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Minimal facts vs. Maximal Data

Recently I had some correspondence with someone who found my interview from several years ago with atheist Luke Muehlhauser and asked me to look around Muehlhauser's (now-archived) web site and respond to some posts there. In the course of doing so I came upon this part of Muehlhauser's deconversion story:

What I learned, even when reading Christian scholars, shocked me. The gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death, by non-eyewitnesses. They are riddled with contradictions, legends, and known lies.

That the gospels were written decades after Jesus' death is apologetically fairly unimportant. From an historical perspective, there is no reason to distrust a document because it was written "decades" after the events it tells about. This statement is even compatible with a document's being written by a careful and truthful eyewitness of the events recounted! Moreover, "decades" could mean as little as twenty years.

But what about the rest: "Riddled with contradictions, legends, and known lies"? That would be problematic, if it were true. And "written by non-eyewitnesses" definitely implies that we know that John wasn't written by John and Matthew wasn't written by Matthew. Then there are Luke and Mark, which on the traditional view were written by people who had access to and conversations with eyewitnesses, but Luke M. obviously thinks that he "learned" that no such thing is the case.

There is an approach to arguing for the resurrection of Jesus Christ known as the minimal facts approach. Versions of this argument have been made by William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas, for both of whom I have the greatest respect. But there is one problematic aspect of minimal facts arguments: They tend to be presented in such a way as to imply that it doesn't matter to the strength of this case for the resurrection if the gospels are historically unreliable. Proponents of the minimal facts approach do not rely heavily upon the details of the resurrection accounts in the gospels themselves, except for a few general aspects (e.g., that Jesus was believed to have appeared to a variety of people), preferring to put more weight upon Paul's creedal statement about the resurrection in I Corinthians 15. The very strong impression given is that we can get a very strong case for the resurrection of Jesus even if the gospels are historically unreliable and even if the resurrection stories in the gospels are beefed-up, legendary accretions.

I submit that this is highly problematic. A minimal facts argument would be fine as a first statement of some of the issues, as a first approach, but it becomes positively misleading if those who learn this method think that they can lightly toss the gospels to the likes of Bart Ehrman and that we can be fully justified in believing in Jesus' resurrection even if the gospels are, in the words of deconvert Muehlhauser, "riddled with contradictions [and] legends."

First of all, some evidence that I am not misrepresenting this loose approach to the reliability of the gospels. Here, from William Lane Craig:

The Christian apologist seeking to establish, for example, the historicity of Jesus’ empty tomb need not and should not be saddled with the task of first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically reliable documents. You may be wondering how it can be shown that the Gospel accounts of the discovery of Jesus empty tomb can be shown to be, in their core, historically reliable without first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically trustworthy. Read chapter 8 to find out. Reasonable Faith, Preface to the Third Edition, pp. 11-12.

We shouldn't "saddle" ourselves with the task of showing that the gospels are historically reliable. We can get what we need without that.

Even stranger and more surprising is a passage here, where Craig (who is among the most careful, brilliant, and worthy analytic philosophers of religion now living) seems to move confusingly from Biblical inerrancy to historical reliability and back again to inerrancy without noting the shift of emphasis:

[W]e have a very strong case for the resurrection of Jesus. That case in no way depends on the Bible’s being inerrant. This became very clear to me during my doctoral studies in Munich with Wolfhart Pannenberg. Pannenberg had rocked German theology by maintaining that a sound historical case can be made for the resurrection of Jesus. Yet he also believed that the Gospel resurrection appearances stories are so legendary that they have scarcely a historical kernel in them! He did not even trust the Markan account of the discovery of the empty tomb. Rather his argument was founded on the early pre-Pauline tradition about the appearances in I Corinthians 15.3-5 and on the consideration that a movement based on the resurrection of dead man would have been impossible in Jerusalem in the face of a tomb containing his corpse.

Evangelicals sometimes give lip service to the claim that the Gospels are historically reliable, even when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research; but I wonder if they really believe this. It really is true that a solid, persuasive case for Jesus’ resurrection can be made without any assumption of the Gospels’ inerrancy.

(I will have much more to say about Pannenberg below.) I am particularly disturbed by the implications of this sentence: "Evangelicals sometimes give lip service to the claim that the Gospels are historically reliable, even when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research; but I wonder if they really believe this." Prima facie, this sentence is expressing a lot of dubiousness about the claim that the gospels are historically reliable when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research. In fact, a natural reading of the sentence would be that Craig is so dubious about this claim that he doubts that even many evangelicals who give "lip service" to it really believe it! Well, I'm not sure whether I count as an evangelical (being that I'm a sacramentalist of sorts), and I'm even less sure that I count as an inerrantist according to the most natural interpretation of the Chicago Statement, but let it be noted here, now, and for the future that I really do believe that the the gospels are historically reliable when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research. More: I think that's pretty important to apologetics, as I will argue here. And if a lot of evangelicals, especially leaders and pastors, are just giving "lip service" to that proposition, then they need to do some digging and learn more. Not so that they can sign off on a statement of faith that includes inerrancy (which wouldn't be guaranteed by historical reliability in any case), but so that they can present the arguments of historical apologetics with confidence that they aren't dealing with a handful of legend-riddled documents.

Here is a fairly typical statement of the minimal facts case for the resurrection of Jesus. The point I intend to focus on is Fact #3, stated here as:

On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead.

In this interesting discussion of different versions of the minimal facts approach, Gary Habermas quotes from Mike Licona a slightly different wording of this same general minimal fact:

Very soon afterwards [i.e., after Jesus' death], Jesus’ disciples had experiences that they believed were appearances of the resurrected Jesus.

One might think, reading these statements, that they mean to take as a "minimal fact" to be explained that the disciples and others (such as the women at the tomb) had experiences of the kind that are described in the gospel resurrection stories--that it seemed to them and that they claimed that they talked with Jesus (experiences both auditory and visual), that Jesus ate food in their presence, that they spent periods of time interacting with Jesus in groups on repeated occasions, that Jesus invited them to touch his scars, and the like.

It's important to emphasize, however, that that is not what is meant by this minimal fact. The reason is that "consensus of New Testament scholars" is very important to the minimal facts approach. Here is how Habermas puts the consensus issue:

From the outset of my studies, I argued that there were at least two major prerequisites for an occurrence to be designated as a Minimal Fact. Each event had to be established by more than adequate scholarly evidence, and usually by several critically-ascertained, independent lines of argumentation. Additionally, the vast majority of contemporary scholars in relevant fields had to acknowledge the historicity of the occurrence.

Further,

When establishing a consensus of views, it is important to show that such a near-unanimity is “composed of scholars from all interested camps” (p. 64). We are not guessing about where researchers stand, and neither are we basing the case on a small, sectarian element within the academic community. Rather, the scholars should hold a variety of religious and philosophical positions (p. 65). Later, Licona reported that:
These scholars span a very wide range of theological and philosophical convictions and include atheists, agnostics, Jews and Christians who make their abode at both ends of the theological spectrum and everywhere in between. We therefore have the heterogeneity we desire in a consensus, and this gives us confidence that our horizons will not lead us completely astray (p. 280).

Licona makes an insightful comment here regarding guarding against our own horizons. We must beware of our own imported biases, as well. When discussing the Minimal Facts, I have always purposely included notes at each juncture that list representative numbers of skeptics of various stripes who still affirm the data in question. This is a significant methodological procedure that serves more than one purpose. Among others, it assures the readers that they are not being asked to accept something that only conservatives believe, or that is only recognized by those who believe in the veracity of the New Testament text, and so on. After all, this sort of widespread recognition and approval is the very thing that our stated method requires.

It is a little surprising that Habermas should appear to agree with Licona about the importance of this scholarly agreement between "conservative" and non-conservative scholars, given that Habermas also says,

Of the two criteria, I have always held that the first is by far the most crucial, especially since this initial requirement [being supported by more than adequate scholarly evidence] is the one that actually establishes the historicity of the event. Besides, the acclamation of scholarly opinion may be mistaken or it could change.

Indeed.

I have always doubted, given what I do know about New Testament scholarship, that the vast majority of New Testament scholars agree that the disciples had experiences of the kind recorded in the gospels that gave them the idea that Jesus was risen from the dead.

In researching this post I found confirmation of this suspicion directly from William Lane Craig here. Craig makes statements that one might at first (incorrectly) take to mean that the consensus of scholarship supports the disciples' experiences as recounted in the gospels:

First, the resurrection appearances. Undoubtedly the major impetus for the reassessment of the appearance tradition was the demonstration by Joachim Jeremias that in 1 Corinthians 15: 3-5 Paul is quoting an old Christian formula which he received and in turn passed on to his converts According to Galatians 1:18 Paul was in Jerusalem three years after his conversion on a fact-finding mission, during which he conferred with Peter and James over a two week period, and he probably received the formula at this time, if not before. Since Paul was converted in AD 33, this means that the list of witnesses goes back to within the first five years after Jesus' death. Thus, it is idle to dismiss these appearances as legendary. We can try to explain them away as hallucinations if we wish, but we cannot deny they occurred. Paul's information makes it certain that on separate occasions various individuals and groups saw Jesus alive from the dead. According to Norman Perrin, the late NT critic of the University of Chicago: "The more we study the tradition with regard to the appearances, the firmer the rock begins to appear upon which they are based." This conclusion is virtually indisputable.

But Craig goes on to make his meaning quite clear:

At the same time that biblical scholarship has come to a new appreciation of the historical credibility of Paul's information, however, it must be admitted that skepticism concerning the appearance traditions in the gospels persists. This lingering skepticism seems to me to be entirely unjustified. It is based on a presuppositional antipathy toward the physicalism of the gospel appearance stories.

In other words, when the architects of the minimal facts approach speak of a vast scholarly consensus on the "appearances" experienced by the disciples, they do not mean a consensus on the physical-type experiences recounted in the gospels. To those aspects of the stories, Craig acknowledges that many scholars still actually have an antipathy, though he (correctly) suspects that this is based on an ideological rather than a scholarly objection.

The weakness of what the minimal facts approach is claiming about the disciples' experiences is further confirmed by Craig's discussion of Wolfhart Pannenberg. Here is more on Pannenberg's view from Craig:

I don’t think that Pannenberg’s objection to the appearances is based on naturalism or a bias against miracles. He is already committed to miracles in affirming the empty tomb. Rather, I think it would be exegetical, frankly. He is convinced by Grass’ exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15 that when Paul talks of a spiritual body, what he is talking about is an immaterial, invisible, unextended body. Therefore, the Gospel appearance stories are late legendary developments that represent a kind of materializing of the original, primitive, spiritual experiences. The original experiences were just these visions of Jesus. It would be similar to Stephen’s vision of Jesus in Acts 73. When Stephen is being stoned, he sees the heavens open and he says, “I see the Son of Man in the heavens.” Nobody else saw anything, but Stephen saw this vision of Jesus. And I think that Pannenberg would say that that is similar to what the original resurrection appearances were. They were these visionary events and then they got corrupted and materialized and turned into the Gospel appearance stories, which are very, very physicalistic.

That is quite clear. The "experiences" that Pannenberg accepts that the disciples had were some kind of "visionary events," others who were present would not have seen anything, and the gospel accounts are physicalistic "corruptions."

The extremely minimal nature of the scholarly consensus on the disciples' experiences is also confirmed by the careful wording used in describing what is agreed upon by New Testament scholars. Habermas has done extensive research in this area. Indeed, much of the information we have about the scholarly consensus comes from his meticulous research. Here are some of the wordings he uses in discussing the results of his research on scholarly opinion:

The nearly unanimous consent of critical scholars is that, in some sense, the early followers of Jesus thought that they had seen the risen Jesus. "Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What Are Critical Scholars Saying?" Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 3.2, p. 151.

The phrase "in some sense" is worth noting.

The vast majority of scholars agree that these persons certainly thought that they had visual experiences of the risen Jesus. "Resurrection Research From 1975 to the Present," p. 152.

The reference is to visual experience, not to tactile or even auditory experiences, much less to the length of the experiences nor to conversational interaction with Jesus. Habermas does imply that there is a high degree of scholarly consensus that these visual experiences (whatever they were like), were reported to have been "witnessed both by individuals and groups" (p. 152).

I think it is necessary to be blunt: If all that we are going to assert and seek to explain is the claim that Jesus' disciples had some kind of visual experiences soon after his death that they took to be appearances of the risen Jesus, and if we are allowing that these experiences could, for all we know, have been fleeting, unclear, intersubjectively inaccessible (that is, invisible to anyone other than the disciples), and involving no senses other than sight, then the case for the resurrection is gravely weakened.

If one hangs onto the idea that these experiences (whatever their precise nature) came "both to individuals and groups," and if one includes James, Jesus' brother, among those who had an individual experience (Habermas discusses the question of whether an appearance experience on the part of James should be included as a "minimal fact"), then this will provide an interesting coincidence, and naturalistic explanations will be somewhat strained. I admit that. Why should these various people, including a former skeptic of Jesus' ministry (his brother) have had these experiences shortly after his death, even if they may (for all we know) have been somewhat vague and visionary in nature?

But let's be clear: The conclusion we thought we could support was that Jesus was risen from the dead. Vague, fleeting, or visionary experiences provide a weak case for that conclusion. In fact, if the minimal fact of the appearance experiences is compatible with minimal experiences, then paranormal explanations become an interesting option, which I gather is what New Testament scholar Dale Allison is exploring. Maybe there's just "something weird" in this world that we don't know much about that isn't a miracle, and isn't a resurrection, but that causes people to have brief experiences "of" a person after his death.

The example of Pannenberg, so far from showing that the gospel narratives are unnecessary to a defense of the resurrection, shows just the opposite. Pannenberg believes that God miraculously made Jesus' dead body disappear from the tomb, raised Jesus in an invisible "spiritual body," and took him to heaven, from which he sent visions to the disciples. This (with variants on it) is generally known as the "objective vision" theory of the resurrection.

To say as Craig does that Pannenberg believes in "the resurrection of Jesus" is to say something that ought to be rather theologically controversial. Pannenberg does not believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus, and that is precisely why he ditches the gospel accounts! He realizes that they are the strongest evidence for the physical resurrection he rejects. There is something oddly backwards about implying that we do not need to support the reliability of the gospels in order to support a belief in the resurrection of Jesus and illustrating this claim by reference to a theologian who doesn't even believe that Jesus walked about visibly on the earth after his "resurrection."

In fact, it is worth asking just how strongly any supernatural explanation is supported by an attenuated body of evidence that has been deliberately weakened by a willingness to waive the whole question of whether the "physicalist" gospel resurrection accounts are legendary late additions.

A case in point here is Gerd Ludemann, a New Testament scholar whom Craig expressly cites to support the contention that there is scholarly consensus on the resurrection "appearances." Ludemann says, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus's death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."

I hope that by this point in my post, however, readers have learned to question dodgy, New-Testament-scholar-like expressions such as "had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ." Such statements are by no means as straightforward as they might appear to the unsuspicious eye. And so it is with Ludemann, who believes that the disciples had hallucinations, starting with Peter, who felt guilty after Jesus' death because he had denied that he knew Jesus. The other disciples then got fired up by Peter and sort of "caught" the tendency to have hallucinations in which Jesus appeared to them.

Now, don't misunderstand me: This is a very foolish hypothesis, and Craig and Habermas are right to critique it. But we are critiquing it with a huge handicap if we insist on doing so without using the gospel resurrection accounts as reliable indicators of what the disciples claimed. One can, perhaps, just barely wrap one's mind around a sort of "hallucination virus" that spreads among grief-stricken followers if the phenomena alleged are a lot different from what the gospels recount--a lot less like actual meetings and conversations with a real, tangible, physical person and a lot more like spooky ghost stories. That is precisely where we need to press in answering Ludemann.

