Can Historians Prove that Jesus Rose from the Dead? Licona vs. Ehrman

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Can Historians Prove that Jesus Rose from the Dead? Licona vs. Ehrman

May 7, 2025

In this episode, Dr. Mike Licona and Dr. Bart Ehrman face off for the second time on whether historians can prove the resurrection. Dr. Ehrman says no. Given that 1.) historians work to establish what most probably happened in the past and that 2.) miracles are, by definition, the least probable occurrence of an event, historical proof is impossible since the least probable occurrence of an event cannot also be, at the same time, the most probable. Dr. Licona disagrees, answers Ehrman, and makes his case for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection.

Transcript

Welcome back to the Risen Jesus Podcast with Dr. Mike Licona. A historian's work is to establish what most probably happened in the past. Miracles are defined according to Dr. Bart Ehrman as the least probable occurrence of an event.

How, then, could the resurrection, a miracle, be the most probable explanation for the post-war period? Most death appearances of Jesus. Ehrman says it cannot. Therefore, Jesus' rising from the dead cannot be established as a historically proven event.

Tune in to this week's episode as we hear how Dr. Mike Licona answers Ehrman and makes his case for the resurrection's historicity. This is the Risen Jesus Podcast. We're so excited.

Right now, we want to open up with a word of prayer. But one of our guests here tonight is the president of Montreak College, Dr. Dan Strobel. And he is going to lead us in a word of opening prayer.

It's an honor to have a president here from a fellow institution regionally. And so let's bow as we are led by Dan Strobel. Thank you, my dear friend.

Thank you, Alex. Please join me in prayer. Dear Lord, we thank you for the men and women gathered here tonight.

We thank you for their interest in the things that are going to be discussed. We ask that you would open our eyes, that you would help us to see, and that through all this, we would come to love you with all our hearts, all our minds, all our strength. And then, in Jesus Christ, we pray.

Amen. Thank you, Dr. Strobel. Now tonight is the final episode of Ehr, and yet you came to attend this debate.

I commend you. Ehr has been on 15 years, but tonight we'll discuss some things that have been around for two millennia. And so you made the right choice.

We're glad you're here. Keeping time tonight is our instructor of English and grammar, Christina Woodside, meticulously keeping us on schedule. There'll be an opening statement from each of the presenters, second statement from each of the presenters, a rebuttal, then a time of Q&A.

And so be thinking, and I have to say that when the question and answer time comes, there'll be two folks floating around with wireless mics. Remember, it's a question, not a treatise or a polemic. So be phrasing your question concisely and clearly because we want to make best use of our time.

And then at the final after the closing statements by each of the men, there'll be time downstairs in the bookstore. So please, when we allow our presenters at the very end to excuse themselves and catch their breath, please don't rush out. Stay for just a few more minutes beyond that.

You will have time to meet them and to experience the full import of this evening. And it's going to be fun. Let's meet in just a moment our speakers, but let me share a little bit of their bios.

I'm sure you're familiar with both of them. Dr. Bart Erman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He's a graduate of Wheaton.

He did his PhD at Princeton Theological Seminary. He has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and early Christianity. Among Dr. Erman's fields of scholarly expertise are the historical Jesus, the early Christian apocrypha, the apostolic fathers, and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.

His best selling books include misquoting Jesus, God's problem, and more recently Jesus interrupted. Winner of numerous University Awards and grants, Professor Erman, is the recipient of the 1993 Undergraduate Student Teaching Award, the 1994 Philip and Ruth Hettelman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Michael Acona is the apologetic coordinator for the North American Mission Board.

He has been featured in programs and books created by Lee Strobel. He was in Strobel's video, The Case for Christ. He's debated Bart Erman before.

He's debated one of the world's preeminent Islamic apologists Shabir Ali and others in the discourse about the Christian faith. He is the author of Paul Meets Muhammad and co-author with resurrection expert Gary Habermas, the award-winning book The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. He received his PhD in New Testament Studies from the University of Pretoria.

