Truth Unites - The Best Case for Jesus' Resurrection with Mike Licona

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

In this video I interview Mike Licona about arguments for the resurrection of Jesus. Mike is one of the world's leading scholars on this topic. See Mike's YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@MikeLiconaOfficial Get Mike's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196/truthunites-20 Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Hey everyone. Welcome or welcome back to Truth Unites. The goal of Truth Unites is gospel assurance through theological depth. So I do videos on apologetics and all kinds of different theological topics. Today I'm talking with Mike Lycona, who is one of the world's leading scholars on the resurrection of Christ. And he also does work on the Gospels. He's got a great YouTube channel. I'll link to that in the video description. Check out his YouTube channel. You can see debates he's done. He's a professor of New Testament studies at Houston, Houston. Christian University and he's written a number of books. The one that we're going to talk about today is the resurrection of Jesus, a new historiographical approach, but up by IVP academic in 2010. Amazing book, as we'll talk about. So, Mike, thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing today? Good. Thanks for having me back with you, Gavin. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I want to say about this book. People should understand it's 700 pages. It's very thorough. If they're looking for a a in-depth treatment of the resurrection of Jesus. This is just painstakingly detailed and just an incredible resource. So I'm thankful for all the work you've done this, because as I just mentioned,

I find this topic an incredible encouragement. When you get into it, you realize how strong the case is. That's my sense. But let me ask you, how did you first get interested in the topic of Christ's resurrection? Well, it was my final semester in grad school. So it was the fall of 1980. 85 and I was doing a master of arts degree in New Testament studies and for the first time in my life, I started to have questions about my faith, whether it was true. And it wasn't anything I'd learned. It was just a matter of, you know, people of other worldviews and, you know, religious beliefs. They have every bit of strong feelings about their views as I do. How do I know that what I believe is true? Now, at that point, I was averaging praying probably, an hour to two hours a day. I was just really dialed into the Lord. I just was enjoying my walk with God at that point. But then I got thinking, well, am I, is this really true? Or am I just deluding myself into thinking I've got this relationship with God? What about people of other religious beliefs? Do they have religious experiences? How do I know what I believe is true?

And so one of my roommates who was doing a master of arts degree in Christian apologetics, suggested that I go see Gary Habermass. And so I did. I saw him in his office. He was welcoming. And he shared with me the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and its importance. And that really helped calm down my doubts. And then it was several years later after I had finished my coursework on the master's degree, that it's about 1989 and I began questioning my faith again. And I was running to, you know, as I was sharing my faithful skeptics, they were bringing up objections.

I wasn't used to hearing, didn't know how to answer. And there was no email back then. So I called Gary Habermas, and I said, you know, what do you think about this? And, you know, you point me to the resurrection of Jesus. And he said, Mike, if Jesus rose, Christianity's true, even if, let's say, the Gospels weren't written by the traditional authors, or there's errors in the gospels, or, you know, whatever the objection is, If Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true, period. And so that's what got me interested in it initially. And later on, Gary and I are writing a book together,

which came to be the case for the resurrection of Jesus. And when that was finished in 2000, I guess it was 2002 as we were wrapping it up, I got thinking, well, I said, Gary, you know, you have all these scholars that you have been looking at what they're saying about the resurrection of Jesus, hundreds of them. They come to different, they're looking at the same data, but they're arriving at different conclusions. Why is that? And who are these scholars? And he said, well, most of them are New Testament scholars. You have a few philosophers here and there.

That's it. And I thought, well, philosophers and New Testament scholars, do they even study how to do history, how to practice? how to practice history. Have they had any formal training in it? I thought, how would a historian who had been trained as a historian investigate this? So that's what I decided to do for my doctoral research, learn how historians carry on their trade, and then apply it to the resurrection of Jesus and see how it turned out. Yeah, fascinating.

Let me ask you about this, because my experience has been this. I'm curious if you see this in others or if you can relate to this at all yourself. I went into this topic very skeptical that a good case can be made. I just thought, well, this is ancient history 2,000 years ago. How can we really know anything for sure about something that happened so far back? We could maybe say it's possible, but how strong a case can you actually make? I got into it, and I was blown away by how compelling. I found the argument personally.

Do you find others have that experience? Do you find that as a common experience? Yeah, I would say. there are quite a few who had that if they look into it. I mean, I know of people who were trying to disprove Christianity and they looked at the evidence for the resurrection and they became Christians or they were challenged to look at the evidence for the resurrection and they couldn't explain it away and it looked like the resurrection occurred so they became Christians. So that does happen and people like myself have had doubts and then we look at the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus

and our faith is strengthened. It's encouraged. When I was doing my doctoral research, I knew enough about the resurrection of Jesus that, and I had interacted enough with naturalistic alternatives, that I thought the resurrection hypothesis, when I really looked in depth to it, I thought that after looking at it in depth,

that it was going to come out on top again, I think what surprised me was how far on top it came out. I didn't realize until I really looked at how a historian carries on their investigations and applying strictly controlled historical method. I didn't understand how good the resurrection hypothesis actually is and how strong it is compared to competing hypotheses. Let me ask you about that, because I was going to ask you this at the very end, And I recognize this question could be, you know, it can be annoying to try to give like a mathematical number to historical knowledge.

