The Minimal Facts for the Resurrection: Why a Skeptic Doesn't Believe

The following is an excerpt from my critical review of Rick Broocks' Man, Myth, Messiah: Answering History's Greatest Question. Rice Broocks is a Christian apologist and the man who has inspired the God's Not Dead films. Man, Myth, Messiah is his 'companion' book to God's Not Dead 2.

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Since 1975, Gary Habermas has been cataloging scholarly sources on the resurrection of Christ to establish certain trends, or ‘minimal facts’, accepted by most historians. In Man, Myth, Messiah, the number of these sources is given as “more than 2,200,” pulled from the 2007 book The Case for the Real Jesus. Just two years earlier, in a paper published in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Professor Habermas numbered his sources at “more than 1400”.¹ In the three decades Habermas took compiling those initial 1400, he averaged a survey of around 47 publications a year. Yet afterwards, in a mere two years, he managed to survey a whopping 800 additional sources for his list. Of course, some may point out the qualified use of “more than” in both of the total figures, but this ambiguity actually exposes a general problem with Habermas’ research. As Richard Carrier has noted, Habermas has not released his data – which is already quite selective in its reliance on only English, German, and French written sources – and so the trends he extrapolates from it are greatly presumptive.²

On this flawed backdrop, we come to the alleged facts in chapter two that “even skeptics believe.” These facts are built on solid historical criteria, according to Broocks, like multiple and independent attestation, a close proximity to the events in question, and the presence of details too embarrassing to have been invented. With the exception of the last criterion, I find this standard reasonable. Embarrassment is a sticky issue in many ways, particularly because of how it rests on judgments about the sorts of things that would’ve been contrary to the purposes of an author living in the very distant past. Perhaps in some cases where we have a good deal of information on the norms in a given society, it can be plausible to make an argument from embarrassment as a supplementary defense of historicity, but even then there are challenging questions about individual attitudes and ‘hierarchies’ of tolerable to intolerable embarrassments.

Before laying out his first minimal fact, our author sets his sights on Jesus mythicism. Denying the historical existence of Jesus is a “pop culture”, “blogosphere” thing, a “tabloid” level absurdity, says Rice, while suggesting a visit to Jerusalem would sway most rational minds. “And you don’t need a scholar or historian. Any tour guide can set you straight.” Although I am not a mythicist, I have to admit I find ridiculing mythicism to be unproductive as well as uncharitable. Broocks aspires to always be prepared to give an answer for his faith with gentleness and respect, per 1 Peter 3:15-16, but on more than one occasion he opts instead for resorting to strawmen and ad hominem attacks on his opponents. “The real motivation for skeptics to deny that Jesus really lived is not a lack of evidence,” he claims. “They often desire to attack Christianity in any way possible because of the evil perpetrated by self-proclaimed Christians.” (p. 28) Claims like these, whether or not they’re true of some mythicists, seem spectacularly inadequate at dealing with mythicists like New Testament scholar Robert Price, Dominican priest Thomas L. Brodie, or historian Richard Carrier.

Fact #1: He Was Crucified

Historical sources are even part of the supporting case for the first minimal fact, making it especially unnecessary to wage such a verbal war on mythicism. Josephus, Tacitus, Lucian, and the Talmud are cited as evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus, and all have been used to endorse historicity, too. While there are issues with each of these sources that leave them open to objections, I think at least the first two are fairly reliable, for the same reasons I gave in my review of God’s Not Dead. It’s worth stating that this first fact, crucifixion, is really not an argument for the resurrection in itself, but more of a stipulation to it. Naturally, it could be that Christ was crucified and remained dead after; the crucifixion is more a part of the minimal facts case to deter the objection that Jesus appeared alive later because he had never actually died. Since I don’t make that objection, I will not offer a critique of the first fact.

Fact #2: His Tomb Was Found Empty

The second minimal fact is the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb by a group of his women followers. Saying that all four gospels depict women as the first to arrive at the tomb, Broocks notes that the testimony of women was “usually dismissed in ancient trials. So no first-century author would have ever made the story up.” (p. 31) Here is an example of the embarrassment criterion in action. The unstated assumption is that women were so distrusted in those days that the presence of them in the resurrection narrative, when they could’ve been omitted or replaced, makes the story more likely to be true. However, even the historian Josephus hung his entire accounts of the incidents at Gamala and Masada on the testimony of women.³ The fact that Rice is careful to say that “usually” the testimony of women was dismissed is also important. If there were instances in which women were treated as reliable sources – including by one of the most prominent historians of the era – then why should we think women in the resurrection story were too embarrassing a detail for the empty tomb to have been made up?