Dr. Lacona is a member of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the Institute for Biblical Research, and the Society of Biblical Literature. He's a frequent speaker on university campuses, churches, and has appeared on dozens of radio and television programs and other media opportunities. Right now, I want you to help me give a big SES welcome to our two debaters tonight discussing the question of Christ Resurrection, Dr. Bart Erman, Dr. Michael Lacona.

Both of these men are busy speakers, highly sought personalities, and I know I speak on behalf of everyone gathered here. We appreciate you both taking the time to come to SES tonight. In just a moment, we'll begin.

Dr. Lacona will begin because he is in the affirmative position and will hear them give their opinions on the subject. Can historians prove that Jesus rose from the dead? Dr. Lacona will begin with you in just a minute. Dr. Lacona will come to the podium.

And we won't start the clock till your laptop is engaged. I said in a minute, so okay. Well, thank you and good evening, everyone.

It's great to be here. I'd like to thank Southern Evangelical Seminary and Alex McFarlane for hosting tonight's debate and for inviting me to participate. Alex is a dear friend of mine.

I love the guy. He's just so humble and I think it's so cool. He used to play on the Beach Boys.

I'd also like to say it's good to see Bart Erman again. Bart and I did debate last year. We had a good time.

And although we don't see eye to eye on a number of things, I do want to say that I respect Bart's scholarship and I admire his writing skills for which he has few peers. Well, tonight's debate concerns the question, can historians prove that Jesus rose from the dead? Am I interested in this topic results from one of my idiosyncrasies? I'm a second guesser. I can't even go into a department store and purchase a bottle of cologne without wondering whether it should have gotten something different before I even get out of the store.

I'm going to even know what I'm talking about. If you think it's difficult for a second guesser to purchase a bottle of cologne, then try choosing a spouse. When I went to college, I wanted to come out with two things, a good education and a good wife.

And for me, making a decision in this area wasn't just a matter of the heart. It was one of the head and I analyzed this thing to death, probably too much. And I doubted once I met Debbie and we dated for 18 months and then we got married.

But I doubted all the way up to the altar and even for several years thereafter. I can remember standing at the altar and there I am and it's like there's two guys on my shoulders. And the guy on my right shoulder was saying, relax.

You thought this thing through, you made a good choice. But the guy on my left shoulder wasn't so certain. And he was saying something in my ear to the tune of run forest, run.

Or if you think it's difficult for a second guesser to choose a spouse, try choosing a world view. You know, if I make a bad decision regarding a bottle of cologne, I've only wasted $40. If I make a bad decision regarding a spouse, well, I'm going to suffer for a while, perhaps even the rest of my life.

But if I make a bad choice regarding my worldview, the consequences are potentially eternal. So I got into a PhD program, decided to study the resurrection of Jesus. My mentor at the time was prior to getting into the program was Gary Habermas and probably the leading expert in the world on the resurrection of Jesus.

And at that point he put together a bibliography of more than 2000 academic sources written about the resurrection of Jesus in terms of its historicity since 1975. In fact, one of the New Testament scholars out there prominent one, Dale Allison, refers to this question we're discussing this evening as the prize puzzle of New Testament research. But I wanted to approach it a little bit differently.

You see, at that point almost all the scholars who had engaged in the study on this subject were biblical scholars. And then there were some philosophers. But I wondered that how a professional historian outside of the community of biblical scholars, how would they approach it any differently than say a biblical scholar or a historian? And at that point only about a handful of journal articles and one small book on the subject had been written by professional historians.

So I got involved in the work and it didn't take long to discover that professional historians outside of the community of biblical scholars are pretty much unanimous in saying that there is no such thing as a completely objective historian. You see, we're all influenced by a number of factors that come up such as our race, our gender, ethics, nationality, our political, philosophical and religious convictions, the way we were raised, the academic institutions we attended, and the very group of people whose acceptance and respect we desire. No one can get out of this.

And I realized that as a Christian who wanted to see the resurrection being true because I already believed in it, that this posed a problem for me. You see, if this is the way historians were saying about typical historical investigations that had nothing to do with religious, that were non-religious in nature, then it becomes more complex when we're talking about a religious issue such as we're discussing this evening. Well, fortunately historians do present a number of actions that one can take in order to manage their bias and to detach themselves from their desired outcome while their investigation proceeds.

