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The Alisa Childers Podcast
#166 Do we Have Actual Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus? With Gary Habermas
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- [00:00]
A
In a time when the best sources for Buddha, according to One Buddhist scholar, 600, 800 years later, best theology of Zoroaster is a thousand years later. There are no good sources for the Hindu sources. The earliest Bhagavad Gita is 4200 years after Krishna may have lived. The sources in these other religions are very poor. But when you have creeds, Creedal reports from two to three years afterwards in that window, from 30 to 33, this is probably the strongest evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
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B
Welcome to the Alisa Childers podcast where we equip Christians to identify the claims of historic Christianity, discern its counterfeits and proclaim the gospel with clarity, kindness and truth. You know, the Christian worldview stands or falls based on the resurrection of Jesus being a real event in history. But the question is, do we have actual evidence for this event or is this just something that we have to take on faith? After all, if Jesus was not raised from the dead, then the claims that he made about himself come to nothing. He would be nothing more than the other people who came along claiming to be the Jewish Messiah and then were lost to history after their death. But today we're going to look at some powerful evidence for the resurrection of Jesus with an expert guest who has dedicated his life to studying the resurrection. Dr. Gary Habermas is a New Testament scholar and historian. He's the distinguished research professor at Liberty University and teaches full time in the seminary PhD program. He's written several books including the Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. That was a co write there with Mike Lacona and he's currently, I believe, working on his magnum opus which we're going to ask him about. But Dr. Habermas, it's such a thrill to have you on the show. Tell us about what you're working on this, this big project and when will it be out?
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A
Everybody that I get a lot of emails when people say I can't wait for this thing and I say back to them. I go, what do you think about me? I can't wait for it to come out.
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B
I bet you're ready to be done with it, huh?
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A
Well, way back to my dissertation. My PhD dissertation was on the resurrection. So it's not that I've ever left this subject, but this mo subject magnum opus. I started the research. Let me stop and count. Over 25 years ago. I've been writing for nine years on it and I work at least 80 hours a week, non stop, never exceptionalist. I'm on the road and right Now I'm at 5300 pages on the resurrection.
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B
Wow.
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A
And volume one is. At the publishers. It was just short of 1300 pages. I'm doing volume two now. It's all written. When I say I'm doing it, it's all written. But because I wrote it over nine years, I've got to go back and make sure my bib is updated. I'm using the latest sources so that if I wrote it in 2013, someone doesn't say what. Doesn't this guy read anything for the last 10 years? You know, that kind of thing. And it's. It's detailed. But I mean, I've got over 20 books just on the resurrection, half of my books. And people are thinking, oh, so you're bringing this all together and putting it all in one place? Actually, it's all new material, all new material. So I haven't done it before.
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B
So a lot of people who are maybe unaccustomed to what is all involved in the evidence for the resurrection might be thinking, there's that much evidence. I mean, there's all these books you've written and then this new one that you're already at 5,300 pages for. I'd love to sort of introduce the audience into what it might look like to. To look for evidence for the resurrection. Of course, whenever we're talking about an event that's already occurred, specifically a unique event that doesn't repeat itself, we're looking at historical evidence. Right. So what are some principles that historians might use to approach an event that's happened in the past, to decide whether or not it's actually happened? Maybe we can start there.
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A
Sure. And I do that in the movie. I've got. The first 200 pages of volume one are how we do history. So that's the way we start. And you look at data. And there are a bunch of ways to get historical data. Some historians say there's four different ways. You've got ancient sources. Well, you've got eyewitnesses, but that dies. That. That kind of goes off the scene, you know, more than 100 years. It usually goes off the scene after a few decades. So you've got eyewitnesses, you've got written documents that can be investigated. You've got archaeology. And then to all these things, you have to apply criticism. So just because an ancient source says X, Y and Z doesn't mean X, Y, and Z happened. So you have to apply other critical apparatus to the question. And that's where we get the naturalistic theories and the first volume that I said, I just mentioned it was finished about 1300 pages and sent in. It is only on the evidence. It is all on the evidence. Volume two, which is 1200 pages, is on naturalistic theories. These are where critics say, yeah, I hear what you're saying, but how do we know the disciples didn't goof up here? How do we know they didn't copy these stories from ancient Greco Roman mythology from 1000 BC? So it's 1200 pages answering their objections. But if the objections are answered and you've got strong data for the event that even critics will allow, I think we're on our way to having a good argument.
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B
And what are some of those principles that historians look for? Like, for example, in apologetics, we talk a lot about the criterion of embarrassment. And there's various things that historians look for actually in these ancient sources to say, hey, this makes us kind of think they're telling the truth there. And maybe that that principle would show us that this is less reliable, this one is more reliable. Maybe just give us a few of those so that, that we can think through how to assess these ancient documents for their historical value.
