Resurrection Lecture London, England – Gary Habermas
Professor Gary Habermas is the Distinguished Research Professor and Chair of the Philosophy and Theology Department at Liberty University in Virginia. His professional life has concentrated on the examination of the historical, philosophical and theological issues surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus.
However, his earlier years were ones of deep searching for religious or non religious belief system that he could know to be true. Now for me, with his background of serious scepticism and enquiry alongside some of his later pastoral work, Professor Habermas was well placed to write about issues of doubt.
And I would recommend his book, The Thomas Factor, Using Your Doubts to Draw Closer to God. You can find this as well as other resources from Professor Habermas on BeThinking, and it really is worth a read. Professor Habermas’s studies have included philosophical theology and world religions, with his doctorate being a study of the, uh, a historical study of the resurrection of Jesus.
Uh, he’s the author of at least 36 books and over 60 book chapters or articles. Uh, most of which deal with his key topic of the resurrection. It’s a pleasure therefore to welcome him to our conference today to speak to us on the resurrection evidence that changed a generation of scholars. Please welcome with me Professor Gary Haldemans.
Well folks, it’s good to be here with you, bring your greetings from the U. S. We’ve also been on tour for the last week, we’ve got a week to go, got to go to Sweden tomorrow and Germany two days later. So, I may be looking at you. But I may not be seeing you. Let me dig right in. I’m going to, if you’re taking a Bible and you want to follow along, I am, uh, taking two texts today.
1 Corinthians chapter 15 and the end of Galatians 1, the beginning of Galatians 2. And I’m going to argue from the text just the way Critical scholars argue from the text. Let me explain that for just a moment. If, if you take the position that the Bible is the Word of God, in some form or another, I assume you think that Jesus was raised from the dead.
If you think the Bible is not the Word of God, but somehow, more or less, it’s sort of trustworthy, there’s some good data there. I’d say you may still get to a resurrection, depends on what you want to to say or not say. But a lot of people think that they can disavow the resurrection by taking another stance, which is to say the Bible is unreliable.
On that sort of argumentation, the Bible may be like Homer, and you may look at the Iliad or the Odyssey and say, wow, not much here in history, but let’s talk about a Trojan horse. Is there a city named Troy? And, and so on. But you might think, as a non reliable book, we’re just going to cut out the resurrection.
I think most people who think the Bible’s unreliable, uh, probably do not believe in a resurrection. But in contemporary theology, I’ve, I’ve couched the title of this lecture in terms of some changes that have taken place in recent research. during the last, say, 40 to 50 years. And scholarship, now I’m talking about critical scholars, people who have terminal degrees, doctor’s degrees, hopefully peer reviewed publications, hold positions of authority in a relevant field.
Might be history, might be philosophy, certain scientific fields, certainly Old and New Testament, things like that. Thank you. People who are trained that way are going to come at this material entirely differently than a lot of the folks on the websites, popular websites in the West, where people blog and critique and often call themselves Bible scholars or historians or philosophers or something like that, but they don’t seem to have the requisite knowledge.
characteristics. I’ll always remember a famous critique of the Resurrection. Well, it wasn’t so famous, but a critique of the Resurrection was published some years ago, and this journal obviously thought that the writer was qualified to write. After all, he was an American diplomat to a South American country.
Now, somebody might do that, and they may read, and they may be good, and they may be talking, they may talk about this, but oftentimes what I’m saying is there’s a difference. between someone who has reason, about whom we have reason to think that they are trained in the data, and some who don’t. If you talk to a John Dominic Crossan, or a Bart Ehrman, or a Marcus Borg, you’re going to get an entirely different picture than if you talk to somebody who says, Jesus probably never lived, we don’t have any data in the New Testament, and so on.
Today, critics will allow you to use portions of the New Testament. And this is one of the hardest things to get across to folks, because you’ll start with the methodology and someone’s going to say, but you’re using the New Testament. Right. Okay, let me go on. No, but you’re using the New Testament. And finally, you get the point that what they’re saying is, you’re using If you’re a critic, you can’t use the New Testament.
And the thought seems to go something like this. The New Testament is a prejudiced book, so it can’t say anything truly. But I’m an atheist, so what I teach is neutral, and I don’t have a perspective. It’s like, uh, study philosophy. If you don’t think you have a perspective. We all have perspectives. So, but Don Crosser would never make that mistake.
Bart Ehrman would never make that mistake. Read their books, and they’re going to start the same way we’re going to start today. We’re going to talk about a couple texts that they are also willing to talk about. And if you don’t bring up the text, they’re going to bring up the text. Why? Well, I’m going to say a little bit about the Gospels today, but most of what I’m going to say is about the Apostle Paul.
So, more about this as I go, but I’m going to argue that you can use a critical approach to the New Testament and still come away believing the resurrection. In fact, from my studies that I’ve done in the last 40 years, um, I would argue that the majority of scholars today, writing in the field, specialists, no matter how far left or right they are, the majority of them think something happened to Jesus.
after his death. Something happened to him, not just to the disciples, i. e. an experience. Now, what that might be and what they might say, that’s different. But let me give you an example of when I was in graduate school, many, many years ago. In the mid 70s, if you found someone in a well placed book with a good company and someone’s got a good degree and so on.