Interestingly enough, Gary Habermas goes a bit in that direction in answering Ludemann, but in doing so he has to go beyond what he has supported as being part of the consensus of the vast majority of New Testament scholars. Habermas asks,

What about the natural human tendency to touch? Would no one ever discover, even in a single instance, that their best friend, seemingly standing perhaps just a few feet away, was not really there?

That's very interesting. As far as I know, Habermas's own careful wording elsewhere shows that he does not have scholarly consensus on the idea that the disciples had long enough and detailed enough "appearance experiences" that this question would have arisen. Do the vast majority of scholars concede that Jesus appeared accessible to touch, that he appeared to be standing just a few feet away, that the disciples had the opportunity to recognize him by distinct visual inspection as their dearest friend? As far as I know, no such consensus has been ascertained, and the minimal facts approach does not depend on asserting those types of appearances.

Of course, the gospels say that Jesus invited his disciples to touch him, but the minimal facts approach does not take that data into account even as part of what the disciples claimed.

Similarly, Habermas argues that the disciples were not in a frame of mind like that of pilgrims to a holy site, a mindset of expectation, that might give rise to ecstatic hallucinations. To some degree he argues this on the basis of what they "would have felt like"--the trauma, sadness, and certainty of Jesus' death following upon his crucifixion. But of course such a case would be much strengthened by the gospel accounts of what frame of mind the disciples were in.

Habermas also states, "Men and women, hard-headed and soft-hearted alike, all believing that they saw Jesus, both indoors and outdoors, by itself provides an insurmountable barrier for hallucinations." But is that supported by the vast consensus of scholarship--that Jesus was seen both outdoors and indoors, by hard-headed and soft-hearted alike, and by men and women? Is that clearly asserted as a "minimal fact"? Habermas himself has acknowledged a difficulty in deciding what to include in a list of minimal facts agreed upon by a large array of New Testament scholars:

[S]ince I have surveyed this material for decades, I can report that most contemporary critical scholars actually concede far more facts than those included even in the long list, let alone just the few Minimal Facts alone. But the problem is that, as the numbers of events expand, fewer scholars agree on each one. So there could be more give and take on “whose facts” ought to be utilized. Obviously then, longer lists would not fulfill especially the second strict criterion of the Minimal Facts method.

As far as I can tell, this difficulty would plague any attempt to attribute to the "great consensus of scholarship" a claim about the great variety of circumstances (soft-hearted and hard-headed, men and women, indoors and outdoors) in which Jesus allegedly appeared to his followers after his resurrection. For example, Licona points out that the number of scholars who even address the conversion of James and its cause is small. Furthermore, how easily such a variety of appearances can be explained naturalistically will depend greatly upon the surrounding circumstances and the nature of the alleged appearance experiences.

Let me try to put this in broad probabilistic terms: The data constrain the explanations we bring to bear. Whether an explanation is far-fetched and ad hoc or not, and how far-fetched or ad hoc it is, depends on what data we are explaining. If we are unwilling to get at all nitty gritty about the nature of the "experiences" the disciples claimed to have had of Jesus risen, then it is easier to argue that naturalistic or paranormal explanations will do the trick. In Bayesian terms (if you happen to be interested in those terms), the Bayes factor for an "appearance" is considerably weaker in favor of the conclusion that that appearance is veridical if one leaves vague the question of what the appearance was like. When the assertion that the disciples had appearance experiences is so weak that it is consistent with purely visionary experiences of an intangible Jesus, inaccessible to any but his followers, experiences that, for all that is stated to the contrary, might have been fairly brief, involving sight and no other senses, then it becomes a much, much harder task to argue that there must have been a supernatural explanation for what happened. It becomes harder still to argue that the correct explanation is that Jesus really was physically risen from the dead. I won't go so far as to say that a minimal facts case thus construed provides no evidence for Jesus' literal resurrection, but it is a much weaker case than a case that includes, as data indicating what the disciples claimed, the types of experiences actually recounted in the gospels.

To argue that this was indeed what the disciples claimed it was like for them to see the risen Jesus, one needs to argue that the gospels are not riddled with legends. To some degree, one needs to be willing to buck the trends of overly literary New Testament scholarship and to argue that the gospels are reliable historical memoirs of Jesus, written by those close to the events (some of them eyewitnesses).

But this argument can be made! Both external and internal evidence support this forward position on the memoir nature of the gospels. My husband and I have spent the last several years mustering such evidence from older authors (see some more sample links here), and I am happy to say that various other apologists are doing the same. To name just two: Jay Warner Wallace has discussed undesigned coincidences; Peter J. Williams has independently begun discussing external evidences for the historical veracity and eyewitness sourcing of the gospels.

In no way do I mean to disparage the work of Dr. Craig and Dr. Habermas. Their immense work is a gift of God to the church. But I think the ambiguity of the minimal facts approach on the matter of the appearances is a subject that has not been discussed enough in apologetics circles. This means that the weakness I am concerned about has gone largely unnoticed, because it is easy to assume that the "appearance experiences" referred to are the types of experiences we read about in the gospels.

I have become concerned over the past few months as I have realized that there are young apologists in training who believe that even major concessions to skeptical New Testament scholars like Bart Ehrman are not all that damaging to the case for the resurrection so long as we can "get some historical information" out of the gospels. I fear that Craig's own writings, perhaps influenced by his interest in Pannenberg and by a desire to induce evangelicals not to lean too heavily upon inerrancy, have encouraged this conclusion. So I have decided that it is important to step up and disagree with any such implication concerning the relative apologetic unimportance of the gospels' reliability.

When it comes to arguing for miracles, both God and the Devil are in the details. That is why it is such a dicey business in the area of miracle claims to set aside pertinent information and to waive contentious questions just because they are contentious. To see a strong probabilistic case aright, we should base our conclusion on all the available evidence. The existence of the gospel accounts and the evidence for their closeness to the facts are highly pertinent data to be taken into account. I therefore propose that, instead of arguing from Minimal Facts, we should argue from Maximal Data.

Comments (80)

Wasn't Pannenberg part of Craig's dissertation committee or his chair?

Might that provide a partial explanation for Craig's deference to Pannenberg?

Very interesting post Lydia. Let me just add as a student of Habermas that I have heard him say in so many words what you correctly state is a "very strong impression" from his writings, namely that the minimal facts argument works even if the Gospels are largely historically unreliable. It would be interesting to ask him if he would concede that the argument is weakened depending on where the Gospels fall on the scale of "inerrant - largely reliable - largely unreliable." I think he would have to. At the same time my guess from having sat under him for days at a time is that he would say the hallucination theory just has no legs whatsoever in his mind, so alternative explanations for the disciples' experiences can't get even get off the ground. I think a lot of skeptics might include hallucination as a possibility among other possibilities and so might be untroubled by the extremely low probability of it.

James Dunn also comes to mind as a scholar who holds to a pretty high degree of error in the Gospels but affirms the Resurrection. As far as I know Dunn believes in a physical resurrection. I was a bit surprised to hear you say that Pannenburg holds to a spiritual resurrection. I wasn't aware of that.

It's also interesting to note that Habermas was thrilled with your and Tim's argument in Blackwell because he read it as a minimal facts argument. Of course you also did a lot of preliminary spadework in making a case for general reliability. I should also note that Habermas is still in favor of what he calls "big umbrella" arguments, which is basically what you are calling maximal data (ie. arguing for the reliability of the Gospels and so forth). He sees that as only helping the minimal facts argument, but he obviously thinks the argument for the Resurrection can succeed without that. I am sympathetic to what he's saying; the less you require your opponent to concede the better. I guess the question might be how far can you go with that. I've made arguments for the physicality of the resurrection in the earliest eyewitness testimony, but that argument does depend on the Gospels and Acts being generally accurate representations of what the eyewitnesses reported but not necessarily requiring the concession that it accurately reports what actually happened. I think that's basically what you are saying also, and I agree with you.

Oh, yes, he was his teacher. Craig makes that clear. I don't know what to call his attitude there, whether to call it "deference" or what. It isn't that Craig _agrees_ with Pannenberg on the nature of the resurrection. He clearly disagrees with him on that. But he does characterize P as "believing in the resurrection," despite P's dubiously orthodox meaning of "resurrection." And Craig does think that P's case shows that the reliability of the gospels is unnecessary to the case for the resurrection. I don't know if he'd think these things even if Pannenberg hadn't been his teacher. That's speculation either way. But I do disagree with Craig on the epistemic point.

At the same time my guess from having sat under him for days at a time is that he would say the hallucination theory just has no legs whatsoever in his mind, so alternative explanations for the disciples' experiences can't get even get off the ground.

I have to say that I think if the experiences were really fragmentary and ghostly then the hallucination theory probably ought to have legs. So a problem arises if we are deliberately vague about what kind of experiences we mean, because we don't want to take the gospels to be reliable. Are we including the possibility that those experiences were fragmentary and ghostly? And if so, why does the hallucination theory not have legs? Those are the kinds of hard questions that I think need to be asked.

I've made arguments for the physicality of the resurrection in the earliest eyewitness testimony, but that argument does depend on the Gospels and Acts being generally accurate representations of what the eyewitnesses reported but not necessarily requiring the concession that it accurately reports what actually happened. I think that's basically what you are saying also, and I agree with you.

Yes, exactly correct.

It's also interesting to note that Habermas was thrilled with your and Tim's argument in Blackwell because he read it as a minimal facts argument.

We didn't intend it to be. In fact, I remember conversations about this, and we definitely intended it to go farther. I would have to go back and read it to see if there was anything we said that could have given that impression, but I think when one reads it as a whole one can see that we are bringing in things that preclude that interpretation of our argument. For example, search for the word "polymodal" in our article. We expressly lean on that as included in the experiences reported by the disciples. We also mention the fact that they would have been interacting with each other and with Jesus all together in the reported conversations. We bring these things out to counter a hallucination theory. But that just isn't a minimal facts argument.

A year or two ago someone sent me his dissertation that he was doing. I seem to recall that it was for a degree at Oxford. It was clear from his emphases that he had a dissertation adviser (I don't know who it was) who was leaning on him to take seriously the possibility of the paranormal--that Jesus really was a ghost in some sense of "ghost." I think it wasn't supposed to be the idea that a ghost was really a Cartesian spirit separated from the body but some idea more like an aura or an astral body. It was a very strange thesis, and I sympathized deeply with the student being forced to take this seriously and counter it. But as I say in the main post, if the "experiences" are very minimally construed, it does seem to me a legitimate question as to why such weird paranormal theories should not be treated as having some explanatory force. Why should the best explanation be a miraculous resurrection as opposed to paranormal weirdness? Well, that depends on the data. If the data are ghostly, then maybe the explanation is ghostly. If we're not willing to say whether the data (the experiences) were ghostly or not, then the explanations open to the skeptic of the miraculous are much less constrained.

19th and 20th century paranormal fads such as resorts to mediums and the like were not a Christian phenomenon. They were an alternative to Christianity. They were the New Age of their day. I don't think the resurrection provides evidence for that kind of thing, but to argue as much we need to get into the nitty gritty.

Hi Lydia,

Good post. I agree the Gospels matter. But any time I have tried to use the few points of the minimal facts material, I really have stuck with Paul. I think we can show all the scholars (both conservative and non conservative) that think the disciples had experiences. But then we need to be very detailed about what accounts for the experiences. Obviously, as you say above the visions hypothesis is the big one they punt to. But then that leads to ask what do they mean by visions. As we know, Ehrman says:

It is undisputable that some of the followers of Jesus came to think that he had been raised from the dead, and that something had to have happened to make them think so. Our earliest records are consistent on this point, and I think they provide us with the historically reliable information in one key aspect: the disciples’ belief in the resurrection was based on visionary experiences. I should stress it was visions, and nothing else, that led to the first disciples to believe in the resurrection. -Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: Harper One, 2014), 183-184.

So here Ehrman sides with the visionary language that Crossan, Borg and Lüdemann use. The good news is that Ehrman goes onto to define what he means by “visions” of Jesus. He describes visions as something that are either “veridical” or “nonveridical.” Veridical visions means people tend to see things that are really there while nonveridical visions the opposite-what a person sees is not based any kind of external reality. It is the latter that leads to what is called the hallucination hypothesis. In other words, skeptics assert that nonveridical visions can be attributed to some sort of psychological explanation. Ehrman then punts to his agnosticism again and says he doesn’t care if the appearances can be attributed to either “veridical” or “nonveridical” visionary experiences or anything else. This is rather confusing in that Ehrman first says it is visions that can explain the resurrection appearances.

So what we see here is that when they discuss visions, they really mean 'subjective visions' as if they are hallucinations. I haven't seen any exegetical arguments that visions is what they meant when the talk about the resurrection appearances. They knew the difference between the two. My experience is that no matter how much exegetical work you do to show they didn't mean visions, they don't care because of their metaphysical starting points.

But I discuss this in full detail here. Note the large exchange with the atheist afterwards. https://chab123.wordpress.com/?s=bart+ehrman%2C+vision+hypothesis

Eric, here's my take: Presumably when Ehrman says "visions" he means "visual experiences."

The thing is, we _do_ want to argue, do we not, that the best explanation is that these were veridical?

But how can we do this if we leave the specifics of the experiences totally up in the air?

If somebody told you that he saw a brief visual image of Elvis in his living room, you would rightly shrug your shoulders and ask what he had been smoking. This would give you very little reason to believe that Elvis is alive. For that matter, you wouldn't even have to postulate that the person was lying. He might have just had a brief mental aberration that is consistent with his being otherwise pretty normal.

But if three different people tell you that they all had dinner together with Elvis the other evening, that he sat around with them for two hours and talked, and that he shook their hands before walking out the front door, then they are probably lying/pulling your leg. Especially if you have no other reason to think that just by chance all these three people have gone totally crazy in this same way at the same time.

Our explanations are constrained by our data.

We cannot even very seriously limit skeptical explanations of the resurrection appearances if the _nature_ of the resurrection experiences is left so far up in the air. That is why Ehrman can get away with airily declaring that they were some kind of visions and be agnostic about whether they were veridical or not. Because he totally disses the gospels, so for all that he is acknowledging, a couple of the disciples could have had some brief, temporary, ghostly image appearing before their eyes like the ghost of Banquo and this type of brief, private hallucination could have caught on by religious enthusiasm and been repeated a time or two.

It's very, very hard to push back convincingly against these types of interpretations if we ourselves refuse to say more than that the disciples had some kind of visual experiences. We need to say what kind.

By the way, Eric, note that Ehrman keeps using the phrase "some of the disciples" over and over again. The quotations you give from him do not support the contention that Ehrman even believes that all the people in your longer list at the beginning of your post had such experiences (whatever in the world those experiences were _like_). In fact, I'd be pretty surprised if he believes that that whole list of people had even the vision-type experiences he acknowledges.

Lydia,

I think we are on the same page.

You say "It's very, very hard to push back convincingly against these types of interpretations if we ourselves refuse to say more than that the disciples had some kind of visual experiences. We need to say what kind."