So if you want to speak in generalities, that's fine. But could you give us some sense of how strong you would? I mean, would you put this in the realm of, you know, is it 98% or is it 60% or how probabilistic would you say this argument ultimately amounts to? Good question, Gavin. What I found is that most historians don't talk in terms of statistical probabilities, you know, 98%, 80% or something. And that is, of course, kind of subjective. And even if you apply Bayesian analyses to this, you know, the background knowledge is going to be subjective in how you, one assesses it. The prior probability, that is.

What most historians do is they approach it. And there is, I found with several of them, a spectrum of historical certainty. So you'd look and you'd say smack dab in the middle would be indeterminate. I can't say one way or the other where it's probable. Okay. And then you can go in increasing improbability. So you'd say something like less probable than probable. Okay.

And then, you know, somewhat improbable, quite improbable, very improbable. certainly improbable okay and then you would do the same thing going on the up the other side of the spectrum more probable than not somewhat probable um you know and and so so forth uh probable uh probable um quite probable very probable you know almost certain you know you're not going to have certain in terms of 100 percent on anything because none of us can get into to a time machine returned to the past and verify the conclusions. So we have to talk, at least as historians, using historical method, we have to talk in terms of probability.

So in terms of how I assessed it, you have to look and say, well, where is the evidence point? And you know, which hypothesis best explains the data and how superior is that best hypothesis to other hypotheses, competing hypotheses. And I assessed it as, you know, very probable that Jesus rose from the dead based on the fact that the resurrection hypothesis explains the knowable data, the data that is widely agreed upon by critical scholars today, the overwhelming majority of critical scholars. So the ability of the resurrection hypothesis to account for the relevant historical bedrock and the fact that it does so in a manner that's so superior to competing hypotheses

that there's not even a close second place. I assess that as being very probable. We'll get into the actual argument in just a second. One last question on the strength of the argument. I'm kind of curious to ask, in your own faith, how does this argument relate to other arguments like for the existence of God, whether it be, I don't know, the moral argument or the cosmological argument or something like that, would you see this argument from the resurrection of Christ as stronger than those, kind of roughly comparable to those, weaker than those, or how would you describe that?

Boy, I've never been asked that question. That's a good one. I'd really have to think about that, Gavin. I could just give you some initial top of my head thoughts. It seems like the, I really like the moral argument for God's existence. It was the first one that I really spent time on. And although it's very difficult to establish objective morals, I think that it just seems intuitive to all of us that morals are objective. In other words, some things are right, morally right or morally wrong, regardless of whether one thinks they are. So torturing babies for the fun of it or rape or enslaving someone or what Hitler did to the Jews and others. These things are morally moral abominations. They're evil regardless of what another person thinks of it.

So there can't be objective moral values apart from the existence of God. a commander, a law giver who transcends society. And I know some atheists will say, well, no, there can be. But most atheist philosophers who spend time with this will agree that there can't be. There's, you know, atheists can be morally good, but they don't have an objective foundation for recalling something moral. So I like that. But it is difficult to establish, um, the existence of objective moral values.

I think they're intuitive, but to establish them logically, it's difficult. On the other hand, say the Kalam cosmological argument, I think that that is a pretty compelling argument that it's a logical necessity that there is a final cause, which is itself eternal, which we would call God. So when you have something that's a logical necessity, it's hard to get stronger than an argument for that. The resurrection of Jesus is based on it's an abductive argument inference to the best explanation and that's not going to be as strong as a logical necessity. So probably the Kalam cosmological argument, again, this is just off the top of my head. I think that's probably stronger than the resurrection argument, but that doesn't mean one is going to find one. Like I

I might find the evidence, I mean, I've never really thought of it, but someone might find the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus stronger than the arguments for first cause of everything. So, yeah, but I think, regardless, something doesn't have to be the strongest argument. And what some people just transitioning a little bit to something related here, someone might say, well, the evidence we have that Caesar was a assassinated is stronger than the evidence we have for the resurrection of Jesus. Well, that may be. But it doesn't mean that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus has to be stronger than the evidence for any other historical event. It just has to be strong enough, and I think that it is.

Right. Thanks for letting me ask you about that. It's just a curiosity of mine because my experience is these different arguments all cumulatively roll together alongside my personal experience. and they each make a particular contribution that helps me. And I love the argument from the resurrection of Jesus because, A, it gets you to Christianity specifically. Exactly.

