Pints With Aquinas - Yes, the Resurrection IS a Historical Fact | Ft. Dr. Trent Dougherty | Last Call Ep. 8

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Blessed Triduum, friends. To ring in Holy Week and soon the Easter season philosopher and theologian Dr. Trent Dougherty is here to make the case that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not just a matter of faith it's historically defensible. Using the "Three E's" framework (Empty Tomb, Eyewitnesses, and Early Creeds), he walks through why secular scholars and believers alike have strong rational grounds for concluding that the Resurrection actually happened. Pints: Last Call Ep. 8 - - - 📚Resources Mentioned: Gary Habermas — The Resurrection of Jesus (shorter, recommended first) https://www.amazon.com/Case-Resurrection-Jesus-Gary-Habermas/dp/0825427886 Gary Habermas — On the Resurrection, Vol. 1: Evidences (the magnum opus) https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-1-Evidences/dp/1087778603 N.T. Wright — The Resurrection of the Son of God https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Son-Christian-Origins-Question/dp/0800626796 Richard Swinburne — The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Dr. Dougherty's top pick) https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-God-Incarnate-Richard-Swinburne/dp/0199257450 - - - Today's Sponsors: Hallow: Deepen your personal relationship with God today. Visit https://hallow.com/MattFradd to get 3 months free. St. Paul Center: hare your faith with others this Easter Season by joining the Easter Accompaniment Challenge. Sign up and become a member today at https://stpaulcenter.com/pints  PreBorn: Make a difference for generations to come. Donate securely online at https://preborn.com/PINTS or dial #250 keyword 'BABY' - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You don't get anything like that at all. You get no defensiveness. You get no artifice. That's very hard to explain in any other way outside of its veracity. Gidey everybody. Today is Holy Thursday. We are now entering the Triduum. So this will be a special Easter episode.

I'm going to sit down with philosopher Dr. Trent Doherty to talk about why we have very good. historical reasons for thinking that the resurrection of Jesus Christ did in fact happen. I know we know this as Christians by faith, but we're going to show why it's a reasonable proposition to believe based on historical evidence. Trendoity, good to have you back. Slancher. Are you a martini fan? Cheers. I am a martini fan. There were times when...

Mmm. That's actually quite good. too much of a fan. Yeah, you said you went three years? Three years without a drink. Three years without a drop, not even sneaking them, not even the little ones. Good for you. It was a good, it was a good process. I don't, it's like a lot of things.

You can use it and you can abuse it. I had abused it. Then went three years without a drop. And then on New Year's, on the fourth year, Sarah and I went out to a very remote area, you know, had a beer. Yeah. Okay, yeah. You know, made sure I'd do it. didn't explode. And then, so now it's very controlled. Well, we're in the tritum, and I thought,

let's talk about the resurrection, because I think a lot of Christians feel nervous when they maybe interact with a skeptic or an atheist. They're not so sure they have good reasons to think that the resurrection occurred, that maybe the resurrection is something to be believed by faith, but that's as far as we can go, and isn't that rather superstitious? Is there any kind of historic grounding, is there any good reasons above faith to think that the resurrection occurred? Right. If you don't mind, I'd like to preface by just addressing that concept of believing by faith. Because unfortunately, so many people out there, so many good Christians out there, think that believing by faith means believing without evidence. And that's not what that phrase

means. In the tradition, to believe by faith is to accept the testimony on the basis of an authority. So there are, for lots of things that the average Christian believes, just like everywhere else in culture, there's a division, social epistemologists call it a division of epistemic labor. So I believe that E equals MC plus squared, and presumably you believe that E equals MC plus squared. Now tell me anything about what that means. Nothing. Like almost nothing. No, almost nothing. Right.