And if that person said Jesus was raised from the dead bodily, and appeared bodily, guess what? You almost could not find one that was not an evangelical. If you said that Jesus left an empty tomb behind, almost for sure you were an evangelical. There were a few. There were a few exceptions in the 70s.
You’d get a few more votes on that one. But the numbers, for all intents and purposes, were pretty low. Today, it’s hard to get a head count. But, to say that Jesus was raised bodily is a very common view today. Maybe the majority view. And a lot of critics will grant, even if they, even if they deny the resurrection, they will say that the New Testament teaches bodily resurrection.
Which is not even what was said so often. I don’t know. 50 years ago. How about the empty tomb? From what I can tell, headcount wise, about two thirds to three quarters of scholars today, critical scholars, who have characteristics like I mentioned earlier, are going to concede the empty tomb. Does an empty tomb prove a resurrection?
It does not. But is it part of a case? Is it something that you have to consider? Yes, it is. Because, in my own research, I have found 23 arguments for an empty tomb, used by critical scholars, used in a critically, um, approved way by other scholars. 23 arguments. So today you have to say, well look, I seem to have some evidence here for bodily appearances.
And I seem to have some evidence here, maybe a dozen or a dozen and a half considerations in favor of the empty tomb. What about this? Well, times have changed. What’s behind that? Alright. Let me stop right there, and let me go to one other type of data that I’m going to have to be really, really brief about.
In the late 19th century, we started seeing some research evolve in New Testament studies that really came to its own in the 20th century. Now, it kind of, I don’t want to say went underground, but you hear less about it during the reigns of of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. I say reigns. Uh, late in his life, Rudolf Bultmann’s, I mean, late in his life, Karl Barth said, Rudolf Bultmann is king.
He’s, he’s the most influential thinker, and that was after Barth had his own day, and that’s what, what scholars often call the no quest period for Jesus existence. They both, from a more conservative viewpoint, from a more left wing viewpoint, both would disavow searches for the historical Jesus. And so, we see less, but when this starts dying down, let’s say the 1970s, for the most part, moving on, books like Reginald Fuller’s The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives and so on.
A lot of emphasis was given to text in the New Testament. Uh, actually dozens, if you go and unpack some of these. And we find that there’s different sorts. I want to be real clear about that. There’s different sorts, so I’m not trying to act like these are all synonyms. But they’re sometimes called confessions, traditions.
Creedal passages, sermon summaries, hymns. And they’re not only different in the species, but they’re different in how they function liturgically in the church. Okay, but be that as it may, these little snippets, generally brief, are older than the text in which they appear. Now, evangelicals haven’t done a lot with this until just a few decades ago.
But most of us know something about Philippians chapter 2 and we say that that could very well be an early Christian hymn. You might hear that. Or you might hear that Romans 10 9, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God’s raised him from the dead, this is an early creedal statement, perhaps even a baptismal creed, even Rudolf Bultmann thought that.
Romans 4, Jesus showed Himself to be Son of God, Lord, and Messiah by virtue of His resurrection from the dead. Large agreement that this is an early creedal statement. In the book of 1 Corinthians, there are three texts actually that refer to creeds, two of them very well known. In 1 Corinthians chapter 11, Paul says, I delivered unto you that which I also received.
And I think you know that passage pretty well. One of the most discussed New Testament passages, without any question, is 1 Corinthians chapter 15. And in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul talks about the gospel. Now let me just say here, before I jump in.
considerate position of the most of the critical scholarly community, is that the books that bear Paul, of the books that bear Paul’s name in the New Testament, anywhere between six and eight of them are authentic. Now by authentic, they mean written by Paul, and are authoritative in some sense. Well, how is Paul authoritative?
Well, for people who think, that don’t think in terms of, of inspiration. Authoritative would mean written by a scholarly individual who was trained properly in the law, was somebody different before he came to Christ. He was a persecutor. He was a critic. He knows what he’s talking about. You can, you can see that he’s, he’s a sharp mind.
I still think the last time I was on this platform, it was with Tom Wright and Anthony Flew. And Tony Flew used to say, Paul is a first rate philosopher. Jesus is a first rate moral philosopher. He would use that little phrase over and over. My point there is, read the Book of Romans, read the Book of Galatians, and you can see a very carefully constructed argument.
So Paul was intelligent, he was trained, he’s in the right place at the right time, and, as we’ll talk a little bit about here today, he knew others who had been part, a very integral part, of the life of Jesus. So generally, critics are going to concede. allow you to use texts such as Romans, Thessalonians, Philemon.
So, they don’t have a problem. In fact, as I said earlier, if you don’t bring those texts up, they might. Because it doesn’t mean they think they’re inspired or inerrant or something like that, the critics. But they do think they’re authoritative in the sense of being by a person who knew what was going on, right place, right time, asking the right questions with a lot of the right data.
Alright, that’s going to be my little introduction here. 1 Corinthians 15 starts like this. Paul says, when I first came to Corinth, he says, I gave you the gospel which I was preaching. 1 And depending on how you respond, he said, whether you’ve believed or believed in vain, he says that determines whether or not you’re saved, those first two verses.
