It was being proclaimed in the same region, in the same city where anyone could go and [00:10:00] check, and yet nobody was ever produced, not by the followers of Jesus, not by his opponents.
Patrick: And if there was a body. It would’ve ended the movement immediately. Now, there’s another detail here that often gets overlooked. The first witnesses to the early tomb, they were women. And in cultural context, women were not considered reliable legal witnesses. So if you’re going to fabricate a story, this is not how you would write it.
Patrick: You would choose witnesses that strengthen your case, not weaken it. And yet that’s what we have here, which suggests we’re not looking at a carefully constructed legend. But an account of what people actually said happened and when we have one more key piece, verily very early eyewitnesses claim. In the book of First Corinthians, there was a passage that scholars widely agree is in early creed, something that was being repeated and circulated very shortly after.
Patrick: After the events themselves. Not hundreds of years later, but within years. And in that creed, it says Jesus appeared to Peter [00:11:00] to the 12 to more than 500 people at once, to James and then to Paul. Now whether someone believes those appearances happened or not, that’s a separate question. But historically what we can say is this, very early on, large numbers of people were claiming that they had seen him alive.
Patrick: So now step back for a moment. We’ve built a set of issues we’ve had to deal with. We have a reliable record of what was claimed, a confirmed death by crucifixion, an empty tomb, and multiple early claims of eyewitness encounters. And we still have the transformation of the people that were scared and scattered that we started with.
Patrick: So now the question becomes unavoidable. What explanation can account for all of that? What explains it? So now we’re at the point where we have to deal with the explanations because something happened and whatever explanation we land on has to account for all of the data, not just part of it. One possibility is that [00:12:00] the body was taken, that somehow the tomb was empty because someone removed the body.
Patrick: But if that were the case, who took it? If it was the followers of Jesus, and remember the tomb is being guarded by Roman soldiers, then we’re saying that these same men who were afraid, hiding, and S scattered suddenly became willing to suffer, to be imprisoned and in many cases die for something they knew was fabricated.
Patrick: That’s not impossible, but it’s not how people behave. People may lie for gain. They may lie to protect themselves, but they do not willingly endure suffering and death for something they know is false with no upside. And if it wasn’t them, then, was it the authorities? Because they had the motive to stop this movement, and if they had the body, all they had to do was produce it publicly.
Patrick: One time the Romans could have stomped all of this and the entire movement ends, but they didn’t. So then maybe it wasn’t the body that was taken. Maybe the experiences were real to them, but [00:13:00] not actually real. Maybe they were seeing things, maybe grief, shock, trauma caused them to believe they had seen Jesus.
Patrick: But that runs into a different set of problems. ’cause now you’re not dealing with one person. You’re dealing with groups, multiple people at different times in different places. And at one point, even a claim of more than 500 people at once and hallucinations don’t work that way.
Patrick: Hallucinations are individual. They don’t synchronize across groups. They don’t produce shared consistent experiences. They don’t explain an empty tomb. Now you’re trying to hold two things at once, an empty tomb and a series of coordinated, repeated experiences across different people, and that explanation starts to break down.
Patrick: Or maybe over time the story just grew. It was exaggerated, it developed, turned into something. It wasn’t, but that also runs into a problem because the claims we’re talking about don’t emerge hundreds of years later. They show up early, very early within the lifetime of the people who were there. Which means if these claims weren’t true, there were plenty of people who could have said so.[00:14:00]
Patrick: They could have corrected it, they could have shut it down, and yet, instead, the movement grows. So every direction you turn, you can explain a piece of it. But not all of it. You, you can’t explain an empty tomb, but not the transformation of the people that were the disciples who went from scared and scattered to martyrs.
Patrick: You can explain the transformation of one or two crazy people, but not the entire early widespread claims. You can explain belief, but not the willingness to suffer for something known to be false. And at some point you’re left with a decision. And we are going to keep reaching for explanations that partially work, but fail to account for the whole picture.
Patrick: Or are we going to ask a different question? What explanation actually makes sense of all of it? Because there is one, one explanation that accounts for the empty tomb. Accounts for the eyewitness claims accounts for the transformation of the disciples from scared and scattered to boldly [00:15:00] proclaiming what they saw.