And B, it's just such a happy thing to think about. Every time I think about it, it's encouraging and nourishing to my faith and happy. So let's get into the argument a little bit. Let me give. Let me add something there. You said it makes you happy. And, you know, 10 years ago, this July, it, it, it, made me happy because it came alive to me in a manner that it had not before. Before that, it was

pretty much an academic thing. And it gave me peace about the afterlife. But when my mom died in July 2013, and it's like, whoa, you know, it was heartbreaking. But then I thought, you know, I'm going to see her again. Why do I know that? Because the resurrection of Jesus. And when my dad died a year later, it's like, okay, I'm going to see him again. Why? Because the resurrection of Jesus. So it came, became for me a comfort at that point that I had not experienced previously. And I didn't need for it to be that way for me previously. So yeah, the resurrection of Jesus is quite profound. Oh, yes. Yeah, it's, you know, I love thinking about the fact that Jesus' resurrection body is a new kind of reality.

He doesn't, he's never going to die again. He didn't just get raised like Lazarus did only to die again, but it's this inbreaking of the kingdom of God and just floods my heart with joy to think this is a picture of what one day heaven will be like, this new newness that God is doing through Christ. So yeah, so let's get into the argument a little bit. Let's help our viewers sense a little bit of the happiness and the strength of it. Maybe I could summarize it like, am I thinking right like this, that what you're basically doing in this book is approaching it from a historiographical perspective, from the standpoint of the study of history, and the unique contribution that your book makes that is so helpful is from that angle, because, and I'm going to quote from a statement from CA Evans on page 19 of your book that you quote, he says, eventually I learned that many scholars engaged in the study of the historical Jesus have studied Bible and theology, but not history. These Jesus scholars are not historians at all. This lack of training is apparent in the

odd presuppositions, methods, and conclusions that are reached." So tell us a little bit about how investigation into the resurrection is influenced by the fact that a lot of these scholars are not actually historical scholars. Yeah, it was Craig Evans. He's a prominent historian of Jesus and New Testament scholar. He made that statement. He's a colleague of mine. at Houston Christian University, one of the top New Testament scholars in the world, too. Scott McKnight, another prominent New Testament scholar, has said something very similar. When I was doing my doctoral research, I looked at all of the Ivy League schools, plus MIT. MIT isn't considered an Ivy school, but all of the Ivy League schools plus MIT, and looked at the

course catalogs for their undergraduate graduate and doctoral level courses for both for for for both uh religion and um philosophy and of of all of those schools and all of the the programs for religion and philosophy undergrad graduate and doctoral level courses on the study of history on historical method and the philosophy of history there was only one course between them all, one course in where historical method or the philosophy of history was taught. So it's true. Students are getting out of those schools from religion or philosophy, referring to themselves as historians of Jesus, and they most, almost all of them, have had not a single course in how to do historical investigation. So Evans and McKnight are

absolutely correct there. No, that's not to say that they don't know how to do history. A lot of them will learn how to do it afterward by reading books, mainly by biblical scholars who either learned it from someone else or they never took courses on it. You go to the, you know, the professional historians, general historians who operate outside the community of religious scholars, who have, who have have actually studied historical method and the philosophy of history. And, you know, they've looked into these things. And they have, many of them have certain methods that they have articulated. So a lot of times New Testament scholars and philosophers are just operating blindly based on things that they think is the right thing to do. But they really just don't have any good way of

doing it. It's kind of like Garrett Ludeman, who died just a few years. years ago, a prominent New Testament scholar, or James Tabor, who's still a practicing New Testament scholar today teaching, that is, you know, they'd make statements like, well, we know the virgin birth didn't happen because we know that people aren't born a virgin. Okay. Isn't that weighing in with your worldview rather than the evidence? Or as Luteman said, we know that Jesus could not have risen and ascended to heaven because now we know there's no heaven to which you could have ascended. Well, you're not weighing in on the historical evidence. You're weighing in on your worldview.

That's not how to do proper history. Bad philosophy corrupts good history. So you have to look at the evidence and deal with the evidence and come up with the best explanation. Yeah, yeah, fascinating. Okay, so let's maybe, is this an accurate understanding of the nature of the argument that first you're identifying certain basic facts that are universally, are almost universally agreed upon, and in a second, we'll walk through what those are. And then we're kind of pivoting to say, let's weigh the evidence for different competing hypotheses that explain those facts. And then we're comparing, you know, which are the stronger and weaker ones.