Another argument made in favor of this alleged fact is that the Roman and Jewish authorities could easily have squashed the Christian movement by producing the body of Jesus. Since they did no such thing, it must have been because the body was missing. Again, though, this is quite an assumption. The New Testament itself claims that the disciples did not begin preaching the risen Christ until about seven weeks after the ascension (see Acts 2), at which point the corpse was likely decayed beyond recognition. Add to that the small size of the early Christian sect, as well as the fact that the earliest Christian writings come 20-25 years after the death of Jesus, and it just doesn’t seem the Romans or Jews would have had the motive to hound Christians over what they were not exactly forthcoming with in the first place.

Skeptics of the empty tomb have often claimed it is unlikely that Jesus would have received a proper burial. In what may be one of his stronger counter-arguments in the chapter, Broocks responds to this objection by contending that leaving the body on the cross would have violated Roman laws urging respect for occupied peoples. “Jewish law expressly commanded bodies of the condemned be buried so that the land would not be defiled,” he states on page 32. Supporting these claims are two sources: Josephus and the Digesta Iustiniani. 

As Leonard Rutgers explains, Josephus mentions certain religious freedoms the Romans did extend to the Jews, such as to “gather freely in thiasoi, observe the Sabbath and the Jewish festivals, send money to the Temple in Jerusalem, and enjoy autonomy in their communal affairs,” as well as being “absolved from compulsory enrollment in the Roman military.”⁴ But to call the Romans tolerant of Jewish customs would seem to be a step too far. Rutgers goes on to say that, “Roman laws of the first century C.E. that relate to Jews give the impression that tolerance or intolerance was nothing but a by-product in the formulation of a given policy. Conscious efforts to be tolerant or intolerant do not seem to have been frequently made.” Indication of this even comes from Josephus, who notes in book 2, chapter 9 of The Jewish War how Pilate spent money from the sacred treasury to build an aqueduct, and then sent undercover soldiers to disrupt the mob of protest that ensued.

In book 48, title 24 of the Digesta Iustiniani (Digest of Justinian), we read: “The bodies of persons who have been punished should be given to whoever requests them for the purpose of burial.” Broocks cites New Testament scholar Craig Evans saying that burial would have been expected in the time of Jesus. In a paper commenting on the Digesta, Evans notes that most of the text is drawn from Roman jurist Ulpian, who lived from about 170-223 C.E. “Ulpian,” writes Evans, “goes on to say that ‘the bodies of those who have been punished are only buried when this has been requested and permission granted’. A statement in the lex Puteolana (at II.13) gives the impression that Romans, as did Jews in Israel, had burial pits reserved for criminals and others buried without honor.”⁵ Evans refers to a book by J.G. Cook that discusses the lex Puteolana. “Some of the corpses were denied burial,” Cook remarks, “apparently at the discretion of the magistrate,” and common burial pits “‘were in use already in the second century BC.'”⁶ Cook and Evans both mention a particular passage in the Digest that specifically states that permission for burial is not always given, “especially where persons have been convicted of high treason.” (48.24.1). Evans argues in his essay that the mention of treason does not apply to Jesus, but the passage appears to give treason as an extreme example rather than the only exception.

Bart Ehrman names a number of historical sources describing how crucifixion victims were often left to rot on the cross:

The Roman author Horace says in one of his letters that a slave was claiming to have done nothing wrong, to which his master replied, “You shall not therefore feed the carrion crows on the cross” (Epistle 1.16.46-48)… Artemidorus, writes that it is auspicious for a poor man in particular to have a dream about being crucified, since “a crucified man is raised high and his substance is sufficient to keep many birds” (Dream Book 2.53)… there is a bit of gallows humor in the Satyricon of Petronius, a one-time advisor to the emperor Nero, about a crucified victim being left for days on the cross (chaps. 11-12).⁷