I gave you the gospel, how did you respond? Now here’s a footnote, and I’d say, when Paul defines the gospel in his epistles, and also we have a number of texts and acts that do this, often times called little sermon summaries tend to be Acts 1 5. 10, 13, 17, that in these texts we see a definition, minimal content for the gospel, minimum.
A couple other things pop in other places, but here’s the minimal content. Jesus is deity, indicated by titles, a lot of work being done on this today. Secondly, died, was raised. Now you could say, well what about burial? Well actually Paul doesn’t mention burial a whole lot of times. You could say, well, what about sin?
You can put sin in there if you want to talk about, Paul says 1 Corinthians 15, 3. He starts giving a list of the, some of this data, and he says, died for our sins according to the scriptures. He doesn’t say that. As much as he says simply, talks about Jesus being, uh, a person of, of, uh, being deity, and dying, and being raised from the dead.
Okay, so just to start, that’s minimal data. That’s it. Now, if you ask the average Christian, how would you verify this material? How would you talk about a high Christology in the earliest church? How would you talk about death by crucifixion? How would you talk about a resurrection? Okay, from this point on, I’m going to start chalking off a timeline up here.
So this is, um, let’s see what you’ve got up there. You’ve got some words. Um, I’m going to do a human PowerPoint with you today. We’re going to mark this off, so you just get used to seeing, I don’t have as long as I would. As I usually walk here, but you can kind of imagine me going way out there. Um, I’m going to call this Ground Zero.
Okay? It’s approximately 30 A. D. Which, it’s amazing. Scholars don’t, uh, answer very specifically. You have to look a long time to find a whole lot of answers on when did Jesus die. 30 A. D., I think it’s fair to say, is probably the most common date. 33, if you will say 33. I’m just going to say ground zero because we’re talking about how far from this point are these data reported.
Now remember, even in ancient historiography, we are interested in certain things like early eyewitness testimony. You might think of those as the two E’s. Early eyewitness testimony. Lucian, for example, perhaps the only ancient writer who gives us a philosophy of history or a historiography, how to write history.
And Lucian says, one of the things we want is we want people who were close to sources. And he says, he said, I’ll just make a point. He said, too many historians claim to be eyewitnesses and they weren’t. So he tries, we want to be careful here, and an early eyewitness is better than a late eyewitness, in general, now I mean the late one might be the accurate one, but in general we’ve got some principles here.
that we want to be careful of. And we have, by the way, uh, Lucian gives us an account of Alexander and a certain Aristobulus who comes to him and says, look what I’ve been writing about your life. And Alexander takes us and spends a little bit of time reading it, talking about things like slaying elephants with spears and things like that.
And now, you know, papyri is pretty expensive in those days. And you just don’t go to Xerox machine and. Type, I mean copy pages, right? Alexander takes the document and throws it into the water and Then he says to Aristobulus, he says it’s a good thing. I’m not doing that to you because you’re spreading falsehood Now it’s known that a lot of mythology was spread about Alexander pretty quickly, but I’m just saying Lucian is trying to make a principle about good sources bad sources.
Who are they from? When are they? You I won’t continue that anymore, but I’m just going to say, we still value some of those things today. So if you’re going to answer that question, a lot of evangelicals are going to make this kind of move. Read books, uh, with reliability, what I would call reliability arguments, and I’m going to use critics, critical dates, okay?
Evangelical dates are a little bit earlier, but it’s not a huge difference. Many, many Christians would argue like this. They’d say, well, if you’re going to talk about Jesus, you’ve got to talk about Jesus. Let’s start with Mark. 65 to 75 A. D. That’s some pretty common math here. We’re talking maybe 35, 40 years after Jesus.
Matthew at about 80. Luke at about 85. Acts just a little bit later here too. And John at about, ah, let’s say mid 90s. And you stop and you say, Hey, look. This is only 65 years later. Good sources, right? Well, you have to read ancient historiography to realize how close these are to the data. In fact, just to give you an example or two.
I’ll use a bad example first, but only because the person’s so well known. Alexander the Great. Several people wrote lives of Alexander during his own lifetime. Even a couple generals. Here’s the bad news. We don’t have anything. We don’t have it. The approximately five accounts we have of Alexander are written between 300 and 450 years afterwards.
So if this is ground zero and this is Alexander, we’re going to be going way, way, way, way over there.
And the best sources are Plutarch and Arian, plus 425 to plus 450 AD. In other words, they’re writing about 120 A. D. for Alexander’s death about 330 B. C. Okay, someone might say, yeah, not a really good example because we know a lot of mythology spread about Alexander pretty quickly and there’s a big gap there.
Uh, can you do a little better? Can you give us a, can you give us a contemporary example? Okay, real quickly, uh, let me mention Tiberius. Tiberius. Tiberius Caesar dies just a few years after Jesus. We have four major sources for Tiberius, four major sources for Jesus, and you think, okay, that’s a nice little parallel right there.
