Resurrected: The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus

Heat up here.

In previous videos, I have argued against the thesis that the Four canonical gospels were anonymous and I have argued in favor of the traditional ascriptions of authorship to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I have argued that there are good reasons to believe that these documents and the book of Acts are historically reliable. I have also established the historicity of the persecution of the earliest Christians. Furthermore, I have dispelled philosophical objections to the rationality of belief in miracles.

All of the parts are now in place to construct a case for the pivotal event upon which the whole of the Christian faith stands or falls, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this video, I will explain the structure of my case for Jesus's resurrection and how it differs from the currently more popular minimal facts argument for Jesus's resurrection. I will then formalize the argument and defend those points that have not been defended in previous videos. I will then proceed to examine the case against the resurrection of Jesus as profered by several modern skeptics. I will show why these objections either fail against my case or else fail on their own terms. The conclusion will be that the historical evidence strongly supports the reality of the resurrection of Jesus.

I apologize in advance if the early portions of this video feel like I am just connecting the dots, glossing over controversial issues, and then referring viewers to my other videos for details. My preceding videos have been deliberately crafted to preemptively support the most critical and controversial premises of my argument for the resurrection so that I would not have to get bogged down thoroughly defending every point in this video. I promise viewers that once I begin engaging skeptics in the latter three quarters of this video, I will return to my usual painstakingly thorough routine. My earlier videos exist so that I can streamline my basic argument for the resurrection here without getting hung up defending each premise.

In contemporary Christian apologetics, there are broadly two different ways of defending the resurrection of Jesus which reflect two different ways in which Christian apologists approach the gospels. We can refer to these different approaches as minimalism and maximalism. If you are at all familiar with contemporary Christian apologetics, then you are probably more familiar with minimalism. This basic approach is utilized by resurrection apologists such as William Lane Craig, Gary Hobbermas, and Michael Lacona. I realize that Craig has rejected the minimalist label elsewhere, but as I will be using the term throughout this video, Craig definitely qualifies. I will explain where Craig differs from the traditional minimal facts approach where appropriate, but in broad strokes, Craig's resurrection argument depends upon the same basic methodology.

Minimalism is characterized by two key commitments. The first is a desire to avoid controversial assumptions or premises within an argument for the resurrection. The second is an attitude of differentialism to experts in the field of New Testament studies. The resulting defenses of the resurrection begin by attempting to locate a small number of facts that are or are supposed to be uncontroversial among New Testament scholars and then attempt to show that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of those facts. Perhaps the most familiar example of this is Gary Hobbermaz's minimal facts argument for the resurrection. As he explains in his recent tome on the subject, for five decades, my contention has been that at the end of Jesus's life, there is a significant body of evidence data that specialist scholars of almost every religious and philosophical persuasion who publish on these areas recognize as being historical. The chief reason for this widespread agreement among scholars on the historicity of each of these facts is the excellent attesting support that each has in its favor, usually from a variety of historical and other considerations.

What are the prerequisites for an occurrence to be designated as a minimal fact? From the outset of my studies on the death and resurrection of Jesus, my thesis has been that there are at least two major requirements for an occurrence to be designated in this manner. Each of these events must be established by an abundance of strong evidences, usually by multiple critically ascertained independent lines of historical argumentation. In addition, the vast majority of published contemporary scholars with credentials in relevant fields of study have to acknowledge the historicity of the event.

As I noted before, minimalism reflects a particular approach to the gospels. Since minimalism is committed to only using facts which are uncontroversial, it cannot directly utilize the stories recounted in the gospels as trustworthy historical reportage because this is simply not accepted by the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars. For the most part, contemporary New Testament scholarship views the Gospels as late anonymous and largely legendary stories about Jesus. However, scholars do for the most part believe that there are historical nuggets contained within the gospels which can be mined out by using what are called the criteria of authenticity.

As William Lane Craig explains, now if we do adopt a position of neutrality when approaching the gospels, how do we move beyond neutrality to the affirmation that some event is actually historical? Scholars have developed a number of so-called criteria of authenticity to enable us to do that. The criteria are really signs of historical credibility. A story in the gospels exhibiting one of the signs is all things being equal more likely to be historical than it would have been without them. Andrew Lok adds, "Nevertheless, the process of sifting through the four gospels to determine which events attributed to Jesus can be traced back to the Jesus of history faces various difficulties. To address these difficulties, historians have devised various criteria for determining authenticity such as the criterion of multiple attestation, the criterion of embarrassment and the criterion of dissimilarity." And Habermas further says recent critical scholars tend to apply various analytical principles to the New Testament text to ascertain which individual portions have the highest likelihood of providing legitimate historical insights. Implementing the standards can isolate portions of the text providing the separate insights. The textual criteria of authenticity are the rules that support the likelihood of particular sayings or events in history. In this case, from the life of Jesus.

To be clear, not all minimalists agree that the gospels actually are a mixture of truth and embellishment. Michael Lacona seems to accept this general thesis saying like everyone who has ever lived the evangelists and their sources had imperfect memories. The evangelists were biased. Their agenda was to provide us with a literary portrait of Jesus. The gospels are not entirely portraits. Neither are they entirely photographs. They contain elements of both photograph and portrait. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of them as hybrids. And elsewhere, the historical accuracy of ancient literature may be viewed in a manner similar to what we observe in movie theaters today. Some movies claim at the beginning to be based on true events, while others claim to be inspired by true events. The latter will involve more dramatic license than the former. Even in the former, however, we expect reenacted conversations to be redacted to varying degrees for clarity, dramatic impact, and artistic improvement.

Other minimalists like Habermas and Craig seem to personally believe in doctrines like biblical inherency for theological reasons but are just granting the mainstream position for the sake of argument. Either way, minimalist apologists begin by agreeing to abide by the mainstream playbook, even if they themselves do not necessarily agree that the gospels are late, anonymous, or contain fabrications. And so by applying the criteria of authenticity, they try to argue that we can show that enough of the details in the gospels and in Paul are historically factual to make an inference to the resurrection as the best explanation.

Which exact facts can be shown to be historical varies depending on who you ask. For example, a minimalist like William Lane Craig thinks that Jesus's empty tomb is critical to the case for the resurrection of Jesus and can be shown to be authentic using the criteria of authenticity, even though it does not have sufficient scholarly support to qualify as one of Gary Hobbermas's minimal facts. On the other hand, minimalists like Mike Lacona, at least in some contexts, try to make the case for the resurrection without making any reference to the empty tomb. Because again, the empty tomb doesn't enjoy the wide scholarly support that other facts might have. As Lacona explains, the empty tomb doesn't enjoy the nearly unanimous majority agreement of others, nor is the majority who grants the empty tomb composed of a significant number of scholars from numerous theological persuasions. I do not believe we have enough here to warrant including the empty tomb as part of our historical bedrock since it does not qualify as historical bedrock. I will refrain from employing it in a resurrection hypothesis.

Despite these sorts of disagreements among minimalists, they all share the same basic approach. Assume, at least for the sake of argument, that the gospels are not trustworthy. Try to dig out what facts you can, either by reference to the criteria of authenticity or by reference to broad scholarly agreement, and then try to show that Jesus's resurrection is the best explanation of those facts. As Habermas puts it, the minimal facts approach has the advantage of potentially indicating that Jesus's resurrection occurred even if the New Testament texts are thought to be unreliable. Lacona adds, "We will approach the Gospels with methodological neutrality, that is with neither approval nor skepticism. Claims made of a particular text bear the burden of proof. Accordingly, neither claims of divine inspiration nor general trustworthiness will play any part in our investigation."

Maximalism, by contrast, rejects this whole peacemeal approach to the gospels and to history in general. It asks why we should care what the majority of scholars agree upon so long as we have good evidence to support what we believe. Rather than attempting to dig out a few facts from the gospels which scholars are willing to accept, it takes as a premise the thesis that the gospels present a faithful account of what the original followers of Jesus actually said. It's important to see that maximalism is not saying that everything which the gospels say is necessarily true. It's just saying that the Gospels are at least accurate statements of what Jesus's earliest followers actually claimed.

As Lydia Mcgru puts it, it is my firm contention that it is not possible to provide a strong argument for the bodily resurrection of Jesus without being prepared to defend the proposition that the gospel accounts of Jesus's resurrection are unmbellished, reliable accounts of at least what the initial puditive witnesses claimed. This distinction is important since certain critics of maximalism such as Paul Gia are prone to claiming that maximalism is a simple appeal to for the Bible tells me so as though the reasoning were as simple as this. One, whatever the gospels say is true. Two, the Gospels say that Jesus rose from the dead. Three, therefore, Jesus rose from the dead.

Habermas too has been guilty of misunderstanding maximalism in this way saying the chief concern regards how these arguments are commonly employed. Some authors might proceed from the conclusion of general textual reliability to particular often major theological conclusions. Thus, after the initial conclusion is reached concerning particular indications that certain authors or texts are trustworthy writings, the researcher may move immediately to several central Christian beliefs. The chief problem is that a generally reliable book does not even necessarily or automatically ensure every report between its covers.

On the contrary, though, maximalism is more subtle. The argument only asserts the premise that the Gospels are accurate reflections of what Jesus's earliest followers were claiming. It leaves the truth of those claims an open question to be settled by consideration of additional premises. Nor is it the case that this premise is unjustified for maximalists are prepared to offer strong arguments to support the authenticity of the gospels. As Jake O'Connell explains, first we begin by looking at the Bible just as we would any other historical document by using the same criteria we would use for any other historical document considering issues of authorship, date, and confirmation from other sources. We establish that certain portions of the Bible are historical. In some cases, perhaps the whole book. In some cases, perhaps only specific passages within the book. And Lydia Mcgru adds, "Multiple lines of evidence, including undesigned coincidences, external confirmations, and the lesserknown arguments from unexplained illusions, unnecessary details, reconcilable variation, and unique personalities show us the historical intention of the authors as well as their success in getting the facts right. External confirmations also support these conclusions. There is a hefty empirical case that the gospels are mirrors of Jesus rather than literary masks."

Given that the gospels are authentic reflections of the testimony of the disciples, a trilmma emerges. Either the testimony reporting the resurrection of Jesus is deliberately false, honestly mistaken or it is true. The maximalist then attempts to show that these first two possibilities are not credible, thereby leaving us with the third possibility that the testimony is true. And if the testimony bearing on the resurrection of Jesus is true, then the resurrection really happened. And if the resurrection really happened, then we have excellent reason to believe in the truth of Christianity.

While this survey of minimalism and maximalism has been overly brief, I hope that by now viewers have a reasonably clear grasp of these two different ways of defending the resurrection of Jesus. But why is all of this relevant? Well, the reason is that my case for the resurrection falls solidly within the maximalist camp. And when I consider objections to the resurrection in the latter portion of this video, the distinction between these two methods of defending the resurrection of Jesus will become important. This is because maximalism is simply not subject to many of these objections in the first place and because it can handle the other objections far better than minimalism. As such, I think that it is important for viewers to have a firm understanding of how minimalism differs from maximalism from the start. Hence, I implore viewers not to disregard this portion of the video. It will turn out to be highly relevant later on.

While it is not the purpose of this video to bash minimalism, it is also a simple fact that minimalism is currently the far more popular method of defending Jesus's resurrection among contemporary Christian apologists. As such, it is likely to be the only defense of Jesus's resurrection which many of my viewers have ever encountered. This video thus functions not just as a defense of Jesus's resurrection, but also to some viewers a wholly new way of doing so. So for that reason, I believe it is worth spending a little time motivating the maximalist case over against the minimalist case.

The label maximalism has unfortunately led to some confusion. It is sometimes thought that the maximalist must utilize all of the available evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. But the term simply denotes a refusal to introduce any sort of arbitrary restriction such as wide scholarly agreement on the facts which may be used to make the case. In other words, maximalists are not willing to exclusively tie themselves to a certain body of facts. any fact, regardless of how widely acknowledged it may be, is allowed.

There are several advantages to maximalism over minimalism. Maximalism does not concede valuable ground to the skeptic by allowing the skeptic to assume that the gospels are unreliable and it is not vulnerable to the possibility that the tides of contemporary scholarly opinion may change thereby changing the facts to which one can appeal. Habermas himself, oddly enough, seems to think that his argument could still be made even if the tides of scholarly consensus were to turn against him, saying, "If the case for historicity already has been resolved, this is an independent conclusion that stands regardless of whether any particular headcount of scholars agrees. It is well known that scholarly acclamation frequently changes and even irerudite opinions may be mistaken. In such a case, the minimal facts argument would miss the nearly unanimous agreement on the data by scholars, but it would still have the more crucial factual portion of the argument on its side, assuming the plethora of evidence remains the same."

But as a basic definitional matter, Habermas is plainly wrong that in this situation, the argument would remain the minimal facts argument. By his own lights, wide scholarly agreement is a necessary condition for a fact to qualify as a minimal fact. He has said over and over again in our minimal facts approach, we only consider content that is considered historical by virtually all who study the subject. What are the prerequisites for an occurrence to be designated as a minimal fact? The vast majority of published contemporary scholars with credentials in relevant fields of study have to acknowledge the historicity of the event and almost all critical scholars who explore this subject agree that these are a minimal amount of knowable historical facts. Hence, if scholarly opinion were to turn against him, while he could still argue that the resurrection is the best explanation for this same set of facts, by definition, it would no longer be the minimal facts argument.

Leaving terminological considerations aside, this move also makes very pressing the question of why Hobbermas feels that it is important to tie himself to the whims of contemporary scholarship in the first place. If he is going to appeal to the same facts regardless of whether or not most scholars agree upon them, then why only appeal to these facts at all? Why not appeal to any facts which are well evidenced regardless of how widely acknowledged they may be? The answer surely seems to be that Hobbermas places evidential weight in scholarly consensus. To be sure, he doesn't think that this is the only source of evidence, but in certain passages, he definitely appears to think that scholarly consensus increases the likelihood that a proposition is true or that a fact is real. He will deny this when directly asked, yet other statements of his on the matter seem conclusive. For example, later within the very same chapter where he claims the scholarly consensus isn't evidential in and of itself, we find Hobbermas asking, "How can these moves be made with many cases being affirmed strongly by researchers who usually distrust the gospels along with many other New Testament books, especially when many additional instances in scholars could be provided something similar torment man's statements must be the case that wellecidenced data often reside in texts still thought to be biased elsewhere he says critical scholars agree with these data precisely because they are well supported on factual grounds often for multiple reasons these statements are clear-cut is absolutely placing epistemic weight in scholarly consensus The assumption is that if most scholars accept it, then they must have good reasons for doing so. This is of course a terrible assumption. Most scholars in general and biblical scholars in particular are not immune from social influences like social contagion, peer pressure, conformity, and compliance. that most scholars accept a fact is not an independent reason to believe that they are correct.

As Mike Lakona himself admits, historians are prone neither to give much attention to epistemology nor to justifying their methods. And Robert Stewart adds, "The minimal facts method requires that we exclude many propositions that are very well justified simply because only a clear majority as opposed to the vast majority of scholars affirm them. But justification is not something that is dependent upon being believed by anyone. Propositions are justified or unjustified even if nobody believes them." Responsible belief is based on justification, not vice versa. This is an apparent problem for the minimal facts method.

Consider these statements from Mike Lacona. A consensus opinion can be valuable for recognizing objectivity when the group is composed of scholars from all interested camps. hand. These scholars span a very wide range of theological and philosophical convictions and include atheists, agnostics, Jews, and Christians who made 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. Commenting on this passage in a review of Lacona's book, we find Habermas saying, "Lacona makes an insightful comment here regarding guarding against our own horizons. We must beware of our own imported biases as well. When discussing the minimal facts, I have always purposely included notes at each juncture that list representative numbers of skeptics of various stripes who still affirm the data in question. This is a significant methodological procedure that serves more than one purpose among others. It assures the readers that they are not being asked to accept something that only conservatives believe or that is only recognized by those who believe in the veracity of the New Testament text and so on. After all, this sort of widespread recognition and approval is the very thing that our stated method requires."

Again, we see both Habermas and Lacona placing epistemic weight in scholarly consensus here. The stated reason for this requirement mentioned by Lacona and reinforced by Havmas is that scholarly consensus is needed to guard us against our own biases. In other words, if we didn't have scholarly consensus, then we couldn't be sure that our biases aren't clouding our judgment. Despite Hobas's and to a lesser extent Lacona's protests that it is really just the evidence that matters, these quotations show us that this is not really true. They do think the scholarly consensus provides further epistemic support because they think that it guards against personal bias.

Lydia Mcgru correctly counters this position of deference to modern scholarship by saying apparently the answer to the question of why we don't bestow such terms on the basis of the strength of the evidence alone is this doing so isn't guarding enough against our own biases. If that is a correct way to approach things, shouldn't you then be afraid that if you think the arguments for something are very strong, but the heterogynous consensus doesn't support it, you are being too moved by your own biases and should therefore correct your two high confidence in the proposition. This is one of the things I mean by conflating sociology and epistemology. I am referring to giving what I consider to be gravely undue weight to purely sociological considerations. The bestowal of a term of apparent epistemic appribation such as known historical facts or historical bedrock is being held hostage to a purely contingent sociological factor. whether or not a certain varied consensus obtains concerning that fact. And that's being done on the grounds that otherwise we'd be too likely to be personally biased.

Minimal facts apologists also prioritize the proximity of a source to an event far more than the credibility of the source. This is one reason why they are so fixated upon 1 Corinthians 15 and more dubious about using the gospels. As Gary Hobbermaus explains, in general, early sources and other evidences are strongly preferred over later data. While greater intervening differences are allowed, especially in ancient history, even the difference of a decade or two can be decisive with application to the historical Jesus. Any material written between AD30 and 50 would be regarded as being especially exemplary. reports from such an early time frame would actually predate the written form of the four canonical gospels or any other such writings for that matter. A celebrated instance is the early preauline list of Jesus's resurrection appearances that the Apostle Paul delivers to his readers in 1 Corinthians 15 3-8. The consensus critical position is that Paul very probably received at least the material on which this early tradition is based and more likely the creed itself in the early to mid30s.

Mike Lacona adds Paul could have received the traditions encapsulated in 1 Corinthians 15 3-7 in Damascus after his conversion experience. He could have received it three years later when he spent time with Peter in Jerusalem or 14 years later when he visited again with the Jerusalem leadership. Although it is impossible to know when Paul received it and from whom, what can be said is that the traditions about Jesus's resurrection embedded in 1 Corinthians 15 3-7 predates Paul's founding of the church in Corenth in AD51. and could go back to the very earliest period of the post Eastern church. And elsewhere he writes, "Virtually all who study first century Christianity admit that Paul is the earliest known author to comment on the resurrection of Jesus. Accordingly, his views on what happened to Jesus after his crucifixion carry a great amount of weight. And again, Paul is very important because he is our earliest written source that mentions the resurrection of Jesus. Since the writings of Paul are almost universally agreed to predate the gospels, proponents of the minimal facts approach assume that they are automatically more valuable."

I think that this is a mistake. While I will suggest later in this video that at least some of the gospels were written far earlier than is commonly supposed, even predating some of Paul's writings, I ultimately care a lot more about who the information is coming from than I do how close it is to the events. Specifically, I care about how well positioned the source is to know the truth of what they are reporting. For that reason, I would prefer a firsthand account written 30 years after an event to an 11thhand account from the very next day. For the same reason, because I affirm the traditional authorship of the Gospels, I prefer the Gospels, even if they were written decades later, over the creed in First Corinthians 15, even though it might date to within months of the resurrection, because I am not at all sure where it comes from. Obviously, these issues are not completely unrelated. The sources need to have been written early enough to have been written by people who were close to the events. But this nevertheless marks a significant difference between my maximalist case for the resurrection and the minimal facts approach. I prioritize the position and knowledgeability of my sources over the date at which they were written.

Maximalism is immune to the newer developments in historical Jesus studies which call into question the usefulness of the criteria of authenticity. As Anthony Leiddon puts it in the introduction to an important book criticizing the traditional criteria of authenticity, almost all contemporary Jesus historians who employ the traditional authenticity criteria do so with repeated reservations and qualifications. One can hardly blame historians for establishing rules for the road or aiming towards historioggraphical rigor. But as the reservations about these traditional criteria become greater and as the qualifications offered by their adherence become more pronounced, it must be asked whether these traditional methods are poorly founded or perhaps should be abandoned altogether. In this way, the authors of this book think it is time to rethink the traditional quest for authenticity from the ground up.

Minimalist resurrection arguments, especially that of William Lane Craig, are critically dependent upon the utility of the traditional criteria of authenticity. As Craig has clearly said, if an apologetic based on the claims of Christ is to work, we must do the requisite spade work of sorting out those claims of Jesus that can be established as authentic and then drawing out their implications. This will involve not only mastering Greek but also the methods of modern criticism and the criteria of authenticity. But as these criteria become more obsolete, so too do arguments which depend upon them, such is the risk of tethering one's resurrection argument too closely to the evershifting winds of popular opinion within New Testament studies. By contrast, such developments can never challenge a maximalist case for the resurrection since maximalism does not insist upon a self-imposed limitation according to which the only acceptable facts are the ones which enjoy broad scholarly support.

Still more concerning is the fact that the criteria of authenticity work on the assumption that the gospels are largely mythical. That is why they exist. to use them to make one's case for the resurrection implicitly allows the skeptic to continue understanding the gospels as mostly untrustworthy sources. As Raphael Lattister points out, Craig relies on the criteria of authenticity, tools used by Jesus researchers to discover the nuggets of truth buried within the legendary material of the biblical texts in order to determine what it is that Jesus really said and did. This is already something of a counterintuitive development as these are tools constructed and used by critical scholars who already reject the Christ of faith that Craig believes in which work on the premise that the New Testament is filled with mythical embellishments.

Even if the resurrection could be established by using the criteria of authenticity, it remains unclear how the minimalist apologist will be able to move from the resurrection happening to the truth of robust Christian theism. All that has been established is that a bunch of likely unreliable documents contain enough nuggets of historical information to infer that Jesus rose from the dead. As McGru puts it, the criteriological approach is designed to support only specific passages rather than a document as a whole. If one uses these criteria as an aid to establishing minimal facts while explicitly issuing any intention to argue that the whole documents are reliable and represent authentic apostolic testimony, then something like a question will understandably remain about any segments that have not been individually authenticated.

Even more importantly, maximalism allows the apologist the necessary background information to be able to make sense of the resurrection and its meaning. Suppose for the moment that the bodily resurrection of Jesus genuinely was the best explanation of the minimal facts, a conclusion which I will call into question presently. Taken with the idea that the gospels are not generally trustworthy, something which minimalists seem willing to grant, at least for the sake of argument, it's very difficult to see what we should make of the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. Suppose that King Ferdinand II of Aragon were to return to life tomorrow. This fact might be interesting, but we should hardly be able to conclude that he was God or that there were any important religious implications flowing from this. We would be utterly unable to know what to make of this event. Miracles in isolation are ambiguous. One needs access to the context of the miracle in order to make sense of it. But by granting the skeptic the basic unreliability of the gospels, the proponent of minimalism also cuts off their ability to make any sort of sense out of what the resurrection means, even if they can establish that it happened. Without the context of Jesus's divine claims and his prediction of his resurrection as a divine vindication of those claims, the resurrection of Jesus is as ambiguous as the hypothetical resurrection of King Ferdinand tomorrow. By using the gospels as holistic sources of information, maximalism avoids this problem. It makes it very easy to see the theological significance of the resurrection because it allows the gospels to contextualize this event.

Lydia Mcgru rightly says, "I do not wish to say that the minimal facts approach is valueless by any means and its widespread use may be in part a result of the fact that it provides a straightforward template for a debate format. However, I do want to say that it is incomplete and that its heavy promotion and near exclusive use in Christian apologetic circles can perhaps unintentionally give an unfortunate misimpression. That misimpression is that we cannot establish the high reliability of the gospels and or acts by neutral historical means. and therefore we ought to issue any argument that involves relying on a premise of reliability. A correlary error is that we cannot neutrally establish that the resurrection accounts in the gospels and in acts came from the apostles themselves rather than being in whole or in part later additions by those who are not in a position to know what really happened or what the apostles claimed. But most significantly of all, it is much clearer that a maximalist argument supports the bodily resurrection of Jesus as having actually occurred. Minimalism is vulnerable to the charge that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is not in fact the best explanation of the minimal facts once it is clear how little is truly granted by the vast majority of scholars. In other words, the minimal facts are probably too minimal to get you to the bodily resurrection of Jesus. This becomes especially clear when one grasps how thin a conception of a resurrection appearance most scholars are willing to acknowledge that the disciples experienced. Unfortunately, when apologists like Gary Hobberm and Mike Lacona state that most scholars believe that there were post-mortem appearances of Jesus, the average churchgoer tends to assume that most scholars are granting that there were appearances of Jesus like those described in the Gospels. This is simply not true and it is misleading to state this without significant qualifications.

Steven T. Davis asks the right question, saying, "Suppose that the witnesses to the resurrection did as claimed, see the risen Jesus. What kind of seeing was this? Was it a normal or abnormal seeing? Was the thing that they saw, that is Jesus's risen body, a material object like a tree or a house or another human body? Were the perceptual processes that were at work in seeing Jesus normal? I don't think that most enthusiasts about the minimal facts argument realize that most scholars do not in fact think that this was a normal visual perception of a physical object. As Gerald O' Collins points out, most New Testament scholars would be reluctant to assert that the risen Christ became present in such a way that neutral or even hostile spectators could have observed him in an ordinary physical fashion. For the most part, when New Testament scholars are saying there were appearances of Jesus, they are talking about something like visions or grief hallucinations. For example, Bart Urman says, "By vision, I simply mean something that is seen whether it is really there or not." And so if one is truly going to restrict their resurrection argument to just those facts which are granted by the overwhelming consensus of critical scholars, then one is only entitled to argue from these visionary or hallucinatory appearances of Jesus. But once this point has been firmly grasped, it becomes unclear why the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation. There is no reason to think that the disciples belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus was rational if it was formed in response to these vague sorts of visionary experiences. Recall that the empty tomb is not a minimal fact according to Habermas and Lacona. Habermas and Lacona will pile on evidence to show that the disciples were sincere in their belief. But notice that the issue which I am raising regards the rationality of the disciples belief in the resurrection, not the sincerity of it. All of the evidence in the world for the sincerity of the disciples belief will do nothing to demonstrate the rationality of their belief. This is the essence of what has been called the bottleneck problem for the minimal facts argument.

As McGru explains, I am saying here that even if the skeptic fully grants that the disciples firmly believed this, that has fairly limited force to support the conclusion that it really happened, absent more information about why they believed it. You cannot make up the deficiency there simply by providing more and more and more evidence that they believed it. Maximalism on the other hand faces no such problem. This is because maximalism is allowed to make use of the details of the resurrection appearances provided in the gospels. And if these details accurately describe the experiences which the disciples had, then it is easy to see the rationality of their belief in the resurrection. Since the phenomenological character of these experiences of the risen Jesus would be just like that of any other veritical experience of a human being. There is no looming possibility that the experiences might have actually been like dreams or visions with respect to their phenomenological texture.