That is exactly what I did in the link I left. I left several quotes by agnostics and others saying they had the experiences. But then I went over the possible options as to what accounts for the experiences such as apparitions, visions, hallucinations, and resurrection. Yes, we can argue on exegetical grounds for all the texts that say Jesus 'appeared' is not the same thing as when they discuss what visions are. Of course, Licona has discussed this in his last book. But like I said, it seems even if we argue on exegetical grounds that the resurrection appearances weren't visions, it seems the metaphysical starting points come back to the surface. Yes, we could argue for veridical visions. But I tend to leave the word 'vision' out of the discussion since it always means some sort subjective vision to the skeptic. That happens about 99.9 percent of the time. Btw, I agree Ehrman probably wouldn't accept all the list of the appearances. He says:


"Very shortly after Jesus’ death, the disciples had experiences that led them to believe and proclaim that Jesus had been resurrected and had appeared to them: Ehrman says: “Why, then, did some of the disciples claim to see Jesus alive after his crucifixion? I don’t doubt at all that some disciples claimed this. We don’t have any of their written testimony, but Paul, writing about twenty-five years later, indicates that this is what they claimed, and I don’t think he is making it up. And he knew are least a couple of them, whom he met just three years after the event (Galatians 1:18-19).” ( see The New Testament: An Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, pgs, 282).

“There is no doubt that [Paul] believed that he saw Jesus’ real but glorified body raised from the dead.” (see The New Testament: An Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, pgs, 301).

In the end, we are best off taking a cumulative case approach to the resurrection which is what you and Tim did in your article.


Many people adopt the minimal-facts approach at least in part because of its focus and brevity. A Christian can fairly easily give a 20-minute talk on the central “minimal facts,” (for lack of a better term,) and when her intellectual opponents take issue at some of the points she can respond by asking why they are willing to run against the grain of most contemporary scholarship. One problem with this (as you’ve pointed out) is that scholars don’t always mean the same thing by “appearances.” But this creates a challenge for proponents of the maximal-facts approach: is it possible to summarise the central lines of evidence in such a way that the average Christian at university can memorise them and present them in conversations with their friends without getting thoroughly off-topic? Perhaps we need a revised version of Paley’s Evidences.

Others are concerned about their own biases. Licona, for instance, specifically expresses this worry in his book on the resurrection of Jesus. Faced with a plethora of competing claims from contemporary scholarship, it’s understandable that many Christians throw up their hands in despair and try to find the lowest common denominator. This attitude unfortunately neglects sociological realities in the scholarly community (the ghosts of Hume and Kant still haunt philosophy, history, &c.), but, as Thomas Chalmers wrote, “the peculiar feeling which the sacredness of the subject gives to the inquirer, is, upon the whole, unfavourable to the impression of the Christian argument.”

Eric,

You are quite right. I shouldn't have used anything like a phrase "veridical visions," because I don't think they are visions at all. My apologies for unclarity.

I certainly think that Ehrman's and others' biases are going to come into play--metaphysical biases and exegetical biases. For example, Pannenberg's own position, which to me seems wildly contrived, is apparently (according to Craig) an attempt to accommodate Grass's interpretation of the "spiritual body" portions of I Corinthians! It's crazy to me that someone would go back and take a pair of scissors to the gospels based _not_ on any objective textual considerations but solely on _one_ controverted interpretation of _one_ passage in I Corinthians. And then as Craig has pointed out for some people the bias is anti-miraculous. I'm sure this is the case for Ehrman.

But it seems to me that Ehrman gets a lot of mileage out of his assertions that the gospels were not written by the people they are attributed to, that they are just "telephone" chains of one person telling another person telling another person, stories arising and being incorporated, etc. In other words, he is able to bolster his anti-miraculous conclusion by his textual claims about the gospels. And that is going to shake a lot of Christians, too. So if we hit him at *that* point and argue that he's totally wrong about the gospels, it almost certainly won't change Ehrman's own mind but it will take away the ammunition he is using that is confusing other people. Hopefully it will at least prevent some deconversions based on Ehrman's allegedly "expert" opinion about the provenance of the gospels.

That's what I'm hoping to encourage more Christians to do.

But this creates a challenge for proponents of the maximal-facts approach: is it possible to summarise the central lines of evidence in such a way that the average Christian at university can memorise them and present them in conversations with their friends without getting thoroughly off-topic?

Sure, it's always possible to summarize, at least for someone who can make a good outline or state an abstract or synopsis of his own views. Really, summarizing or giving the big picture briefly isn't the challenge, so much. Rather, the worry of many who take the minimal facts approach is the other thing you mentioned, Tom Larsen: that what we would be summarizing is a view that doesn't happen to agree with the "vast majority of New Testament scholarship," and they feel insecure about doing that.

So one would be saying something like, "The disciples claimed that they had detailed, apparently physical, lengthy interactions with Jesus after he rose from the dead, and they were willing to die for that claim." That's brief, right? But one wouldn't be able to add, "And that is conceded by the vast majority of New Testament scholars, both liberal and conservative."

Too bad. We need to be willing to step out, tough it out, and make the claim nonetheless, because the evidence objectively strongly supports it. Majority of scholarship, including liberal scholars, can go hang.

Faced with a plethora of competing claims from contemporary scholarship, it’s understandable that many Christians throw up their hands in despair and try to find the lowest common denominator.

Psychologically, I'm sure you are right about that. There's unfortunately a difficulty though in that the lowest common denominator has to some extent _deliberately_ been set by certain elements in the scholarly community in such a way that it cannot provide strong support to a miraculous conclusion. As you rightly say,

This attitude unfortunately neglects sociological realities in the scholarly community

Yes, precisely.

Unfortunately, I really think that Licona is too tentative in his overall approach to the whole subject. Which is not to say that his book doesn't have some very good things about it--especially his knocking down once and for all the confused "spiritual body" interpretation of I Corinthians 15 which, as we've been discussing, has messed up Pannenberg himself.

Too bad. We need to be willing to step out, tough it out, and make the claim nonetheless, because the evidence objectively strongly supports it. Majority of scholarship, including liberal scholars, can go hang.

Let me play the minimal-facts advocate for a moment: “Wait a second. Who am I to say that I’m a better-informed, clearer thinker than the majority of historical Jesus scholars / philosophers of religion / &c. out there? Presumably most people in those fields think they’re well-informed and clear thinkers. What makes me any different? Sans some solid reason to think I’m really exceptional, shouldn’t I submit to the scholarly consensus, however insipid it might be?”

A couple of answers to that. First of all, as Habermas points out, plenty of _individual_ "Jesus scholars," probably the majority, believe some _individual_ propositions that are not shared by the vast majority of all of the scholars. It's just that those individual beliefs that go beyond the consensus don't overlap enough for them to be included in the consensus. So in going beyond the vast consensus on some point or other, one is in fact being _like_ the scholars themselves. It is not as though they all confine themselves to believing only what they can get a vast majority of their peers to agree with them on.

Second, as a strictly logical point, going beyond the consensus of scholars, beyond some least common denominator, isn't necessarily the same thing as *opposing* the consensus of scholars. To say, "There is not consensus that P" is not the same thing as to say, "There is consensus that not-P."

Third, the epistemological facts are what they are. At the risk of precipitating a crisis of faith in someone who thinks in that way (and I really do not want to do that), I have to be blunt: If this incredibly skimpy least common denominator is *all that you believe* about the data, it is not clear that you have enough evidence for the physical resurrection of Jesus. So maybe, from an evidential perspective, such a person shouldn't believe that the resurrection occurred. Maybe he should be agnostic about it, or hold open the possibility of some "spiritual resurrection" or something else.

Now, that's a bold statement, and whether in fact one has enough evidence for Jesus' resurrection on such a minimal basis will depend heavily on *other* evidence. Some examples of "other evidence" would be the liar, lunatic, or Lord trilemma, the argument from messianic prophecy that Jesus was the Christ, and so forth. One further problem, however, is that a lot of that other evidence is going to get tangled up in the same New Testament scholarship types of issues. For example, the trilemma depends on the proposition that Jesus claimed to be God. But I doubt that one could get an overwhelming consensus of NT scholars to agree that Jesus claimed to be God, so uh-oh!! Now this tentative Christian can't use the trilemma. Or the argument from Messianic prophecy might depend on believing that, e.g., Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Uh-oh! Do the majority of NT scholars concede that Jesus was born in Bethlehem? After all, if the gospels aren't historically reliable...

You see the problem. Once we start deferring to a field such as NT scholarship which is heavily biased _against_ taking the gospels even as _historical_ sources that give us reliable information about what Jesus said, did, where he went, where he was born, even on the non-miraculous points, then it becomes pretty hard to argue much of anything about Jesus, doesn't it?

So I think at some point our tentative apologist is going to have to discover his spine and delve into things more deeply or else start really questioning the evidence for fundamental Christian doctrines about Jesus.

This is a matter of epistemic honesty for me to say this. I'm not going to pretend that the argument for Christianity can be made while tossing out 3/4 of our best evidence because we are too timid to consider the possibility that the field of NT studies is rather badly messed up.

But quite honestly, I think if people--including laymen and anybody moderately intelligent who is interested in these fields--can get over pure credential-driven fretting ("How could little ol' me believe more than is conceded by the Majority of New Testament Scholars?") then the evidence is there. The evidence is accessible. The evidence can be known and seen without having any vast credentials and without being a super-genius. It doesn't require years of training and study. The evidence for the historical reliability of the gospels is accessible to, e.g., a bright thirteen-year-old. So it's certainly accessible to a college student, apologist, or pastor. We just have to get it out there.

The problem is not lack of data or difficulty of data. The difficulty is exaggerated out of fear and timidity.

Another interesting point. Don't know quite what to do with it:

I think a whole lot of people who think they are using the "minimal facts approach" are already going beyond the "vast scholarly consensus" without knowing they are doing so. How many lay apologists who refer to the appearances to the disciples realize that as a "minimal fact" this is consistent with the disciples' having merely a few brief visual experiences? Precious few, I'll wager. I think most of them assume that they can take as a fact that the disciples reported experiences *like those in the gospels*. Experiences *like really talking with their friend Jesus*.

Even at the highest level, at the level of the scholar who taught all the rest of us, through his incredibly careful work and research, about the scholarly consensus, Gary Habermas, the temptation to go beyond that consensus when arguing against the hallucination theory is irresistible! I illustrated this in my post, where Habermas asks whether the disciples wouldn't have attempted to touch Jesus.

So I think we need to tell people to trust that instinct, to just keep on in that direction and to assume that the disciples did claim to have had physical-like experiences. We just need to reassure them that it is okay to do that even while making it clear that the "vast consensus of NT scholarship" doesn't grant that the disciples had those kinds of experiences.

Lydia, I hope you’ll forgive me for pushing on this point – I know several people who have significant reservations about the very possibility of confidently coming to know much at all about the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, &c. precisely on account of the issues we’re discussing.

Mr. Tentative, faced with lack of majority scholarly agreement with his position, can explain it in various ways. He can claim, first, that the majority of scholars do not know the evidence he takes to conclusively support his own position. Or, second, if instead he thinks the majority of scholars are aware of that evidence, he can claim they have failed to reasonably evaluate it – due perhaps to sociological factors, cognitive biases, uncritical acceptance of preexisting scholarly views, unreasonably high epistemic expectations, &c.

The trouble with the latter approach is that Mr. Tentative knows he is not immune to these prejudicial factors either. Perhaps he can say he has good metacognitive grounds for supposing he is less susceptible to them – however, what are these grounds? The former approach perhaps will have more traction – certainly there are some pretty embarrassing cases of otherwise thoughtful scholars making glaring mistakes when it comes to matters of philosophy, history, and so on. (For instance, Feser’s “So you think you understand the cosmological argument?” ought to shake up those who assume smart people know what they’re talking about and/or are well-intentioned when it comes to the intellectual landscape around theism.)

I'm not going to pretend that the argument for Christianity can be made while tossing out 3/4 of our best evidence because we are too timid to consider the possibility that the field of NT studies is rather badly messed up.

Absolutely. it is appalling, and frankly astounding, to imagine and claim in print that "what the vast consensus of scholars agree on" as a particularly worthwhile methodological approach to identifying truth. Maybe in mathematics it could. But it certainly does not work AT ALL in philosophy, it isn't used in climate science, and it doesn't hold any help in discerning about the various explanations of quantum dynamics (see: Copenhagen, super-strings, etc.). It seems, at least a bit, as a silly kind of last resort for someone who either is dallying with despair on any of the REAL inquiries into the truth, or who is so tired, tired, tired of being beat upon by the "scholars" who don't WANT real inquiry into the truth, that he is just throwing out a make-shift to get them off his back. A kind of capitulation.

Show me a single other religious figure reported to have been "seen" back from the dead (after predicting it), and whose "appearances" were convincing to EVERY SINGLE ONE of his 12 closest friends enough for them to submit to decade upon decade upon decade of poverty, misery, ridicule, celibacy, persecution, and finally painful death (for 11 of the 12), and where each and every one of these 12 become: humble, patient, kind, industrious, and (some) literarily advanced, and world travelers, even though they had mostly before been rough and hard-bitten fishermen who had spent their entire lives in a small corner of Galilee. It doesn't take just a mental aberration to have such visions, it would take a complete mental overhaul of the worst sort to keep on in its effects for so many decades. And yet THAT kind of mental distortion doesn't result in people who are better in every way than most of us, it doesn't result in people with the interior balance and strength to spend day after day being saintly without any return on investment, who can smile calmly at their murderers. We can tell the difference between sane people and those obsessed with a bad idea - and James, Peter, and Paul were sane. It takes more than a brief "vision" alone to do all that.

If that's the state of "New Testament studies" today, better to be out of it and just read old stuff from before the 20th century. For anyone who has doubts about whether the Gospels' authenticity and historicity are in good standing, stay away from the modern stuff and read the old stuff.

Tom, there are many things that can be said to Mr. Tentative. First of all, it isn't just a matter of referring in broad, sweeping terms to biases in the profession. It is possible to get quite specific. For example, pick up Bart Ehrman some time and look at his attempts to claim contradictions between the gospels. Then look up the gospels and see with your own eyes how sleazy and strained these attempts are. They are simply awful. Even a modicum of careful reading is able to detect them.

Or read New Testament criticism and see how oft-used and how mis-used the phrase "know nothing of" is. The usage is pervasive and pernicious and is often used to drum up phony contradictions or to argue on skimpy grounds that some aspect of a given gospel narrative never happened.

Or ask sometime whether there is any strong evidence for the existence even of such a thing as the "pre-Markan passion narrative." I'm not saying I'm *absolutely* certain that no such thing existed, but I've seen even a very conservative scholar write as though we _have_ this conjectural entity and can see what was and what was not in it. Whereas this is completely false. We don't have any such source. Its very existence is a shaky conjecture.

Mr. Tentative can also note that William Lane Craig himself says that the opposition among New Testament scholars to the gospel narratives of the resurrection is based upon metaphysical prejudice rather than upon independent textual grounds.

In that case, of course, Dr. Craig himself should be willing to step out and not restrict himself to what is acknowledged by the "vast majority of New Testament scholars." After all, I don't suppose that his primary audience for convincing and converting is the community New Testament scholars themselves! If he is justified in stating that their inclination to regard the resurrection narratives as accretions is caused by a prejudice rather than by objective scholarly information, why be strait-jacketed by what they will admit?

More:

People are far too inclined to tackle these things in a highly abstract manner. It is just a mistake to treat oneself and one's own evidence as a black box and to think in generic terms like, "I have my biases too."

It is much better to get down to brass tacks. For example, instead of fretting vaguely about the possibility of his own biases, Mr. Tentative should ask, "What reason is there for me to believe that the gospels were written by people close to the events?" Then he should start examining the evidence and see where it seems to lead. Including things like undesigned coincidences and incidental confirmations. Look at the evidence itself and see where it points.

Mr. Tentative should remember that he himself is testing the hypothesis that the gospels are memoirs, written by people close to the events--eyewitnesses and those who interviewed eyewitnesses. So unlike a New Testament critic who _assumes_ that the gospels were all based on much earlier "sources" and weren't written by those to whom they are attributed, he will not be simply _assuming_ the opposite. He will be _examining_ the opposite hypothesis and seeing whether it is supported by evidence.