If that's accurate, maybe we can just work through what are these basic facts? You talk about the historical bedrock and then second order facts. Can we work through and maybe identify what those are? Sure. Well, in my big book, I identified, I think it was just three historical bedrock, facts past doubting, as the Jewish historian of Jesus Paula Fredrickson said it. So that would be Jesus' death by crucifixion. And when I say facts past doubting, and, you know, these, this would be agreed upon by 99.9% of all historians of Jesus. You're never going to get 100%. You don't even have 100% of historians agreeing that the Holocaust happened, right? So certainly you're not going to have that with Jesus. You're always going to have a few nuts out there. And, and, you know, people who don't think we went to the moon or flat earth kind of people, they're going to say Jesus never existed, which is something that no real credible historian would would accept today. Or I don't want to be demeaning. So let's just say that you may just have, you know, half dozen or so credential historians who would say they doubt

whether Jesus existed or they say he didn't exist. But other than that, out of, you know, thousands and thousands of historians, you know, all but that handful are going to say Jesus never existed or probably didn't exist. So they'd say Jesus' death by crucifixion, granted by virtually every historian out there who studies the subject that shortly after his death, a number of his followers had experiences. They interpreted as appearances of the risen Jesus to them. So we're not saying by that that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them. We're just saying these people had experiences they interpreted as the risen Jesus appearing to them. And then you had Paul, a skeptic, a persecutor of the church who, while persecuting Christians, had an experience he likewise in

interpreted as the risen Jesus appearing to him and he converted to Christianity as a result. Now, rarely ever or any of these three facts that I've given you question by critical scholars today. So those and you know, you have virtually 100%. And then you have some that are, you know, almost there, but not quite. So, you know, maybe you're looking at around, you know, the 80% or something like that. That'd be things like the original disciples claim that Jesus rose bodily, physically from the dead, or they believed that he had. And that Jesus, some of these appearances occurred in group settings, were groups of people,

like all of Jesus' disciples or so forth, had an experience that they thought Jesus had risen and had appeared to them. So it depends how far you want to go. most scholars who comment on the subject would say that James, the skeptical brother of Jesus, who did not believe in Jesus up through his death, that sometime after Jesus' death, came to believe that Jesus was Messiah and Lord because he also had an experience that he interpreted as the risen Jesus appearing to him. So, yeah, those would be some, depending on where you put your cut off there in percentages. These would be historical bedrock. Would the empty tomb be in the historical bedrock or would that be slightly behind that in kind of the second order? I don't know where Gary

Habermas would put it, but I would put it second order. And I'll tell you why. I mean, it's got significant, significant approval by critical scholars, but most by far of the critical scholars who would say the tomb is empty are believing Christians. Whereas with the others I've mentioned, you have a heterogeneous, a very heterogeneous group. So what I mean by that is it's not only conservative Christians, but moderate, liberal Christians, agnostics, Jewish scholars and atheist scholars.

They would all agree on those, at least the three things. that I gave and even some of the others like the group appearances, bodily resurrection, the majority would grant those. But you don't have that when it comes to the empty tomb. You might have a majority of scholars who comment on whether the tomb was empty, saying it was empty, but a very large majority of those are Christians, not many non-Christians. Okay. Let's maybe work through some alternative hypotheses to explain those facts. Maybe we can start with the idea of hallucinations or other kind of psycholo, you reference in the book that this is one of the more common ones that's on the rise, these modern psychological theories for how, whether hallucination or some

kind of other explanation in that ballpark, how would you assess that, that there's either individual or group hallucinations or some other kind of psychological event to explain those facts. Yeah, well, hallucination, let me say this first, that yeah, it had experienced a very strong comeback when I wrote that book and published it in 2010. But there's a change in the way scholars are going with things now. I think they recognize for the most part that hallucinations don't even work. And I'll explain why in a moment. And so most critical scholars now, aren't even going with a natural alternative to it. They're not saying hallucinations.

They're not saying anything anymore. What they're just saying is, well, historians can't investigate miracle claims. And they'll give several reasons for it. Like Bart Ehrman has said, well, if Jesus rose from the dead, that would require, that would be a miracle and would require God. And historians have no access to God. and so they can't determine whether Jesus rose from the dead. We can talk about this if you want.

Or they might say something like Gaze Vermesh said in his final book, which I think he published it way too soon because he really didn't come up with any answer. He just said, well, there's six possibilities here. One is the inveterate skeptic who won't be convinced no matter what. And so we can dismiss that, which I think, well, wait a minute, you can't just dismiss that. They may be against the resurrection for the wrong reasons, but they still might be correct, you know, like a Christian may, let's say Jesus rose from the dead. They may come to that belief through the wrong reasons,

but they're still believing the right thing. So, and then he says, well, the Christians have to accept resurrection by faith, and so you just dismiss that. And there are no, And it's like, well, wait a minute, you already have, at that point, you had William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas and Tom Wright, who had argued, put forth sophisticated arguments for the resurrection of Jesus. Academic arguments in print. You can't just say that they're accepting it through faith. That's really a cop-out. And then there were four other possibilities he gave. hallucinations was one.