As Timothy and Lydia Mcgru say, the accounts of the 11's encounters with Jesus are striking in a number of respects. And while in the context of this argument, we are not entitled on pain of circularity to assume that these accounts are true, we need to get clear in our minds what sort of claim is being made. First, the accounts of Jesus's appearances to the disciples are neither vague nor spiritualized, but rather circumstantial, empirical, and detailed. Not only do they purport to give a number of his statements, they also state expressly that he deliberately displayed empirical evidence that he was not a spirit, but rather a physical being. It was therefore a physical resurrection claim that the disciples made. William Lane Craig agrees that every resurrection appearance narrated in the Gospels is a physical bodily appearance. All their separate sources of information agree that Jesus appeared physically and bodily to the disciples and other witnesses. There is no trace of non-physical appearances in the sources. A remarkable fact if all the appearances were really visionary as some critics would have us believe. But it remains unclear why Craig thinks that he can appeal to the resurrection appearances within the gospels since he has not shown that these stories or the details present within them meet any of the criteria of authenticity. The maximalist need not worry about this because the maximalist explicitly utilizes the gospels as holistic sources. However, the limitations which minimalists like Craig place upon themselves preclude them from making these sorts of appeals to the details within the resurrection accounts in the Gospels. It is not just important to establish that the apostles genuinely believed in the resurrection but also that they were rational in doing so. If we are to be able to base our belief in the resurrection of Jesus on the apostles belief in the resurrection, then it is absolutely critical that the apostles belief in the resurrection was rational. In order for their belief to have been rational, their experiences of the risen Jesus would need to correspond to their belief in Jesus's bodily resurrection. And in order to establish this, we need to have details about what the resurrection appearances were like. In order to get those, we need the witness of the gospels.

As Lydia Mcgru observes, one particular concern is the nature of the appearances to the disciples treated as one of the minimal facts and the relationship between the details of the appearances in Jesus's bodily resurrection. Generally, this minimal fact is stated in minimal terms, such as that in some sense, the early followers of Jesus thought that they had seen the risen Jesus or that the disciples had experiences that led them to believe and proclaim that Jesus had been resurrected and had appeared to them. The limited wording and absence of detail are part and parcel of the method presumably in order to be able to claim widespread support across the scholarly spectrum. But if we cannot be at all sure that the accounts as given in the gospels and in the first chapter of acts represent at least what the disciples claimed, the argument for the bodily resurrection of Jesus is considerably weakened. It is these details that give such tremendous force to the apostles testimony and to their willingness to die for it. For it is from these details that we can conclude with confidence that they were not hallucinating, experiencing some sort of non-physical paranormal event, having visions, or merely mistaken. Yet, by no means will the vast majority of New Testament scholars admit that Jesus's close friends had these sorts of experiences. You can't get these sorts of details out of the creed in 1 Corinthians 15. You simply can't. And that's why you need the Gospels to establish not just that the disciples believed in the resurrection, but that they did so for good reasons.

As Eric Manning summarizes, I'm not saying that the creed has no value whatsoever, but here's the big problem. What does the creed tell us about the nature of the appearances? Not much. The Gospels give us a walking, talking Jesus who eats with people and invites them to touch him, especially in Luke and John. The majority of scholars do not acknowledge those kinds of appearances. Rather, they explicitly deny them and label these stories as late embellishments. Vague and fleeting appearances aren't all that evidentially convincing. And a floating Jesus would not make us think Jesus rose from the dead rather than that they saw some kind of apparition. And that's the Achilles heel of the minimal facts argument. It is very difficult to evaluate the rationality of the disciples beliefs when we aren't able to describe in detail their experiences. There's a lot we'd like to know that this simple creed doesn't give us. It wasn't meant to.

I can appreciate that proponents of the minimal facts approach are trying to appeal to premises which are uncontroversial in making their argument for the resurrection. After all, as a general rule, arguments which employ more widely accepted premises are more likely to persuade. But if the problems which I have raised for the minimal facts approach are decisive, then the resurrection apologist will simply have to accept that the case for the resurrection cannot be made by exclusively using uncontroversial premises. More foundational issues and disagreements will need to be addressed. And that is why I spent so much time laying the groundwork for this video in prior videos. A strong case can indeed be made for the resurrection, but most of the controversy will regard issues which are not directly related to the resurrection.

I understand that this section may have been upsetting for some viewers. After all, in a video dedicated to defending Jesus's resurrection, why am I starting off by attacking the most popular argument for this event? Perhaps some viewers share Gary Hobo's concern when he says, "In my opinion, raising objections on behalf of the unbeliever to the historicity of Jesus's resurrection, Jesus's view of God, his deity, or the truthfulness of Jesus's message, is definitely not the way to argue against a fellow evangelical, even if we object to their methods. The response almost seems to me to be one of burning the message along with the messenger." But I want to be clear that I am not here raising any objections to the historicity of Jesus's resurrection. Rather, I am trying to draw our attention to some very important distinctions which will be absolutely critical when we turn to addressing objections to the case for the resurrection. It is crucial that viewers clearly understand how and why my resurrection argument differs from the minimal facts so that they understand why it is able to better handle the objections.

We are at long last in a position to erect the argument for the resurrection of Jesus. I would formulate the argument as follows.

One, there is testimony saying that Jesus was resurrected.

Two, this testimony comes from credible sources.

Three, there are only three logical possibilities with respect to credible testimony. It is true, it is deliberately false, or it is honestly mistaken.

Four, the credible testimony for the resurrection of Jesus is not deliberately false.

Five, the credible testimony for the resurrection of Jesus is not honestly mistaken.

Six. Therefore, the credible testimony for the resurrection of Jesus is true.

Seven, if the credible testimony for the resurrection of Jesus is true, then Jesus was resurrected.

Eight, therefore, Jesus was resurrected.

Premise one is, or at least should be, the least controversial premise within this argument. Surely no one doubts that the four gospels do claim that Jesus rose from the dead, regardless of how they judge the truth of that claim. Premise three should also be fairly uncontroversial. After all, there are only two possibilities when it comes to the truth of any proposition. It is either true or false. And if it is false, then it can only be either intentionally false or unintentionally false. Hence the third premise expresses a true tricotomy. Premise 7 is a tautology and is therefore true by definition and premises 6 and 8 follow deductively from the preceding premises. Hence the controversial premises are going to be premises 2, 4, and five.

Arguably premise 2 is the most controversial premise within the entire argument. It asserts that the testimony pertaining to the resurrection of Jesus in the four gospels is credible. By credible here, I mean that the sources of information originate with someone who is in a good position to know if some event happened such as an eyewitness. The importance of this premise is that it disallows the skeptic from positing that the gospels represent the end of a long evolving legendary oral tradition. If the gospels come directly from eyewitnesses or their immediate followers, then this forces the skeptic into the trillemma stated in the third premise.

As Brandt Petri puts it, contrary to what some claim, two of the gospels that report Jesus's appearances after the resurrection claim to be firstirhand eyewitness testimony. The Gospel of Matthew records Jesus's appearance to the 11 disciples, which would of course include Matthew himself. And the Gospel of John records the appearance of Jesus to John the beloved disciple along with several other apostles while fishing in the Sea of Galilee. and that is to say nothing of the accounts contained in the Gospel of Luke who describes the material in his gospel as also being based on the testimony of eyewitnesses from the beginning though he does not name them. Of course, none of this means that you have to accept the truth of the accounts of Jesus's appearances. What it does mean is that there is no historical basis for claiming that there are no eyewitness accounts of the appearances of the risen Jesus. You can reject those accounts if you'd like, but you can't say that they don't exist. And Lydia Mcgru adds, "The Gospels undeniably present themselves as true accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth." Without any need for a highly specific genre identification, one can say that the immediate impression one gets is that the evangelists intend to tell what really happened. I say that this is probably the most controversial premise within the argument because the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars believe that the Gospels are late and anonymous and certainly were not authored by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Now, strictly speaking, the defender of this argument does not have to defend the traditional authorship of the four gospels if he can come up with another way to show that the gospels go back to credible witnesses. And various defenders of this general line of argument have thought of various ways to do this. However, the most straightforward approach to defending the second premise and the approach that I prefer is to simply show that premise 2 is true by demonstrating that the gospels were actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As Timothy and Lydia Mcgru explain, if we take the account indicated by the external evidence at face value, we shall be essentially forced to concede two points. One, the first two gospels were written very early, well before AD.70. And

Two, they came either directly, Matthew, or one removed, Mark, reporting what Peter had said, from independent eyewitnesses who had been Christ's own disciples. Fortunately, I have already made the case for traditional authorship at length in a previous video. So, we need not dig into the details here. For those who are skeptical of the second premise of this argument, I invite them to consider the detailed case I offered in that video. But for the purposes of this video, I will take premise 2 to be defended.

The next portion of this video then will primarily be concerned with defending premises four and five. There is perhaps a different sort of objection which might be raised against the second premise which it will be worth briefly addressing. The skeptic could object that wholly aside from the issue of who wrote the gospels, we could not have credible testimony pertaining to the resurrection of Jesus for the simple reason that no one would have been in a position to know that it happened even if it did. In other words, the resurrection, if it actually occurred, was not directly witnessed by anyone.

Now this observation that no one witnessed the resurrection event is certainly true as far as it goes. Surely no one other than Jesus himself was inside the tomb for the actual event. Nevertheless, it does not follow from this that no one was in a position to know that Jesus rose from the dead. A person could perfectly well be in a position to know that Jesus rose from the dead simply by one knowing that Jesus was dead at one time and then two knowing that Jesus was alive at a later time. These two items of knowledge together allow one to know that Jesus rose from the dead. So if one can know these two things, then they can be in a position to know that Jesus rose from the dead, even if they didn't directly witness the event of the resurrection.

As Steven T. Davis puts it, it is frequently pointed out that there were no witnesses in the tomb at the crucial moment and that therefore the resurrection itself was not observed. This is surely correct. Some go on to argue, however, that the resurrection was accordingly unobservable, that in principle it could not be observed by human beings, and that this is what rules out the possibility of Jesus's resurrection being an event in history. I only wish to point out two logical fallacies that are sometimes committed here. One, the inference from the fact that the moment of the resurrection inside the tomb was not humanly observed to the conclusion that it could not have been humanly observed and two the inference from the claim that the resurrection could not have been observed if this is granted to the conclusion that it is therefore not history.

So given that this objection does not succeed and given that I have already defended premise 2 in excruciating detail in a previous video, I am going to take premise 2 for granted. If premise 2 is true, then the skeptic is forced into the trillemma stated in premise 3. All I need to do for the remainder of this video then is to show that the testimony pertaining to Jesus's resurrection is neither deliberately false nor honestly mistaken. If those possibilities can be ruled out or shown to be sufficiently unlikely, then this will allow us to conclude that the testimony is true. And this in turn will entail that the resurrection actually occurred.

Against the idea that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were deliberately lying, two points can be made. First, it seems that they had nothing to gain by lying about this. There is no obvious benefit to be gained by deliberately misleading people into believing that Jesus had been resurrected. As Timothy and Lydia Mcgru put it, "The prior probability of such a conspiracy in the specific context is not very high. It is hard to see what motive the disciples could have had for planning a conspiracy to convince others that Jesus had risen from the dead. Even before their own warnings from the Sanhedrin, after they began teaching that Jesus was risen and spreading the message of forgiveness through his name, they knew full well that such preaching was unlikely to gain them societal power, not counting the possibility of influence in a small and well-hated new sect. sexual gratification, wealth, or anything else of value to unscrupulous men, but rather persecution and death."

Second, there appears to be every reason not to lie about something like this. The early Christians faced intense persecution at the hands of the Romans. Generally speaking, one of the strongest human instincts is self-preservation. If the disciples really believed that Jesus was resurrected and that this ensured them eternal life, then their willingness to die for this belief is easy to explain. On the other hand, if they were deliberately lying, it is very hard to explain their willingness to die. On balance, the evidence is strongly opposed to the idea that the witnesses to the resurrection were liars. Again, the Mcgru observe, "Beginning on the day of Pentecost, the now 12 apostles engaged in behavior that virtually invited martyrdom, persisting in asserting that Jesus was risen in the face of known danger and explicit and escalating threats."

Now, there has been a recent series of criticisms objecting to the idea that any of the apostles actually did die as martyrs or that early Christians face significant persecution. The most well-known critic here is Candida Moss in her book, The Myth of Persecution. However, we need not get bogged down here since I have already addressed Moss and other skeptics in considerable detail on this point in a previous video. Hence, skeptics of this premise are referred to that video for an extensive defense of the persecution and martyrdom of the apostles against the leading critics. Suffice it for now to say that the persecution of the early Christians is well attested in Acts, the gospels, the writings of Paul, the writings of the early church and even in Roman sources like Tacitus and Swatonius.

Now, it is common for counter apologists to respond to this point about persecution and martyrdom by insisting that people can indeed die for lies. A favorite example here is radical Islamic suicide bombers who likewise demonstrate a willingness to die for their faith. But clearly that doesn't make Islam true. Now, I think that this is a good response to the careless but unfortunately often repeated claim by Christian apologists that no one would ever die for a lie. Plainly, that is not true. But I would make two points by way of response.

In the first place, while it is easy to find examples of people who unwittingly die for a lie, it is considerably more difficult to find examples of people who willingly and knowingly die for a lie. In the case of the apostles, we are talking about people who are in a position to know whether or not what they are saying is a lie. Since they were the source with which the belief in Jesus's resurrection originated, they would surely know whether or not they were lying. And in this respect, they are different than suicide bombers who are not in a comparable position to know the truth or falsity of their religious beliefs.

Second, notice that my argument for the resurrection does not conclude that the resurrection really happened just because the apostles wouldn't die for a lie. Premise 3 explicitly leaves open the possibility of the apostles being honestly mistaken even if they weren't lying. I am using persecution and martyrdom in support of the fourth premise which merely rules out the apostles lying about the resurrection. They were sincere in cases like that of suicide bombers, which are supposed to be a counter example to this claim, actually support it. Suicide bombers presumably are willing to die for their causes because they sincerely believe in them. It's just that they are honestly mistaken. And the same point applies to the apostles. It could be that they were honestly mistaken about the resurrection. Premise 4 does not deny this. Premise 4 merely asserts that they were not lying and their willingness to die for this belief is absolutely evidence for the truth of this premise.

Mike Lakota makes this point quite well saying the disciples willingness to suffer and die for their beliefs indicates that they certainly regarded those beliefs as true. The case is strong that they did not willfully lie about the appearances of the risen Jesus. Liars make poor martyrs. No one questions the sincerity of the Muslim terrorist who blows himself up in a public place or the Buddhist monk who burns himself alive as a political protest. Extreme acts do not validate the truth of their beliefs, but their willingness to die indicates that they are sincerely convinced of the truth of their beliefs. Moreover, there is an important difference between the martyred apostles and those who die for their beliefs today. Modern martyrs act solely out of their trust in beliefs passed along to them by others. The apostles died for holding to their own testimony that they had personally seen the risen Jesus. Contemporary martyrs die for what they believe to be true. The disciples of Jesus suffered and were willing to die for what they knew to be either true or false.

The fifth premise in my argument says that the apostles testimony attesting to the resurrection is not honestly mistaken. Unlike premise 4, defending this premise is a more complicated matter. This is because there are so many different ways in which a skeptic might suggest that the apostles were honestly mistaken. If they were not lying, then perhaps they were honestly mistaken as a result of purely psychological factors such as expectation, hallucination, group think, cognitive dissonance, or grief.

Against the thesis that the disciples were honestly mistaken on purely psychological grounds, there is already an immediate difficulty, namely the empty tomb. To the extent that we are going to posit that the disciples were honestly mistaken, then we must accept that they at least genuinely believed their own reports contained in the gospels. This means that we would have to accept their witness to the fact that Jesus's tomb was really empty. This physical evidence cannot be explained by a purely psychological hypothesis. As Jake O'Connell says, if the tomb was not empty, the Christians could not have believed Jesus was raised from the dead.

Now, there are several ways in which the apostles might have been honestly mistaken about the empty tomb. These would include the ideas that the apostles went to the wrong tomb or that Jesus's body had been stolen or reburied by a third party. These hypotheses are insufficient in and of themselves to explain the resurrection appearances and subsequent belief in the resurrection, but they can be paired with psychological explanations to account for all of the relevant evidence. The difficulty is that neither of these explanations is independently particularly plausible. That absolutely everyone should have been mistaken about the location of the tomb. Strange credulity. And that some third party would want to steal the body doesn't appear particularly likely, especially if we believe Matthew's account that guards were present at the tomb. I understand that most skeptics will wish to reject the guards as a later apologetic, but this becomes a challenge to premise two, which asserts the credibility of the testimony pertaining to Jesus's resurrection. And I have already defended this premise. In the present context, we are assessing challenges to the apostolic witness on the assumption that it is honestly mistaken. So if Matthew is honestly mistaken about the resurrection and he is attempting to tell us the truth, then the presence of guards at the tomb cannot be explained away as being an apologetic invention. The main point here is just that the two major ways in which a skeptic might account for the empty tomb are already highly unlikely. And this unlikelihood will be compounded when paired with a psychological explanation to account for the apostles experiences of the risen Jesus and their subsequent belief in his bodily resurrection.

So now we turn to the major ways in which one might account for the appearances of the risen Jesus in the gospels without thereby invoking the resurrection itself. While skeptics have appealed to various factors such as cognitive dissonance and group think, it's important to realize that these are only explanations for how the apostles might have come to believe in the resurrection. They do not account for the apostles experiences of the risen Jesus as contained in the gospels. One can believe in something without an experience of it and one can experience something without believing in it. Experience and belief therefore are different and alternative explanations for how the disciples may have come to believe in the resurrection will not automatically explain how they could have come to experience the resurrected Jesus.

Far and away the best option open to the skeptic here is to suggest that these experiences of the risen Jesus were grief hallucinations. But there are numerous well-known difficulties here. Probably the most important is that Jesus appears to groups of people within the gospels. Hallucinations, much like dreams, are private to the individuals who have them and cannot be shared between or among different people. Andrew Lok puts the basic worry this way. A hallucination is understood in the present context as involving a sensory experience which occurs in the absence of corresponding external stimulation of the relevant sensory organ. It is unreasonable to think that a group of people perceived the same thing together at the same time when there is nothing there experimentally corresponding to their experiences. For without a corresponding external stimulation of the relevant sensory organ, the mental states internal to each person within the group would not agree on various details concerning their experience of the external world.

Skeptics will sometimes suggest that there have been such things as group hallucinations. But it's important to realize that in these cases, we are not literally dealing with different people seeing the exact same thing or having the exact same visual experience. What we are dealing with is groups of people who are all having individual but similar hallucinations. As Jake O'Connell explains, the hypothesis which we mean to designate by the term collective hallucinations is the hypothesis that people may while in each other's presence have very similar individual hallucinations and that the hallucinations may be so similar that the precipitants may afterward believe they have seen the same thing. The hallucination is not transferred from one person's mind to another's. Each has his own hallucination in his own mind. Of course, the odds of two people just happening to have very similar hallucinations at the same time are astronomical. Can this account for the resurrection appearances in the Gospels? It seems unlikely since they involve Jesus doing very specific things like helping the disciples fish, eating with them, or inviting Thomas to touch him. Even if the apostles had group hallucinations of Jesus, it seems unlikely that they would all see him doing these exact things. Furthermore, most actual examples of so-called group hallucinations are actually cases of visual illusions rather than hallucinations. Again, Lok says cases which have been labeled as group hallucinations may have been cases of illusions, which is a case of misidentification. A recent study by Bergerson and Hobbermas concludes that collective hallucinations are not found in peer-reviewed medical literature.

Moreover, the experiences of the risen Jesus were multi-sensory. They didn't just involve seeing Jesus. They also involved hearing him, talking to him, eating with him, and touching him. While it is possible to have auditory hallucinations and probably even some sort of tactile or gustatory hallucinations, that is hallucinations involving feeling or tasting what isn't there. These sorts of hallucinations are much rarer than visual hallucinations and the odds against them all coalescing around all of these individuals in exactly the same way are just astronomical. As Andrew Lo and Nick Meter observe, one of the difficulties for the hallucination hypothesis is that multiple gospels attest that the disciples touched Jesus. If these were hallucinations, they would be exceptions to the rule. For example, Ree found that 2.7% of widows claimed that their dead spouse had touched them. Similarly, Grimby found 6% of spouses experience tactile hallucinations. Although some studies report slightly higher rates, such as Olen at 13%, median estimates across studies show tactile hallucinations are far less likely than other sensory modalities. Timothy and Lydia Mcgru add a third factor exasperates this problem. The hallucinations would have to be not only parallel but also integrated. According to the gospels, the risen Jesus interacted with his disciples in numerous ways, including eating food they gave him and cooking fish for them. In such contexts, the disciples were interacting not only with Jesus but with one another physically and verbally. The suggestion that their parallel polyodal hallucinations were seamlessly integrated is simply a non-starter, an event so improbable in natural terms that it would itself very nearly demand a supernatural explanation.

What's more, group hallucinations typically occur among individuals who have some level of expectation or have been primed to have them. While one could argue that Jesus's predictions of his own resurrection caused such an expectation, in fact, the evidence within the gospels suggest that the apostles expected nothing of the sort. The depictions of them there show them to be despondent and afraid that they will be killed next. What's more, even after Jesus appears to them, many are still said to doubt in Matthew 28:17. And then there is doubting Thomas, someone who most surely was not expecting Jesus to rise from the dead and who refused to do so until he could physically touch Jesus's wounds. The depictions of the apostles within the gospels don't portray them as being particularly susceptible to group hallucinations at the time at which their experiences of the risen Jesus occurred. As Lok says, given that hallucinations are caused incrementally, expectation is evidently a relevant factor. One issue is whether all the eyewitnesses already had prior belief that Jesus would rise from the dead. The historical evidence indicates otherwise. The resurrection appearances occurred to Paul and James, both of whom were unbelievers. Moreover, even among the 12, there were those who were initially doubtful. And then we might ask why these group hallucinations occurred abruptly 3 days after the crucifixion, conveniently coinciding with the discovery of the empty tomb, and then ended abruptly 40 days later. This is not typical of bereavement hallucinations, nor of group hallucinations. As Gary Hobbermaus asks, why did the hallucination stop after just 40 days? I understand that skeptics will want to say that these depictions of the apostles may be later in legendary or that the idea that the appearances ended abruptly after 40 days is legendary. But that returns us to a discussion of objections to premise 2. In the context of defending premise 5, we are assessing the plausibility of the idea that the testimony which the gospels relay about the resurrection appearances can be honestly mistaken. And from what we know about the nature of hallucinations, even group hallucinations, the resurrection appearances of Jesus in the Gospels do not appear to fit the bill.

A further difficulty with the appeal to hallucinations, which has not been appreciated by most skeptics or even by most apologists, is that the writers of the New Testament demonstrate a clear ability to delineate between veritical experiences and visions. The biblical authors have no problem saying that God spoke to people through visions. Yet, they don't include the resurrection appearances in this category. Were the disciples to have had hallucinations, they would have much more likely been like visions and interpreted as such. But their experiences of the risen Jesus don't appear to have been like that. As Lok points out, the New Testament authors consistently refer to resurrection appearances as involving an extremental appearing in the real objective world. They distinguish this understanding of resurrection appearance from that of a vision, a term which they refer for subjective mental phenomenon.

Now recall that the implausibility of hallucinations as an explanation is going to be exasperated by the implausibility of the explanations for the empty tomb with which the hallucination theory must be conjoined in order to adequately explain all of the evidence. The result is that the most promising way to say that the apostles were honestly mistaken is highly improbable right out of the gate. As Craig reminds us, the hallucination hypothesis seeks to account only for part of the evidence, namely the appearances, but it does nothing to account for the empty tomb. In order to explain the empty tomb, one must come up with another theory and join it with the hallucination hypothesis. And Hobbermas and Lacona add, combinations of theories generally lead to higher improbability, not a more probable solution. If a combination theory is to be true, all of its sub theories must be true. If one is not, then the theory fails to account adequately for all of the data. If one sub theory fails, the combination fails.

Of course, there are other means of trying to explain how the disciples might have had a sincere but mistaken belief in Jesus's resurrection. These range from mass hysteria to cognitive dissonance. Steven H. Smith and Herman Phipe are examples of recent champions of these sorts of explanations. However, like the hallucination hypothesis itself, these psychological explanations are typically employed merely to explain the origin of the disciples belief in the resurrection. Skeptics rarely if ever think that these sorts of explanations for the disciples belief can also explain how the resurrection appearances as described in the gospels could be honestly mistaken reports from the eyewitnesses themselves. As Aaron Lucas, a skeptic himself, puts it, "If the disciples really did have extended, detailed, integrated, polymodal sightings of Jesus in which they all ate and lived together, then of course these appearances cannot be explained by something like a hallucination. But as far as I know, no advocate of the hallucination theory has ever seriously suggested that the appearances as described in the gospels are explained by hallucinations. Though to advocate a hallucination hypothesis, are using hallucinations to explain the minimal facts version of the appearances, not the maximal facts version. Since my resurrection argument is unapologetically a maximalist argument, it has the virtue of being able to bypass most of these psychological explanations for how sincere but false belief in the resurrection might have originated. Hallucinations are deeply implausible and factors like mass hysteria, mass delusion, and cognitive dissonance lack the explanatory adequacy to explain the sorts of experiences which the gospel resurrection narratives describe.

There is one further hypothesis by which the skeptic could try to explain both the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances without combining hypotheses, without appealing to any psychological phenomenon, and without affirming the reality of the resurrection. This idea, commonly known as the swoon theory, asserts that Jesus never actually died on the cross. He only fainted or swooned on the cross, and was then buried alive. Later, the coolness of the tomb revived him, and when his disciples saw him alive, they mistakenly believed that Jesus had risen from the dead. This hypothesis has few defenders these days due to the sheer number of implausible things which it implies. However, some Muslim apologists do defend it since the Quran plausibly commits them to it. So, for the sake of completeness, it will be worth briefly reviewing the problems with this idea.

Right off the bat, it's incredibly difficult to take seriously the suggestion that Jesus did not really die on the cross. Crucifixion was an absolutely brutal form of execution. And there is only one individual known to have survived. The Jewish historian Josephus tells us that after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in AD 70, the Roman commander Titus had numerous Jews crucified. Three of these were friends of Josephus. Upon his request, Titus had these three individuals removed from their crosses and they were immediately given medical attention. Even having undergone only a partial crucifixion and having been given immediate medical attention, two of these men died anyway. Thus, it is unthinkable that Jesus, who had undergone a full crucifixion and then was given no medical attention whatsoever for 3 days, should have survived. As Gary Hobbermas explains, in spite of being given Rome's very best medical care available, only one of Josephus's friends survived, even their shortened crucifixion, the other two died under the physician's hands. The point here is that besides this single case of a rescued crucifixion victim, we know of no other survivors of crucifixion in antiquity.

But if general considerations aren't enough, recall that John tells us that a spear was used to make sure that Jesus was dead prior to his removal from the cross. What exactly should be made of John's statement that both blood and water poured from his side is unclear, but this at least potentially indicates a ruptured heart, which would remove all doubt about Jesus's death. And as Hobbermas points out, ancient sources report that occasionally a final stroke to crucifixion victims guaranteed their deaths. The spear wound to Jesus's side is an example with medical opinion concluding that the weapon punctured his heart, ensuring his death. Also, if Jesus had been alive and the spear had pierced his plural cavity, an obvious sucking sound would have alerted his executioners. And if it is difficult to believe that Jesus didn't really die on the cross, it is even more difficult to believe that if he hadn't, those who buried him wouldn't have noticed.

