This blog post is based on the Minimal Facts argument for the Resurrection of Jesus by Dr. Gary Habermas, and it one of the strongest arguments that I have seen for the resurrection.
Dr. Habermas is an American historian, New Testament scholar, and philosopher of religion , and he has been studying the resurrection for around 40 years now. During this time he has been cataloguing the accepted facts of the resurrection by every New Testament scholar he can find, regardless of their belief.
He says this about his Minimal Facts argument:
My Minimal Facts Argument in favor of Jesus’ resurrection was developed many years ago while writing my PhD dissertation. It has two requirements for the historical facts that are used: each must be confirmed by several strong and independent arguments, plus the vast majority of even critical scholars must recognize the occurrence’s historical nature. The critical scholars can be liberal, skeptical, agnostic, or even atheist, as long as they are specialists in a relevant field of study, such as New Testament. Of these two requirements, it is important to recognize that the initial standard concerning strong evidential back-up is by far the most crucial.
So why do even critical scholars admit or allow these individual historical facts? The answer is that each one is virtually undeniable. Most of the half-dozen Minimal Facts typically used are confirmed by ten or more historical considerations each. That is simply an amazing foundation, especially for events that occurred in the First Century AD!
If a physicist was writing on the resurrection, then they didn’t qualify because their doctorate wasn’t relevant. But if even an atheist New Testament scholar was writing on the resurrection, then he counted what they accepted. He has compiled over 3000 references in English, French, and German, and note the lowest common denominator of accepted facts. The following are accepted by virtually all historians, skeptic and believer:
- Jesus died by crucifixion
- His disciples had experiences which they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus (They claimed it and they believed it.)
- His brother James, who formerly believed that Jesus was crazy, became a believer
- Paul, a former persecutor of those that believed, suddenly became a believer.
- The tomb was found empty 3 days later
The only one that is slightly contested is the empty tomb, but even then, you have 75%+ of historians accepting it. But there are 3 arguments to support the empty tomb:
- Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, the very place the message started. All the authorities had to do to squelch the start of Christianity was produce the body.
- Enemy attestation. The early critics accused the disciples of stealing the body, which was an admission that the body was missing.
- The first witnesses to the empty tomb were women. This is relevant because women’s testimony in the 1st-century in both Jewish and Roman cultures was deemed as questionable and unreliable.
There are actually other well-accepted facts as well, like
- He was buried, most likely in a private tomb
- His disciples were transformed from doubters to bold proclaimers and were even willing to die for this belief.
- The origin of the Christian church
- How the central message was the resurrection
- The message started early
- and more
But you really only need the top 5 to make this argument. With these being accepted facts, even by skeptical and atheist historians, one needs to try and explain these facts. Yet most of those explanations fail to explain all the data.
The most common theories that you will hear to try and explain these core facts are:
- The Conspiracy Theory
- The Apparent Death Theory
- Displaced Body Theory
- Hallucination Theory
The Conspiracy Theory essentially says that the disciples conspired to start a religion. But this fails to account what is needed to actually to pull off a conspiracy (which I’ve written about here, here, and here.) It also fails to account for the empty tomb and the conversion of Paul and James.
The Apparent Death theory says that Jesus didn’t actually die from the crucifixion, that they only thought that he had died when he was taken down and put in a tomb, and 3 days later he “miraculously” emerged from the tomb. This fails to understand how successful the crucifixions were. First-century Jewish historian reports that during one set of crucifixions, he noticed that 3 of his friends were being crucified. So he went to the Roman governor and made an appeal. The Roman governor ordered those 3 taken down and given the best medical care possible. 2 of those 3 still died. If Jesus didn’t die on the cross but was “buried alive”, he wouldn’t have “miraculously” emerged 3 days later and have been mistaken for risen; the disciples would have taken one look at him and said, “You need a doctor!”
The Apparent Death theory also fails to account on how thorough the Romans were at executing people. Or the charge that if someone didn’t die that was supposed to, the guards over it died in their place. It also doesn’t account for Paul or James.
The Displaced Body theory says that the body was either moved or that they went to the wrong tomb. But this theory fails to account for Paul and James, as well as for the disciple’s claims that the risen Jesus appeared to them. Also, all the authorities would have had to do was present the body, but they never did.
The Hallucination theory might be the strongest natural theory, but even if fails. For one thing, hallucinations are more like dreams, individualistic in nature, not shared. 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, which is the earliest creed (written about here and here), dates to within 6 months of the resurrection. It says that Jesus appeared to the twelve, to over 500 brethren at once, and then to all the disciples. (This creed is one of the evidences that all skeptic scholars accept.) Plus the hallucination theory fails to account for the empty tomb as well as for Paul and James.
When you consider all of the core facts of the resurrection, only the Resurrection theory, the claim that Jesus truly did rise from the dead, accounts for all of the data.
If you’d like to read more about this, then I highly suggest The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Dr. Gary Habermas and Dr. Michael Licona.
Cyber Penance 
I would like the chart that Craig Hazen developed from this information. Is it available online anywhere?
LikeLike
Not that I’m aware of but I’d also be interested in it.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Joshua Bassey's Blog.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’d like to read the sources for the evidence.
LikeLike
According to Dr. Habermas, it’s over 3400 references.
“My bibliography is presently at about 3400 sources and counting, published originally in French, German, or English.8 Initially I read and catalogued the majority of these publications, charting the representative authors, positions, topics, and so on, concentrating on both well-known and obscure writers alike, across the entire skeptical to liberal to conservative spectrum. As the number of sources grew, I moved more broadly into this research, trying to keep up with the current state of resurrection research.