Now, the first source for Tiberius is actually contemporary. You go, ooh, wow, that’s tough. But actually, that’s the, that’s the source that gives the least information about Tiberius. The best source for Tiberius is Tacitus, at plus 80. So Tacitus is 15 years other side of John. Suetonius about the same time, Deocassius about 180 after ground zero for Tiberius is going to be very close to ground zero for, for Jesus, and Deocassius is plus 180.
Now some people are going to say, well, look, here’s the problem. You think Greco Roman biographies are roughly the same as, as the Gospels, but you’re forgetting something. The Gospels are religious propaganda and they Spread miraculous accounts. Well, read ancient Greco Roman histories. Virtually every ancient Greco Roman historian gives all kinds of prophecies, portents, miraculous accounts.
Tacitus talks about one of the Caesars healing a couple people, and so on. And so then the skeptic says, Oh, well, okay, now it just said that. So much the worse for these ancient writers. Now, we don’t want to, you’re not going to throw out ancient history, but you’re going to have to be really, really careful, and I’m going to say, okay, we do need to be really, really careful, but I think we’re going to try to be careful here about the resurrection of Jesus.
So that’s a rule of things out. And in the last 20 years, due to the work of some scholars such as Richard Burridge, University of London, it’s become very, very common to think of the Gospels now as Greco Roman bio. Um, Biographies. And, and the Gospels have entered a new sphere of study. An excellent book would be Richard Baucom’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, almost 500 pages on the, on the eyewitness traditions behind the Gospels.
Okay, I’m gonna, I’ll say it, I mean if you want to raise questions that’s fine. I’m not gonna do any more with this reliability approach. I’m gonna use a different argument today. Totally independent. for the resurrection. And I’m going to say, let’s go to the source that critics accept most of all in the New Testament.
It’s the Apostle Paul. Michael Martin, a well known American atheist philosopher, says, Paul is the only eyewitness to a resurrection appearance whose writings we possess. Now you might say, okay, let’s talk about method. Do you want to say, no, no, no. I’m going to use the Gospels. Or if he gives you Paul, are you going to use Paul?
Alright, maybe we say both and. But for the rest of this talk, I’m going to discuss Paul. Now Paul, in 1 Corinthians, there’s not a lot of dispute about the date. Liberal, conservative, it’s going to be a couple years either side. But let’s think of 1 Corinthians as being penned about 55 AD. So, 55 AD. Ground zero.
It’s about 25 years after the fact. Interestingly, Paul says, in verse 3, I gave you what I was given. Now sometimes I just slow down on this, especially when I’m doing this in a church, and I’ll just say, did you hear that? I mean, these are great words. I gave you what I was given. I did some work on this.
Did a little bit of research. I’m passing this on. Didn’t make it up. Material didn’t come from me. In fact, some very, very skeptical scholars call this pre Pauline material. Paul’s passing it on, but if he were writing today, it would have to be footnoted to keep from being plagiarism. But in his book, he says, I gave you what I was given.
He’s telling you he’s not the source. Paul wrote this, 55 AD, but he said, this is what I gave you when I came to Corinth. I won’t be able to go into detail here, but some New Testament scholars say this is one of the best, most, uh, most recognizable dates in the New Testament. When did Paul come to Corinth?
51 to 52 AD. So now Paul writes it, plus 25. He taught them about plus 21. for joining. And, I’m going to give you the, a critical consensus position, and then I’ll tell you why they get there. They think Paul received this material, this is a consensus New Testament position according to, say, Richard Baucom, is that Paul received this material about 35 AD.
Really? My pastor said, the gospel, well, the gospels are later. But, we do have contemporary material. And this material, Paul says, he derived from the sources about plus five. You say, Paul said that? How do you get that? Well, let’s do the math. Remember, Paul’s taken to be an honest, straightforward source. And here’s how you get it.
When did Paul meet Jesus? When did Paul have this experience under the order of Damascus? Here’s another way to ask it. One, when does Acts 9 happen in contrast to Acts 1? Well, critics put Paul’s conversion at about 1, 2, 3, something like that, years after the cross. Maybe 4, getting a little late now, but let’s say an average is 2, 3, years after the cross, Paul meets Jesus, and then he says in Galatians chapter 1, verse 16, he says, I met Jesus, and then he said, I didn’t go running up to Jerusalem to see these folks who were apostles before me.
I went out to Arabia and I spent three years with the Lord, and then I went up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before me. So Paul does the math, ground zero, thirty ish. He comes, he makes his trip to Damascus about plus two, plus three. He says three years later he went to Jerusalem, we’re talking plus five, plus six.
And Paul says in Galatians chapter one, He says, I spent 15 days in Jerusalem with Peter, he said, the only apostles I saw were Peter and James, the brother of Jesus.
C. H. Dodd, a New Testament scholar from Cambridge, last generation, said, very famous statement, he said, Paul spent two weeks with Peter and James, and it’s safe to say that they did more than talk about the weather. So, what would you ask Peter and James if you got 15 days in Jerusalem at plus 5? I’ll tell you my first question.
I’ll tell you what Jesus looked like to me, what my experience was like. I’ll give you my testimony. It happens three times in the book of Acts. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9, when I’m an apostle, have I not seen the Lord? 1 last of all he appeared to me. I’ll tell you about my experience if you tell me what you saw after Jesus died on the cross.