But by far, the biggest weakness in the swoon theory pertains to how Jesus, even if he had survived, should have been able to unwrap himself from the inside, push aside the stone in front of the tomb all by himself with nail-pierced hands, get past the guards unnoticed, walk to wherever his disciples were hiding on nail-pierced feet, and then somehow managed to convince them that he was the risen Lord of Life. That this story is utterly unbelievable is the chief reason why almost no one takes this theory seriously. The only exception here would be a handful of Muslim apologists and their reason for doing so derives from their other religious commitments rather than the independent plausibility of the swoon theory. While David Strauss's comments on this theory have probably been overused by apologists, they remain effective nonetheless. It is impossible that a being who had stolen half dead out of the supplr who crept about weak and ill and wanting medical treatment could have given the disciples the impression that he was a conqueror over death in the grave, the prince of life. an impression that lay at the bottom of their future ministry.

Perhaps the skeptic will agree that none of the explanations for how the apostles might have been honestly mistaken is very probable. However, the improbability of these scenarios is simply dwarfed by the improbability of a miraculous event. So no matter how unlikely or contrived these explanations may seem, they remain better than positing a miracle. As Larry Shapiro says, although what we learn through testimony might suffice to justify some beliefs, when the belief is about something as improbable as a miracle, it faces an especially hard burden. Not an impossible burden, but a burden that, in the case of the miracles reported so far, has not been met. If testimony is to justify your belief in an extremely improbable event, you need very good evidence that there's no better explanation for the testimony. I have addressed arguments of this sort at length in my video defending the rationality of belief in miracles. There I showed why David Hume's version of this objection fails and so do modern iterations thereof. Skeptics wishing to object on these grounds are referred to that video, but for the time being, suffice it to say that there is no good argument for assigning an infinite decimally small prior probability to the occurrence of a miracle. If a miracle explains a body of evidence far more easily than the most promising naturalistic hypothesis, then there is no reason whatsoever to refrain from inferring a miracle as the best explanation.

Some skeptics might suggest more extravagant naturalistic explanations to account for Jesus rising from the dead. Perhaps aliens did it with unknown technology. Or perhaps people do very rarely come back to life naturalistically. Or perhaps there is some other unknown but naturalistic explanation. In this way, we can account for Jesus rising from the dead without thereby inferring that a miracle has occurred. Again, Larry Shapiro suggests such a move, saying, "I'm simply granting for now that Jesus really did die and then rose to life again." Into the hypothesis box goes God. But why stop with just this one hypothesis? Perhaps 17 gods work together to bring Jesus back to life. Or maybe a nearly omnipotent being, not quite as powerful as the Christian God, but darn close, brought Jesus back from the dead. Could aliens have restored Jesus's life? That's no worse a hypothesis than God. We might also consider the possibility that on very rare occasions, very very rare, dead people simply come back to life as the result of natural causes. Why is God the best candidate and not 17 gods or aliens or unknown natural causes? Similarly, Raphael Lannister suggests Jesus could have risen naturally by some unknown biological mechanism. After all, we do not yet have a complete understanding of the laws of nature. Jesus may have risen naturally through the intervention of some sympathetic and non-ivine alien. Jesus might have possessed a rare or even unique mutated gene which gives rise to resurrections or apparent resurrections. In other words, the hypothesis that Jesus was resurrected fails to answer the so what question concerning God's existence.

For the purposes of this video, I am actually willing to grant Shapiro's and Lister's point. This video is not necessarily arguing that Jesus rising from the dead was a miraculous event. It is more narrowly focused on justifying the proposition that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. Whether or not this event qualifies as a miracle requires further argumentation. I think that this case can be made rather easily and it is significant that there is not so far as I know any non-Christian who actually believes that Jesus rose from the dead naturalistically. As Timothy and Lydia Mcgru observe, the resurrection is also positively relevant to Christianity. On any construal of Christianity worth the name, the assertion that Jesus rose bodily and miraculously from the dead is one of its core assertions. It is fairly easy to see that the probability that Christianity is true is greater given that the resurrection of Jesus occurred than it is otherwise on our present background evidence. And Andrew Lok adds Jesus predicted that his violent and imminent death would be followed shortly afterward by God's vindication of him via resurrection. The occurrence of Jesus's coming back to life 3 days after his death by crucifixion together with this context demands an explanation. It is contrived to think that this event out of billions of deaths which have occurred happened as a scientific anomaly and is associated by chance with a person's claim to be divine and or with the person's prediction of it.

But since in this video I am solely trying to show that Jesus did rise from the dead and these sorts of appeals to unknown naturalistic explanations tacitly assume that Jesus did rise. These sorts of explanations from Shapiro and Lister are not actually in conflict with the basic thesis of this video. They are simply offering an alternative explanation for how Jesus rose from the dead rather than a rival theory which would suggest that Jesus did not rise from the dead.

We can now confidently say that there is abundant reason to believe that the testimony bearing on the resurrection of Jesus is neither deliberately false nor honestly mistaken. As noted in premise three, there are only three logical possibilities when it comes to credible testimony. It is either deliberately false, honestly mistaken, or it is true. And if those first two options have been eliminated, then that leaves us with the third, namely that the testimony declaring the reality of Jesus's resurrection is true. And this means that the resurrection really occurred.

This concludes the positive portion of my case for the resurrection of Jesus. Throughout the remainder of this video, I will examine what several skeptics and critics of the case for the resurrection have to say in reply by showing where their criticisms fall short. I hope that this will foster greater confidence in the positive case I have made for the resurrection. Perhaps the most influential contemporary critic of the case for the resurrection of Jesus is the New Testament scholar Bart D. Urman. While once an evangelical himself, he has since abandoned the faith and become one of Christianity's more notable critics over the past couple of decades. As such, no discussion of contemporary objections to the case for the resurrection would be complete without a discussion of Urman's objections. Urman has debated on the subject of Jesus's resurrection many times, and he has also written much on the subject as well. While a thorough examination would doubtless interact with the full range of material which Urman has written on the subject, for our purposes in this video, it will suffice to examine the most lengthy and developed treatment of Urman's case against the resurrection as presented in his book, How Jesus Became God. We can break Urman's case against believing in the resurrection into three basic objections. The first is that the resurrection, even if it occurred, cannot be known to have occurred via the historical method. The second is that the resurrection accounts in the gospels are too contradictory to be depended upon. And the third is that the resurrection requires an empty tomb, but there was almost certainly no empty tomb because Jesus was almost certainly never buried in a tomb.

Regarding my argument for the resurrection, Urman, like most of the other skeptics we will address, rejects the second premise, asserting the credibility of the gospels as sources. I have already addressed Urman's general objections on this front in considerable detail in my video on gospel authorship. Consequently, we need not rehash all of that here. Instead, we will focus upon Urman's three-part case specifically against the resurrection. We turn first to Urman's claims that miracles like the resurrection lie outside of the range of what history can establish. As he says, "As a historian, I do not think we can show historically that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead. To be clear, I am not saying the opposite either. that historians can use the historical disciplines in order to demonstrate that Jesus was not raised from the dead. I argue that when it comes to miracles such as the resurrection, historical sciences simply are of no help in establishing exactly what happened."

This is a remarkable statement. We might wonder why Urman feels that the resurrection cannot be established by historical investigation. His answer is that historians are not allowed to make reference to miracles to explain things. As he says, "The first thing to stress is that everyone has presuppositions. So, let me stress that historians working as historians do indeed have presuppositions. On the other hand, some presuppositions are decidedly not at all appropriate for historians who want to establish what happened in the past. for presuppositions that the vast majority of us do not share. Historical reconstruction cannot be based on them. Anyone who has these presuppositions has to silence them, sit on them, or otherwise squaltch them when engaging in their historical investigations. The belief that a Christian miracle happened in the past is rooted in a particular set of theological beliefs. Without such beliefs, miracles cannot be established as having happened. Since historians cannot assume these beliefs, they cannot demonstrate historically that such miracles happen."

So the reason why historians can't conclude that miracles have occurred according to Urman seems to be due to two considerations. The first is that historians are not allowed to adopt presuppositions which are not widely shared. And second, belief in miracles can only be accepted if one has presuppositions which are not widely shared. The first point seems a bit odd. If all other historians suddenly came to believe in Jesus's resurrection tomorrow, would this somehow obligate Urman to accept the resurrection of Jesus? It seems odd that Urman should be forced to change his mind if he wants to continue being a historian based solely on the fact that everyone disagrees with him. Indeed, how is any progress to be made in history if everyone must simply constrain themselves to the presuppositions of most other historians? Urman's criterion here seems to make progress in historical investigation impossible.

But the real difficulty for Urman lies in his second consideration. Why think that one can only conclude that a miracle has occurred by presupposing religious beliefs? This is precisely the point which resurrection apologists are challenging. The whole argument is that the resurrection is the best explanation of the historical evidence which can be established strictly using the tools of history. It would seem that Urman is placing the cart before the horse here. He would need to first show that the historical argument for the resurrection fails before he could conclude that one can't infer that the resurrection happened without depending upon a theological presupposition.

It's possible that Urman is here expressing in a very inept way an objection to evidential apologetics popularized by Norman Gistler. According to which trying to establish a miracle without first establishing the existence of God is question begging. As Geistler put it, "The historical method alone is inadequate to establish the truth of Christianity or any other worldview purely on the basis of history. For example, one cannot justifiably argue that the resuscitation of the corpse of Jesus of Nazareth, even if it could be established by historical evidence, is sufficient a ground on which to build the entire Christian worldview. It must be interpreted as a miracle, a supernatural event in order to accomplish this task. But it cannot be a supernatural event unless there is a supernatural being, God. And to assume the existence of such a being begs the question. Or to put it another way, one could not know that such an event was a special act of God without already knowing there was a God who could so act."

So Geistler's thought was that God has to exist in order for miracles to be possible. And thus, one has to establish that God exists before one can establish that a miracle has occurred. If Urman has adopted this perspective, then it's easy to see why he would think that one has to hold a theological presupposition in order to infer that a miracle has occurred. Unfortunately for Urman, if this is his intended point, Geiseler was simply wrong about one having to establish God's existence in order to establish a miracle. Geistler confused the order of being with the order of knowing. It is surely true that God has to exist in order for miracles to be possible. But this does not imply that we have to know that God exists in order to know that miracles are possible. Rather, as long as we know that God's existence is possible, it follows that miracles are also possible. The epistemic possibility of miracles must be considered so long as God's existence has not been conclusively disproven. If God might exist, then he might perform miracles. And if he did, then there is absolutely no reason whatsoever why we couldn't infer God as having been the cause of an event if that's the best explanation for it. Moreover, we can do so without presupposing that God exists.

So Urman is just clearly and obviously wrong about this. As Robert Lmer argues, "While it is true that once an event is described as a miracle, one commits oneself to the existence of God, this in no way prevents the event from functioning as evidence for God since it is on the basis that theism provides the best explanation of the event that one is prepared to call it a miracle. To claim otherwise is analogous to claiming that a corpse, the existence of which is best explained on the hypothesis of a murderer, cannot function as evidence for the existence of a murderer. True, once the corpse is described as a homicide victim, one commits to the existence of a murderer. But this scarcely implies that the corpse cannot function as evidence of a murderer. Analogously, the fact that an event is described as a miracle scarcely implies that it cannot function as evidence for God. There is, therefore, no logical reason why events best understood as acts of supernatural intervention by God cannot be taken as providing evidence for God."

And Mike Lacona adds, "Erman confuses historical conclusions with their theological implications." Most would admit that if Jesus rose from the dead, God is probably the best candidate for the cause. Thus, for Urman, since God is a subject for theologians rather than historians, the entire exercise of investigating the historicity of Jesus's resurrection is illegitimate. But this is to do history backwards. Historians should approach their data neither presupposing nor a priori excluding the possibility of God's acting in raising Jesus.

But suppose that we allow Urman to stipulate that historians by definition cannot make reference to the miraculous at least not in so far as they are doing historical investigation. Even if we arbitrarily restrict the scope of history to exclude investigations of the miraculous, that doesn't mean that we can't make a philosophical argument for the resurrection, which utilizes historical evidence to support the premises. So even granting Urman that miracles lie outside of the purview of the historian, this doesn't actually tell us anything about the knowability, justifiability, or probability that the resurrection occurred. The whole debate over whether or not historians are allowed to investigate miracles is kind of a red herring. For whether such examinations constitute the practice of studying history is merely a semantic question. However one decides to draw those lines, we can still investigate the miraculous whether or not we choose to stipulate that this investigation lies within the purview of doing history. Philip Goff made this point quite nicely in his review of one of Bart Airman's debates with Mike Lacona. Rather than disputing the history, a lot of time was taken up arguing about whether it is possible for a historian as a historian to argue for a miracle. This seems to me a very silly thing to argue about. We could define the word historian however we wish. Surely the interesting question is what we have reason to believe.

Lastly, we can leave aside the question of whether or not the resurrection was a miracle entirely. We can surely establish that Jesus came back to life using the tools of historical inquiry. And this holds regardless of whether or not historians can identify the event as a miracle. As Lacona puts it, "Historians must often leave the cause of an event unanswered. But this does not prohibit them from drawing historical conclusions. Historians are certain that Carlan died in AD 771, although they are uncertain whether his brother Charlemagne had him murdered or he died of natural causes. In a similar way, historians could conclude that Jesus rose from the dead without deciding on a cause for this event. They can answer the what, what happened without answering the how, how it happened or why, why it happened." Urman himself actually even admits this saying "it is in theory possible even to say that Jesus was crucified and buried and then he was seen alive bodily afterward. A historian could in theory argue this point without appealing to divine causality. That is without saying that God raised Jesus from the dead."

Turning now to Urman's second objection to believing in the resurrection. He contends that the resurrection narratives in the gospels are hopelessly contradictory, which for Urman casts doubt upon all of them. As he says, "We have already seen why the gospels are so problematic for historians who want to know what really happened. This is especially true for the gospel accounts of Jesus's resurrection. Are these the sorts of sources that historians would look for when examining a past event? Even apart from the fact that they were written 40 to 65 years after the facts by people who are not there to see these things happen, who are living in different parts of the world at different times and speaking different languages. Apart from all this, they are filled with discrepancies, some of which cannot be reconciled. In fact, the gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives."

Now, before we critically examine Urman's putative examples of contradictions between the narratives, I must make a preliminary methodological point. That being that contradictions between accounts in peripheral details support their independence, which actually should increase our confidence in the truth of the events upon which they demonstrate agreement. As Mark Pearson reminds us, "Before we see if attempts at harmonization require as much fudging as Urman imagines, an important point regarding historioggraphy needs to be made. The veracity of the core events in historical reports is not jeopardized when inconsistencies exist involving peripheral details that are of little significance. In other words, to think that apparent conflicts regarding relatively minor points of a narrative disprove the central facts is bad historioggraphy. This is especially the case when the sources have been shown to contain generally reliable data."

Four brief examples from history help illustrate this point. First, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides was bothered by the fact that not all written accounts of the Peloponnesian War were in agreement. Since he had served as a general during the war, however, these incongruities should not dissuade him from knowing whether the war occurred or who won. Second, the great fire of Rome in the first century was recounted by three primary sources which differ on some intriguing details. Despite the varied answers found in our sources, no serious historian would doubt that Rome actually burned. Third, survivors of the Titanic contradicted each other about whether the ship broke in two or remained intact. This may seem like a strange point of contention for eyewitnesses, but that the Titanic sunk was not disputed by anyone. Lastly, there is perhaps no recent historical event about which more disagreement exists than the death of President John F. Kennedy. And yet the chief event of Kennedy's assassination in Dallas via gunfire remains an accepted fact. The same principle of historioggraphy should be applied to the gospels. Virtually every question Urman raises about discrepancies in the Eastern narratives pertains to peripheral details. Yet, the core of each account lines up remarkably well with the others, thus strengthening their credibility on the central event of Jesus's resurrection.

But what of Urman's specific examples? Is it even true that the resurrection narratives are as contradictory as he claims? Urman gives us a list of his best examples as follows. "Read through the accounts and ask yourself some basic questions. Who was the first person to go to the tomb? Was it Mary Magdalene by herself, John, or Mary along with another Mary, Matthew, or Mary along with another Mary and Salome, Mark? Or Mary, Mary, Joanna, and a number of other women, Luke? Was the stone already rolled away when they arrived at the tomb, Mark, Luke, and John, or explicitly not? Whom did they see there? An"

Angel, Matthew, a man, Mark, or two men, Luke? Did they immediately go and tell some of the disciples what they had seen, John, or not? Matthew, Mark, and Luke? What did the person or people at the tomb tell the women to do? To tell the disciples that Jesus would meet them in Galilee, Matthew, and Mark, or to remember what Jesus had told them earlier when they had been in Galilee? Did the women then go tell the disciples what they were told to tell them, Matthew, Luke, and John, or not, Mark? Where did they see him? Only in Galilee, Matthew, or in Jerusalem, Luke?

There are other discrepancies, but this is enough to get the point across. This is a stock list of contradictions which are supposed to exist among the resurrection narratives of the gospels. However, let us remind ourselves that a contradiction requires two mutually incompatible propositions to be asserted as true at the same time and in the same sense. For man's list of contradictions to be genuine, these examples must be asserting genuine incompatibilities. In this next section, I argue that they are not necessarily incompatible. This territory has been fairly well trodden by other apologists, so I will endeavor to be as brief as I can.

First, how many women went to the tomb? The answer is that we don't know exactly how many because none of the gospels purports to be giving a full list. This fact also means that there isn't any contradiction here. A contradiction would only emerge if one of the gospels claimed to be giving the entire list and this list didn't contain some of the names on another list. Since this is not so, there is no contradiction. As Jake O'Connell puts it, "no gospel writer claims to give a complete list of the women who accompanied Mary Magdalene to the tomb. When for example, Matthew says the other Mary accompanied her, that does not mean that the other Mary was the only other person who accompanied her. And so he does not exclude Salome or the unspecified other women mentioned by Luke and the same is true for the other gospel writers."

Second, did the women witness the stone being rolled away from the tomb? Matthew would be the only gospel which might indicate that the women witnessed an angel rolling the stone away. In Matthew 28:1-2, we read, "In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. And behold, there was a great earthquake. For the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it." So given this translation, it definitely looks like the rolling away of the stone took place as the women were arriving at the tomb. However, the main verb of the sentence, "there was a great earthquake," is in the aorist indicative. The aorist can be used in a pluperfect sense to describe background events. The pluperfect rendering would imply that the stone had already been rolled away by the time the women arrived. In fact, the NASB translates the verse in this way as a pluperfect, saying, "Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the tomb, and behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it." And this translation finds support in Matthew 14:3 where the same verb must be rendered in the pluperfect. Given that this translation is at least as plausible as the translation man prefers, we cannot say that there has to be a contradiction here. As John Wenham argues, "On a superficial reading, it would seem that the great earthquake took place after the women had arrived and that the guards lay prostrate on the ground while the angel delivered his message. But on deeper reflection, it becomes clear that it is unlikely that Matthew intended his readers to understand this. The suggested picture is an incongruous one: the guards lying about like dead men while the women approach the dazzling angel. While the angel delivers his message outside the tomb, while he brings the women into the tomb and instructs them there, and while the women rush out of the garden, it is better to suppose that without spelling out the details, he intends his readers to understand that the soldiers left shortly before the women arrived. Often in the New Testament, the aorist tense needs to be rendered by an English pluperfect. So, Matthew 28:2-4 could be inserted in brackets and translated with no impropriety, 'and behold, there had been a great earthquake.' We may thus conclude that the earthquake took place before the arrival of any women, and that the terrified guards had already left by the time they arrived."

Third, how many men or angels did the women see at the tomb? Once again, none of the gospels purports to give an entire list. Presumably, the angels are described as men in Mark and in Luke because that is how they appeared. As Wenham says, "Although the figure is described simply as a young man, the whole scene is depicted as one of awe and fear, partly evoked by the nature of his white robe. He was a supernatural young man. In other words, he was an angel depicted as all biblical angels are, not as a winged creature, but as a man. Moreover, it was not uncommon for ancient Jews to describe angels in this way." As O'Connell points out, "it is plausible Mark thinks the young man was an angel is clear from the fact that the ancient Jewish sources often conceived of angels as young men and from the fact that the young man wore a white robe, which is the traditional garb of angels. Luke's mention of there being two of them entails that there was at least one. And this is all that Matthew and Mark's narratives require. Again, when Wenham rightly says, 'It should be said once and for all that the mention by one evangelist of two angels and by another of one does not constitute a contradiction or discrepancy. If there were two, then there was one.' When learned critics make heavy weather about the accuracy of such accounts, they lack common sense. And O'Connell further summarizes, 'Mark and Matthew do not say that there was only one angel. The fact that they only mention one angel does not mean that there were not two. Consequently, we are dealing with a difference here rather than a contradiction.'"

Fourth, what did the angels tell the women? Did they tell them that Jesus would meet them in Galilee or did they ask them to remember what Jesus had said to them in Galilee? I frankly don't see any reason why the angels couldn't have said both of these things. Again, this seems to be an example of a difference rather than a contradiction. And as Andrew Lok reminds us, "differences are not the same as contradictions. Differences can be understood as complimentary rather than contradictory."

Fifth, did the women tell the disciples what they had seen or not? I think the answer is clearly that they did. Mark's reference to them saying nothing to anyone can perfectly sensibly be interpreted as Mark saying that they told no one on their way to tell the disciples. Such an interpretation is more than justified by context. As O'Connell observes, "it is certainly plausible that when Mark says that the women said nothing to anyone, he means that they said nothing to anyone as they were on their way back from the tomb, but that they did say something to the disciples once they reached them. This is suggested by two facts. First, it is not likely that the women would disobey a command of an angel, and the angel had commanded them to tell the disciples. Second, earlier in Mark, there is a very similar verse in which Jesus tells the leper he has just healed, 'say nothing to anyone,' but then says, 'Go show yourself to the priest.' Clearly, the leper was only to say nothing to anyone on his way back. But once he reached the priest, he would have to say something."

Sixth, did Jesus only appear to the disciples in Galilee or in Jerusalem? The answer seems to me that he appeared to them in both locations. According to Luke, the disciples did not believe the women until Jesus appeared to them at Jerusalem. Matthew doesn't tell us anything about what transpired between when the women told the disciples what they had seen and when they left to meet Jesus in Galilee. So, a plausible reconstruction of these events would be that the women told the disciples what they had seen. The disciples did not believe the women until Jesus appeared to them at Jerusalem, after which they obeyed his command to go to Galilee and saw him there. Again, this can easily be seen as a case of Luke filling in some details which Matthew had left out. There is no necessary contradiction here. Moreover, it fits the known travel patterns for ancient Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem. As O'Connell notes, "appearances in Galilee, then Jerusalem, and then again in Galilee are exactly what we should expect. If the disciples did what pilgrims to Jerusalem often did, go up to Jerusalem for Passover, then return to their hometowns, in the case of the disciples, Galilee, for about 40 days, and then return to Jerusalem for Pentecost. We would thus have no trouble postulating that there were appearances in both Galilee and Jerusalem and that Matthew and Mark chose to relate only the appearances in Galilee while Luke chose to relate only the appearances in Jerusalem. Indeed, given how elegantly my reconstruction of events has the movements of the disciples fit the known patterns for pilgrims to Jerusalem at this time? And given that this correspondence is not directly suggested by any of the gospels themselves, but rather is demanded by a consistent reading of them, I think we are more than licensed in saying that my reconstruction is historically plausible. The correspondence confirms that this sort of movement on the part of the apostles would have actually happened. It is not just a case of finding a way to make the biblical texts consistent with each other."

Man does anticipate this move but says that it is impossible because in Luke Jesus commands the disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they receive the Holy Spirit, which they don't receive until Acts 2. This would straightforwardly preclude them from leaving Jerusalem to meet him in Galilee. However, that command is issued in the context of Jesus telling his disciples to preach the gospel to all nations. The command to tarry in Jerusalem until they receive the Holy Spirit means that they are not to begin spreading the gospel to all of the nations from Jerusalem until they receive the Holy Spirit. The command doesn't mean that they couldn't briefly leave Jerusalem for any reason. And this can be clearly seen in Luke's own narrative since in the very next verse, we see that Jesus did indeed take his disciples out of Jerusalem and into Bethany for his ascension. If we adopted man's wooden literalism to interpret Jesus's command to tarry in Jerusalem in verse 49, then we would have to conclude that Jesus was forcing his disciples to break his own command just one verse later. By contrast, my reading of this command makes perfect sense of Luke's narrative in context while also rendering it consistent with Matthew's narrative. And even if we adopted man's hyperliteral interpretation, O'Connell suggests another possibility saying, "it is not clear that the words of Jesus were uttered in 24:49 were said on Easter day. For it is plausible that these words are actually said 40 days after Easter and thus after the Galilean appearance had already taken place. It becomes clear that this is a possibility once we realize that there is a time gap somewhere in between Luke 24:36-53. Luke seems to say in his gospel that the ascension took place on Easter. Jesus ascends in 24:50-53. And this event appears to happen right after Jesus's words in 24:44-49. And those words appear to have been said at the time of Jesus's appearance to the 12 on Easter day. But though all this seems to take place on one day, this cannot actually be the case. For in Acts 1, Luke tells us the ascension took place 40 days after Jesus's resurrection. Thus, unless Luke blatantly contradicted himself, the events of 24:36-53 could not all have taken place on Easter day since that would require that the ascension took place on Easter day instead of 40 days later. Therefore, there must be a time gap somewhere in these verses."

I have had to be brief in my discussion of these supposed contradictions. I hope that I have at least shown that the narratives do not have to be in conflict with one another. There is a reasonable way to read them such that they complement one another. As Pearson concludes, "while not everyone will be satisfied with these proposed solutions, they are enough to show that the apparent conflicts are nowhere near as impossible to reconcile as man makes them seem. They are merely differences, not contradictions, each of which involves minor points of secondary importance."

Man's theory is that the disciples had visionary experiences of the risen Jesus, which convinced them that Jesus had risen from the dead. He denies that there was an empty tomb because he doesn't believe that Jesus was ever buried in a tomb. As he explains, "I should stress that it was visions and nothing else that led the first disciples to believe in the resurrection. Frequently, it is stated that a combination of things led to this faith: the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus. My view is that an empty tomb had nothing to do with it."

Man objects to the reality of the empty tomb on the basis of this not being the norm for victims of crucifixion. Typically victims of crucifixion were either left on their crosses to be eaten by animals or else thrown into a mass grave, and so the same thing probably happened to Jesus. For this reason, he deems the empty tomb to be improbable, as he explains: "My view is now that we do not know and cannot know what actually happened to Jesus's body. But it is absolutely true that as far as we can tell from all the surviving evidence, what normally happened to a criminal's body is that it was left to decompose and serve as food for scavenging animals. Crucifixion was meant to be a public disincentive to engage in politically subversive activities. And the disincentive did not end with the pain and death. It continued on and the ravages worked on the corpse afterward. My second reason for doubting that Jesus received a decent burial is that at the time criminals of all sorts were, as a rule, tossed into common graves. It's possible that Jesus was an exception, but our evidence that this might have been the case must be judged to be rather thin. People who are crucified were usually left on their crosses as food for scavengers, and part of the punishment for ignominious crimes was being tossed into a common grave where very soon one decomposed body could not be distinguished from another. My third reason for doubting the burial tradition has to do with the Roman rule of Judea at the time. Pilate was not a beneficent prefect who kindly listened to the protests of the people he governed. Was Pilate the sort of ruler who would break with tradition and policy when kindly asked by a member of the Jewish council to provide a decent burial for a crucified victim? Not from what we can tell."