I endeavored to be more than fair to all the positions. In fact, if anything, I erred in the direction of cataloguing the most radical positions, since this was the only classification where I included even those authors who did not have specialized scholarly credentials or peer-reviewed publications. It is this group, too, that often tends to doubt or deny that Jesus ever existed. Yet, given that I counted many sources in this category, this means that my study is skewed in the skeptical direction far more than if I had stayed strictly with my requirement of citing only those with scholarly credentials. Still, I included these positions quite liberally, even when the wide majority of mainline scholars, “liberals” included, rarely even footnoted this material.9 Of course, this practice would also skew the numbers who proposed naturalistic theories of the resurrection, to which I particularly gravitated.10
The result of all these years of study is a private manuscript of more than 600 pages that simply does little more than line up the scholarly positions and details on these 140 key questions, without additional interaction or critique. Most of this material is unpublished, though I have released some of the results in essays that specifically attempt to provide overviews of some of these current academic positions.”
http://www.garyhabermas.com/articles/southeastern_theological_review/minimal-facts-methodology_08-02-2012.htm
LikeLike
How come this is in a “trashed” directory? I see “__trashed-3/” at the end of the URL.
LikeLike
Lol, probably because I accidentally deleted it as I was typing it up and then restored it.
LikeLike
I don’t believe that Habermas includes the Empty Tomb in his Minimal Facts argument for the simple reason that it fails to meet this standard: ” The following are accepted by virtually all historians, skeptic and believer”. I think you should double check his website. I believe you have included this item in error.
If 75% of scholars accept the historicity of the Empty Tomb that means that a quarter of all scholars reject the historicity of this claim. Imagine if a quarter of all historians rejected the claim that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon or that Alexander the Great captured the city of Tyre. Would these claims still be considered historical facts? I doubt it. If Habermas’ data is correct, it certainly represents a majority opinion, but 75% does not establish this claim as an historical fact.
Second, where did you get the information that the Early Creed developed within six months of the death of Jesus? Could you give me a source or a link? Thanks.
LikeLike
Thanks for your comment.
As far as Habermas including the empty tomb, he’s included both times that I’ve heard him speak (last time was November of last year), as well as every lecture that I’ve heard him speak, plus he devotes an entire chapter to it in the book that he co-authored with Mike Licona: The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus.
As far as the Early Creed developing within 6 months, that’s also based on Habermas’s lecture, which I refer to here: https://cyberpenance.wordpress.com/2016/09/30/__trashed-3/ . He specifically mentions it in the video as well as the source (as well as the empty tomb). In fact, it was either him or Mike Licona who recently mentioned that another historian traces the early creed to within weeks of the Resurrection (but I’m not relying on that because I don’t remember which lecture I heard it from.)
LikeLike
Weeks?? I’m waiting for the scholar who says he believes it was composed within “minutes”.
Even if we accept the historicity of the Empty Tomb and that the Early Creed was written within a short time of the death of Jesus, there are many much more probable explanations for the early Christian resurrection belief before arriving at the probability that an ancient Hebrew deity breathed life back into a three-day-brain-dead corpse. I believe that the reason Christians cannot see this is that they presume the existence of their god Yahweh in this discussion. Without making this assumption, the evidence for the Resurrection on its own is actually quite poor.
LikeLike
You are free to be convinced of that, but I don’t believe that you are truly looking at the information. I’ve only briefly covered the most predominant theories offered by others to try and best explain the evidence. Those alternate theories actually rely on way more presupposing theories than Christians relying on the existence of God for the Resurrection theory. (And there are upwards of 2 dozen individual arguments for the existence of God, which is a whole different conversation.)
The thing about the minimal facts argument is that it is only looking at information that everyone (or most everyone in the case of the empty tomb (which several arguments can be made for)) accepts. And then trying to explain that information.
Even by critical scholars (and there are numerous on this), the latest the earliest creed originated was 2-3 years after the Resurrection.
LikeLike
Ok, I can agree that the Early Creed was probably written within a couple years of Jesus’ death. Most scholars seem to agree on that. So here is a question for you, Mark, just to see if we are on the same page: If someone makes a claim that a very extraordinary event has occurred, is it necessary for the skeptic to prove that the claimed extraordinary event did NOT occur, or is it sufficient for the skeptic to demonstrate that there are alternative possible explanations for why the person making the claim arrived at his belief? And if sufficient, must the skeptic give evidence for these possible alternative explanations or simply present that they are possible?
For instance, this very extraordinary claim: Your neighbor claims that last night, a small group of two foot tall, green, antennae-toting space aliens abducted him from his bed, flew him to the planet Neptune, and gave him a walking tour of the planet—without an oxygen tank—for three hours. They then returned him safely to his bed before sunrise this morning. His wife and five children confirm that his bed was empty from Midnight to 5 AM.
You doubt your neighbor’s story. Are you obligated to prove your neighbor’s extraordinary claim is false to not believe his claim? Must you have evidence supporting an alternative explanation to state that it is much more probable that your neighbor was drunk, on drugs, or hallucinating this experience, and, that he either wandered out of his house on his own two feet or that other humans (not aliens) assisted in his “escape” from his house? Or is it sufficient to simply state, without providing any evidence, that these possible scenarios are much more probable to be the explanation for your neighbor’s very extraordinary claim for his empty bed than his explanation of an over-night space trip to Neptune?
Do you see the point I am trying to make?
LikeLike
By the way, I am not in any way insinuating that Jesus was drunk, on drugs, hallucinating, etc.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, I see you point, but I don’t think it applies. At best, you are claiming the hallucination theory, which fails on multiple points, and which I’ve addressed above.
First, this wasn’t just one person, but numerous and multiple encounters, single and group, as well as previous hostile witnesses: Paul and James, for example.
Group hallucinations simply do not happen. Each hallucination is individual, never shared, and rarely the same. But we have reports of numerous group appearances, even up to 500 at the same time (and that 500 is just men, not counting women and children).
And these were repeated claims of appearances.
And then Paul and James. Paul was persecuting and killing Christians, and then he radically changed and became a Christian, to the point that he suffered and ended up giving his life for this.