I mean, after all, what’s the book of Galatians about? I mean, you could almost summarize Galatians in a couple sentences, and you could say that Paul’s theme is, it’s the gospel, get it right, don’t make it too small, don’t make it too big, stay right there, don’t expand it, you come by faith, don’t try to perfect yourself by works, it’s the gospel.
You got it? Okay, get it right. That’s Galatians.
Now, Pete’s, Pete’s gonna give you a, you know, a 40 page outline, but, I mean, that’s my, that’s my shortened version of Galatians. So I mean, I’m just saying, I think it’s foreign to Paul to go there and not talk about the Gospel data. In fact, a few verses later, that’s precisely what he tells us they were talking about in Galatians chapter 2, verse 2, and there’s no break there in the original.
Paul says, 14 years later, I went back to Jerusalem. Critics like Bart Ehrman, Helmut Kirster, put this at about 48 AD. Paul goes back to Jerusalem at about plus 18. And he says in Galatians 2. 2, I think one of the most interesting texts in all of Scripture. I like the King James rendering here, it’s kind of interesting.
Although translations are pretty close, usually. It says, I went back to Jerusalem, and you find out he’s meeting with the pillars, those who are apostles before me, and he says, I set before them the gospel I was preaching to see if I was running or had run in vain. To see if I was running or had run in vain.
You go, Paul, dude, you took 18 years to get back to these guys just to make sure you’re on the same page regarding the gospel? And Paul would say, you know something? I can see you don’t understand arguments real well. He said, let’s do it again. You’ll get it. He says, I met Jesus. Any problems with my source?
I didn’t think so. Okay. Three verses later, I got it from Peter and James. Y’all have any issues? Good, that’s smart. Okay. At plus 18, I saw Peter, James, the brother of Jesus, and John. That’s smart. You folks have driven, some of you, a long way to hear several people here this weekend. How far would you drive to hear Peter, James the brother of Jesus, Paul, and John?
Oh, Barnabas is there. Yeah, yeah, right, I’ll get him after dinner. Talk to me, Paul. Talk to me, Peter. You know, this is a very special event. Yeah. And Paul says, I set before them the gospel I was preaching to see if I was running or had run in vain. And five little words in English, he says, they added nothing to me.
They added nothing to me. And in verses 9 and 10, we get this phrase, right hand of fellowship, when I was little I thought we invented that in our German Baptist church. It’s Galatians 2. Basically laid hands on Paul and Barnabas and said, You take the gospel to the Gentiles, Peter’s gonna take it to the Jews, and this is what we accept.
And they said a few other things, you know, Be sensitive about Jews in your town, Don’t eat blood, uh, don’t eat, uh, food with, uh, blood, Be careful to the poor, and Paul said he, he was very much interested in doing that himself. In fact, we see Paul going a great, uh, distance toward taking up offerings for the poor.
But they added nothing to me. Now that’s their comment about him. 1 is Paul’s comment about them. After giving the appearances in 1 Corinthians 15. 3 7, Paul says, last of all, he appeared to me, verse 8. And in verse 11, after talking about them, he says, I don’t deserve to be called an apostle, I persecuted the church.
In verse 11, he says, but you know what? Whether you get it from them, or whether you get it from me. So we preach, and so you believe. In other words, Jesus appeared to these folks. There are individual appearances to Peter and James. There’s one to Paul of Pence, his own. There’s a group called All the Apostles.
There’s the Twelve. Paul says, I don’t care whether you get it from them or whether you get it from me. You’re going to hear the same story about the appearances. Very next verse, he says, and if we preach that Jesus was raised, he says that three times in the next few verses. We preach, we talk, we witness.
Who are the we? Amen. They’re the apostles, and the appearances are what they talked about. Now this is pretty neat. This is when Paul got the material. Don’t miss the point. This is when Paul got the material. If he got it from Peter and James, I just wanna, I’m gonna out skeptic the skeptics at this point, okay?
Let’s just say that Paul didn’t get this early creedal material right here, although most scholars seem to be very willing to say that. As I’ll tell you in just a moment. But, let’s just say he didn’t get the creedal material right here. He at least got the, he at least got the data on which the creedal material were based.
Or was based. But, most people don’t agree. I don’t, don’t argue that Paul received the creedal material right here. But my point is, this is when Paul heard it.
Peter and James had it before Paul had it. Now, it is, uh, it is, uh, a creed or a tradition in 1st Corinthians, like many of these, and it reads as a standard, as a stylized text. Da da da da da da da, da da da da da da da. It’s often thought they’re two stanzas, but it takes a while to take a text that way, especially for an audience, as as many historical Jesus scholars think today, that a lot of Jesus heroes, very high percentage, maybe 80 or 90 percent, were illiterate.
And so it takes a while to put it in standard language so it can be So it can be memorized and kept. So, okay, Paul hears it. They had it before him. They had to standardize it. Whoops. We’re right on top of the events. You say, well, come on, this sounds kind of conservative. Um, when you have these discussions with, uh, you know, major scholars out there, are they going to concede this stuff?