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A
Sure. I did an article years ago on the reliability of the Gospels. And what I was going after in this was just to zero in on the Gospels on those kind of criteria. They're called criteria and they're rules that historians, they may not call them the same words, but historians and New Testament scholars use the same rules. Now, some of them are more important than others. Here's a couple. Right off the bat, if you have early eyewitnesses, you know, you can have eyewitnesses that are not early. I heard about a fellow doing his memoirs or World War II, and he was writing them in 1990. Okay, so that's an eyewitness, but he's about, what would that be? He's going to be 40 years, 45 years late. So. And you can have a non eyewitness early source, but how do they know what happened if they weren't there? So a combination of early and eyewitness is rare, but it's very, very good data. Some others, a favorite with the critics is called multiple attestation. And I don't, I don't want to get too technical, but they tend to allow events from the Gospels if they come from more than one source. Now, this is the part I won't explain unless you have a question, but sources don't mean Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Critics think Matthew and Luke, even conservatives think Matthew And Luke borrowed from Mark. So if it's in Mark and Matthew, Mark and Luke, Matthew, Mark and Luke, it's called Mark. That's one source. John is a separate source. That's two. Matthew had a source that was separate from him called M. Again, I don't want to get too technical, but there's an L source for Luke. He had a source. And then there's a source that Matthew and Luke shared that Mark didn't have. So there's about five sources. And if you take an event like the feeding of the 4,000, for example, that's reported in all four Gospels, the feeding the 5,000, there's a feeding of the 4,000 too. But the feeding of the 5,000, besides the resurrection, is the only miracle that's in all four gospels. And that's a two count. Because in Matthew, Mark and Luke, that's Mark, you got John. But you find other things in there. And two. Two is still decent, but. But you can have events where there are four sources. And then you're getting kind of heavy. If you got four sources, that's great. So there's three for you. Early eyewitness and multiple evidences. Now, you mentioned embarrassment. That one's put a little bit lower, but it's still important. Embarrassment. There's one enemy attestation. Like if your enemies admit this point, there's probably something to it. So there's five for you right there. And they look for those tools.
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B
So when you mention that Luke had a source, that's l, Matthew had a source. Are these. Is this oral tradition you're talking about or some other written source that they depended on?
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A
Well, they could be written, but right now it's usually thought that they're oral. Now, James D.G. dunn, a very prominent New Testament scholar who unfortunately just died in the last year, I think. But he was doing a big work, almost a thousand pages called Jesus Remembered. And part of his work was to show that there was probably note taking that went on while Jesus was speaking. Now, popularly, some of your audience has probably seen the Chosen the series on television or DVD or whatever. And Matthew and who's the other one? Is it Andrew? Two of the disciples take notes while Jesus is talking. Now Matthew, you'd say for sure because he's a tax collector and he's got to keep notes. So that would be the kind of thing Donne would look for. And he'll compare passages to see that something's here that shows there's a background to them. So that would be a huge argument if There were notes and if you have early eyewitnesses, that's huge. And so I, when I do my argument for the resurrection, what I call the minimal facts, I try to narrow it down so that I'm only using data that critics allow. Critics will allow me to use this data. In fact, they will admit the facts I use. I only use six and they will admit it. I don't know hardly any scholar who will not allow these six. And my thesis is I've taken your six and I think I can get a resurrection from those six. Now when I say from those six, there's data that support those six, sometimes there's 10 different things that support one of those facts. So it's more than just six. But they allow those six because there's backup. I hope I'm not getting too deep here, but that's what you look for. Early eyewitnesses and multiple backup.
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B
That's good. And just to give our audience just a picture of say the enemy attestation, I think this would probably qualify. But there's this second century anti apologist, I guess you could call him, his name was Celsus and he was writing against Christianity. He was trying to disprove Christianity. But in trying to disprove Christianity, he didn't say, hey, Jesus never performed miracles. What he was doing was trying to explain away why Jesus was able to perform these miracles. I think he had this story of Jesus going down to Egypt and learning some kind of arts down there. And so what we apologists can derive out of that is that, well, that's an enemy attestation to the fact that at least Jesus was known to perform miracles. And this guy had to find a way to explain why he was able to do it apart from, you know, a deity type situation where he was actually God. And so that would be, you know, enemy attestation example there. So let's do talk through these minimal facts because I think that this is just when you're in everyday conversation with people. This is so powerful. I have used the minimal facts in conversation. I'm going to tell a story a bit later, but just tell us basically what these are like. How did you come to decide what they are? And maybe too I think that what people need to realize is set a little foundation too because this is a kind of evidence you could present to someone who does not believe the Bible is the word of God. This is an argument you could present to someone who does not believe that the four gospels are inerrant or even directly written by the people we think wrote them. I believe that's true. Isn't that true? If somebody didn't believe that Matthew wrote Matthew, you could still use these minimal facts. Yeah. So tell us what the minimal fact, not what the individual ones are, because I want to walk through those in a moment. But what is this concept of the minimal facts and how did you come up with it?
