Minimal Facts vs. Maximal Data Approaches to the Resurrection: A Conversation with Dr. Lydia McGrew

Hello folks, this is the Apologist Academy. The website is apologist-academy.org. And every Saturday, we bring on different scholars, thinkers, philosophers, apologists from across the theological spectrum to present to us on topics of interest to you Christians, especially those that pertain to the question of whether or not Christianity is true. We also cross-examine other worldviews as well.

And after our time of presentation by a special guest speaker, we open up to open floor Q&A, discussion, dialogue, and debate. And there are a number of ways you can participate in this evening's live program. You can sit back and listen anonymously, if you wish. You can also participate in the chat window. Please, if you're doing so, direct chat to everyone or all panelists and attendees. That would be excellent. You can also submit a question in textual forum by hitting the Q&A button at the top of your screen. You can submit anonymously, if you wish. And when we get to the Q&A, I'll read out your question to your guest speaker. And you can also raise your hand by clicking the raise hand button at the top of your screen, and I will promote you to be a panelist with the speaker and ask a question that way also. And it gives you opportunity to interact with the speaker during the Q&A.

So, without further ado, let me turn to our guest speaker for tonight and our topic. We're going to be discussing minimal facts for his maximal data to approach to apologetic approaches to the resurrection of Jesus. And we're going to be discussing this in the company of analytic philosopher, Dr. Olivia Madrid. She is especially well known for her book, "Hidden in Plain View: On Design, Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts," making a case for the substantial veracity of the New Testament Scriptures. So, let me just turn over to Dr. Madrid. Thanks for being with us.

Thank you for having me, Jonathan. I'm going to start by characterizing the minimal facts approach. My presentation is going to have what I would call a negative and a positive side. Those two may overlap really, as well. But first, I'm going to characterize the minimal facts approach, and then I'm going to explain what I see is some problems with that approach and reasons why it needs to be supplemented. It's a very popular approach to arguing for the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Let's start by kind of talking about what this minimal facts approach is.

Extremely popular, popularized by, um, philosopher and New Testament scholar Gary Habermas. And a lot of people use it, particularly in debate. It's found very useful in a debate format. The first aspect of it is that the facts that are used, tries to use a very small number of facts and then seek the best explanation for them. The facts that are used must have a very high majority of scholars who acknowledge a particular fact. Gary Habermas addresses in one place, you know, what percentage? And he says he was looking for 90 something percent of New Testament scholars who agreed that this is a fact. And then it must have scholars, including skeptics, across the current ideological spectrum who agree with or grant that fact. So that needs to be living scholars. We're usually looking for, or scholars who have been living in the past 30 years or something like that, who are agreeing all the way across.

This is a part of the methodology, and it's treated as having epistemic significance. Sometimes people will say, well, that's just for rhetorical purposes. That's just to help people to feel that this is secure or something. And that is certainly part of it. But the minimal facts case has always been an uneasy hybrid of rhetorical and epistemic considerations. And to show the someone of read application here, it begins with a quotation that Dr. Habermas is giving up Dr. Michael O'Connor, because the two of them have worked together quite a bit on minimal facts. And then Habermas glosses that. This isn't a 2012 article that had Habermas. 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.

So, hang on to that. "Gives us confidence that our horizons will not lead us completely astray." Now, Habermas commenting, quoting makes an insightful comment here regarding guarding against our own horizons. We must beware of our unimportant biases as well. When just discussing the minimal facts, I have always purposely included notes at each juncture that lists 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 reckon, subserviently, that is only recognized by those who believe in the veracity of the New Testament texts and so on. After all, this sort of widespread recognition and approval is the very thing that our stated method requires. So, as you can see, this is being given up the stomach significance to supposedly guard against our own biases. I'll be coming back to that later when I talk about an aggressive minimal facts approach. I call an aggressive version of the minimal facts approach.

Okay, so three facts that satisfy the criteria that get used a lot and when Habermas is presenting as when he considers his most rigorous version, and also O'Connor, they will boil it down to these three facts. O'Connor calls them historical bedrock: Jesus died due to the process of crucifixion; very soon afterwards, Jesus' disciples had experiences that they believed were appearances of the Risen Jesus; and just a few years later, Saul of Tarsus also experienced what he thought was the post-resurrection appearance of the Risen Jesus. You will notice that the empty tomb is not here. However, Habermas emphasizes quite a bit that he does not generally regard the empty tomb to be a minimal fact. Dr. William Lane Craig will sometimes use the empty tomb as a minimal fact, but never Habermas and O'Connor. They emphasize they were only able to get about 75% scholarly agreement and only able to get, I say, me, it was just surveying, it was like a meta-analysis of the literature that had invested, and that was only of those who addressed it, not everybody addresses it explicitly. So, kind of makes a big deal about the fact that he just didn't think the minimal fact that the empty tomb quite measured up. They use that as what they call a second-order fact, which is it's like a second-class citizen, semi-minimal fact. But these are the three that meet those criteria very robustly.

Okay, so, a central problem with the minimal facts case that I find is the appearances. And I call this the Achilles' heel of the minimal facts case. Because the question is, for that appearance factor, what were the appearances like? What are we really asserting when we assert that appearance fact? So here are some statements, and I just want you to notice how carefully worded these are. Some statements of the appearance fact, quoted from Michael O'Connor in his 2010 book on the resurrection. I have added emphasis. "Historians may conclude that subsequent to Jesus' execution, a number of his followers had experiences in individual and group settings that convinced them Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to them in some manner." Appeared to them in some manner. All right, whatever that means.

Here's from Habermas in 2012: "Very soon afterwards, Jesus' disciples had experiences that they believed were appearances of the resurrected Jesus." Okay, they believed that they were, in some sense, appearances of the resurrected Jesus. And here's William Lane Craig's statement from a 2017 version. He gives this version a lot on multiple occasions and under various circumstances: "Different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead." We'll be talking in a little while about what "alive from the dead" means. But I want to note some things here. Are some limitations placed on the appearance fact by the need to get this very high percentage of scholars on board with it? It does not mean that the appearances were like those described in detail in the Gospel accounts. In other words, it does not mean that the disciples had experiences as if of eating with Jesus, as if of talking with him, as if of having conversations with him, being invited to touch his wounds and so forth. Not enough scholars across the ideological spectrum acknowledge that. In fact, Fremont Craig talks about this explicitly. He says that, "At the same time, the typical scholarship has come to a new appreciation of the historical credibility of Paul's information." This is in first Corinthians 15. "However, it must be admitted that skepticism concerning the appearance traditions in the Gospels persists."

And what's interesting is they will definitely include scholars who are expressly deny or are deeply skeptical about the authenticity of the details at the resurrection accounts. These will be said to acknowledge the appearances. Geared Ludum, as an example, he says, "Oh, all that physical stuff is a later corruption. The original sermon was a seeing in the spirit." As littleman, both Harp and Berg say that there's scarcely a kernel of truth in the in the Gospel narratives. Bart Ehrman certainly doesn't acknowledge that they claim to have had experiences like those given in the Gospel narratives. Many, many scholars are being included as quote, acknowledging the appearances, that who do not acknowledge the kinds of experiences given in the Gospels. So that means that the appearance fact doesn't mean those kinds of experiences, because they could not have gotten the consensus that they want. In fact, I've even been unable to ascertain how many scholars acknowledge a group appearance. Now, Lacan, specifically, you'll remember in his statement here, "in individual and group settings," and he treats that as a bedrock fact, and he gives his own arguments for that. But it's not at all clear to me that 90 some percent of the scholars acknowledge even a group appearance. I know that Ehrman denies that. Walters and Armstrong denies that. John Dominic Crossan denies that there was a group experience of an appearance where they appeared, seemed to see Jesus. But whatever, it's certainly not the kind of experiences that we find in in the Gospels. It's not acknowledged by that wide number of scholars.

Okay, it does not, in and of itself, mean that the disciples believed that Jesus was specifically alive. Abernathy, Lacan, expressly break out the idea that they believed that Jesus was physically alive, and they call that a second-order fact. So when William Lane Craig says they believed that Jesus had appeared to them alive from the dead, if we're again, if we're going to limit ourselves to these things acknowledged by this really large majority of scholars, not necessarily physically alive, and not even necessarily that they believed that he was physically alive, although that can be argued for as a so-called second-order fact, but it doesn't have as high a scholarly consensus.

Okay, so here are some scenarios that are consistent with the appearance fact. I'm just going to allow a group appearance. I'm not even sure we've got the 90 some percent acknowledge a group appearance, but let's just throw that in there. All right, so here's a scenario: a floating man speaking Jesus. Suppose the disciples were all gathered for a meal in the upper room, and they suddenly saw this appearance, this scene coming before their eyes, as if Jesus, whose feet don't even touch the ground, and who never says a word, and he kind of hangs there for five minutes, and then he disappears and is never seen again. That would be consistent with affirming that the disciples had experiences as if of Jesus who was in some sense or in some manner risen. Well, you're going to say, "I want to use that second-order phantom. I want to use the bait. They thought he was physically alive." Okay, let's try this one. We have a Jesus. Suppose we had a Jesus who appeared only once, or who seemed to appear only once, brief. We and only said, "Peace be upon you." Okay, so we've got a maybe a visual experience. It lasts for approximately 90 seconds, and Jesus says, "Peace be with you," or something like that, and then he disappears again and he's never seen again. Maybe they would have concluded that he was physically risen from that. But maybe they, that wouldn't have been enough.

These scenarios already assume at least one group experience and at least a visual component, but they are still weak. And in the first case, the floating, non-speaking Jesus, I would say even disconfirm a bodily resurrection if he doesn't even seem to touch the ground. That's better, better explained in some kind of paranormal way or something like that. And when we water down the appearance experiences, we do have to start talking about the paranormal. You know, Allison has definitely brought the paranormal to prominence. He's done a lot of work cataloging, I would say rather naively cataloging, rather credulously cataloging, but still cataloging claims that are made of appearances of people's dead relatives and so on that supposedly appeared to them. What most of us would call ghost stories, though Allison doesn't like that phrase, those stories. But still, if all you had were these kinds of scenarios, you might conclude that something odd had happened, but it might not be a physical resurrection. You might conclude the world is just as strange a place as we thought it was, but not that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead.

This is a very important point. If we are not able to say in detail what the experiences were like, it's very difficult to evaluate the rationality of the disciples' belief. Even if we include the second-order fact that they believed that Jesus was raised bodily, people believe a lot of things in an irrational fashion. Suppose that you had a friend who said to you, "I believe that my father was raised from the dead, physically raised from the dead." You said, "What?" And now let's suppose that your friend, um, I don't know, dies or goes off to someplace where you can't get a hold of him before you get a chance to get any details. You never get any details about why he thinks his father was physically raised from the dead. Maybe he says, "My father appeared to me," and that's all he says. But you never get a chance to talk to him to say, "Whoa, you know, did you could have a conversation with your father? How many times did he appear to you? Could you touch him? How long was this experience?" No, no details. You can't get any details whatsoever. Would you yourself be justified in thinking that your friend was rational in thinking that his father had risen from the dead? I would say no. People who are grieving are sometimes not rational. I think at the most, if you had a certain amount of trust in your friend, you might think, "That's really weird. I might think, huh, or I wonder what that was all about." But if you couldn't get any further details, even even asserting that your friend believed that his father was physically raised from the dead would not justify you in concluding that his father was raised from the dead.

Now, there are different ways that someone could make the minimal facts case. When I, when I bring up this point about the appearances, I often find that people are just, they don't want to let go of it. I've had people email me or discuss this in threads to blog posts, and they'll say, "Well, could I do the minimal facts case as a preliminary? Or could I do it this way? Or could I do it that way?" Because they really think they need it. Now, in the second half of my talk, I'm going to be talking about an alternative, an alternative that you could even use for presentation purposes. So you don't actually have to have the minimal facts case, but, you know, it's a kind of a security blanket. So people will say, "What could I still do it?" So let's talk about some ways that you could do it, and these get increasingly problematic epistemologically.

So, the first way, a preliminary minimal facts case with clear eyes. Yes, you could do this if you wanted to. We were talking before, John, and put this onto the livestream about the fact that Jordan Peterson tweeted a stream article. I believe it was Gary Habermas gave a minimal facts case this Easter, and the atheists who are director Peterson's fans are not very happy about this that he would even consider it. And I was talking about this at dinner with a friend the other day, and she said, "Well, it's a gateway drug." And she was being funny. That the minimal facts case is a gateway drug for Christianity. And for someone like Peterson, who probably likes to hear that phrase, you know, "large majority of scholars are agreed," and probably a lot of non-Christians are as well. They like that sense that that there kind of is a rhetorical thing. They're hanging on to something, something that's not weird, something that's mainstream. I do wonder, though, to what extent the value of it, even as a gateway drug, arises from a misunderstanding concerning the nature of the appearances that are agreed upon by a large majority of scholars. In that same stream article, after stating it in the cautious way, then a number of paragraphs down, Dr. Habermas has got a little carried away, and he said, "I, you know, we're gonna boil our case down. Jesus was crucified, and then a few days later, he was seen conversing with his friends and having conversations with his friends, just as you or I might do." Wait a minute. That's not acknowledged by 95% of scholars that he was seen conversing with his friends a few days later, just as you or I might converse with our friends. I think that's true. I think he was seen conversing with his friends, but we have left the minimal facts criteria behind at that point in our enthusiasm.

But not everybody knows this. But suppose you didn't know this. Maybe you would present the minimal facts case with what I call clear eyes, and you would say, "Well, you know, this isn't going to get us very far, but it should make you at least wonder if something odd happened. It should maybe challenge your naturalism. It should move you in the direction of, you know, either a real resurrection or something paranormal. It should make you go, 'Huh.' It should make you curious or make you do some more investigation." But you're going to need to do that, that additional investigation, and say that to your audience. That wouldn't be, Mrs. Whedon, that would be presenting it clearly. But it will only get you that very, very, very pre-evangelistic step.

Here's another one: a preliminary minimal facts case with some confusion. Someone might say, "Well, it's preliminary, but it gets us a good ways. You know, it gets us to up maybe more probable than not that the resurrection happened." Well, you know, a philosopher might say that depends on your priors, what we call your priors, because the minimal facts evidence is so boiled down or so watered down, it doesn't have a lot of punch in and of itself. So then it depends a lot on whether you were already a theist, whether you already a naturalist, and so forth. So someone could present a minimal facts case, admitting that it's preliminary, but with some confusion about how far it would get you.