Well, let me just give you two examples real quickly. Garrett Ludeman. A prominent German skeptical New Testament scholar, who denies the resurrection, says that this material was formalized in this creedal form no later than plus three years after the cross, max. The Jesus Seminar, not conservative, right?
They throw beads in the hat, depending on how you count the colors, they reject 80 90 percent of the red letter words of Jesus. In their commentary on what Jesus did,
This is pre Pauline material that predates Paul’s conversion. Here’s Paul’s conversion, here’s the material. And get this, in their What Did Jesus Do book, red is yes, pink is probably, gray is probably not, black is no. What color is, am I not an apostle, have I not seen the Lord, and last of all, He appeared to me?
Thank you. It’s red. Yes. Really? Jesus Seminar. Yeah. Red. Okay. What about that first statement of the Creed? He appeared to Peter. Pink. And in the note they explain. The reason it’s pink, is because we get it from Paul. If we’d gotten it from Peter, it would be red. But Paul is passing the tradition on So it’s a little bit more hearsay.
It’s pink. It’s probable. And then the note says, oh yeah, and there’s another group here that’s real important. The appearance to the women is also authentic. Although they don’t tell you if it’s red or pink. Well, this is amazing that they’re going to take that kind of respect. Now you say, well, they don’t believe the resurrection happened.
No, because in their first book they say we’re not going to give any sayings of the risen Jesus because dead people don’t rise and everything that happened is, is, uh, over on Friday. But they do rate those events red and pink. So they’re, what I’m saying is they’re, they, there’s some reliable tradition there we can talk about them.
Okay. Let me bring this to a close. This is, it’s a very early date. We have data here we can use. Now people are going to come up with naturalistic theories. We get five of them right in the New Testament. But they’re going to say, well, yeah, you know, I’ll admit all this, but I don’t know if the resurrection happened.
What if? And the point is, I mean, I, I don’t know, Bill, I don’t know what you do when, when you debate with the resurrection, but I want my opponent to pick a theory. I want them to pick a naturalistic theory. And some of them will say to me, Yeah, I’m not going to pick a naturalistic theory. Why not? Well, because I’m going to pick something, and you’re going to get me in a corner, and it’s not going to be real con A guy actually said that to me.
You’re going to get me in a corner, and I’m not going to like that very much. I’ll go, wait a minute, whoa, whoa. I’ll just tell you who I am. I’m a supernaturalist. I believe the resurrection. You’re a naturalist, right? Yeah. You don’t believe the resurrection? Nope. Be a good naturalist and pick a theory.
Okay, I’m not going to be able to work through this. Maybe we can during the Q& A. But my point is, these are some of the data. Put the empty tomb in there if you like. It’s not as, as, uh, admitted as widely as these other data I’ve been using. It’s two thirds to three quarters. Alright, let me make a comment here, and I’ll be done.
Paul ends the chapter here. And the resurrection of Jesus isn’t something that’s just in a vacuum. He ends with verse 58. He’s been saying in verses 12 through 20, he says, if this isn’t true, this is vain, this is vain, this is vain, this is vain. And then he says in verse 19, if Christ has not been raised, and we only have hope in this life, we are of all persons most miserable.
Then in verse 20, he says, forget everything I said, flip flop it, because Jesus has been raised from the dead, and he’s the first fruits of those who sleep. He goes on and talks largely about the resurrection of the body, and he ends in verse 58, he says, yeah, no, this stuff isn’t vain. He says it’s not in vain.
And he says, hang in there. Be steadfast. You’re laboring the Lord. He says, first of all, he says, be steadfast. Secondly, he says, you’re laboring the Lord, it’s not in vain. Very next verse, 16. 1, he’s taken up an offering for poor believers. What he should be doing. I mean, what they asked him to do, too. But, he’s very willing to do that, as he says.
So, Christianity, it’s not just something, we can talk about true or false. I mean, we really want to chat about that. But, it’s something that makes a difference. According to some surveys, I just saw the latest one just a couple weeks ago, and the figure there was 95%, that 65 to 95 percent of American young people who go away to secular schools walk away from their faith.
65 to 95%, depending on which survey you get. That’s their own They say they walked away from their faith. Now the good news is, a later study said that 80 percent of them come back, usually in their 30s. That’s 15 years lost, and some don’t come back. I think we need to do a better job telling folks the data behind some of the things we believe.
So Paul says stand fast. I can’t think of a better message for standing fast. The resurrection of Jesus. Secondly, your labor and Lord’s not in vain. If you believe these things, you should be involved. Paul says, same book, Galatians. He says, do good unto all, especially those of the household of faith.
Galatians 6. 10. He says we should be out there working. And then he backs up a couple verses, and he says this. He’s quoting from the Old Testament, and he says, death, where’s your sting? Grave, where’s your victory? And, and read the commentaries, he’s not He’s not doing poetry. I was the ice hockey coach for nine years at Liberty.
Um, I don’t know how that translates in a British population, but, you know, ice hockey’s a pretty rough sport. I’m not a, I don’t like, I don’t appreciate poetry very much. Now, if, if you do, that’s fine. Okay, I’m not making comments against poetry. I’m just saying that’s not what Paul’s doing here. Read the commentary.