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A
Well, it started back in my doctoral dissertation and I finished that in 1976. And it's really funny because I'm teaching these PhD students and they're middle aged and I would see it in their faces because we're, you know, we're, we're loose with each other and we can all talk together in this discussion. And I'll say, I did my PhD in 1976. And then somebody will say I wasn't even born then. So it's been a long time. But I was going through a lot of doubts, very serious doubts. You have your own a deconversion or in danger of deconversion story. I have a in danger of deconversion story. And a lot of people say, well, I doubt and I almost fell away from Christianity. And you say, how old were you? And they go, 16. Well, that doesn't count. I came close to becoming a Buddhist after I received my PhD. So this was after a lot of thinking, but I was going through a whole lot of doubts. And I still remember the night in the chair I was sitting in and the light over my shoulder. I was doing homework for one of my own grad classes. And I thought, I've got to defend this with the people of my committee. Now today, doctoral committees are very typically three people. I had six on my committee, and three of them thought the resurrection had a good chance of being true. And three of them thought absolutely not. And a couple of those were agnostics. And so I had to be really careful how I put this together for a group of people and what I came up with. As I noticed, a lot of New Testament scholars will start their Historical Jesus volume, which is very popular today. But they'll start with a list of facts which they think everybody agrees on. And then based on those facts, they'll tell you, here's what Jesus looks like from these facts alone. And you're right that he was believed to do miracles. That's one of them. In fact, Elisa, I've read a source, a liberal source, that said I wouldn't even say this, but the Liberal says there's 100% agreement today, which there isn't. But they Were trying to make a point. There's almost total agreement today among critics, New Testament critics, that Jesus was a healer and an exorcist. And they'll just say, now it's another question whether he was doing supernatural things or if he was doing cognitive therapy, talking people out of things. But it's healing nonetheless. We go to a counselor for that kind of healing. But they'll admit that. So they'll start their works and say all this is true. So I got this idea, okay, what if I did that about the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus? So I sat there in my living room and I made a list of data that everybody would agree to. And I was entertaining a naturalistic theory that explains the resurrection away, that Christians copied off ancient dying and rising tales from Greco Roman and sometimes Middle Eastern people. And they said Jesus was raised when he really wasn't. They weren't trying to be dishonest, but they wanted Jesus to be like all the other gods and gods in the region. And everybody rose from the dead in those days. Now these gods and goddesses were mythical. I mean, 90% of them are mythical, never even lived. And we don't have good sources on the ones that did live. But they didn't want to be left behind, so they made the theory. And that was when I was entertaining and I took this list and I thought, how can I refute that theory using only the information which critics are going to give me. And I made a list of refutations and I still have the sheet of notes I wrote and I wrote at the bottom. And if there are some critics who won't grant all of these facts, I'll simply tighten my list, use fewer facts that they do agree to and still have enough to refute the theory. And that I say, that was for me, the birth of the minimal facts argument using the lowest, I sometimes call it a lowest common denominator method. If we can get the resurrection with the fewest number of facts, we've got it. And I start my lectures on the resurrection. Here's a couple of things I say at the beginning. I'll say, you folks who get asked all kinds of tough questions, questions about your from your friends, how old was creation? When did it take place? What about the so called genocide passages in the Old Testament? What do you do with eschatology? Are you a Calvinist or are you Arminian? And these are questions, they're asked. And I tell them, look, if you're sure of the strength of the gospel which is defined in the New Testament, whatever's defined mostly in Paul and the Book of Acts, you get deity, death and resurrection. The deity of Christ is death and resurrection. And I tell them at the beginning of the lecture, if you have reasons for those and you know they're true, you don't have to be able to answer any of the other questions, because if the gospel is true, Christianity follows.
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B
That's good.
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A
So it's that. It's that important. So I think, I thought, wow, this is. I'm going through doubts. I wonder if Christianity is true. And it occurred to me, if it turns on the gospel, we've got it, because the data are that good. So I sat there that night with that little tiny line after, if this isn't good enough, I'll cut my list down and still have enough refutations. And I've done that ever since.
- [19:54]
B
I love it. Well, I want to give our audience a little teaser for an episode that's we're going to be doing a couple of episodes with Dr. Habermas, one of which is coming up that I have wanted to do for ages because the early creeds are such an important part of our work when we interact with progressive Christianity. But you just mentioned deity, death and resurrection. Many progressive Christians will say that they believe in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. Now, when you ask further questions, they don't mean atoning death, at least in a substitutionary sense, and they don't mean necessarily a physical resurrection. So I love how you've sort of reformulated this, and this is like where the teaser is, because this is all based on these early creeds that predate the New Testament books they're recorded in. But you've reformulated that to be deity, death and resurrection. We're going to be just teaser, teaser, looking at some creeds that have to do with the deity of Jesus and how the earliest Christians believed that about him. That was not a legendary development. So stay tuned for that episode. But Dr. Habermas, I'd love to walk through these minimal facts point by point, because I have found myself, even as I research topics, I sort of apply the philosophy of the minimal facts as I go along. I'll take a Bart Ehrman and I'll take a Michael Krueger and Dan Wallace, And I try to take a broad spectrum of scholars and say, okay, let's say the topic is variants in the New Testament manuscripts. What does everybody agree on? Say the number of the variants, what does everybody agree on is the significance of the impact of those variants. And then now they're going to disagree on what that means for Christianity, of course, but then that's really helped me to sort of narrow down the topics and be able to sort through all of the information. So this is an argument that our viewers could take to a friend who says, hey, I do not, you know, you Christians, in your Bible, I don't believe the Bible is the word of God and you're getting your resurrection out of your Bible. And so the minimal facts argument is something that you can bring to them and say, look, this, this is what all of the, even most liberal and skeptical and atheist scholars agree on these facts. You know, they agree that these facts are true. And so then we can talk about, you know, let's just put the Bible aside for a second. Let's put the inerrancy of the Bible aside, the idea that it's God's word aside, and let's just talk about these facts. And so really you can reason to the truth of Christianity if you need to, with someone to kind of come around and say, look, let's just put the Bible on the side as far as it being inerrant and all that stuff.
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A
Let's.
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B
And let's just talk about facts. So the first fact that virtually all scholars agree upon and there's lots of even extra, there's a couple of really strong extra biblical quotes on this from non Christian history around the time that Jesus lived within a couple hundred years or so. And that's that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. Talk about that one.