Excepted because people who seem smarter than me and have been accepted by people smarter than me. Exactly. And it is perfectly acceptable, as Aquinas says explicitly, to accept some of these propositions on the basis of the fact that we have these giants, these intellectual giants in the Catholic tradition, Augustine Anselm, Aquinas, and many great Catholic philosophers and theologians today, perfectly legitimate to accept the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact on the basis of simply that we have all these intellectual giants who have, have investigated it, who know the sources, and who confidently assert that. Nothing untoward about that at all. But there is an advantage or a benefit to looking into the first order evidence yourself. So I want to, first I want to say, it's a good thing, but it's not, it's not necessary. It is perfectly legitimate, perfectly reasonable to, just as you accept so many scientific propositions on the basis of, this is what the people in the know say.

Likewise, theologically, you can do the same thing for a host of not just the resurrection, but a host of other things. Because in the Catholic tradition specifically, in the Christian tradition overall, we have many great intellectuals who have gotten all of this thought through very carefully and we don't have to figure everything out for ourselves in religion any more than we do in science. But happy to talk about the particulars. And I think it's great when people do get interested in the particulars and are able to understand and grasp those for themselves. That's a win-win.

Okay, well, let's do it. How do we historically show that it's at least likely? Yeah. So two things there. There's one is likely relative to what, right? So typically when an epistemologist thinks about the concept of likelihood, they're thinking about likelihood relative to two different types of sets of propositions or information. Okay. There's likely relative to our background information, like just what do you kind of know in general? And then there's relatively likely, likely relative to some particularly salient facts that are brought out specifically. So here's an analogy from the literature on causation. So somebody strikes a match in a powder shed full of kegs of black powder and it explodes.

Okay. Now what caused the explosion? We're tempted to say it was the lighting of the match. But if you didn't have all those powder kegs around that were open or maybe. it's better with gas or something, right? If you didn't already have that background situation of the escaped gas from the gas lines, lighting in the match would have been benign. And it's the same when we're assessing likelihood of evidence.

There's a sort of general background stuff that makes a major contribution, in fact, an essential contribution. And then there's the foreground focal facts that are pulled out as particularly salient pieces of information that also make an essential contribution. So what would be the salient background information to make this likelihood assessment? Because that's where you've got to start. You're going to start with the background. Well, one of them is, is there a God or is there not?

Right? Yeah. Because obviously the probability of a man being raised from the dead, if atheism is true, is pretty dang low. And if there is a God, though, it may not be more likely than not, but it's also, there's no problem for God to raise somebody from the dead. It's like super easy for God, right? What, what, it's crazy, you think, I see these Christians who are anti-miracle. Honestly, it's bizarre. They're like, yes, I believe there's a being who can create the entire space-time continuum, X in the hello.

But he can't raise someone from the- They don't be raising people from the dead. That's crazy. He can't put water into wine. No, no, no, that's nuts. We've got to come up with a totally different explanation for that. We've got to, you know, Moses's parting of the Red Sea was this weird crosswind phenomenon that happened to occur right when he needed to get through, right?

So, that's pretty weird. So you have to ask yourself, how likely is it that there's a God? And if you think that even if it's 50-50, let's suppose you're like, oh man, I don't know. I'm really torn on that one. On the one hand, you know, I feel like science has done pretty well. And these sciencey people say there's no God, which is a whole thing to debunk. But you might think that. On the other hand, like, where did this all come from? And we've got all this amazing stuff in nature. This couldn't just be an accident. So gosh, I don't know. I feel pulled in both directions. So maybe you say, okay, it's 50-50. Well, if it's even 50% likely that there's a God.

And then you've got this guy, this Palestinian Jew, that is talking about being the son of God, being having this very special relationship with Yahweh, and he appears to be working miracles, and he, there's, you know, in retrospect, you look at some of the things he says that he appears to predict that he's going to die and be risen again, then, okay,

well, it's not super improbable. Like, it's not, you're not there yet, but you can't, the starting point, if you're even 50-50 on theism, is, okay, well, for sure that could happen. For sure that could happen. If God wanted to, you know, send a prophet into the world, and there's lots of people in the world that have claimed to be prophets, the only one really that's claimed to be, you know, the incarnation of Yahweh, it's certainly not out of character with God that he would send a prophet to work some kind of super miracle, to confirm. his message as a prophet of God. That's not crazy. That's within the realm of possibility. So when you, if you're starting from that background and going, then you, then you zoom in to the

focal evidence, the contribution that that focal evidence has to make is more like tipping the scales or taking you from something that is a plausible possibility to something that actually occurred. So I think it's really important to talk about that background starting point. And within the framework of formal epistemology, you have to, because there's really no such thing as just this focal evidence. The focal evidence is what it is in virtue of the background that it takes place in. So just wanted to contextualize that. That's helpful.