Paul is taunting death. Paul’s saying That death has nothing on him. He’s saying, death, you know, forget it. You’ve lost. You’ve been defeated. Where’s your sting? Where, you know. Now, Paul gives us a list of all the things he’s gone through. He knows he’s, he’s suffered. He’s been shipwrecked. He’s been beaten.
He got 40 minus one lash. He was stoned and left for dead outside of Lystra. He knows people can oppose him. He knows things can happen, but he says, bottom line, he says, death has been defeated. That’s the practicality of the message of the resurrection, because earlier it said, if our loved ones have died in Christ, there’s no hope.
And then he says, he says, but they’ve died with hope, because death you lost. Where’s your sting? Some of you know my story, you know my, uh, uh, Eileen is here, my, I was remarried, but my wife Debbie died in 1995 of stomach cancer. And I won’t take that into any more detail except to say, you know, it makes a lot of difference when it’s somebody that you love and you’re so close to.
And let me end with Paul’s words in 1 Thessalonians. He says, we mourn when our loved ones die. We mourn, but not as those without hope. Do you ever think about the difference between mourning with hope and mourning without hope? It only makes an eternity of difference. Mourning with hope, mourning without hope.
All of that. is because of the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is linked to the resurrection of believers more than any other doctrine in the New Testament, almost 20 times. John says we shall see him as he is and we shall be like him. Paul says he will change our vile body to be like unto his glorious body.
And he says we have our citizenship at heaven, Philippians chapter 3. Greatest message in the world. Stand fast. Get about your work. Because our faith is well grounded. Applause
Okay, isn’t it great to be reminded of that and, uh, of, uh, the facts that we have behind what we believe. Um, again, if you have questions, we have, um, around about five minutes or so for questions, so it’ll probably just be two or three. I’m not quite sure how extensive Gary is in terms of answering questions, so, yeah, first one, thank you.
Hello, um, can you just clarify, very briefly, how you, um, dated Paul’s conversion to three years after the crucifixion? All I’m doing is giving a report of where New Testament scholars usually date it. Do you have anything else to, to add, Pete? It’s in, in Galatians chapter one, Galatians chapter one gives you the fourteen years, you work back fourteen years.
He said in Galatians chapter one you take that fourteen year period and work back. Wow. So that you can get to the back of the direction of the cross. Does it, does it strike, um, you as strange that there don’t seem to be any non biblical sources for Paul? That there are none? There are biblical sources for Paul, but do you mean Gentile sources?
Yeah, non biblical sources for Paul. Well, I mean, there are non biblical sources, but you mean non biblical pagan sources. I suppose. As equivalent to Tacitus or someone like that. Sorry? Equivalent to Tacitus or someone like that. Right, secular sources. Yeah, secular sources. Because I mean, very early, um, Clement of Rome about 97, 95 97 AD, Ignatius about, uh, 107, and Polycarp about 110.
I just read an article, uh, last, uh, last week, that how many quotes and allusions they have to Paul. And you know what’s interesting for New Testament scholars here? Uh, it’s dozens. They refer to Paul’s works dozens of times, cite Paul, cite Paul’s apostleship, cite his inspiration, and they cite 12 out of Paul’s 13 epistles.
Which is a little different than contemporary critics take it. But only for laymen. It’s not recorded in that earliest literature, which is right at the end of the, you know, the New Testament canon, right on the other side of John, up until about ten years later. But if you mean non Christian pagan sources, you’re right.
Oh, I’m sure we’d all like ten more pagan sources for Paul. Yeah, we don’t have them, but we do have non biblical early. In fact, Clement even records Paul’s and Peter’s martyrdom, as Josephus records James’s. So back to that group of four, that’s pretty important. Okay. Thank you David. Um, when discussing resurrection Atheist, um, mates, the common objection they throw up as well, the disciples were clearly hurting, clearly mourning, it’s natural, they’re gonna want to Jesus, um, appear to them and raising the dead.
How do you start addressing that kind of objection? That would say it’s due to what? Um, well say they either imagined it or hallucinated purely outta grief. Grief hallucinations? Yeah. Okay. Actually Gary could speak for half an hour on this, I know. If we could keep it quiet. Keep it short. I’ll tell you what.
Because I won’t be able to answer it in detail, I’ll send you to my website, GaryHabermas. com. Unlike John Lennox, I’ll send you to a source that’s free.
On my website, under hallucination. I have 19 responses to several sorts of hallucination. Grief hallucination is one of the most common ones. One of the most, one of the ones I prefer to. And it’s very common today because Dom Crosset and others, uh, go there with the grief hallucination. The main thing I would say with hallucination, a, a, a general comment.
Hallucination is probably still the most popular naturalistic theory. And yet it is the, it is the naturalistic theory with the most number of refutations. very much. has the most issues. One of the main ones is critics, because of 1 Corinthians 15, uh, 3 and following, they take group appearances of Jesus very seriously.