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A
Yeah, you could count the critical scholars, I mean the really big names, you could count on one hand how many scholars think he didn't die on the cross. And that's out of hundreds. And one of them that comes to my mind right now, who takes that view. No, I mean it's virtually nobody likes what she's saying, but Tom Wright said about her, he said nobody accepts her theories except her. And that was funny. But the point is you're not going to get pushback. Let me use two paraphrased quotes. John Dominic Cross and Marcus Borg. Now, Marcus passed away a few years ago, but the two of them were co founders of the very liberal Jesus Seminar who, depending on how you count the, their coding, they reject between 80 and 90% of the red letter sayings of Jesus. And yet both of them say very close to each other, they say the crucifixion of Jesus is not the best, not only the best known thing about his life, it probably is the best known thing in The New Testament, it's the number one fact. And I think it's crossing. Who says? I take it and take absolutely for granted. That's the way scholars talk about it. Bart Ehrman, the atheist New Testament scholar. Crosson and Borg, Gert Ludemann. I know why everybody's dying lately, but Garrett Ludemann just died in the last year. A German atheist scholar, he has no questions about the resurrection. In fact, a lot of these guys, they admit the resurrection was preached right after the crucifixion, right after. So, yeah, no one's going to question that. And we have a lot of reasons for death by crucifixion. People will say, well, the Romans weren't medical doctors, right? I mean, they didn't get MD from Johns Hopkins. What's going on here? Well, and I'll come back and I'll say, well, first of all, we could agree these guys knew how to kill people. And they might not know where bodily organs are in the first century, but they know where to stab a spear to drop a guy faster than anywhere else. And the major I. We did my TA and I and. And a medical guy we did an article was published in the Baylor Journal of Medicine on how Jesus died by crucifixion. And by far the most common view is that he died by asphyxiation. And that if you hang in the. In the low position on the cross with your body hanging down, your arms up above, and the weight pulling down, they strain your intercostal pectoral, deltoid muscles, the same muscles you work out in the gym, and they constrict on the lungs. And basically, like an asthmatic, you can inhale, but it's almost impossible to exhale, which is not being any better than not be able to inhale. And so in that case, the centurion would just have to say, how do I know he's dead? Well, I look at him, and if he's hanging in the low position on the cross, German experiments showed that people just hanging in these experiments lost consciousness in a maximum of 12 minutes. You go, well, I thought Jesus wasn't up there for very long, but 12 minutes, well, Jesus was nailed in the feet, so he could push back up. Now, very, very painful. He could push back up. When you push back up, you free those muscles. When you let go, you slip back down again. But if you're in the low position and these guys lost conscience in 12 minutes in this experiment, if he slumped back up again and wow, it's been at least a half hour, and he hasn't pushed up for half hour. And the centurion would go, that dude's dead. Because if you don't push up, you can't breathe. All right, so that's one major sign. They came to the two men on each side of Jesus. We're told they broke ankles. It's very well known in the Roman world. There's a bunch of references to crufragium, it's called, but they didn't do it to Jesus, but they stabbed him with the spear. We have a Roman source, a Roman historical source that says the centurion will give the body of the crucifixion victim after they're dead. They'll take them down and they'll give the body to the family for burial after they pierce him one more time. And the word for pierce in the Latin is a military word that means to strike with a weapon. And that weapon was almost always a spear, a sword, or an ax. And they would strike the dead body. So when that's explained in the New Testament, people go, it's only in John. That's baloney. You've only got one source there. It's not a very good source. Well, tell James Dunn and Raymond Brown, two moderates, tell them that that probably didn't happen because it's in John. They both defend it. And this Roman historian tells us that was normal stuff. You pierce the person. And the best critique, the best defense really of the crucifixion is the famous David Strauss critique. I don't know if you want me to go into detail, but basically David Strauss did this in the 1860s, and to this day it is referred to as the number one refutation of anybody who dies questions that Jesus died. And the theory is if this guy was crucified and they took him down alive, he, at the very least, by any judgment, is in very bad shape. He's probably wheezing deeply, his breathing's been interrupted, congestive heart failure. They suppose he's walking on feet that have been pierced by nails and he's going to walk to where the disciples are, maybe, what, a half a mile away, we don't know, but quarter mile, okay, he's going to walk on pierced feet and his hair's not washed bodies, the blood is flowing again from like the side wound or whatever. And he walks into the door and he knocks on the door and he goes, fellas, I told you I would rise again from the dead. And David Strauss, who was a famous 19th century German critic, in fact, he Left he quit believing in God and Christianity. Late in his life, he became a non theist. He said the joke on saying Jesus died is that here's the key. The disciples would thank God for keeping him alive, but they would not call him risen. Alive but not risen. And if he's not risen, you start out your program with that. There's no Christianity to this day. David Hume's critique is usually said to be the number one reason people accept it. But I mean the rest of it, the historical data, the sources that I was talking about, there are about. There are more than a half dozen sources for the crucifixion. It's the most commonly reported fact in non Christian sources at that time.
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B
Yeah, just to give our audience an idea of what we're talking about here, this is coming from Tacitus, historian from. When was Tacitus around? Like the third. No, he was like first century, wasn't he?
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A
No, he was about 118 to 120 AD.
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B
Okay, if you want to think this
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A
way, Tacitus is writing about 25 years after the Gospel of John.
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B
Okay, great. And he wrote this. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate. We have mentions from other places, ancient history, which is what led, as you mentioned, John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar, famously skeptical, said that he was crucified is as sure as anything historical ever can be or can ever be. So again, these are points that virtually all scholars agree on. So what is the second of the minimal facts? What's the second fact?