I suppose that the most that can be said in favor of man's argument is that if he is correct, then this does provide some level of inductive evidence against the empty tomb. Some scholars have responded that man is overstating his case here. For example, Craig Evans suggests that we don't actually know what typically happened to the corpses of crucifixion victims, saying, "In fact, we are not sure how normal leaving the corpse on the cross unburied was in the Roman Empire. That it often happened is not in dispute, but the evidence is more variegated than man and others have assumed." Man also overlooks the fact that there is actually no evidence whatsoever that the throwing of people into mass graves was ever practiced in Israel. As O'Connell points out, "the evidence indicates that mass graves were a Roman phenomenon. Jews did not bury their dead in this way. There is no archaeological evidence for such graves in Israel and no one has ever found any literary references to them. It is not surprising that this form of burial was not practiced in Israel given the importance which Jews ascribed to burial."

Evans presents some examples of known crucifixion victims who were allowed a decent burial. This serves to show that man's general inductive argument against the burial of Jesus in a tomb is already pretty weak since we independently know that what the gospels say happened to Jesus is not without precedent. Evans gives an example from the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, saying, "An interesting passage that bears on this question is found in Josephus in his account of the malevolence and demise of Flaccus the governor of Egypt. Josephus complains of the insults visited on the recently appointed Agrippa I when he visited Alexandria: the desecration of synagogues, the looting of Jewish homes, and the flogging and crucifixion of some of the Jewish counselors on the day of the emperor's birthday, no less. The fact that these poor men were crucified and then denied burial on a day when normally mercy is shown only underscores the brutality and callousness of the governor's behavior." Man thinks this passage offers no support for the New Testament Gospels report that Pilate permitted the body of Jesus to be taken down from the cross and be properly buried. Had Jesus been crucified in Alexandria, man's point would be well taken. But Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem in the land of Israel where very different political and religious factors were in play. What is important in the Flaccus passage for the matter at hand is that this sorry incident demonstrates that it was in fact Roman practice under various circumstances to permit bodies of the crucified to be taken down and be buried. If there was no such Roman practice, this part of Josephus's complaint loses all force.

Evans also gives an example from Josephus, saying, "it is simply erroneous to assert that the Romans did not permit the burial of the executed, including the crucified. Bodies were in fact released to those who requested them. Josephus himself makes this request of Titus, son of Vespasian, and Titus granted it. Of course, Roman authorities often did not permit burial, request or no request, especially in cases of high treason. But crucifixion, especially during peace time, just outside the walls of Jerusalem, was another matter. Given Jewish sensitivities and customs, burial would have been expected, even demanded." Evans argues that Josephus indicates that crucifixion victims were regularly buried in Judea prior to the Jewish uprising in 66 AD based upon a passage in The Jewish War 3:3:317. As Evans explains, "In his account of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, Josephus vents against the Idominian rebels who murdered some of the ruling priests and then did not see to the proper burial of their bodies. The actions of the rebels is not of interest in the present discussion. Rather, it is what Josephus says about the expectations of burial: 'the statement that the Jews are so careful about funeral rights that even malefactors who have been sentenced to crucifixion are taken down and buried before sunset' is in reference to peace time before the Jewish rebellion erupted in AD 66. However people died, whether by execution, misadventure or natural causes, the Jewish people buried the dead, Jewish or gentile, saint or sinner. Even if crucified by the authority of Rome, the dead were buried." And from these observations, he concludes, "In short, there is nothing irregular about the gospels' report that a member of the Sanhedrin requested permission to take down the body of Jesus and give it proper burial in keeping with Jewish burial practices as they related to the executed. It is entirely in keeping with all that we know from the literature and from archaeology."

But the evidence is not restricted to testimonial evidence. There is also archaeological evidence that victims of crucifixion were sometimes allowed respectful burials in tombs. The most striking example of this would be an ossuary containing the bones of one Jehohanan son of Hagkol discovered in 1968 by the archaeologist Vasilios Zaferis. This discovery was notable because the heelbone was pierced by an iron nail, showing that Jehohanan had both been a victim of crucifixion and also that he had been allowed a proper burial. So the idea that this would have been allowed for Jesus as well is not without precedent. Furthermore, the bones were dated to the time of Pilate's governorship, which calls into question man's claim that this is something which Pilate never would have allowed. Mark Pearson puts this point sharply but accurately when he says, "In 1968, the bones of an ancient Jewish male were found inside of an ossuary, a container for skeletal remains with an iron spike still protruding from his right heelbone and a piece of wood adhering to the spike. Clearly, he had died on a cross. Since ossuaries were used to gather up the bones of someone whose flesh had decayed after being buried, this specimen provides tangible evidence that burial was permitted at times for victims of crucifixion. Furthermore, the ossuary and its contents date to the late AD 20s, which is when Pilate himself was governor. Pilate then, having condemned this individual to a cross like he did Jesus, must also have granted permission for the interment."

Man is aware of this archaeological evidence, but conveniently omits it when arguing that Jesus would not have been interred. Based on this and other glaring oversights, his conjecture about the early creed, and his unconvincing case against the gospels as reliable sources, man's dismissal of Jesus's burial flies in the face of the historical record. But even granting man's claim that victims of crucifixion were typically left on the cross or tossed into a mass grave, very general inductive arguments like this one are pretty easy to override when there is specific evidence supporting the reality of something unusual or atypical. And when it comes to the burial of Jesus, this is absolutely the situation we are in. Since Jesus was far from typical even by man's skeptical lights, it shouldn't be terribly surprising that his burial was not typical. The specific testimonial evidence that Jesus was buried in a tomb is just overwhelmingly clear. All of the gospels agree on this much. And given that man takes the supposed disagreements among the resurrection narratives to be such strong evidence against their trustworthiness when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, he should presumably take their complete agreement on Jesus's burial by Joseph of Arimathea to indicate their trustworthiness. On this point, Jake O'Connell observes, "The empty tomb is attested by all four gospels, which means we have four sources attesting to the event. It might be objected that the four sources are not independent of each other. However, Matthew, Luke, and John all have information concerning the empty tomb, which is not found in Mark, and thus they must have had other sources for the empty tomb. Hence, we do have four different sources. Even Paul directly says that Jesus was buried in 1 Corinthians 15." Hence, even granting some weight to man's broad inductive argument against the burial of Jesus, all of the specific evidence points in the other direction and simply overrides the inductive case against Jesus's burial.

Much has been made of the fact that women are reported as being the first to discover the empty tomb in the Gospels. William Lane Craig, for example, has argued that the testimony of women was not considered trustworthy by ancient Jews. And so, it is unlikely that women would be invented as the first witnesses to the empty tomb. As he says, "The women are used as witnesses of the crucifixion, burial, and empty tomb. Unless they actually were the witnesses, it seems inexplicable why they should be used and not the disciples themselves. Given the low status of women in Jewish society and their lack of qualification to serve as legal witnesses, the most plausible explanation in light of the gospel's conviction that the disciples were in Jerusalem over the weekend why women and not the male disciples were made discoverers of the empty tomb is that the women were in fact the ones who made this discovery. This conclusion receives confirmation from the fact that there seems to be no reason why the later Christian church should wish to humiliate its leaders by having them hiding in cowardice in Jerusalem while the women boldly carry out their last devotions to Jesus's body unless this were in fact the truth."

I myself tend to think that Craig and most other apologists have made far too much of this fact, chiefly because the gospels are not presenting the testimony of these women as evidence for the reality of the empty tomb. There is nothing in the text to suggest that we, the readers, are supposed to believe in the empty tomb based upon the witness of these women. They are simply included as part of the narrative. As man replies, "The first thing to point out is that we are not talking about a Jewish court of law in which witnesses are being called to testify. We're talking about oral traditions about the man Jesus." Still, even if some apologists overplay their hand on this front, it doesn't follow that there is no evidential significance in this fact. While we can't say that it is absolutely unthinkable that anyone should have ever invented women as the first to discover the empty tomb, they are also not the sort of people we would have expected to be invented for this role. So the presence of women does provide some evidence favoring the historicity of the empty tomb even if their inclusion is not a slam dunk. As Timothy and Lydia McGrew conclude, "The point should not be overstated, for there are disagreements reported in the Talmud regarding the degree of credibility to be granted to the testimony of women. Nevertheless, it would plainly be better from the standpoint of enhancing the credibility of a contrived story to put a group of respectable males at the tomb and as the first to see the risen Christ than a group of women."

So to sum all of that up then, since the idea that victims of crucifixion were allowed to be buried is not without precedent, and all of the sources which specifically discuss this claim that this happened to Jesus's body, I conclude that whatever force man's general inductive argument against this may have is simply overcome by counter-evidence in favor of Jesus's burial in a tomb.

In conclusion, this section has examined Bart Ehrman's three-point case against believing in the resurrection on the basis of historical evidence. We have seen that Ehrman's claim that historians cannot make appeals to miracles is both unmotivated and, for the purposes of this video, irrelevant. I have endeavored to show that Ehrman has grossly overstated the degree to which the resurrection narratives conflict with one another. In each case, it has been seen that there is a plausible harmonization. And finally, we have seen that Ehrman's case against the historicity of the empty tomb is not very strong and overlooks several pertinent pieces of evidence.

One of the most popular critics of resurrection apologetics, at least within the online sphere, is Richard Carrier. I feel compelled here to mention that Carrier has a PhD since his fans will whine and complain about it in the comments if I don't. Carrier's approach to arguing against the resurrection is in some respects similar to Ehrman's and is in other respects quite different. Carrier's article, "The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb," is well over 100 pages long and represents his basic approach to dismissing the significance of the New Testament evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. In short, Carrier's hypothesis involves the idea that Paul is our earliest source for the resurrection of Jesus. For Carrier, Paul had some type of hallucination which, in conjunction with his own questionable readings of the Hebrew scriptures, convinced him that Jesus had risen from the dead. As he explains, "I believe the best explanation consistent with both scientific findings and the surviving evidence is that the first Christians experienced hallucinations of the risen Christ of one form or another." However, Carrier does not believe that Paul thought of this as a resurrection of the same body which Jesus inhabited on earth. The body remained in the tomb and decomposed there. Rather, for Carrier, Paul thought of Jesus's soul as receiving a spiritual or non-physical body in heaven. The gospels then represent an evolving legend where certain Christians began interpreting the resurrection body as a physical body, and the empty tomb was an idea which naturally grew out of this general trend of development. As he explains, "The evidence suggests that the first Christians, at least up to and including Paul, thought Christ's soul was taken up to heaven and clothed in a new body after leaving his old body in the grave forever. The subsequent story that Jesus actually walked out of the grave with the same body that went into it, leaving an empty tomb to astonish all, was probably a legend that developed over the course of the first century, beginning with a metaphorical empty tomb in the Gospel of Mark, most likely written after Paul's death."

Most of the discussion surrounding Carrier's hypothesis has centered on the idea that Paul thought of Jesus's resurrected body as being non-physical. In particular, there is much debate regarding the merits of his reading of Paul's statement that the resurrection body is a spiritual body in 1 Corinthians 15:44. The question regards whether or not Paul means to say that the resurrected body is not physical when he describes it as spiritual. Does his contrast between a natural body and a spiritual body contrast the metaphysical composition of these bodies? The answer is probably negative. James Pear summarizes the basic difficulties with this reading as follows: "One, there is no evidence in Paul's letters that the notion of spirit-matter had any place in his thought and such a notion has no connections to Paul's thought elsewhere. Two, the notion that verse 44 introduces the concept of a new body distinct in substance from the body sown in death misunderstands the structure of Paul's syntax in this verse. The implied grammatical subject of the verbs in verse 44 is the mortal fleshly body that is sown in decay but thereafter raised to immortal life and thus describes two contrasting modes of existence of this same body: one prior to the resurrection and the other following the resurrection. Three, the understanding of this body as involving a body composed of spirit, distinct in substance from the fleshly body, entirely ignores the actual lexical meaning and usage within Paul and within the wider ancient world of the key terms in question. This view is thus routinely bedeviled by the gratuitous assumption that the contrast Paul draws in 15:44 is that of flesh and spirit." Additionally, earlier in 1 Corinthians 2:14-15, Paul contrasted the natural man with the spiritual man, by which he seems to be referencing unbelievers and believers. Presumably, Paul is not intending to convey that believers have immaterial bodies simply because he describes them as being spiritual. As Mike Licona puts it, "it is clear here that Paul is not contrasting physical beings with ethereal ones. Rather, he is contrasting those governed or animated by their fleshly and sinful desires and who think in accordance with the world's wisdom with those governed by holy desires and heavenly wisdom centered on God. In other words, when employing the terms natural and spiritual, Paul is not referring to the substance of the old and new bodies, but rather their mode of existence."

While I appreciate scholars like Wear and Licona who have criticized Carrier's idea that Paul did not believe the resurrected body was physical, and I think that they are right that Carrier is misreading Paul, there is a serious risk involved in letting the debate focus on this point. That risk is that it lets Carrier choose the battlefield by giving off the impression that the case for the resurrection must be primarily based on 1 Corinthians 15. Since my preferred argument for the resurrection privileges the testimony of the gospels, this affords me an opportunity to present another way of responding to Carrier's arguments, which is constantly overlooked and, in my view, much more robust.

In addition to the heavy focus on Carrier's spiritual resurrection hypothesis, many objections to Carrier have focused on the adequacy of hallucinations to explain the resurrection appearances. For example, in his nearly 400-page critique of Carrier, S. Ross Hickling devotes more than 100 pages to objecting to the adequacy of hallucinations to account for the multi-sensory appearances of Jesus to multiple people at a time and even to skeptical individuals like Thomas, according to the gospels. As Hickling explains, "in regard to the way in which Jesus Christ was experienced after his resurrection in line with other religious traditions. If Jesus was experienced as a hallucination by the disciples, then he would have appeared in a glorious form. However, the risen Jesus Christ is nowhere depicted as having a glowing or grand appearance that those viewing him would be in awe of. Instead of this, it is observed that the appearance of Jesus in bodily form is altogether ordinary. The disciple Thomas, who did not believe that Jesus Christ had arisen from the dead, was convinced that it was Jesus after he encountered him. This is relevant to Carrier's discussion regarding hallucinating disciples, as Thomas did not even believe that Jesus Christ had arisen from the dead. So if Thomas did not believe that the other disciples had seen the risen Jesus Christ already, then how would he be predisposed in a group setting to hallucinate the risen Jesus Christ?"

But for all the good points which Hickling makes, they are simply misplaced against Carrier. For Carrier does not grant that the resurrection appearances, as they are described in the Gospels, ever actually occurred. Those are not the sorts of appearances which his hallucination hypothesis is intended to explain. Rather, Carrier intends for hallucinations to partially account for the initial belief of Paul. Paul's resurrection experience is insulated from the sort of defense Hickling is offering since Paul doesn't provide us with any details about what his experience was like. The gospel accounts, in Carrier's view, are later legendary developments rather than the testimony of eyewitnesses. As he says, "it is also possible that Matthew relates an actual hallucinatory experience, but we need not assume this. Either way, the passage offers no proof that Matthew's appearance tradition derives from any real encounter with a flesh and bone Jesus. The appearance tradition in Matthew is highly stylized. If Matthew is drawing on or reworking any actual appearance tradition, then the tradition contained no real support for a resurrection of the flesh."

So, having clarified what exactly Carrier's hypothesis says, we are better positioned to see which premise of my argument for the resurrection is targeted. Carrier, like Ehrman, objects to the second premise. He contests that the gospel accounts cannot be relied upon as evidence for the resurrection because they do not come from people who were in a position to know whether or not Jesus was physically raised from the dead. Carrier's objection to the use of the gospels depends critically on the assumption that they are late and legendary. Without that, he cannot legitimately limit the scope of the discussion to the writings of Paul. So rather than following in the long line of scholars who have critiqued Carrier on the grounds that Paul did not believe in a spiritual resurrection, I will instead focus on Carrier's case for the gospels being late and unreliable. While I do think that Carrier is wrong in how he interprets Paul, this territory has been well trodden by others. By instead focusing on Carrier's attempts to remove the Gospels from the discussion, I will be able to pioneer a different sort of response to Carrier and thereby contribute something original to the discussion.

Carrier begins his discussion of why we should discount the Gospels from serious consideration by offering a scattershot of common skeptical objections pertaining to the sources of the Gospels. He writes, "In the generation after Paul, someone wrote what was probably the first ever account of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Tradition has assigned that book to an unknown author named Mark. According to legend, Peter's scribe. It is not known when the book was written. Most scholars believe it was sometime around 70 CE, give or take a decade. But it is clear that Paul knew nothing of the work. So, we can be fairly certain it was not circulating when he was alive. Yet, this gospel contains the first known appearance of an empty tomb story. All other accounts rely on it and basically just embellish it or modify it to suit each author's own narrative and ideological agenda. As nearly all scholars agree, Matthew and Luke clearly used Mark as their source, repeating the same elements in the same order and often using identical vocabulary and word order, not only for this story but for the whole gospel. And though John does not directly use Mark as a source, it is probable his account ultimately derives from it. Beyond mere conjecture, there is no indication any of them had any other source of information for the changes and additions they make."

So I count four distinct objections here: First, the gospel authors are unknown. Second, the gospels must be late because Paul never cites any of them. Third, Matthew, Luke, and John are just embellishments of Mark. And fourth, the gospel authors had no sources of information beyond Mark. Let's consider each one.

First, in my video, "Who Wrote the Gospels? The Case for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John," I offered a detailed case against Carrier's claim that the authors of the Gospels are unknown. All Carrier has to say in defense of this is that the attribution of Mark as being Peter's scribe is legendary. But the earliest source for this is Papias of Hieropolis, who was writing, as I argued in my video on the historical reliability of Acts, as early as the '90s AD. Since Carrier dates Mark to around 70 AD, we are dealing with a period of only 20 to 30 years. Moreover, I have argued that Papias knew the apostles themselves. Hence, we have no reason whatsoever to conclude that the attribution of the second gospel to Mark is legendary. And the same is true of the other gospels.

Second, Carrier suggests that the gospels must be late because Paul never cites Mark, and he assumes that the other gospels are later than Mark. So if Mark was written after the writings of the Apostle Paul, then so are the other gospels. But even if we granted this point in its entirety, nothing particularly significant follows from it. Recall that Paul would have likely died sometime in between 64 and 68 AD. So even if all of the gospels are written after this, that doesn't automatically place them outside of the lives of their purported authors. In other words, it doesn't automatically make them too late to be trusted as sources. Furthermore, it can be disputed that Paul does not cite any of the gospels. For example, in 1 Corinthians 11:23-2, Paul says, "For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.'" These words closely match Jesus's words as recorded in Luke 22:18-20. It is not impossible to suppose that Paul is directly quoting from Luke's gospel. He does claim, after all, to have received this information from somewhere prior to teaching it to the Corinthian church. As Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy observe, "No one disputes that Paul's words here strongly parallel the account of the Last Supper found in all four gospels, especially Luke's. The text itself suggests Paul is relying on traditional material. He introduces his material with standard Jewish terminology for receiving and handing over sacred tradition. This suggests that Paul was passing on material that had been passed on to him by others. In this light, when Paul says he received from the Lord this teaching, it seems most natural to take him to be referring to his conviction that this traditional material goes back to the Lord's own words and actions. Through the tradition now being mediated through Paul, the Corinthians were receiving from the Lord the teaching about the Last Supper." This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that Paul's words betray a wholly fixed verbal form, as is seen when compared with Luke 22:19-20. This is all the more plausible if, as some scholars have suggested, Paul is referring to the Gospel of Luke when he uses the phrase "according to my gospel" throughout his epistles. Since Luke is traditionally thought to have been a companion of Paul, and since I take the evidence to be strong that Luke authored the third gospel, there is a compelling alternative to viewing this connection between 1 Corinthians 11 and Luke 22 as a mere coincidence.

Additionally, some scholars have thought that Paul's eschatological statements in 1 and 2 Thessalonians may show dependence upon Matthew 24. Similarities in themes as well as the phenomenon of distinctively Matthean vocabulary turning up in Paul here are highly suggestive. As Bernard Orchard argues, "Preceding from attaching any specific dates to any of the gospels, but being open to the possibility of early dating, the evidence will be outlined here for Paul's use of the literary tradition as found in our Greek Matthew. The case of First and Second Thessalonians offer the best and clearest example of Paul's adaptation of the eschatological teaching found chiefly in Matthew. In Matthew 23-25 and in the eschatological section of both letters, we find the same teaching, the same metaphors and similes, and the same key words, some exceedingly rare. Paul is seen to utilize the same key words and the same illustrations that Matthew uniquely uses with regard to the suddenness of the coming of the Lord: like a thief in the night, like the sudden birth pangs, like the sudden arrival of the bridegroom, like the sudden coming of the flood while life was going on normally, a coming in power and glory, with the angels, and with the sound of a great trumpet. Other powerful supporting reminiscences of Matthew are found in Galatians and First Corinthians. Of course, it is certain that Paul made full use of Old Testament eschatological imagery, but some extra details that he himself adds are found together only in Matthew and argue strongly for his firsthand knowledge of it." And in his excellent book, *The Sayings of Jesus in the Churches of Paul*, David Dunan argues extensively that Matthean and Lukan themes can be found throughout the Pauline corpus. He suggests that the evidence here is just as strong as for supposing that various New Testament books influenced many of the Petristic writers. As he explains, "Although a Tertullian and an Irenaeus may have succeeded most of the time in keeping their citations explicit and unscrambled, the same thing cannot be said for Justin Martyr or Second Clement or First Clement. In them, however, the degree of explicitness is clearly on the rise. But if we go back farther to someone like Polycarp or Ignatius or the Apostolic Fathers, we can see much less explicit citation of traditional material. The argument that Paul knew only a few sayings because he only mentions a few openly falls to the ground. And the numerous verbal correspondences between his text and those of the synoptic gospels as well as other more distantly related parallels in ethical exhortation show that Paul actually used or cited a considerable number of Jesus's teachings."

Now, of course, Carrier can try to argue that the dependence goes in the other direction. He might try to suggest that Matthew and Luke are drawing this information from Paul rather than the other way around. I'm not interested in pursuing that question right now. The point is just that Carrier cannot be too confident that Paul does not demonstrate knowledge of the gospels. This is far from a foregone conclusion.

Moving on to Carrier's third objection. He suggests that when we look at the resurrection narratives side by side in chronological order, we can actually see the story evolving by getting more fantastic with each new entry. As he says, "It cannot reasonably be doubted that the gospels exhibit legendary embellishments upon the basic story of Mark. However much you might quibble about which elements were invented, it is clear at least some were. Mark tells a simple story about a Sanhedrinist burying Jesus, women going to the tomb and finding it open, meeting a single boy in white, then running off. But by the time we get to Matthew, Joseph has become a disciple of Jesus who buried Jesus in his own new tomb. The boy has become an angel descending from heaven. The women experience a massive earthquake and watch the angel descend and open the tomb. And guards have been added to the story. There can be no doubt that we are looking at extensive legendary embellishment. We can see the same trend in the other two gospels. Luke, unaware of Matthew and less prone to the fabulous, also embellished the story received from Mark, though less excitingly. John borrowed some of the embellishments of Luke, but makes the story entirely his own."

Now, quite obviously, Carrier's objection here is entirely dependent upon his preferred synoptic theory. In particular, it depends upon the thesis of Markan priority. Regular viewers of this channel will know that I am quite skeptical of Markan priority. I have dedicated several videos to arguing for the thesis that Matthew was in fact the first gospel written and that Mark was actually the last of the synoptics to have been written. Clearly, if this sort of synoptic theory is correct, then there is not a clear evolution of the resurrection narrative. Instead, the level of detail in each narrative simply varies without any discernible evolutionary trajectory. This would increase the plausibility of the idea that the level of detail in each resurrection narrative is simply reflecting the

preferences of the respective authors rather than a growing legend. But even granting Mark and priority, we still don't have as clear a case of an evolving legend as Carrier would have you believe.

Of all the gospels, it is Matthew who has the most elaborate resurrection narrative, complete with an angel descending from heaven and an earthquake. Yet, even by Carrier's own reckoning, Matthew is only the second gospel to have been written. This already begins to shake up the smooth progression from less fantastic to more fantastic which Carrier would like you to believe exists among the resurrection narratives.

As David Wood points out in John, we find an impressive amount of fish in the net and Jesus appears in a locked room. Luke is more stunning with Jesus vanishing instantly and later ascending into heaven. Matthew is the most spectacular, however. He records a violent earthquake, an angel grabbing the stone and rolling it back, and several dead people coming back to life and roaming the streets of Jerusalem. Notice that the pattern of evolution proceeds in exactly the opposite direction required by this theory.

And Carrier's analysis ignores independent reasons to believe that the gospel authors are at least attempting to be historically accurate. If these reasons are taken seriously, then this further increases the likelihood that we are dealing with different preferences of the respective authors rather than a growing legend.

Turning now to Carrier's fourth objection. How can he possibly claim to know that the gospel authors had no sources of information beyond Mark? This certainly assumes that Matthew and John were not written by apostles of Jesus who would have had their own experiences from which to draw. But Carrier has done nothing to argue against this.

John in particular has a verse directly saying that it was authored by an apostle of Jesus in John 21:24. Carrier briefly addresses this by saying, "John claims to derive from an unnamed eyewitness, but only in a section of his gospel that looks like it was added by a different author." Now, I actually agree with Carrier that John 21:24 probably was added by another author, likely Papius, shortly after John's own death. And I defended such a hypothesis in my video on gospel authorship. But that does not change the fact that the verse directly says that the gospel was written by an eyewitness. Carrier's implication seems to be that this statement cannot be trusted if it did not come from the author's own hand. I frankly find it doubtful that Carrier would believe John was authored by an eyewitness even if John 21:24 were written by the same author as the rest of the gospel. In any case, this is at the very least evidence that the author of the fourth gospel did have access to information besides Mark. Minimally, this verse shows that the gospel was believed to have been written by an eyewitness from very early on. Carrier has not done anything to refute this.

And then what about the Gospel of Luke? Luke is explicit in his prologue that he has used other sources. Carrier is well aware of this, saying, "Luke does claim to have many sources, but does not say who or for what material, so this can be of no help here." But for Carrier to complain about the fact that Luke doesn't name his sources is to miss the point. Carrier's claim is that Luke has no access to sources beyond Mark for his resurrection narratives. This statement in Luke's prologue gives us at least some reason to believe that this is not true. Furthermore, Luke actually does tell us who his sources are, at least in a very broad way. He identifies his sources as being eyewitnesses. I would suggest that at least one of those eyewitness accounts is certainly the Gospel of Matthew.