So with that prologomena, having been said, I am one of the guys that goes in for what's called the minimal facts method. Now, when you're making your final assessment, every fact makes a difference. but if you're just trying to maybe have an Easter meditation or using Easter as an occasion to ground your belief a little better, this is the perfect thing to do. It's called the Minimal Facts Approach. And I learned this at the font from Gary Habermass

in the class on the resurrection at Liberty University in the 90s. And Gary Habermas, in addition to being an amazing human being, hockey coach, and Man of Prayer is also, I think, the best defender of the resurrection that we have. And a lot of untapped, people just, lot of people don't realize how much he knows about this topic and how much he's studied it and how incisive his logic is. So the simplest sort of mnemonic device is the three E's. Empty Tomb, early creeds, and eyewitnesses. Those three E's represent three core facts. that are believed by the majority of scholars, secular and Christian, such that those facts are very

hard to make sense out of apart from the resurrection. And so we'll do empty tomb and actually we'll do eyewitnesses and then early creeds. The early creeds one is the most complicated but not that complicated and pretty interesting. So the tomb was empty. The proposition that the tomb was empty is accepted almost universally. It's very difficult to find any scholar, secular, or otherwise that doesn't believe there was an empty tomb that was gone to, that was thought to be or known to be, where he was buried, and he's gone. He's not here, right? That is not a thing that is really doubted. And so when you say, well, where did the body go? It's a, it's a cheap trick to say, oh, no, right? That's not a very good, that's not very good historiography. You have to, you have to consider what the hypotheses are and evaluate each one of those. hypotheses for credibility and compare them to each other. Because when we're being good historiographers, we're thinking abductively, kind of like Sherlock Holmes did. And there's that famous line from the sign of four where he says, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains,

however improbable, is the truth. Okay. And so that's how we should reason here as we should in other mysteries. So his body was missing. there's broadly three categories of people involved, the early Christians, the Jewish authorities, and the Roman authorities. Okay? So would the Roman authorities have moved the body? Well, why would they have done that? What possible motive could they have had?

The Christians were making themselves a real pain in the butt based on the resurrection. And you've got, you know, letters, you got Tacitus, got letters from plenty. Christians were not liked, to say the least, right? And certainly in the time of Nero, you've got people's, you know, he's turning Christians into streetlights. Even like with Pliny, he's like, oh, they're so dirty, they're so low-minded and they get together and they talk about eating God. It's so gross.

These people were not liked. Okay. So the Romans would have loved to try it out the body and say, ha-ha, psych, idiots. So not only did they not have a motivation to do it, but even if they had have done it, they could have presented the body to squash the movement. That's right, because you don't have to think the book of Acts was divinely inspired to think that it's generally historically accurate. And the disciples were making a big fuss out of themselves right outside of Jerusalem right after the resurrection. Okay, sorry, right after the crucifixion. They were, there was a lot going on there.

People were converting all mass, largely on the basis of preaching on the resurrection. this was one of the situations where if the Roman authorities thought they were solving a problem and executing Jesus, it just got worse. So there's nothing that would have been better for them than to bring out that body. No doubt, even if they didn't do it, they would have put bounties out, things like that, bring us the body of Jesus. And the same basically goes for the Jewish authorities. The Jewish authorities were complicit completely in the crucifixion. They had everything to lose by having this king of the Jews come up. up and challenge their authority, and they would have had resources to also put out a bounty.