The one I think is most common is what I call a naive minimal facts case. I hear a lot of people giving it, and I think they do not know. They literally do not know: A, that it's not being included that the Gospel, that the disciples believed Jesus was physically alive, and when they say alive, they assume that it means physically alive. That of course, we're bundling in there, that they believed he was physically alive. Well, that's not acknowledged by a super high majority of scholars. So they're bundling that in there and assuming that it is. But B, more importantly, that when they say appearances, I mean that this large majority of scholars acknowledge the appearances, they assume it's just sort of been handed to them as a gift. You know, that we have some skeptic out there who doesn't believe in Jesus' resurrection, but nonetheless, we're not quite sure why he believes that the disciples really thought they were eating meals with Jesus in groups. And if the skeptics are going to hand that to you as a gift, why not use it? Okay, so that I think is probably the most common. And I think when you hear people other than Habermas and O'Connor and Craig, but other other apologists giving the minimal facts case, or when it's just adopted by what you might call your apologist on the streets, I think he's often giving a naive minimal facts case.

And then there's the aggressive minimal facts case. And this is the problem, the really problematic one. The person giving the aggressive minimal facts case recognizes full well how minimal the facts are, and he thinks that's a good thing and insists that we need to do this. But it's better to argue from the minimal facts, and sometimes will even go so far as to imply that if we try to make a strong case, that it's not going to be objectively supportable. I'm not going to reread it, but you can think back to the quote I read at the beginning from Gary Habermas about this ensures the reader, or he might say the listener, that he's not being asked to accept something that only conservatives accept, and it helps to guard against your own horizons. But somehow, if we did more, it would be biased, somehow, or a problem, somehow. And a couple of other quotes I want to give for the aggressive minimal facts case. Here's one from Dr. O'Connor's 2010 book on the resurrection, beginning with page 371. "What may we conclude about the appearances to the disciples?" he asks. "A similarity exists with the miracles of Jesus." Now, what he's going to do, I'm not going to quote this part, but he's going to say, "We're not actually justified as historians in believing that any particular miracle took place, but merely that Jesus did some kind of amazing things that caused people to drop their jaws." He even uses that phrase, "drop their jaws." But it's difficult, he says, to award historicity with a great deal of certainty to any particular miracle or exorcism reported in the Gospels.

Now, I'm quoting now: "In a similar manner, historians may conclude that subsequent to Jesus' death by crucifixion, a number of his followers had experiences in individual and group settings that convinced them Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to them." Again, notice that he doesn't say how they were convinced by the. And he's going to make that clear. Continuing quoting: "We may affirm with great confidence that Peter had such an experience in an individual setting, and we will say see that the same may be said of an adversary of the church named Paul. We may likewise affirm that there was at least one occasion when a group of Jesus' followers, including 'the twelve,' had such an experience. Did other experiences reported by the Gospels occur as well, such as the appearances to the women, Thomas, the amazed disciples, and the multiple group appearances reported by the tradition at first Corinthians 15:3-7 and John? Where did these appearances occur? Historians may be going beyond with the data or in assigning a verdict with much confidence to these questions."

I want to repeat that. "Historians may be going beyond with the data or in assigning a verdict with much confidence to these questions." This note is what he says. "We may conclude, not what we may start with about the appearances, but like when we're done as historians, we can't say that Jesus appeared to Thomas." I think that should be bothersome, worrisome. Why do you believe that Jesus appeared to Thomas then? And this is making a split that I will come back to and talk about later, between history and religion, and between history and Christianity, that I think is a very unhealthy split. I'm going to give another short quote here from William Lane Craig. I wrote a blog post recently discussing this discussion of Craig's. He says, "With unbelievers, we should, we should simply make the case that the documents collected into the New Testament are reliable enough to warrant the beliefs that Jesus understood himself to be the Messiah, the unique Son of God, and the Daniel extent of man, and that his crucifixion, burial, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, and the origin of his disciples' belief in his resurrection are historically well-founded."

Well, again, we talked about what appearances amount to there. But notice, Dr. Craig says, "We should simply make this case." And Dr. Craig is very explicitly says, "I almost never argue with an unbeliever about biblical inerrancy." And I'm not just talking to Maya Lydia. I'm not just talking about inerrancy. And I think inerrancy gets on hopefully mingled in here with reliability. And the discussion with Dr. Craig, he goes on, "I'll concede for the sake of argument virtually all the errors and inconsistencies in the Old and New Testament that he wants to bring up, while insisting that the documents collected into what was later called the New Testament are fundamentally reliable when it comes to the central facts undergirding the claims and fate of Jesus of Nazareth." He's clearly recommending this procedure. And Finis and Luke O'Connor present what I call an aggressive minimal facts case. This is highly, highly problematic. It, it indicates again, this notion that really, maybe we can't argue that the documents are any more reliable than us or unreliable in any stronger sense. And O'Connor says expressly that historians may be going beyond with the data warranting concluding that Jesus appeared to the women or to Thomas or in these other ways recounted in the New Testament documents. Well, that's a problem. Because if we can't go beyond this, then maybe a physical resurrection of Jesus isn't the best explanation. Maybe Christianity isn't true. So I think we need more than this, because we have watered the case down and made it so weak that it is not clear that we can get a robust conclusion out of the facts we've left ourselves with. So let's hope, let's hope that as historical investigators, we can go farther.

I want to advocate what I consider to be a better, better alternative, which I call maximal data. And I will be giving examples of this and how this might be stated as I go on. And I want to assert that this maximal data can be used in presentation. This is not just for you to keep in your own mind. I think you can actually give presentations based on maximal data approach. Here are some distinctives of the maximal data. First of all, it asserts upfront the Gospels' resurrection accounts represent what the disciples claimed happened to them. Okay, now I'm not just doing a naive thing where I say, "Well, the Gospels are reliable when they say that Jesus rose from the dead, so probably Jesus rose from the dead." And not doing that directive and induction. But I am saying that if the documents come from eyewitnesses and friends of eyewitnesses, just very few removes, and they're reliable documents, they have this provenance, and they're careful, it's not a game of telephone like Bart Ehrman talks about, it's not at many removes, then we can be justified in saying that the the narratives in the Gospels represent what the disciples claimed. And you'll see if you read Tim McGrew, my husband, and my article for the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, that that's what we do. Okay, when we talk about the testimony of the disciples, then we mean, we mean the testimony that the kinds of things recorded in the Gospel narratives happened to them. That that's what they were testifying. And then this can be supported indirectly by arguments for the reliability and the origin of the Gospels and eyewitness testimony.

When I use the word reliability, by the way, I am using it in a different sense than the sense that Dr. Craig was using it. Dr. William Lane Craig, and the quotations I've read to a moment ago, I have recently discovered, literally just in the last few weeks, that reliability is being used in a very, very strange way in the evangelical community, and I think we need to challenge it. It's being used to mean that we can get historical data out of the Gospels. So Dr. Craig says, "They're reliable enough that we can get these minimal facts out of them," or "we can get the Jesus thought he was such an yelling son of man," or something. That doesn't mean that they were reliable. You could take an unreliable document or the statements of an unreliable person and you could put them through some kind of soon, what are you ad ways of telling, you know, as if he's a person, his nose always twitches when he's lying, or something, or I could check it out by asking some other person that I consider to be more reliable. Or of course, as you know, if you're an apologetic speaker and New Testament student, they have these criteria of authenticity. They like to apply to the Gospels. And however much talks about that a bit in the stream article that I was just mentioning. So we're taking the Gospels and we're like applying various litmus tests to different passages and and by this we sort of ring or mine historical data out of them. That doesn't mean they're reliable at all. That means potentially it could mean we can get data out of them even though despite the fact that they are unreliable. Normally, if we're going to use the word reliable for something, a person, a document, we don't just mean a not completely fictional, it's not totally made-up. And you could do that for a historical novel or capable of yielding some true data. Usually, at a minimum, a reliable source is a source such that if it alleges that a fact is true, you have non-negligible reason to believe that fact. This could be overcome by other evidence, or this might not be enough to overcome some prior implausibility. But a Bayesian philosopher might say it has a non-negligible Bayes factor for those of you who are into that for the fact it alleges. It gives you some non-negligible reason to believe this fact. If the Gospels are reliable in a normal sense like that, then we ought at least to be able to treat the resurrection accounts as what the disciples claimed. Don't worry, I'll be giving you some examples of what this maximal data approach might look like in a minute.

Another distinctive of the maximal data approach is that it treats the objective vision theory as not being a claim that the resurrection occurred. I haven't talked about this yet. The objective vision theory is the theory that Jesus did not physically appear to his disciples. Sometimes it's called the Telegram theory. Jesus was up in heaven, he sent telegrams to his disciples, and they were down on earth, and they were kidding with Jesus in a vision, or at least hearing him. An objective vision does occur in the Bible, and that's Stephen. When Stephen is going to die, he says, "I see the heavens open and Jesus sitting on the right hand of God." And if you know, certainly the author of the Gospel of Acts thinks that Stephen really did see the heavens open and so forth, and Jesus sitting there. But Jesus was not walking around on earth at that time. That would be an example of objective vision. The objective vision theory of the resurrection holds that all of the appearances were like that. But it's worth noting that those who advocate it will typically dismiss the Gospel narratives. They will typically not take the Gospel narratives to be vertical. That actually fits together very well. Because if you had an objective vision where Jesus is like, "Pass the salt." "Hey, can I have some fish?" "Mmm, yeah, nicely yummy fish." Then we're practically turning God into a deceiver because he's sending an objective vision to the disciples, it's making it look like it's not a vision, making it look like Jesus is really walking around. That's not what objective vision theorists typically believe. They typically believe in far more minimal appearances anyway. And what you have is that someone like Dr. William Lane Craig or Dr. O'Connor will say that that is a version of the resurrection. In fact, a little-known fact about Dr. O'Connor's very large book on the resurrection is that RH, I'm going to charge you it backwards, RH comes out right in the video, RH, the resurrection hypothesis, he defends in that large book is a disjunction that either the bodily resurrection occurred or the disciples had objective visions of Jesus. Both Hardpan and Berger call it an interesting sort of hybrid view that the tomb was empty and Dad sort of transported Jesus' body away somewhere, presumably out of our space-time continuum, which means that he kind of sort of believes in a bodily resurrection, but then all the appearances were non-bodily. Well, in the maximal data approach, we're not going to do that. When we talk about the resurrection, we're going to mean the bodily resurrection right up front. We're not going to call the objective vision theory the resurrection. And then this fits because we are asserting right away that the de Gospel narratives are what the disciples actually attested. So then that allows us to defend something stronger and not to call the objective the theory the resurrection.

Also, it asserts upfront that the early chapters of Acts accurately represent what the disciples were testifying, how soon, and under what dangerous conditions. Interestingly, this doesn't go, this part doesn't go much beyond the second-order facts, because the idea that they were testifying quite soon and that they were risking their lives are actually what Habermas would call second-level facts that are, you know, affirmed by a lot of scholars, but not a large, large, large majority. And he, in fact, uses that in his stream articles. So that's interesting. But we are going to, we're going to use the reliability of Acts to defend, for example, the physical resurrection assertions made by Peter in his speech at Pentecost. They were attesting to the physical resurrection very soon. And then what was what was the danger to them? The stoning of Stephen, the execution of James, the son of Zebedee, they're being dragged before the Sanhedrin and told not to preach and so forth. They were really sticking their neck necks out. So that's also, I'm going to assert that right up front in my maximal data approach. I'm not going to treat it as a second, second-order fact.

So, I'm going to clear away some misconceptions about the maximal data approach. Misconception one: This is the first thing you're probably all thinking. It's the first thing people will say, "A maximal data approach would take too long to present and is therefore inappropriate for a debate format or for efficient dialogue." People will say, "Well, people have short attention spans. We need something they can give quickly." Response to the first misconception: Given the above discussion, you're going to have to go further than minimal facts anyway to get a robust case for the resurrection. If we want something that is strong evidence for the resurrection that could overcome, for example, a low prior probability, you're going to need to go farther anyway. In that sense, taking a maximal data approach is efficient because it gets us right away to where we need to be. And then we can see what our interlocutor, our debate opponent, or the person we're witnessing to, or discussing with, will or will not grant. Where is it the sticking point for him? I've already mentioned Dale Allison. I've just been reading an exchange between Jo Allison and several evangelical scholars in the pages of Philosophy of Christi. William Lane Craig, C. Stephen Evans, Gary Habermas, and Michael O'Connor, I believe. And it's very interesting because the other guys have to go beyond the book no effect immediately. And I already mentioned Allison. Allison is, in a sense, he's the guy by his very nature is showing why we need more than minimal facts, because he's bringing up the paranormal. Okay? And then how you can argue against that? Well, Jesus argued against the paranormal in Luke 24. "Have any food? Touch me and see that I have flesh and bones and I'm not a spirit." Interestingly, Dale Allison dismisses that as a later apologetic addition. Convenient. Okay, so you see them going to this, saying, you know, Dr. Habermas, in this exchange as well, you know, "They were able to touch him." And Allison, in his responses, "Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You know, how do you know that? You're taking the Gospel narratives at face value. You know, how can you defend that?" Well, you know, I'd like to think if the discussion had gone back and forth, Habermas would have defended it. It's just there's only a certain number of back and forths in that exchange. But you're going to have to do that anyway. That's the point I'm making. So the maximal data approach just moves us right to that point.

Second, any case for the resurrection, whether minimal facts or not, will start with certain assertions that can be backed up with additional facts if challenged. You don't bring all of your pots and pans out to the table when you're serving a meal to your guests. You bring the meal. If somebody wants your recipe, you can give them the recipe later on. If somebody wants to see how you cooked it, you you can tell them. But you, when you give a presentation, or even in a debate, you'll have your initial statement. In the debate, you don't give all the support. You give brief support. The minimal facts people do this to a minimal facts person. Mag debated Jesus' method and might suddenly discover, "Oops, you know, he doesn't acknowledge even that Jesus existed." Well, then he's got stuff that he can bring up for that. Not all those you're debating will acknowledge the minimal facts. Have 30 names of three people who do not acknowledge a group appearance. So if you were debating Walter Sinnot-Armstrong and you gave the minimal facts and you said it's individuals and in groups, and then Armstrong comes and gives his statement, he says, "No, I think somebody just thought he said Jesus and then told the others." And Ehrman will do this too. And then they were influenced, sir, they didn't want to appear on pious and so they were like, "Yeah, yeah, I saw him too." Okay, you're going to have to back up to defend your group appearance. So in that sense, the maximal data approach is similar. You give your initial statement, and then you've got all this stuff over here, okay, that you're ready to bring out if challenges are made to the assertions that you make as premises. The initial statement. So now we're just going to talk about an initial statement. But if we're talking about efficiency, the initial statement of a maximal data case is no less efficient than the initial statement of a minimal facts case.