This sort of tough-mindedness and interest in concrete evidence is what is needed.

We just need to reassure them that it is okay to do that even while making it clear that the "vast consensus of NT scholarship" doesn't grant that the disciples had those kinds of experiences.

I think you meant to say that the vast consensus doesn't grant that the disciples reported those kinds of experiences (although it goes without saying that neither do they think they had those experiences). If we can show that we have a strong basis for the claim that the disciples reported these experiences, then we can make the move to showing that actually having those experiences is the best explanation for the reports, which is what you and Tim do as I read it.

I get frustrated by the fact that there is so much good, scholarly, historical research supporting the reliability of the Gospels which simply isn't getting out there, but instead every crackpot liberal hack grabs headline after headline.

Actually, Tony, what you bring up, though you are making a different point, leads to something I should probably say in fairness: The minimal facts case in some versions does include the transformation of the disciples. Its advocate could then attempt to argue from _that_ minimal fact that the nature of the experiences must have been perduring and physical-like even if he does not assert that (about the nature of the experiences) as one of the minimal facts itself.

I think that is sound psychology, and all the high-falutin' talk of the theologians about "Easter faith" and what-not that assumes the contrary--that is, that assumes the the disciples could have been transformed so thoroughly by something other than clear, concrete, convincing evidence that Jesus was risen--is so much hot air.

So that evidence of transformation is to some degree available to the minimal facts advocate.

But even having admitted that, I have to note: Depending on how deferential one is to New Testament scholarship, I don't know how nitty-gritty one can get about transformation. For example, is Peter's speech in Acts 2 really Peter's speech? Are we allowed to take it that Peter and John really told the Sanhedrin that they must tell what they had heard and seen? So even there, taking Acts apart at the seams by not taking it to be a reliable historical account is going to weaken the case for the transformation.

Second, it's quite roundabout to argue for the nature of the appearances from their effects while leaving out the gospel narratives. So the handicap is still pretty severe.

I think you meant to say that the vast consensus doesn't grant that the disciples reported those kinds of experiences (although it goes without saying that neither do they think they had those experiences).

John, what you bring up here does show a small and mildly interesting diversion in another way between the way I approach this and the minimal facts approach. In one sense it might be said that the minimal facts approach is _stronger_ than mine, because the fact asserted there is that the disciples actually _had_ experiences, not merely that they reported experiences. So in my wording which you quote ("making it clear that the "vast consensus of NT scholarship" doesn't grant that the disciples had those kinds of experiences"), I was simply taking that wording as a starting point.

In one way, in our own argument, we "back off" by talking about what the disciples reported rather than what they experienced. But in another way we take a much more forward position by saying that they reported very detailed and physical-like experiences. The idea there, of course, is to press the skeptic into a corner where he has the unsavory alternatives of saying that the disciples colluded in developing this incredibly detailed lie or, on the other hand, postulating types of hallucinations never seen anywhere that involved, e.g., eleven people all having meals with each other and with a non-existent person, chatting with him, handing things to him and to each other, etc.

Depending on how deferential one is to New Testament scholarship, I don't know how nitty-gritty one can get about transformation. For example, is Peter's speech in Acts 2 really Peter's speech? Are we allowed to take it that Peter and John really told the Sanhedrin that they must tell what they had heard and seen? So even there, taking Acts apart at the seams by not taking it to be a reliable historical account is going to weaken the case for the transformation.

Quite right. I don't mean to diminish in the least the important arguments on the reliability of the Gospel accounts as historical. There is no substitute for getting into the nitty gritty and actually investigating the details, not just bloviating in general about it.

My experience of NT studies as mal-practiced these days is pretty thin, as I can't stand the idiocy very long, but what I have seen includes the particularly moronic circular hypothesis that (much) later writers (communities) invented myths of the earlier miraculous events of the Gospels to "account for" the interior transformations that you too can experience if you only listen to these myths and pretend to yourself that, like the people who NEVER EXISTED whom these events "happened to", you can do great things with faith in mythery. I call it the "positive power of intentional self-delusion". Why the later writers needed legends to "account" for it all when the first believers obviously did not is never quite addressed.

Who's volunteering to send this post and comment string to Drs. Craig, Habermas, and Licona?

;-)

I have had excellent personal interactions, both face to face and in correspondence, with Dr.'s Craig and Licona and have had a cordial though brief opportunity to meet Dr. Habermas. I believe I've exchanged some e-mail with him as well. I was actually intending to send the link to Dr. Craig. He is a real philosopher and will not mind in the least receiving friendly and careful criticism. That's what philosophy is all about.

"He is a real philosopher and will not mind in the least receiving friendly and careful criticism. That's what philosophy is all about."

Can't help but be focused on the adjective "real" in the quote above.

Have you interacted with philosophers or academics who weren't "real"? If so, how would you characterize the interaction with these "unreal" philosophers and/or academics?

Naming no names, but it is an indication of, shall we say, wobbliness in the reality of one's philosophical commitment if one takes any criticism of one's position, however carefully and professionally worded and researched, as a personal attack.

Lydia: I think you're right on the mark, here.

A consensus is only telling if the people holding to that consensus are not subject to systematic biases that warp their thinking. But one of the main points of my book, Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could, is that liberal scholars ARE subject to such biases, and make a series of systematic errors as a result (I describe twelve). And of course Ehrman is no better, still less the really radical scholars and pseudo-scholars who suck up so much oxygen these days.

Of course, for Craig and Habermas' purposes, it is useful to cite non-Christian scholars to convince non-Christians. I do the same, including even the like of a Loftus or Carrier -- in fact that was Augustine's habit, and it's fun as well as useful. But the root problem here may lie in trying to encapsulate a complex argument in a few moments -- on stage, the Argument From Authority is really the only method that will work in a five minute rebuttal. So I don't blame Craig for going that route. Only as you say, it shouldn't be made the norm.

Thank you, David. I think one could finesse things on stage and start with some kind of argument from authority while implying briefly that it is necessary to go beyond.

For example, one might say briefly, "Even skeptical scholars will say that the disciples had *some* kind of experiences that brought about their transformation. The question then is what kind of experiences these were. The evidence of the disciples' own claims as well as the radical nature of their transformation indicates that they reported very clear and physical experiences that appeared to be Jesus risen from the dead."

I am largely sympathetic to what you are saying. By bringing in the specific nature of the resurrection appearances from the gospels, the case is much stronger and naturalistic explanations become extremely difficult.

Let me play devil’s advocate on this. Could not a proponent of the Minimal Facts method say something like this: Almost all researchers agree that after Jesus’ death, His disciples had some sort of visual experiences, in both individual and group settings—and whatever those experiences were, they were of such a nature as to convince them that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Could we then ask if merely fleeting and unclear visual phenomena have produced in them the conviction that Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead? Especially in light of a text like Acts 12:9 where we see that the early Christians understood the difference between a vision and a physical event? (I agree that the Minimal facts proponent may have to argue that Paul taught a bodily resurrection, and that, given his contact with Peter, James, and John, that they also were convinced that Jesus was raised bodily-1 Cor. 15:11.) Like you mentioned earlier, if we then add in the appearance to and conversion of Jesus’ unbelieving brother James, the naturalistic options do become strained. But if we add to that the conversion of Paul and then add to that an empty tomb, as well as the transformation of the disciples-to whatever degree, doesn’t the Minimal facts proponent still have a pretty decent case here?

Dale Allison’s paranormal/apparition type theories are interesting. But my understanding is that these apparitions, rarely, if ever, result in the belief that the person has been bodily raised from death and that Allison concedes that reports of apparitions are not accompanied by an empty grave. Of course, the more details that can be corroborated from the gospels (like Jesus’ predictions of His resurrection, the specific details of the resurrection appearances), the less strength that Allison’s alternative has in contrast to the resurrection hypothesis. But it seems that even on a Minimal facts approach there is enough evidence to beat out Allison’s hypothesis or a hallucination type theory. I’d be curious to know what you think.

I think a lot will depend on how much of Acts one is "allowed" or is allowing oneself to access. And since the book of Acts is Luke Part II, then if one is allowing a lot of NT scholarly skepticism about Luke, the question arises as to why this should not metastasize, as it were, to similar skepticism about Acts.

In my opinion it would be arbitrary from a scholarly point of view to take Acts to be a reliable indicator of what the disciples preached and taught, of their belief that Jesus was raised _bodily_ from the dead, while taking the resurrection accounts in the gospel of Luke to be legendary accretions that the author of Luke-Acts inexplicably allowed to wander into his narrative.

This all gets us into the question of who the author of Luke-Acts _was_. If he was in fact a companion of the Apostle Paul who carefully recorded things that he learned from eyewitnesses (as a "naive," "conservative," or "traditionalist" reading of Acts would lead us to believe), then there is no reason not to use the resurrection narrative in Luke as *at least* an indicator of what the disciples *said* their experiences were like.

If, on the other hand, one is hog-tied to the "broadest consensus of scholarship," one is not going accept that notion of the authorship of Luke-Acts or of its reliability and one is not going to be able to access Acts with confidence as an indicator of the early claims made by the disciples.

In fact, as you see in my main post, Pannenberg apparently believes that the disciples did _not_ claim a literal, physical resurrection in a tangible body but that the "physicalism" of the accounts in the gospels is a late corruption. Presumably he says the same about the passages in Acts that most clearly indicate that they were preaching a true, bodily resurrection.

Concerning an appearance to James, Licona has made the point (if one cares about scholarly consensus) that the number of NT scholars who even address the question of whether James experienced an appearance is very small. I haven't investigated that myself, but I'm sure Licona has, because he _does_ care about the consensus of scholarship! So why, if one is tying oneself to the "vast consensus of scholarship," is one allowed to access an appearance to James?

So I think what we see here again and again is a kind of dilemma for the minimal facts advocate: To get a good case he needs to fudge on really _forcing_ himself to stick _only_ to what is acknowledged by the "consensus of New Testament scholars." But if he's going to do that, then he should be willing to just go ahead and access *all the available data* and not continually fret about the "consensus of New Testament scholarship."

In fact, we should be willing to do that anyway, because as apologists, we should be all about accessing all the available data. That's the most reasonable way to proceed and to make the case.

Fascinating post that I stumbled upon courtesy of the Wintery Knight...

A couple of quick questions:

1. When you look at the texts chronologically, the earliest reports of the resurrection seem very scanty and unimaginably brief. As we know, the likely original ending of Mark has no appearances at all, just the women running from the empty tomb; and the later ending, in later manuscripts, amounts to just 172 words in Greek. Not a lot for the greatest miracle in history. Doesn't this support those who argue that the story grew in the telling, with the later evangelists (John and Luke) adding later stories (perhaps from eyewitness reports) they had from their own sources?

2. The earliest texts, the early letters of Paul, also use language that supports a more spiritual understanding of the Resurrection, as mentioned above. In 1 Corinthians, Paul says Jesus "appeared" to Cephas, then to the Twelve, then to the 500, then to James and all the apostles, and, lastly, he appeared to Paul. But in what way did he appear: Physically? In a vision? Paul doesn’t say. Are the appearances to the Twelve and to the 500 like the appearance to him on the road to Damascus, when, at least according to Acts, Paul saw a "white light" and "heard a voice" speaking to him?

3. Speaking of Acts, what does this mean: "After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs (1:3)." Isn't that an odd way to phrase it? "Presented himself alive by many convincing proofs?" And what about this: "... after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles... (Acts 1:2)" what does that mean? Giving instructions "through the Holy Spirit"? That sounds more like inspiration than speaking verbally.

4. Also, this odd line in Matthew: "When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted (28:17)." They saw him... and worshiped him... but some doubted? If you saw Jesus alive, would you... doubt?

5. Finally and principally, William Lane Craig says he is not an evidentialist -- which means, he says, that he is NOT claiming that Christian faith is based on the always contingent, probable judgments of historical research. You know more than you can show, as he puts it. He makes these historical arguments to counter skeptics and to lead people to investigate on their own, but Christian faith is not based on these arguments. Fair enough.

But then, what is it based on? Reflecting his "reformed epistemology," Craig says it is the interior witness of the Holy Spirit -- which is a fairly fideistic argument to make in a debate (in effect, "it's true because God told me it's true"). Catholics might say faith is mediated through the historic witness of the Christian community, the regula fidei.

For both Protestants and Catholics, then, these historical arguments are interesting but ultimately neither prove nor disprove anything. From a strictly historical point of view, the available data -- letters more than 2,000 years old -- seem too meager to mount a convincing case for anyone who doesn't already believe.

To me, that doesn't mean the Resurrection didn't happen. It just means we likely can't prove it using historical methods. But so what? Perhaps Pannenberg is wrong. Perhaps faith really is faith and not scientific knowledge. Perhaps people believe in the Resurrection because it "fits" their experience of who God is and what the world is ultimately like and so, even without strictly scientific proof, they accept the witness of the New Testament, the Holy Spirit and/or the Church and say, Okay. Jesus didn't die and stay dead but rose again, even if we aren't sure what exactly that means. It might have been physical, might have been purely spiritual. We don't know. Isn't that the most pragmatic, honest approach? I'm just thinking outloud.

Jesus didn't die and stay dead but rose again, even if we aren't sure what exactly that means. It might have been physical, might have been purely spiritual. We don't know. Isn't that the most pragmatic, honest approach?

No. A "purely spiritual" resurrection would have left a body behind, and Christianity dead on arrival. So to speak.

Bob,

When you look at the texts chronologically, the earliest reports of the resurrection seem very scanty and unimaginably brief.

This is incorrect and is part of what I am attempting to counter. The entire idea in New Testament scholarship that the resurrection accounts in Matthew, Luke, and John are "growths" and are _not_ what the disciples reported "earliest" is _not_ evidentially supported and needs to be challenged.

Yes, the short ending of Mark is short. And the point is what, exactly? It does not follow from that that what we have is some kind of paleontological sequence with the "smallest" or "least developed" creature coming first!

For that matter, Matthean vs. Markan priority is a live issue in NT scholarship anyway, and it would be circular to support Markan priority *just because* Mark is shorter so anything longer *must* have "grown." But I won't press on Matthean priority, because I don't think it's the main point.

The case for John's real authorship of John is _very_ strong. This means that the accounts in John _are_ eyewitness accounts. Yes, Luke gathered his accounts from others who were eyewitnesses, and why should this mean that they are not the same as "the earliest accounts" or that they "grew in the telling"? No reason at all. If, for example, Luke talked with Peter or some other apostle, there is every reason to believe that these people told him the same thing they had been saying all along!

There are no objective _textual_ reasons (except for the long ending of Mark) to take the resurrection appearance accounts to have been added to their own texts later.

And in fact, the account of the meal by the sea of Galilee at the end of John actually contains an undesigned coincidence--a mark of authenticity and of coming from an eyewitness. I have discussed this elsewhere.

The entire "eohippus" approach to the gospels needs to be scrapped. They are full of markers of reliability and of coming from eyewitness memories, and people need to know that and get rid of this idea that the longer a gospel is, the more full it is of extra stuff that sort of got stuck on as time went on.

The earliest texts, the early letters of Paul, also use language that supports a more spiritual understanding of the Resurrection, as mentioned above.