They wouldn't have moved the body. Would the early Christians have moved the body? That's slightly more probable than the other two, right? It makes it less obviously contradictory in terms of motives. But who would have done it within the Christian community? And would they have been able to do that long term. Okay. So Jesus's tomb became a place of worship very early. We know that. And the early Christian community was very hierarchical. This is often missed by people, but when you look at the narrative about the Council of Jerusalem early in Acts, when you are, there's two things that are going on. They're replacing Judas as an apostle. We've got to have a new apostle. And they're like, It has to be somebody's been there from the beginning.

Has to be somebody who saw Jesus before. And so there's these criteria for involvement. Then Paul comes before the Council of Jerusalem, and they're like, you've been preaching Jesus and the resurrection without authorization. Peter speaks up for him, and he's included, but he's given conditions, right? So people skip over this all the time. But the Council of Jerusalem passage in Acts shows there was a real structure there, real authority. there, a real authority structure. In fact, as a young Protestant, searching about the foundations of Catholicism, I was shocked. I had read that passage numerous times, but I had blazed right through

it because there was nothing in there that served my purposes for evangelism. But when I was going back through the scriptures with a different lens thinking about what was the structure of the early church, were there hierarchies, were their roles? Well, then it jumps off the page at you now because James speaks and then he calls Peter and you can sort of see him backing up and Peter comes in. Peter says how it is. Right? Peter makes the judgment. And Paul is coming in, you know, cap in hand. And they decide this is you can't, okay, we now allow you to preach the gospel, but don't be doing this and do be doing that. Right. And Paul doesn't argue about it. He just does it. Peter's in charge. And Paul had to come before that council and get approved. So who would, which Christians would have stolen the body and then what would,

have happened. Well, it wouldn't have been the apostles or the disciples themselves. Most of them came to a very bad end, right? People might lie, but they're typically not going to, they'll die for a falsehood. True believers will die as martyrs for a falsehood, but they're not going to allow themselves to be tortured for something they know is false. Right. That's just, that's not human nature. That's not plausible. And so you've got to really dig. Okay, well, maybe it was some random grave robbers who somehow had never heard of this Jesus guy. And also, aren't there Roman guards there? Yeah, there's Roman guards there. So where did they go? How are the Christians even being in there to take the way? Yeah, it's not like the,

you'd have to picture the Roman guards like the guards of the swamp castle in Monty Python, right? He's like, don't let anybody out of this room. Got it? Right. You are not to enter this room. No, no, no, no. Nobody comes out, you know, that's what the Roman guards would have to be like for some Christians to waltz in and take the body. This episode is sponsored by Halo. You know, most of us want to pray more, but if we're honest, we get distracted, bored, or we simply forget. It's like we love God in theory, but in practice, we're scrolling. That's why I'm grateful for Hallow, which is the number one Catholic prayer app and meditation app that actually helps you build a real daily habit of prayer. Right now, we're in the Easter season, which means the church is celebrating the fact that Jesus is alive,

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They would have to continue to persist in this mess. throughout the persecution of the church, and that the probability of a conjunction is the probability of the product of its conjuncts. If they're independent, the probability of A and B and C is the probability of A times B, times C. So, and that shrinks fast. It's called the problem of dwindling probabilities. So let's take four propositions, all of which are pretty likely, point nine, and let's say they're essentially independent. So what's the probability of their conjunction. 0.9 times 0.9 times 0.9 times 0.9 times 0.9. 0.72.0.72 times 0.63 times 0.9 is 0.54-ish. So you can take four propositions, all of which are very likely, and their conjunction is

barely more probable than not. Okay? It's called the problem of dwindling probabilities. And any conspiracy theory has this problem, because you've got to have all you've got a conjunction of events, all of which had to occur. And we're not even starting out with events that are initially very probable. We're talking about a conjunction of a sequence of events that are all already pretty improbable. And so the probability of their conjunction, being the probability of the product of their conjuncts, is going to be vanishingly small. So the sort of conspiracy hypothesis of, you know, somebody stole the body is really, it's a tough road to hoe.

Okay. Very tough road out. So that's first, so picture an E, three prongs, empty tomb, right? Okay. Very. Let's just accept that then. Right. The tomb was found empty for some reason. Yeah.