- [31:08]
A
Shortly afterwards, the disciples had experiences with which they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus. They saw something. And the emphasis in the New Testament critics often say it's the language of sight. However you explain it, it's about sight. And they saw something or several somethings which caused them to think that Jesus had reappeared to them later. They believe these were appearances of the risen Jesus.
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B
Okay, so the first fact being Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. Second fact, shortly after Jesus, disciples believed that he had rose and appeared to them. What is the third minimal fact?
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A
The third one. This is where I bring the creeds up and also the changed lives. These two are almost. These are three and four out of the six. And they're almost interrelated as far as when they occur, when the disciples saw Jesus. I tell my grad students, picture this Saturday was a bad day because they were thinking about going Back fishing. I've got nothing to live for. I've given three years of my life. I've left my family back home. I only see him sporadically and I thought he was the one that would redeem Israel. Like the two men sat on the way to Emmaus and all of a sudden he's there. They were overjoyed and their lives were transformed. So you can make that the fourth one. The third one is that they began preaching this immediately. Gert Ludeman, the atheist New Testament scholar, says, well, that's his word, that they began preaching this immediately. Now, in the book of Acts, Peter's first sermon, the first Christian quote unquote, post Jesus sermon was 50 days later on Pentecost. That would be about right, because Ludemann says they started preaching 10. They started preaching immediately. But a number of scholars, I was counting some of them this morning. A number of scholars say that those creeds which, you know, we'll talk about, but those creeds, a lot of scholars date them between 30 and 32 to 30. 32 to 33 is Paul's conversion. And they believe these creeds date two to three years of the cross. Now, in a time when the best sources for Buddha, according to One Buddhist scholar, 600, 800 years later, best theology of Zoroaster is a thousand years later. There are no good sources for the Hindu sources. The earliest Bhagavad Gita is 4200 years after Krishna may have lived. The sources in these other religions are very poor. But when you have creeds, Creedal reports from two to three years afterwards in that window from 30 to 33, this is probably the strongest evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. And just real quickly, a critic's going to say, yeah, well, what you call evidence, I call hearsay. I'll go, okay, well, let's look at the fourth one. The fourth fact is that these guys were totally transformed. They turned the world upside down. They were all willing to give their lives, but some of them did. And the first century martyrdom stories that we have affect the three biggest named Christians. All three died as martyrs. And that would be Peter, James, the brother of Jesus and Paul. All three of them died as martyrs, the fourth one being John. But I probably lagged back a little bit in influence. But Paul, Peter and James were the biggies and they all died for their faith. Now, if everyone's willing to die and the leaders die for your faith, that's why it's not hearsay, because they reported what they saw and they were willing to Take it to the grave with them. So that's. It's beautiful. And here's. We haven't even gotten into this. We have to do it during the creeds. 1. But basically, what everybody overlooks, that may be the best fact. Actual evidence in the New Testament is that Paul went to Jerusalem three years after he became a Christian. So if he were saved at plus two, three years later is plus five. If he was saved to plus three, three years later is plus six. So at five to six years after the cross, he makes a trip to Jerusalem and he spends 15 days with Peter and James. And they're the pastors of the church in Jerusalem. They didn't even know if they should trust Paul because he might be trying to trick us. You know, he might be trying to get information. And Acts actually says that. And so he goes and visits them in Galatians, you go, yeah, but that's a New Testament book. Actually, of the 13 books that bear Paul's name, critics will give you seven of them. The strongest atheist critics will let you use seven of them. If you cite from these seven books, and I'm only using First Corinthians 15 and Galatians, end of Galatians 1, beginning of Galatians 2. Those are give mes those sources that you can do them all day long. And so Paul went up to Jerusalem, interviewed these two guys who are eyewitnesses. And if you were Paul, what's the first question you would ask? Here's my first question. If I'm Paul talking to Peter and James, I go, guys, I've heard stories. What it was like to see Jesus on Sunday after you were downtrodden and as John says, hiding for fear of the Jews. What was it like to see Jesus? I've heard stories from people all over, but I want you to tell me, what did your appearances look like? And then if you do that, I'll tell you what I saw on the way to Damascus. We can change testimonies. You got to say that. But then Paul went back in the beginning of Galatians 2, he went to Jerusalem again. And this time John is there. So the big four are all there. And what were they talking about in Galatians 2? The gospel. What's the Gospel? Deity, death and resurrection of Christ. So they're discussing resurrection. Besides, it's the sinner of faith. Paul already said that. How could he get out of there and not ask him about the appearances? And then to back this up, 1 Corinthians 15, 11, Paul gives this list of Appearances that we talk about when we talk about creeds. But he gives us a list of appearances. And in that list there are three individuals. Well, in the actual list, there's James and Peter. And then Paul adds his name to the list. So there's three. And after saying this, oh, and then he appeared to a group called the 12. He appeared to a group called all the Apostles. And right after Paul gives this list in verse 11, beautiful verse, highly evidential. And critics love it. If Paul says it, they love it. And Paul says, whether it is them or. Or me, this is what we preach and this is what you believe. What is what you preach? Well, what he just got done talking about was the appearances. He gave a list of the appearances. This is what we preach and what you believe. I think what Paul's saying is, I really don't care if you come to me, but if you don't go to me, you happen to live in Jerusalem, go talk to Peter, go talk to James. You're gonna hear the same story. And Bart Ehrman, of all people and his an atheist New Testament scholar, he says in his book, did Jesus exist? He says, because he rejects all the classical authors, the four gospels. So about these Jerusalem visits, he says, where do you get closer to the eyewitnesses than right here? Now, you put this together. Reports from 30 to 33 called the creeds. And there's a step before the creeds too. I'll talk about that. But it's there from the beginning. Paul is a Pharisee. He knows how to do research. Read Josephus was a Pharisee. Read Josephus on what Pharisees had to do and what their training was like. You know, they basically were guys who had PhDs in Old Testament and they know how to do research. And Josephus says when they teach, they repeat things and they pass on creeds, they press on traditions to people. So guess what, Paul, a Pharisee who knows how to do research. I mean, does God work these things out or what? Paul goes to Jerusalem to talk to the big three, the other three. He's one of them. And they hammer out the Gospel. And he says, oh, don't worry, we're all on the same page. You're not going to hear one gospel from Peter and one gospel from me. We're all teaching the same thing. This combination that Bart Ehrman says is close to the eyewitnesses. It's a knockout. And critics may say the. The lay people who say Jesus never lived, the critical scholars do not say that Bart Ehrman says of the thousands of people who teach religion and New Testament, of the thousands who teach it, he says, I'm not aware of one single one who doubts Jesus existence. There's two well known scholars who are well trained to hold that view. But Bart Ehrman says nobody who teaches an accredited college, seminary or grad school holds that. And so when critics say, you can't use that, it's in the Bible. Ask the critics. They'll give you if you use one of these seven books of Paul, First Corinthians and Galatians are two of them. It's good. You're good to go. Paul's a scholar, they love him. We just have a really good foundation here.