It requires delivered and sustained effort. It's very difficult. It's agonizing.

I can remember Lane in bed one night. It was quiet. It was dark.

My wife's voice broke the silence. You're doubting again, aren't you? Yep. What do you believe now? I don't know.

I think God exists. That's about all of which I'm certain. And I might need to be looking for a new job.

You see, here I was a leader in the largest Protestant denomination in North America, and I wasn't certain any longer of what I believed. But for me, discovering and finding and following truth was, and it continues to be the most important thing in my life. The average doctoral dissertation is between 60 and 80,000 words.

Mine was over 250,000 words. But detaching myself from my desired outcome and strict adherence to controlled historical method consumed me. Well, now this evening I can't give you in the limited amount of time that Martin and I have.

I can't give you a good summary of all of my research. But what I can do and what I'm going to do this evening is this. I'm going to construct a case for Jesus' resurrection using two major building blocks.

Facts and Method. Let's look at my first major building block. Facts.

John Meyer of Notre Dame puts it this way. There's a Jew and agnostic and a Christian. This is not a joke.

A Jew and agnostic and a Christian who are all honest historians and well acquainted with first century religious movements. We're going to lock them up in the Harvard Divinity School Library and tell them, you can't come out until you've hammered out a consensus document on what we can know about Jesus apart from faith. We're going to establish this Jesus based on strongly supported data that are granted.

They're so strong that they've persuaded nearly 100% of all scholars today studying the subject, including Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists. Now if we were to scroll down toward the end of that document, we would find no less than three facts pertaining to Jesus' fate and what may have occurred afterward. I'm going to give you those three facts.

I'll give you a few arguments to support them. I can't give you all of them, but we just don't have time. And scholars do arrive at them sometimes through different routes.

But almost all of them arrive at these three facts. Fact number one is Jesus' death by crucifixion. Now not only do a number of multiple independent Christian sources report this, some of which are quite early, but even a number of non-Christian sources.

For example, Josephus, a Jewish historian from the end of the first century, and Tacitus, a Roman historian from the beginning of the second, they both report Jesus' execution by the Romans. Fact number two is the appearances to the disciples. Now that's short for saying that subsequent to Jesus' death, shortly thereafter, a number of Jesus' followers had experiences in both individual and in group settings that they perceived were of the risen Jesus who appeared to them.

Perhaps the most interesting text on this is 1 Corinthians 15 verses 3 through 8. Most scholars who studied the subject agree that what we are reading here in these verses is an early oral tradition, or maybe even portions of a few of them, but early oral tradition that predates Paul's letter. And if it doesn't go back to the Jerusalem Apostles themselves, Peter, James, and John, it was certainly something that the content was something for which they agreed. And this oral tradition says that Christ died, was buried, was raised, and that he appeared.

And then it lists five post-resurrection appearances, three of which are in group settings. So what we have here it appears is a certifiably official and formal proclamation of the disciples on the resurrection of Jesus, but we can go further. Because a number of ancient sources ranging from say 30 to 200 years after Jesus report that these same disciples were willing to suffer continuously for their gospel proclamation, that they were willing to die, and at least a few of them did die as Christian martyrs.

Of course, this doesn't prove that what they were proclaiming was true. We're all too aware that there are Muslim terrorists who are willing to blow themselves up for their cause. But what this shows is like with the Muslim terrorists, it shows that they sincerely regarded what they were proclaiming as being true.

After all, liars make poor martyrs. So we can establish that the disciples were not only claiming that Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to them, we can also show that they actually believed it. Fact number three, the appearance to Paul.

Now this is short for saying that about one to three years after Jesus' death, there was a young Jewish leader named Paul. He believed that the Christian church was a dangerous threat to Judaism. And so what he ended up doing was he went out, he arrested Christians, he imprisoned them, and he consented to their execution for being Christians.

And then all of a sudden, Paul had an experience that he perceived was of the risen Jesus appearing to him. We have Paul's own testimony on the matter and two of his undisputed letters. We have Luke who confirms it in Acts, and we have what also may be an early oral tradition that predates the writing of the New Testament in Galatians 1.23 that says, he who persecuted the church now proclaims the faith he once sought to destroy.