Later in the article, Carrier asserts his conviction that Matthew and Luke are independent of one another, saying, "We can see the same trend in the other two gospels. Luke, unaware of Matthew and less prone to the fabulous, also embellished the story received from Mark, though less excitingly." It seems that in 2005 when the empty tomb was published, Carrier still affirmed something like the two source hypothesis where Matthew and Luke both independently used Mark and a lost source called Q. However, Carrier himself has not been able to sustain this. For as of at least 2017, Carrier has defended the Farer hypothesis, which explicitly asserts that Luke knew Matthew's gospel.

As Carrier says, what is simpler? That Matthew and Luke used two sources, one of whom we can only hypothesize the existence of, or that Matthew used one source and made the rest up, and Luke only used Mark and Matthew and made the rest up. The latter theory requires no ad hoc hypothetical sources. It relies solely on evidence and texts we actually have. It is therefore the much simpler hypothesis. And on top of that, it turns out unlike evidence for Q, there actually is concrete evidence Luke copied Matthew.

Carrier seems unaware of how this flies in the face of his explanation for how the resurrection narratives in the gospels emerged. His acceptance of the Farer hypothesis undercuts his evolutionary hypothesis in at least two ways. First, it refutes his claim that Luke was not working from any sources besides Mark. It entails that Luke was using Matthew as well. And if, as I have argued, Matthew was authored by an eyewitness, then this should increase our confidence in Luke's assertion in his prologue that he obtained his information from eyewitnesses. For in the one case where we can confirm his source, we can confirm that it was an eyewitness.

Second, the Farer hypothesis challenges Carrier's story about how the resurrection narratives grew with each subsequent installment. The earlier quotation, where Carrier expressed his prior belief that Luke was independent of Matthew, was intended to explain why Luke's narrative looked less fantastic than Matthews. The explanation was that Luke just didn't know about Matthew's embellishments, but he was still embellishing Mark. However, now that Carrier has acknowledged Luke's dependence upon Matthew, this excuse is no longer open to him. He has to come to terms with the fact that on his hypothesis, Luke had Matthew's greatly embellished version of Mark and yet chose to tell a less embellished version of the story. Needless to say, this doesn't square well with his idea that the resurrection story just kept growing as time went on.

To conclude, this section has reviewed Richard Carrier's case against the historicity of the resurrection. We have seen reason to doubt both his interpretation of Paul's doctrine of the resurrection as well as his story for how the resurrection narratives within the gospels came to fruition. Carrier does not justify his claim that we don't know who wrote the gospels. There are reasons to suspect that he is wrong about Paul being wholly ignorant about the gospel resurrection traditions. There are reasons to suspect that he is wrong about Paul being wholly ignorant about the gospel resurrection traditions. His claim that the resurrection narratives can be seen as an evolving legend do not actually fit the pattern which we find among them and his claim that the gospel authors had no reliable sources of information is simply unsustainable.

Michael Alter is a Jewish author who despite having no formal degrees in relevant fields so far as I can tell has made contributions to the resurrection debate that have been considered by many to be noteworthy. Alter is interesting because given his Jewish beliefs, he does not harbor any sort of bias against theistic explanations or against miracles, which makes him very different from a lot of other skeptics. As he explains, this text will accept as a premise several basic ideas or tenants. One, God exists. Two, the Hebrew Bible is God's revealed word. Three, miracles or supernatural events can and definitely do occur.

Alter has written a few books responding to Christian apologetics. Two of these offer direct interaction with arguments for the resurrection. By far, his most significant contribution to the debate is a 1,000-page tome titled The Resurrection, A Critical Inquiry. This volume has been hailed by many counter-apologists as a devastating bombshell on Christian apologetics. I have to confess that my opinion of Alter's work is considerably more negative. It is my opinion that Alter's book is sort of the counter-apologist equivalent to Gary Habermas's 4,000-page, four-volume work on the resurrection. Despite having a lot of pages, both also have very little valuable information per page. Despite online apologists acting as though Hob's volume is some sort of serious challenge for skeptics simply because of how long it is, there's nothing new or innovative in Habermas's overly long books. And similarly, despite online counter-apologists acting as though Alter's book is the death knell for the resurrection simply because of how long it is, there's nothing particularly challenging to be found here. In both cases, I strongly suspect that those who are most vocally championing these works by both Habermas and Alter have not actually read most of them. I, on the other hand, have read the three volumes of Habermas's book which have been released as of the time I am releasing this video. I have also read Alter's book on the resurrection and I can confidently say that neither of them justify being this lengthy.

Like the other skeptics we have engaged thus far, Alter rejects the second premise of my argument for the resurrection. He does not accept the credibility of the gospels. As he explains, "It is the position of this text that the gospels are not a biography and that they are not written to record history in the modern sense. These works were written approximately 30 to 70 years after Jesus's death and many of the witnesses were dying off or dead. Therefore, the Gospels tell the story of Jesus for a generation who did not know any eyewitnesses or have access to firsthand accounts of the Jesus tradition."

And why should we accept that the Gospels were written by people with no access to the real events? Alter's answer is less than satisfactory. Here's what he has to say. "How do we know that the authors of the Gospels are anonymous? Because the topic of the Gospels' authorship is important, this text will cite numerous excerpts of relatively recent publications in the category of introduction to the New Testament and the origin of New Testament manuscripts that challenges the position that the names penned to the four gospels are authentic." Alter then goes on for the next four pages offering quotations from several New Testament scholars expressing their belief that the gospels could not have been authored by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Were Alter merely trying to establish the uncontroversial thesis that most New Testament scholars do not affirm the traditional ascriptions of authorship, then this would be fine. But he is explicitly offering these quotations in answer to the question of how we supposedly know that the gospels are anonymous. And here it simply will not do to appeal to what most scholars believe without defending the adequacy of their reasons for holding this belief. This is a simple appeal to popularity fallacy. In my own videos on gospel authorship and gospel anonymity, I dealt with these scholarly arguments against traditional authorship in detail and showed why they fail. Alter's comments here do nothing to move the conversation forward. For a book of this length, it is disappointing how briefly Alter discusses this issue.

Alter's book might have more appropriately been titled The Big Book of Bible Contradictions, for the vast majority of his book is merely dedicated to detailing supposed contradictions in the New Testament. Alter seems hyper-fixated on the task of disproving biblical inerrancy. His book takes great pains to detail 120 Bible contradictions. I give him credit for engaging evangelical attempts to resolve these contradictions, but it seems to me that his extensive critique of biblical inerrancy is out of place in a book dedicated to examining the resurrection of Jesus. One can, after all, reject biblical inerrancy and still affirm the resurrection of Jesus.

Furthermore, Alter seems to misunderstand the doctrine of inerrancy as typically understood by Christians. He argues for three full pages that the many variations among the New Testament manuscripts refute the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. But the doctrine of inerrancy has never maintained that all copies of scripture are or always will be inherent. Rather, it claims that the original autographs were inherent and that Bibles today are only inherent in so far as they reflect those original autographs.

In my previous response to Bart Ehrman, I already addressed the most popular examples of putative contradictions between the resurrection narratives. Alter's book is largely a more comprehensive attempt at developing this general line of argument. Alter offers 120 purported contradictions within the New Testament. Obviously, I cannot delve into each and every one of them in this video, but more importantly, I don't really need to. Many of his examples, even if legitimate, seem irrelevant to the resurrection. For example, his 86th and 87th contradictions allegedly occur between Matthew and Acts. And his 120th contradiction allegedly occurs between the book of Galatians and Acts. But what exactly have these examples got to do with the resurrection? I would submit that the answer is precisely nothing.

More importantly, Alter doesn't even seem to know what a contradiction is. To illustrate, consider his first example of a contradiction. "Theologians, New Testament scholars, historians, standard reference sources, evangelicals, and even evangelical organizations are divided regarding the exact year Jesus was crucified and resurrected. It must be remembered that Christian apologists maintain that the year Jesus died and was resurrected is the most important and significant event in the history of mankind. Yet historians, scholars, and theologians alike cannot pinpoint when these two momentous events occurred." Apparently, our not being able to pinpoint the exact year of an event qualifies as a contradiction for Alter.

Alter himself notes that the New Testament doesn't actually tell us the year of the crucifixion other than that it took place within the tenure of Pontius Pilate. So how can there be a contradiction with respect to the year of Christ's death, something which entails two mutually exclusive affirmations when there is no scriptural affirmation whatsoever regarding the specific year? Alter spends numerous pages explaining and critiquing different proposed years which Christian apologists and scholars have proposed as being the year of Christ's death. Perhaps what he means is that there are contradictory theories regarding the year of Christ's death. But if so, then so what? That's not a contradiction in scripture, and it's certainly not an objection to the resurrection of Jesus. At best, all that follows from Alter's observations is that we can't say for sure which exact year Jesus died. But so what? Who has said that we can have certainty on that matter? Why would we need to know the exact year in order to know that the resurrection occurred?

Alter's reasoning seems to be that since the death and resurrection of Jesus would be the most important events to have ever occurred, we ought to be able to know the year in which they happened. But it's simply not clear to me that we should be able to know that, and even less clear why knowing the year would be relevant to assessing the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Should we also expect to know what the exact world population was at the moment of the resurrection just because it was the most significant event to have ever occurred? Should we expect to be able to determine the exact number of seashells on the face of the earth at the moment of the resurrection just because it was the most important event of all time? No. Then why should we expect to know the exact year? The significance of an event does not necessarily correlate with the amount of information which we can expect to have about it. One would have thought that this was obvious.

Taking his cue from Bart Ehrman, Alter also consistently blunders into the same mistake of assuming that differences are the same as contradictions. His second example of a contradiction regards the garments which the synoptic gospels claim that people were laying down in front of Jesus and the donkey he was riding to welcome him into Jerusalem. As he explains, "Prior to Jesus's entry into Jerusalem, Mark 11:7-8, Matthew 21:7-8, and Luke 19:35-36 report that an unknown number of people laid down their heat in Greek outer garments or clothing on both the colt and on the ground for Jesus's donkey to walk on as it carried Jesus. In contrast, John omitted any reference to people laying down their clothing on the ground for Jesus." So, what's the contradiction? Well, as best I can tell, it's supposed to be that the synoptic gospels mention the laying down of the garments, whereas the Gospel of John does not. I trust that it is obvious that this is not actually a contradiction. Contradictions take the form of an affirmation that P and not P are true at the same time and in the same sense. But John merely does not mention the garments. He doesn't deny that this happened. So where is the contradiction?

Alter sort of anticipated this type of response earlier in part one of the book, but his preemptive response amounts to saying that if we would expect a gospel writer to include some details which are absent, then it still counts as a contradiction. As he explains, "Omissions can at times be considered contradictions when the missing material is highly relevant and significant. Numerous times this text will present contradictions which fall under the Christian apologist's rubric of omission." But this is no response at all. Again, the necessary and sufficient condition for a contradiction is an affirmation of both P and not P. This is not present, indeed, can't possibly be present in a situation where certain details are simply not mentioned. Alter's response amounts to an admission that he has no idea what a contradiction actually is.

Alter proceeds to argue against the plausibility of this event having ever happened, given that we can hardly imagine that these Jews were stripping down buck naked in public and that they surely were not carrying extra clothing just for this event since clothing was so expensive and hard to come by back then. As he says, "The description of people laying down their clothing is dubious. First, either the 12 disciples or these non-disciples were literally stripping down to their undergarments and placing their clothing on the colt and on the road or they were carrying an extra set of outwear for this specific purpose. Second, it must be remembered that in those days, people did not have numerous sets of clothes." Alter just doesn't consider the possibility that this is most likely a reference to people taking off their coats or outer tunics as opposed to everyone stripping nude or down to their underwear. But more fundamentally, even if he's right that this event never happened, this doesn't establish a contradiction as he claims. Fictional events are not the same thing as contradictions.

Timothy and Lydia McGrew rightly say, "The number of alleged discrepancies in the gospels is greatly exaggerated by a free use of the argumentum ex silentio. If an author does not mention some piece of information, it is too often assumed that he was unaware of it or even that he positively believed the contrary. Such arguments from silence are pervasive in New Testament scholarship, but they are tenuous at best. By such reasoning, we can easily find contradictions even in the writings of one and the same historian as when Josephus mentions facts in his Antiquities that we might have expected him to repeat in his Jewish Wars. When we extend it to the comparison of multiple authors who treat of the same subject, the results are ridiculous. The moral to be drawn is that it is a risky business to speculate upon the motives of authors for including or omitting various facts."

It's also unclear what bearing Alter's second example of a contradiction has on the resurrection of Jesus, since Alter isn't all that clear on what the significance of his list of 120 contradictions is in the first place. Is he targeting the minimal facts argument where gospel reliability doesn't factor into the argument anyway? If so, why bring up contradictions at all? Is he targeting the maximalist approach? If so, then why has he completely ignored the positive arguments for gospel reliability? And why aren't the most prominent contemporary proponents of this approach so much as cited or mentioned? The book often reads more like a 1,000-page stream of consciousness rather than a well-thought-out case against the historicity of the resurrection.

The vast majority of the supposed contradictions which Alter cites can be explained by recourse to the differing perspectives of the eyewitnesses or the differing preferences and emphases of the different gospel authors. As N.T. Wright says, "The stories exhibit exactly that surface tension, which we associate not with tales artfully told by people eager to sustain a fiction and therefore anxious to make everything look right, but with the hurried, puzzled accounts of those who have seen with their own eyes something which took them horribly by surprise, and with which they have not yet fully come to terms."

Alter replies to remarks like Wright's by saying, "The shortfall with this Christian apologetic is that one, not all the writers were eyewitnesses to the account. Two, the narratives were written approximately 30 to 70 years after the events. Three, at least Luke admitted in his preface that he was reporting hearsay. Four, the writings are believed to be the result of an evolving oral tradition. And five, the writings are biased, written to evangelize and spread their theological propaganda." But to the extent that these are problems at all, they are problems of Alter's own making. I don't agree with him that none of the gospels were written by eyewitnesses. I don't date the Gospels as late as he does. And even if I did, it remains unclear what that has to do with the plausibility that the gospels often reflect different perspectives. Luke says that he got his information from eyewitnesses. He does not claim that it is hearsay. I do not believe that the gospels are the result of an evolving oral tradition. And I don't think the evangelistic purposes of the authors does anything to undercut the idea that they sometimes reflect different perspectives. These are only problems if one accepts Alter's views on what the gospels are. But the defender of the resurrection has been given no reason to think that Alter is right about these points.

As I said, I simply cannot go through each and every example of a purported contradiction which Alter puts forward in this video. But I think that what I have said here is sufficient to show that his list is artificially bloated to the point that skeptics cannot unproblematically appeal to Alter's book as some sort of definitive knockout punch to the case for Jesus's resurrection. So to summarize, Alter's book is high in terms of page count and low in terms of substance. It really is just the skeptical equivalent of Gary Habermas's four 1,000-page volumes on the resurrection. Despite its inordinate length, critical matters like the authorship of the Gospels are treated only briefly. Furthermore, most of it is dedicated to detailing contradictions within the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament. Alter demonstrates from very early on that he has no idea what a contradiction is and fails to account for the fact that most of the differences which he highlights can be explained as variations of eyewitness testimony. I conclude that it doesn't pose anything in the way of a serious challenge to resurrection apologetics.

One of the significant recent contributions to the debate over Jesus's resurrection comes to us from the acclaimed New Testament scholar Dale Allison through his book The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, and History. My inclusion of Allison in a discussion of skeptics may seem anomalous in as much as Allison describes himself as a Protestant Christian. Allison's orthodoxy has been the subject of considerable disagreement among other Christians, with some accepting him as such and others denying this. But my purpose in this video is not to weigh in on that debate. I have included a discussion of his work on the subject since, despite describing himself as a Christian, his book is very skeptical of apologetic efforts to show that Jesus was raised beyond all reasonable doubt. And while he also criticizes skeptics who think that the resurrection can be shown to have not occurred, his book has been hailed by many of them as one of the best refutations of apologetic arguments for the resurrection. Thus, because of the significance which Allison's work is deemed to have for the resurrection debate, it merits some discussion in this video.

Frankly, it's a bit odd reading Allison's book as someone who defends a maximalist argument for the resurrection of Jesus. I noted near the beginning of this video how there are broadly two approaches to defending the resurrection: minimalism and maximalism, which correspond to two different ways of approaching the gospels. The maximalist approach considers the gospels as holistic sources of information and tries to assess the credibility of these sources by attempting to link them to the original apostles. Allison has drunk deeply of the cup of bad habits which permeate modern New Testament studies. Among those bad habits is the rejection of approaching sources as unified wholes, the overall reliability of which can be assessed as such. Instead, he buys into the assumption that the gospels are mixtures of both history and legend. So the task of the New Testament scholar is to try to determine which parts of the narrative can be relied upon and which parts cannot. This way of treating the gospels is completely different than how they are treated in my argument. In many ways, Allison's book is a great catalog which demonstrates the many problems which plague contemporary New Testament studies, as the plethora of logical fallacies which are so deeply entrenched within this discipline are on full display.

For example, when discussing the appearance of the resurrected Jesus to Mary Magdalene, Allison suggests that John's account may be dependent upon Matthew's account. And if this is so, Allison claims, then Matthew must be the only source for this appearance, and John can be discounted as being an independent source. As he says, "The issue is John, which a few take to be dependent exclusively on Matthew. If John does nothing but rewrite Matthew, then the latter would be our sole source for Mary's Christophany." The problem is that it simply does not follow that literary dependence precludes the having of independent sources of information. It is entirely possible that the author of the fourth gospel should have depended upon Matthew's gospel literarily and still also had independent access to additional sources of information.

Allison likewise concludes that the presence of apologetic glosses within the gospels licenses the inference that the apologetically significant material is fictional. But obviously a detail can be included in a narrative both because it is apologetically useful and also because it is historical. Arguably, the former depends upon the latter. Similarly, Allison concludes that Matthew's story of the saints rising in Jerusalem is certainly not historical. He refers to it in other writings as a fiction and as a tall tale. How does he know this? According to him, this is because no other sources report it. As he says, "Wright's half-hearted argument arrives at no firm conclusion. In historical terms, there is no way of finding out whether Matthew's little story mirrors an event of the past. My verdict is different. We can be almost pontifical here. Matthew 27:51-53 recounts a miracle unsurpassed anywhere else in the Gospels or other books of the Christian scriptures. Indeed, if it happened, it is the most amazing event of all time. But it did not happen. The astounding series of prodigies has left no trace in the other gospels, Acts, Paul, Josephus, or for that matter any other pre-Man source. It stands alone half a century or more after the incredible events it reports."

The key problem here is that this is a blatant argument from silence. And as I explained in my video, "Were the Gospels Originally Anonymous?", arguments from silence are seriously problematic. We simply have far too many examples of ancient sources remaining silent with respect to significant events which we independently know to have occurred. At the very least, this should cause us to be wary about concluding with any confidence that an event did not occur simply because there is silence about it. Allison is aware that he is making an argument from silence, but he protests that some arguments from silence are nevertheless valid. He asserts, "While this is to be sure an argument from silence, some arguments from silence have force."

Allison is correct that not all arguments from silence are equal. Some carry more force than others. However, they only carry force when some fact or facts about the silent source generates the expectation that the silent source would have mentioned the event if it had occurred. Unfortunately for Allison, it's fairly easy to think of a reason why Mark, Luke, and John wouldn't have included the story of the raising of the saints. It's not directly relevant to Jesus's story. It's not a miracle which Jesus performed. And since the Gospels are primarily focused upon telling Jesus's story, it's not at all surprising that they wouldn't have included it. Furthermore, it's not even necessarily true that Matthew is the only source which mentions the resurrection of the saints. The Odes of Solomon certainly appears to describe such an event. This work shows no signs of dependence upon the synoptic gospels and it does not connect the resurrection of the saints with any of the other events to which Matthew relates it, such as an earthquake and the tearing of the temple veil. The work is also typically dated to the later 1st or early 2nd century, which makes it a possible candidate for an early and independent source testifying to the resurrection of the saints, as Jake O'Connell observes. Hence, although the Odes do not actually mention appearances of the resurrected saints, they do at least attest to the fact that people were raised from the dead around the time of Jesus's death.

But in any case, it's not clear why Allison thinks that we would have so much additional evidence for the resurrection of the saints. He seems to think that this event involved hundreds of individuals returning to life and publicly presenting themselves to the whole of Jerusalem. But nothing within Matthew's gospel suggests that it was anything like this. He leaves the entire matter quite vague. For all we know, it only involved half a dozen saints appearing to people who were already believers. Indeed, the number of saints would have had to have been relatively small. Matthew says that they emerged from their tombs, but we must remember that when a Jewish person died, they were not laid in a tomb permanently. They were only left in the tomb until their flesh decomposed, at which time they were moved to an ossuary. So, the total number of saints in tombs at this time would have had to have been fairly small. Again, O'Connell is correct when he says, "This objection loses its force once we realize that the event was not as spectacular as it initially seems." There is no evidence that the appearances were public appearances. The assumption of scholars such as Allison seems to be that the resurrected saints appeared to huge crowds which included neutral and hostile witnesses such as Pilate and Caiaphas. If this was the case, one would certainly expect the event to be widely attested. But in fact, there is nothing in the text which indicates the appearances were like this. We are only told that the resurrected saints appeared to many. And it may be that these appearances, like the resurrection appearances, occurred primarily to those who were already followers of Jesus. In this case, the appearances would have no more apologetic value than the resurrection appearances themselves.

I highlight these points to illustrate why it's somewhat difficult for me as a maximalist to engage with Allison on the resurrection of Jesus. We are simply approaching the matter in two very different ways. Allison's methodology presupposes that my way of approaching the gospels is incorrect. But because this is a presupposition, he does not directly argue against my way of approaching the gospels. As such, the vast majority of his 400-page book is simply not applicable to my argument for the resurrection. Our starting points are just so radically different that we would have to engage in a deeper debate pertaining to our overarching methodologies before we could have a substantive debate over the particulars.

With all that being said, Allison does offer some very brief comments on the resurrection arguments of Timothy and Lydia McGrew as well as of Jake O'Connell. Since my argument for the resurrection is broadly within the same family, I will take some space to consider Allison's criticisms of the McGrews and O'Connell.

Regarding O'Connell, Allison writes, "O'Connell, in order to arrive at odds of a quadrillion to one in favor of Jesus's resurrection, needs to establish that the gospels are generally reliable. This task involves defending the historicity of the resurrection of saints in Matthew 27 and ironing out even minor discrepancies among the gospels. Not only will his argument sway none, save those already swayed, but one is puzzled as to why anyone who swallows the camel of Matthew 27 with its resurrection of many should strain at the gnat of Mark 16 with its resurrection of one. Indeed, the gospels are so steadfastly factual for O'Connell that one wonders why he needs anything more. If all the relevant texts are literally true down to their details, the orthodox conclusion would seem to be inevitable."

There are two points of clarification which need to be made here. The first is that Allison seems to have misunderstood O'Connell. The maximalist argument asserts that the Gospels faithfully represent what the eyewitnesses claim to have seen. It does not, as Allison seems to think, assert that the gospels are factual in every respect. I have made this point extremely clear in the third premise of my argument where I explicitly say that it is possible that the testimony is deliberately false or honestly mistaken. By leaving open those possibilities, I do not presuppose the factuality of the testimony. The truth of that testimony remains to be revealed by the excluding of those other possibilities. This distinction is critical because it is in virtue of this that maximalist arguments for the resurrection are not question-begging, as Allison implies.

The second point is that Allison seems to have misunderstood O'Connell's purpose in defending the plausibility of the rising of the saints in Matthew. The point is not to establish that this actually happened. The point is to undercut the idea proffered by scholars like Allison that it is just absurd to believe that this event could have happened. If Matthew made it up, then we would have reason to question the thesis that Matthew's gospel represents a faithful account of what the original eyewitnesses claim to have seen. O'Connell is trying to take that objection off the table. And so he defends the rationality of believing that this event might have happened. This is all that the maximalist needs to defend. Allison is guilty of a very serious misunderstanding of the maximalist case for the resurrection, and his critique of O'Connell puts that misunderstanding on full display.

Regarding the McGrews, Allison writes, "As for the McGrews, they presume the detailed facticity of Luke 24:36-43, where the risen Jesus eats fish and John 20:24-29, where Jesus shows himself to doubting Thomas. Narratives whose historicity many, including everyone who disbelieves in the resurrection of Jesus, query. Perhaps it would be instructive were someone to apply Bayes' theorem to other astonishing religious claims. What would happen were a Tibetan Buddhist to run the numbers for this or that master achieving rainbow body? I cannot begin to guess what such exercises might yield or even how they might be conducted. But the lack of a comparative yardstick argues my hesitation regarding the efficacy of Bayesian analyses of Jesus's resurrection."

Once again, we see the same misunderstanding. Timothy and Lydia McGrew are clear in their Blackwell article which Allison is discussing and elsewhere that they are not presupposing the historical factuality of the text, but rather just that it corresponds to what the original witnesses claimed. In their Blackwell article, they say in no uncertain terms, "Where the texts do assert something miraculous, for example, Jesus's post-resurrection appearances, we take it, given the basic assumption of authenticity, that the narrative represents what someone relatively close to the situation claimed." And elsewhere, Lydia McGrew has said, "This argument is not question-begging since it is a statement about what the alleged witnesses claimed. Their testimony with this content must then be explained." I think that the McGrews have been more than clear that their argument assumes only that the gospels accurately relay what the apostles claimed. It does not assume that what the apostles claimed, and so what the gospels report, is necessarily truthful, and they have offered numerous arguments for why they think that the gospels are trustworthy on this front. I don't claim that Allison is doing this deliberately, but yet again, we see that he has some fairly serious misunderstandings regarding the structure and nuances of the maximalist case for the resurrection.

As for his statement about rainbow bodies, his mentioning them gives me an opportunity to discuss what some might regard as one of Allison's more unique contributions to the resurrection debate. Allison claims that the evidence for the Buddhist phenomenon of so-called rainbow bodies is comparable to the evidence for the resurrection. It is a somewhat common strategy in replying to resurrection arguments that some other religion has miracles which are attested as well or better. Rainbow bodies are Allison's preferred example, as he goes on for the entirety of chapter 12 of his book, explaining why if you think that the evidence for Jesus's resurrection is rationally compelling, then you should similarly find yourself rationally compelled to believe in rainbow bodies. The phenomenon of rainbow bodies involves a body typically after death rapidly shrinking or dissolving over a period of days until it disappears. This is supposed to indicate that one has achieved a profound state or level of spiritual realization. Allison believes that this example should give Christian apologists pause to think, as he explains, "What would follow if every single one of the stories from Tibet is a hagiographical fabrication or the product of pious hocus pocus? A Christian wanting to defend the uniqueness of Jesus's resurrection might think this the obvious view to back, yet to my mind the apologist should here be ill at ease. Would not rejection of all the non-Christian stories reinforce the skeptics' repeated insistence that religious sincerity and eyewitness testimony do not ensure historical truth? If Tibetan bodies never mysteriously dissipate in a few days, but rather, against the multiple testimonies, some of it indisputably firsthand, invariably succumb to the usual phases of biological decay, then some must be, if not liars, then deluded victims of someone's misperception or trickery. And surely the more examples of such delusion and or deceit surrounding dead bodies that one can amass, the more confident skeptics will be in rejecting the testimony to the resurrection of Jesus."