I forgot what the other three were. And he said, none of these work. So we're just left with Sam, I don't know what happened. Now, despite the weakness or the way he went about that, I think if I were going to be a skeptic, that's really the only way to go. I think it's the only one that you can really hold with integrity because I think all these other arguments, like, well, you can't investigate it as a historian because it's a miracle or it's the least probable explanation or whatever. I just find them extremely weak and unpersuasive. So I think if you're going to be a skeptic, the best way to go is just to say, look, there's just not enough evidence to convince me.

I don't know what happened. It's curious. I can see that you Christians, I believe that you're rational to believe Jesus rose from the dead. You got enough evidence to be rational to believe it. It's just not enough to convince me. I think that's probably, if I were going to be a skeptic, that's probably the way I go. probably the best way to do it, but everybody thinks a little bit differently. Yeah, fascinating. Let me read a quote from page 44 of your book. This might help our viewers

who are wondering about this group hallucination idea, help them understand why this is problematic. You quote a licensed clinical psychologist with a PhD in the subject, and he said these words. I have surveyed the professional literature written by psychologists, psychiatrists, and other relevant health care professionals during the past two decades, and have yet to find a single documented case of group hallucination, that is, an event for which

more than one person purportedly shared in a visual or other sensory perception where there was no clearly external referent. Do you want to comment on this idea of group hallucination at all? Sure. Yeah, that was clinical psychologist, Gary Sipsy, who said that. And I would say that his conclusion is fairly echoed by two other hallucination researchers. I forgot their name.

But they published a book, Hallucinations, The Science of Idiocentric Perception, Ailman and La Rai. And it was published by the American Psychological Association, I think 2007, somewhere around there. And really a great book, on a lot of research done on hallucinations over more than a century period of time. So they combed through all those and published results.

And I contacted the authors and I said, why didn't you touch on group hallucinations? And La Raé, he responded and he said, we intended to include a chapter on it. But in our research, we couldn't find a single documented case on group hallucinations. So there's another one for you. And it's understandable why. And the reason being is because hallucinations are false sensory perceptions. You perceive your sensing something that's not really there, whether it's sight or hearing or feeling, touching, a sense of motion, smell, taste. You have the sense of that, natural sense perception, but it's not really there.

So in that way, it's like a dream. And just like I couldn't wake up my wife and say, hey, I'm having this dream. I'm in Hawaii. Go back to sleep. Join me my dream. Let's have a free vacation. You can't do that. She might go back to sleep and we might both be dreaming.

We're in Hawaii, but we're not doing the same thing. We're not interacting with one another for real within the same dream. if I had a room full of let's say 100 people and say all right I'm going to give us all sleeping pill and we want to go to sleep and I want us all to dream that we're in Hawaii how many of the people would even dream period and those who did how many would dream they were in Hawaii and of those who dreamt they were in Hawaii how many of them would have a dream that was so similar that we all thought we had the same dream well to have this group hallucination would require that all of these disciples simultaneously, because it's a group appearance,

simultaneously experienced a hallucination that was so similar that all of them thought that they were experiencing the same thing, that they had seen the same thing. And it'd be really weird for that to occur since the ailment and La Rui show that only about 7% of those in the group most likely to experience a hallucination, those groups. grieving the loss of a loved one, only 7% of them experience a visual hallucination of that person. So now you have to have 100% that simultaneously in the same setting are experiencing a hallucination that's so similar they all thought they're having the same thing. And then, I mean, that's just impossible. And then it'd be so improbable that seems like it would require a miracle

for that to occur. And then you're looking at Paul. Paul is not grieving Jesus' death. And so Jesus would have been the last person in the universe that Paul would have expected to see or wanted to see. So that causes a problem. And then because the disciples thought that Jesus had been raised physically bodily, hallucinations don't typically lead to that. They might lead to thinking that the person had been raised spiritually, but not bodily, where they could go and check out the person's grave and it would be vacant. What about the theory that the disciples stole the body and then made up the rest of? resurrection. Yeah, nobody holds that today, and for good reason. Everyone seems to believe, every critical scholar seems to believe that the disciples had experiences they interpreted as appearances

of the risen Jesus. You'd really be hard pressed to find a reputable scholar who would deny such, you know, who had studied the subject. So if they really believed that the risen Jesus had appeared to them. Well, you know, they're not going to have stolen the body, right? You know, that's fraud. They steal the body. They lied about it. The appearances. Well, if they actually had these experiences, they're not lying about it. The fact that, you know, as I show in the book and my friend Sean McDow has gone even more in depth, he did his doctoral dissertation on the fate of the apostles. And we have really good evidence that, several of them were martyred for their gospel proclamation because they believed Jesus rose from the dead.