- [40:22]
B
So correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't John Dominic CROSSON Put that First Corinthians 15 creed even earlier than five years? I think I read that he puts it even around 18 months, possibly.
- [40:33]
A
Do you know why I would like to find that quote? I know cross them pretty well, actually. We're friends and he says very early, but I'm not aware of him dating it. If you can find that, I would love to get the quote. I will tell you some guys who do date it. James D.G. dunn says it probably dates from months after the crucifixion. Gerrit Ludemann said that creed probably came about between 30 and 33. Before Paul's conversion, that creed was already there. A bunch of guys say that, but in the 30s, in the 30s for sure, it's unanimously put. In the 30s, it might have been
- [41:15]
B
Ludemann I was thinking of. I knew it was somebody real skeptical that put it fairly early.
- [41:21]
A
Ludeman says 30 to 33 in that window right there. So when Paul goes to Jerusalem, he's ticked about something. He holds the coats for those who killed Stephen. Something sets him off. He never says he killed anybody, but he says, when it came time for their trials, I gave testimony to them, to their death. So he was adamant, and it's been said by a number of critics, he probably knows these early Christian teachings. He knows these creeds which are. Which are made by the way to be memorized. And he knows what they were saying. And that's deity. See, that would really tick him too, because he thinks that means two gods. And so Jesus, deity, his death, which Paul didn't have any questions about, and then his resurrection. Then of course, what happens when Jesus meets him? Yeah, it's like, oh, wow, it's true after all. So he was changed just like they were.
- [42:18]
B
Yeah, And I just looked it up. It was Ludimann. I had that confused. It wasn't Crossin. And it was, I think two to three years is what he. That's what you said. Yeah.
- [42:27]
A
Okay, so in the first couple years.
- [42:30]
B
Yeah, first couple years. So, okay, so we've talked about Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. Jesus disciples believe that he rose and appeared to them. They were willing to suffer and die maintaining that belief to be true. There was radical transformation. I think we're at number five now. What are five and six?
- [42:50]
A
Five and six are that the two skeptics. The two skeptics, Paul and James, the brother of Jesus, both came to believe when they thought that they saw the risen Jesus. So the skeptical testimony from. And critics will tell you the only testimony from an eyewitness that we're positive we have is Paul's because they don't trust, they don't think. The foregoing, they don't like the traditional authorship of the Gospels. But you have Paul, but then James, Peter and later John were all there when they talked to Paul. And that's why, that's why Bart Ehrman says that's close to the eyewitness testimony when he went there. So Paul's doing the research to know what the eyewitnesses were teaching. It didn't take until the Gospel of John in 95 A.D. we get it from Paul at the latest 35 or 36 A.D. with this trip to Jerusalem. So Paul and James, two skeptics, both die for their faith. Both turn the world upside down. Both are obviously transformed. So I think all six together now, what I did in the old days, I started with a list of six. Sorry, list of 12. And then I cut the list in half. And almost everybody will grant you the 12, but I cut it down to 6 because the smaller the, the focus, the more people you're going to get on board. And, and people say critically to me sometime I want to be sure I'm understood. I'm not saying this. These facts are not true because the critics admit them. Yeah, the critics can be wrong. Like everybody else, the critics, they're on board. But the reason the critics believe the facts that believe these six is because the evidence indicates all six. The evidence indicates all six are true. So the number one reason to accept the minimal facts is that there's multiple evidence. I just. This first chapter that, I mean, the first book that I just sent in the almost 1300 pages, there are 600 pages of evidence for those 12 facts, almost all for the six. And I'd say the average pieces of evidence for each One of the six is between 10 and 20. Account of 10 and 20 for each one. In other words, you have an argument out here and there's 10 and 20 facts, 10 to 20 that come to bear on that one fact and say it's true. And now you wonder why Ludeman admits it, why Ehrman admits it, why cross it admits it, why Marcus Borg admits it. So by far the most evidential point is that the critics is that the facts say it happened. It's incidental and it's important. But the fact that the critics allow it, that just gives me a common ground to talk to them. I will tell you this. You talk about witnessing and talking to people and lay people and so on. I'll be on a plane with somebody and to be honest with you, I just rather they let me read or something, but somebody will say, so what do you do? And I'll say, well, I specialize on the resurrection. Really? And how do you do that? I don't believe you can do that with the Bible. Okay, fine. And I'll tell them the six. And when I say everybody agrees to these six, the guy sitting next to me on the plane, he'll say, I don't have a problem with those six. And he never asked questions on my testimony that the six are allowed. He goes, ah, great, okay, take them now what do you do with them? And then I show how there has to be a resurrection. We have eyewitnesses, they died for it, blah blah, blah, and all the naturalistic theories can be answered. So what else do you have? You go, well, I don't believe in a resurrection. Well, I can't help that, but you're going to have to deal with data. And I will add this just for the record, when someone says, you're asking me to believe something supernatural, not just a resurrection, but you're asking me to believe eternal life. You're asking me to believe there's another world that we don't see. And at that point I'll