There are a few important things to take from all this. First, there is reasonable doubt that Roman officials in the first century respected Jewish practices and beliefs as a matter of habit. We have seen both scholarly argument and a historical example for this, and it is perhaps further instructive to consider the Jewish-Roman war that arose just a little over three decades after the purported death of Jesus. Second, while it seems that some crucifixion victims were allowed to be buried in special cases, others were denied burial. Although it’s not entirely clear what all the circumstances were that could lead to a denial, the “stereotyped picture that the crucified victim served as food for wild beasts and birds of prey,” as conservative Christian Martin Hengel once remarked,⁸ suggests that being left on the cross was not a punishment reserved for only the worst of traitors. As a third point, there is a lack of clarity in this material about what kind of burial was allowed in which cases. It’s fair to assume that since giving the body to “relatives” is mentioned by Ulpian, the relatives would likely bury their beloved in a family tomb or something of the sort. Yet when the body is that of a troublemaker or perceived criminal who supposedly had a lot of enemies among the Jewish leaders, the law in Deuteronomy 21:22-23 could have been respected and the Sabbath could have been honored simply by burial in a common grave. Since Pastor Broocks’ main objection to improper burial is Roman respect for Jewish law, this possibility, conceded by both Evans and Cook, poses a significant problem.

Surprisingly, the “unanimous” early church tradition on the site of Christ’s grave is another supporting argument made in defense of the empty tomb. “Custom required Jesus to be buried outside the walls,” Mr. Broocks states, “so the tradition for the site’s location had to go back to within ten years of the resurrection.” (p. 32) The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the earliest known site to be identified with the tomb of Jesus. Eusebius reports in his Life of Constantine that the tomb had a pagan temple built over it by the Romans to “obscure the truth.” Under Constantine, the temple was then demolished and replaced by a church. Constantine’s own mother allegedly found the “true cross,” which proved its power by restoring a corpse to life. Curiously, though, there is no evidence prior to the 4th century that links the location to the resurrection story. In her book, Christians and the Holy Places: The Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins, historian Joan E. Taylor argues that Constantine chose the site as part of his campaign to Christianize paganism, and the temple he built over was never constructed with the purpose of concealing the tomb of Christ. The absence of early veneration for any alleged site of Jesus’ grave, especially from Paul’s trip to Jerusalem, is a strong argument against the empty tomb legend.

It’s worth noting that Gary Habermas does not include the empty tomb among his minimal facts because 1/4 of the scholars he surveyed are skeptical of it, which Rice notes as well. Our author tries to dismiss the divergence here: “This drop is likely due to the profound implication of an empty tomb. If Jesus were buried after His death, then the empty tomb would be a decisive additional piece of evidence for the disciples encountering a physical Jesus.” (p. 31) However, we have just seen numerous reasons why the empty tomb is a questionable ‘fact,’ reasons all based in historical evidence. In addition, if the empty tomb is so critical to the Christian faith, then it seems the very same reasoning could be used against Broocks and other believers to suggest that bias is why they favor an empty tomb.

Fact #3: His Disciples Believed He Appeared to Them

As certain as Christ’s crucifixion, Broocks says, is the fact that his followers had experiences of him after his death. We find these appearances mostly in Paul and John, but Acts is also included with the caveat that the historical reliability of the text is disputed. 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, often regarded as an early Christian creed by scholars, reads:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Rice calls this a “credible list” of witnesses, and makes special mention of how Paul and James were skeptics before their conversions. What exactly about this list is credible? The appearances to the five hundred are frequently talked about by apologists as if we have five hundred eyewitness accounts, when all we really have is this one account saying that five hundred people saw the risen Jesus. No gospel or other early Christian document tells of these unnamed, mysterious five hundred. Most of the individuals identified in this list have left us no first-hand account of their experiences. Notice also that there is nothing said about women being the first to find the tomb – in fact, a tomb isn’t even mentioned at all.

There is an unexplained dissimilarity between the experiences of Paul and James. The story of Paul’s conversion is that he was a Jew persecuting Christians up until his vision on the road to Damascus. Thus, Paul was a skeptic converted by an appearance. James, on the other hand, is considered a skeptic merely because of biblical references to divisions in Jesus’ family (i.e. Mark 3:21, John 7:5), and we are given no information for when James became a believer, whether it was before or after the alleged appearance discussed in 1 Corinthians 15. Christian scholar James F. McGrath shares this view, explaining that “even if there were antagonism or otherwise soured relations between Jesus and James, this does not in any way lead to the conclusion that the estrangement lasted until Jesus’ death.”⁹ This matters because, as apologists like Broocks assert, the conversion of a skeptic due to a post-resurrection appearance is a more surprising deal than the report of a devout believer that they witnessed a miracle.