Now, the example of rainbow bodies is by no means a special case. Skeptics have appealed to a large number of cases which are supposedly comparable to the resurrection of Jesus. Certain Catholic miracles tend to feature prominently in such discussions. There are always two points to make in response to these sorts of arguments, which apply to Allison's example of rainbow bodies as well. The first is that not all miracles are equal in terms of what they can establish. Not all miracles confirm the truth of the religions in which they may occur. There is no reason to suppose that the Christian God, for example, could not miraculously heal the child of Muslim parents. Just because the miracle happened within a Muslim family, it does not therefore confirm Islam. So, we have to distinguish between miracles which corroborate doctrines and miracles which do not. The defender of Jesus's resurrection does not need to reject every last miracle in every other religion. He just needs to show that Jesus's resurrection can support Christian doctrines. And since Jesus said that his resurrection would be the one sign that his teachings were true, that's pretty easy to establish. The defender of Jesus's resurrection would probably want to contest any miracles which would corroborate doctrines which conflict with Christianity. However, it's not immediately clear how the phenomenon of rainbow bodies would conflict with any doctrines of Christianity. So, the Christian may not have to reject this phenomenon in order to retain his Christian beliefs. Ultimately, we should be concerned with the evidence. If the evidence for another miracle is as good as the evidence for the resurrection, and if the evidence for the resurrection warrants belief, then Christians should believe in other miracles with comparable evidence. This will only create a problem if the other miracle is in conflict with Christianity.

As a second point, and probably more importantly, the evidence for these other miracles actually needs to be on par with the evidence for the resurrection if the critic is to have an argument. And here is where I maintain that Allison's example of rainbow bodies is not comparable to the resurrection. In the first place, I don't agree with Allison that we are dealing with multiple attestation. He gives three examples of this phenomenon in his book, but in each case they are reported by just one source. In one instance, the source claims that three Tibetan monks could corroborate the story. But in this case, the three monks only saw the shrinking body as it lay covered by a blanket. So while they assumed that what they saw was a body, they did not actually confirm this. Consequently, it's quite easy to see how they could have been deceived.

In addition to a lack of multiple attestation to any particular instance of a rainbow body, we don't have comparable grounds for thinking that any of the witnesses would not have lied in this case. This phenomenon of rainbow bodies is perfectly acceptable within Buddhist communities. And so unlike the apostles when they proclaimed the resurrection, the witnesses in these cases were not opening themselves up to a serious threat of persecution and death for the most part. Furthermore, as I have already indicated, it's often easy to see how the witnesses could have been honestly mistaken, as with the three witnesses who presumed that they were seeing a body shrink underneath a blanket. But the situation is very different when it comes to the apostles. The resurrection is multiply attested. Persecution and martyrdom were real threats which the disciples faced for proclaiming it. And it is not at all easy to see how the disciples might have been mistaken about the resurrection given what they tell us about what the appearances of Jesus were like. So the Christian need feel no guilt over being inconsistent when simply rejecting reports about rainbow bodies as cases of lies or as cases of being honestly mistaken because these reports are not comparable to the reports about the resurrection.

As Lydia McGrew explains, "They're not comparable. They're not similar. That's the question is whether they're comparable or similar. So, let me talk a little bit about how they're not comparable or similar. How difficult in some of the in the things that he quotes and cites as evidence would it be to be mistaken and for some of the people whose accounts we have to just be mistaken? Now, it might be that somebody else is carrying out a fraud, but in that that case, we don't know who they are or whether anybody knew who they were and whether they got in any trouble for it or whatever. And for many rainbow body claims and for many of the people, not that hard."

He has this very strange quotation concerning the Dalai Lama who believes that someone achieved rainbow body. He furthermore knows firsthand some of the witnesses involved. Witnesses who handed him physical evidence related to the alleged event. You you want to know what the physical evidence is? A piece of a robe. Okay. So, the Dalai Lama talked to a couple of disciples of one of the Buddhists who supposedly achieved rainbow body. They appear not to have gotten into trouble for doing this. And they meet the Dalai Lama and they say, "Yeah, our master achieved rainbow body." And they hand him a piece of cloth. This is a joke. This is like a bad epistemological joke. If I said that my husband flew around the house yesterday and I handed you a shoe and I said, "And this was the shoe he was wearing." That shoe proves nothing. That's not physical evidence related to the event. What are you talking about? It's a piece of cloth. It could be from somebody's robe. It could even be from that master's robe. That is no evidential vector at all to support their claim beyond the claim itself. Ridiculous. They handed him physical evidence related to the alleged event. I mean, if the Dalai Lama thought, "Wow, you handed me a piece of his robe," then you know, Allison has this other talk about how the Dalai Lama is incredulous. Well, if he thought the piece of the robe was epistemologically relevant, that's pretty darn credulous.

Or, there was one case where they were coming in every day after the person died and there was this robe covering his body completely to begin with, and then people would come in and they believed that it looked like the object under the robe, which was presumed, Allison says, to be the body, was getting smaller each day. And the objects under the robe. We don't know what they're presuming to be the body. This reminds me of the origins of Mormonism where Joseph Smith wouldn't let the other so-called witnesses even see the alleged golden plates. He said he'd been told he'd be killed if he showed them. So, he had these metal plates of some kind wrapped up in his tunic. And they said they saw them with the eyes of the spirit. So, it's like object under a robe. Okay. Or to come in and say that the body was gone later. So they would find they would open the room after seven days and the body was gone. Okay. So maybe the body was gone. But to be mistaken about whether it turned into a rainbow, that's very easy. Um, there was even a relative of one of these whose uncle had died and he thought that his uncle's body was getting smaller. So, he's like sitting by the corpse and he's like, "Huh, it looks smaller to me." Now, we don't know how much smaller or what. And this guy actually did suffer persecution. He contacted the newspapers and he wanted the journalists to come and he wanted measurements to be made.

of his uncle's body. The communists weren't happy about this. He was thrown in prison. I don't know for how long, but, um, then the body was burned, was cremated.

So, this nephew's already in a religious tradition where they believe that bodies disappear and turn into rainbows. Again, this is not establishing a whole new idea like the disciples of Jesus were. And there's one of those older apologists that shrewdly says that it's much easier to support an existing religion by allegations of miracles within that religious context than it is to establish a new set of religious ideas by, uh, within a hostile context by an allegation of a miracle. And it's completely true.

So, this guy already believes that they turn into rainbows, and he thinks that his uncle may be achieving the rainbow body because the body looks somewhat smaller. Well, I mean, it's very subjective. Um, and then, you know, the it was never carried out. So he could have been sincere. Okay.

Um, and then there's there's one where there are some guards. They've thrown the, uh, living Buddhist master himself into prison, and he's there. I think they guarded him for like a year, and then, uh, eventually they they come in to the room and they find nothing. Well, first of all, the claim is they came into the room and they found his body shrunk, uh, to the size of a, he was dead, and his body shrunk to the size of a child. Um, like, was it just curled up, or were did someone else add that to the story? I, you know, there can be religious embellishments of stories. Okay. I don't deny that there are religious embellishments of stories. I just argue that that's not happening in the case of the the resurrection claims, and I'm prepared to argue for that.

Um, but then later they come in and there's just a robe and some hair and some nails. Um, I might add that as far as I know, um, no one did DNA testing to see if they were that guy's hair and nails. And even if they were, you could take them off the corpse and you could leave them there and leave them there with the rope. So, um, who knows, you know, what happened to that body, but I don't think it turned into a rainbow. Sorry if you just think that's a theological prejudice, but the point is that this would be, if the guards were impressed, this would be something they could easily be mistaken about that it really turned into a rainbow. Okay? So, a lot, a lot of that is interpretation. Um, and sometimes the even the alleged data itself is something that someone could just be mistaken about, like, oh, my body, my uncle's body looks like it's something smaller. Okay.

And then, then I've sort of anticipated this a little bit, but the question of faking. If all we had in the case of Jesus were the empty tomb, we'd have a much weaker case. It would still have, you know, some evidential force, but it would be a much weaker case. Not something you would go out and, I think, reasonably die for, commit your life for, not something I would commit my life for if all we had was, you know, his body disappeared.

In the case of the disciples, I contend that what we have is that these people are saying, "We were with him. We met with him. We ate with him. We were we were able to touch him after he rose from the dead after he had been dead, and then he met with us in a group." That's not the kind of thing you can be mistaken about. Um, Allison is not even presenting that. Okay. These are claims that people could have interpreted as as somebody turning into a rainbow that was just the body being missing, or that people who faked don't seem to have suffered a serious fate. Okay.

Okay. And that would actually be, you know, not all that hard to fake. You know, put some object under a a robe and then you put a smaller object under the robe the next day and so forth. Pretty, pretty easy to fake. Or, uh, going and meeting the Dalai Lama and handing him a piece of cloth. I mean, that's not impressive. It's, it's, it's just astonishing to me that Allison makes a big deal about these things.

Now, he, he also makes a big deal about how recent it is. He seems to think that the fact that something happened in the, uh, you know, allegedly happened in the 20th century or was alleged in the 20th century, or even the early 21st century, should be extremely exciting. Uh, not in and of itself. I mean, I imagine there are people out there, uh, credulously believing miracles today.

So, I hope this has given you some idea of the the nature of the differences between the cases. To summarize, while Allison's book does discuss a lot of the literature surrounding the resurrection, I think it fails to provide any reason to seriously shake the apologist confidence in the historical case for Jesus's resurrection. Allison's approach is hampered by the problematic way in which he approaches the Gospels. He has unfortunately and seemingly uncritically accepted most of the assumptions and methods inherent within contemporary New Testament studies, but nowhere defense of those assumptions or methods. We have seen that Allison's criticism of the maximalist approach to the resurrection pretty flagrantly misunderstands it. And lastly, I have argued that his favorite counter example to the case for the resurrection, namely rainbow bodies, are not analogous to the resurrection with respect to the quality of evidence which supports them.

Allison has become something of a darling of both several apologists and counter apologists. He is praised by many on both sides as a refreshing beacon of honesty. The reason for this, I suspect, is that Allison comes to very middle-of-the-road conclusions. He defends aspects of both the apologetic and skeptical approaches to the resurrection. But I would suggest that there is a very important distinction between being moderate and being honest. It seems to me that many people on both sides have mistaken Allison's moderation for a sign of honesty. This is not to suggest that I think that Allison is dishonest or anything like that, but it is to suggest that Allison is subject to the exact same biases and methodological blunders as anyone else. And while his book certainly deserves to be widely read, it also deserves as much criticism and critique as any other book on this subject. Mike Lakona reminds us, even humility can be employed immoderately, resulting in agnosticism that forfeits itself against mounting evidence that threatens it.

There is a newer line of response to the historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus spearheaded by Matthew McCormack, which is based upon a comparison between the evidence for Jesus's resurrection and the evidence for the Salem witch trials. A certain segment of online counter apologists, notably my friend Ben Watkins from Real Atheology, have been impressed with McCormick's argument. John Loftess has also indicated to me that he would endorse McCormick's basic approach to the case for the resurrection. As such, it merits some attention here.

Like most of the skeptics I have engaged, McCormack rejects the second premise of my argument, asserting the credibility of the New Testament witness to the resurrection of Jesus. As he explains, up until a few hundred years ago, the traditional view was that all of the Gospels were written by the followers of Jesus for whom the books are named. But the view now, on the basis of modern work in history and Bible scholarship, is that none of the Gospels were written by the apostle to whom it is attributed. Their authors are unknown. Furthermore, it is widely agreed that none of the authors were eyewitnesses to the events themselves. They heard the stories from others and recorded them many years after the alleged events transpired.

All McCormack offers by way of a defense for rejecting the traditional ascriptions of authorship is to appeal to the fact that this is widely agreed upon by contemporary biblical scholars. While this is true, it is worth asking if contemporary biblical scholars have good reasons for this agreement. And in my videos on gospel authorship and gospel anonymity, I already assessed their reasons and found them to be wanting. Furthermore, I found that they have underappreciated the positive case for the traditional authorship of the Gospels. As such, McCormack doesn't offer anything new to the conversation on this front. Indeed, he doesn't even seem to be familiar with it. He appears to have just uncritically accepted the opinions of mainstream biblical scholarship on this matter.

But even if traditional authorship is granted, McCormack thinks that there is a further reason not to trust the gospel authors, namely that they were uneducated and biased. As he says, "We have good reasons to doubt that the record is impartial and objective, and the people who recorded and transmitted the Jesus miracles did not have the conceptual tools, investigative methods, principles of good evidence, or background knowledge that would be necessary to adequately evaluate and represent the phenomena."

There are two key points to raise in reply to McCormack here. The first is that being impartial or unbiased is not a necessary prerequisite for being honest or for being trustworthy. Clearly, McCormack himself is quite biased towards the testimony of modern, educated, scientifically literate people. But this doesn't mean that we have to therefore reject everything that McCormack says. Angus Menuge notes the irony saying, "McCormack argues that the biblical reports of the resurrection are not credible because they reflected believers' enthusiasm, desire, and ideological commitments, and because their low levels of scientific knowledge, education, and literacy would have given them a low level of skepticism for what we would identify as supernatural, miraculous, or paranormal claims. However, both of the charges commit a genetic fallacy and hint of red herrings, too, and reveal a serious modernist bias in McCormick's own approach."

Second, and more importantly, the witnesses to Jesus's resurrection don't need any special academic qualifications or conceptual distinctions in order for us to be able to trust their testimony, as McCormick seems to think. They simply need the common ability to tell the difference between a person's being alive and being dead. Again, Menuge makes this point well. "The important point is that establishing that a resurrection occurs does not require any unfamiliar special test. We do not have to confirm some bizarre theory of how a resurrection happens, but simply apply the normal tests for telling if someone is alive or dead. The only difference in the case of the resurrection is that the tests are applied in reverse of the normal order, death preceding life instead of life preceding death."

McCormack does offer some other fairly standard objections to the trustworthiness of the Gospels, and later in his book, he defends the plausibility of bereavement hallucinations to account for the resurrection appearances. I have addressed most of these points in other videos or elsewhere in this one. So, I want to bypass all of that for the sake of focusing upon McCormack's truly unique contribution to this debate. Namely, his claim that the quality of the evidence for the resurrection is comparable to the quality of the evidence for witchcraft at Salem. Hence, if one rejects the idea that witchcraft transpired at Salem, then they should also reject the reality of the resurrection.

McCormack presents this argument in chapter 3 of his book, *Atheism and the Case Against Christ*. As he puts it, "Does our evidence justify concluding that there was real magic at Salem? Much can be said for the supernatural explanation. First, hundreds of people were involved in concluding that some of the accused were witches. Eyewitnesses testified in court, signed sworn affidavits, and demonstrated their utter conviction that those on trial were witches. Furthermore, the accusers came from diverse backgrounds and social strata, including magistrates, judges, the governor of Massachusetts, respected members of the community, husbands of the accused, and so on. They all became passionately convinced that the charges were true on the basis of what they had seen. The witnesses, accusers, and investigators had a great deal to lose by being correct. Men would lose their wives. Children would lose their mothers. Community members would lose friends they cared about. It seems very unlikely that such accusers could have ulterior motives leading them to such a dramatic and profound conclusion. Accusing a friend or a wife of being a witch very likely would have the horrible outcome of getting her executed."

And he goes on to drive his point home, saying, "Of course, I am not making a serious case for real witchcraft at Salem. I do not think you should conclude that the accused were really witches. The point is that they were not witches and you probably do not believe that they were based on this substantial body of historical evidence. If we take seriously the attempts to prove the resurrection of Jesus on historical grounds, then in order to be consistent, we must also accept that the Salem witches actually performed acts of black magic."

So, right off the bat, there are some real problems here. In the first place, there is a critical difference between the context in which the witchcraft and the resurrection are supposed to have occurred. The Salem witch trials occurred within a staunchly Puritan colony where fear of witchcraft was already acknowledged as an abiding threat. As such, it is not surprising that this might have been a readily acknowledged possibility for all sorts of phenomena. As Emerson Baker observes in his scholarly study of the Salem witch trials, "Salem offered a perfect storm, a unique convergence of conditions and events that produced what was by far the largest and most lethal witchcraft episode in American history. Salem was a small part of a much larger pattern. Although England and her colonies saw fewer cases of witchcraft accusations than on the continent, they were still common and long-standing. Between 1645 and 1647, at the height of the English Civil Wars, more than 250 people were accused of witchcraft in East Anglia and more than 100 were executed, 15 in one day. In Salem, a total of 25 people lost their lives." Indeed, so paranoid were the residents of Salem about witches that they thought that even unusual behavior from animals counted as evidence for witchcraft. Again, Baker says, "Witches were also believed to be able to assume the shape of animals. Thus, unusual behavior in an animal, especially a strange one, might suggest the presence of a witch." And goes on to suggest, "The step from affliction to accusation was a short one. Today we attribute mass psychogenic illness to global concerns about toxic waste and terrorism. But in 1692, the omnipresent threat was witchcraft. In 1692, everyone believed in the existence of witches in league with the devil who had been created by God as a challenge to man. During the Salem witch trials, there was no dispute over the existence of witches. All ministers and learned people knew that witches were real and that they had the power to harm. The debate was over how one detected witchcraft and whether the victims were truly victims or were just faking their ailments."

The point again is just that the Salem witch trials occurred within a context where people were already primed to appeal to witchcraft as an explanation for certain events. By contrast, the proclamation of Jesus's resurrection occurred in the context of Second Temple Judaism, where there was no expectation at all that a resurrection would occur in the middle of history. In other words, the people involved in the Salem witch trials were already primed to appeal to witchcraft to explain things in a way which first-century Jews were not primed to appeal to a resurrection. There is an element of social contagion present in the case of the Salem witch trials which is simply not present for the resurrection.

Second, McCormack's claim about what the witnesses stood to lose in the case of the Salem witch trials is not analogous to what the witnesses to the resurrection stood to lose. McCormack points out that the witnesses at Salem stood to lose certain women within their community. But why exactly are we to suppose that the witnesses would have been strongly motivated to protect these women within their community? Surely we are all too familiar with jealousy and dislike for people among the members of communities. So it's not terribly difficult to imagine that certain individuals within the Massachusetts Bay Colony would have been willing to give false testimony against other members of the community. Losing certain members of the community may have been viewed as a benefit rather than a loss. As Baker puts it, "Those accused of witchcraft were perceived as a threat, directly or indirectly, or as somehow related to a threat to the spiritual, political, or military stability and well-being of the community or the colony. Furthermore, there can be no doubt that the accusations involved power and authority, and in particular their perceived misuse and corruption. If any one factor links virtually all of the accused, it has to be religion. The trials were largely an effort to bolster Puritanism and orthodoxy under attack on multiple fronts. For in Massachusetts Bay, religion was the fabric that held the polity and society together. Many of those accused were perceived as posing a threat to the religious order."

And indeed, when one looks at the situation preceding the Salem witch trials, it looks rather plausible that these people would be willing to lie about one another. Emerson Baker observes how two of the principal witnesses, Joseph and Bathsheba Pope, were part of the minority of Quakers within the Bay Colony. Coincidentally, they were also Benjamin Franklin's uncle and aunt. These two had previously been persecuted by several members of the dominant Puritan community. It is therefore not unfathomable that they should have been willing to falsely accuse their neighbors of witchcraft due to a lingering grudge. As Baker concludes, "The story of the Popes also reveals the complexities behind witch trials in Salem and elsewhere in New England, as well as some of the inaccuracies in how these events are often portrayed. Traditional textbooks and popular tales make the trials sound like a Puritan affair. Yet, the Popes were Quakers." Indeed, Baker goes on for the entirety of chapter 3 of his book, detailing the turbulent history of Salem, arguing that the village was ripe for something like this to break out. As he concludes, "Regardless of which factor ultimately was most important, the witchcraft accusations resulted from a long-standing failure of leadership. Not only did Salem Village's ministers fail to help resolve the divisions, but something about the ministry there brought out the worst in them. Overall, this was not a group to inspire confidence, let alone build a community of Christian believers in the face of adversity. Given its small size, poor pay, and frontier location, Salem Village was not able to attract the gifted divines who could have healed its wounds. The battle lines were drawn for a new kind of war against sinners and worse."

So McCormack simply doesn't know what he's talking about when he claims that the people of Salem would have been strongly motivated to avoid lying about one another. The evidence suggests just the opposite, namely that there were sufficiently vicious inner conflicts and divisions to lead to these sorts of false accusations. By contrast, when it comes to the apostles, they stood to lose their own livelihoods and even their own lives for proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus. We know that human beings are, as a general rule, strongly motivated to protect their own well-being. So, the motivations to not deliberately lie are not even remotely similar for the respective witnesses in these cases.

Third, McCormack overlooks contemporary counter-evidence. Notably, the governor of Massachusetts forbade any publication pertaining to the trials in recognition that things had gone horribly wrong. As Baker points out, "One reason that witchcraft disappeared from the public record was that the governor of Massachusetts Bay insisted upon it. Engaging in one of the first cover-ups in American history, Governor Sir William Fipps banned the publication of any account of the witch trials. Even before the trials ended, people realized that something had gone horribly wrong and that some innocent people had died." This is a tacit acknowledgment that it was well known from very early on that the quality of the evidence was not anything like sufficient to condemn many of those who died at Salem on charges of witchcraft. McCormack simply doesn't mention any of this.

But the situation for the resurrection is very different. No one close to the events leaves a trail of trying to cover something up. On the contrary, the early Christians readily invited people to check out the truth of their testimony for themselves. This is another significant difference between the evidence for witchcraft at Salem and the evidence for the resurrection.

On a related note, some of the witnesses are just known to have been fakes. Baker points out that one of the principal early witnesses was Mary Warren, who was supposedly being afflicted by someone accused of being a witch and yet had a remarkable recovery as soon as her master threatened to whip her. Margaret Jacobs famously recanted of her testimony, saying that it was all a lie. Baker rightly says, "While it is possible that the erratic behavior of the girls sparked a mass psychological phenomenon, a considerable amount of deliberate fraud eventually took place, carried out for a range of reasons. Scholars have speculated that Abigail Williams might have accused people because of the attention she received." By contrast, none of the apostles are known to have recanted of their belief in the resurrection despite facing persecution and death.

Fourth, quantity of testimony is not the same thing as quality of testimony. McCormack makes much of the sheer amount of testimony we have for the presence of witchcraft at Salem, saying, "How much evidence do we have? Enough to fill a truck." Modern archives at the University of Virginia and elsewhere have thousands of documents, books, records, transcripts, affidavits, testimonials, and other works detailing the events. But there is this thing called the law of diminishing returns. At a certain point, simply piling on more witnesses gets one only a marginal degree of greater confirmation. Eventually, the quality of the testimony itself has to be assessed if significantly more evidential mileage is to be had out of it. And here is precisely where the defender of the resurrection claims to have the advantage. For the details of the testimony pertaining to witchcraft at Salem often do not justify the belief that witchcraft was present.

Emerson Baker observes that in some cases the testimony consisted of nothing more than vague references to being tormented by specters of the accused. As he says, "Like some of her neighbors, Bathsheba said that she was afflicted by witches, specifically claiming that the specters of John Proctor, Martha Corey, and Rebecca Nurse tormented her. But what exactly is it like to be tormented by a spectre? And how would this indicate that someone is guilty of witchcraft? We have no idea. No details are present in this sort of testimony which provides a significant symmetry breaker with the testimony about the resurrection appearances of Jesus." Furthermore, this affliction was not experienced by more than one person at a time. As Baker notes, "Bashibba and her cohorts suffered spectral attack. That is, they were assaulted by a spirit that was invisible to everyone except the afflicted. As the circle of accusation grew in Salem Village, the afflicted would even point the finger at people they had never seen in person." These are but a few of the contradictions behind what happened in 1692, during a witch hunt that in many ways was an aberration from earlier proceedings. So we can see that the element of corroborating testimony is also missing from most of these accusations. To be sure, many people might have claimed to suffer spectral attack from the same person, but the actual instances of it were thought to be private events which were incapable of being shared even in principle. This too provides a significant difference between the supposed witchcraft at Salem and the resurrection appearances of Jesus. For Jesus is experienced in the Gospels by groups of people, and the Gospels serve to corroborate one another.

In some cases, the testimony consisted of nothing more than descriptions of illness, which people at the time simply didn't understand and interpreted as affliction by invisible demons, followed by delirious claims from those who were ill. Again, Baker explains, "Reverend Samuel Paris and his wife Elizabeth began to notice that their daughter Betty and niece Abigail Williams were behaving oddly. Betty was nine and her cousin was about 11, vulnerable ages in a time when illness all too often proved deadly. Soon, the minister called in friends and colleagues, including Reverend John Hale, from neighboring Beverly, to observe the girls. Hale noted, 'These children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents. Their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way and returned back again. So it was impossible for them to do of themselves and beyond the power of any epileptic fits or natural disease to affect. Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouth stopped, their throats choked, their limbs racked and tormented. They also suffered by pins invisibly stuck into their flesh and pricking with irons.' They baked a loaf of rye bread mixed with some urine from the afflicted girls, then fed it to the family dog. This was one of many known counter-magical folk remedies. When the dog ate the witch cake, it was supposed to reveal the witch's identity. Indeed, the afflicted girls soon cried out that it was Tatuba who was tormenting them."

I ask, if this sounds anything like the accounts of the resurrected Jesus in the Gospels? Are the sightings of Jesus in the Gospels something which can be easily explained away by physical ailments and delirium coupled with a healthy dose of superstition? In my judgment, the answer is clearly negative. But McCormack just glosses over these sorts of critical differences, claiming that the evidence for witchcraft is just as good as the evidence for the resurrection.

In other cases, the evidence for witchcraft consisted of nothing more than a bunch of people testifying to strange or unusual happenings, but nothing which could reasonably be interpreted as witchcraft. As Baker comments, "As was often the case at witch trials, the accusations confirmed the long-held suspicions of neighbors who then came forward to recount a long history of Bishop's satanic acts. A total of 10 witnesses testified about strange actions that surrounded her, some dating back to the 1670s. From unusual accidents and the disappearance of money to mysterious deaths and her apparent ability to summon monstrous satanic imps, Bishop was a bilious reservoir of the invisible world. To no one's surprise, Bishop was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged." Apparently, McCormack thinks that testimony pertaining to a history of unusual events supports the reality of witchcraft as strongly as the testimony of multiple people having bodily experiences of the risen Jesus supports the resurrection. But I take it that the asymmetry is obvious.

Astonishingly, despite all of this, McCormack still claims with apparent sincerity that the evidence for witchcraft at Salem is actually of better quality than the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Saying, "When it is put up against the case for the resurrection in the important respects, the historical evidence for witchcraft is better than the historical argument for the resurrection. We do not have any of the original Gospels, only copies from centuries later. The gospel stories are only a few anecdotal hearsay stories from passionate and committed religious adherents passed by word of mouth for decades through an unknown number of people before being written down. All that remains of those stories are copies of copies from decades or even centuries later, then were actively called and patched together from a wider range of more varied writings. By reasonable measures of quantity and quality, the evidence we have for witchcraft at Salem is vastly better than the evidence we have for the magical return from the dead by Jesus."