And James, the brother of Jesus, thought Jesus was crazy, but then afterwards became the head of the church in Jerusalem and was martyred.
And this is without appealing to the empty tomb, which a strong argument can be made for.
And when you consider the context of it all, both in 1st century Israel and Jewish culture, as well as Jesus living a radical life.
And none of the eyewitnesses recanted their claim, even under duress, to the point that they were martyred for this.
The only ‘evidence’ in your story is that he was gone for 3 hours, confirmed by the family.
At minimum, we have:
1. Jesus died by crucifixion
2. His disciples had experiences which they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus (They claimed it and they believed it.)
3. His brother James, who formerly believed that Jesus was crazy, became a believer
4. Paul, a former persecutor of those that believed, suddenly became a believer.
5. The tomb was found empty 3 days later
5a. Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, the very place the message started. All the authorities had to do to squelch the start of Christianity was produce the body.
5b. Enemy attestation. The early critics accused the disciples of stealing the body, which was an admission that the body was missing.
5c. The first witnesses to the empty tomb were women. This is relevant because women’s testimony in the 1st-century in both Jewish and Roman cultures was deemed as questionable and unreliable.
And can include
• He was buried, most likely in a private tomb
• His disciples were transformed from doubters to bold proclaimers and were even willing to die for this belief.
• The origin of the Christian church
• How the central message was the resurrection
• The message started early
LikeLike
I understand, and I will be happy to address the evidence. But can we agree that just as in the case of the neighbor claiming an alien abduction, the skeptic is not obligated to provide all the evidence for an alternative explanation, he is simply obliged to provide POSSIBLE explanations than can explain the evidence that is available.
For example, you would not require me to provide hard evidence that humans helped the neighbor out of his house in order for me to suggest that this explanation is much more likely to explain the neighbor’s absence from his bed than that your neighbor was truly abducted by space aliens.
Do we agree?
LikeLike
The question is not POSSIBLE explanations, but REASONABLE explanations. That’s the same standard that they use in a court of law. For example, it’s POSSIBLE that only one of us truly exist but only as a brain. But is that really reasonable?
LikeLike
Ok, that seems reasonable enough. So rephrasing my original question:
Can we agree that the skeptic is not obligated to provide all the evidence for an alternative explanation, he is simply obliged to provide possible, reasonable, explanations than could explain the evidence that is available.
Now, I guess we must agree on the definition of “reasonable explanation”. Could we agree on this definition: a possible explanation that the average educated person would view as within the bounds of probability. So for instance in our “neighbor space trip” scenario, an explanation that the neighbor was drugged by humans and taken out of his house for five hours is a “reasonable explanation”. The explanation that a swarm of bees carried him out of the house is an “unreasonable explanation”. Is that acceptable?
LikeLike
To consider your story, the explanation that the neighbor was drugged by humans and taken out of his house for 5 hours would be would definitely be a better explanation than the bees. However, it is appealing to evidence that simply isn’t there.
The only evidence at all in that scenario is that he was missing from his bed for 5 hours. So any and all explanations of this scenario just really become possible explanations, because any explanation is appealing to evidence that isn’t there. Sure, some will be more reasonable than others, but all of them will still just be possibilities.
LikeLike
So unless I can provide evidence to prove an alternative explanation for your neighbor’s five hour absence from his bed, I am forced to accept his explanation that he was abducted by space aliens?
LikeLike
Not at all. It’s a whole nother topic to talk about aliens in the first place.
For me, the first thing that came to mind for your scenario is that he was sleep walking. Even the kidnapping humans is still a forced explanation. With only 1 piece of evidence, any explanation is going to be forced. As I said, some suggested explanations will seem more reasonable than others, but they all are going to be forced and appeal to evidence that isn’t there.
LikeLike
I think we are making this much more difficult than is necessary. If you wake up tomorrow and cannot find your car keys, you are going to do what every other educated person in western civilization does: you are going to go through a mental list of possible explanations for your missing keys such as this one:
1. I misplaced my keys.
2. My wife took my keys.
3. One of my children took my keys.
4. My dog took my keys.
5. Someone broke into my house last night and stole my keys.
Even if you have ZERO evidence for any of these possible explanations for your missing keys, they are still very reasonable, possible explanations for your missing keys and western culture would consider it perfectly normal and acceptable for you to consider one of these possible explanations as the true explanation for your missing keys even if you cannot provide any evidence to support these explanations.
Even if your psychic next door neighbor claims (after hearing that your keys are missing) that her tea leaves tell her that a demon stole your keys in the middle of the night, our culture is going to assume that one of the above, natural, explanations is much more likely to be the cause of your missing keys than the explanation given by your psychic neighbor, even though the car-key-stealing-demon story is the only story we have.
See my point?
Skeptics are under no obligation to provide evidence for alternative, natural explanations for the early Christian resurrection belief, we only have to provide alternative, natural explanations that explain the few facts that everyone agrees exist.
LikeLike
In that scenario, those explanations start with the most reasonable one and get more contrived. You can brainstorm possibilities all you want but at some point you have to consider the evidence to see if that possibility works.
Wife: check with your wife to verify that possibility
Children: check with your children to verify that possibility
From personal experience, a pet ferret would be more reasonable than a dog taking the keys.
Someone broke in: is there any evidence of someone breaking in? Did they take anything else? Did they take the car?
just reaching for any possibility is like a kid saying the dog ate his homework to explain why he didn’t do his homework. Sure, it’s possible. But is it reasonable. (Like, does he actually have a dog to start with.)
As far as explanations for evidence, the best explanation will be feasonable (i.e. explanatory viability), straight forward (explaining explanatory simplicity), be exhaustive (displaying explanatory depth), logical (possessing explanatory consistency), and superior (accounting for all the evidence).
The only time a skeptic is asked for evidence, is when there explanation requires further evidence that isn’t there (or readily available).