So what about Paul? The vision described in Acts stands out in some ways from the other appearances. Paul hears a voice and sees a light so blinding that he falls to the ground and loses his sight. In Acts 9, his companions hear a voice, but see nothing; in Acts 22, they see the light, but don’t hear a voice. What’s odd about labeling this a postmortem appearance is that Paul had never met Jesus while Jesus was alive, and in his vision Paul doesn’t see Jesus – only a bright light – he just knows (or assumes) it’s Jesus based on the voice. This experience is quite similar sounding to a hallucination, and what’s stranger still is that it is not distinguished in any way from the other supposed appearances spoken of in the early creed.

Could multiple people have hallucinated the same thing, or something quite like it? Broocks declares the Christian message “is not based on some corporate self-delusion triggered by the disciples’ grief over having lost their beloved leader; such a scenario would have required a much longer period of time to develop.” (p. 38) But why think this? 

On the hallucination theory, philosopher Keith Parsons writes:

In fact, the article “Hallucinations” in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Psychology, says that 1/8 to 2/3 of the normal population experiences waking hallucinations… Causes of hallucinations in normal persons include social isolation, rejection, and severe reactive depression. The disciples were very likely to be experiencing a strong sense of rejection, isolation, and depression after the execution of Jesus. Further, it is very common for the bereaved to experience visual or auditory hallucinations of their deceased loved ones.¹⁰

Not all hallucinations require a good length of time, either, as Matthew McCormick explains.

When people lose someone they love, it is quite common for them to have hallucinations of the person (or even a pet) shortly after the loss. The phenomenon is now well documented and is known as a bereavement hallucination. In one study, a remarkable 80 percent of elderly widows reported having hallucinations – either visual or auditory – up to one month after the spouse had died… And these are not just fleeting glimpses or vague feelings that these widows and widowers are experiencing. They report seeing or hearing the lost person in some familiar environment, being visited in their dreams, or having complete conversations with them while being wide awake.¹¹

We’ve already seen that not all experiences of the risen Jesus are equal. Paul’s vision in Acts is very different from the appearances in John 20. Other appearances, to the five hundred, to James, or to unspecified apostles, are so devoid of any description that it would be sheer speculation to imagine what those experiences might have been like. Worse yet, since Paul is thought to have relayed an early creed pertaining to appearances to some of the same people we find in the gospels, this creed raises doubts about whether the sources we have are truly independent. Perhaps John and Acts relied on the same material Paul relied on. Noting this problem of ambiguity, there just doesn’t seem to be any reasonable grounds for claiming that the postmortem appearances were shared by so many people that hallucination is out of the question. To make that argument, we would need more and better evidence for the array of alleged experiences.

Fact #4: Proclaimed Early

For the fourth fact, Broocks provides the earliness of the preaching of the resurrection. Because “creeds require time to become standardized, the original teaching had to have originated years earlier” (p. 37). Habermas is cited as claiming that such teaching must go back to within fewer than five years of the death of Jesus. This is said to be a consensus view of even critical scholars, but we have previously seen the flaws in the survey approach used in Habermas’ resurrection research. Nonetheless, if we assume that the resurrection was preached so early after the crucifixion – which I am actually willing to grant – is this a fact supporting the historical reality of Christ’s resurrection?

This is where the trouble with assessing miracles through historical method becomes especially apparent. The reports of Joseph Smith’s vision of the angel Moroni are very close to the time he supposedly had his vision. Likewise, as Matt McCormick argues, there is substantial evidence surrounding the Salem witch trials:

…hundreds of people were involved in concluding that some of the accused were witches. Eyewitnesses testified in courts, 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.

…The trials were part of a thorough, careful, and exhaustive investigation. The investigators deliberately gathered evidence and made a substantial attempt to view it objectively and separate truths from falsehoods, mistakes, and lies. In the court trials, they took great care to discern the facts. The accusers must have become convinced by their evidence…

The witch trials were historically recent, so we have hundreds of the actual documents that were part of the evidence. We have the signed, sworn testimonies of the eyewitnesses claiming to have seen the magic performed – not as it was repeated and relayed for decades to others, but immediately after it occurred. We have whole volumes written by witnesses to the trials, such as those by Cotton Mather and John Hale.¹²

Should we then believe Joseph Smith really was a prophet, or that those convicted in the witch trials really were witches? I should say not. The reason why involves a lot of what has already been covered. What we know (or don’t know) of those reporting the event, of the time and place in which they lived, and of the subsequent developments and advances in our general knowledge has to play a significant role in our approach, beyond a basic consideration of criteria like multiple and independent attestation, closeness in time, or embarrassment.