So early eyewitness multiple testimonies to Paul's conversion. And then we have a number of ancient sources that report that Paul willingly suffered, was willing to die, and in fact he did die as a Christian martyr for his gospel proclamation. Again, this shows the sincerity of what he was proclaiming.

So those are our three facts. The question now is, what do we do with these three facts? And that leads us to my second major building block method. The practice of history in many ways is like the practice of medicine.

What a physician does is to look at the symptoms of a person, and then tries to figure out the best explanation or the most reasonable diagnosis that is most likely to produce those symptoms. In a similar way, what historians do is they look at the knowable historical facts, like we've done with these three this evening, and then tries to figure out the historical condition most likely to produce those facts. Let me give you an example with the medical field.

Let's say we've got a 15-year-old male, very robust. He walks into the physician's office and says, Doc, what's wrong with me? Here's my problem. I've got a fever.

I've got lower abdominal pains on my right-hand side, and I've been vomiting. The physician says, well, it could be any number of things. Let's look first at the flu.

The problem is that flu only really accounts for the first, the fever, and it doesn't account for the other two because those symptoms typically are not affiliated with the flu. So in such a case, we would say because it can only account for one of the three symptoms, that diagnosis of the flu would lack explanatory scope. Well, let's try something different then.

Maybe you'd say, well, yeah, fever is very common with the flu, but then we come to something like the lower abdominal pain on the right-hand side and vomiting. It's rare that you could have either of these with the flu, but it's medically possible, and it would be even more rare to have two of these rare symptoms with the fever, but it is medically possible. So we'd say it's possible, but because you have to stretch your explanation, your diagnosis, we would say that that lacks explanatory power.

And then if a physician went to the medical records or the medical literature, that is, and couldn't find an example of someone who had the flu with these symptoms, then we would say that that diagnosis lacks plausibility. In other words, because it goes against the widely accepted beliefs within that profession. Now, let's look at one other possibility.

Let's take a combination and say that what we have here is this 15-year-old robust male has the flu, and he decides to push through it. So we have to speculate and say he's a martial artist, and he went to martial arts practice that night, and he got kicked in the lower right abdomen. And then maybe he went out to eat afterward and got food poisoning.

Well, that explains the three symptoms and explains them without pushing them. The problem is that he's a martial artist who went out to eat afterward or non-evidenced assumptions. And so we would say that that hypothesis is ad hoc.

Let's look at one final one. Appendicitis. Any physicians in here? Well, you were probably tracking with this from the very beginning, weren't you? Appendicitis.

All three of these symptoms are very common in appendicitis. You don't have to stretch them at all to get there. It explains all of these.

In fact, this would be a textbook case to explain these three symptoms, and there are no non-evidenced assumptions. So although we would say that it's possible that this guy has the flu, it's possible that it could be any combination of events, the best explanation here, medical explanation, would be that he has appendicitis. You'd prep for surgery and remove his appendix.

Now, let me show you how this would work in the practice of history as we examine two different hypotheses. First, let's look at the most common hypothesis, naturalistic hypothesis, offered today, and that's hallucinations. Many varieties of hallucinations.

Let me just give you a very generic one. Jesus dies a sudden and brutal execution, and his disciples find themselves in a state of confusion and grief, and so they experience hallucinations of the risen Jesus. Well, that perfectly explains Jesus' death by crucifixion because that would place them in the frame of mind to hallucinate.

It also does a good job of explaining the individual appearance, like the appearance to Peter, because he would have been not only grieving, but if he denied Jesus three times as the gospel's report, he'd also be in a state of guilt. So depending on his personality type, he could have been a good candidate for hallucination. The problem is that hallucinations don't do a good job of explaining the group appearances.

Psychologists know that hallucinations are private events in the mind of an individual. They have no external reference, and so you can't share in another person's hallucination. They're kind of like dreams.

I couldn't wake up my wife in the middle of the night and say, honey, I'm having a dream. I'm in Hawaii. Go on back to sleep.

Come join me in my dream, and let's have a free vacation. You can't do that. And likewise, you can't participate in other person's hallucinations.