LikeLike
Ok. So you ask your wife and kids if they took your keys and they say, no. What then? Odds are that YOU misplaced your keys, but unless you find your keys, there is no evidence to prove that explanation. So are we forced to believe your psychic nextdoor neighbor’s story that a demon stole your keys just because it is the only story available???
Of course not!
The most probable explanation for your missing keys is that YOU misplaced them even though there is ZERO evidence to prove this explanation. Just because an explanation exists for the missing keys does not mean that we must accept that explanation as the most probable cause.
And the same is true for the early Christian resurrection belief. Just because the Christian explanation is the only story we have does not mean that we must accept this explanation. And just because there is no evidence for alternative, natural explanations does not mean that an alternative natural explanation is not possible.
LikeLike
Here is just one of many alternative, natural explanations. I challenge you to demonstrate that this explanation is not plausible (reasonable). You may believe that your supernatural explanation is more probable, but I do not believe that you can demonstrate that my alternative explanation is implausible. And no, as I demonstrated above with the lost key analogy, I am not obliged to provide evidence that this is what happened as this is NOT my objective. I am only attempting to demonstrate that plausible, alternative, naturalistic explanations for the early resurrection belief exist:
Jesus is crucified. His dead body is placed in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb on Friday before sunset. On Saturday night, after sunset, the Sanhedrin comes to the tomb, with Pilate’s permission, and moves the body of Jesus to another unmarked grave, leaving Arimathea’s tomb empty. They had only placed Jesus body in Joseph tomb temporarily so as not to defile the Sabbath. They never intended to leave it there.
Sunday morning, the women come to the tomb, find it empty, and run to the disciples telling them that Jesus has risen just as he had promised. Emotional hysteria grips the disciples. Simon Peter is emotionally exhausted and hasn’t slept for days. He experiences an hallucination. In this hallucination, Jesus appears to him in the flesh and tells him that he has risen from the dead and that he will soon ascend to the Father. The general resurrection will soon follow. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Peter shares his appearance story with the other disciples. They are ecstatic. They believe him just as the Jews in Asia Minor will believe Paul’s appearance story a few years later. Soon other disciples are “seeing” Jesus. Some are experiencing vivid dreams of Jesus. Some are experiencing illusions of Jesus. Groups of disciples see bright lights that they perceive to be Jesus. It is these illusions/misperceptions of reality (not group sightings of a body) that lead to the claims of appearances of Jesus to groups in the Early Creed quoted in First Corinthians 15.
Then in circa 70 AD, non-eyewitnesses, writing in far away lands, write the Gospels, based on oral legends about Jesus that have been circulating for forty years. The authors of the Gospels add their own literary embellishments to the story, embellishments which were perfectly acceptable in that genre of literature—Greco-Roman biographies. The authors did not add these fictional details to lie or deceive anyone; they never intended all of the stories to be understood literally. Their first century readers understood that.
So people in the first century knew that dead saints were not shaken out of their graves the moment of Jesus’ death to then walk the streets of Jerusalem. They knew this was literary symbolism. And they knew the same about the story of Doubting Thomas sticking his fingers into Jesus’ wounds, and the story of the resurrected Jesus cooking a fish breakfast on the shores of the Sea of Tiberius. They never meant people to believe these stories as historical events. The Gospels were not history books. They were religious propaganda: “these things are written that you might believe.”
What about James: We have no idea why and when James converted. Christians assume he converted due to an appearance by Jesus, making his appearance and appearance to a skeptic. However, it is possible that James had converted prior to Jesus’ death. The Gospels do not say when James believed.
What about Paul: For all we know, Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was episodes of mental illness which included delusions and hallucinations. Anyone who is unsure if he has or has not taken a space trip to a “third heaven” is most likely not of sound mind. Therefore, Paul’s “heavenly vision” may have been an hallucination or just a vivid dream.
This explanation is much more probable to be the explanation of the early Christian resurrection belief than the Christian supernatural claim.
LikeLike
The more theories you have to appeal to to explain all of the evidence, the more ad-hoc your explanation is, the more contrived it is. Honestly, the more explanations you have to appeal to, the more desperate you come across as trying to appeal to anything to ignore it.
You have combined the displaced body theory with the hallucination theory (both of which I have already addressed) with other theories.
Your first explanation ignores the facts. It wasn’t the Sanhedrin itself that buried Jesus in the tomb of Joseph of Arimethea, it was Joseph himself that buried him in a private tomb. Even if the Sanhedrin came and moved the body, all they had to do to stop the movement was produce the body. But no, they accused the disciples of stealing the body, and tried to stop the movement by beatings and killings.
The appeal to the hallucination theory simply ignores the facts of hallucinations. They are never shared. That would be like me waking up from a dream, waking my wife up, and telling her that I had this awesome dream, and that we should both go back to sleep and that she should join me in that dream. Even then, hallucinations are generally visual or audio. But on several occasions, they ate fish with the post-mortem Jesus (in fact, once he cooked it for them.).
And then we come to the often claimed “it was written by non witnesses”. Except the evidence is against that. All of the early church fathers claimed that the gospels were written by the four writers, including the very disciples of the apostles. It wasn’t until centuries later that it was even suggested that they weren’t written by the writers that tradition says they were written by. Also, this is ignoring the several lines of evidence that they come across as actual eye witness accounts. Also also with: it’s also ignoring the numerous archeological evidence that indirectly supports them, plus they get all the common names correct (go a century before or after and the commonality of names changes, or even leave Jerusalem to Antioch or Egypt, and the commonality of names changes), plus they get as many locations correct as Josephus does. PLUS you are ignoring the fact that even Atheist scholars date some of the gospels much earlier than AD70. James Dominic Crossan dates Mark to the 40s!.
I really can seriously go on with this one, so here’s a few more: you are ignoring all of Paul’s writings (written before he was martyred in the early 60s), and the early creeds that predate all of New Testament documents (of which 1 Cor 15:3-8 is included but there are many more.)