often go time out, have you ever heard about near death experiences? And that's the second topic that I've done the most research on, ever since the early 70s and right along with resurrection, and there are hundreds of really well evidenced near death experiences where people, when they're measurably flat heart, flat brain, as far as we can tell, as far as the machines tell, they report data that can be verified during that stage and the things they verify the patient couldn't have seen. If they were looking out of the hospital room out the window, they still wouldn't see them. Could be a mile away. Could be on this side of the hospital there's over 300 cases like that into about three dozen of them are flat brain, flat heart. Now I'm not trying to get into another topic, but all I say is if they go, yeah, but I don't believe there's another world. I'll say, well you should because this one has empirical evidence, this one has scientific data and, and then they'll go, oh well, maybe there is. I wouldn't mind if there's an afterlife. Maybe there is. And then I say, all right, now let's go back to the resurrection. Because if they're old fashioned into an afterlife, I'll say to them, I'm talking to you about a specific case of afterlife. Why would you be inclined to dismiss this just because you don't like the religious views or the afterlife when that's. The afterlife is, is tough right now? Hey, I'll tell you something, you might get a kick out of this. You might go repeating it everywhere yourself. It's pretty good maybe. The best known skeptic in America recently gave information from a, from a survey of atheists and agnostics. And they were asked several questions and people voted, you know, said what they were. And just under 33%, I think the number was 32, 31. Almost 1/3 of atheists and agnostics said they believe in an afterlife.
- [48:53]
B
Wow.
- [48:54]
A
What in the world is going on? Yeah, that does not come from naturalism. Yeah, you don't have a world where you live after you die. I mean it's a theistic concept. In fact, Bertrand Russell, the famous, called both an atheist and an agnostic. But the famous British philosopher, he said there's two major beliefs for Christians or theists in general. He said God and an afterlife. Well, wait a minute, why are the skeptics admitting the one point? And I think it's because they're hearing these near death experiences and they're getting a lot of play and some of them are highly evidential. In fact, they've been. There's one near death scholar who's published over a hundred articles in peer reviewed psychological and medical journals. So it's out there. Anyway, I don't want to get off on that. But I'm just saying if there's an afterlife, I'm certainly within my rights to talk about a specific case of afterlife which is resurrection.
- [49:50]
B
And it always amazes me the lengths people will go to try to find a naturalistic explanation for everything. To your point about atheists and agnostics, I remember talking to an agnostic once who was not so much just, hey, I'm an open agnostic, give me what you got. I want to consider your point. It was more of a hostile kind of agnostic. And she said, well, because I mentioned some of the data on near death experiences and she said, well, maybe that can just be explained. Like maybe there's just a split second at death where you experience an eternity of bliss and then the lights go out. But in real time it just happens in a split second. I thought like, you have to really bend over backwards to come up with that, right?
- [50:38]
A
Yeah. Elisa, some of these go for 40 minutes, some of them are. A few of them are hours long. And this would take some explaining, I realize, but some of the data come from years. The data are years old. So it's not five minutes, it's not five minutes, one second and it's over. That will not work with these theories.
- [51:02]
B
Yeah, well, so where does the empty tomb fit into all of this?
- [51:07]
A
The empty tomb is part of my 12. But, but it didn't make the cut down to six. It's like 12 people go out. You know, you have 12 people on your bench for a basketball team and empty tomb is not one of the starters. Empty tombs are really good evidence. There's many evidences for the empty tomb as there are for any of the others. There's about. Well, I have an essay where there's 23 arguments I give for the empty tomb. And those 23 arguments are according to the way the critics count the arguments, not believers. Not like, oh well, Matthew says Luke. No, that's not going to convince anybody if you quote a verse. But 23 arguments for the tomb. Reason I don't accept the empty tomb is my second criterion, which is not as important, but is that virtually all scholars accept it. And when I started this research while I did my dissertation back in the 70s, that number was 75% of the people that I was able to see admitted the empty tomb in my. I just finished that in the. My magnum opus and the num. I surveyed 250 plus critical scholars and the number is now 80. Wow.
- [52:21]
B
It's gone.
- [52:22]
A
But the other, the other six, they're like 98. Yeah, you're not going to find it. It's a rare person who, in fact, it's a rare person who doubts any of the 12. But if they're going to doubt one it's probably the empty tomb and you know, used to be 75, but it's going up to about 80. There's sure a lot of evidences for it. And if that's your criterion, the most important one, where the evidence is the empty tomb has it. I use the empty tomb all the time at evidences. It's not one of my five. I call my, not one of my six. I call, sometimes I call my six minimal facts. I call them the six plus one. And I call six plus one. The plus one is the, is the empty tomb where it qualifies on the evidence side, which is by far the most important. Doesn't quite make it on the unanimous scholarly side. So I call it, you know, six plus one. And then people say I think the minimal fact. The, the empty tomb is a minimal fact. And I do not think that, but doesn't fit my definition, but it fits my evidential definition of 10 to 20 evidences.