And it wouldn't account for the appearance to Paul as well, because Paul really isn't a good candidate for hallucination. He's certainly not grieving over Jesus' death. He hates the Christian church.

He hates the hated Jesus, and now he's trying to finish the job that the Roman Jewish authorities started by destroying the church. So in terms of assessing the hallucination hypothesis, it lacks explanatory scope because it can only account for one of our three facts. It lacks explanatory power because it can't account for, in order to accommodate the group appearances, you'd have to posit that all of these guys experience individual hallucinations at the same time.

And that's really kind of stretching it. And so you would like explanatory power. In terms of plausibility, you look in the literature, for example, a book that recently came out by Elman and Leroy titled Hallucinations, the science of idiosyncratic perception, published by the American Psychological Association.

They don't have anything on group hallucinations. I emailed the authors and Leroy responded and said, we really couldn't find much on it. And Gary Sipsi, who's a licensed clinical psychologist and a PhD in that area, says that he looked through the professional literature for about two decades and couldn't find anything.

So hallucinations, in terms of a group phenomena here, would lack plausibility. And it'll see anything at Hock or non-evidence assumption. So at least hallucination hypothesis passes one of the four important criteria.

And what about resurrection hypothesis? The hypothesis that Jesus died rose from the dead and then appeared to others in individual and in group settings. Friend and foe alike. Well, that perfectly accounts for Jesus' death by crucifixion, of course.

And it accounts for why a number of people, friend and foe alike, had experiences that they believed were the risen Jesus who appeared to them. After all, if Jesus rose and appeared to them, we would expect them to have these kind of appearances, wouldn't we? And have the beliefs that Jesus rose and appeared to them. So we see that in comparison to hallucination hypothesis, the resurrection has great explanatory scope because it adequately accounts for all three facts.

You don't have to push or have a strain in any way in order to do it. And so it has great explanatory power. In terms of plausibility, I'd say here that we don't have it on a positive side because there's nothing in the literature that would say that people rise from the dead per se.

But you don't have it on the negative side because there wouldn't be something like with hallucinations that says these things can't occur. You don't have something that says that God can't raise someone from the dead. So if you put it in neutral position, it still beats hallucinations, which is in a negative position.

And there's nothing ad hoc here. So in terms of taking the facts which virtually every scholar in the world who studies the subject agrees, you subject them to controlled historical method. You come up with the conclusion that the resurrection hypothesis is far superior to the most popular one out there today.

And when we use the same kind of exercise with other naturalistic hypotheses, resurrection wins every time. And that's why I'm contending that historians can prove with reasonable and adequate certainty that Jesus rose from the dead. Now Bart and I, I believe that Bart has wrestled with this himself.

And he's become, he's arrived at a conclusion radically different than my own. The benefit that you all have here this evening is Bart and I both agree on these three facts. Virtually every scholar in the world agrees on these three facts.

Where Bart and I disagree is on what to do with these facts. And so I'd like to encourage everyone here tonight as we go throughout the debate. It's kind of hard to assess debates unless you're used to doing it.

Listen very carefully to the methods that both Bart and I present and then determine for yourself whether you believe that historians can prove that Jesus rose from the dead. I look forward to the remainder of our discussion this evening. We'll give Dr. Erman a moment to get his computer ready.

And when he has done so we can begin. It will come out on the side screens. You may begin.

Okay, thank you. Thank you very much to SES for having me here and for Alex for a pleasant dinner that we had. And thank you to Mike for debating with me again.

What Mike didn't tell you is that the last debate we had was in Kansas City at Midwest Baptist Theological Seminary. And that day prior to the debate Mike lost his voice. That made matters rather easy for me.

In point of fact Mike had no reply to anything that I had to say. So he wanted another go at it and so here we are. How many of you think that Jesus is physically raised from the dead? How many of you think that historians can prove that? How many of you are here to see me get creamed? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Driving over here I had these visions of Daniel and the Lions Dan. Well, I'd like to thank Mike very much for that interesting and impressive opening statement. We are going to agree I think on a lot of things.