AND to go off of what it seems like you are implying: essentially no writing can be trusted if it was written later than 40 years. Which puts our modern times as about the time of the Vietnam War. But since it’s been so long, we can’t trust anything anyone says about that. That’s what that accusation says.
And we get to the often claimed “the gospels were not history books”. See, you haven’t said anything original or that hasn’t been addressed before. The Gospels themselves actually line up with 1st Century biographies, and is what they are considered as.
Now the topic of James. His family thought he was crazy before he was crucified, including James. 1 Cor 15 (within 2-3 even by atheist standards) is where the record of Jesus appearance to James is included.
And finally Paul. Which you has to resort to non evidential psycho analyzing to try and fit him into the hallucination theory.
Your “explanation” as you call it, is really more like at minimum 7 different unrelated explanations. And all have been addressed by scholars.
LikeLike
Every extraordinary tale begins in some fashion. Do you believe them all to be true just because you do not have any evidence to prove otherwise? Can you prove that the Buddha did not cause a water buffalo to speak in a human language. Millions of Hindus believe he did? Can you prove that Mohammad did not receive a message from an angel? Can you prove that he did not fly on a winged horse to heaven? Millions of Muslims believe he did. Can you prove that three children in Fatima, Portugal did not see and speak to the Virgin Mary? Can you prove that tens of thousands of people did not watch the sun spin and do other unnatural movements due to an appearance of the Virgin Mary in Fatima? No you cannot. No one can. So we ask ourselves: “What are the possible naturalistic explanations for how these human beings came to believe these very extra-ordinary events happened to them? We don’t need evidence to do that. We are not trying to prove what happened. We are trying to prove what might have PLAUSIBLE happened to cause these people to believe that a supernatural event has occurred. And the same with the Resurrection tale. I am not saying I can prove that my theory happened. I am simply suggesting that this theory is possible and plausible. It is much more possible and plausible than that an ancient middle-eastern deity breathed life into a three-day-brain-dead corpse.
I will address each of your objections shortly.
LikeLike
“The more theories you have to appeal to explain all of the evidence, the more ad-hoc your explanation is…”
Is it ad hoc to suggest that the explanation for your missing keys is that you possibly misplaced them? Is it ad hoc to suggest that the reason why your neighbor was absent from his bed for five hours last night was possibly because he snuck out to have an affair with another women; he was drinking; he was doing drugs; he was gambling? No. It is only ad hoc if you insist that this IS what happened based on zero evidence. I am not saying that my theory is what happened, only that it is POSSIBLY what happened. My theory is plausible. You may believe that a supernatural resurrection is MORE plausible, but you cannot prove that my theory is not plausible. To do that you would have to show that most people in our society would find my theory implausible/unreasonable, and I will bet that most people in our society, excluding Christian fundamentalists/evangelicals/ and other ultra-conservative Protestants, will agree that my theory is very plausible. If you don’t believe me, ask them. Ask someone who is not a member of one of the above religious groups and see what they say.
LikeLike
“Your first explanation ignores the facts. It wasn’t the Sanhedrin itself that buried Jesus in the tomb of Joseph of Arimethea, it was Joseph himself that buried him in a private tomb. Even if the Sanhedrin came and moved the body, all they had to do to stop the movement was produce the body. But no, they accused the disciples of stealing the body, and tried to stop the movement by beatings and killings.”
Habermas includes the Empty Tomb in his list of minimal facts but he does not include the biblical claim that Joseph alone buried Jesus in his list of facts. So I am not ignoring a fact, I am ignoring an alleged claim in the biblical story. You may believe it is historical fact but I would like you to demonstrate that any scholar, including Habermas, is willing to state that it is a historical fact that Joseph buried Jesus.
“Why didn’t they stop the movement by producing the body?”
Christians assume that the Gospels are correct that Jesus caused a great controversy. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe all that mattered to the Sanhedrin was that the trouble-maker was dead. Maybe they could have cared less if a few dozen Galilean peasants claimed he had risen from the dead. Many scholars believe that the author of Matthew’s story about guards at the tomb and their deal with the Sanhedrin to accuse the disciples of stealing the body is literary fiction. Mike Licona believes that other stories in Matthew’s resurrection story are fiction (dead saints being shaken out of their graves by an earthquake). I believe that you are assuming much more to be “fact” than Habermas has suggested is fact. You are certainly welcome to your opinions, but you can’t claim that they are “facts” and that I am ignoring them.
“The appeal to the hallucination theory simply ignores the facts of hallucinations. They are never shared.”
I never said that anyone “shared” an hallucination. I am fully aware that no two persons can have the same, exact hallucination. In my theory, I am suggesting that one of the Eleven had an hallucination and that he then convinced the other disciples that his hallucination was a real event. Just as the Jews in Asia Minor did not need to see the resurrected Jesus to believe in his resurrection, the other ten disciples did not need to see a body to believe, they only had to believe the one disciple who believed he had seen the resurrected Jesus. People who have hallucinations remember them as very real. (I am a physician.)
“And then we come to the often claimed “it was written by non witnesses”. Except the evidence is against that.”
You are certainly welcome to your opinion, but the issue at hand is whether or not my theory is plausible and if the consensus position of New Testament scholars is that the Gospels were NOT written by eyewitnesses, then my theory would meet the threshold of plausibility on that issue very easily. (I assume when we are discussing plausibility we are using the definition of what is plausible to the average educated person, not just what is plausible to you or to me.)
“Now the topic of James. His family thought he was crazy before he was crucified, including James. 1 Cor 15 (within 2-3 even by atheist standards) is where the record of Jesus appearance to James is included.”