- [53:28]
B
Yeah, well, I was having a conversation once with someone who's very close to me, who is in deconstruction. And this is very well established relationship with real openness and love and communication. So this isn't just somebody I met that I was having this conversation with. But in this case this person was open to talking to me about evidence. So I brought up the minimal facts and I think I condensed them down to four. I just said Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. His closest disciples believed they saw him alive. After he was dead, they were radically changed and went to their, you know, were willing to be tortured and die maintaining this to be true. And then I brought up Paul and James and then I glad to know it's 80% now for the empty tomb I had said 75%. And it's really interesting because I said to this person, I said, okay, you know, this is just the bare bones case for, for the truthfulness of Christianity. If Jesus was raised from the dead, then Christianity is true. Despite all that other stuff you're doubting this person was doubting. There was moral doubt, there was emotional doubt, all sorts of things. I said, just put that aside for a second and just determine if you think Christianity is true. And then I said, in my view the most reasonable conclusion derived from these facts, the best explanation of these facts is that Jesus really did rise from the dead. And so what I did with this person is rather than bring up all of the different ways people try to explain these facts, like the hallucination, I know we don't have time to get into all these. But, you know, the apparent death, the idea that maybe Jesus didn't really die or maybe they hallucinated it or something along those lines. I didn't bring any of that up. I just said, so what you need to do if you want to disprove Christianity is come up with a better explanation than he really rose from the dead and doing it that way. This person looked at me and basically said, I can't. And I said, really? And what it exposed was that for this person, the doubt was not intellectual. And they said to me, I realize, and I'm just going to be honest, that I don't want Christianity to be true. And there was a moral. They did not want to have to live biblical morality. And it's just interesting that even just using a little simple, minimal facts argument can bring that out, even to help somebody along their journey to realize, you know, my problem is not intellectual, it's moral, it's emotional, it's something else. And so it can be so incredibly effective. But as we close out here, at the risk of opening up a whole new can of worms, can you give us just a couple of minutes on the Shroud of Turin? Is this something we can look to? As I know I've opened a can, but just, you know, is this something that's just folklore, mythology, or is this, you know, what is the scholarship saying on this thing?
- [56:30]
A
Yeah. I'll warn you, the two topics I'm afraid to bring up when I only have short time are near death experiences in the Shroud, because you won't get out of the room if you bring either one of them.
- [56:39]
B
I know, I know.
- [56:41]
A
I was lucky enough to co author two books on the Shroud. Lucky because the guy I co authored it with was the editor and spokesman for the team of scientists that did the 1978 investigation in Turin, Italy. And here's my bottom line. People ask me a lot, where are you on the Shroud today? And I'll say, I'm being funny, but. But I'm trying to make a point. And I'll say, the Shroud depends. My belief about the Shroud depends on what day of the week it is or what happened when I woke up that morning. And I'll tell them, they'll go, oh, well, you know, yeah, okay, but be serious. What. What is it on a bad day? And what is it on a good day? And I'll say, well, on a bad day, it's 80% likely. On a good day, boy, I could be at 90% on the Shroud. And the Shroud is. There's empirical data, there's a whole bunch of tests that indicate that the image on the Shroud is. Is a scorch. It's a couple different kinds of radiation. Now, you have to answer the question, why is radiation coming from a dead body? There are hundreds of burial garments in existence in museums and other places. Any number of them can have blood or decomposition on them, but they don't have body images. So the Shroud image is utterly unique in the data. Now, it could be a person who was really crucified, just not Jesus. But that's not going to explain why the image is there. And it's like anything else. Our first, our two books we published, we have an appendix in the back where we have naturalistic theories, just like on the Resurrection. And we give 7, 8, 9 refutations of about a dozen different theories against the Shroud. So you can do the same thing with the Shroud and the carbon dating, which is the 1988 carbon dating, which is the number one reason that's given against it. All the other reasons point to it. It was just about two years ago now. An article was published by an Oxford journal. In fact, if I understand the story correctly, the editor of that journal was one of the same guys involved in the 88 carbon 14 that said it was medieval. They published this article which said, you have all these data points, but these guys apparently average these dates, and you can't average these dates. So the four people who wrote this article, two of them were logit, two of them were statisticians, and they said, here's how you do statistics. You don't just take four years that are hundreds of years apart and average them. So what came out of this was, we don't know how old the cloth is, but it's not that medieval date that you guys gave before. So that's your quick summary on the Shrub.
- [59:48]
B
Good job. Well, I want to thank my guest, Dr. Gary Havermass, for this great conversation on evidence for the Resurrection. If you want more, you can go to garyhabermass.com for all things resurrection, early creeds, Shroud of Turin, all the things go to garyhabermass.com we're also going to have him back to do an episode on the Creeds. If you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified every time we release a new video, because we've got some really great conversations coming up. If you're listening on audio platforms like Google, Spotify really helps if you leave a great review and of course sharing this on social media, clicking like and commenting on a post where you see it shared. All of those things work together to let Let the powers that be know that people are interested in this content and will suggest it to more people. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.
- [60:57]
C
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