I'm going to give you two forms. First version, trilemma version. This is taking us back, yes, to the 18th century, yes, to the 19th century. I heard someone who some skeptic was complaining about my 19th-century approach to apologetics on Twitter recently. I bear that badge with pride. William Paley would love this. "Sorry, even the disciples were deceivers, they were mistaken, or they were telling the truth." There's your trilemma. They were not deceivers. And just as with the minimal facts case, you state your premise, you give a few brief arguments for it. They had a massive motivation against bringing forward such a story as a lie in those social circumstances. Interestingly, the minimal facts case also does count the fraud theory. That's one of the few things. It's not popular anymore, the fraud theory, because of the enormous motivation, especially for Jews who could have just gone back to being Jews and lived within a respected way in their community, against their coming out with this strange new idea that Jesus had risen from the dead and there, then risking getting stoned or killed by Herod, it just pleased the Jews or any of a number of other unpleasant ends they might have come come to. So they were not deceivers. And they were not merely mistaken. At this point, you instance briefly the nature of the appearances. The way I like to put it is when I, when I do this, I've done this trial, a version. You could not be mistaken merely in a normal way unless you were massively insane, in a very strange way, about whether or not you ate meals and hung out in an extended way with your best friend over spring break. And if there's a group of you, the whole group could not be merely mistaken about whether all of you hung out with this member of your group who was one of your best friends repeatedly over spring break. So I'll say that to make that vivid. That the nature of the claims, repeated appearances, and and multi-sensory appearances, and they're all talking to each other and interacting in groups and so forth, are not the kind of thing that in normal circumstances this group of people could have been merely mistaken about. Therefore, they were telling the truth. There's your trilemma version. Look how fast that was.

Here's another one. Say that's just a different format. Inference to the best explanation version. The disciples claim to have had multi-sensory experiences, both as individuals and in groups, on multiple occasions of conversing with Jesus. They claimed that he was able to eat and was tangible. They gave details of these encounters as found in the Gospel accounts. They undertook serious risk of death from making these claims and continued to do so under persecution. Notice, by the way, that I do not say they died for it. Now, I am not yet read Sean McDowell's book about the fate of the Apostles. I should read it. But my understanding is, they're a relatively small number of apostles from whom we have solid evidence that they did die. We do have solid evidence for those for those. But if we're talking about, you know, Matthias, what happened to Matthias, or what happened to James, the son of Alphaeus, I'm not going to say that I know that he definitely died. So I say, "undertook serious risk of death." This, of course, being based on non-miraculous evidence in the Gospel of Acts. I just want to point out the testifying and taking risks is not in itself a miracle, except in the sense of human nature. It's very surprising, but it's not intrinsically miraculous. The best explanation of these facts is that they were telling the truth. Jesus really had physically risen from the dead, because it's very difficult to find any other explanation that will account for these facts.

All right, so those are some brief initial presentations. You could easily put one of these into the appropriate length, for example, for an initial presentation in a debate format.

Misconception two: If you were giving a maximal facts argument, you would have to answer all objections such as alleged discrepancies on the spot. Okay, well, that's just not true. Responses to the section second objection: The skeptic does not get to dictate when and how you answer an alleged difficulty. We are not phased in presentation with a false economy either. As doctrine, Craig said, "We just concede it all to the skeptic." I'm just going to concede all the discrepancies, or I have to go and stop and answer them all this instant, this minute. That's not true. You are the one presenting a positive case. You can say, "I'm just going to present this positive case. You know, we can come back to that later." I do this in my book, "Hidden in Plain View," on design course. And as I just say, "I'm not going to discuss alleged discrepancies right here. I'm going to present positive evidence from undesigned coincidence." I have a good book like that. But nobody would ever guess or think or be confused for a moment to think that I'm conceding the discrepancies. On the contrary, I'm presenting evidence that should make us more open to harmonizing if this is the nature of the texts. Not answering a particular objection at a particular rhetorical moment is not the same as conceding a point. Even for the sake of the argument, you know, you don't even have to say, "Oh, conceding for the sake of the argument that if there are all these discrepancies." Don't say that. You can just say, "I'm going to bracket that. We can come back to that another time. Maybe we can get to that in Q&A. Maybe you can press some of these in the part where you get to ask me questions." Because a lot of debates have that. Um, but you don't say, "Well, for the sake of the argument, let's suppose that there are these discrepancies." You don't have to do that.

Misconception three: A maximal data case is epistemically dubious because it presents a skeptic with some premises that are accepted only by conservative scholars. That does not make it epistemically dubious. Since has already argued, you will need a rule or a robust evidence base. You're going to have to face at some point the need to use propositions that are not widely granted by skeptical and liberal biblical scholars. And as I've said, in that discussion, that symposium on Dale Allison's book, they had to do that. They had to start working with that. So it better not be epistemic lis.

dubious because we're going to need to do it. So hopefully, and I would say definitely, it is not epistemically dubious. The happenstance of scholarly politics does not constrain the force of objective evidence. This is so important. I can't, I can't emphasize this too strongly. The fact that something is not granted by skeptical and liberal scholars does not mean that it is weakly supported by an unquestioning begging evidence. This is so important. You know, hark back to that quotation I've read from Dr. Lu Kona. Historians may be going, "Yeah, with the data warrants and assigning a verdict with much confidence to these questions." Wrong. It's not like you put your historian cap on and now, now there's very little that you can even conclude that is not true. And it also doesn't mean that such a proposition is based only upon a theological presupposition, such as a supposition of an errancy or a supposition of a high view of Scripture or something. We can conclude these things, for example, that these resurrection accounts came from eyewitnesses or putative eyewitnesses originally, by using historical investigation. We don't just conclude that by, by circular reasoning. You know, "I'm a Christian, so I believe this," or "This is the Bible," or something. No, we can support this in ways that are historically strong and objective. It's just an unfortunate accident that the field of New Testament scholarship is so, is so bent in one direction that, as it turns out, only those who are deemed conservative believe these things. That doesn't tell you how strongly they're actually supported.

Okay, now I'm going to click through the next part, and this is going to be approximately the last part of my talk of additional resources for maximal data. My goal in most of these is to mention the existence of this evidence, not to get into it in detail. I'll get into a few details on some types of evidence that you might not be familiar with. My husband Tim and I have maybe not done in as great detail. You can't just necessarily go out and find a video about it somewhere. So I'll give a few more details of those. But for most of those, most of these, I'm just going to mention them, and you can go out and find them. Now, the point of snap that you bring all of these out as part of the initial presentation, again, you can leave your pots and pans and your ingredients in the kitchen, but you have them available to answer objections as they arise. These resources help you to see it to show inductively the reliability of the Gospels, again, in a normal sense of reliability, not just as we can get some kind of data out of them and hence the high probability, but the accounts of the resurrection represent what the disciples claimed happened.

I have seen New Testament scholars go so far as to imply that we have to test every pericope. That's a phrase for like a passage or an incident in the Gospels separately. That agnosticism is the default position, and that then we have to use the criteria of authenticity every time, and that you always bear the burden of proof if you either assert that something didn't happen historically or assert that it did happen historically. That's completely wrong historically. That's like saying, "Induction? What's induction?" Okay, no, that's not how we should evaluate documents. We should be more holistic, where we see, "Oh, you know, John gets it right here and here and here, but there's reason to think that Luke is accurate here and here and here." And then we get a sense of what the, the document is like, and what the author is like. Because these aren't the pericopes in a given gospel or have just, you know, scattered bits of papyrus you found somewhere. It's a document. You can get a sense of what that author was like, and you shouldn't pretend amnesia. You know, "I'm just going to forget everything I found out about how reliable this author is and come to each pericope anew as some kind of tabula rasa." That's a completely, completely unreasonable means of approach.

And I want to emphasize that what follows isn't to encourage you, it's not meant to overwhelm you, it's meant to empower you. I am NOT saying you have to have all of this at your fingertips. I don't have all of this at my fingertips. If I were preparing for a debate, I'd have to prep. Everybody who prepares for debate has to prep. Okay. Um, I'm trying to show you that the information is available. We don't all have to be Tim the group, because Tim McGrew is Tim the groom, and he has made this evidence available. So you can just start any that interests you. I would encourage you to get familiar with the categories and the range of categories. That in itself is strengthening because of the variety of the kinds of evidence that we have. And then get a couple of favorite examples, ones that strike you within various categories, and then you can gradually add to your knowledge. Any Christian can do this.

Okay, so just to mention on design coincidences, I have a book. It is only $2.99 for the Kindle version right now. It's only $2.99. Go to Amazon, buy it on Kindle while supplies last. I guess with Kindle, the supply will always last. But anyway, it's, it's on a special sale because I won the academic division of the Baker Book House March Madness. I defeated a postmodernist. This is a source of great satisfaction. Anyway, to celebrate this, my publisher has put the Kindle version on $2.99. So you can get that if you want. A paper version, I think it's $15.99 from Amazon. But I discussed these on design coincidences. I've given many presentations about this, so I'm not going to give examples right here right now. But I will say these support the instances, the incidents in the Gospels that are recounted there. So they fulfill that side of it. External confirmations can fulfill a slightly different niche, and then this confirms the actual stories that are told in the Gospels.

Now, this argument is called the LK homo argument. I call it that. Tim calls it something different, artless similarity, I believe. Okay, homo, of course, is what Pilate said when he brought Jesus out. He said, "Behold the man." I want to use it to mean behold the man, the man Jesus. Only one Jesus. Those of us who are into apologetics in the New Testament must stop using phrases like "the Johannine Jesus," "the synoptic Jesus," "Luke's Jesus." Don't do that. It's confusing. It gives the impression that there are four different Jesus's, and that these might be in conflict with one another. Actually, we find only one Jesus. And there are some great, great arguments for this. I'm just going to give a couple of examples here, just a couple. There are more out there. I have a blog post about this. Here and there, I give a link to a book by those great old guys, and Stan Lee, Leath, yes, Re. Compares Jesus in the Synoptics with Jesus in the Gospel of John.

Here are two examples. In Luke 13:31, Jesus says, "It cannot be that a prophet will die outside of Jerusalem. He says, 'I must journey on today and tomorrow, but it cannot be that a prophet will die outside of Jerusalem.'" Jesus can be just surprisingly droll, but not bitter. In a sense that is a sin, but just, it's this, this biting, sarcastic wit that he has. Hidden in John 5:42 and 43, he says, "He's coming in the name of the Father, and he says, 'If another comes in his own name, him you will listen to.'" Okay, they don't like Jesus because he's claiming to represent the Father. They would almost like him a few more, even more self-centered. So Jesus can be very sarcastic.

Here's another example. In Luke 13:15 through 17, Jesus has just healed a woman who had a condition that caused her to be bent over, possibly could have been Parkinson's, or it could have been a problem with her back where she couldn't stand up. And Jesus heals her so she can stand up. Then the ruler of the synagogue chides the people. He doesn't, he doesn't bully Jesus, he bullies the people. "Aren't there are six other days in which he would come and be healed? Why do you have to come to be healed on the Sabbath?" And Jesus says, "You know which of you that has an animal will not unloose him to take him to the water and give it, get him a drink of water on the Sabbath? But should I not have loosed this daughter of Abraham whom Satan has bound for 38 years?" Loosed and loosed, he likes to use that, and he's showing their hypocrisy. He loves that kind of wit. In John 7, we find exactly the same Jesus, exactly the same kind of wit. It's a totally different incident, and there he's talking about the fact that back in John 5, he healed a man on the Sabbath and told him to take up his bed and walk, and the leaders were unhappy because he shouldn't have healed him on the Sabbath. And he says, "Well, if the eighth day from the time when a baby is born, a boy baby, happens to fall on the Sabbath, he will circumcise him on the Sabbath, that the law be not broken. But if I make a man entirely whole on the Sabbath, that bothers you?" Okay, you consider that to be breaking the law. Now, this is getting, uh, this is getting pretty sharp. All right. And then circumcision, obviously, a man is a boy baby is made less than perfectly whole, but Jesus made a man whole. It's exactly the same Jesus. Loosed, loosed, circumcised, made whole, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, and he just sings them. But one is sin, Luke, and one is in John. So more examples elsewhere.

This idea of the similarity of Jesus throughout, reconcilable variation. Jonathan McClatchy has talked about this in some of his blog posts about the, about the resurrection. Many plausible harmonizations exemplify this. Can people consider harmonization to be an embarrassment? But it's actually not. Um, harmonization actually is what we expect to have to do with truthful accounts, that there might be some appearance of tension, but then we could actually find a plausible way that they could be true, just using some imagination. John Wenham has a book called Easter Enigma that does this. It's kind of a proof of concept of harmonizing the, harmonizing the resurrection accounts. I don't necessarily agree with every one of Wenham's conjectures, but I like the proof of concept, and it shows that, and when we find we can do this with the accounts, then they start to look like truthful testimony that just comes from different people.

I'll just give one quick example here. Very often, it's falsely claimed that we put all of the events of Easter onto Easter day, that he somehow makes it all happen on one day. This is not true. And you can tell this just from Luke's account itself. He has this little unnecessary detail thrown in that Emmaus, where these men walked to, that Jesus came and walked with them, was about six or seven miles from Jerusalem. And then that when they arrived there and they invited Jesus to dinner, they said, "Oh, it's, it's the evening. It's already evening." And then after Jesus disappeared from their sight, they happen to hasten back to Jerusalem. Now, if you follow all, there's just not time to fit it all in before sundown, before sunset. And then if they were going out on that same day, watching and received up into the clouds, you know, getting awfully dark. You know, do we have some strobe lights here that we can use to see the Ascension? So, um, we can actually reconcile Luke's account with the other Gospels just by looking at these details here, and then looking at the other Gospels, such as John, for example, that talks about a meeting and then another meeting a week later, and then another meeting in, in Galilee. So there's some time. And then Luke himself, at the beginning of that, said Jesus appeared to him over a period of 40 days. This isn't that Luke is crushing these together onto one day. In Luke 24, he's just getting to be in a hurry, and we don't know why he was in a hurry, but he was writing briefly and non-specifically. So we've got reconcilable variation between the accounts, showing that they actually do fit together.

Okay, I consider Richard Malcolm's book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, to be a good resource. Again, we're giving resources for arguing that the Gospels are reliable and that the resurrection accounts come from from the putative eyewitnesses. I have some caveats about Balcom. I'm not convinced of all his arguments, and I think he's so to concessive at times. I have given a detailed review of Malcolm in two places. I made tinyurl.us about these back and review Roman numeral 1 and by a review Roman numeral 2. Tinyurl. You can read details. But certainly, he helps to counter some of these bad habits in New Testament scholars that I've discussed elsewhere, and is willing to consider some rather radical ideas, such as that some of these Gospels actually came from eyewitnesses.