I do not disagree that at one point in time Jesus’ family thought he was crazy. This is of course very odd if their mother and father had told them of all the miraculous events of Jesus’ birth, but nevertheless, this has nothing to do with WHEN James converted. We have no proof that James converted due to his alleged appearance. For all we know James converted prior to Jesus’ death and his appearance experience occurred as a believer. Thousands of Christians have believed that Jesus has appeared to them over the last two thousand years so this claim is nothing extraordinary. Bottom line: We have no statement from James himself. For all we know, James woke up in the middle of the night, saw a bright light on the ceiling, and thought it was Jesus.
“Your “explanation” as you call it, is really more like at minimum 7 different unrelated explanations. And all have been addressed by scholars.”
When it comes to explaining the appearances of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, is there only one explanation for the experience of the children and the experience of the crowds? No. Multiple people are involved in this alleged supernatural experience so there are multiple POSSIBLE explanations for why these people came to believe what they came to believe.
LikeLike
Thanks for your well thought out reply. I apologize that it’s taken a few days for me to get back to you. Been neck deep trying to get some software code working correctly following by some family time with my wife and step-daughter.
First, I want to say, and I do mean this honestly, you do weave a good story. If you hadn’t had said that you were a physician, I would have thought you were a writer.
Now to my reply:
“Every extraordinary tale begins in some fashion. Do you believe them all to be true just because you do not have any evidence to prove otherwise?”
You look at the evidence for each one individually. It’s not a case of believe one, believe all. What is the evidence for them? How early is the evidence? Etc. And just believing that it happened isn’t evidence at all. For history claims, the following rules apply (gotten from historians):
Historical claims are strong when supported by multiple, independent sources.
Historical claims which are also attested to by enemies are more likely to be authentic since enemies are unsympathetic, and often hostile, witnesses.
Historical claims which include embarrassing admissions reflect honest reporting rather than creative storytelling.
Historical claims are strong when supported by eyewitness testimony.
Historical claims which are supported by early testimony are more reliable and less likely to be the result of legendary development
So what and how strong is the evidence for each of these claims?
If you really want to read further on the topic of the miraculous, then I would recommend Miracles by Craig S. Keener, who has found so many documented and verifiable miracles in the past 25-30 years that it took a 2 volume set.
“I am not saying I can prove that my theory happened. I am simply suggesting that this theory is possible and plausible. “
But the thing is, when your theories, not theory, because it takes numerous ones to explain the data, they fail once you consider the facts.
And again, the examples that you have given (of the missing keys and the missing guy), hardly anything can be proven by only 1 piece of evidence.
And again, your THEORIES, not theory, because your suggestion of the explanation of the evidence is at minimum 7 separate theories. I’ve already shown how each of them individually are implausible when you consider the whole picture.
As far as Jesus being buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimethea, it’s actually one of the supporting evidences to prove that Jesus was buried. It is multiply attested and highly unlikely to be a Christian invention. Biblical scholar James G. D. Dunn explains that Joseph of Arimathea
is a very plausible historical character: he is attested in all four Gospels… and in the Gospel of Peter…; when the tendency of the tradition was to shift blame to the Jewish council, the creation ex nihilo of a sympathizer from among their number would be surprising; and ‘Arimathea, ‘a town very difficult to identify and reminiscent of no scriptural symbolism, makes a thesis of invention even more implausible.”
Atheist Jeffery Lowder agrees that “the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea has a high final probability.”
As far as the body, both Michael Licona and Gary Habermas, as well as other scholars, have used this same point on why they didn’t just produce the body if they have moved it. You say “Maybe all that mattered to the Sanhedrin was that the trouble-maker was dead. Maybe they could have cared less if a few dozen Galilean peasants claimed he had risen from the dead.” This doesn’t seem very plausible for the simple fact that it was a thorn in their side. The Jewish authorities had plenty of motivation to produce a body and silence these men who “turned the world upside down,” effectively ending the Christian religion for good. The Sanhedrin beat the disciples, continually told them to shut up, stoned Phillip, and licensed Paul to hunt them down and kill them. And they were the ones that threw James off the temple to kill him. But no one could end it. The only early opposing theory recorded by the enemies of Christianity is that the disciples stole the body.
The appeal to just one disciple have the hallucination and then convincing the others that his hallucination was a real event also ignores the facts. Even above “His discipleS had experienceS which they believed were appearanceS of the risen Jesus (They claimed it and they believed it.)” It was numerous disciples that had numerous experiences. It wasn’t one that convinced the others that he had his own. The Creed in 1 Corinthians 15 say Jesus was seen by Peter, THEN by the twelve, THEN by over 500, THEN by James, THEN by all the apostles, THEN by Paul. You are only taking the first one and ignoring the rest. Even atheist scholar Gerd Lüdemann acknowledges, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter AND the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.” (emphasis mine)
The Creed in 1 Corinthians also shows when the appearance was to James: after Peter, after the twelve, and after the 500.
As far as whether they were written by eyewitnesses, even if you go with the most critical scholars, 7 of Paul’s letters are genuine (including 1 Corinthians). Habermas needs only Galatians and 1 Corinthians (both authentic even by the most critical scholars) to prove his point. But Habermas says this:
““One “secret” not readily known is that these skeptical scholars are quite willing to cite New Testament texts in order to buttress the historical nature of these six events. While not believing that these passages are inspired or even generally reliable, they still employ the individual texts that meet their standards of evidence. It is largely from these passages, plus occasionally from extra-New Testament writings, that they find plenty of data to accept these half-dozen events.”
Finally, to have to appeal to multiple theories (7+ on your suggested explanation) to try and explain the whole story violates Occam’s Razor, i.e. the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is.
LikeLike
Thank you for your response. You said: “And again, your THEORIES, not theory, because your suggestion of the explanation of the evidence is at minimum 7 separate theories. I’ve already shown how each of them individually are implausible when you consider the whole picture.”
How have you shown them to be implausible? Is it implausible that one of the disciples had an hallucination? No. As a physician, I can assure you that even mentally healthy people can have hallucinations especially when they are under great emotional strain and sleep-deprived as the disciples quite probably were. So this scenario is not implausible by any stretch of the imagination.