Patrick: It accounts for the rapid growth of the early movement. And it’s the explanation that the earliest witnesses themselves gave that Jesus who was crucified was seen alive again. So if we step back and we look at this, the way we would evaluate anything else that matters, we have a set of data points, a real historical figure executed by crucifixion, a tomb that was reported empty in the same place the events occurred.
Patrick: Multiple early claims from individuals and groups. That they saw him alive and a level of transformation that turned fear into conviction and opposition from somebody like Paul into belief. And we’ve walked through the alternatives. Each one can explain a piece, but none of them can carry the full weight of the evidence.
Patrick: So the question isn’t, can I find an explanation? The question is what explanation best accounts for all of it? And when you look at it that way, the [00:16:00] answer the. The earliest witnesses gave is not only possible, it’s coherent that Jesus who was crucified, was alive again. Now at this point, you don’t have to like that conclusion.
Patrick: You don’t have to even accept it, but you do have to deal with it because if it’s true, it changes the category of this conversation completely. This is no longer about religion. It’s no longer about preference. It’s no longer about what works best for your life. It becomes a question of truth. And truth demands a response because if Jesus rose from the dead, then his claims carry weight not as cool ideas, but as authority, which means you’re no longer in a position to casually evaluate him the way you would a business idea or a philosophy or a strategy.
Patrick: You’re in a position where you have to decide, is this true? And if it is, what do I do with it? ’cause there are really only two options. You can accept it and align your life with it or you can reject it. But what you can’t do [00:17:00] is ignore it. Not if you’ve actually looked at it. And for a lot of people, that’s the uncomfortable part.
Patrick: ’cause it’s one thing to never examine the question. It’s another thing entirely to see the weight of the evidence and realize that staying neutral isn’t actually neutral. It’s a decision. So wherever you land, just make sure it’s an informed decision, not one based on assumptions, not one, based on what you’ve always heard.
Patrick: Not one that’s comfortable, but one that’s based on actually asking the question, is it true? And if it is, what does that mean for me? And if you’re listening to this or watching it and you find yourself convicted or even just unsettled in a way you can’t ignore that, don’t leave this as an idea, respond to it.
Patrick: That response doesn’t have to be complicated. It starts with something as simple and honest as this. Acknowledging that if this is true, then Jesus is who he claimed to be and choosing to turn toward him and [00:18:00] to trust him and to follow him. Now you can do that right where you are.
Patrick: There’s no script. There’s no performance. There’s no magic words. You have to say. It’s just honesty. Something like this. Jesus, if this is true, I believe, help me understand. Help me to follow you, and if that’s a step you take, don’t do it alone. Lean into it. Open the gospel. Start with John. Show up at church on Sunday.
Patrick: Seeking the truth, continue asking questions because this isn’t the end of an investigation. It’s the beginning of something entirely new. So thank you so much for tuning into this episode, the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast. I hope you found real value in this message, whether you are trying to figure out who this Jesus thing is, um, what it means, or if you’ve believed for a long time, if you’ve made it this far, you’ve done something.
Patrick: Most people never do. You’ve actually examined the question. So now the only thing left is your response. If this episode challenged you, share it with someone who thinks the way you do. Uh, someone who [00:19:00] values evidence, someone who asks hard questions. And if you’re continuing to explore this, again, start with the Gospel of John.
Patrick: Don’t take my word for it. Go to the source. We also have a weekly Bible study where we spend time looking at what it means to follow Jesus. It’s every Tuesday at 11:30 AM central. We can add you to the calendar invite. If you can make it, that’s great. It’s a zoom. You can sit there with your video off and never not say a word.
Patrick: If you want to just check it out. Uh, if you wanna talk more about any of this or get added to that Zoom invite, uh, just email me atPatrick@vitalwealth.com. If you didn’t enjoy this episode, I’d encourage you to share it with anyone who could benefit. And remember, you’re a vital entrepreneur. You’re vital because you’re the backbone of our economy.
Patrick: Creating opportunities, driving growth and making an impact. You’re vital to your family creating abundance in every aspect of life, and you’re vital to me because you’re committed to growing your wealth, leading with purpose, and creating something truly great. Thank you for being a part of this incredible community of vital entrepreneurs.
Patrick: I appreciate you. Look forward to having you back here next week on the Vital [00:20:00] Wealth Strategies Podcast, where we help entrepreneurs minimize their taxes, master wealth, and optimize their lives. That’s what today’s conversation was all about. Thank you.