Okay, another type of argument is unexplained allusions. This again doesn't get a lot of treatment, so I'm just going to give a few examples. You know, what we have here are things that, um, we never understand why they happened in the Gospels. Okay, but that is a sign of authenticity. If you're writing a novel, even if you have some kind of foreshadowing, then you will come back around and you will explain that foreshadowing. You leave it dangling out in the wig. But if you ever listen to someone tell a story, he'll mention things sometimes that just don't make any sense, and he doesn't stop to go back and explain himself. Interestingly, an unexplained allusion in one gospel can become one half of a non-designed coincidence. A lot of things that are wouldn't be unexplained allusions if we didn't have the other side, then turn into undesigned coincidences when we find an explanation somewhere else, and we say, "Aha!" But in some cases, we just have the one half. That's evidence of the artlessness, the lack of massaging in the accounts.

So here's one. In John 3:25, it says that the disciples of John the Baptist had to dispute with a Jew about purification. No details are given. And then it says, "Then they came to John the Baptist." So we expect they're going to say, "We are to dispute with a Jew about purification, and he said this, and we said that, and Rabbi, what's the, what's the truth?" And John doesn't say. John says, "They came to John the Baptist and they said, 'Do you remember that man whom you said you testified to when you baptized him? Well, he's baptizing way more people than you are.'" So they started complaining that Jesus sent was really Jesus' disciples. John clarifies, was baptizing more people than John the Baptist. How does this fit with the dispute about purification? No idea. It's never explained. That's great. That's great. That tells us the kind of document John is. It's a realistic document. He's just telling it the way he remembers it, or the way he heard it, but he's telling what really happened, not writing this deep, entirely theological, deeply literary massage thing.

There's another one. John 12:20. "There are some Greeks." And I've been reading some commentaries lately, looks like they may really have been Greeks. Looks like they may have been like God-fearers who were attracted to Judaism, and they had come to the Passover. And they come to Philip, and maybe because he had a Greek name, possibly. And they say, "We would like to see Jesus." So Philip goes to Andrew. And Andrew is also from Bethsaida, which is mentioned here. And he says, "They want to see Jesus." And so Andrew goes to Jesus and says, "There are these Greeks who want to see you." And Jesus says, "The hour has come." And then he goes on to talk about the Son of Man being glorified. The hour has come. We never find out if the, or if the Greeks got to see him or not. We never find out what they wanted to talk to him about, or what they wanted to ask him. And most of all, we have absolutely no idea why he said, "My hour has come," when he heard that some Greeks wanted to see him. It's very funny to read the commentaries. They never want to say, "We have absolutely no idea." So they'll come up with some theological theory, but it's all highly conjectural. That's great. It shows the kind of document that this is. John probably, maybe doesn't even know why Jesus said that, but he remembers that he said it, so he tells you.

Mark 3:17 is listing the, listing the disciples, and it pauses and says, "James and John the son of Zebedee, whom Jesus called Boanerges, meaning the sons of thunder." No explanation. Mark doesn't have like a little, uh, you know, origins story for the nickname. And then at the end of it, "Jesus said, 'You shall be called the sons of thunder.'" For no, he just mentions it. It's this wonderful little unexplained allusion. We have no idea why he called them the sons of thunder.

Okay, and I'll give you the last one I'm going to give here. In John 2:12, right after the miracle at Cana of turning the water to wine, and right before the cleansing of the temple, there's this random verse. "And Jesus, his mother and brothers, mother and brothers went down to Capernaum and stayed for a few days. The end." And then it was the Passover, and they went to Jerusalem. And the next verse. We have no idea why they went down to Capernaum. By the way, "down to Capernaum" is topographically confirmed because Capernaum is down at sea level, and they had been in Cana in the mountains and had to go down. Just one of those lovely little, little topographical things. But it's random. It has no theological meaning whatsoever. What kind of document is John?

Unnecessary details. Unnecessary details indicate the intention to be taken as historical. This is not how openly as historical material is written. You know, I thought I'd seen recently the Gospel of John compared to the allegory of Lady Wisdom in the book of Proverbs. And I would like to ask, how many water pots does Lady Wisdom use? Because in the miracle of Cana, we find out that there were six, and that they each contained a couple of gallons or a certain number of gallons apiece. You know, what random things does Lady Wisdom do in between being Lady Wisdom? Look, this doesn't look at all like an allegory. C.S. Lewis said of that kind of views, "Such a person does not know how to read." These vivid and unnecessarily realistic details are either the mark of historicity or deception masquerading as history. I want to note two apologists. You cannot have it both ways. If you like on design coincidences, then you need to hold that these documents are intended to be taken as historical. If you like external confirmation of details, and you should like them, then these details are prima facie to be taken as historical. You can't say, "Oh, well, details, details, you know, that's just a little detail. Maybe they just thought they could make up details." Okay, then why do we expect to find them being confirmed at all? You can't say, "Maybe they were just making up all of these details," and then turn around and tell you, "Safe to somebody, let me tell you this really nasty thing." I saw it, tip accrues talked the other day about how this little detail is confirmed. It's certainly from Matthew's infancy narrative. Okay, you, you can't do that. You have to accept that these are intended to be taken as historical.

So let me just give you a few. I'm going to click through these really fast. John gives the precise location where John the Baptist was baptizing in two instances: Bethany beyond Jordan and Aenon near Salim. Why? There's no why, not some theological reason or literary reason for this. Just saying it. Just saying it. What time of day did John the Baptist's disciples go with Jesus to his lodging after John the Baptist had testified to Jesus? About 2:10 PM. How many water pots were there at the marriage at Cana, and how big were they? There were six. They contained twenty or thirty gallons apiece. Random. Good, good reality contains random facts, and people remember random facts. The number of years that work had been going on in the temple before Jesus' first cleansing: 46 years. This is externally confirmed. Tim talks about this in one of his talks, and on HIPAA, the URL right here. But they, they say it's been 46 years that we've been building this temple, and will you raise it up in three days? I think John remembered that if they actually said that.

Unnecessary details, intention to be taken as historical. More. When was Jesus sitting at the well, sorry, at Sychar, when he met the Samaritan woman? About noon, about sixth hour. How many porticos were there at the Pool of Bethesda? Five. The early 20th century, a liberal critic named Alfred Loisy said that this was invented as an allegory of the five books of Moses. Then in the 1950s, archaeologists discovered the five porticoes. There just were five porticoes. He mentioned it because he noticed it. Mark mentions that in one of the incidents where Jesus comes to see, to begin with, he was asleep on the pillow. I'm going to have the pillow. I'm going to notice the pillow. They sat down in the green grass. Was green. This is confirmed by an undesigned coincidence that it was the time of Passover from John. Jesus' precise actions in curing the deaf-mute. You know, he touches his tongue, spits, and touches his tongue. And all of us going through this little ritual. Unnecessary to just say that he healed him, but somebody remembered those two divisions. Precise details in the feeding of the four thousand. It mentions there were seven baskets. In the feeding of the five thousand, it mentions that there were 12. And Mark uses a different word. It's a word for a smaller type of basket, number 12, and a word for a bigger type of basket, number seven. This is one reason why the whole idea that this is just a made-up doublet, as they call it, is not supportable. In Mark, clearly intends to be relating two completely different incidents, and he's got these little details. Okay, and many more.

All right, just want to mention, there are many external confirmations. I made a tiny URL for this: tinyurl.com/mcgrew-external. This is one of his talks, Reliability of Acts. He gave a talk for Apologetics Academy here, wonderful talk. And he also fisk's or airs men on alleged contradictions in Acts. Tinyurl McGrew Acts, capitalized Acts.

All right, I want to back back out to the big picture. I'm going to, sorry, I want to say one more thing about external confirmations. These again are part of that holistic approach I was mentioning earlier. We should never just be saying, "Well, this book has a lot of details right about topography and geography and the customs, but gee, we have no idea whether it's historical in genre. G, we have no idea what the author's intent was, or maybe he didn't intend it to be historical. Or gee, maybe this only means it's reliable in the sense that if we erroneously apply these criteria of authenticity, we can, you know, wring some historical data out of it." That is not a way to approach a historical document. A good way. The external confirmations confirm with their early sources that they knew Jerusalem in many cases before the fall of Jerusalem. But they knew Jewish customs. That these two people acquainted with pre-70 Judaism. And the harder they are, the better. As Tim puts it concerning Acts, Acts gets hard things right. Some of these are not, "Oh, New York City exists." You know, the skeptics will try to portray it that way. It's not like that at all. So sometimes it's useful to stop and ask people, "How many things does Luke need to get right before we realize that he is a historically reliable writer? How many things does John need to get right before we admit that he's writing a historical document?" Hit the skeptic with that question, and don't be afraid to hit the, the overly concessive evangelical scholar with that question too. So this is part of a holistic approach.

All right, back back out to the big picture. There is only one truth. And this takes us back to that quotation I gave from Dr. Luke Ona's 2010 book. "As a historian, you're the historian may not be able to conclude this without going beyond the data, but there is not historical truth and religious truth." If you believe that Jesus appeared physically to Thomas after his resurrection, inviting him to touch his hands and his side, then you should believe this for good evidential reasons. And in that case, these reasons can be presented to others. You, you are not going beyond the data if you've got good reasons. If you've got data, you're not going beyond the data. So you should be able to give that data to other people. If there are not strong evidential reasons for believing such historical facts, and if the Gospels are not strongly reliable records of Jesus' life and teaching, someone is probably not justified in becoming a Christian in any meaningful sense of Christian after being given only a minimal facts case for the resurrection. We should not expect an somebody the minimal facts case in them, you know, they're just going to be zapped and suddenly they believe in the Trinity. Uh, if we've thrown the reliability of the Gospels essentially under the bus, gee, you know, I'm going to just concede for the sake of the argument that it contains all these discrepancies. Well, then all you've got left is that is what Bart Ehrman will leave you with, for example, as far as Jesus' teaching, and you may not be able to defend robust Christian truth. So either there are or aren't good reasons for believing these things. In any event, you should have a unified mind, an integrated mind. So we should present an epistemically robust case from the outset, a case that can sustain a robust faith.

I'm going to give a quotation here, a very good, important quotation from John Warwick Montgomery. "In a world of increasing unbelief, nothing is to be gained by a posture of defensiveness in regard to the historical claims of Christianity. Our task as Christian historians and theologians is not to clothe the gospel with an alleged invulnerability by historicizing it. We are to render ourselves and our messages historically vulnerable, as did our Lord Himself, when He gained a fully and unreservedly into the maelstrom of human history. If we so present Him, His historical claims will assuredly prevail, for as those who had an eyewitness contact with Him declared, His manifestation in history was accompanied by many infallible proofs. Only when the Christian messages are offered in these uncompromising terms, his unbelief find itself properly faced with the offense of the Cross, the watershed decision as to whether to accept the historical evidence of salvation in Christ and reject one's own autonomy, or to rationalize away the facts in the interests of retaining control of one's sinful existence." This is from the preface to "Where is History Going?" "When God calls a man, He bids him come and die." Let's present people with reasons for which they can die.

If you would like to have these PowerPoint slides, or you have more specific questions, feel free to write to me at Lidia McGrew at gmail.com. And I'm going to, and share screen now, and go with our remaining time to Q&A. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lidia. That was exceptional. Now, turn to some questions, folks. If you would like to ask a question, just click the raise hand button on top of your screen, and then what we wanted to promote you to panelists. There's time to interact with Lidia, or you can submit questions in textual form by using the Q&A button. Double your screen. And we have currently six text questions that have been submitted.

Anonymous attendee says, "Gary Habermas has not published his magnum opus yet, so he might present a maximal and/or minimum presentation in his more exhaustive treatment on the issues dealing with the resurrection. What do you think of this?"

That would be great. I'm all in favor. And I'm never saying that Gary doesn't know more than the minimal facts. I mean, Gary is a very good scholar. I'm sure he knows a lot more. And in fact, when he was here in Kalamazoo some months back, I didn't actually go to this particular talk, but Tim came home with a yellow legal pad and he sat down and he said, "I want to tell you what Gary said in his talk tonight." And I'm sure this was directed at me, but in a good way. He said, "We need full reliability of the Gospels." I thought that was so interesting that he said that. We need full reliability. He had doors to my book, "Hidden in Plain View," and I get into some of this in my conclusion. And I know that he had gotten there. And it seemed that, and this is how I endorsed it anyway, so I know he knows what. So I certainly hope he gets into that. But in that case, we're going to have to give up making a virtue of the minimal facts case. I'm going to have to say there is really no epistemic virtue to a minimal facts case.

An attendee says, "Doesn't Licona present a chart on page 640 of his book, The Resurrection of Jesus, and use a topographical approach published in 2010 that the bodily resurrection appearances pass on the criteria for historicity, while the resurrection appearances as visions fails the less ad hoc test? This is in his review of D. A. Carson. He mildly chastises Carson for being too modest. He has an entire appendix on Carson."