Second stage: The one disciple who had an hallucination and who remembered his hallucination as a real event (which medical experts confirm is what happens with hallucinations) tells the other disciples that he as seen the resurrected Jesus. The other disciples believe him. You don’t believe that they would believe him? Why not? The Jews in Asia Minor believed Paul’s story of seeing the resurrected Jesus. So this scenario is not implausible.
Third stage: The other disciples subsequently “see” Jesus in vivid dreams and in false sightings (illusions) similar to what happens with Virgin Mary sightings today. This is probably the most implausible scenario for you because you believe that the detailed appearance stories in the Gospels are true and groups of people cannot all have he same vivid dream or see the same illusion of a body eating broiled fish. However, if the detailed appearance stories are literary inventions, then my scenario becomes plausible. If you look at the Early Creed without reading the Gospels into it, there is no mention of groups of people seeing a “body”. It is therefore possible that groups of believers saw a bright light, similar to what Paul allegedly saw on the Damascus Road, and believed it to be Jesus.
Now let’s say you still don’t believe this is plausible. Let’s say that there is only a one in a million probability that this could be true. That is still greater than the probability of a Resurrection, my friend! Why? Because I’m sure that even you will agree that if there has ever been a resurrection in human history, there has only been ONE resurrection of a dead body. And since there have been several billion dead human bodies in human history, that would mean that a resurrection of one of those several billion dead bodies would be much less probable than a one in a million probability that a group of disciples saw a bright light and believed it to be Jesus and that is what is recorded in the Early Creed. It’s simple math.
And the chances Paul was mentally ill? Once again, much more probable than a once in a couple billion resurrection. The chances James was already a believer? Again, much more probable than a once in a couple billion resurrection.
And if you add up all “seven” of these probabilities, the end result is still more probable than a once in a couple billion resurrection.
LikeLike
You said, “The Jewish authorities had plenty of motivation to produce a body and silence these men who “turned the world upside down,” effectively ending the Christian religion for good. The Sanhedrin beat the disciples, continually told them to shut up, stoned Phillip, and licensed Paul to hunt them down and kill them. And they were the ones that threw James off the temple to kill him. But no one could end it. The only early opposing theory recorded by the enemies of Christianity is that the disciples stole the body. ”
25% of NT scholars don’t believe in the J. of A. Empty Tomb story. Many of these scholars believe that Jesus’ body was most likely tossed into a common grave with others executed that week. There would have been no way to “dig up the body and identify it”.
You don’t believe that this happened, I know, but if 25% of experts believe it is plausible, it can’t be considered “implausible”.
You said, ” Even above “His discipleS had experienceS which they believed were appearanceS of the risen Jesus (They claimed it and they believed it.)” It was numerous disciples that had numerous experiences.”
Experiences can include other things other than just hallucinations. Paul described his experience as a “heavenly vision”. I am suggesting that the other disciples could have “experienced” Jesus when they saw a bright light, just as did Paul. This type of experience is called an illusion. This is the type of experience that probably explains most Roman Catholic sightings of the Virgin Mary. Another possibility is a vivid dream. If the step father of Jesus believed his vivid dream involving seeing an angel was so real that he moved the family to a foreign country in the middle of the night, maybe some of the disciples had vivid dreams of Jesus that they took equally as real.
LikeLike
Are we done?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Not at all. Just got sidetracked at work. Sometimes scripting can be taxing. Thankfully, there are 3 day weekends for resting and recovering.
As I said before, you write a good story. But just suggesting a possibility is not enough – you have to provide evidence for it.
To decipher the inference to the best explanation, we use the criteria of the historical method. The hypothesis that best meets all of the criteria is to be preferred and regarded as to what most likely (or probably) occurred. Here are the five points of criteria:
1- Explanatory Scope
2- Explanatory Power
3- Plausibility
4- Less Ad Hoc or Contrived
5- It provides Illumination
It’s not implausible that one of the disciples had a hallucination. But your second point fails. Yes, the Jews in Asia Minor believed Paul’s story of seeing the resurrected Jesus. But those Jews themselves did not then claim to have seen the risen Jesus themselves. Even the 1 Cor 15 creed says that he was seen by all the others, not that he was seen by Peter and then Peter told the others and they believed Peter. Plus, Thomas did not believe the report of the other disciples. He only believed when he not only saw Jesus but the holes in his hands and feet.
From personal experience, in my pre-Christian days, I can tell you that shared experiences of hallucinations don’t work. Even medically induced hallucinations like that via LSD, as much as you describe what you are seeing, the others also tripping do not see the same thing, even if they wanted to.
Mike Licona has thoroughly looked into the hallucination theory. He sums it up like this:
1. Since a hallucination is an event that occurs in the mind of an individual and has no external reality, one person cannot participate in another’s hallucination. In this sense, they are like dreams.
2. If a group hallucination had actually occurred, it would have been more likely that the disciples would have experienced their hallucinations in different modes. Perhaps one would have said, “I see Jesus over by the door,” while another said, “No. I see him floating by the ceiling,” while still another said, “No. I only hear him speaking to me,” while still another said, “I only sense that he’s in the room with us.”
Mike Licona spoke to Gary A. Sibcy is a licensed clinical psychologist with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology who has as interest in the possibility of group hallucinations. He comments:
“I have surveyed the professional literature (peer-reviewed journal articles and books) written by psychologists, psychiatrists, and other relevant healthcare professionals during the past two decades and have yet to find a single documented case of a group hallucination, that is, an event for which more than one person purportedly shared in a visual or other sensory perception where there was clearly no external referent (personal correspondence with this author on 3.10.09).”
As far as probabilities, the more explanations you appeal to, the more ad-hoc the overall explanation is. When you run these numbers through Bayes’ Theorem, the more explanations you use, the lower your percentages. Just because something has only happened once, does that mean it cannot happen? The universe came into existence just once. Yet we are still here.