All right. Okay. So then the second one is eyewitnesses. Right. There's the second and third prongs of the E involve a little bit of biblical criticism. Okay. So in the scriptures, we're told that there were. lots of eyewitnesses. There's one passage that there's about 500 witnesses, right? But certainly

even apart from that, and again, you don't have to treat the gospels as divinely inspired at all. They're just telling their story, right? You can believe there's all kinds of errors in there, whatever you want. But clearly, central part of the narrative is they saw Jesus, they touched him, they hung out with him, even in ways that are kind of embarrassing, right? Like at the very initial part of the resurrection narrative, they don't even recognize it's him. Yeah. Right? And, And it's women who come to the tomb first and women's testimony meant nothing to, you know, to that early Middle Eastern milieu. There's all sorts of these sort of embarrassments in the narrative. And...

Right. Like if I'm writing a story to try to convince people of a falsehood, namely that this Messiah rose from the dead, I'm certainly not going to write a story where I didn't recognize it was him. Right. That's just weird in general. That's weird in general. Because, I mean, even as, you know, Christian, you go, well, why the hell didn't they recognize it? You know, what happened? Well, instead I'd be saying, I saw him and I know it was him for sure. That's right. We all knew it immediately. That's right. Everybody conveyed, do you see? Isn't that Jesus? And we all said, yeah, heck yeah, that's Jesus, right? So you've got this really unfortunately embarrassing narrative that is not at all how you would want to find it or write it. I mean, I don't like it even because you've got to be like, okay, well, he veiled their understanding so that he could test them, et cetera. I don't like that. I don't love that. But it's not the sort of thing that you write and come up with.

If you're trying to convince people of something that didn't actually. And that sort of, you know, Lewis points out that those sort of like elements where you try to include that sort of stuff in a story, you don't see that until way, way, way into literature. I mean, it just that as a literary trope, that sort of thing just doesn't exist at that time. Okay. And yet people seeing Jesus and interacting with him is ubiquitous throughout the narrative of acts or that segment of time when he appears. He teaches people, preaches to people, you know, reveals himself in these small groups, these larger groups. It's not just some one-off. It's an essential part of that narrative. Okay. And so what the heck? I mean, these things are happening. These claims are occurring in public areas outside of Jerusalem, right after the crucifixion, where anybody could have said, wait a second, I was, you know, who are these people?

What are their names? Where were they? Where did you see? You know, this stuff that could easily be sort of cross-examined. And it would be a pretty dangerous kind of move to make to make these claims about, what you'd expect is like, oh, yeah, I know Jesus didn't like come out a lot. I know you all didn't see him. But trust us.

In private, he came to the three of us, and this is what he said. You can take our word for it. But you don't get anything like that at all. You get no defensiveness. You get no artifice. You just get, yeah. and then he came out and he said this and he did these things. And then he's like, whoop, gone, you know.

That's very hard to explain in any other way outside of its veracity. And then the third one, early creeds. This one's, I think, the coolest one in a lot of ways. A lot of Christians are kind of afraid of biblical criticism. I don't think they need to be. I think biblical criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism. I think these are great tools when used the right way. And so the idea behind this one is that there are,

are, there's early information embedded in the texts. So think about, we talked about Paul coming before the Council of Jerusalem earlier. So Paul's ministry had these phases. There was the pre-council of Jerusalem phase and the post-council of Jerusalem phase. And he's traveling about as an itinerant preacher, right? So we can, there are certain things we know about Paul's life where we can go back and we can date certain of his writing. So if we just rehearse that very briefly and very cursory way. So when did Paul die?

almost certainly died under the persecution of Nero in the 60s. Okay? We know that he was a Roman prisoner and we know that there was massive persecution of Christians and we know that none of the gospels record Paul's death or anything like that. So Paul almost certainly died. And this is again, this is accepted by the vast majority of secular scholars that Paul died in the 60s, probably 60 to 62 under Nero. So, okay, so before that,

that, what did he do? Before that, he had his period of authorized itinerant preaching. And so he's going through Corinth, he's going through all of the, you know, Galatia, he's going through all of the churches whose epistles bear the names of those geographic locations. So by widespread consensus, secular consensus, now the Gospels, people get argued, oh, that was second century. People argue by the gospel's lot, but no secular scholars really doubt that Paul's stuff was written mostly in the 50s. And so some of it quite early, like 51, 52, maybe some of it, 49. But right around just after the 50s is when Paul's epistles are thought to be written by most secular scholars. Okay.