Yes, that's true. But he says something there that's interesting. He says, um, "I'm using facts that are not part of our historical bedrock." Because Carson chooses to grant, and in particular, the empty tomb. Frankly, I don't know why Carson grants the empty tomb. And I wouldn't grant the empty tomb because he wants to maintain that's very, um, this very, uh, what word should I use? Moved there. And he debates with Craig Allison does in this philosophy of Christianity discussion, how strongly the empty tomb is supported because Allison's like a barely over fifty percent or something, the empty tomb. But then what Licona does is he, and it takes that and runs with it. Needs as well, if you're going to grab the empty tomb, you know, then, um, it's kind of ad hoc to say that Jesus wasn't finally resurrected and so forth. So sure, I mean, I'm not saying Michael Licona doesn't believe in the bodily resurrection. Okay, but he doesn't, he doesn't support it with only what he calls historical bedrock, the so-called historical bedrock, and that's his phrase. And the minimum facts not something that he uses to get to bodily resurrection, which is why his R.H. throughout the book is a disjunction of bodily resurrection and objective vision. You can actually, I think, support the empty tomb via undesigned coincidences and reconcilable variations, which is an interesting way of, I think, arguing for the empty tomb. So, for example, in John 20, is speaking with Mary Magdalene, I'm going to the tomb on Sunday morning. It doesn't imply or doesn't say explicitly there that there are other women present with Mary Magdalene, whereas there are other women according to the synoptic Gospels that go to the tomb as well. And then you've got the very interesting statement where Mary says to the disciples that they've taken away our Lord, my Lord, and we didn't know where, wouldn't they have laid him? Right. And so use the, the inclusive plural pronoun "we," which then dovetails then with the Synoptics in corroborating that indeed the women were at the tomb on the Sunday morning. Absolutely. And I think the empty tomb is, of course, defensible. And I will tend to defend it as part of defending the testimony for women. So like in our Blackwell article, we use what for the testimony of the women. You, you have to take those accounts pretty seriously. You know, if you're just going to say, "Well, gee, for all we know, these girls could be at issue of later embellishments," then you're not going to make the kind of argument that you just made, Jonathan. You're not going to do that because you're not going to view them as really candidates for that, right? And you also have yourself documented an underlying coincidence relating to the women in Luke 8 from Galilee and her, and showing the independence between Mark and Luke in relation to the, the woman being at the cross and indeed the empty tomb, which is also, I think, quite good evidence for the empty tomb on the Sunday morning. I would agree because the angel says, "Remember what he said when he was in Galilee that he would die and be resurrected." And it says, "Some baby remembered his words." Licona mentions this, but interestingly, in Michael Licona's more recent book, "Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?" he expressly suggests that that "remember what he said to you while he was in Galilee" in Luke is, um, you know, a Lukan redaction because Luke is not going to have have an appearance in Galilee because Luke is going to put all of the appearances in Jerusalem on one day. And so then, "Oh, you know, he said something about Galilee, so we're going to, we're going to make on the Galilee reference," which in Mark, I believe, is "He goes before you into Galilee." But this is redacted in Luke into "remember what he said when he was in Galilee," which I'm sorry, insinuates that it's not historical, that it didn't really happen. So this causes Licona to overlook an undesigned coincidence because he's treating it as an unhistorical redaction. Once we start taking them seriously as historical documents, we're able to notice these tellings much better. Absolutely.

We have a hand raised from Ashish. Let me bring up Ashish. Hello, Ashish. Hello, you there? Can you see me? Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, we can see you. Okay. John, alright, okay. Yeah, hello. Praise the Lord. Good evening. How are you? I'm good. Yeah. Thank you so much for your presentation. I had learned a lot from you, especially by watching your YouTube videos also. And your husband also is a great teacher of mine through the YouTube. I just wanted to add that I recently saw the debate between Dr. Mike Licona and never says about government. And the topic was the reliability of extreme documents. And it was so sad. I was watching him. I was observing him. I mean, Dr. Licona for so, so long. And it seemed that in the debate, he almost agreed with all that Bart Ehrman has to say regarding the contradiction in the New Testament documents. So, and at that point, he mentioned a very crucial point about Dr. Licona's strategy. He said, "If Dr. Licona agrees with me in everything, then why he is beating me?" So, as a point of fact, I think he is the scholar. He is writing Christian books to help people like us. But at that, at that crucial point, he almost agrees. He is not able to answer the contradiction of so more difficulties. As a Christian, I believe that the Bible is inerrant. And I have no problem in admitting that. But being a scholar, do you think that Dr. Licona has some responsibility to defend that more practically or in a more, you know, in a way which is more useful for us? And that brings to our in-house debate, the biggest question to discuss for all of us, for all the believers. And the question is, what is the view of inerrancy? Or what, as a believer, as a layman, we take, you know, a view of inerrancy in the Bible, especially the New Testament document, when we see these debates and we see the difficulties also called the contradictions. If I feel like appointing, but the context, what is your view regarding inerrancy?

Sure. A couple of questions there. So I'm going to answer them in the opposite order to the order that you asked them. First of all, I do not identify myself as an inerrantist, but I often call myself a near-inerrantist, close to an inerrantist. So that, particularly with respect to the Gospels and Acts, I'm finding only a few places that I think are potential candidates for very trivial errors. And something Bart Ehrman will do, he'll say it's not just small things, it's big things. Well, I have no intention of debating Bart Ehrman, but if I ever did, I would hit it right there. I'd say, "No, it's small things, and it's only a few." Only a few, because the vast majority of the so-called contradictions that Ehrman talks about are not contradictions. They are manufactured. Bart Ehrman can manufacture a contradiction ex nihilo. It's amazing. I mean, you know, we thought only God could make something out of nothing. Bart Ehrman can make a contradiction out of nothing. Okay. I would answer those very, you know, very forthrightly. And, and I'm a big fan of harmonizing. So I think this takes us to your other question about what kind of things should apologists be defending, including Licona, but all of us, really. And I think we should be defending reliability in the stronger sense that I've been discussing in this talk. The problem with that, that debate with Ehrman, and I've seen portions of it, and I've seen similar debates between Craig Evans and Ehrman on the same topic of reliability, is that they have redefined reliability. And you know what Ehrman catches money every time he'll say, "That's not reliability. What do you mean? That's like a stopped clock is right twice a day. You know, if my stopped clock is right twice, it it doesn't mean it's a reliable clock." Okay. And that's what they're doing is that they've redefined reliability to mean there is some historical stuff in there. Or they'll use the phrase, an interesting phrase, "You can get reliable information out of the Gospels." Well, "you can get reliable information out of them" isn't the same thing as "they are reliable." And Bart will point this out, and he's right to point this out. So I think actually what everybody should be doing, because I think it can be defended, so I mean, because is defending that the Gospels are reliable in this sense that a high, high proportion of what they say is true. Okay. And that they can be verified and confirmed. And it's just like if you test, it's like induction. And you know, you test this, and you test, and you test this, and you find it turning up right again and again, then we can trust it. Then when it asserts something that is itself reason to take it to be true. And this is the thing that Dr. Licona and many of these others are not willing to do. They are not willing to take the mere fact that something is asserted in the Gospels as any kind of significant evidence that it really happened. So they'll question things on the flimsiest grounds, you know, even when there's not a contradiction. So when Jesus breathes on disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Ghost," you'll see scholars saying, "Oh, maybe that didn't happen. Maybe John was just anticipating Pentecost or something." But there's no contradiction. Jesus could have done that, and Pentecost could have happened as well. So they're very ready, extremely ready to assume that something is historical. And I would say this is because they don't think the Gospels survive. This is because they don't think that an assertion in the Gospels is, ipso facto, in virtue of that very fact, probably true. And you don't even have to believe in inerrancy per se to have a very high reliability. And that's what I think we need to be defending. That's going to get us much further, and that will enable you to stand up to Bart Ehrman in a way that too many people are not doing, unfortunately.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much, ma'am. Thank you. Thank you.

One thing that really bugs me, Lydia, is when scholars point out that one of the gospel authors might contradict Josephus or some other author, and the sir at that point, and then knowledge impetus the gospel author. This made the mistake rather than just Eavis true. I mean, that is absolute truth. And I think that's relevant to the census in Luke, because we're having trouble, we have trouble identifying the census, and it's a famous crux. And Colin Hammer says something so sensible, and he says, "Look, Luke deserves credit. We found Luke to be right again and again and again. So in a case where we can't really figure out exactly how he fits with other historical sources, we should give him some cred. We should extend him some credit that, you know, there may just be something we don't know." And I'd love to see him do that because he doesn't say, "Oh, I did that because I have a high view of Scripture or because of my piety or something." He says that as a historian. And I think this fits with what you're saying there too, that if there is some sort of conflict, maybe they're right and the other source is wrong. That could certainly be true. And by the way, on inerrancy, as we've discussed in the past, I coined the phrase "mythological inerrancy," which I think is a good approach and strategy when we're assessing or when we're doing biblical research. So we should always strive for harmonization. And the same way, to find his might assume naturalism in order to give an order to prevent himself from giving up a necklace gay explanations too soon. We like my that ain't should adopt methodological inerrancy. That is, that we, we assume that the scripture is without error in order to safeguard ourselves against giving up on searching for harmonization is too early. I think there's truth to that, except I probably wouldn't use the term inerrancy there because I think that's a good approach to on secular documents too. So when I read Josephus, and I find someone saying, "Oh," or Plutarch, and I find someone saying, "Which contradicts himself or contradicts some other writer," you know, I'm doing methodological inerrancy for Plutarch too, because I'm going in there and saying, "Well, let's go read it and see if there's really a contradiction there." And sometimes there is, or appears to be. Very, very often there isn't. So it's just a good historical approach. Harmonization is good historical practice. Absolutely.

Anonymous attendee asks, "If one accepts the empty tomb, that in combination with an ephemeral version would seem to explain well bodily resurrection. If that is granted as a second-order fact, a group appearance with speech with a lot of punch in my view." So I'm trying to try to restate the question. Is the question that what if we had the empty tomb and a non-speaking Jesus? What would that we is to conclude? Is that how you take the question? Or if we had the empty tomb in of speaking Jesus appearance? How he says, I'm trying, I'm not quite sure. I'm not quite sure I understand the question myself.

"One accepts, um, to Tim, that in combination with an ephemeral vision would seem to explain well bodily resurrection." Tim, and the vision isn't explaining the resurrection, it's the other way. Okay. Means blink. Well, I don't know if that's true though, because if it's an ephemeral vision, I mean, that's just weird. If you found the tomb empty, and then Jesus kind of appeared briefly and went poof, I think you'd just be left with a really weird dataset, because real tangible people do not do not go poof. I mean, and then somebody now, I know, I know, I'm waiting for the skeptic, he's gonna go, "But Jesus did disappear to the disciples that the road to Emmaus." Yeah, and and he showed back up again, and he said, "Touch me and see." So, I mean, I'm taking ephemeral here in a very strong sense, that he was not tangible, he didn't speak, he he was constantly, you know, disappearing after only very, very, very brief appearances, and he didn't speak. And that kind of thing. If you had that, and then you had the empty tomb, you might be forced to believe that somebody stole the body. Certainly, I would not conclude a bodily resurrection. I would, I would be more like Thomas, you know, I want to touch him in order to confirm that he is bodily, uh, raised, because it's such a strong conclusion. But I think we need some pretty strong data. Interestingly, about John's gospel, and Jesus assuming tip here and disappear at will and turn Li through closed doors and so on, it's interesting because John's gospel and John's epistles are largely written polemics against asceticism, which is becoming prominent or popular in John's day when John was writing his gospel. That's interesting because, because I mean, John, and in the gospel, emphasizes, you know, the word became flesh. He emphasizes the physicality of the resurrection, Jesus eating broiled fish on the seashore, and writing, "Touch and be touched by the woman," etc. And yet, the same John also has Jesus appearing, disappearing at will, and ensuring leaving through closed doors. It's kind of not the sort of thing you would expect John to invent, right? Which I think also is best explained by this is really is what happened in John's reporting what happened faithfully, because it's not the.

Kind of thing that you would expect you to invent if he's writing the purpose of combating that ascetic Gnostics which denies the physicality of the Incarnation. That's a very good point because skeptics will want to make a big deal about Jesus' disappearance, but then they will also want to make those physical details apologetic additions. They were added. What wouldn't have been just as easy to cut out the part about his walking through doors as to add the part about his eating? You know, you could, you could make this a more apparently consistent picture, but John doesn't attempt to do that. So it seems like he's just messing with his facts.

I also like the point that you make in your video about the principle of restraint in regard in relation to the resurrection. Previously, before using it in your book, I had associated the principle of restraint with respect to things like Jesus not mentioning whether Gentiles not to be circumcised, which was a hot potato topic in the early church, or the rules they're open to women in ministry, or how to regularly speaking in tongues. Saturday, which were kind of hot potato topics that were discussed and pawed to address. Many of these things in his letters, and you would think if the gospel authors had liberty to just to mix 'em up, you would expect them to have, saying, attribute sayings to Jesus where he addresses these hot potato topics in the early church. But use it as that further when you pointed out that in 1st Corinthians 15, we have reference to the individual, singular appearance to Peter, or Cephas, and James, the Lord's brother. And James is only mentioned, the appearance to James is only mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15:1 time. And the appearance to Peter is also referenced in 1 Corinthians 15, but is also alluded to in Luke 24:34. Which, which is interesting because if you just had the liberty just to make stuff up, then why not give more details on the individual, singular appearance to Peter? It seems that that Peter and James had had this private experience of the raised Jesus appearing to them, and they, for whatever reason, decided not to make the transcript of their private interaction with Jesus available for publication, which is a really interesting pattern that we find.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that applies to Joseph as well. I mention in the book, too, Joseph, this very sympathetic figure. And in some of the, you know, the later non-canonical Gospels, we do get more detail about God's Joseph. But in the canonical Gospels, we don't. We don't learn how he died. We don't hear more stories about Jesus' childhood and all of that kind of thing. So this is again an example of that principle of restraint. That if they didn't know about something, or they hadn't been authorized to tell about it, they, they did not, they were not making stuff up. And it's, it's so important because people don't think about this. And if you read New Testament scholars, they commercially suggest that they made stuff up. But it's easy to get immersed in that and not think about these counter-arguments. So we need to keep them before our minds. And John James Blunt, in his American Undesigned Coincidences, talks about the principle of expressive silence, or the criterion of expressive silence. And he gives an example concerning Bethuel, who's the father of Rebecca in Genesis 24 in the Old Testament. And he also gives an example in relation to Joseph, the father of Jesus. And as you mentioned, he's present in the in Matthew and Luke, and he's alluded to twice in John's Gospel, very briefly. It's like John 6:42, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?" And it seems to suggest that, as you point out in your book, he's conspicuously absent even while Jesus' family are conspicuously present, which suggests he had indeed passed away. Or perhaps he's in a leper colony, or perhaps, and we don't know what was going on there. But it suggests that the, there, that the, the fact that he disappears from the narrative and his conspicuous absence, apologies, his family conspicuously present, so it has a mark of verisimilitude, which is also, I think, a criterion that we can use in studying the New Testament.