Actually, as I mentioned in this comment sequence above, this is false. It is not that the language of Paul "supports" a more spiritual understanding but that it has been *misread* that way. Paul's creed is *brief*, which is why I think it should not be our primary source just because it is taken to be "early." As I have said, I believe that the resurrection accounts of Jesus' appearances in Luke, Matthew, and John have every reason for support as being *the same as* what the disciples were saying all along, though John (e.g.) did not _write down_ his account until later. The mis-interpretation of Paul in the rest of I Corinthians 15 has been soundly refuted, and here I want to take off my hat to Mike Licona, who lays all this out very well. I gather that the fact that it has been refuted is not fully acknowledged by the "vast majority of New Testament scholars," but we should be concerned with what is _true_, and it is _true_ that this is a complete misinterpretation of Paul's use of a phrase "raised a spiritual body."

"After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs (1:3)." Isn't that an odd way to phrase it?

No, it isn't odd at all. In fact, it shows that the disciples weren't gullible, that they _didn't_ believe that it was Jesus based on some unconvincing or ghostly appearance but demanded clear evidence. It emphasizes the very physical nature of Jesus' appearances. To take this to indicate vague experiences or a spiritual resurrection is quite frankly bizarre, since the whole point is to emphasize the exact opposite--that Jesus _showed them clearly_ who he was. In fact, I would not be surprised if this verse indicates that Luke knew of Thomas and of Jesus' showing his hands and side.

And what about this: "... after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles... (Acts 1:2)" what does that mean? Giving instructions "through the Holy Spirit"? That sounds more like inspiration than speaking verbally.

Only if you take it *completely out of context*. Not only does the surrounding context state that Jesus _showed_ them who he was clearly, it goes further: It further emphasizes a _period of time_ during which he was physically present with them and emphasizes further the physical nature of his presence by recounting the ascension. Note that the ascension is *completely pointless* if Jesus merely gave them "inspiration" or spiritual appearances. The ascension implies that Jesus was present in a physical body which left our world *only* then, when he ascended, which explains why he wasn't walking and talking with them afterwards!

As to what it means by "giving instructions to the disciples through the Holy Spirit," commentators vary. One point is that the phrase "through the Holy Spirit" can be taken instead with "whom he had chosen"--emphasizing that the disciples themselves were originally chosen by Jesus "through the Holy Spirit." In any event, to tear that phrase out of the surrounding clearly _physical_ context is completely unjustified and poor exegesis.

Also, this odd line in Matthew: "When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted (28:17)." They saw him... and worshiped him... but some doubted? If you saw Jesus alive, would you... doubt?

Once again, you are taking the verse out of context. The next verse begins, "And Jesus came and spake unto them..." some translations giving "came near." In other words, the doubt is recorded as occurring at a time when he had not yet drawn near to them.

Finally and principally, William Lane Craig says he is not an evidentialist -- which means, he says, that he is NOT claiming that Christian faith is based on the always contingent, probable judgments of historical research.

I have no idea why that is "principally." I take your word for it, because of Craig's use of the "internal witness of the Holy Spirit" (of which I'm aware), that he does say somewhere explicitly that he is not an evidentialist. That is unfortunate. He should be. Every Christian should be an evidentialist.

But aside from that, his argument from the minimal facts *is* supposed to work as an inference to the best explanation. I'm arguing that it has problems in that regard. I doubt very much that Dr. Craig himself would punt at that point and say, "Oh, well, I'm not an evidentialist anyway." The point is that the argument is supposed to work on its own terms, and I'm arguing that it has less force than it might appear to have on its own terms. My argument needs to be answered on that level. In fact, it would be a kind of tacit admission that I'm right to say, "Oh, well, I'm not really an evidentialist."

For both Protestants and Catholics, then, these historical arguments are interesting but ultimately neither prove nor disprove anything.

So now you have shifted from a descriptive statement about Dr. Craig's religious epistemology to a normative statement about what is supposed to be true "for Protestants and Catholics alike."

The fact is that we have *very strong* historical evidence for the resurrection. I am not going to agree that that is not the case, because it is an area to which I've devoted a lot of study, and I say you are just _wrong_ that these historical arguments "neither prove or disprove anything," at least if "prove" is taken in the colloquial sense. (Obviously, "prove" cannot be taken in the mathematical sense. In _that_ sense we don't have mathematically deductive proof that Abraham Lincoln existed, but so what?)

Jesus didn't die and stay dead but rose again, even if we aren't sure what exactly that means. It might have been physical, might have been purely spiritual. We don't know. Isn't that the most pragmatic, honest approach?

It's an incorrect approach and neither explains the evidence nor fits with actual Christian doctrine. Paul says that if Christ is not risen we are of all men most miserable. A purely spiritual "resurrection" is simply not a resurrection and for that matter not a miracle. It's a cop-out phrase that means something like "went to heaven." It isn't what the apostles preached, it isn't the Christian doctrine, and it isn't what the church was founded on. If Jesus was not raised _miraculously_ from the dead, then we do not have strong evidence that our sins are forgiven in his name. It was on the basis of the miracle of his resurrection that the apostles preached forgiveness of sins through belief in Jesus on the day of Pentecost. This is why Paul says that we are "still in our sins" if Jesus has not risen from the dead.

Lydia,

Very interesting. I love your comments even though I disagree with at least half of them.

If you don't mind, and if you have the time, a few more questions. I think you're almost completely incorrect but your arguments are nonetheless interesting.

1. On Matthean prioroity: That would require you to believe that Mark came along and CUT OUT most of what Jesus says (i.e., the Sermon on the Mount) as largely irrelevant. This is a bridge too far for, yes, "most" professional New Testament scholars. Hence the Four Source hypothesis remains relatively unchallenged

2. By "texts," I mean the actual books of the New Testament -- not imagined sources or "eyewitness reports" embedded in them. (That is a separate argument or discussion.) If we're talking about the actual books of the New Testament, then it is NOT incorrect to say that the earliest texts are very short and contain very little detail on the Resurrection. Mark contains NONE... at least until the 172 word appendix was added. The earliest letters of Paul, likely written in the 50s, only refer to the Resurrection as a fact but with no detail about what it actually was. The letter of James, perhaps the earliest text, doesn't mention the resurrection at all.

It's not until we get Luke and John, which even conservative scholars say were written after AD 80 or so -- or a full 50 years after the events they describe -- that we get any telling details. Sure, these details are likely based on eyewitness accounts -- I think Bauckham makes a convincing case on that score -- but the TEXTS themselves are late. That is a fact that has to be accounted for.

3. So your position is that Christian faith is based on scientific history, then? We can PROVE the resurrection with the same certitude (not of mathematics) that we can prove Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford Theatre?

If that were the case, then most people would be Christians.

Alas, most are not... precisely because the exegetical arguments you use require a long chain of suppositions most people are not prepared to accept -- that 2,000-year-old documents, with a handful of alleged eyewitnesses, can be trusted with the same degree of certitude as those from 1865 that contain eyewitness reports from HUNDREDS of people, plus photographic testimony (Lincoln dead), etc.

Christian apologetics that proceeds along these lines will not convince many, I am afraid.

And that is precisely why the Minimal Facts arguments only convince the already convinced: many secular historians simply do not accept as "facts" what are presented as facts. They simply say that the documentary sources are too meager, and too old, and not buttressed by corroborating sources, to be accepted as reliable. At least not in the same way that we accept as reliable newspaper accounts of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

(BTW, I actually DO accept the Gospels as more or less reliable... and believe, on faith, that the basic story is true... but I recognize that, from the point of view of scientific history, there are many problems with the sources. To deny those problems or pretend they don't exist does not help Christian apologetics, in my opinion. It's better to acknowledge the problems... show why secular historians have problems with these texts... and then show why it's credible to believe the basic story of the resurrection anyway, even while conceding that there may be legendary accretions that occurred.

There is a middle path between fundamentalist literalism and John Dominic Crossan -- and that is the path of historical critical scholarship as practiced by Christian exegetes, such as James Dunn, Bauckham, N.T. Wright, John Meier, the late Raymond Brown, etc.

"There is a middle path between fundamentalist literalism and John Dominic Crossan -- and that is the path of historical critical scholarship as practiced by Christian exegetes, such as James Dunn, Bauckham, N.T. Wright, John Meier, the late Raymond Brown, etc."

Bob, where do you think Drs. William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and Michael Licona fall on your spectrum?

On Matthean priority: NT scholarship has a bad habit of being overly dismissive of patristic evidence. Such dismissiveness would never be accepted in a field like classics or Roman history, and it is just one sign of the biases in NT scholarship which a rational person should take into account. One example of this is the complete dismissal of the patristic testimony that Matthew wrote first, in Aramaic. Theodore Zahn, I understand, had the interesting theory, at least worth considering, that Matthew first wrote in Aramaic, though it was briefer than our present Matthew--a sayings document. Then, on this theory, Mark wrote independently. Our Greek Matthew, written either by Matthew or with his cooperation, made use of Mark inter alia. This would account both for textual evidence and for patristic evidence. This could actually be quite early--not much later than Mark.

You interestingly treat Matthew as though it is not an independent source and its resurrection account as late (you don't bother to say how late). But actually, though of course Matthew does contain passages that appear to come either from Mark or from a shared source, there is also evidence not only that Matthew wrote Matthew but that Matthew has independent material. Of course if Matthew wrote Matthew, then that is relevant epistemically to the value of its resurrection account!

"Luke...which even conservative scholars say were written after AD 80 or so..."

A large overstatement. You would not have any difficulty finding conservative scholars arguing for a date for Luke in the early 60's. Indeed, the ending of Acts supports this position, by an argument with which you are probably familiar. But if you are familiar with it, then why did you make it sound like everybody agrees that Luke was written in the 80's or later?

Further evidence for the earliness of Luke comes in Paul's virtual _quotation_ from Luke's account of the Last Supper. Given Paul's and Luke's close association, this fits together very nicely.

Then there are the discourses on the last things in Luke and Matthew, the arrangement of which supports the hypothesis that they were written prior to the destruction of Jerusalem. (Interestingly, this argument arises from the fact that the authors may have been _confused_ in their interpretation of what Jesus was referring to and hence may have placed portions of Jesus' discourses next to each other that did not refer to the same events. This would have been _evident_ after the destruction of Jerusalem.) By the way, if one takes a post-70 date because of Jesus' prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, this is question-begging against the proposition that Jesus was actually able to prophesy!

There are other arguments that could be given. Suffice it to say that you have overstated your case.

The texts are late....That is a fact that has to be accounted for.

No, that is a _proposition_ that can be reasonably _debated_. Moreover, I absolutely refuse to grant that the lateness of John, *if it was written by John*, means _anything_ against its accuracy. In fact, that is in no sense a "fact to be accounted for" as though it counts _against_ the accuracy of John. Why should it? If a man with an excellent memory (and there is both strong internal and external evidence of the accuracy of John's memory) tells what he remembers of important events decades later, why should this cast a doubt upon his account or imply that his account of the resurrection "grew in the telling"?

To deny those problems or pretend they don't exist does not help Christian apologetics, in my opinion. It's better to acknowledge the problems... show why secular historians have problems with these texts... and then show why it's credible to believe the basic story of the resurrection anyway, even while conceding that there may be legendary accretions that occurred.

A) I don't agree that there are all these problems to be acknowledged, as I've indicated. That's called a scholarly disagreement, not a "pretense."

B) It's rather odd for you, as a commentator, to be saying that "it's credible to believe the basic story of the resurrection" when, as your above comment shows, your notion of the "basic story" is so extremely thin that it is compatible with Jesus going to heaven without appearing on earth at all and sending "inspiration" to his disciples! That is _not_ even the "basic story" of the resurrection.

So your position is that Christian faith is based on scientific history, then? We can PROVE the resurrection with the same certitude (not of mathematics) that we can prove Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford Theatre?

I think we have extremely strong evidence. The actual posterior probability, as probability theorists call it, will depend upon the prior probability. The fact that this is a claim of a miraculous occurrence legitimately gives it a _somewhat_ lower prior probability than a non-miraculous occurrence. But I think that the concrete evidence is so strong as to swamp completely the prior and give us an extremely high rational posterior probability.

When it comes to the point that we are parsing the difference between a .99 probability and a .9999 probability (for example), it shouldn't matter a whole lot to whether one believes this to have been shown on the basis of a strong argument that doesn't require the "eyes of faith."

By the way, the evidence that Acts was written by a close personal companion of the Apostle Paul might be fairly said to be overwhelming.

The primary advocates of the minimal facts argument try to evade these issues about the gospels because they don't want to get into them. That is not the same thing as being forced by evidence or even feeling forced by evidence, to concede that it is probable that they do contain legendary accretions. For the most part it is a preference (in my view, a misguided preference) for deferring to the "consensus of scholarship" for strategic reasons. To parse this strategic decision not to get into those issues as, "These guys know all about this stuff and have _seen_ that there is are insuperable problems with an early date for Matthew or Luke or for taking the gospels to be written by their traditionally ascribed authors" is incorrect.

Then too there is the fact that many of the internal evidences which tend to support traditional authorship, such as the undesigned coincidences argument, have been lost to scholarship for a long time and are just now coming back to light and general knowledge even amongst evangelical apologists.

We can PROVE the resurrection with the same certitude (not of mathematics) that we can prove Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford Theatre? . . . If that were the case, then most people would be Christians.

Since when did belief that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated commit a reasonable person to turn to God, to abhor idols, to acknowledge the corruption of human nature, the need for atonement between God and man, the gracious provision of this atonement in a man both astonishingly powerful and thoroughly humble, the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit, &c.? There is a common assumption that wishful thinking affects only those who think Jesus rose from the dead. We would do well to consider the ways in which wishful thinking might affect those who, for various reasons and in various stages of life, would find it far more convenient if he did not.

Yes, I did not happen to address Bob's claim that if the evidence were really that strong most people would be Christians.

The answers to this are *so obvious* that it almost seems they should not need to be made.

Here is one example: The atheist philosopher J.L. Mackie, who was a much higher quality atheist than the "new atheists" we have around these days, nonetheless stated *in so many words* that if one saw what seemed to be a miracle before one's very eyes one should conclude that one's senses were wrong.

The real irony here is that Mackie was a Bayesian theorist and therefore should have known better--he should have known that a low prior probability can be overcome by strong evidence.

Yet he tried every which way to argue that one could never be rational in concluding that a miracle had occurred.

In this he was following in the footsteps of David Hume, who claimed to have given an "everlasting check" to all miracle claims. Hume, in turn, was trying to block without inquiry the work of the evidentialist apologists of his own day.

All of this is irrational.

But then, people aren't always rational, are they?

"There is a middle path between fundamentalist literalism and John Dominic Crossan -- and that is the path of historical critical scholarship as practiced by Christian exegetes, such as James Dunn, Bauckham, N.T. Wright, John Meier, the late Raymond Brown, etc."

Bob, where do you think Drs. William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and Michael Licona fall on your spectrum?

I would rather not speak for them... and I only know Habermas and Licona from articles. I think William Lane Craig is personally very conservative and believes in a bodily resurrection but he is also well aware of the exegetical problems involved. He seems respectful of the Objective Vision Theory... which is that SOMETHING REAL HAPPENED but we can't really know precisely what it is, given the paucity of our sources and any lack of corroborating evidence. I think that is the position of Pannenberg, although I'm not sure.

In other words, we don't really know what exactly happened.

We accept on faith that Jesus rose, appeared alive to many of his followers, but whether this was a spiritual vision or a glorified version of his human body... we can't know for sure.

I actually lean to something bodily, for the reasons Lydia gives, but that isn't the same thing as saying we can PROVE it. A hunch is not proof.

The most recent issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature has a fascinating article on what Paul means by a "spiritual body," laying out all the options, but it, too, argues for a more physicalist position. But again, that's not the same as scientific proof. It's an exegetical argument. Saying we can prove the resurrection scientifically or according to the standards of mainstream historical practice is overstating our case, in my opinion.