Further Facts

Additional facts are presented in the chapter that have already been touched on at this point, in one way or another. These involve Paul, James, the growth of the early church, and the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. To say brief words on the latter two, however, I find the absence of any figures or statistics on the growth of the church makes such a ‘fact’ indefensible, and the purportedly embarrassing nature of Jesus’ baptism hangs on an incredibly thin supposition that it “could” be seen as implying the superiority of John. I mention a study by Keith Hopkins in my review of God’s Not Dead which argues that Christians composed only 10% of the Roman population by the year 300. If the early church exploded in the miraculous way many Christian apologists claim it did, these are the kinds of studies that need to be produced to substantiate their claim. As for John and Jesus, Mark 1:7 effectively eviscerates any notion of embarrassment: “And this was [John’s] message: ‘After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.'”

As a conclusion to my (very long) review of this chapter, I want to make one last argument regarding these minimal facts – one which I believe greatly reduces their persuasiveness on top of all that’s been said so far. Throughout the chapter, Pastor Broocks makes frequent note of how “all four gospels” mention the crucifixion, the women at the tomb, Joseph of Arimathea requesting the body, John baptizing Jesus, and “supernatural confirmations of Jesus’ ministry” (p. 30, 31, 41). These remarks are misleading in that they give the impression that such details are independently and multiply attested by more sources than is likely accurate. The Two-Source Hypothesis in New Testament scholarship, which is the consensus view among even most conservative scholars, has it that Mark was a primary source for both Matthew and Luke. This is even addressed somewhat in the very next chapter of the book, and it’s a little suspicious why something so obviously pertaining to the historical criteria is put after the minimal facts case. The importance of this is that something which appears in all four gospels may only really be independently and multiply attested in two gospels once we take parallel passages into account.

Let’s take the women at the tomb as our example. After stating that this is found in all four gospels, Rice says, “This fact is significant because the testimony of women was usually dismissed in ancient trials.” The significance the author sees here is not just the reporting of women at the tomb, but clearly also the reporting of women at the tomb in four sources. Yet when we look at Mark 16:1-8, Matthew 28:1-8, and Luke 24:1-12, we find a number of similarities and parallelisms, from the two Marys to the fear of the women to the presence of men/angels (one in Mark) in white clothing and more. We even find some plausible spots where the authors of Matthew and Luke changed the text from Mark, such as Matthew 28:8, which adds that the women were not just afraid, but “filled with joy,” and so ran to tell the disciples what they’d found – quite an improvement over Mark’s original ending, where the women “said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” None of these details occur in John’s gospel. This illustrates how Matthew and Luke relied on Mark, and it changes the scope of attestation for the women at the tomb from four to two sources. If Helmut Koester is right, though, about Mark and John sharing a passion narrative source that is also represented in the Gospel of Peter, then the evidence for women at the tomb comes down to a lonely single attestation.¹³

When we move outside the realm of guesswork based on a questionable survey, and go into dealing with the problems and arguments that historians deal with, the picture becomes far more complicated with respect to which sources are reliable and for what reasons. The minimal facts case not only faces objections from a methodological perspective, for inferring a supernatural explanation out of historical data, but also from an evidential perspective.

Sources:

1. Gary R. Habermas, Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present, GaryHabermas.com (2005). Retrieved April 12, 2016.

2. Richard Carrier, Innumeracy: A Fault to Fix, Freethought Blogs (Nov. 26, 2013). Retrieved April 12, 2016.

3. Josephus, Jewish War 4.81, 7.399.

4. Leonard Rutgers, "Roman Policy towards the Jews: Expulsions from the City of Rome during the First Century C.E.," Classical Antiquity, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Apr. 1994), p. 57.

5. Craig Evans, "Roman Law and the Burial of Jesus," Matthew and Mark Across Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2016), ed. Kristian Bendoraitis and Nijay Gupta, p. 57.

6. John G. Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World (Mohr Siebeck, 2014), p. 385-386.

7. Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (Harper-Collins, 2014), p. 158.