Yeah, we need to, we need to really expand our criteria. Definitely the criteria, the so-called criteria are too restrictive in my opinion. We have a hand raised from there. The mentioned arguments, right? So the way that they abuse the argument from silence, right? So an example would be, our Ehrman will say, well, Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels never says, "Before Abraham was, I am," or "I and the Father are one." You listen, if you listen to Ehrman very much, you'll come to conclude that if you remove the argument from silence from his repertoire, you have nothing. Well, maybe, maybe a few things, but very little. It's a very important part of his repertoire. And, um, so he'll say, therefore, the Synoptic Gospels are a con, what, with John? And it, I mean, it's almost as though the Synoptic Gospels had asserted, "Hey, Jesus never said, 'I am the Father are one'," you know, which of course is not the case. So, help place them in conflict. Um, but as, as Tim has argued, my husband, Jim, has a technical article on the argument from silence. And he says, this is premise, you always have to defend that if this thing had happened, it would have been mentioned in this place. Okay? And that's a very, very difficult, it's an amazingly difficult premise to support, particularly when we calibrate from history. And Tim has these wonderful examples, you know, Marco Polo goes to China and never mentions the Great Wall. And it'll say, "Fake Marco, did you notice something? You know, it's many feet wide and this many miles long," you know? Or there's a memoir, a contemporary memoir by a priest about Abraham Lincoln that never mentions the Emancipation Proclamation. So when we start calibrating these, we start realizing there are a million different reasons why people might not have mentioned things. And so I find people asking, "Why didn't they mention that Jesus said, 'Before Abraham was, I am'?" And I'll say, "Oh, you know, there could be so many reasons. You know, maybe, maybe Matthew didn't happen to be pressing the medication or whatever." So then we could contrast that with the argument that Jonathan and I were just discussing, where you get this kind of expressive silence, as he said, where you, you have all these different vectors coming together. And what you're not doing is using the silence of one witness or document to contradict the assertion of another witness or document. Okay? So it's not like, you know, John actually has a story about Joseph after Jesus' ministry had begun, and I'm saying, "Oh no, the Synoptics never mentioned Joseph after Jesus' ministry," because so John must be wrong. Instead, they all concur, and all of the vectors point in the same place, and in the same way, toward something he having happened. I would say probably his death. And so forth. So that's one principle we should always bear in mind. It's almost always a bad idea to use the silence of one witness as if it were a positive argument against the positive declaration of another witness. Silence should be pretty easily overcome by assertion. So I think that's, that's a pretty good way of distinguishing some good and bad uses of the argument from silence.

An anonymous attendee says, "Hema masters, defendant, accost my historicity depending on the moment. He said in a debate with Antony Flew, at the late John A. T. Robinson, quote, 'By the way, in that same book, Robinson also argues that there is eyewitness testimony behind the Gospels and that they are trustworthy sources. I think he believed there's some literal and objective experiences occurred to the disciples. He specifically notes that the experiences were not subjective.' End quote." And the question is, he's just pointing to the pepper masters defend the gospel historicity, and he does that. Quote, "I need to pay attention. I know that Habermas wants to defend the gospel historicity, but it's not a minimal fact, you know, that's the thing that I have to keep coming back to that. But of course, these scholars believe more than they treat us know where as bedrock. Okay? And one of the points I would make is, if they're going to go to something more than the minimal facts, then let's go for more. You know, let's go all out. So especially with the empty tomb, and you will find a book right doing this, which is great. You know, he'll, he'll give reasons to believe the empty tomb. We'll talk about the stories of guard, and that they couldn't just produce the body, and so forth. The fact that they didn't go to the tomb to mourn or to venerate Jesus' bones, and so forth. These are findings, good arguments. But once we do start arguing for a more robust sense, then I would argue that we should go whole hog. I would argue that we should go all the way to a maximal data approach. And probably what's stopping some people from doing that is the notion that it cannot be done efficiently. So that's what I tried to address. But I fear that what's trying stopping other people is the notion of not wanting to go up against consensus of scholarship in a really strong way, and a feeling that that's indefensible or might seem biased or something like that. And I definitely want to keep people past that. Of all of the advocates of the minimal facts case, I think Gary Habermas might be that one of the ones most willing to to go beyond it. And I would just say, let's all get on board and go maximal data approach.

Yeah, I totally agree with you. When I was on recently, unbelievable, debating Richard Carrier, and I noted at the beginning of the debate, because Carrier said that mainstream scholars now agree that only seven of the letters of Paul are actually were written by Paul. And I said that I don't agree with it. I think all thirteen letters of Paul were written by Paul. I think that could be defended quite well. And then we didn't really get into the details of that in particular in the debate. But I wanted to say that for the record. So when he says that Paul never mentions Pontius Pilate, for example, well, I think he does in First Timothy 6:13, he mentions Jesus Christ, who stood before Pontius Pilate, made his confession, etc. And then after the debate, I saw people in the comments saying that, "She Jonathan was uninformed because he thinks that Paul wrote all 13 letters of Paul. Doesn't he realize that all scholars reject that Paul wrote the Pastorals?" Like, it's a debate. If there's an hour, we don't have time to get into the details of every, every point.

Yeah, I agree. And then, if I recall correctly, Jonathan, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't one of them compare you to a flat-earther? Well, I mean, give me a break. I mean, that's just crazy. Certainly that Paul wrote the Pastorals is a good deal more defensible than that the earth is flat. But you do get these very over-the-top statements. And I think even people who would not go that far wouldn't under less just not want to appear to be, I was the mainstream. Someone recently referred in an email to me to the, they called the layman's dilemma, which is this idea that the layman feels like, "Well, I'm just a layman. You know, how can I possibly evaluate that?" And I kind of wrote back, "Units, the layman's gonna have to man up and get over his dilemma, you know? We're just gonna have to be willing to go farther." Which doesn't mean you have to know everything, okay? But it does mean you have to be willing to recognize that there's a deep problem in the New Testament scholarly world, and therefore people need to get beyond those counting.

Yeah, it's, it's the same problem in the field of evolutionary biology and theistic evolutionists who will not want to, you know, shake the consensus view because they feel that they don't want to be seen as going against the, what's seen as being the mainstream view of the scientific community. Well, I'm sorry, in some cases, a scientific consensus is wrong, and this is just one of those cases. We shouldn't be afraid to say so. I believe that's even stronger in the United Kingdom, where you're located. As Dave Vemula in the chat asked a question about Baulkham. He says, "If it's not too much of a rabbit trail or off-topic, could you address a theory of protective anonymity in the Gospels? I believe it's a theory put forth by Baulkham and mostly even worse Scott. Have you critiqued this area before? If so, is that critique available?" I don't think I've written anything up about it, though I've made some editorial comments. I've never met a theory of protective anonymity that I really liked. In general, I find this is just my opinion, and Tim and I disagree a little bit about this, so I just want to say that to be fair, so he doesn't get blamed. Um, although a lot of the same ones that I don't like, he also doesn't like. But I think there are a few that he thinks might work or might have more value than I do. But generally, what I find is that when someone theorizes protective anonymity, there are way too many other options that have not been ruled out, and they're also inconsistencies within a given book in that treatment. So I'll give you an example. Um, Baulkham theorizes that Mark may not name the woman who anointed Jesus' feet as Mary of Bethany because, possibly, anointing his feet with, in his head as well, especially his head, would have been seen as a messianic act, and then it would have been politically dangerous for her. And that this is why he doesn't name her. Well, Mark names the women who, who gathered spices to come to the tomb. In fact, he names them quite gratuitously. He doesn't even have to name them. He names them being at the cross, you know, and I think he names Salome, Mary Magdalene, and so forth. So he's bringing people into danger. And then the other thing is, a messianic act. The early church was out on the street corners declaring loudly that Jesus was the Messiah. So, you know, if you were afraid to be known to think Jesus was the Messiah, you aren't a Christian. So in many cases, these people would have been in so much danger already that the idea of protective anonymity is completely unnecessary or ad hoc. Or the author is not leaving out the names of other people who would seem to be at least equally in danger, or that kind of thing. So I'm just often finding I really can't think of a protective anonymity argument that I think is is strong. One that sometimes you use concerning the the saints that were raised at Jesus' death, that maybe Matthew doesn't name them because possibly someone might have tried to kill them. My phone's ringing. Someone might have tried to kill them. Just a second. I'm going to go hang up. [Music] Okay, sorry about that. The way that the original Jewish leaders were wanting to kill Lazarus. I, I don't find that at all convincing because Matthew would have been written even, even 10 years after me. They'll say an excessively early date for the Gospel of Matthew. That urgency that they felt to kill Lazarus seems to me to have been based on the very immediate situation. Okay? It does not seem to me to have been based on something that would be ongoing. So by the time that the time that the Gospel of Matthew was written, and also I feel that passage in Matthew is just very brief anyway. It's not just that he tells it in great detail and just leaves out their names, but rather that you get the impression that he didn't know a whole lot of details, which I think is a better explanation for not including their names. So, and that's probably the best of the protective anonymity arguments. So it's, I'd be open to it, you know, it's not like I'm saying protective anonymity always stinks, but I'm developing an inductive case against it. Um, you know, you have leave to try to convince me of one, but it hasn't happened yet. That's all I'm saying.

Are you happy to go? I could go for at least half an hour. We have currently 17 submitted questions. You know, maybe 40 minutes, something like that. Sure.

An anonymous attendee says, "Possibly naive objection to unexplained delusion. This couldn't they have been vivid fleshing out of the narrative for entertainment, or more precisely, good storytelling? As history would be delivered at dinner, for example." I don't think unexplained delusions are good storytelling. Um, if you tell a story that way, and people have absolutely no idea what something means, it actually causes your audience to, to be interrupted their attention to your story. Think someone telling a good fictional story actually causes his story to hang together. He does not throw in this kind of totally random, pointless, unexplained thing. So I actually would would consider that to be at odds with good storytelling, rather than fitting with good storytelling.

Up, perhaps what I'll just, I'll just make the question better. How about vivid details? Okay, instead of instead of unexplained, which is so the pillow in the boat, for example. Value pillow in there because it makes a good story. I'm sure. But the Gospels present themselves as being historical. They present themselves on the face of it as tying for history. So remember what I said about vivid details, that they show the intention to be taken to be historical. So, Jay, weren't Wallis, as the detective will say, "Well, I've known of liars who will throw in a lot of unnecessary detail to make themselves look like they're telling the truth." And especially if the liar doesn't have to coordinate his tale with anybody else, it's just him, you know, so he'll throw something in about what he had for supper or whatever. True, but he's a liar, he wants you to believe him. So with the unexplained delusions, I put them in a different category. I'd say, no, they make a bad story. With the vivid detail, I'd say, sure, they make a good story. But this shows that he wants you to believe it, okay? This shows that he wants you to take him to be truthful. And it's important to remember that a lot of these, um, theories that I'm opposing right now are saying that the Gospels aren't even intended to be taken to be truthful. The Gospels are some other genre or something like that. And that's why I joked and asked, "How many water pots this lady wisdom have?" Because, um, John tells you how many water pots they had at the marriage at Cana. So why are we comparing John to the portrayal of the allegorical portrayal of Lady Wisdom? So I think this is pertinent to the genre question and pertinent to the intention to be taken. And then that's indirectly relevant because then you're gonna have to accuse them of lying, which a lot of people are not really willing to do. Calling human race was a number of examples from Acts of unexplained illusion, which are quite interesting. But I think my favorite example in Acts of an unexplained illusion is in Acts 18. We're talking about Paul's return to Antioch. But it says, verse 18 of Acts 18, after and so this is after they have just been in Corinth. Mm-hmm. And it says, "After this Paul stayed many days longer, and then took leave of the brothers and set sail for Syria, and with them, so and Aquila, I can't create got his hair free. I was under that. And they came to Ephesus." So he's, he's taken a Nazirite vow, and he's sure in his hair as a result. But there's nothing else given on that. It's just kind of an off-the-cuff remark. I mean, that just moves on with the rest of the story.

Yeah, I agree. That one is it is a good example. It's so random. It's so random. It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't fit with anything else. And I don't think he tells you to give sacrifices or something at the end of the vow. I don't think he tells you how the vow ends or anything. He doesn't continue it or carry it out anywhere later. So, yeah, it's very temporary. Yeah, exactly.

Another of my favorite examples is in Mark 15, where it mentions Jesus carrying his cross, and then they compel passerby Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross for Jesus. And it's mentioned that he was the father of Alexander and Rufus. And then it just carries on with the story. And you're like, "Well, who are Alexander and Rufus?" Well, clearly they were individuals that were known to the early church. And as you mentioned in your book, there is a Rufus mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans. And church tradition suggests that actually Mark's Gospel was written in Rome. So, right. And that's a good example of what I said, that many times an unexplained allusion, it's one half of an undesigned coincidence. And in this case, we actually have the other half. Or we, and actually that's an interesting example of that. Actually, it is. And I use this in my debates with Muslims. Is in Mark 14:58, or in Matthew 26:61, where Jesus is before Caiaphas, and the false witnesses step forward and give a false testimony against him. "We heard this man say, 'I will destroy this temple, and in three visible hands.'" And then later, and he's on the cross, in Mark 15:29, and 27:40, passers-by are mocking Jesus and saying, "This is the man who said he will destroy this temple and rebuild it in three days. Come down from the cross and we will believe that you are the Son of God." And neither Matthew and Mark it was any pretext of this accusation. So it's like an unexplained allusion. And then we have the other half in John 2:18-19, after Jesus has cleansed the temple for the first time, and the Jews asked Jesus, "What sign do you use to prove your authority to do all this?" And he says, "I will destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." And he's really speaking of his body. And so it seems that the Jews had misunderstood what Jesus had said. And so that gives rise to the garbled and came to Jesus' words in the Gospels. And the Synoptic Gospels. But John doesn't report the later garbled accusation against Jesus. And was it, which is what's interesting about that is a response that I'll get to that is, "Well, perhaps John had just read the Synoptics and so he invents this to try and explain the Synoptics." But, but I think, exactly. But also, and it, when you point out that you've got that combined with the fact that Mark and Matthew have the unexplained allusion, which itself has a ring of verisimilitude. And so they see, and it seems that this isn't some thing that's been invented by these false witnesses out of whole cloth, but rather a garbled version of our corrupted version of something Jesus really said, especially in view of the reference to the three days, which we know in other cases is associated with Jesus' resurrection predictions. So the whole thing. And then also in Acts 6, remember Stephen is being stoned. And actually, I don't think you mentioned this one in your book. In Acts 6, Stephen is being stoned, and people say, "We heard this man say that Jesus was going to destroy the holy place." Right? Yes, very good. Right. That rumor just really ticks them off, you know, that's stuck in their in their behinds. As, "Oh, he said he would destroy the temple." And it's even a misquote because he says, "You destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." So he doesn't even say, "I will destroy it and raise it up in three days." This is, "Destroy this temple. If you destroy the temple, it will raise it up in three days." Yeah, I completely agree. But I, I agree with you that people need to see that just the one side, that why are they saying this totally random, unexplained thing?