I think it's more honest to say we don't know precisely what happened but that we believe Jesus "presented himself alive with many proofs" that are no longer accessible to secular historians.

I don't think that's a cop-out. I think that's facing facts.

Fascinating discussion, tho. I think it's fantastic that the Christian community is FINALLY facing up to these exegetical issues on a popular level. Classical apologetics -- that miracles in the New Testament prove Jesus was God and the fulfillment of OT prophecies -- no longer convince anyone. We need better arguments, and William Lane Craig is helping to pioneer a new apologetics that takes into account the exegetical facts.

Jesus didn't die and stay dead but rose again, even if we aren't sure what exactly that means. It might have been physical, might have been purely spiritual. We don't know. Isn't that the most pragmatic, honest approach?

No. A "purely spiritual" resurrection would have left a body behind, and Christianity dead on arrival. So to speak.

Yes, good point... if we could prove the empty tomb... but we can't.

We have the reports of the empty tomb in the Gospels (but not in Paul!) but, again, these sources are not accepted by many people as sufficiently reliable to be trusted alone, without corroboration.

What if, as James Tabor claims, Jesus was buried in a temporary, borrowed tomb due to the approaching sabbath... and then moved to another location for more permanent burial? I don't believe that for a second, but it's inherently possible. The mere fact of an empty tomb, even if it could be proven, which it can't, isn't sufficient to prove the resurrection because there are other possible explanations for it.

Thus, such an argument won't convince the unconvinced. It is a good point for the already convinced, however, and is one reason why I personally lean to a bodily resurrection myself. But again, belief isn't the same as proof.


He seems respectful of the Objective Vision Theory.

No, not epistemically respectful or respectful from a scholarly point of view of the theory itself. He's respectful of W. Pannenberg personally, because he was his teacher, but it's quite clear that Craig believes the objective vision theory has been refuted.

Classical apologetics -- that miracles in the New Testament prove Jesus was God and the fulfillment of OT prophecies -- no longer convince anyone. We need better arguments, and William Lane Craig is helping to pioneer a new apologetics that takes into account the exegetical facts.

First of all, I don't know quite why you are using the term "classical apologetics" in that way, since the term is more often used in apologetics for something quite different--namely, for an ordering in which one makes metaphysical arguments for the existence of God first.

Setting aside the terminological point, your dichotomy is extremely strange. William Lane Craig's work has actually led to a revival of the argument from the resurrection. In no way does he assert anything like what you are asserting--e.g., that we can't know what happened and what not.

I'm simply pushing the argument from miracles further and back to a more _robust_ version of the argument from miracles. But even the minimal facts approach that I am criticizing for being insufficiently bold _is_ a version of the argument from miracles.

Your airy statement that the argument from miracles in the NT "no longer convinces anyone" is flatly false. Many people have been convinced by it, even in the recent past. I happen to know some.

The fact is, Bob, that you seem to specialize in overstatements. This is particularly ironic given that your whole counsel is that we should be extremely careful, not to say timid, in what we are willing to claim _for_ the resurrection evidence. But your statements against that evidence do not demonstrate much in the way of moderation.

Bob,

Just a quick point on the issue of Abraham Lincoln. I kind of wish Lydia had used the better example of Caesar crossing the Rubicon, because in point of fact just about any example from ancient history (and really any pre-modern history before photography or mass printing) suggests that the Gospel accounts of Jesus' resurrection (plus Acts and Paul) is more evidence than we have for many, if not most, events from ancient history. Plus we have archeological evidence to back this all up!

If only we had several accounts of Alexander's campaigns through Persia written within 20-50 years of his life -- we could be much more confident of what we was up to back then (as La Wik says "The primary sources written by people who actually knew Alexander or who gathered information from men who served with Alexander, are all lost, apart from a few inscriptions and fragments.") One could say the same about many great figures from the past.

Lydia talks about some of this in her wonderful piece on the probability of the resurrection, which if you haven't read it you should do so right away:

http://www.lydiamcgrew.com/Resurrectionarticlesinglefile.pdf

Yes, I just randomly picked Lincoln because I was trying to be clear about the word "prove," which Bob had introduced.

By the way, speaking as a layman, I know of no insuperable reason why Matthew, Mark, and Luke (not necessarily in that order) could not have all been completed by AD 60.

What if, as James Tabor claims, Jesus was buried in a temporary, borrowed tomb due to the approaching sabbath... and then moved to another location for more permanent burial? I don't believe that for a second, but it's inherently possible. The mere fact of an empty tomb, even if it could be proven, which it can't, isn't sufficient to prove the resurrection because there are other possible explanations for it.

Such an account is of course theoretically possible. But it remains a poor account taken with the rest of the events. Just for example, the Apostles would have been AWARE of the possibility that his body was moved, and would have been ready to reply to "his body is not there" with "so where was it put?" In fact, Mary Magdalene assumes JUST THAT as the first answer to the empty tomb: "They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him." So the possibility was thought of AND ACCOUNTED FOR in the rest of the accounts. The Apostles themselves disproved the theory of the other location for burial. In order for later scholars to propose this as a working theory, they have to have an account of (a) why the Apostles DIDN'T pursue the same concern (when it is so obvious), or (b) why the written account was made to gloss over what they REALLY found out when they tried to locate the secondary tomb and instead report a fiction. And none of these theories are particularly good ones, at all.

I think that Bob may be confusing "there are other possible explanations" with "there are other explanations that are just as reasonable or almost as reasonable to believe." Now, I myself don't think the empty tomb makes a super-strong case all by itself, but of course even the minimal facts advocate isn't using it _by itself_. And the evidence for the empty tomb is data. I think that when people are opposing the evidentialist approach they tend to think that if the skeptic can come up with _some_ other explanation, the skeptic's work is done.

On the contrary, that is just the beginning. If the explanation is ad hoc and strained, then that means that the evidence has confirmed the resurrection (though the skeptic may not be admitting it).

What is _possible_ to believe is not the same thing as what is _reasonable_ to believe.

But, again, do you REALLY want Christian faith to be based on the always shifting "probabilities" of history?

Really?

This is what Karl Barth saw clearly. Faith based on historical probabilities isn't faith at all -- certainly not the kind of faith to base your life on.

Caesar may well have crossed the Rubicon, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Bob,

You write:

But, again, do you REALLY want Christian faith to be based on the always shifting "probabilities" of history?

Actually, the probabilities of well-evidenced history don't shift all that much. You'll have noticed that there isn't a lot of debate for the past century or so over whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon or whether Lincoln was assassinated.

And in any event, there is no rational alternative.

Barth was wrong.

Actually, probability is the guide of life. You base your life on probabilities every single day. You couldn't get into your car without doing so or a million other activities. There is no way to get away from probabilities or from dependence upon them, and it is rational so to depend.

Leaping into Barthian anti-rationality is a disastrous alternative.

History happened the way it happened. It is a mere confusion to refer to the shifting probabilities of history. History is made up of facts.

And as for our knowledge thereof, in point of fact, what has happened in the past century has been only more and more and more confirmation of the historicity of the events of the gospels. No "ever-shifting" going on there. You just either do not know the evidence very well (which I'm afraid your comments thus far simply confirm, sad to say), in which case I earnestly and sincerely invite you to study it more and become familiar with more of it, or you lack the ability to evaluate it justly.

By the way, speaking as a layman, I know of no insuperable reason why Matthew, Mark, and Luke (not necessarily in that order) could not have all been completed by AD 60.

Actually, you're right: there really isn't. A secular scholar at the University of Sheffield, James Crossley, wrote a book in 2004 in which he argued that Mark, at least, could have been written around AD 39. Why? Because, he says, the "desolating sacrilege" that is "set up" in the Temple likely refers to the Caligula crisis, mentioned by Josephus. That means Mark could have been written within 10 years of the crucifixion.

But of course, that means accepting the notion that Mark altered Jesus' words to reflect the political realities when he was writing -- in AD 39.

Luke, of course, appears to change Mark's version of what Jesus says and has Jesus say, "When you see" -- not the desolating sacrilege but -- "Jerusalem surrounded by armies" -- to reflect what he likely saw when he was writing, perhaps in the late AD 60s... when Jerusalem actually WAS "surrounded by armies."

Now, in order to protect their idea of inerrancy, conservative apologists can try to argue that Jesus made one prediction recorded by Mark... and, on a different occasion, made a different prediction recorded by Luke. Critical scholars, however, accept the less complicated explanation that Luke simply EDITED Mark and put DIFFERENT WORDS in Jesus' mouth, to reflect what he saw happening when he was writing.

This is why, then, critical scholars favor a later dating at least for Luke.

You don't have to be a New Testament scholar to see this. All you need is a synopsis of the New Testament and you can see the likely editing for yourself. It doesn't take long before Markan priority seems to make a lot of sense.

Luke, of course, appears to change Mark's version of what Jesus says and has Jesus say, "When you see" -- not the desolating sacrilege but -- "Jerusalem surrounded by armies" -- to reflect what he likely saw when he was writing, perhaps in the late AD 60s [emphasis added]

Hold on a minute. Earlier today you were saying this, above at February 27, 2015 12:05 PM:

It's not until we get Luke and John, which even conservative scholars say were written after AD 80 or so -- or a full 50 years after the events they describe -- that we get any telling details.

Something is shifting here, but it isn't the probabilities.

And in any event, there is no rational alternative.

Actually, I think there is: classical Christian theology.

Belief is the acceptance of something as true based on the authority of another. In the past, and still today, people come to faith in Christ either because they were born into a Christian community -- and just believe the articles of faith because they trust that community -- or because they encounter Christians, hear the Gospel and believe it (interior testimony of the spirit a la reformed espistemology).

Only very rarely do people become Christians because they've studied textual variants in the Gospel of Luke... and decide that it is probable we have the authentic texts of original Gospels... or because they have studied historical analyses of the resurrection and concluded, a la Habermas, that a bodily resurrection is the "most probable explanation for the data."

Sorry, but that just isn't how it works... and never has.

IF history is the basis for faith, then no one prior to, say, the late 19th century, had Christian faith. None of the great saints and leaders of Christendom -- Francis of Assisi, Luther, Corrie tenBoom, whoever -- had faith... because few of them made historical studies of first-century Palestine.

I could be wrong (frequently am), but I think this obsession with PROVING the facts of the Gospels is really an outgrowth of fundamentalism and a need to prove the Bible inerrant. That's why it's mostly conservative evangelicals who are engaged in this type of apologetics. As I said, while it's interesting I think it only convinces the already convinced.

William Lane Craig engages in it as well.... but, again, he insists that historical arguments are NOT the basis of faith. They can SUPPORT faith. They can intrigue skeptics into investigating things. But they are not the basis of faith.

Belief is the acceptance of something as true based on the authority of another. In the past, and still today, people come to faith in Christ either because they were born into a Christian community -- and just believe the articles of faith because they trust that community

Fine as a sociological description. Lousy as a _basis_ for faith that will withstand the first breath of the understandable "If you'd been born in Iraq you'd be a Muslim" line. Many a young person has lost his faith *precisely because* this was all they had.

I aim to give the Christian young person better. Since it's available, and I know it, it would be a sin for me not to offer it.

IF history is the basis for faith, then no one prior to, say, the late 19th century, had Christian faith.

This is such silliness as almost not to be worth answering. The gospels, which _are_ historical sources, are the foundation of the entire Christian religion.

I think this obsession with PROVING the facts of the Gospels is really an outgrowth of fundamentalism and a need to prove the Bible inerrant.

So, you didn't read my main post, where I expressly disclaimed inerrantism in anything like the usual sense. Or is the word "outgrowth" doing all the work in this little piece of psychologizing pseudo-argument?

As I said, while it's interesting I think it only convinces the already convinced.

And as I said, I could present you with counterexamples. Do you have some kind of a priori proof that the people I know who have come to be convinced when they weren't already convinced don't really exist? Perhaps they are figments of my imagination?

Or do you just specialize in ignoring what other people say in response to your claims and repeating yourself as if they haven't already answered you?

I'm sorry, Bob, but I'm afraid that after having started off merely sounding friendly and, in my own opinion, incorrect, you're starting to sound a bit like what is known in the blogosphere as a concern troll.

Now, in order to protect their idea of inerrancy, conservative apologists can try to argue that Jesus made one prediction recorded by Mark... and, on a different occasion, made a different prediction recorded by Luke.

So far as I can tell, nobody in this discussion is trying to protect an idea of inerrancy.

Critical scholars, however, accept the less complicated explanation that Luke simply EDITED Mark and put DIFFERENT WORDS in Jesus' mouth, to reflect what he saw happening when he was writing.

This is why, then, critical scholars favor a later dating at least for Luke.

There is a gap in the logic here, and it matters.

The simple hypothesis is that Luke is paraphrasing what he takes Jesus to have been saying, probably using Mark as a basis. However, all that this would establish, if we took it as given, is that Mark was was writing in the 80s. If you want to see what a real critical scholar does with the data, have a look at Adolf Harnack -- that hard-bitten fundamentalist -- as he retracts his arguments in favor of a late date for Luke and puts it prior to Acts, which is itself prior to the mid 60s, a decision that pushes Mark back still further. Be sure not to miss Harnack's discussion of the language in Luke 21:20-24, pp. 118 ff.

You seem to be confusing Markan priority with a late dating of the Gospels. These are separate issues.

Bob: My father-in-law "pretends" that he remembers the atomic bombing of his hometown, Nagasaki, Japan, 70 years ago. That would correspond to 100 AD or later, if he wrote an account of Jesus' resurrection. My wife's former pastor "pretends" to recall events on the European front, in Patton's army, the same year.

Why should recalling events a mere 60 years past have been a problem for the Apostle John?

I think this obsession with PROVING the facts of the Gospels is really an outgrowth of fundamentalism and a need to prove the Bible inerrant.

Two points. First, you are the one who is talking about "proving." Everyone else is talking about making a good historical argument. Proof may be your white whale, but you're reading it into what other people are writing.

Second, you are indeed completely wrong about where this sort of argument comes from, even as a matter of the history of apologetics. In order to get a better idea of what is being advanced here, I would suggest that you read Paley's View of the Evidences of Christianity.

A secular scholar at the University of Sheffield, James Crossley, wrote a book in 2004 in which he argued that Mark, at least, could have been written around AD 39. Why? Because, he says, the "desolating sacrilege" that is "set up" in the Temple likely refers to the Caligula crisis, mentioned by Josephus. That means Mark could have been written within 10 years of the crucifixion.

Because of course Jesus didn't actually _predict_ any of this.

You can cut the presumptions there with a knife.

Luke, of course, appears to change Mark's version of what Jesus says and has Jesus say, "When you see" -- not the desolating sacrilege but -- "Jerusalem surrounded by armies" -- to reflect what he likely saw when he was writing, perhaps in the late AD 60s... when Jerusalem actually WAS "surrounded by armies."

Ditto on assuming Jesus didn't really predict stuff.

But how interesting, Bob. You started off giving us the impression that all are agreed that Luke was written in the 80's, and you used that as some heavy argument that the Lukan resurrection narrative was an accretion. Did you change your mind, now, or just decide to put forward a _completely different_ hypothesis that is still supposed to make us think that Luke made stuff up to fit his surrounding circumstances?

Now, in order to protect their idea of inerrancy, conservative apologists can try to argue that Jesus made one prediction recorded by Mark... and, on a different occasion, made a different prediction recorded by Luke. Critical scholars, however, accept the less complicated explanation that Luke simply EDITED Mark and put DIFFERENT WORDS in Jesus' mouth, to reflect what he saw happening when he was writing.

Because those are the _only_ options.

False dichotomy much?