And all of them were at least willing to die for their beliefs that Jesus had been raised and was who he claimed to be. So people die for what they believe is true. And sometimes you might find someone who, because they don't want to lose face, they're embarrassed. Otherwise, they'll die for something that they claim is true. true but know is false, but you're not going to have entire groups of people who die for what they know is false. There's a difference between dying for what you believe is true and dying for what you know is false. Liars make poor martyrs. Now, of course, that doesn't mean that because they suffered and were willing to die and at least many of them did die for what they believed is true. It doesn't mean it's true, but it does

mean that they believed that it was true. And so they weren't lying about it. Does anyone today still have entertained the hypothesis that someone else stole the body? So the disciples were sincere, but there was still a theft of the body from the tomb? I'm not aware of any scholar who would take that position, Gavin. And, you know, I would think that if you're one of the disciples, that'd be the first thing you thought. Someone stole the body. In fact, the Gospels report,

like the Gospel of John. It reports that when Mary Magdalene went back and reported the empty tomb to Peter and the beloved disciple, what does she say? They have taken the Lord and we don't know where they've laid him. And then when she goes back to the tomb, she thinks Jesus is the gardener. She's inside the tomb where it's dark. And if you've been to Jerusalem to, let's say, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, there's other first century tombs right there inside that church. And if you go inside and you go inside one of those tombs and you look outside, you see people up to their waist, from their feet up to their

waist. You can't see their head. So you could have Mary inside the tomb, turn around and look at Jesus and not see his head, maybe not even see his torso. So and maybe she's even going to be. And maybe she's even tears in her eyes and you know we don't know why she doesn't recognize him but at that point she doesn't and she thinks he's the gardener who's reburied the body so a stolen body is the first thing that it seems that they thought had happened um certainly the apostle paul when he was out persecuting the church before his conversion he would think that uh body theft tomb theft is going to be the most probable explanation for why there's an empty tomb and that that either the disciples are lying about it or they are just freaking out over the empty tomb and

naively think that Jesus has been raised from the dead. So there's good reason why, as far as I know, no critical scholar today holds that someone else stole the body. Let me give you one more possible hypothesis and just, you know, for the sake of viewers who may have heard these things, it might be helpful to canvas them, even though I know you're saying a lot of these aren't necessarily taken seriously in the scholarship. What about the old the swoon theory? Jesus didn't really die on the cross. He was just he fainted or something and then was resuscitated. Yeah, I know. I think there are, if I remember correctly, since 1985 in my research, I found in a medical journal, there were, there was a physician who suggested Jesus may have survived his crucifixion. And then in the

following issue, there were several physicians who responded and said, not a chance, given if the New Testament reports are accurate about crucifixion and what we know about crucifixion. Then there were two, if I remember correctly, two French scholars who suggested, I think back in the 80s that Jesus may have survived his crucifixion, but no one really caught on to that. As far as I know, only one New Testament scholar, only one. You know, come to think about those two French scholars. They weren't New Testament scholars or historians. I think they were just positive.

I don't even know what their credentials were. Only one New Testament scholar, Barbara Tearing, who suggests that Jesus survived his crucifixion, and they put aloe and some herbs on him, and he revived, and he married Mary Magdalene, and they went off and, to either France or Germany and had children together. But she's the only one who even thinks that. And even the radical fellows of the Jesus Seminar think that that's really out to lunch. So nobody has really accepted that today.

And for good reason, what we know about crucifixion and the tortures that preceded it would seem to militate against such a conclusion. I did a study on that, I did a six-month study on crucifixion and the tortures that preceded it for six months prior to Mel Gibson's movie coming out in 2003, or no, that was 2003, 2004, it came out. But I did my study before then, probably in 2003. and you're just not going to survive something like that. In fact, there's only two accounts in antiquity of a person surviving crucifixion. Herodotus mentions one, but doesn't mention anything about crucifixion itself or whether in that particular case, the person was tortured beforehand, whether they were just hung up by

ropes in order to be uncomfortable for several hours and then taken down, you know, whether it was meant to be an execution in that case, no details at all. The other is Josephus, who mentioned seeing three of his friends crucified during the fall of Jerusalem. And so he asked his friend, the Roman commander Titus for mercy for his friends. And because Titus was his friend, Josephus was Titus's friend, he ordered that all three be removed and provided the best medical care available at that time. In spite of that two of the three still died. So even if Jesus was intentionally removed prematurely, and medically assisted his chances of survival were quite low. But there's no evidence whatsoever that Jesus was intentionally removed while alive or that he was provided any medical care whatsoever,

much less Rome's best. So historians can entertain possibilities, but they've got to go with probabilities based on the data. And because the data for Jesus's death by crucifixion is so, strong, very strong. Without any conclusive evidence to the contrary, the historian at least must conclude that Jesus was crucified and that the process killed him. Now, if you're an internet blogger and, you know, your only credential is that you have to be able to breathe. You don't even have to type since voice recognition software is available. You know, you can posit anything you want. But the fair-minded historian has to conclude that Jesus died as a result of being crucified. You've done some debates with Bart Airman. What is his response to this argument?