So Paul says there's this interesting passage. I probably should have looked it up where it is, but you can put it in the footnotes. Because remember, I'm reaching back. This is not primarily what I do now, right? Right. So I'm reaching back many years in my studies. But there's this famous passage where Paul says, I delivered to you, that which is delivered under me, that Jesus died according to the scriptures, that he, that this, that he rose again, that he was seen by the 500, right? So there's a couple things going on there. The phrase, I'm delivering, I delivered to you, that which is delivered under me, is sort of a technical phrase.

Okay? This is, you can see this in other bits of Semitic literature. This is Paul signaling, I'm about to quote some canonical material. Okay. He's, it's not just like his manner of speaking. I see. This is an official statement of, I am about to quote something. Because one of the ways the Jews were able to preserve the text of the Old Testament so well is that they had all these literary devices where they would anchor parts of texts and they would signal, okay, Okay, this is preserved material. So it is almost universally recognized by secular scholars that him saying that is him saying, I am about to quote some preserved material, okay?

And then within that, and I wish I had that passage before me now, he uses this literary device called polysendatin. Polysyndotin. So poly means many, sen-s-Y-N, Greek-S-Y-N-conjunction. like synthetic, put together. So polysenditan means many things put together. And in Greek, the Greek word for and is Kai. And so in Greek there is, he says,

I delivered to you, that was delivered to me, that. Jesus died according to scriptures, and rose on the third day, and was witnessed by the 500, and. And this literary trope called polysendentan is another one. way of organizing information that is preserved. He's not writing this. It's not just Paul being a weird writer. And when you analyze Paul's verbiage, like, he doesn't write that way. There's no other place in Paul's epistles that he uses polysendentin, literally unique. And when he's quoting

materials, and polysendenton is an established literary technique for preserving material that you are quoting, okay? So, what follows in that polysendentan that refers to the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the eyewitnesses, and some other things, follows the language of handing on, literally, Traho to hand on, to deliver, tradition, or tradition literally comes for that. Exactly right. So, so these are the teachings that Paul gave them when he was preaching to them, right? And so the epistles are being written in early 50s. So when did he teach them that? Well, it would have been in the 40s when he was on his preaching circuit. Okay, that's when he handed it on, but when did he, he delivered

that which he received? When would he had received it? Most plausibly he would have received it when he was in the council, when he went to the council of Jerusalem to become instructed in the church and be sort of basically ordained, right? Go back and look at it. That's basically what's happening. He's being ordained. Well, when was that? Well, it wasn't long after the crucifixion, you know, is probably late 30s, early 40s. Okay. So here we've worked ourselves backwards from the death of Paul and Nero, when Paul was writing the epistles, when he had preached to them, and when he had received that which he preached to them in this preserved early creeds. And we're already back to probably the 30s. Okay. So we've got a formalized statement

of the resurrection as a key component of the Christian faith within a number of years after the crucifixion. That tells the lie to this idea that, oh, it was, you know, it went on, it was the pass-it-on game, all this nonsense. No, it was very early. And it was in the time when eyewitnesses would have been alive. This is not some developed doctrine, and some developed story that evolved over time.

Quite the opposite. Paul's epistles showed that it was right from the beginning. Because then that's back to when he received that in the late 30s. So you still got to go backwards to when that creed was formulated, when that terminology was formulated. So we're like two, three years after the crucifixion. There's already the promulgation of creeds about the resurrection, the crucifixion and the witnesses.