How about the still simpler hypothesis that Luke was talking to a different person who was there who remembered what Jesus said differently?

That doesn't _have_ to mean that one witness was wrong. Jesus could have said _on the same occasion_ that they will see Jerusalem compassed by armies and also the abomination of desolation. "Contradictions" are frequently manufactured by critics who assume that if one thing is true another thing isn't also true. Even students taking notes on the same lecture may note different words.

But say that one witness or the other remembered incorrectly. So what? The idea that this supports the conclusion that Luke was written late, or that Luke was making stuff up after the fact to fit what he saw going on around him (you've apparently switched from one hypothesis to the other) is not particularly well supported and certainly doesn't justify the lofty tone of superiority you are taking with regard to the skeptical hypotheses of "critical scholars."

And, as usual, and as so often happens in such conversations, you are conflating "Markan priority" with the eohippus doctrine of "development" or ahistorical alteration.


Belief is the acceptance of something as true based on the authority of another.

And thus do I believe in the authoritative witness of those who claim to have seen the body of the risen Christ, to have spoken with Him, touched Him, eaten with Him, and worshipped Him. The sincerity of their desire to tell the truth blazes through every passage of the New Testament; and to tell it not entirely for their own sake, but for mine and for all men, since they had not much to gain from embellishment or delusion but persecution and death. Either that or it's all a lie, in service to that Authority they believed to be - and to Whose word they had entrusted their eternal fate - the Truth incarnate. The New Testament is the most unselfish, generous - in sum, charitable - document in the history of human letters, in the same way that its authors' Master wanted nothing for Himself except that repentance which works to our good - and our love. There has never been anything like it, and never will be again. And that fact is itself good evidence in its favor.

What a magnificent comment, Bill. Have you ever considered taking up blogging?

Bob: “1. On Matthean prioroity: That would require you to believe that Mark came along and CUT OUT most of what Jesus says (i.e., the Sermon on the Mount) as largely irrelevant. This is a bridge too far for, yes, "most" professional New Testament scholars. Hence the Four Source hypothesis remains relatively unchallenged”

If one assumes that Mark’s Gospel was written after the other two Synoptic Gospels and that Mark used the latter it can be argued that it wasn’t Mark’s aim to replace the other Gospels and that therefore Mark left out the parts that he didn’t find necessary to record, as could have been the parts about Jesus’s childhood and the Sermon on the Mount (or the Sermon on the Plain). As for the latter it may have been that its content was learnt by heart by early Christians (see Matthew 7,24-27) and therefore known to the addressees of Mark’s Gospel. As for arguments against Markan priority the following book is very informative:

Hans-Herbert Stoldt, History and Criticism of the Marcan Hypothesis, Edinburgh 1980.

Strong arguments against Markan priority include the fact that in the parts Matthew, Mark und Luke share with each other those in Mark are often more detailed than those in the other two Gospels. Stoldt detected 180 such parts in Mark, but only 35 more detailed parts in Matthew and Luke! One may ask why Matthew and Luke left out so many details they supposedly had before them in Mark. Moreover, in favour of the view that Markan priority is false it can be argued that with respect to the parts in which Mark shares pericopae with at least one of the other Gospels the order of the pericopae in Mark is such that from 1,1 to 3,6 Mark follows Matthew and Luke, then from 3,7 to 3,19 he follows only Luke, from 3,22 he first follows only Matthew and from 3,31 to 4,20 Luke as well, from 4,30 to 4,34 he follows only Matthew and from 4,35 to 5,43 Luke as well, from 6,6b to 6,29 he follows Matthew and Luke, in 6,30-31 only Luke, in 6,32-44 Matthew as well, from 6,45 to 8,21 only Matthew, from 8,27 to 9,10 Luke as well, in 9,11-13 only Matthew, from 9,14-37 Luke as well, in 9,38-40 only Luke, in 9,42-48 und in 10,1 Matthew as well, in 10,2-12 only Matthew, from 10,13 to 10,34 Luke as well, in 10,35-40 only Matthew, from 10,41-11,11 Luke as well, in 11,12-14 only Matthew, in 11,15-19 Luke as well, in 11,20-25 only Matthew, from 11,27-12,40 Luke as well, in 12,41-44 only Luke, from 13,1 to 14,2 Matthew as well, in 14,3-9 only Matthew, from 14,10 to 14,25 Luke as well, in 14,26-31 only Matthew and, finally, from 14,32 Luke as well.

Wenham has argued for Matthean priority. I have not read all of his arguments, but since all I said above is that the issue is "live," that is sufficient.

Wenham also had (prior to his book arguing for Matthean priority) an extremely interesting article arguing that Peter could have been in Rome for a relatively short time in the 40's, which would accommodate Markan priority, patristic evidence concerning the origin of Mark, and the evidence that Acts was not written later than the early 60's, giving us a still earlier date for Luke.

We already see in John a situation where things are left out because the author was trying to do something different--write an independent account with a different emphasis. So there is no reason that Mark could not have done this.

Bill -- such an eloquent testimony. Thank you. I'm going to copy it to keep handy as a reminder of the beauty of the Truth.

Belief is the acceptance of something as true based on the authority of another. In the past, and still today, people come to faith in Christ either because they were born into a Christian community -- and just believe the articles of faith because they trust that community -- or because they encounter Christians, hear the Gospel and believe it (interior testimony of the spirit a la reformed espistemology).

This presents another of those false dichotomies.

People who are "born into a Christian community" don't believe just because they were "born into" the community. I have brothers who were born into a Christian community who don't believe in Christ, and haven't since their teens. If a person was born into a Christian family and believes on the testimony of his parents, that is indeed "based on the authority of another". That is a sound and appropriate act of belief: we are designed to believe our parents. It is, in fact, a measure of a WHOLESOME mental and psychological personality that he is ready and willing to believe his parents.

But let's take the next option: they encounter Christians, hear the Gospel, and believe it (interior testimony of the Spirit, says Bob). I say, Bob, that you have COMPLETELY MISSED the reality of the spiritual and psychological experience there. The people who accepted Christianity, over the ages, upon hearing it from missionaries, did in fact believe "on the testimony of others". Why? Yes, they had the interior movement of the Spirit, but that's not ALL they had. Not by half. They had ADDITIONAL reasons to believe in the testimony of the apostles & missionaries: they had miracles performed in front of them - cures and prophecies. They had the apostles' supernaturally holy lives in front of them - humble in the face of degradation, kind in the face of cruelty, forgiveness in the face of hate-filled harm. These are natural kinds of witness to the INTEGRITY of the words of the missionaries. When you have a missionary say to you "Christ taught us: do good to those who harm you", that's difficult to BELIEVE, much less to follow. Forgiving and doing good to those who harm you isn't really a naturally human act, it is a supernatural sort of thing. When, though, you actually see and hear the apostle doing good to those who are in the process of murdering him, then it is not so hard to believe his words as being a true account of Christ. That's a natural reason to accept the testimony of another. Miracles, too, are supernatural in operation but are a natural motive for accepting the words of the miracle worker.

St. Paul says "faith comes by hearing." God uses the instrumentality of us humans to first propose the truth of Christ to others, He doesn't (usually) convey the concrete message of the Gospel (to those who have never heard it) through purely divine methods - though He could, and may in a few very exceptional cases. Similarly, God uses the instrumentality of natural motives to accept the proposals of missionaries about the truth of Christ, He doesn't usually leave the WHOLE motive of belief to purely divine methods - though He could and may in a few very exceptional cases. Even in exceptional circumstances - such as Pentecost Sunday - the apostle intelligently provides what would be normal motives for belief alongside: "we ourselves saw Him after He rose from the dead..."

Belief is acceptance of something not proven, so it is always adherence to something more strongly than the evidence provides certainty for - even in cases of natural belief. Even though most people when they accept Christianity as a positive act later than childhood do it WITH an admixture of natural reasons to accept the testimony of other Christians, the natural motives for belief are NEVER ENOUGH by themselves to generate that living faith that is part and parcel with the indwelling of the Spirit. That latter is inherently supernatural and requires God's direct action. So living faith is never MERELY due to human motives of belief in the testimony of another.

However, this living faith is the faith of a human being, that is, of a rational being. As such, it is appropriate and suited to such a nature that God so move him, in that act of faith, in a manner suited to RATIONAL behavior. Now it is irrational to move to believe something that you have rock-solid proof is wrong. Thus faith is not the kind of thing that is composed of "belief in things that you already know cannot be true." Taking it a step further, though, it is not a rational sort of behavior to believe things proposed merely when they have been proposed. Scientists propose guesstimates, hypotheses, conjectures, etc all the time - nobody rushes to _believe_ such things. The mere fact that you can string together words that form a proposal that is not an oxymoron is not a sufficient preliminary for believing it. The rational behavior is to seek actual reasons to believe, and withhold belief until sufficient motives for belief are present. God, the source of human nature ("Let us make man in Our own image"), taking that nature into account, normally instigates for our needs naturally useful and sound motives for belief while He ALSO provides that supernatural motive for belief that is the special interior movement of the Holy Spirit. God, if He chooses (exceptionally) to move solely by the interior movement of the Spirit without any other accessory motives of belief, does thereby provide sufficient motive of belief - at least for the first moments of faith. But even there, the sincere Christian will then proceed to seek out a deeper understanding of what he has been given, and this naturally includes an understanding of both natural and historical reality that WILL AUTOMATICALLY support and bolster the faith with natural motives of belief. Thus even in the exceptional situation you will have faith seeking understanding, and never simply faith without any coordinate movement of the mind working with the natural light of reason. Faith and reason together, because both the will and the intellect together need to be restored from the effects of sin.

To simply ASSUME that God's interior movement must work blindly and without natural motives for belief is to assume man's nature as a reasoning creature is something independent of his salvation. But such a thing is not: God does not save us regardless of our rational natures, He saves us AS creatures of reason.

I'm sorry, Bob, but I'm afraid that after having started off merely sounding friendly and, in my own opinion, incorrect, you're starting to sound a bit like what is known in the blogosphere as a concern troll.

Okay, I shall bid everyone adieu, then.

I have a very low tolerance for ad hominem attacks of any kind. Fascinating discussion, tho.

For the record, I didn't see anyone say Bob's claims were invalid because he was a concern troll. Rather, one side proposed, another side responded, and the first side acted like no one said anything. I assume readers can figure out which is which.

So, you didn't read my main post, where I expressly disclaimed inerrantism in anything like the usual sense.

How many senses of inerrantism are there?

"Contradictions" are frequently manufactured by critics who assume that if one thing is true another thing isn't also true.

I'll admit to only reading a little of Bart Ehrman's work, but he states that the reason he brings up contradictions, some of which he also explains ways they could be resolved, is to attack two principles of Sola scriptura; namely that the Bible is self-authenticating and perspicuous. Any strong appeal to an outside source, whether that is a particular tradition, authority, or the imagined “rest of the story” by the reader is demonstrative that the Bible alone is insufficient to avoid contradictions.

How many senses of inerrantism are there?

About as many as there are different Christian sects.

Any strong appeal to an outside source, whether that is a particular tradition, authority, or the imagined “rest of the story” by the reader is demonstrative that the Bible alone is insufficient to avoid contradictions.

A Catholic in the making. ;-)

(Though to be fair that sounds like a faulty understanding of Sola Scriptura.)

MA, I wish I had thought of saying that!

How many senses of inerrantism are there?

Several, actually. :-) I guess I have a minute to list a few:

1) Chicago statement inerrantism. (Look it up.)

2) Inerrantism regarding matters of doctrine and religious requirements/practice. Similar: Inerrantism regarding all doctrinally important matters, including many historical matters.

3) Inerrantism regarding all that Scripture "affirms" combined with with a lot of wiggle room provided by *very generous* statements that "God wasn't really affirming P but only appearing to affirm P by culturally accommodating what the audience was able to understand."

Ehrman definitely manufactures faux contradictions. He does it so often and so misleadingly that it cannot be accidental. And believe me, by no means does he generally provide the solutions, even when he has made the "contradictions" out of nothing. _That's_ no way to sell books.

Lydia
While I agree that a lot more can be said in defense of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, my understanding of the minimal facts approach has been to say, "Okay, you reject the historicity of the gospel accounts, but accept Paul? Fine. I will show you why it is still more reasonable to believe in the bodily resurrection than not." (Although in Habermas and Licona, they list the gospels as documentary evidence for the facts.)

In your OP you said

"I am particularly disturbed by the implications of this sentence: "Evangelicals sometimes give lip service to the claim that the Gospels are historically reliable, even when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research; but I wonder if they really believe this." Prima facie, this sentence is expressing a lot of dubiousness about the claim that the gospels are historically reliable when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research."

Maybe your interactions with Craig would show me mistaken, but I read this to express dubiousness about Evangelicals beliefs, not the reliability of the gospels. Note it says the claim is "the Gospels are historically reliable, even when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research,"

You also state:

"In other words, when the architects of the minimal facts approach speak of a vast scholarly consensus on the "appearances" experienced by the disciples, they do not mean a consensus on the physical-type experiences recounted in the gospels. To those aspects of the stories, Craig acknowledges that many scholars still actually have an antipathy, though he (correctly) suspects that this is based on an ideological rather than a scholarly objection."

While it is true that this claim does not delineate between physical and nonphysical appearances, this, like the other facts, are part of a cumulative case that claims that the bodily resurrection is the best explanation for the facts. The point is that even if the scholar only assumes a vision, and not an actual appearance, the actual physical resurrection is the best explanation.

Finally, you said

I think it is necessary to be blunt: If all that we are going to assert and seek to explain is the claim that Jesus' disciples had some kind of visual experiences soon after his death that they took to be appearances of the risen Jesus, and if we are allowing that these experiences could, for all we know, have been fleeting, unclear, intersubjectively inaccessible (that is, invisible to anyone other than the disciples), and involving no senses other than sight, then the case for the resurrection is gravely weakene
d.

Again, in light of the other facts, alternative explanations of these appearances runs afoul of one or more of the other facts.

Hi, I've really enjoyed the article and comments here. I've watched lots of debates online using the minimal facts approach and it's seems to me to be borne out of the reality that every discussion of the resurrection will end up quickly getting derailed into a debate about the reliability of the gospels, contradictions, etc and end up never actually focussing on the main evidence for the resurrection itself. It seems to me that although this minimal facts approach seems to concede far too much in taking the gospels and acts out of the discussion, it does at least keep the debates centred on the resurrection rather than getting derailed. I'd love to discover if you or anyone has put together a 'maximal facts' approach that adds the best arguments for gospel reliability, Habermas' 4+1 facts and N.T. Wright's arguments about the context of Jewish belief and the transformations into early Christian beliefs to make a kind of super-argument approach to the resurrection rather than a minimal one!

I myself do not do debates, so I have not actually had to "put together" something, but to my mind it would not be difficult to do. My reasoning is something like this: At any time in a debate one is always summarizing points on which one has much more detail "in one's back pocket." This is true of anything. Consider the kalam cosmological argument. You put out there a premise like, "The universe had a beginning." Or various other premises about the need for an explanation of its beginning. Every single premise can be hotly debated by non-Christians, and the debates can get very technical. But nobody says, "Oh, don't do the kalam, because then you'll get all _derailed_ arguing about what a quantum vacuum is or whether the principle of sufficient reason holds." Right?

So I don't think there's any point in having a double standard when it comes to the argument for the resurrection. One could say something to the effect that we _have strong reason to believe_ that the disciples testified such-and-such, where that includes the fact that Jesus appeared to them on multiple occasions, that they had ample opportunity to recognize him, that he talked with all of them together, and the like. We can state that we know that the disciples testified that Jesus was _physically_ risen. We can use these as premises in an argument presented briefly. And, yes, part of the back-story for how we know this is the existence of the accounts in the gospels and Acts. So if somebody wants to argue about that, wants to say, "No, we don't really know that they testified to a physical resurrection" or something like that, yes, we will end up arguing over that.