You have three group appearances in this, in this, uh, creedal passage from the 30s AD, and you have to prove, uh, the plausibility of group hallucinations. That, that’s, you know, going to be an issue. In fact, a friend of mine, a clinical psychologist, Ph. D., he did a, a, a bib summary of, group hallucinations that are clinically known in the literature.
This is about 2005. And he found zero sources for clinical group hallucinations. So that’s just a couple of brief responses. Also, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna establish the empty tomb, for example, The empty tomb is a, the hallucination is a full tomb theory, not an empty tomb theory. So, empty tomb would be a huge issue.
You have to ask, what about Paul, what about James? Two people who most likely are not going to be in the right frame of mind to visualize something to which they, as far as we know, were very much opposed. So you have unsympathetic people seeing a, a glorious resurrection in the case of Paul. And, uh, 1 records James’s.
So they’re just, there’s a, you know, four responses. Thank you. You’re welcome. Okay. And just very briefly, if we can. Thank you. Um, hi, Gary. Thanks for such a warm letter. I was going to ask you, um, we appreciate that what you’ve given today is very much from a historical skeptic point of view. And you can establish the resurrection and kind of based on that.
What would you do if people started getting interested in this and then start reading the gospel accounts themselves and recognize the differences in the account? I know it’s a red herring to the actual establishing of the historical resurrection, but can you maybe suggest any literature apart from Easter enigma that kind of works?
I know your harmonization is sometimes a bit of a swear word in a historical The so called apparent discrepancies in the gospel accounts. Yeah, can you recommend anything to dig into that? Sure. In fact, some of the, these, uh, issues are so common that when people try to show their discrepancies in the gospels as a whole, they use the resurrection accounts.
And in particular, the two most common ones, of course, are the women who go to the tomb and the number of angels. The women is probably the most common one. And to me, Um, I know critics can have good questions. I know they can be very, very sincere. I’ve got a lot of friends who are critics and skeptics, and so I don’t mean this like, like, uh, you know, try reading the text.
But there are a few times you’d like to say to them, you know, just read the text like you’d read any other text. Because on the question of the women, here’s how many women are said to go to the tomb. Matthew 2, Mark 3, Luke 3, John 1. Okay, so first of all, it’s not 1, 18, 22, and 14. It’s 2, 3, 3, 1 in the Gospels.
But three of the four Gospels tell you there were other women there that they don’t choose to name. John says, we. I mean, that’s at least a fair sense of what we could mean. Luke, you don’t know who the women were that went to the tomb until you get to Luke 24. 10. And Luke says, These three women, Mary, Mary, and Joanna, and others who were with them.
Why do we say, huh, nobody else mentions Joanna, and how come we don’t mention Salome? You know, from Mark, but Luke says, other women. And Mark, remember that the, there are no chapter divisions in the original, so Mark 16. 1 comes right after the burial passage. You know, just verses earlier, and it says these are the women who came from Judah, and the names are the same, Mary, Mary, Salome, and it says, and other women with them.
Only Matthew doesn’t say, and other women. So, I mean, there’s something in me that says, let’s be fair, because what they just tell you, we’re not trying to be exhaustive, and the angels are, uh, 1, 1, 2, 2. That’s the four gospels. But you know what, there’s not four trips to the tomb. You’ve got one in Matthew, one in Mark, you’ve got two in Luke, when the disciples run back, and even what you do with the textual variant there early in Luke, there’s a reference later to the men running to the tomb, and in John you have three, right?
Mary plus we, whoever, whatever you do with that, then Peter and John, and then Mary going back. The angels are only mentioned on the last occasion. Now, what does that tell you? I mean, that either says John doesn’t know of any. Or he doesn’t care to answer the question. He’s not going to give you a number.
You see, I mean, whatever, whichever way he’s going, it doesn’t seem like it’s a, it’s a crucial thing to give a number, because it doesn’t show up the third time in John. It doesn’t show up the second time in Luke. So all I’m saying is, I mean, I remember an essay Eleanor Stump did. That’s, that’s an article you should go to.
Visits to the Sepulcher. Eleanor Stump, I think Faith and Philosophy. And she goes after Raymond Brown and says, Contradiction is the domain of philosophy, not the domain of theology. And every time critical scholars come in with a little problem, they just say, ah, another contradiction, no big deal. And she says, sorry, contradictions are two things that cannot both be and not be at the same time, same place, same manner.
You’ve not shown that these are same type, same place, same manner. These are different trips to the tomb. Other women are there. So this isn’t a contradiction. So just don’t throw that word around. And she argues that there’s no contradictions there. Trips to the Cyclate, it’s excellent. But the second thing, and this is super brief, um, the , are you making faces?
Uh, no. No, not me. He’s making faces . Um, that’s okay. Watch out. Very brief that’s throwing down in hockey. Um, this is super fast. Seriously. Um, I would not do the, I I would ignore the appearance account. I mean the apparent discrepancy accounts if I were doing the minimal facts argument. Because the minimal facts argument says I’m only going to use the text critics allow.
They don’t like those passages, so they wouldn’t come up on this side of the slate. So I’m only going to talk about the things we have in common. So discrepancies say sometimes they don’t realize that when they ask me that question, they’re asking me about doing this side of things. But I’m doing this side for my argument.
Okay. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.