So this is early material that is core to the Christian faith using purely secular methods of criticism, redaction criticism, source criticism, other forms of literary criticism there, pure literary criticism. And that is much better explained by those events occurring than they are by any conspiracy theory that involves some other source of origin. And again, usually when people respond to, oh, but it's so, you know, dead people don't come back from the right. Well, it depends on if there's a God. Again, that's why I started with the background. If you assume atheism from the start.

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And so we talked about the problem of dwindling probabilities, that the probability of a conjunction is the probability of the product of their conjuncts. Evidence works the other way. It is additive. It is additive. So if you have three lines of evidence, they actually add up. And the more they mutually support each other, the better. Okay? So that works in favor of the resurrection hypothesis, because these are three somewhat independent lines of reasoning, and therefore they are to actually sum up to a cumulative force. So the way they relate to each other formally is that they have a cumulative force

in proportion to their independence as propositions. But also, yes, so your, it's almost like the second one, the fact that these eyewitnesses, which is, so the third one confirms the early witness to the eyewitnesses, and the eyewitnesses rule out the idea that the Christians stole the body, and, you know, so they're mutually supporting. So it's actually, from a formal evidential standpoint, it's kind of like an ideal situation, multiple lines of evidence, at least partly independent, that support one another and converge on one another

and create a form of holistic support. And if you do this in the background where God is at least not horribly unlikely, you don't have to assume theism at all, but if you do it in a background where it's at least not abysmally unlikely that there's a God, which would be begging the question, then that evidence is more than enough to tip the scales in favor of the resurrection. Thank you so much. That was really powerful. Thanks for being on the show. Is there a book or a video or something you would point people to to go deeper?

Yeah. I mean, whatever the most recent thing that Gary Havrimass is published. And it's not that long ago that he published kind of his magnum opus where he does all the background stuff and puts together a big fat book. But honestly, his original short book just called The Resurrection of Jesus. is fantastic, the very best thing. So Tom Wright has a book called The Resurrection of the Son of God, and that's a very good book too.

And even though Tom is not a philosopher, to say the least, and kind of anti-philosophical at times, he shouldn't be. But it's actually a fairly philosophical book, and he marshals a lot of good New Testament criticism behind the claim that Jesus rose from the dead. But the very, very best, in my opinion, is Richard Swinburne's book called

The Resurrection of the Son of God. because he is relentlessly detailed about these things, and he really does a good job of showing how the background evidence plays in here and how when you factor in the specific teachings and character of Jesus, that really sets up the prior probability for the resurrection in a way that some people have joked around about it, but he just uses numbers as placeholders for proportions. He has a calculation in the back of the book, an appendix where he calculates the probability of the resurrection to be in excess of 97%.

Wow. And people laugh about it because it is an artificial precision. Yeah. But the reality is set it up for yourself because I've done this. I've set up base theorem

in Excel spreadsheet with the individual atomic propositions and you can go way down on his initial numbers and the output is still very high. It is actually extremely challenging to find a reasonable assignment of the prior probabilities

and atomic probabilities such that with those assignments, the posterior probability of resurrection isn't significantly high. And so that's the challenge is, okay, fine, fine, you can make fun of the number. Give me your own numbers. Give me your own numbers.

Don't just poo-poo his numbers. Give me your own numbers. Because on the basis of any reasonable assignment of probabilities to the atomic propositions and the background information, it is scarily high what the posterior probability of the resurrection is. So if you're intellectually honest

and you want to actually engage that formal, careful reasoning, it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that the historical, viridical, bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the grave is very, very likely given strictly historical evidence. Well, Trent, I know we're a couple of days away, mate, but happy Easter to you and happy Easter. Happy Easter.

Everybody watching. Cheers. Thank you very much for watching. I hope you all have a beautiful Triduum and a happy Easter. Thank you so much for being here. I know people say this on the YouTube videos a lot, and I'll just say it here. If you've watched this far, that shows that you're kind of into pints with Aquinas, And so I would love it if you would subscribe to the channel and wish everybody in the comment section below a happy Easter and tell us what you're doing.

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