8. Ibid, p. 158.

9. James F. McGrath, Early Converted Skeptics?, Exploring Our Matrix (Aug. 7, 2009). Retrieved April 14, 2016.
10. Keith Parsons, in The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (Prometheus, 2005), ed. Jeffery Jay Lowder and Robert M. Price, p. 441.
11. Matthew S. McCormick, Atheism and the Case Against Christ (Prometheus, 2012), p. 84-85.
12. Ibid, p. 58-59.

13. Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels (Trinity Press, 1990), p. 253-255. 

Gary Habermas Shows Why the 'Minimal Facts' of Jesus' Death Can't Establish the Resurrection

Gary Habermas is a New Testament scholar and philosopher of religion at Liberty University who has devoted much of his career to defending a historical case for the resurrection of Jesus. For over 30 years now, Habermas has collected and analyzed scholarly materials published on the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, distilling them down to a core set of trends. His work has been cited by numerous Christian apologists, perhaps most notably in The Case for Christ and the debates and writings of William Lane Craig.

Recently, Dr. Habermas appeared on the Unbelievable radio show and podcast in dialogue with James Crossley on whether the "minimal facts" surrounding Jesus' death support the resurrection. Crossley is an agnostic New Testament scholar at the University of Sheffield and the author of a book called Jesus and the Chaos of History. The minimal facts are intended to be general points of agreement acceptable even to skeptics, and the two criteria Habermas gives are that they be facts with multiple lines of argument supporting them, and they share in a consensus made up of the "vast majority" of New Testament scholars.

Habermas identifies 6 minimal facts in the show, which are as follows:

1. Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.

2. The disciples had experiences they believed to be of the risen Jesus.

3. Some among the disciples died for their belief.

4. James, a skeptic, was converted.

5. Paul, a skeptic and persecutor of Christians, was converted.

6. The earliness of the proclamation of the risen Jesus.

One immediately noteworthy thing missing from this list is the empty tomb. To his credit, Gary concedes that the empty tomb is not a minimal fact because of the many biblical historians who dispute it. As the host, Justin, remarks, this seems contrary to what some apologists, like William Lane Craig, have attempted to cull from Dr. Habermas' work. In his book God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist, co-written with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Professor Craig writes: "There are at least four facts about the fate of the historical Jesus that are widely accepted by New Testament historians today." (p. 22, italics mine) Dr. Craig then goes on to articulate some of the reasons that "most scholars" accept the empty tomb.

Of course, it could be contended that this is just another way of saying that the majority of scholars favor the empty tomb as a historical fact. However, 1/3 to 1/4 of experts dissenting from a given viewpoint is not a negligible difference. Things get even sketchier when you look at the methodology behind Dr. Habermas' 2005 study and discover how that figure is calculated. The survey is not a comprehensive one of thousands of New Testament scholars, it's a survey of select literature published in German, French and English since 1975. While Gary's work offers important insights, he also has not released his data, despite requests for it, and the closest we get to an idea of how many sources he's surveyed is "more than 1400" in that 2005 study of his. Break that down over 30 years and that's a ballpark average of 46.7 studies examined per year. It's hardly a robust amount of data from which to assess the opinions of New Testament scholarship on the whole.

This methodological problem has implications beyond the empty tomb, too, for all of the six minimal facts mentioned above, as well as any other facts that could be conjured up on the same basis. So whether Dr. Habermas wants to single out 4 facts, 6 facts, 12 facts, or his exceedingly generous 21 facts, the fatal flaw remains present in all cases. Statistical analysis is only as good as your data and the method you use to analyze that data, and a study like the one published by Dr. Habermas in a religious studies journal would not pass in an introductory level Stats class (I say this from experience). Granted, it was probably not Gary's intent to do a rigorous statistical analysis, but the limitations of this research need to be noted when attempts are made at extrapolating certain trends from it. For more on this specific concern, see Richard Carrier's article, Innumeracy: A Fault to Fix.

But what real use is a list of even roughly calculated minimal facts when it requires another list of supplementary philosophical assumptions in order to support the resurrection? Near the end of the discussion on the podcast, Habermas explains that the way he sees of moving from the death of Jesus and the reports of his postmortem appearances to the involvement of the supernatural is by bringing in "worldview aspects." This is, in fact, something he notes early on in the show. Among these assumptions are conclusions about the character and identity of Jesus, and the continuation of life after death, though I would argue there are additional assumptions about the existence and nature of god. In a chapter from The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave, Robert Greg Cavin outlines still more hidden assumptions in the standard resurrection story of Jesus, which is not just revivification, but has to do with Jesus being raised as a living supernatural body sometime after his death.