An anonymous attendee says, "In your writings, in your blog, you mentioned sometimes that there are privacy reasons for historicity of this or that episode in the Gospels that we should accept simpler theories versus more complicated, or at least leaning in the direction whoever has the fallacy called the oversimplification fallacy. That just to say there might be explicit and or implicit teachings in the Gospels. It needs to be ironed out, not like a quadriga of some of the Church Fathers, but a meaning for a narrowing, a narrowing meaning of a particular passage, but has many significant applications. What do you conclude about something like this?" I'm not going to necessarily rule out a non-literal interpretation, perhaps of something that Jesus said. I mean, an example would be when he says to Peter, "Whoever has washed, only if whoever has bathed, only needs to wash his feet." And we could give that a, we could give that the literal meaning, and he's probably addressing ritual purification rules there, that if you've taken a bath, then you could be made ceremony only clean just by washing your feet if they get dirty. But then obviously, it has all of these, all these deep theological connotations that if you're a follower of Christ, you only need to confess your immediate sins and that kind of thing. So Jesus often says things that have multiple meanings. That's a completely different thing from an overly complex theory of why this is here, where we just jump over the theory that it's here because it happened to the theory that they made it up because they wanted to make a theological point or they wanted to make a literary point or something. That kind of over-complexification is not merely seeing some deeper meaning in the text. It's taking, it's taking an extra layer of complexity for even explaining the existence of the thing in the text. And I would submit that in the vast majority of cases, the best explanation for why something is there is that the other, at least thought it was true. You know, even if we try to say, "Well, maybe he got it wrong or something," even if we don't absolutely insist on its accuracy, but then at least he thought it was true. He was saying it because he thought it was true. And the other person's gonna bear the burden of proof if he wants to say, "No, he didn't think it was true. He just pulled it in there. He made it up for some other reason." You're gonna have to show me why I should think that. And the mere fact of being able to sit there and spin out some theory, you know, perhaps John alluded to Pentecost by having Jesus freed on his disciples. Okay, there's your theory. Why should I believe it's true? Why should I believe it over against the idea of it, this rather odd thing that Jesus did was just something that John recorded? And the mere fact that the critic can make the theory up does not discharge the burden of proof. So I would not call that a fallacy of oversimplification at all. I would just call that a reasonable way of reading a beautifully historical text.

As an ask a question about the use of Acts in defending the resurrection, because I think you've pointed this out yourself, the book of Acts is an underused weapon in our apologetic arsenal. And people underestimate its value in apologetics because we can correlate to using undesigned coincidences with the Pauline letters. We can correlate it with external sources which confirm incidental details in the book of Acts, like like an emphasis when there's a riot, the city clerk tells the creditor councils, and it just turns out that there happens to be two at this particular time, even though normally there's only one. We in Acts 23, Ananias, Paul, Ananias, and the Jews stated, "Paul, would you have our God, high priest?" And he says, "I know, brother, see, he was the high priest." And of course, it turns out he wasn't actually the high priest, but he was sitting in judgment in that capacity, etc. You see what? And then my favorite one, of course, is the undesigned coincidence relating to Paul sending Timothy to Corinth from Ephesus, 1 Corinthians 4:16. Ever since, so essentially, "I send Timothy to you. When Timothy comes, see he's among you." So he's already sent Timothy. Expects lettering for Timothy. Gets there, presumably, sentences later by boat across the Aegean Sea. And and so Timothy must take the indirect overland route through Macedonia, which indeed is what works. He does take according to Acts 19:21 and 22, although it doesn't say there that Corinth was Timothy's destination. So with this very well, so we can show using all these sorts of patterns that Acts is a very, very reliable source. Luke was a very, very good historian. And we can also, I think, argue, and Craig Keener has an excellent, he's at Craig Keener's actually coming on my webinar soon. Craig, Craig Keener is an excellent section on the "we passages" in his four-volume commentary on Acts, where he gives very, very extensive, rather extensive defense that the "we passages" are should be taken in the most obvious sense, which is that the author actually was a traveling companion of Paul. And when you correlate that also with the various patterns of evidence to support the substantial eyewitness detail in Acts, it becomes very, very powerful. And then we learn that in Acts 21, Luke is with Paul when he is in Jerusalem with the treasure trove of living witnesses to the resurrection, the Jerusalem leadership. And he actually meets with them. And then they, and then Luke travels with Paul from Jerusalem to Rome. Right? And then the ship, which in Caesarea is real prison in Caesarea for what, two years? Beers. And that's not that far away from Jerusalem. And so Luke would have had a lot of opportunities there to to interview people in Palestine. Absolutely. And, and importantly, I mean, there's a whole book on this, which I highly recommend people read by James Smith, on the voyage and shipwreck of St. Paul, where he details extensive, like extensive evidence for the historicity of the wrath of Paul's voyage to Rome, which ended in a shipwreck, of course, which is is this a really fascinating read. And there's just so much material on that, it's supporting that Luke really was a traveling companion of Paul at that point, which means that he must have been in Jerusalem, and indeed, as you mentioned, Caesarea, in close proximity to the living witnesses. And so he would have had opportunity to interact with them. And we know that Luke was an eyewitness to the eyewitnesses of the resurrection. And we also know that Luke was a very reliable historian, so he's a habitual truth-teller. And he tells us in Luke chapter one of his gospel that he interviewed and interacted with and received material from eyewitnesses. And so Luke, then, is a very, very good source on what the earliest Christians believed. And then we've got these sermons in Acts 2, or Peter at Pentecost proclaims that Jesus' resurrection, that none of this, "We were all witnesses." So Luke was in a position to know firsthand what Peter, James, the 12 were saying on that matter. So that becomes very powerful evidence. And he, of course, in Acts chapter 1, mentions specifically that the resurrection appearances were involving many irrefutable proofs. He says, and also, and also it's extended across 40 days. So it's not just one brief, confusing episode. And so you've, you've got very good evidence, I think, from from from Acts of that, which is often not used as it should be. I think.

Right. And then this is gonna take us back to Jesus eating in Luke 24, because people notice this, they'll say, "Wow, you know, Luke's version of Jesus' resurrection is very physical because he's supposed to even say, 'I'm not a ghost.' It's like he knew Dale Allison was going to live and he's like, 'Touch me. You know, do you have any food?'" And this kind of thing. And I recall correctly, I think Allison says either doesn't have any or has very few instances of ghosts eating. I think it's just a few. He doesn't like the word "grief hallucinations" eating. And so he says it's an apologetic addition, which is very convenient. But in fact, I find this pattern again and again, that Allison will say, "If anything that is evidence against the grief nation theory, that it was probably added later for apologetic reasons." Well, the very fact that something has apologetic force doesn't mean it was added fictionally for apologetic reasons. So we had this very physical view of the resurrection in Luke, then put that together with all of the evidence you were just talking about. I think we can argue that not just that the disciples had a physical view of the resurrection, but that the reason they had a physical view of the resurrection was because Jesus did these things, or they had experiences where it seemed to them that Jesus was doing these things. And you'd have to have a very serious, very weird, unprecedented kind of hallucination for it to be seeming to you that that is what's happening when it's not happening. If we go with that, we're gonna have a very robust case. And then also John's Gospel, I mean, we can show, I think, very well that the, the author of John was an eyewitness, almost certainly a disciple. And I think, you know, so far as to say John, the son of Zebedee, and not being the case, then we have another independent source that shows this was indeed the proclamation of the resurrected Jerusalem church disciples, etc. So I think that's also significant. On Paul, Paul's also a line of evidence because in 1 Corinthians 15 is often used as an evidence for the for the proclamation of the earliest church. But the, the creedal nature of 1 Corinthians 15 is is usually taken for granted. How strong do you think is the case for the creedal tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 actually being pre-Pauline?

"I delivered to them that which I also received." So that gives you some idea that it was pre-Pauline. Obviously, he trails off. It is something that's unique to him at the end. "And last of all, he appeared to me also." Well, that's not going to be pre-Pauline because that's my Paul. Right? So he must be modifying it to just at least that extent. But I don't camp so much on it because the very creedal nature of it, where it's easy to memorize, it's in short phrases and so forth, makes it undetailed. So to my mind, it's less useful. You know, whereas someone who's doing the minimal facts, the minimal facts person always wants to run everything through Paul, everything through Paul. It's amazing. And if you can go to talk about the second level sets, that they believe that the bodily resurrection, or that the resurrection was bodily, that's a second level fact. So they'll go, "Um, I think Paul believed that the resurrection was bodily." Well, of course, Paul believed that the resurrection was bodily, but that's not necessarily independent because he got that from the disciples. So now we have to go back and say, "Well, why did the disciples think the resurrection was bodily?" Okay? So you can't even get as much as they want to get out of Paul that the resurrection was bodily. What they do now, we need to talk about how justified, like I said, how rational the disciples were in believing the resurrection was bodily. So that's why, you know, I mean, I love 1 Corinthians 15, but I don't think it's as strongly evidential as some people think it is, precisely because so brief, necessarily so, because it made an easy way for them to memorize what they were attesting to concerning the resurrection.

Yeah, we've got like 15 more questions. Tony says, "Can you name some historical methods that would be used to support the reliability of Caesar's Gallic Wars from Tacitus?" Some historical methods? Yeah, I'm not gonna claim to know enough about Caesar's Gallic Wars and Tacitus to to try to do that. If I were going to do it, I'd go read them both in detail, and I'd start talking, I'd start looking at, you know, do they dovetail? Do they have undesigned coincidences? To and so forth? You know, do they have unexplained delusions and incidental details and this kind of thing? And I would certainly be looking for those things, but I'm not going to claim to be enough of a classicist to be able to hand you a handful of those. But it would be very interesting to try, for sure.

Races, as a matter of interest, must be accepted as interpolation, the mention of Christ in Josephus, and why? Well, there's a very good discussion of that. I believe Pines for Pines, he constructed the probable original text. And what I believe comes to it, he knows a lot more about this than I do, but is that it's not that the mention is entirely a Christian interpolation, but the over-the-top stuff, you know, "He was indeed the Christ," or whatever it is he's supposedly says, may have been, or probably was, an interpolation. But not that the very mention of, you know, "his brother James," and that Jesus existed at all, it's an interpolation. And as far as I know, that's pretty secure. So that Josephus does mention Jesus, but, you know, wasn't Christian or something like that. I tend to not rely on those as much, except to show, you know, I mean, if you are debating the mythists or something. But well, I don't crazy, and I don't think we should give them too much, you know, too much respectability. But in general, I find that those kinds of really overt external confirmations are less interesting and less valuable than the more incidental confirmations, like the ones about that it had been 46 years the temple being built, and here that would take us to. And or the very crazy things that, um, Herod Agrippa did, where he killed all the pilgrims. And then, and Joseph in Matthew is afraid to go to a place where Herod Agrippa was going. Those are better. Those are better than the fact that, oh boy, they're not even as good as confirmations of the reliability as the other kind. And we have a lot of, "What if the other kind?" And no other branch of history would we chuck all the primary sources and appeal to secondary, tertiary sources instead? We know why do we do this? New Testament studies? Why do people always want to talk recently on the resurrection in London, and someone in the audience asked me, "Well, how much of the New Testament could support from extra-biblical sources, services outside the Bible?" I'm like, "Why would you want to throw away all the primary sources that we have, preferably key primary sources, and appeal to secondary sources?" They asked me, "Well, how many of the biblical characters in the New Testament, we could substantiate from external sources that were looks in the story?" And why, what, why go to just see fit? So we have a probably good historian, Luke, he records it, and we can show that he's reliable. And the answer that they will give you is, "Well, they were Christians, you know," and so like automatically they're treated as biased or something. But you know, one thing you have to realize is, the being a Christian didn't necessarily make you more likely to mention how many years the temple had been being built, or that Joseph was afraid to go to this place where Herod Agrippa was there. Many of these little things are that the grass was green when this event took place. This very anachronistic notion that anything that serves to confirm the Gospels must have been put in there by the authors in order to confirm them. And I think we can show that that is simply not the case. These things were put in there rather in a casual and incidental way, and then they happen to correspond either to one another in undesigned coincidences, or to external things, which is in a sense, a kind of undesigned coincidence with the external sources. But it's not as though everything that makes them look true is something that I, but they just added that because they were Christians, you know, that it's, that's not a reasonable way to approach. And I think that's a very crude way to approach it. But you'll see that. And of course, then the other thing is, well, if you believe Jesus rose from the dead, you would probably have become a Christian. And then you would no longer be a non-Christian source. So it's this kind of non-question-begging way of ruling people out just because they believe that these things, this thing is true. And that's also not legitimate either.

Nathan asks, "Hi Dr. Berger, thank you so much for this. You mentioned that the minimal facts argument is an uncomfortable hybrid of rhetorical force, but also some epistemic weight given to the majority consensus, especially given the aggressive version. How do proponents of the as it means deal with the problem this raises between the consensus behind the minimal facts versus the non-consensus behind the religious conclusion they draw, broadly resurrection akin to the gospel? I can't she raises as the religious versus historical truth problem. Is Craig's appeal to properly basic belief based on his experience of the Holy Spirit one way this is dealt with? Also, in what issue of for Sophia Christie is a Dalek deal Allison?" Okay, um, I don't know that Bill Craig does that for that reason, and so I don't want to saddle him with that. I think there's just a failure to recognize the weakness of the inference to the best explanation. I just really think they're just making an epistemic mistake. And maybe this is partly because they perhaps are sometimes shifting back and forth between more robust and less robust versions of the appearances. I said this before we turned on the livestream. I don't think I said it afterwards, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself. But in de stream article, this just came out. Gary Habermas gives the minimal facts and several paragraphs later, he says, "In that, what this boils down to is that Jesus was crucified and then a few days later, he was seen afterwards having conversations with friends, just like any of us might do." And that sounds great in an article for the stream, but that is not a minimal fact. He wasn't standing up in conversations with friends, just like any of us might do. So I think at times they make themselves be sort of shifting to a more maximal version of the fact, well, overtly saying, "Oh no, I don't want to have to defend that," or "I don't want to have to go against the the consensus." So it, I kind of think they think they can have their cake and eat it too. And it's just an epistemic error that they're making, more so than an ultimate appeal to the internal witness of the Holy Spirit. You could try that. I mean, I don't think that works because I'm evidentialist. I don't think after Craig wants to do that sort of supply the deficiencies of the minimal facts on what issue it is. I will go get it, just a second. Hey, and shout out to my friend John Mayer, who loaned this to me. I gotta get it back to you. It is Vol 10, Number 2, 2008. That's what it is, where this debate or symposium is on book symposium on Bill Allison's Resurrecting Jesus. Stephen T. Davis, William Craig, Gary Habermas, and Dale Allison. Oh, I thought is that the Kona had a part in this? I guess it's just the other three who are talking with this house. And he asks, "Ever does Winburn leans heavily on the fact Jesus was said to speak. However, he doesn't seem to endorse any specific, just the fact that he spoke. This seems to remind me of Lakota's exorcisms happened, but can't pinpoint any specific one that would seem to be in the family of minimal thanks." Yeah, good, good question. Um, it's certainly in the spirit of minimal facts. I don't know that 95% of scholars acknowledge that Jesus spoke in fact, or seemed to speak. You know, it seemed to them that he spoke. My impression from reading Habermas is that what they had really high consensus is a visual component, and that's why the word "appearance" is that they saw him sometimes. Mm-hmm. But I think it's a lower number of scholars they will add an auditory component that he said something. Um, Allison, and it's hard to remember sometimes that Allison does not consider himself a skeptic because he acts like a skeptic. But he will say that grief hallucinations do sometimes speak, but they do not speak at length. So there's actually a footnote in, I think it's in Resurrecting Jesus, where Allison says, "Grief hallucinations do occasionally speak, but they usually only speak a few words." So I added a few words in one of my scenarios, if he just said, "Peace be with you," or something. Um, they usually only speak a few words. And this is consistent with the resurrection appearances in the Gospels. It's like, "What? That, you know, he opened their understanding and beginning with the scriptures, he expounded unto them that the Christ must suffer." My goodness, Jesus engages in extended discourses. It's just that we are, do not have them recorded for us. We would love to have recorded. But certainly, it is asserted that Jesus engaged in.