How does he interpret these bedrock facts? Oh, he would he would say that Jesus certainly died. He would say that at least some of Jesus disciples had experiences they interpreted as appearances of the risen Jesus. He says maybe all of them did, but at least some of them did. I don't know that he would grant the group appearances just because he knows that that means, because he takes hallucinations. And he knows as soon as he grants group hallucinations that you got a problem if you grant the group appearances, because now you've got to deal with group hallucinations. You know, interesting, the group appearances to the disciples are more strongly evidenced than the individual appearances. So Bart has he has to answer for that.

Why is it that he grants that some of them had experiences when it's the group appearances that has the strongest evidence for them? But he would also grant that these people truly believe that he'd been raised from the dead and that they believe that he had been raised physically, bodily from the dead. And he would grant that with Paul as well. How would he then interpret that? Do you have a sense of what his explanation of those facts is? You know, he and I had a seven-hour debate last April, April of 2022. and I think he talked about where he's at, at least at that point.

I forgot exactly where it is. I think he opts for hallucinations. But he's more keen on just saying that Jesus didn't rise from the dead. The evidence just isn't good enough for it. And historians can't investigate miracle claims. So, yeah, that's where he's at with it, I think. Okay. Yeah, you're, you're.

comment earlier that the claim of well historians can't investigate miracle claims that really feels like a philosophy that's being imposed upon what what the evidence might yield historically so that's interesting to me but that's weak it's so weak yeah it feels like an arbitration yeah i mean you know he'll say you can't uh and not only barred but some others have said it you know resurrection is a theological explanation since God's involved. It's not a historical one. But my response to that is, let's just take an illustration from science, an analogy from science, and let's say that astronomers have determined that there's a comet on a collision course with the moon and that the collision is going to occur on a certain day and time. And when that day arrives, you've got the Hubble Space

telescope and planetariums on various parts of the world that are zoomed in on the lunar surface to watch the event. We're watching it on television. And at the pointed time, the comet slams into the moon. And as the lunar dust settles, there is a message written on the moon's surface. And it says, Jesus is Lord. And it's written in Hebrew and in Greek. Now, what the good, rational astronomer would say is, wow, what an extraordinary event that would seem to require God. I certainly have no plausible naturalistic explanations to account for this phenomenon phenomenon um but i have no tools to be able to ascertain the calls on this whether it be god because as a scientist i can't detect god through any of the tools that i have as a

scientist therefore i can only conclude that the event itself occurred leaving the message on the moon i'm just going to have to leave the calls of the event undetermined that's what a good scientist would do here's what a good scientist would not do wow what what an extraordinary event. It would seem to require God. I certainly have no plausible naturalistic explanations for this, but as a scientist, I also have no tools for determining whether the calls or whether God did this. So it would require God. I don't have those tools, so I can't even verify that the event itself occurred despite the evidence I had that it did. That would be just an insane way of practicing science. But this is the way a lot of New Testament scholars and historians

want to treat the resurrection of Jesus. It's just a very poor approach, and I don't think they've really thought through it. They're just desperate to come up with a way, now they're out of naturalistic hypotheses. Well, what do you do with it? Well, let's just try to make the investigation itself illegitimate. What we're seeing is just moves of desperation. that just don't work. It's interesting how bad all these naturalistic explanations are now faring in the literature. I hadn't realized even since your book came out, they're not viewed with favor. Maybe close the loop for us in this way. Suppose Jesus really did bodily rise from the dead.

How would that function to explain well all of the various bedrock facts that we've recounted here? Well, I mean, first you look at a bedrock fact and you say, does it account for them? That's called explanatory scope. So it's like, well, does it count for Jesus crucif? Well, of course it does. Does it account for why a number of his followers had experiences? They interpret his appearances of the risen Jesus? Yep.

What about the group appearances? Yep. What about the appearance to Paul? Yep. What about an empty tomb if you include that? Yep. It accounts for all of those in a beautiful way. And then you'd say explanatory power.

Given the truth of the hypothesis, what kind of things do we expect? And the extent to which we get those things that we expect, we could say that hypothesis has explanatory power. So if Jesus actually rose from the dead, what do you expect? Do we anticipate him that he would appear to his followers? Yeah. Would it surprise us that he would appear to a skeptic who's persecuting in the church? No, it shouldn't surprise us at all. So the kind of things that you would expect, you get those things.