But this claim can only hold water if McCormack is right in his assessment of the Gospels as late, unreliable hearsay in the first place. But the defender of my resurrection argument, and indeed probably of most resurrection arguments, is not likely to agree with McCormick's assessment of the Gospels. And as already noted, McCormack makes no attempt whatsoever to defend this assessment of the Gospels. Surely, if McCormack were to be right about the Gospels being of as little historical value as he thinks, then he would be correct that the evidence for the resurrection would be comparable to the evidence for witchcraft at Salem, which is to say, not very strong. But that is precisely the point of contention between McCormack and myself. I do not agree with him regarding what the Gospels are. And the comparison to the Salem Witch Trials only succeeds on that unargued assumption. Consequently, the whole comparison to the Salem Witch Trials is irrelevant. If I agreed with McCormack about the Gospels, I would automatically agree with him that belief in the resurrection is unjustified. And I would agree with this even apart from his comparison to the Salem witch trials. The real premise of McCormack's argument, which I take issue with then, is that the Gospels are the end result of years of stories being passed down to unknown authors. Without that premise, the comparison to the Salem witch trials cannot be made. And it is precisely this premise which McCormack utterly fails to defend.

All in all, McCormick's book simply fails to engage the substantial amount of argumentation which Christian scholars have put forward in defense of the historical credibility of the Gospels, opting instead to lazily take the opinions of critical scholarship at face value. Even more problematic is how McCormack fails to critically engage recent scholarship surrounding the Salem witch trials. For how confidently he asserts that the evidence for the resurrection is comparable to the evidence for witchcraft at Salem. McCormick's book demonstrates surprisingly little knowledge of the specific evidence. Indeed, based upon Baker's persuasively argued research, I think that the conclusion that McCormack is simply repeating a sort of pop history about the Salem witch trials, which lacks a substantial basis in history, is more than warranted. This has caused him to grossly overestimate the quality of evidence for witchcraft at Salem. His failure to seriously engage conservative biblical scholarship has correspondingly caused him to grossly underestimate the quality of the evidence for the resurrection, thereby skewing his final judgment about the respective quality of the evidence for both events.

As with Matthew McCormack, Robert Greg Caven is a philosopher who is skeptical of the resurrection of Jesus. Like McCormack, he eschews the prospect of muddying himself in the trenches of history by dealing with the actual historical evidence, preferring instead to cast down objections from his philosophical ivory tower. Caven's case against the resurrection is not so much an argument that it did not happen as that it would be impossible for us to have any evidence for it, even if the Gospels are 100% true. And even if the resurrection actually occurred, as he says, I shall argue in particular that because resurrection entails the transformation of a corpse into a supernatural body, our only sources of potential evidence, the New Testament Easter traditions, do not provide sufficient information to enable us to establish the historicity of the resurrection, even on the assumption of their complete historical reliability.

Now, if you have a similar reaction as I had when I first heard this, then you are wondering how Caven can possibly sustain such a thesis. After all, if the resurrection happened, then it was a historical event and should be capable of being justified by historical means. Right? But Caven disagrees. To understand why, we must first be clear on the distinction between a resurrection and a resuscitation. A resuscitation merely involves a dead body returning to life. But the body will continue to age, to deteriorate, and eventually to die again. This is not what Christians believe happened to Jesus. As Steven T. Davis puts it, "When the Jewish disciples of Jesus spoke about his resurrection, they were not claiming that he had simply come back to ordinary earthly life. This is what we would call resuscitation. Think here of the prophet Elijah raising the widow's son from the dead, or of Jesus bringing Jairus's 12-year-old daughter back to life, or of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead after he had been 4 days in the tomb. In all of these cases, the person is miraculously brought back to life. Eventually, however, each of them would die again. By contrast, a resurrection involves being raised back to life in an incorruptible, glorified body which will never again see death. This is what Christians believe happened to Jesus."

But just here, we must stare down Caven's argument. For Caven contends that all of the evidence that we do have, and indeed all of the evidence we could ever have, will not be able to distinguish between Jesus being resuscitated and Jesus being resurrected. As he explains, "Now from this brief review of the concept of resurrection held by those who claim that there is sufficient historical evidence to establish the resurrection of Jesus. It is clear that the hypothesis of the resurrection is not to be identified with the comparatively weak claim of revivification. One, Jesus died and afterward he became alive once again, which is strictly neutral between the hypotheses of Jesus's resurrection and resuscitation. Rather, the resurrection hypothesis is logically equivalent to the much bolder claim. Two, Jesus died and afterward he was transformed into a living supernatural body. Correlatively, it is clear that those who claim that the New Testament Easter traditions are sufficient to establish the resurrection hypothesis are claiming not merely that there is sufficient evidence to establish one, but quite significantly that this evidence is sufficient to establish a much stronger hypothesis, too. And in consequence, the specific dispositional propositions it logically implies. But now, while one may be established through sense perception, this is quite impossible in the case of two."

Now, we might respond to Caven in broadly two ways. In the first place, we might suggest that we are, for the moment, merely arguing for the thesis that Jesus was raised by God from the dead and simply leave open the question of whether or not this was a resuscitation or a resurrection. Even if Jesus's being raised back to life after 3 days was merely a resuscitation, we can still argue that it was miraculous. After all, when people are resuscitated after being pronounced clinically dead, this typically happens as the result of CPR, defibrillation, advanced airway management, and within a few minutes of death. Even in the most extraordinary case of a medical resuscitation on record, Velma Thomas was revived 17 hours after being pronounced clinically dead. We simply have no reason whatsoever to believe that someone who was dead for three whole days without any medical attention could have been resuscitated naturalistically. This is especially so given the particularly brutal nature of Jesus's death. Add to this Jesus's prediction that he would return to life as a divine vindication that his message came from God. And I think that we have more than enough reason to conclude that Jesus returning to life was a miracle, regardless of whether it was a resurrection or a resuscitation.

As Stephen T. Davis puts it in his review of Caven's article, "It seems to me that most Christian apologists for the resurrection, like me, are only trying to establish the rational credibility of belief in one, which of course describes a miracle that is big enough in itself." Caven argues as follows: "It is clear that those who claim that the New Testament Easter traditions are sufficient to establish the resurrection hypothesis are claiming not merely that there is sufficient evidence to establish one, but quite significantly that this evidence is sufficient to establish the much stronger hypothesis, too." Well, the truth of this claim depends on what is meant by the resurrection hypothesis. If we mean the entire Christian doctrine of the resurrection, Caven is right. But if it means something like, "God raised Jesus from the dead," it is not true. I think the New Testament Easter traditions are sufficient to establish that claim. And J.P. Holding adds, "Is Caven's demand that we can't be sure Jesus really resurrected unless we're able to be sure he didn't die of old age in 1300 AD?" The pose is a curious one, since a Jesus who comes back from the dead to die of gangrene hundreds of years later has already undergone some sort of miraculous recovery which begs an explanation and is contrary to what is possible in Caven's materialistic worldview. And this is all we really need to establish in making the case for Christianity. We have a miracle which confirms the truth of what Jesus taught. But once this has been appreciated, then we must also realize that one of the things which Jesus taught was that he was going to be resurrected. So, as long as we can establish that Jesus returning to life was a miracle functioning as a divine confirmation of his teachings, we have evidence for Jesus's resurrection. To be sure, the historical evidence would be supporting nothing more than that Jesus was at least miraculously resuscitated. But coupling this fact with Jesus's teachings, which were confirmed by that miracle, we are more than warranted in concluding that Jesus was not just resuscitated, but was also resurrected.

As William Lane Craig explains, "Given the religio-historical context of Jesus's own radical self-understanding and blasphemous personal claims, not to mention his activity as a miracle worker, exorcist, and herald of the inbreaking of God's kingdom, God's raising Jesus from the dead is most plausibly understood as God's ratification of those claims."

Caven does anticipate this move, but his response is difficult to take seriously. He objects that we cannot trust Jesus's testimony on this point because it's conceptually possible that other factors might explain this. As he says, "It is conceptually possible that a very powerful evil spirit or a group of technologically advanced but unscrupulous aliens brought about the resuscitation, ascension, and glorious appearances of Jesus, either forcing him against his will to lie about the resurrection, or else tricking him into believing that it had actually occurred by enthroning him after his ascension in a fake heaven." I must admit that I am a little taken back at finding this level of argumentation from a qualified philosopher in the opening chapter, no less, of a book which is ostensibly supposed to provide a serious challenge to the resurrection of Jesus. Caven has offered us nothing more than the bare possibility that Jesus might have been wrong. But what needs to be shown is that this is more probable, or at least as probable, as that he was telling the truth. It is possible that we were all created 5 minutes ago, complete with memories and food in our stomachs. Yet few take this to be a reason to consider this possibility very likely. It is possible that we are living in the matrix or as victims of Descartes' evil demon and that the external world does not exist. Yet few consider this possibility reasonable to believe. Possibility comes cheap. It is always possible to create a highly elaborate and ad hoc story to get around any body of evidence. But by doing so, one ratchets up the complexity of their hypothesis and correspondingly lowers the likelihood that it is true. The fact that Caven can tell a highly complex alternative story about how Jesus might have been resuscitated and then falsely claimed that this was divine proof of his resurrection does not even begin to make that story a serious contender to the resurrection hypothesis.

Again, Craig correctly points out, "The objector seems to think that the Christian apologist needs to be able to deduce logically from the evidence that, for example, Jesus could have survived cholera or an automobile crash. But that's not the way an inductive argument works. For any data set, there will be an infinite number of hypotheses that are consistent with the data. In inferring that Jesus was raised from the dead in the full Jewish sense of that term, one is inferring to the best explanation of the data."

As a second point, from the historical evidence alone, we are able to conclude that Jesus's body possessed different abilities after he was raised from the dead. He is able to simply vanish and reappear at will. He is able to walk through closed doors and so on and so forth. While these special abilities may not supply evidence that Jesus's risen body was specifically incorruptible or immune from aging, they do supply evidence that it was not just a normal human body. And if we accept this, then this should increase our credence that Jesus's risen body possessed other special abilities, such as those of a resurrected body. As Richard Swinburne says, "The resurrection of Jesus was a resurrection in which Jesus had supernatural powers to pass through doors, etc." I argued in the previous chapter that Jesus did claim a divine status and coming to life again with supernatural powers. Jesus would at least be showing that he had a supernatural status, and that is some of the way toward showing his divinity. Holding adds, "It is certainly true that we have no direct evidence that Jesus would not have been able to be destroyed by a hydrogen bomb and so on. However, the direct evidence Jesus provided functions as circumstantial evidence that he would have been able to survive such attempts."

In any case, Caven's whole discussion seems a bit hypothetical. I am fairly confident that he himself does not believe that Jesus was actually raised from the dead, but that this was a mere resuscitation. Indeed, I don't know of any skeptic who believes this. For this reason, my suspicion is that this whole line of argumentation from Caven is one big smoke screen intended to distract us from the question of what he actually believes happened on that first Easter morning. If he started defending that over against the idea that Jesus did rise from the dead rather than quibbling over precisely how far the historical evidence allows us to go, I have a feeling that things would go very poorly for him. For the record, when Caven has ventured to comment on what he actually believes happened, he suggests the ludicrous idea that Jesus had an identical twin brother who was mistaken for Jesus after his crucifixion. So, it's a small wonder that he prefers to quibble over how far exactly the historical evidence will allow us to go rather than defend the twin brother hypothesis. But even just taken on its own, Caven's case against rationally believing in the resurrection strikes me as extraordinarily weak. It feels like a trivial semantic argument which leaves the substantive underlying issues completely unaddressed.

To sum up, this section has considered Robert Greg Caven's case that historical evidence alone is indeterminate between the possibilities of a resurrection and a resuscitation. I have offered two general lines of response. First, I have suggested that even if Jesus was only resuscitated, this would still be miraculous and would therefore still support the truth of Christianity. And from this it follows that we would have reason to believe that what Jesus taught was true. Jesus taught that he was resurrected. Therefore, even if the historical evidence alone only allows us to infer a miraculous resuscitation, we can pretty easily move from this to a miraculous resurrection. Second, Jesus's resurrected body demonstrated abilities far beyond those of a natural body. This renders the idea that Jesus's risen body possessed other special properties, including those of a resurrected body, fairly plausible. Together, I think that these points are sufficient to show that Caven's case against believing in the resurrection of Jesus may be readily dismissed.

Lastly, I want to discuss James Fodor's case against the resurrection of Jesus, which he details in his book, *Unreasonable Faith*. Now, in that book, Fodor is laser-focused upon William Lane Craig's case for the resurrection of Jesus. While Craig's case is not as minimal as say Gary Habermas's or Mike Lacona's, I think it is fair to say that he still very much falls into the minimalist camp. Again, I recognize that Craig rejects being labeled as a minimalist, but as shown earlier, his resurrection argument falls within the boundaries which I have stipulated for a minimalist approach. And as I explained before, I reject a minimalist approach to defending the resurrection. As such, Fodor's objections are not specifically directed against the sort of resurrection argument which I am offering. With that being said, I still think it will be of value to survey his objections. This is because Fodor's contribution to this debate is somewhat unique. And by showing how the maximalist can overcome Fodor's objections, I will further cement the strength of the maximalist case for the resurrection.

William Lane Craig's resurrection argument is based upon four allegedly widely accepted historical facts. These are: one, the burial of Jesus; two, the empty tomb; three, the post-mortem appearances of Jesus; and four, the disciples' belief in the resurrection. Craig argues that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of these four facts.

Fodor's response grants Craig all of these four facts, but argues that the resurrection is not the best explanation of them. As he explains, "I wish to pursue quite a different strategy, one that I believe has been largely neglected in the discourse thus far. Specifically, subject to only a few relatively minor qualifications, I will accept both of the first two premises of Craig's argument. I believe Craig has provided adequate evidence to attest to the four historical facts, even if I believe he does overstate his case at times. I also largely accept the criteria that he presents for judging explanations. Instead, I want to focus my attention on Craig's third premise that the resurrection hypothesis is the best explanation for the four historical facts. I will present an alternate explanation for Craig's historical facts, defend it against various objections, and then argue that this alternate explanation better fulfills the criteria for a good explanation than does Craig's resurrection hypothesis. As such, I argue that Craig fails to show that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation for the historical facts and therefore his argument for the truth of Christianity fails."

Fodor's alternative hypothesis is a combination of four different theses which, according to him, better explain Craig's four facts than the resurrection when assessed by the criteria of a best explanation. He calls it the RHBS hypothesis, as he summarizes, "I have termed this explanatory hypothesis the RHBS model, which stands for rearial, hallucination, biases, and socialization, corresponding to the key elements of the model. A summary of the model follows. Rearial: between Jesus's burial on Friday afternoon and the discovery of the empty tomb on Sunday morning, Jesus's body was removed from the tomb and subsequently re-interred. Exactly why is a secondary matter, but in my view, the most likely explanation is that..."

Joseph of Arimathea himself wished to remove Jesus's corpse from his family tomb.

Individual hallucinations. Following the discovery of the empty tomb and exasperated by grief and emotional excitement, one or more of Jesus's followers experienced individual hallucinations of the risen Jesus. The most likely candidates are Mary and Peter, though that is not essential to the argument.

Group religious experiences. These followers then discussed their experiences with the disciples, generating an expectation that they might experience something similar partly as a result of this expectancy and also mediated by social reinforcement, strong emotions, sensory distortions, and environmental influences. The early disciples had several collective religious experiences of the risen Jesus. These experiences were social in nature and so not purely psychological hallucinations but were delusory in the sense that they did not involve the disciples actually seeing a physically resurrected Jesus.

Memory and cognitive biases. In the process of discussing these experiences among themselves afterwards, the disciples' memories of what they experienced were reshaped through processes of reconstructive recall and social memory co-cognition in the direction of increased coherence between individual accounts and also greater impressiveness of the experiences. In the process, a standard version of these experiences began to develop. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, selective perception, and other similar biases combined to reduce any inconsistencies or discrepancies in the accounts or memories.

Socialization and marginalization of doubt. Public expressions of doubt, disagreement, and skepticism were further muted because few disbelievers cared enough about Christianity to engage much with early Christians or disprove their claims, and most of those exposed to these claims had neither the inclination nor the ability to check for themselves.

Fodor goes on to examine how his RHBS hypothesis compares to Craig's with respect to satisfying the criteria of a best explanation. He begins by considering the relative parsimony of his hypothesis versus Craig's. He identifies a more plausible explanation as one with fewer new assumptions and better justified new assumptions. He identifies the new assumptions of the RHBS hypothesis as follows.

One, Jesus's body was removed from the tomb before its discovery by Jesus's women followers.

Two, some of Jesus's followers experienced individual hallucinations of Jesus appearing to them.

Three, reports of the empty tomb in these first appearances triggered a series of collective experiences of the risen Jesus among the disciples.

Four, the memories and understanding of these experiences were reshaped over time by psychological and sociological forces towards being more consistent and impressive.

Fodor goes on at considerable length arguing that none of these new assumptions are terribly implausible since he thinks that he can tell a plausible story to support the first and that there is considerable psychological evidence to support the plausibility of the other three. Furthermore, he contends that collectively these new assumptions possess the explanatory power to adequately account for all of Craig's four facts. This makes it a real competitor against the resurrection hypothesis as he concludes.

Overall, therefore, I conclude that each of the four postulates of the RHBS model is plausible and that taken together, they have adequate explanatory scope and moderately high explanatory power in accounting for Craig's four historical facts. As such, I think that the RHBS model provides a reasonably good explanation for the historical facts. It is certainly not a perfect explanation. It does not account for every detail, nor does it do so with maximal degrees of plausibility or explanatory power. Nevertheless, I think it accounts for the facts in question in as good a manner as can reasonably be expected given the paucity of the evidence for such an ancient event.

Fodor then moves to assess the relative plausibility and explanatory power of the resurrection hypothesis as Craig defends it. He concludes that the new assumptions which it includes, namely that God exists, that God would want to raise Jesus from the dead and that Jesus would want to be seen after his resurrection are not independently plausible. Fodor is willing to grant that the resurrection hypothesis has strong explanatory power with respect to most of the facts, although he does quibble with its ability to explain the fourth.

That is about as brief a summary of Fodor's case as I can give without glossing over essential details. And I actually think that it's a reasonably good response to Craig's resurrection argument and to minimalist arguments. More generally, the key problem with minimalist arguments, which Fodor effectively leverages, is that they do not make any reference to the details of the resurrection appearances in the Gospels. Without those details, it's impossible to make a determination with respect to the question of whether or not the disciples were rational in their belief in the resurrection of Jesus. One can argue all they like for the mere fact that the disciples genuinely believed in the resurrection. But if they did not believe it for good reasons, then this fact is not significant. The whole idea behind an argument based on historical testimony is that the justification which people in the past had for their beliefs is to some extent supposed to be able to be transmitted to us in the present. And the justification which those people had was the details of their own experiences. Therefore, our being able to access some of the details of those experiences is absolutely essential to our being able to have justified beliefs about the past. But Craig's four facts, which make up the premises of his resurrection argument, make no use of the details within the resurrection accounts. Craig attempts to argue for the resurrection just from the fact that the disciples saw Jesus in some sense and then came to believe that he was resurrected. This is the critical oversight in minimalist arguments for the resurrection and Fodor exploits it very well as he puts it.

I should note, however, that accepting these four facts does not amount to accepting the historicity of every detail recorded in the New Testament or in the Gospels specifically. In particular, I do not necessarily grant the historicity of all the details surrounding Jesus's death, burial, and appearances, nor that each appearance recorded in one of the Gospels is necessarily historical. I grant that experiences of the risen Jesus occurred and that they took place on multiple occasions in different circumstances with individuals and groups of people. This does not, however, entail that all details of such accounts in the Gospels are completely accurate or can be uncritically appealed to.

Fortunately, we do not have to rely on minimalist arguments for the resurrection. The maximalist argument which I have made explicitly utilizes those details by referencing the credibility of the testimony pertaining to the resurrection of Jesus. Again, the maximalist is not necessarily appealing to the historicity of the details within the resurrection narratives. Rather, the maximalist is appealing to the idea that these details are part of what the original eyewitnesses claim to have seen.

Fodor's case against the resurrection depends critically upon the details in the Gospels pertaining to the resurrection appearances not being anything like what the disciples originally experienced. In this way, Fodor drives a wedge between the disciples' belief in the resurrection and the rationality of that belief. The failure of minimalist arguments is that they allow skeptics like Fodor to make this move. The maximalist case, however, is equipped with the resources necessary to block this move.

My argument for the resurrection takes for granted something which I extensively defended in a prior video, namely the traditional authorship of the four Gospels. In order to get to the conclusion that the resurrection narratives in the Gospels are nothing like what the disciples originally experienced, one might think that Fodor would have to deny the traditional authorship of the Gospels. After all, it doesn't seem likely that Matthew and John, for example, could be mistaken about their own experiences when they relayed them in their respective Gospels. But Fodor is actually willing to grant traditional authorship. And yet, he maintains that this is not sufficient to guarantee that the details in the Gospels accurately relay what the appearances of Jesus were like. As he explains, the embellishments that occurred to the story, therefore, were not primarily gradual legendary accretions, but largely were the result of the psychological and sociological processes I have just outlined, shaping and reshaping the disciples' memories and understandings of what they themselves had experienced.

As such, the RHBS model that I am here defending is in no way dependent upon gradual legendary accretion or on the Gospels not having access to original eyewitness testimony. Although I regard it as unlikely that any of the Gospels were directly written by eyewitnesses. Nevertheless, my account is consistent with this possibility since the RHBS model seeks to explain how the eyewitnesses themselves came to believe that the risen Jesus appeared to them in the flesh. The key in achieving this remarkable conclusion for Fodor is his suggestion that the disciples' memories of what had originally occurred in their visionary or hallucinatory experiences were distorted by sociological factors to the extent that they really came to believe that their experiences occurred in the way that they are reported in the Gospels. As he explains, the final postulate of the RHBS model is that the stories of Jesus's appearances that came to be told by Jesus's followers do not correspond exactly to what the disciples really experienced in their collective religious experiences of the risen Jesus. Even though the disciples really did believe they were truthfully reporting their experiences. This is the result of the disciples' memories of what they experienced being altered over time leading to a general increase in impressiveness of the accounts incorporating new elements from the recollections of other different disciples and also to enhance the overall coherence of the accounts of different disciples.

The weight that Fodor's case will carry against the maximalist argument for the resurrection then is directly proportionate to the strength of his evidence that this level of memory distortion really occurred. But before addressing Fodor's case for memory distortion, I just need to flag one thing about his appeal to hallucinations. For although he appeals to memory distortion to explain away the details of the Gospels, Fodor thinks that the disciples' belief in the resurrection was originally generated by hallucinatory experiences. As a result, it is worth asking how likely it is that hallucinations would lead the disciples to believe in the resurrection in the first place, even if the details in the Gospels could be explained by recourse to memory distortion. The basic worry here is that although bereavement hallucinations are somewhat common, they do not typically lead those who have them to believe that the deceased has returned to life. More commonly, they are just interpreted as communications from the deceased from beyond the grave.

As David Greg observes, Fodor then turns to bereavement hallucinations, which are more relevant to the question of Jesus's resurrection. One crucial question that Fodor does not consider is if hallucinations are common, why are such experiences not regularly understood as resurrections? Fodor then cites studies on individuals involved in new religious movements indicating that such people are more prone to fantasize. While I can agree with Fodor that hallucinations are relatively commonplace realities, they are consistently interpreted by reasonable people to be at most communications of comfort about the departed from beyond the grave. Which is to say, even if the disciples had experienced hallucinations, it is improbable, given their first-century memory schematics of the afterlife, that they would have remembered this as a resurrection. Instead, it is more probable that the disciples would have interpreted this as evidence that Jesus was dead and destined to arise at the end of the age or assumed into heaven. If bereavement hallucinations are not a good explanation for the disciples' belief in the resurrection in the first place, then Fodor's hypothesis has plausibility difficulties right from the start, even aside from the viability of his claims about the likelihood of memory distortion.

But let us put this point aside. Even granting Fodor that bereavement hallucinations could account for the disciples' initial belief in the resurrection. I argue that memory distortion is not a good explanation for how those hallucinatory experiences got transmuted into the reports we find in the Gospels.

Now, a preliminary point to make in response to any objection to the historicity of the details within the Gospels on the basis of potential distortions of memory is that one must always be very careful about arguing against the reliability of memory. For one thing, it becomes far too easy to reject almost any historical event one likes on the basis of the possibility of memory distortion. As Angus Menuge puts it, if the possibility of unreliable memory is a reason to reject the reliably preserved, multiply-attested reports of eyewitnesses to the resurrection, that would mean that we ought to reject vast amounts of history.

Even more seriously, arguments against the reliability of memory are prone to having much more wide-ranging skeptical consequences than is typically appreciated. Furthermore, such arguments are prone to being self-defeating. The reason for this is quite simply that the vast majority of our knowledge is based at some level on memory. This is obviously true when it comes to our historical beliefs, but it is also true of our scientific beliefs which depend on the trustworthiness of the memories of the scientists who perform the experiments which justify scientific beliefs. It is even true of our everyday beliefs. For we rely upon memory to justifiably believe that we did perform such and such an action last week, yesterday, or even 5 minutes ago. In fact, any belief about some event which we are not directly perceiving in the present will depend upon memory. Hence casting widespread doubt upon the reliability of memory will have disastrous epistemic consequences for almost all of our beliefs. And such skepticism is likely to end up being self-defeating because inevitably whatever studies one wishes to cite in support of the thesis that memory is unreliable will have depended upon memory in various ways in order to acquire the evidence that memory is unreliable.

The point here is not to ignore the evidence which Fodor cites in support of the idea that memory can sometimes be unreliable. Rather, the point is to caution against being too quick to jump to the conclusion that unreliable memories are very common without being careful to specify the conditions under which they occur and can be identified. For otherwise, one risks the argument being generalized to invalidate nearly everything which we believe. The upshot here is that if we wish to avoid making it far too easy for people to reject absolutely any historical event that they please or, more seriously, if we wish to avoid global skepticism about the past, we should have a high degree of credence in the general reliability of memory. We should be slow to adopt the unreliability of memory as a basis for rejecting the historicity of a reported event unless we have very good reasons for doing so in that particular instance. In other words, we should want far more than just general indicators that memory is sometimes unreliable or susceptible to distortion. We should want reasons for thinking that memory distortion is actually at play in a particular case.

With all that being said, what are we to make of the evidence Fodor cites in support of the thesis that false memories can occur rather easily? Fodor gives us five examples which are supposed to render credible the thesis that what we have in the Gospels are sincere but misremembered recollections of hallucinations. I should highlight from the start that none of his examples of memory distortion or of false memories are particularly similar to what he is proposing. That is to say, none of them involve memory distortion of hallucinations at all. Indeed, it's somewhat difficult to assess the relevance of any of Fodor's examples since Fodor leaves it quite vague to what extent he believes that the content within the Gospels results from hallucinations and to what extent it involves memory distortion.