At one point in the episode, Dr. Habermas refers to the resurrection allegedly supported by the minimal facts as "mundane," saying that the gospels depict the postmortem appearances as if seeing a dead friend at the supermarket, acting as normal. Yet the point by Cavin above reveals this to be naive. A mundane resurrection in that sense would be as easily dismissed as any incident of a grieving loved one hallucinating their dearly departed. There is nothing especially impressive about it. The minimal facts are where many apologists say that the resurrection differs from other allegations of resuscitation or revivification of a corpse. If the transformation of the disciples is a stand out feature of the resurrection story, it would seem to play a part in discounting the mundane nature of events as Habermas portrays it. After all, we're often told, people might see the dead after they're gone, but they generally don't go to be martyred for them. If this famous image of the disciples valiantly accepting death having seen the risen lord is as true as apologists claim it is, then the resurrection simply can't be a mundane occurrence by their own reasoning.

Does this not also say something about the exceptional kind of assumptions that are required to make a minimal facts case for the resurrection function at all? We are not talking about spotting someone in the supermarket, alive and apparently well when they'd been dead the day before. We are talking about something much less "mundane," and it's the reason why the case for the resurrection has been turned into an argument for the existence of god by an apologist like William Lane Craig. There is an element of the supernatural, a "worldview aspect," as Habermas called it. It isn't simply that Jesus appeared again to his followers, like in a daydream, it's that he miraculously rose from the dead, in a way that his followers took as a vindication of their ideas about his teachings and his identity. It meant, for them, that god not only existed, but that he was the god represented by Jesus, and Jesus was the sort of person god not only had the power to raise back to life, but wanted to raise, did raise, and had the power and will to raise into something more than just a reanimated earthly form.
 

The miracle of the resurrection is the saving grace of many Christians. To Paul it gave hope for a life beyond death and for a righting of the wrongs faced in this life. Entertaining the historicity of the resurrection without the supernatural and metaphysical assumptions behind it is practically unimaginable, not only for atheists and skeptics but for believing Christians, too. This brings us to the awkward position of either asking each other to buy into our philosophical presuppositions, or leaving things at a set of bare minimal facts that is by itself incapable of showing anything except what it already contains. The minimal facts are, one might say, minimally interesting. Even if we put aside the troubling concerns with the methodology that undergirds them, they aren't what's really doing the work in winning minds. Rather than minimizing background assumptions and asking us to buy into some ample facts, the apologetic case for the resurrection minimizes the facts and asks us to buy into some ample assumptions.

Bart Ehrman on What We Can and Cannot Know About the Resurrection

In his newest book, How Jesus Became God, New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman spends two chapters discussing what he thinks we can and cannot know about the resurrection. What we can know is familiar territory to most who have studied the emergence of Christianity:

(1) some of Jesus's followers believed that he had been raised from the dead; (2) they believed this because some of them had visions of him after his crucifixion; and (3) this belief led them to reevaluate who Jesus was, so that the Jewish apocalyptic preacher from rural Galilee came to be considered, in some sense, God. [p. 174]

These are relatively mundane points. They appear in the earliest Christian sources, require no commitment to an actual resurrection or actual postmortem appearances, and there is something to be said for their role in Christianity's historical survival.

More interesting are the two things Dr. Ehrman says he has changed his mind on regarding what we cannot know about the resurrection. Like his colleague John Dominic Crossan, Professor Ehrman now believes that the tradition of an honorable burial of Jesus is doubtful. He makes note of the suspicious backstory of Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the same Jewish council that condemned Jesus to death, absent from the early Christian creeds, and a figure who is progressively portrayed across the four gospels as more and more of a sympathizer to the Christian cause. Citing a handful of ancient examples, he observes that Roman crucifixion victims were not usually given proper burials because humiliation was an important part of the practice, intending to deter potential criminals from committing acts of rebellion against Rome. Those who were crucified were often laid in common graves or left to decay and be eaten by scavenging animals.