Another way of looking at explanatory powers, do you have to force any of the facts to fit? No, it fits beautifully with group appearances, everything. What about ad hoc? Are there any non-evidence assumptions? No. You say, well, what about God's existence? No, because I'm not presupposing God's existence. I'm open to it when I'm doing the history.

historical investigation. And so I'm not throwing that in there. What about plausibility? Well, that's a little difficult one. I would call that inscrutable because if, you know, the background knowledge, you'd have to presuppose God exists, and if he exists, that he would want to raise Jesus. Now, I think we have good evidence for God's existence. But then you have to say, well, look at the arguments for God's existence, the cosmological argument, the argument for design, the moral argument for God's existence, do any of those require God to raise Jesus from the dead or say that we would anticipate that God would raise Jesus from the dead? No, I don't think so. I don't see why. So you have to kind of assume that even if God exists, that he would want to raise Jesus.

from the dead, which I think is difficult to do. I mean, you could say, you know, I do think that we have historical evidence that Jesus predicted his imminent death and resurrection, that he claimed to be God's uniquely divine son. These would not be historical bedrock, however, despite the fact that I think there's good evidence for it. But if a person is willing to grant those, then, yeah, I do think we've got some background knowledge that you could use to show the plausibility of the resurrection.

but if you're being strictly controlled historical method and only looking at the historical bedrock that's granted by virtually all scholars, you don't get there. So I'd say it's not implausible, but it's not plausible. And so you just say, well, it's inscrutable and you leave it neutral. If you look at other things, though, like the hallucination hypothesis, it doesn't account for 100% of the disciples experiencing what they believe is the risen Jesus or the group appearances. It's not good at explaining the appearance to Paul because you don't expect him to experience a hallucination. In fact, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, we really don't expect much of anything to happen

except for the Christian, the followers of Jesus to disband and the movement fall apart, just like every other messianic movement did shortly after the Messiah died. But that's not what we get. So the hypothesis that Jesus did not rise from. the dead has terrible explanatory power, whereas the resurrection hypothesis has excellent explanatory power. I don't see necessarily ad hoc in the hypothesis that Jesus didn't rise from the dead unless you're trying to posit group hallucinations or something like that, well, then you are going to be ad hoc and implausible. So yeah, that's how I would look at an assessing, you

you know, various competing hypotheses. That's really helpful. Let me ask you one final question. Let's suppose someone's watching this video and they're not a follower of Jesus, but they're open and they're kind of thinking, wow, this maybe has some purchase. Maybe I need to do something about this. Number one, could you explain why Jesus' resurrection is good news for them? And number two, what should they do about it?

How should they respond to this? Well, for me, it was good news because, you know, there's a lot to look at out there. Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, all these different worldviews, things to take into consideration. You can look at these things. This is going to take a lot of time if you're going to look at them. And, you know, I've looked at a lot of these things. I looked at Buddhism.

I looked at Hinduism. I looked at Islam. Some I looked into more deeply than others. I did deeper dives with some than I did. with others. And there's a lot to look there. So if a person, depending on how much time they want to spend in it, I think most people will agree. If Jesus rose from the dead, it's game set match. Christianity is true, period. None of the other religions have anything like this. So for example, with Hinduism, you know, you've got, say, the Bhagavagita that talks about a big battle that

allegedly took place about 3,000 BC in which Krishna was incarnated as a chariot driver. Well, 3,000 BC, the very first mention we have of Krishna in the historical record is an inscription saying he was worshipped, and it's dated somewhere between 400 and 500 BC. That's 2,500 to 2,600 years later, and it doesn't give us any details except that he was worshipped. And then more stuff about Christian doesn't come until much, much later. Well, how much evolution or corruption happens to a story that's been translated, transferred orally for 2,500 to 2,600 years or more? Then you've got Buddhism. Most would think that the Buddha died in the 4th century BC.

But even Buddhist scholars acknowledge that stories about the Buddha and his teachings circulated only, only orally. for a minimum of 400 years after the Buddha died. In other words, they weren't first put into writing until more than 400 years after the Buddha died. What kind of corruption happens during that period of time? How can we trust anything? You might be able to get some historical kernels, but that's about it.

When it comes to Jesus, we've got oral tradition that can be traced back to the apostles themselves. We've got stuff that's dated within 20 years of the death of Jesus, 20 to 25. Well, 20 years of the death of Jesus. We've got four full-fledged biographies of Jesus that are written within 20 to 65 years of Jesus' life. So, I mean, the stuff we have for Christianity is so much better. And so you can focus on the resurrection of Jesus. And look, if Jesus rose Christianity is true.

So what's your next step? Do a deep dive into the resurrection. resurrection of Jesus. I don't mean to just promote my book here, but grab my book and look at it. And I'm transparent with my method. I mean, the facts are granted. You know, I'm using the historical bedrock and I cite the scholars who say you can either say I'm lying on that, but then look at my method, is my method sound? And just assess for yourself after reading it whether you think Jesus rose from the dead. And then I'd put a subjective element. in that if you're truly seeking ask God to show you whether it's true as you're doing this and you don't even

have to believe you exist just be seeking it and say God if you exist show me whether it's true and see what happens that's what I'd recommend and watch a few debates watch some that I've done watch some that William Lane Craig is done on the resurrection of Jesus read some books by Gary Habermass and and see how we respond to the top skeptics out there, make a decision for yourself. Get around the rhetoric and just look into the content and make a decision for yourself.