But how is that any different from ending up arguing about the PSR or quantum vacuums if one presents the kalam? Any argument worth making for the existence of God is going to have aspects that others can challenge and technical points that _can_ come up in debate.

What is happening with the minimal facts argument, I believe, is that people _think_ they are getting a really strong argument, in a sense, "on the cheap." It's like, "Oh, good, I have this great argument that doesn't require being prepared, even if it comes up later, to argue for anything controversial." Doesn't that sound suspicious?

And in fact, it doesn't work that way. As we've seen right here, if you're going to argue against the hallucination hypothesis, you're going to have to go to more than "what is granted by the vast majority of NT scholars." If you're going to even argue that the disciples were radically transformed, you're going to need Acts!

For that matter, I was reminded since I wrote this post of a different way in which the minimal facts approach is sort of secretly using more than minimal facts without admitting it: The dating of the I Corinthians creed. Plenty who present the minimal facts approach will argue for its earliness on the basis of the earliness of Paul's conversion, when he was probably taught it. Oh. How do we know much at all about the dating of Paul's conversion in relation to the date of the crucifixion of Jesus? Oh, yeah, by connecting the Pauline epistles to Acts!!! It's absolutely true. You cannot date Paul's conversion in relation to Jesus' crucifixion if you regard Acts as just historically unreliable.

So at point after point we see that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The minimal facts approach has to fall back, without acknowledgement, on more maximal data. So we might as well just _say_ things at the outset such as that the disciples attested a physical resurrection, since we know that from Acts as well.

Hi Lydia,

Thank you for this fascinating article! I really enjoyed reading it, and my comment isn't really one of critique but merely one regarding interpretation. I'm not sure if this has been mentioned in the comments before (although I didn't see it if it has), but I wanted to suggest to you a slightly more sympathetic reading of one of William Lane Craig's statements.

You quote Craig as saying "Evangelicals sometimes give lip service to the claim that the Gospels are historically reliable, even when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research; but I wonder if they really believe this." You then go on to interpret this as follows: "Prima facie, this sentence is expressing a lot of dubiousness about the claim that the gospels are historically reliable when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research. In fact, a natural reading of the sentence would be that Craig is so dubious about this claim that he doubts that even many evangelicals who give "lip service" to it really believe it!" I agree with you completely that if this is the intent of the quotation (namely that the gospels don't stand up to historical scrutiny), then this is quite problematic.

Having read the source of the quotation well before reading this article, I interpreted this statement of his quite differently. Perhaps I am wrong, but I would like to suggest an alternate reading. Craig elsewhere expressed that, in the context of his doctoral studies under Pannenberg where he examined the evidence for the resurrection, he was shocked at how strongly a historical case for its truth could be made. While himself being a Christian and believing in the resurrection, he, at that time, was unaware of the strength of historical arguments in its favor. This, I think, forms the context in which the quotation you are dealing with is to be interpreted.

Rather than interpreting his statement as him claiming that he himself is doubtful that the gospels hold up under historical investigation, I always took this statement as his claiming quite the opposite. I understand him to be saying that while evangelicals take the Bible to be inspired and inerrant and thus want to affirm its historical credibility, many of them are unaware of the strength of the case for their reliability and are thus afraid to open them up to the same historical analysis that other historical texts would receive. His saying "but I wonder if they really believe this" is, I take it, not an expression of his doubt that it is true and that any rational person could believe it, but rather a question of whether or not they really are confident enough in that assertion to allow the gospels to be examined in that way. His comment directly after the quotation you gave I think illuminates this: "It really is true that a solid, persuasive case for Jesus’ resurrection can be made without any assumption of the Gospels’ inerrancy." While he questions whether many evangelicals are confident enough in the reliability of scripture to open it up to scrutiny, he himself is fully convinced that the gospels do hold up under historical analysis even when their inerrancy is not an assumption. Understood in the context of his surprise in his doctoral studies under Pannenberg, I think that he is suspecting that many evangelicals are not aware of the strength of the case for the claims of the Gospels just as he wasn't before he began to study it. If that is right, then his statement should be understood as his affirmation (and astonishment, given that he himself was surprised how strong as case there was) that the gospels have stood so strong under historical analysis, and his concern that many evangelicals are unaware of this and thus not confident enough to subject them to such scrutiny.

With respect to his statements about not needing to defend the aspects of scripture that are not part of the minimal facts (e.g. "The Christian apologist seeking to establish, for example, the historicity of Jesus’ empty tomb need not and should not be saddled with the task of first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically reliable documents."), I take it as his suggesting not that this is an unimportant task, but merely his suggesting that the case for the resurrection does not depend on it. You paraphrase him as saying "We shouldn't "saddle" ourselves with the task of showing that the gospels are historically reliable. We can get what we need without that," but in the quote he merely says that if we are seeking to demonstrate the truth of the claims of scripture to the resurrection, then we need not FIRST establish the general reliability. I don't take him to be saying here that that is not an important task (as he himself holds to inerrancy), but merely that it is not necessary to establish the resurrection.

I do understand your concern that an overemphasis of a minimal facts approach can result in an improper attitude towards the rest of scripture and a diminishmment of the importance of defending the general trustworthiness of the gospels as a whole. I think that both the minimal facts and maximal facts approach have their place, and I've very much enjoyed the contribution that you and Tim Mcgrew have made to the discussion. I am very willing and content to include as much evidence as possible in the case for the resurrection, and don't at all think we need to rest solely on what there is a current scholarly consensus for. Thank you again for the great read and God bless!

Matt, I'm giving a quick answer here, but let me just say that, no, I think the context is _very_ clear that he is questioning whether the gospels hold up if they are "examined by the canons of ordinary historical research." In fact, I don't know if you are aware of this, but in the larger context still in that introduction, he is saying that for this reason he is glad that he was allowed by the publisher to _remove_ from this edition a chapter by Craig Blomberg defending the historical reliability of the gospels! That is very striking. Craig is an inerrantist, as you say, which makes the whole thing all the more odd, but I think the answer is that he would not want to be saddled with showing his inerrancy, or even historical reliability, *by examining the gospels by the ordinary canons of historical research*. Remember that he also has a "reformed epistemology" side to his approach, so the internal witness of the Holy Spirit is, in his view, another source of information. It would be possible to make a consistent picture by holding that this internal witness leads us to hold inerrancy while the "canons of ordinary historical research" may or may not (the question is very open) even be able to support _reliability_.

Remember, too, that the reference to Pannenberg _strongly_ calls into question any sort of affirmation of historical reliability, since Pannenberg _denies_ a physical resurrection and believes that the gospel narratives that are "physicalist" were later legendary accretions. Of course, Craig does not agree with him on this, but the point is that his studies *under Pannenberg* would hardly have been likely to bring home to him in a strong way the conclusion *that the gospels are historically reliable*. Rather, I take him to be saying that his studies brought home to him the conclusion that we can (in some sense) believe in the resurrection on the basis of a much weaker historical affirmation about the gospels, since this is what Pannenberg does. I myself question just how valuable Pannenberg's "belief in the resurrection" really is. I have zero sympathy with the objective vision theory. My perception is that, while Craig certainly does not hold that theory, he was much struck by how "revolutionary" Pannenberg was even to accept *that much*. And indeed, I think that is how Pannenberg was regarded in NT studies. It is therefore understandable that Craig would be inclined to think that one can somehow "learn from Pannenberg" that it is possible to believe in the resurrection without affirming the reliability of the gospels.

In fact, Craig is very clear that this is _precisely_ what he means by his reference to Pannenberg:

Pannenberg had rocked German theology by maintaining that a sound historical case can be made for the resurrection of Jesus. Yet he also believed that the Gospel resurrection appearances stories are so legendary that they have scarcely a historical kernel in them!

I myself find this _extremely_ problematic. I don't think Pannenberg's "belief in the resurrection" without physicality is really worth the name. On that point, I think Craig and I would disagree.

Note that it is just after this excited explanation of what Pannenberg did while denying historical reliability that Craig muses about whether evangelicals "really believe" that the gospels can be seen to be reliable when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research.

Quite honestly, I cannot see how one could _begin_ to get out of that an _affirmation_ that the gospels can be seen to be reliable when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research. The entire thrust is to distance oneself from that claim, to state that it is unnecessary, that we don't need to get saddled or bogged down with it, and in general just to leave that question (at a minimum) completely up in the air. Then to sigh with relief that we (allegedly) don't need to make that claim. That is quite clearly why Craig wanted to cut the Blomberg chapter, which was only included in the earlier edition at the insistence of an editor. He didn't want it even to _appear_ that a claim of historical reliability, as examined by the canons of ordinary historical research, is important or necessary for the case.

Lydia,

Thank you for the quick response! I am aware of his reason for removing the chapter from Reasonable Faith, but as in the previous case, I understand his reason to be that he does not want to give the impression that the case for the resurrection depends upon the general reliability of the gospels. In fact, he says "The inclusion of this chapter (itself a solid piece of work written at my invitation by Craig Blomberg) perpetuated the misimpression, all too common among evangelicals, that a historical case for Jesus' radical self-understanding and resurrection depends upon showing that the Gospels are generally reliable historical documents." Here the focus seems to me to be the lack of dependence of the case for the resurrection on the general reliability of the gospels, and not whether or not a good case can be made for their reliability. In fact, he commends Blomberg's article as "a solid piece of work," at least to me suggesting that he believes that the case Blomberg made is successful (or somewhere in the neighbourhood).

With respect to your statements on Pannenberg's objective vision theory, I agree with you and not with Craig that it really doesn't merit the title resurrection. It is strange that Craig is willing to call Pannenberg's view a resurrection, considering his (and many other's) correct insistence that a resurrection in Jewish thought is a physical, bodily event. I did not mean to suggest that it was the influence of Pannenberg per se that would have convinced him that the gospels are reliable under examination (as he himself, as you point out, does not hold that), but merely that in the context of his studies of one particular claim of the scriptures, it was clear that they held up quite well under scrutiny. This, I suggested, could possibly furnish the context for the statement in the sense that evangelicals should not be afraid to allow the gospels to be opened to historical investigation, because when they are, they are shown to be accurate in their claims. I guess I just think the main thrust of what he is trying to say is that establishing the general reliability of the gospels isn't necessary for demonstrating the truth of the resurrection.

I understand your point about Craig's comment coming "after this excited explanation of what Pannenberg did while denying historical reliability," but I still get caught up with the statement he makes right after: "Evangelicals sometimes give lip service to the claim that the Gospels are historically reliable, even when examined by the canons of ordinary historical research; but I wonder if they really believe this. It really is true that a solid, persuasive case for Jesus’ resurrection can be made without any assumption of the Gospels’ inerrancy." Italicising "really is true" seems to me to be his putting emphasis and reassurance on the fact that claims of the gospels (in this particular case the resurrection) hold up under historical investigation, contrary to what he suggests many evangelicals might be concerned about. I take the emphasis in that second sentence to be contrasting itself with the concern of the first sentence. He wonders if evangelicals are actually confident enough that the Bible holds up under historical investigation in the first sentence, and then in the second sentence strongly emphasises and affirms that, at the very least in the case of the resurrection, it does. Contrary to the concerns that he perceives in many evangelicals, "it really is true" that the gospels hold up under historical study. I know that he doesn't say the gospels in general as I did in the last sentence and merely mentions the resurrection, but my main point here is that it seems that he intends second sentence to be standing in contrast with the concerns of evangelicals in the first sentence, and not to be expressing agreement with such concerns. That's just how I've always taken his comments, but I could be horribly wrong about that.

I do want to express my agreement with you, however, that it does seem to me that many people have underemphasized the importance of the general reliability of the Bible. Just because you can construct a case for the resurrection without the inerrancy or general reliability of the gospels does nothing to mitigate its importance, and we as Christians would be making a grave error in endorsing such a watered down view of scripture. To, as you put it "lightly toss the gospels to the likes of Bart Ehrman" just because a case for the resurrection can be made without establishing the general reliability of the gospels is a serious mistake, and I am very concerned that an overemphasis on the fact that the general reliability of the gospels is not needed to establish the resurrection could lead down that road.

I guess I just think the main thrust of what he is trying to say is that establishing the general reliability of the gospels isn't necessary for demonstrating the truth of the resurrection.

I agree with you there. And I think that main thrust would sit rather oddly with his actually affirming in this passage that the general reliability of the gospels holds up well under neutral historical scrutiny. There is no strict logical contradiction between them, and he might have said something in an aside that did affirm that that reliability could be established historically, but he just doesn't do so. To go on and on about how unnecessary it is to "saddle ourselves" with defending the general reliability by the canons of ordinary historical investigation and to say _nothing_ clear that _affirms_ that the general reliability _can_ thus be established leaves me thinking that it is extremely implausible that he is affirming any such thing, even tacitly, in this passage. To the contrary.

He wonders if evangelicals are actually confident enough that the Bible holds up under historical investigation in the first sentence, and then in the second sentence strongly emphasises and affirms that, at the very least in the case of the resurrection, it does. Contrary to the concerns that he perceives in many evangelicals, "it really is true" that the gospels hold up under historical study. I know that he doesn't say the gospels in general as I did in the last sentence and merely mentions the resurrection, but my main point here is that it seems that he intends second sentence to be standing in contrast with the concerns of evangelicals in the first sentence, and not to be expressing agreement with such concerns. That's just how I've always taken his comments, but I could be horribly wrong about that.

What he is saying, rather, is that a much more minimal claim can be defended historically, namely that (in some sense) Jesus rose from the dead. This can be defended (see the previous paragraph) as Pannenberg did it, on the basis of the I Cor. creed.

So what he is saying "really is true" is that the _resurrection_ holds up to historical investigation, not that the _gospels_ hold up to historical investigation. In fact, he is explicitly setting aside the entire question of whether the gospels do and arguing that the resurrection can be defended without defending the historical soundness of the gospels. I really think the passage is quite clear on this point.

In that sense, he is not going so far as to deny that the gospels hold up to such investigation, but he is going to a fair bit of trouble to bracket that question, which naturally makes one wonder whether he thinks they could endure such investigation. After all, if he were as confident on that point as I am (for example), he would, one would think, be far more likely to welcome that investigation for purposes of further confirmation rather than going to such lengths to insist that it is not important to the case.

Thanks for your agreements. I don't mean to sound antagonistic in my responses, and I can tell that we agree a lot on the substantive issues. I'm just responding in a certain amount of haste.

Many Christian apologists believe that Gary Habermas' research found that 75% of scholars believe that the Empty Tomb is an historical fact. This is a false claim.


If you read Habermas' research the truth is that his 75% claim is based on a literature search of articles in which scholars state an opinion on the historicity of the Empty Tomb. That's it.

Let me ask you this:
Which group of scholars is going to be more motivated to write articles
on the Empty Tomb? I would bet good money that the answer is: evangelical
scholars. Why? Because without the Empty Tomb, the evidence
for a BODILY resurrection of Jesus is significantly weakened. Appearance claims by a small group of mostly uneducated, superstitious Galilean peasants is NOT strong evidence upon which to base your claims of the veracity of the foundational belief of the conservative/traditional Christian faith: that a three-day-dead corpse walked out of his sealed grave, spent forty days with his friends, and then levitated into outer space.

Check out this critical review of Habermas' research:

http://www.lutherwasnotbornagain.com/2016/07/a-review-of-gary-habermas-claim-that-75.html

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