As stated before, and agreed upon, yes, 25% don’t agree with the Empty Tomb, but then they have to answer for the 3 facts supporting the Empty Tomb, which are:
1. Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, the very place the message started. All the authorities had to do to squelch the start of Christianity was produce the body.
They physically and numerously tried to squelch the start of Christianity. It would have been much easier on them to just produce the body.
2. Enemy attestation. The early critics accused the disciples of stealing the body, which was an admission that the body was missing.
3. The first witnesses to the empty tomb were women. This is relevant because women’s testimony in the 1st-century in both Jewish and Roman cultures was deemed as questionable and unreliable.
As well as the burial in Joseph of Arimethea’s tomb being multiply attested, and therefore historically credible. The belief that Jesus body was thrown into a common grave goes against all the evidence against it.
The reason historians agree that the disciples had experiences that they believed to have seen the risen Jesus is because it is multiply attested. Your suggestion that the other disciples saw a bright light isn’t what they claimed to have seen. Their claims were different from Paul’s.
Here is the list of appearances:
• Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, shortly after his resurrection (Mark 16:9; John 20:11-18)
• Jesus appears to the women returning from the empty tomb (Matthew 28:8-10)
• Jesus appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Mark 16:12,13; Luke 24:13-35)
• Jesus appears to Peter ( Luke 24:34, 1 Corinthians 15:5)
• Jesus appears to his disciples, in Jerusalem. (Mark 16:14-18; Luke 24:36-49; John 20:19-23).
• Jesus again appears to his disciples, in Jerusalem. At this time Thomas is present (John 20:24-29).
• Jesus appears to his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 28:16; John 21:1,2)
• Jesus is seen by 500 believers at one time (1 Corinthians 15:6)
• Jesus appears to James ( 1 Corinthians 15:7)
• Jesus appears to his disciples on a mountain in Galilee (Matthew 28:16-20).
• He appeared to his disciples (Luke 24:50-53).
• He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road (Acts 9:3-6; 1 Corinthians 15:8).
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Last Eden.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on HolisticThinking Blog.
LikeLike
I had an interesting discussion with Bart Ehrman recently on his blog regarding the historicity of the Empty Tomb and Gary Habermas’ research on that issue:
Bart Ehrman: To my knowledge non-conservative scholars do not generally read the work of Habermas. They tend to stick to the writings of critical New Testament scholars.
Gary: So when Christian apologists tell me that the majority of New Testament scholars believe in the historicity of the Empty Tomb based on Habermas’ research, I can tell them they are wrong?
Bart Ehrman: You can tell them that the majority of NT scholars have never *read* Habermas (and may not even know about him).
LikeLike
that’s okay, i don’t think OP did either.
>> Concerning the empty tomb, Licona actually says comparatively little. He cites my studies indicating that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the critical scholars who comment on this matter favor the tomb being empty for other than natural reasons. Further, Licona also mentions that my research specifies 23 reasons that favor the historicity of the empty tomb along with 14 reasons against it, as found in the scholarly literature (pp. 461-2). But having said this, it becomes immediately obvious that even the pretty strong scholarly agreement in favor of this event does not approach the much higher, nearly unanimous requirement in order to be considered as a Minimal Fact. Accordingly and not surprisingly, Licona rejects the empty tomb as part of the historical bedrock (pp. 462-3).
http://www.garyhabermas.com/articles/southeastern_theological_review/minimal-facts-methodology_08-02-2012.htm
note, “between two-thirds and three-quarters”, NOT 75%+
note, “does not approach the much higher, nearly unanimous requirement in order to be considered as a Minimal Fact.”
OP, why lie?
LikeLike
Actually, I didn’t lie. I was using primarily as my source The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Dr. Gary Habermas and Dr. Michael Licona, in which they devote several pages to making the case of the empty tomb. “Gary Habermas discovered that roughly 75 percent of scholars on the subject accept the empty tomb as a historical fact.” (Kindle version, location 616).
And if Licona rejects the empty tomb, then why did he record this video on Dec 1, 2017? https://www.risenjesus.com/jesuss-tomb-empty
LikeLike
Also, Dr. Habermas, in a free PDF from his site: http://www.garyhabermas.com/books/EvidenceBook/GaryHabermas_Evidence-for-the-historical-Jesus-Release_1point1.pdf dated 2015
pg 53:
“Now I admit, as I likewise repeat all the time, that this next fact is not quite as widely held, but the majority of scholars still think that the tomb in which Jesus was buried was discovered to be empty just a few days later…
“What I’m saying is that, with the exception of the empty tomb, virtually all critical scholars accept as historical the events listed here, and most of these scholars will even grant the empty tomb. If anyone wants to check some of the data or sources on this, they may find lists of critical scholars who accept these facts, as I’ve listed many of them in my volume, The Historical Jesus24 and elsewhere. Of course,there are many additional books on these subjects by others, as well”
This is just 2 paragraphs from 1 page. He talks about it and makes the case for it quite a bit further on in the PDF.
LikeLike
Gary,
I apologize for the extremely delayed response. Your comment was made during a time that I was dealing with the death of my step-father followed by the death of my sister less than a month later. In reality, I don’t even remember reading a notification for your response, though I’m sure that I did at the time. I ended up taking months off of this blog while I worked through my grief. Still, I ask that you forgive me for the delayed response.
The exchange you had with Bart Ehrman is interesting but doesn’t address nor deal with the facts claimed by Habermas. And thanks to the many debates that Ehrman has had, most have heard of Mike Licona, who co-wrote the book The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, that addresses the core claims of Habermas as well. In fact, Habermas works closely with Licona on the minimal facts.
Thus, that conversation seems to be more of a red herring or a genetic fallacy rather than addressing the facts claimed.
LikeLike