It is sometimes remarked that Jesus was buried by Joseph in accordance with Jewish law, since the Sabbath was close at hand. Deuteronomy 21:22-23 gives instruction in this vein, but as Dr. Ehrman points out, it's an open question of whether or not the Romans, particularly Pilate, would have respected such a rule. Though the Pharisees and the Jewish Sanhedrin had accused Jesus of blasphemy, the charges brought against him in front of Pilate were more political - inciting crowds, forbidding payment of taxes to Caesar, and claiming to be king (Luke 23:1-3). If Jesus was executed as an insurgent, under certain circumstances perhaps he would have been left unburied. If, however, he was executed in accordance with Jewish law, it's not so obvious where he was buried. In a chapter of the anthology The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave,  Peter Kirby writes that there is some evidence for a dishonorable burial tradition in passages like Mark 12:8 and Acts 13:27-29, which allude to Jesus being buried by his enemies rather than by his followers. [1]

The second thing Professor Ehrman has come to change his mind about is the empty tomb tradition. Like many before him, he draws attention to the fact that no empty tomb is mentioned in the earliest New Testament sources, the writings of Paul. Christian apologists often claim that a burial followed by a raising from the dead a la 1 Corinthians 15:4 implies an empty tomb. Yet Ehrman elsewhere argues that Paul interpreted the resurrection in a spiritual and not a physical sense, which would make an unoccupied tomb unnecessary. Dr. Ehrman also counters another apologetic claim that the discovery of the tomb by women lends credibility, since no one at that time would have made up such a story, as distrusted as women were. One can rightly question why we ought to think the gospel authors intended the resurrection narratives to hold up as any sort of legal or quasi-legal testimonials. The gospels come from oral traditions, they're not court documents. Additionally, women may have been so featured in the resurrection narratives because they were the ones tasked with preparing the bodies of the dead, or because, as some sources note, the Christian sect was especially popular with women. As the author says, this objection seems to rest on nothing but a lack of imagination.

Bart doesn't offer much comment on the empty tomb, but after some reflection this doesn't quite seem as disappointing as it might initially seem. The case for the empty tomb is razor thin when you think about it, relying pretty exclusively on texts which scholars have known for a good while to be dependent on one another. [2] Earlier texts outside of this literary dependence, like the Pauline epistles, do not mention an empty tomb, or any of the familiar details of the empty tomb tradition. Furthermore, there is the strange fact that there is no indication from any ancient sources of veneration of Jesus' tomb - a point I'd like to have seen Ehrman make - which is baffling especially with characters like Paul, who never was able to meet Jesus before his crucifixion, who preached the extreme importance of the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:17), and presumably would have wanted to see his lord and savior's tomb, if it had existed in his time.

Consider how damaging these two areas of doubt are to the case for the resurrection, even against the three areas of confidence Dr. Ehrman notes. The disciples may have believed that Jesus rose from the dead, that he appeared to them after his death, and that he was god in some sense, but why should any of this compel us to believe as they did? People believe things for all sorts of reasons. People can be mistaken, people can hallucinate, as Professor Ehrman discusses in chapter five. When most of us hear of a body missing from a grave site, we don't think resurrection, we think grave robbers, we think the body has been moved, or that we came to the wrong site. Ironically, even the gospels have the followers of Jesus entertaining some of these explanations first, finding the resurrection just too unbelievable (John 20:2, Luke 24:11).

If it's doubtful Jesus was buried, and doubtful there was ever an empty tomb, then what we're left with sounds an awful lot like what Dan Dennett has described as "belief in belief". Whatever the disciples actually experienced, whatever was or was not actually going on, one chooses to believe in the disciples' belief that god raised Jesus from the dead. Of course, this is what I have seen the picture to be for a good while now, and the same assessment has been made by many other atheists, many biblical scholars, many philosophers, and many non-Christians in general. I'm pleased to see Bart Ehrman planting himself more firmly in this camp.

However, the question remains: if belief in belief is all that's required, why not belief in Mormonism, in Islam, in Buddhism, in Hinduism, or in the traditions of any other religion? Despite what William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and other apologists may call things like the belief in an empty tomb or the belief in postmortem visions, they are not facts. The reality of it has always been belief in belief, particularly belief in the reliability of uncorroborated beliefs. But without facts, without empirical data, without some independent means of assessment, Christian belief in the resurrection has nothing substantial distinguishing it from similar belief in the uncorroborated traditions of other religions. Building on his extant work questioning the reliability of the New Testament, Dr. Ehrman's latest book offers quite a bit of food for thought.


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Sources:
1. Peter Kirby, in The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (2005, Prometheus), p. 246-247.
2. Stephen C. Carlson, Synoptic Problem FAQ (2004).