As David Greg points out, while there is some good humility in Fodor stating that the details of precisely what occurred can never be known and that his model does not pretend to explain exactly how these collective experiences occurred, this is also a weakness of his view as it is too broad to move from mere possibility to plausibility. Most of all, as explained above, it would be inconsistent with the disciples' worldview and expectations to conclude that Jesus had risen as the historical texts record. Consequently, Fodor's view lacks explanatory power. According to all of the accounts, the appearances of Jesus began 3 days after the crucifixion and then ended abruptly around 40 days later. Is it Fodor's belief that the group hallucinations actually began precisely at this time and then sharply ended 40 days later? Or is this idea to be attributed to memory distortion? It's really impossible to say because Fodor doesn't tell us. It is difficult to take seriously the suggestion that the disciples really had collective hallucinations only for this precise time frame. As Timothy and Lydia McGrew observe, these detailed parallel integrated hallucinations must be invoked repeatedly across a period of more than a month during which the disciples were persuaded that they repeatedly interacted with their Lord and Master here on earth and then abruptly they stopped. Christ no longer appeared on earth. From the standpoint of calculating a Bayes factor, the problem with the hallucination theory is that it has a vanishingly small probability. Given that this is radically implausible, I presume that Fodor would opt for the idea that the appearances lasting precisely 40 days owes to memory distortion. But what this implies is that for Fodor, memory distortion rather than hallucination is really doing the heavy lifting in explaining the content of the resurrection narratives in the Gospels. So from this it follows that the examples of false memories which he cites need to demonstrate this level of memory distortion if they are to make his thesis plausible. In this next section, I shall argue that his examples do not do this.

Fodor's first example comes from a 2006 paper by Chrissy Wilson and Christopher French, and it regards a questionnaire in which participants were asked to recall memories about dramatic news footage of five different events. Four of the events were actually documented with video footage, whereas one of them, the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, was not. And yet, 36% of participants reported false memories about seeing footage of this bombing. While this example does demonstrate the fairly uncontroversial thesis that humans sometimes form false memories, it's not clear why it does much of anything to support Fodor's thesis that the resurrection appearances of Jesus, as described in the Gospels, can be understood as distorted memories. In the first place, it's relatively easy to see why participants might claim to remember footage of the Bali bombing. It was suggested by the questionnaire itself. For all we know, the participants were genuinely remembering footage of a bombing on TV, and they simply carelessly connected it to the Bali bombing when this was suggested by the questionnaire. Furthermore, there had actually been bombings in Bali just four years earlier, which were probably doing some work in generating false memories. Given that participants were being asked about several different dramatic events as they were seen on television, it's fairly easy to see how some confusion might arise. In addition, we don't really know much about how deeply the participants were affected by these news stories. While such stories can surely impact people, there is almost inevitably a greater level of detachment when one sees something on television than when one experiences it for oneself.

As David Pilmer points out, similarities and differences between direct and indirect exposure to a shocking occurrence have yet to be studied fully. Comparisons of experienced and reported events suggest that memories of these two types of occurrences do in fact differ in some respects. For example, flashbulb memories of how one heard the news of a public tragedy appear to be factually less consistent over time than memories of tragedies experienced personally. People who directly experienced the 1989 California earthquake had highly consistent memories of this event a year and a half later, whereas people who only heard the news of the earthquake showed more evidence of memory distortion or loss. By contrast, the resurrection accounts in the Gospels are not the result of the prompts of a questionnaire, but rather flow from the conviction of the evangelists. As such, they are not open to the power of suggestion in the same way in which random participants who answer a questionnaire might be. The Gospel accounts are not describing a series of events as seen on television, but rather are recounting the experiences which changed their author's lives. As such, this first example does show that people can make mistakes in forming false memories, especially when the power of suggestion is present when relaying their memories about several similar events or when reporting what they have learned indirectly through mediums such as television. But this doesn't do much to render plausible the idea that this is what was going on in the case of the resurrection narratives in the Gospels.

As Robert McIver observes, while the DRM false memory procedure might be interesting in its own right, and while the ability to induce false memories by social contagion is fascinating, it might fairly be asked, what do these and other experimental procedures described have to do with the study of the nature of the Gospel traditions? What have doctored photos, misleading questions, and memorizing lists of words, and all other diverse ways that have been shown to generate false memories have in common? The answer is that they are all able to induce false memories because they share the same characteristic of plausibility. The memory frailties of transients, suggestibility, and hindsight bias investigated in earlier chapters were discovered to have more impact on the details of memories rather than on the general gist of what is remembered. If this is true of eyewitness testimony in general, it is therefore true of the contributions that the individual eyewitnesses would have made to the formation of the traditions found in the Synoptic Gospels. Their memories would have been accurate more often than not. They would have been most reliable in reporting the gist of the event and what happened and least reliable about matters relating to time. Their contribution would have had a first-order faithfulness to the events in Jesus's life that they had witnessed.

Fodor's second example involves an experiment discussed in a 2004 paper by Carrie Pickel where test subjects viewed a videotaped robbery and then were interviewed about it a week later. The experiment showed that some witnesses reported certain details not present within the video. Once again, the relevance of this case to Fodor's thesis seems minimal. Unfortunately, the research he cites within the book doesn't tell us what percentage of the witnesses added false details. Was it a sizable number of witnesses or was it just a handful? The section cited by Fodor doesn't say what sorts of details were added. Were these added details incidental or were they added details on the level of Thomas demanding to touch Jesus's wounds, as Fodor's thesis would require? And the paper explicitly leaves open the possibility that the witnesses who did add these details not present in the video were simply lying. This is a possibility that is not open to Fodor given that he has granted the sincerity of the disciples.

In short, it's simply unclear how much memory experiments in a laboratory setting can tell us about human memory of real-life experiences. As Andrew Lok and Nick Meter observe, many of the studies cited in favor of a skeptical view are conducted in the laboratory. For example, the simple idea that memory decays with time is sometimes put forward without acknowledgment that most studies involve meaningless experimental materials and that there are numerous counterexamples. Distortion and deterioration begins within a very short time after the event. Yet in memory of real-world events of greater importance to individuals, initial decay in the total amount recalled typically plateaus, resulting in stable and largely accurate long-term recall of the remainder. Similarly, laboratory experiments designed to manipulate memory or implant false memories may be misleading. The fact that memory can be manipulated in the laboratory is important but does not by itself allow of any conclusion about how reliable memory is under normal real-life circumstances. And in any case, recent studies have shown that the way in which participants in these sorts of experiments are asked questions affects the perceived accuracy of their answers. In general, where there is greater opportunity for participants to clarify and add nuance, the level of accuracy increases, casting doubt on the significance of these findings.

As John Wix and his co-authors explain, laboratory studies typically have participants view a mock crime after which different interviewing strategies are compared, e.g., the cognitive interview versus a standard police interview protocol. Although most studies are concerned with the ability of a structured interview, such as the cognitive interview, to elicit more information than alternative techniques. Many studies also report the accuracy of the obtained information. In an early meta-analysis of the literature, it was determined that the cognitive interview elicited significantly more information than alternative interviews. More importantly for our present purposes, they also found that accuracy was as high or slightly higher in the cognitive interviews than in the comparison interviews. Comparable accuracy scores were recently reported by River, Fiser, Robertson, and Hearn Mueller in a more realistic study. Critically, of the recalled information that could be corroborated, the accuracy rates were 88% correct and 87% correct for the cognitive interview and a standard interview protocol respectively. Accuracy rates that fall in the range of 85% to 90% correct indicate that eyewitness recall for details is not perfect. But such results are hard to reconcile with the prevailing notion that eyewitness memory is simply unreliable.

Another factor overlooked by Fodor and the individuals he is citing is that oftentimes the surveys of these individuals do not allow participants to give an indeterminate answer. Participants are sometimes forced to answer yes or no to the questions which effectively makes them guess and so is insensitive to the fact that memory may not even be in play at times. Yet if the participants guess incorrectly, then this is taken to be a strike against the reliability of their memory. Obviously, this skews the final results of many studies on memory, giving an unfairly negative perception of the reliability of memory. Again, Wix and his co-authors suggest witness confidence may be assessed unobtrusively by allowing witnesses to withhold uncertain responses or to say, "I don't know." Presumably, if given the opportunity to withhold a response, witnesses will withhold the low-confidence responses. In a test of this hypothesis, Evans and Fiser showed experimental witnesses a brief crime video and then tested them with either free recall, cued recall, or yes and no questions. Moreover, witnesses were either permitted to withhold responses, say, "I don't know," or they were forced to answer all questions. As might be expected, witnesses were less confident about responses they withheld and were later asked to report than responses they provided voluntarily. In agreement with the results summarized in figures three and four, witnesses were very accurate for the high-confident answers they provided voluntarily, but accuracy declined considerably when they were forced to also provide low-confidence responses.

Fodor's third example draws from a 1994 paper by Roger Beller and Dale Griffin which showed that an individual's interpretation of an event can shift after they either conform to or dissent from the viewpoint of a group. I confess that this seems rather unremarkable to me. I don't really need a scientific study to tell me that one's affiliation with a particular group can color how they see the world since common experience bears this out. Fodor neglects to explain how this is supposed to support his thesis. I suppose the idea is that once a group of Christians was established, the group perspective colored the way in which the disciples viewed their hallucinatory experiences, thereby giving us the Gospel narratives. But this then seems to assume that these experiences of the risen Jesus as they are reported were not the basis for Christianity in the first place. This again raises the question of how belief in the resurrection originated. And in any case, the types of examples canvassed in Beller and Griffin's paper don't really encompass flashbulb memories or personal event memories, which are the two most likely classes of memories under which the resurrection appearances of Jesus would have been formed. And there is good evidence that these sorts of memories are less susceptible to the sorts of distortion that Fodor is bringing up here. More on this in a moment.

Fodor's fourth example comes from a 2002 paper by Agneska Nidzuenska, though he accidentally cites it as a 2012 paper and it regards an experiment wherein students were asked to recall two significant autobiographical events, then were shown a videotape of a young woman recounting her own experiences of those events. After this, they were asked to recall those autobiographical events again, and it was found that most of the students ended up incorporating elements from the young woman's account into their second account. Yet again, I really struggle to see the relevance of this experiment to Fodor's thesis. Obviously, if one has recently heard someone else recounting an event which they lived through, then they are more likely to incorporate some of those elements within their own account. This is especially so if the other person has mentioned an aspect which the original witness saw but neglected to mention or if that aspect is consistent with their own experience. It's really not even clear that this is a case of memory distortion. It seems to be more akin to the results of DRM experiments showing that similar ideas tend to be remembered alongside others simply because of the close association between the concepts.

As MacIver puts it, Rodener and McDermott discovered that if experimental participants were asked to recall the following list of words: bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, nap, peace, yawn, drowsy. that the word sleep would be remembered as frequently as any of the words in the middle of the list. This should not be surprising given that the word sleep has strong associations with all the other words in the list. One must note what kind of an error it is to include sleep in a list comprised of bed, rest, dream, etc. It is true that sleep is not a part of the list, but it is consistent with the list. One could question whether sleep is a false memory or just memory working in its usual way, as it endeavors to bring out the underlying meaning of experiences. But even if Fodor's example does present us with a case of genuine memory distortion, it involves melding similar memories together. Fodor has got to explain how the entire story of Thomas touching Jesus's wounds, for example, developed as the result of memory distortion when this wasn't anything like anyone's actual hallucinatory experience. And it seems pretty clear that this example does little to further this goal.

Fodor's final example is a study which revealed that witnesses tend to modify their description of suspects based upon their audience's evaluation of the suspect. But again, I really fail to see how this relatively common-sense observation is supposed to support the idea that memory distortion can account for the resurrection narratives representing honest but misremembered descriptions of hallucinations.

As Greg concludes, Fodor lists an article arguing that flashbulb memories only have perceived accuracy based on North Carolina students' memories of an event in other states. However, he does not engage studies that found that the greater the connection that one has to an event, the more likely one is to form an accurate flashbulb memory. Admittedly, Fodor does proceed to cite studies indicating that false memories are not limited to disinterested individuals. These results do not actually support Fodor's argument because in the cases Fodor references, it is not that the individuals misremembered that the event took place, but that they misremember who did it. Further, Fodor mentions the cases of identifying a rape victim, one of which was sadly misremembered as an individual who was seen on television during the terrible violation, and consequently, it is not clear that such cases are analogous.

So far, I have objected to Fodor's thesis on the grounds that we should be very reluctant to appeal to the fallibility of memory to explain away testimonial evidence on pain of global skepticism about memory. As a result of this, we should have case-specific evidence for memory distortion before being too enthusiastic about settling on memory distortion as a significant explanation for how some testimony came to be. And I have further objected that the specific examples he cites of memory distortion don't seem particularly analogous to what he is proposing for the descriptions of the resurrected Jesus in the Gospels. But we should also consider the positive case for the general reliability of memory and the reliability of memories of significant moments in particular. It will be instructive to consider Robert McIver's excellent work on memory here since he directly connects it to the testimony contained within the Gospels.

After surveying much of the contemporary psychological literature, McIver finds that memory regularly deteriorates by up to 20% within the first 5 years of an event having happened. If the event is remembered at all after this time, McIver's findings suggest that memory is stable after this point for at least 20 years. As he says, each of the experiments on human memory reported so far has underlined the fact that human memories are indeed transient. Moreover, most reveal that the macro effects of this transience are largely predictable. But of the different kinds of memory that have been shown to exhibit a similar pattern of retention and loss, episodic memory that survives for the first five years after an event is likely to be very stable for the next 20 years or more, after which time a further slow decline takes place. It may even be estimated that between 30 and 50% of significant material is likely to survive long enough to become a near permanent part of long-term memory.

McIver's findings are not only supported by the psychological data which he examines, but they also more or less comport with common sense. We don't need to perform exotic experiments to know that we have a harder time remembering things as time goes on up until a certain point. The upshot here is simply that human memory, while certainly not infallible, is generally fairly reliable. It deteriorates more quickly within the first 5 years after an event, but even here it tends to remain up to 80% accurate. And after five years, memory tends to remain stable for another 20.

As David Pilmer puts it, despite these qualifications, research supports a conclusion that fits nicely with commonly held conceptions of human memory. Memories of personal life episodes are generally true to the original experiences, although specific details may be omitted or misremembered, and substantial distortions occasionally do occur. Fodor is right to remind us of the distortions to which memory is subject, but the preponderance of data suggests that this is not what is typically going on. And when memory is distorted, the distortions tend to turn up in details like the time at which an event occurred, the color of people's clothing, or the interpretation of someone's underlying motives. But clearly, these sorts of minor errors of memory are not anything like what Fodor is proposing. Fodor needs memories of hallucinations to be transmuted into the sorts of descriptions we find of the risen Jesus in the Gospels. And neither these common sorts of memory distortions nor even some of the more extreme cases documented by Fodor illustrate that this level of memory distortion is possible, let alone that it is common.

As David Pilmer concludes, it is safe to say that memory researchers do approach a consensus on some issues. There is widespread agreement that memory is an active reconstructive process rather than a passive reproductive process. In the process of constructing a memory narrative, errors can occur. At the same time, memory for the most part does its job. That is, memory descriptions usually are consistent with the general form and content of past experiences even if particular details are lost, added, or distorted in the act of remembering. A person hit by a car may misremember its color or the day of the week, but will rarely confuse being hit by a car with, say, falling down a mountain.

Andrew Lok and Nick Meter add, since the mid-2010s we have seen another revision of the consensus on the reliability of memory. For example, Loftus questions whether the focus on the sins of memory has led researchers to downplay the virtues of memory. Recent studies give support to this suggestion. And elsewhere, Nick Meter says, "An influential study published a few years ago kickstarted a replication crisis in psychology. Researchers were only able to replicate the findings of a third to half of all studies they investigated. This started a period of reflection across the discipline. There is growing evidence of an unrealistically negative view on the accuracy of memory. But perhaps more significantly, there is compelling evidence that specific types of memories are more reliable than general memories. In particular, there has been a lot of discussion surrounding what psychologists have labeled flashbulb memories and personal event memories. These are particularly vivid memories of short but significant events."

As David Pilmer says, flashbulb memory has come to be associated primarily with memories of learning about newsworthy events. Presumably, the disciples considered Jesus's resurrection to be newsworthy since it would come to form the heart of the Gospel. The Greek word for Gospel is evangelion and it literally translates to good news. Flashbulb memories are likelier to form when an event is especially important to someone. McIver gives the following example. The reported study included 40 white students and 40 black students. It was discovered that the black students were much more likely to form a flashbulb memory of the death of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King than the white students. Brown and Kulick concluded that this is evidence that personal consequentiality is important in the formation of flashbulb memories. As a result of their analysis, Brown and Kulick postulated that a flashbulb memory is fixed for a very long time and conceivably permanent, varying in complexity with consequentiality, but once created, always there and in need of no further strengthening. This memory, they suggested, is not preserved in a narrative or verbal form but in other forms such as images.

Robert McIver argues that the evidence is strong that these sorts of memories are uniquely resilient against the sort of memory distortion which Fodor's hypothesis requires. He finds that more recent research has corroborated the idea that personal event memories display a higher level of immunity to distortion than typical memories. A particularly striking example here regards a comparison between the memories of veterans who actually fought during World War II and the memories of those who did not. The veterans were consistently able to get the details right, such as the weather during particular days, the specific dates of particular invasions, and even the days of the week on which particular battles occurred, far more often than those who were not directly involved. McIver summarizes the results saying, "Compared to many other types of memory, flashbulb and other personal event memories are long-lived and have the ability to retain many details with great accuracy. Not all details are remembered and not with 100% accuracy. What is retained though is sufficient to contain the gist of the event. Thus, one is safe in concluding that personal event memories are more long-lived than other types of memory and can be relied on to conserve the general gist of the event, even if some of the details might be lost or even wrong."

It seems likely that whether hallucinatory or not, the disciples' experiences of the risen Jesus would have formed flashbulb memories or at the very least personal event memories given their personal connection to Jesus and the obvious significance which these experiences had on them. But since these types of memories appear to be particularly resistant to being distorted, Fodor's hypothesis is a particularly implausible explanation for them.

As Lok and Meter suggest, several studies have shown that events of personal or emotional significance are recalled far more accurately and it has been argued in recent literature that the earliest Christians' remembrance of Jesus's post-resurrection appearances belongs to this category as such events would have been regarded to be of foundational importance for the earliest Christian movement. And McIver adds, "Much of the episodic memories of the eyewitnesses of Jesus would have been of such a nature as to form personal event memories. What has been discovered about personal event memories allows at least three more observations about the contribution that the memories of the eyewitnesses may have made to the formation of the Gospel traditions. First, while their memories are often likely to be accurate in the details recounted, they would have been most reliable at the level of gist. Second, eyewitness memories tend to be concentrated around a moment of time. Personal event memories are characterized by the recollection of emotional reactions and vivid details concentrated in a very short period of time. Eyewitness memory then is granular. It remembers short moments in great detail. Of significance is the observation that was made in the previous chapter that the various pericopae that make up the Synoptic Gospels exhibit a similar granularity. Studies on personal event memories do show that humans can accurately remember some details over periods as long as 50 or more years. This lends more credibility to the observation made already. Though it's eyewitness memories of Jesus's ministry that survived intact for the first five or so years would likely have lasted over the lifetime of that eyewitness."

In addition to the comparable resistance of personal event memories against the sort of distortion which Fodor is positing, we should also note that specific details within the resurrection narratives themselves are resistant to explanation by recourse to memory distortion. Of particular interest here is the example of doubting Thomas in the Gospel of John. Thomas is said to have demonstrated remarkable skepticism towards the idea that Jesus rose from the dead until he was permitted to touch Jesus's wounds. It's difficult to see how this episode fits within Fodor's hypothesis. If this event is admitted to be part of the apostles' original testimony, then it seems that Fodor could see the appearance to Thomas either as being a hallucination which Thomas experienced or as a distortion of John's memory. But both alternatives face difficulties. As a skeptic in denial about the resurrection, Thomas does not appear to be in a frame of mind which would have made him susceptible to a bereavement hallucination. Plus, the group setting accompanied by an invitation by Jesus for Thomas to touch him further mitigates against the plausibility of this episode having been entirely hallucinatory.

As David Greg puts it, "In theory, others might be able to convince someone that Jesus appeared to them. However, this would depend on the individual's personality. For example, in the case of a doubting Thomas, one might require more evidence. Consequently, while such studies on memory might support the notion that some of the 500 came to believe as outlined earlier, it would not, however, support the idea that all experiences of the risen Jesus could have arisen in that way."

However, there were also problems with trying to explain the doubting Thomas episode as a distortion of memory because the evidence that distortion due to factors such as suggestibility and social contagion indicates that such distortion must at least broadly be consistent with the original memory or event. As Greg observes, "Is it plausible that such a statement might have implanted the notion that the tomb was empty and Jesus was raised? Studies on suggestibility show that one is only able to implant information within limits consistent with the context. And so even given resurrection predictions, the first-century Jewish beliefs about the afterlife, not to mention someone would have eventually checked for the body, such an extrapolation is not supported by research on memory." Yet there appears to be no way for the episode with Thomas to be consistent with the original memory if this episode is purely or primarily the result of distortion. Either Thomas originally demonstrated skepticism towards the resurrection or he did not. If he did, then as we have already noted, hallucinations are not a plausible explanation for how he came to believe in it. If he did not demonstrate initial skepticism, then the memory distortion which Fodor is hypothesizing is not a plausible explanation for how this episode came to be written down since it is no longer even remotely consistent with the original event. Thomas's skepticism makes him resistant to Fodor's explanation for how his belief in the resurrection might have arisen. And for an independent reason, Thomas's skepticism makes him resistant to Fodor's explanation for how this story might have arisen as the result of memory distortion. There is therefore a genuine dilemma for Fodor's hypothesis here.

If the account about Thomas is an authentic part of what the apostles originally claimed, it is worth highlighting that when he specifically addresses the story of doubting Thomas, Fodor simply rejects its authenticity. He says, "Many scholars have noted the clear apologetic intent of this passage, which combined with the fact that it is only reported in John, the latest of the Gospels, has led many scholars to doubt its historicity. Furthermore, claims to prior skepticism, as seen in the case of Thomas and elsewhere in the Gospels, are a well-known narrative device used in reporting miraculous or paranormal events. The accounts of doubting Thomas are therefore best explained as later apologetic accretions to the core narrative made likely unconsciously in accordance with the common motif of the avowal of prior skepticism concerning miraculous claims."

Craig has not provided evidence to show that Thomas truly was as skeptical as John claims he was, or that the events in this passage occurred exactly as John claims they did. As such, Craig's appeal to the appearance to Thomas adds no compelling evidence to his case for the resurrection. David Greg replies to Fodor on this front by saying, "Just because only one source mentions an event does not mean that one should doubt that account. Instead, one source still increases the likelihood of the authenticity of an event, even if multiple independent attestation would further strengthen the case." Fodor also points out that prior claims to skepticism are a common narrative device. However, what Fodor needs to demonstrate is that in this instance, it is merely a fictional narrative device based on the little information known about Thomas. His doubt concerning Jesus's resurrection is consistent with his character. And so, it is probably a historically plausible event. Greg is right to point out that a source should not be rejected simply because it is the only source to mention an event. Other factors pertaining to the general trustworthiness of the source must also be considered. However, in the context of his book, I actually think that Fodor is permitted to reject the appearance to Thomas. This is because that chapter is a direct response to Craig's argument for the resurrection. And since Craig does not show that the story of

doubting Thomas meets any of his criteria of authenticity, Fodor is well within his rights to disallow Craig from appealing to it. Things become more complicated, however, when Fodor moves away from this very narrow task and suggests that his RHBS model can be applied more generally even to more robust resurrection arguments like mine.

Recall that Fodor thinks that his RHBS hypothesis can succeed even on the assumption of traditional authorship and on the assumption that the apostles were intending to be honest. Perhaps he means to accommodate these requirements by suggesting that the story of Thomas was likely unconsciously added to the narrative. I really must wonder how exactly Fodor conceives of that happening. It's not as though one can modify a few things within the episode with Thomas to get around the difficulty which it poses for Fodor's hypothesis. The exclusive reason why the story is included at all is to spotlight Thomas' skepticism. So Fodor can't get around this just by saying that a few elements may have been unconsciously added to the narrative. On the contrary, what he is suggesting would require that the entire story has been fabricated for apologetic reasons. But how are we to imagine that such a thing could happen unconsciously? The very suggestion is so implausible on its face that it does not merit serious consideration.

While Craig's methodology allows Fodor to simply reject the story of doubting Thomas, Fodor is not permitted to reject it in the context of my argument for the resurrection. Precisely because my argument is predicated upon the premise that the resurrection accounts in the Gospels present an accurate picture of what the original witnesses claim to have seen. Fodor may challenge this premise, of course, but in doing so, he tacitly admits that he cannot, in fact, make the case that the resurrection appearances in the Gospels represent sincere but misremembered recollections of hallucinations. Contrary to his claim that his hypothesis can work even granting traditional authorship and the sincerity of the original witnesses, he actually does have to suggest that certain resurrection appearances are either knowingly false or at the very least not faithful to what the original eyewitnesses claimed. This is all that I need to establish in order to show that Fodor's RHBS hypothesis does not succeed against my argument for the resurrection.

This section has reviewed James Fodor's RHBS hypothesis as a rival to the resurrection hypothesis. I have granted that Fodor's hypothesis presents a reasonably good defeater to minimalist arguments for the resurrection like William Lane Craigs. However, I have taken issue with Fodor's more ambitious suggestion that his hypothesis can also succeed as a rival against a more maximal case for the resurrection like mine. Specifically, it struggles to account for the descriptions of the resurrected Jesus in the Gospels, if those descriptions are faithful to what the original disciples claim to have seen. Fodor's case here depends critically upon the plausibility of the thesis that these descriptions can be explained as cases of memory distortion. I have argued in response that we should be very slow to accept explanations which depend upon memory distortion due to the radically skeptical consequences to which this sort of reasoning opens the door. I have also argued that Fodor's specific examples of memory distortion are importantly disanalogous to the sort of memory distortion that his hypothesis would require. I have further argued that there is a good positive case for the reliability of memory in general and for personal event memories in particular. Lastly, I have argued that the story of doubting Thomas provides a unique hurdle for Fodor's hypothesis as deployed against a maximalist argument for the resurrection. This is because maximalism deliberately closes off the very exits which Fodor uses to escape the conclusion of minimalist arguments. While I consider Fodor's RHBS hypothesis to be the best alternative to the resurrection on offer for skeptics, I believe that the points I have raised are collectively sufficient to show that the resurrection remains a better explanation of the total evidence by a fairly significant measure.

This video has detailed my case for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. I have explained why I reject the minimal facts approach to defending the resurrection. I have developed my own syllogistic version of a maximalist case for the resurrection. We have seen that given that the resurrection appearances in the gospels are faithful representations of what the original eyewitnesses claimed. Then three possibilities emerge. the apostolic testimony is either true, deliberately false, or honestly mistaken. I have argued that these latter two possibilities are indefensible, leaving only the first, namely that the testimony is true, which entails that Jesus rose from the dead. I have supplemented my case by critically engaging seven popular critics of resurrection apologetics. These included Bart Airman, Richard Carrier, Michael Alter, Dale Allison, Matthew McCormack, Robert Greg Caven, and finally James Fodor. In each case, it was seen that the objections of these critics failed to undermine a maximalist argument for the resurrection of Jesus. Because of this, I can confidently join the Apostle Paul in saying, "But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, and by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. Heat. [Music] Heat. [Music]"