Extended discourse. It's not, no doubt, Allison would dismiss that as a later apologetic addition. But it is very misleading for him to say in that footnote that he speaks only a few words, because it's sort of convenient and can't still be fitted within his grief hallucination model, which is presumably what he would say to swimmer.

Lucas Honduras asks, "What books would Lydia recommend on the resurrection from the non-believing side?" Sorry if it was said earlier, I just joined. Thanks.

"Mmm, you know, you mean like good opponents or something, I guess. Instead of recommending whole books, I would recommend that you read things by, um, Christian apologists and then follow up their footnotes. You know, if you see somebody and you think, 'Um, what, that sounds like an interesting objection or something,' and you want to go and see what you think about it, then go read it.

Now, I've been talking a lot about Gail Allison here. He's maybe resurrecting Jesus's, maybe an interesting thing to read because he's allegedly a Christian, and yet he's got all these unusual ideas about the paranormal and so forth. And it's interesting how to mask points that's that, but he's almost, he's very credulous about, about constants paranormal and very incredulous about the Gospel accounts. He's got a double standard, and I think that's true and and good to see. I generally think it's good to be able to respond to Bart Ehrman. But when you read Bart Ehrman, please, please be prepared to remember that the way that you can tell Bart Ehrman is lying is that his out this movie is really, really deceptive and misleading. So always have your Bible at hand. If he says, you know, 'Matthew tells us that Mary and Joseph were originally from Bethlehem,' open the account in Matthew. It does not say that Mary and Joseph were originally from Bethlehem. Those arguments from silence, I thought of bringing up in response to Tony's question. And all that it means is that Matthew does not give an account of the census and how they, they journey to Bethlehem. And then and then Ehrman concludes from this that Matthew more or less says that they were originally from Bethlehem. I mean, originally, not just that Joseph's family was from there, but that was their hometown. So, yeah, you know, read Bart Ehrman by all means. Read some de Lausanne, but not because I have enormous respect for these guys, just because it is good to be acquainted with our opponents and ready to, ready to give an answer. Get ready to give that answer. Don't go in there thinking of them as somebody who's gonna present something you're gonna not be able to answer. Absolutely. And I think actually engaging with the toughest critics is a very good way of sharpening our faith and in fact enriching our faith. It's bigger to understand or feint better understand the Scriptures better by understanding what the fallacies in what these people are saying. So by all means, and they go and read, or even read people like Richard Carrier or David Fitzgerald, because even though I think that arguments can be some good things about, I think it's called alleged contradictions in the Gospels, and if I recall correctly, that's focused a lot on, you know, Ehrman. So you can check these books out and, you know, have the stack of the books in front of you, and then and then kind of watch Tim's video as well, and then look up the references, and that could be a useful exercise.

As an anonymous attendee says, "Thank you very much for your fascinating and frankly exciting presentation. I have two questions. One, to historians outside of the field of Jesus scholarship, use an optimist atomistic historical approach, sifting through tax criteria for attending material? If they do not, this could be used to lend credibility to the atheist of your wider robust reliability inductive approach? And two, where is research to be done which would lend itself to this approach further? Many thanks."

"With the second question, I was just wondering if they mean it would lend pro support to my approach, you would lend support to the approach I'm criticizing. I'm assuming they meaning would lend further support, support should the approach I'm recommending. But as far as the first one, I have wondered that a lot. I have certainly never seen any historian do that with any other text. It would be interesting if someone finds it. I'm just gonna say the field of history is, it's more corrupted than I previously thought it was. But, um, I've, I've never seen that kind of pericope by pericope kind of approach to with Tacitus, for example. There was an inscription that showed up in the '90s, I believe it was, that was taken to contradict Tacitus, and then later it was decided that it didn't really contradict Tacitus. This caused a little bit of an earthquake in Tacitus scholarship because they had previously taken him to be a pretty sober guy. He made up speeches sometimes, but his accounts of of things were pretty reliable. So they generally seem to take Tacitus to be reliable rather than approaching him in this atomistic kind of way. So that would be some evidence there.

I do want to say, however, that I do think there have been inroads from old early literary theories and postmodernism and so forth in history and in classics. And one of the ways that I think we can see this is in the treatment of Plutarch by a Pauling, Christopher Pauling, who is an influence upon, a big food influence upon Michael Okona. So that Pauling will sound like a New Testament critic, and and so does Laconia when he talks about Plutarch, defined contradictions in Plutarch from very rigid readings. And it's like, you know, Bart Ehrman reads Plutarch. So as far as that's concerned, that's not necessarily evidence of this peretta P by P approach. It's evidence of an, I would say, a hyper-skeptical approach to reading Plutarch's that were overly quick to find contradictions or places where Plutarch's allegedly changed the facts unnecessarily. So I don't want to hold up classics or secular history as free of these kinds of problems, especially since the '80s and the '90s when various literary critical theories began to make their way into into history and people also wanted to say something new and different.

And he says, 'Lady, what do you think of the strength of the appearances to the 500 and the Apostles as grip appearances in first Corinthians 15?'

Well, the 500 is of course mentioned only as such in 1 Corinthians 15. Group appearances to the Apostles mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15, other than the 500, I would take probably to correspond to some of those given in in the Gospels. I don't have any reason to think that they're separate, although we can't always pin it down. For example, this the last one perhaps refer to the Ascension. Oh, well, it gives the the 12 like one more time. Well, then to all the Apostles, is that at the Ascension? Remember that he was there for 40 days. So if Paul had something particular in mind with people who taught Paul, it's something particular in mind. It could be something that isn't recorded in the Gospels. As far as the 500, certainly Paul's willingness to mention that they are alive at that time, see me to encourage people to go and and find them and talk to them, that's got to have some evidential value. And I would take that to have some evidential value independent of the Gospels. The other group appearances mentioned, it seems to me, I wrote more robustly defended just from the Gospel appearances in the narratives themselves. But I would say the 500 is is something independent that we would not have known from the Gospels alone. Although there's possible independent confirmation of the parents of the 500 in Matthew 28. There's a deep earnest to the group there, and the disciples go to Galilee, and there they meet Jesus. And it says it's undoubted, which suggests that there were more present than just the twelve, because they had already had an encounter with Jesus. I agree with you that that certainly seems to suggest a larger group than just the, you know, the eleven or whatever. And in fact, when him has a really neat note on the Greek there, any so he's so careful, but he says the Greek doesn't demand this, but it's a turn of phrase nicely suggested. 'Um, they did this, but some did that.' And he gives several of their examples. 'They did this, some did that' is often used when the groups are different, as opposed to being that the but some is an ink is included within the first group. He said it's more often used when the but some is a separate group. So that's kind of cool, a little little information in the Greek that possibly that some who doubted are not the eleven, because the eleven is the immediate antecedent of a. So that's kind of cool. When they saw him, they worshipped us doubt it could be a different group. I am not sure I want to go so far as to say that was definitely the appearance to the 500, but it's certainly could have been, or it could have been the seventy or something like that. And maybe the 500 was later. But it did you say make that point by the Greek Wynnum? Okay.

In Easter enigma, okay, I'm pretty sure the answer to this question is no, but I'll ask anyway. None of certainty says, "Thank you for doing this. Are Tim and you going to write a reputation of Richard Cures use of Bayesian theory we're dealing with the historicity of Jesus?"

"If you can find it, though, I don't know if it's so I'm there on dumb. Oh, my mind is flanking. Who's the blogger who wrote the book called CS Lewis's Dangerous Idea? Victor Records blog several years ago, Tim actually did a little bit of a fiscal some of the materials that carry her had out there in Bayes theorem. And I believe that material has actually been deleted and changed by this time. But showing that at least at that time, his he had some real problems in his understanding of basic theorem. I think he's gotten some technical assistant, sent some technical help to bring him up a little more to speed. Um, it's there, though. You know, you do have a GI geo problem, garbage in, garbage out. And so with any of these things, it is never a replacement for good historical judgment. It is a modeling tool. And so what we need to do is be examining the historical judgment. And I would say anyone who is a Memphis assist, if so facto has poor historical judgment. So I leave you with that for considering Richard Carrier.

Ray asked the question for me says, "Johnson, could you do a webinar defending all thirteen letters of Paul and by Paul? That would be really invaluable."

"Absolutely, I could do that. And I'll be happy to do something on that sometime in the near future. Maybe let's see. And I'm sure Lydia would be very competent to do that as well, if you're interested in.

An honest attendee says, "Doesn't Paul do a minimum vac style type of argument in Acts 17? He quotes from sources that the audience will grant him, their own poet, su, etcetera. However, he does not quote from the Jewish Scriptures because the Greeks did not see them as authoritative."

"Yeah, that's a weird way to put that. I'm sure that had he had for the dialogues with them, he would have talked about a lot more. But there's a big difference between saying, 'I'm not going to use Jewish sources because you're not going to be interested in Jewish sources,' and saying, 'I'm going to restrict myself to this because it's what's granted by scholars.' Certainly, Paul is not talking about the consensus of scholarship at all. He's trying to pick their interest. He's trying to pick their interest. And I don't, I don't think we have to restrict ourselves to something that is granted by the consensus of scholars in order to pick people's interest. I think we can definitely do that by the maximal data type of approach I gave, when we give assertions that can then be defended later if they're questioned. So, yeah, I would not call that a minimal facts approach that I was doing. I think he's just quoting things to try to, he's a good preacher, he's a really good preacher. He wants to draw them in. But this whole idea of like premises and they've got to grant the premise, Caesar, I can't go any farther. I can always back up. You know, somebody says, 'No, you know, I don't grant you that the disciples really said this, you know, I think that these are elaborated accounts.' It's like, 'Great, let's go for it. Let's discuss that.' And we can back up to that. And I can back it up all the way to the point of saying, 'Okay, these documents exist. You know, will you grant me that?' Arguing forward from that, and that takes place, I think, fast in a give-and-take of actual dialogue with a specific individual. So I would definitely not say that Paul's use of the big and poets endorses a minimal facts approach.

Wilma Carroll asks, "Lydia Corina, great talk. Curious, I'm curious, have you or anyone else assessed the Book of Mormon with these principles in mind? For that matter, the Apocrypha and extra-biblical books as well? Minimal tax, unintended, I think coincidences, etcetera."

"I haven't tried, and I would be willing to bet a good deal that you're not going to find, you're not going to find them. I will say this concerning the Gospel of Thomas, that it definitely does not have these kinds of historical tie-downs. The Gnostic Gospels, my understanding is, tend to be very fragmentary and not historically, you know, not historically pasted. And I think sometimes people get confused about this because they think, 'Well, if you mention one thing, you know, Samaritan was going to Jerusalem,' it's like, 'Hey, let me mention a Samaritan.' But the Gospels are historically based in a far more nitty-gritty and detailed way, getting much harder things right. And you will definitely not find that in the Book of Mormon, and and and the Apocrypha and Oster Gospels and so forth, that kind of nitty-gritty getting hard things right, that I can say for sure.

Let's take one more. Then I gave my email address, Lydia McGrew at gmail.com. If you want the PowerPoint, or if you didn't get your question answered, feel free to write to me and ask that question. C, pick the best one. Okay, there's not many questions left besides this one from an anonymous attendee.

"What is the traditional scholarly definition of reliability? And do you recommend any publications who want reliability actually means?"

"I guess I would tend to go at it from an epistemic point of view. As a probability theorist, when we talk about something being reliable, and this is discussed in John Irma's book, it's E.A.R. and then Hume's abject failure, where he uses Bayes' theorem, and he's not a believer, by the way. When he talks about a reliable source, he means a source that has, we would call it, a top-heavy Bayes factor. And I talked about that, and a Bayes factor can be affected by a lot of things. Tim and I have an article in a book of analytic readings in the philosophy of religion, on the use of probability and philosophy of religion, on the way that a Bayes factor can be affected by surrounding circumstances. So it isn't even just necessarily a track record of that individual. But definitely, we at least want a top-heavy Bayes factor. And I would say certainly that in common parlance, we're not going to use reliable for a source if it's just barely tap, you know, just like barely more, you know, giving you some reason to believe this. We want it to be significantly top-heavy. And so I'm gonna spell that out just a little bit more. What it means to have a top-heavy Bayes factor. It doesn't necessarily mean that if you say the thing, thing probably happened. Now, some people would use it that way, but you know, you can just say, 'Okay, you know, 99% of what this person says is true, and he said it, so 99% probability that it's true.' But a top-heavy Bayes factor is a little more nuanced. It's that the probability of his saying it, given that it's true, is higher than the probability of a saying it, given that it's false. And that's a way of putting the. And when that is the case, then this declaration will do something, at least to overcome the antecedent improbability of the event. It may not be enough if the antecedent probability is very high. But what we find in these, this redefinition that I'm finding in eventual scholarship is that they are not even asserting that. And you can tell that they're not even asserting that because of this case-by-case approach they're taking, where they, you know, they come to something and there's like totally agnostic as to whether it happened or not when it's asserted. They don't seem to think that the assertion I that gospel is any evidence in favor of the event at all. And to my mind, that shows that they're not treating them as reliable in any, in any important or significant sense that they have redefined it.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lydia, for coming on.

Thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun. And I just feel free to, you'll feel free to write to me. And how long will it be before this is on YouTube?

I'll try and get it up by Monday. I might be able to get up tomorrow. It's great because I've given to you URL of apologetics Academy to a lot of people if they couldn't make it today.

Thank you for all the great questions, everybody. Thank you. Take care."