We will disagree on the fundamental point. We will fundamentally disagree on the question about whether historians can prove Jesus was raised from the dead. I want to be clear that I am not arguing here that Jesus was not raised from the dead.

That is not my argument. My argument has to do with if Jesus was raised from the dead, is that something that is susceptible to historical proof? Can that be proven by historians or not? That is the question I'm dealing with, not the question of whether the event actually happened. The way I should explain right now, I'm not going to be responding to the things that Mike just said.

We each have a rebuttal, and I was furiously taking notes while he was speaking, but I have a set speech that I'm going to be giving now, and I'll be responding to what he said in my second speech. So don't expect a refutation of what he just said now. Hold on to your hats for that.

That will come, trust me. What I want to do in my talk is to talk about why it is historians cannot prove that Jesus was raised from the dead, and I'm going to have two major points. One area that I'm going to talk about has to do with what it is historians do for a living, and what kind of things constitute proof for historians.

Secondly, I'm going to look at the problems inherent with historians trying to demonstrate that miracles happen, and I will be arguing that historians by the very nature of historical evidence cannot ever prove that a miracle has happened, even if it did happen. It is beyond the realm of historical proof. But first, let me talk a little bit about what it is historians do.

By and large, what historians do is establish what probably happened in the past. Historians establish what probably happened in the past. There are various levels of probability of what happened in the past, depending on what it is you're talking about.

For example, if you want to decide what Bill Clinton was doing in 1992, you can pick almost any month and have a pretty well documented account of what Bill Clinton was doing in 1992, an account that would be convincing to all of us, because you would have newspaper clippings, you would have magazine reports, you'd have TV clips, you would have lots of evidence. You'd have less evidence to discuss what Bill Clinton was doing in 1972, not inhaling or whatever. Because we have far less evidence of Bill Clinton in 1972 than we do in 1992, less evidence, and historians want to have lots of evidence for the conclusions they draw.

Suppose you move the clock back and you want to talk about William Shakespeare. My wife is a Shakespeare scholar writing a book right now on William Shakespeare, and one question that lay people often ask is did Bill Shakespeare actually write those plays or not? Well, how do you know? What kind of evidence is there? In fact, there is evidence, but there's a lot less evidence than there is for knowing what Bill Clinton did in 1992, or even 1972. Move the clock back.

Did Caesar cross the Rubicon? What kind of evidence do we have that Caesar crossed the Rubicon? Well, everybody knows he crossed the Rubicon. Well, but what's the evidence? What if somebody called it in the question? How would you argue that he really did? What basis would you have for your belief that he crossed the Rubicon? How did Simon Peter die? I can say something with authority about these sources. We have terrible sources for knowing how Simon Peter died.

Our earliest accounts are late second century, 100 years afterwards, accounts that are filled with legendary details, many of which are quite amusing and funny and for great entertainment in terms of reading. But the idea that Simon Peter was crucified upside down in Rome, that is a later legend. Did it really happen? Well, it's really, really hard to prove because we just don't have the kinds of sources.

Historians have to base what they say on the existence of sources of evidence. Whether you're talking about Bill Clinton, William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, or Simon Peter. You have to have sources of information.

Now, for some people, this comes as a little bit of a surprise because history just seems to be something we know. And so, for example, people just kind of know what Jesus said and did. Like, you were born with that knowledge.

And so, there's no question about it because you've always heard certain things and so those things are probably true. But if you're a historian, you can't accept what everybody has always said, you have to try and establish what really happened in the past. To establish what Jesus said, to establish what he did, to establish what happened to Simon Peter or to William Shakespeare, etc.

Historians have to have evidence. Well, what kind of evidence do they look for? The best kind of evidence when dealing with ancient periods is to find evidence that goes back to the time itself. If you had some contemporary eyewitnesses telling you how Simon Peter died, that would be brilliant.

Unfortunately, you don't have that. You would love, though, to have contemporary accounts written like the next day from the events. That would be great.

Historians would love that kind of thing. Historians would love to have lots of sources. You want to have lots of sources that go back to the time of the events that are being narrated.

You would like these sources to be independent of one another. If you have 20 sources but they all got their story from the same guy, then you don't have 20 sources. You have one source.

You want 20 independent sources who all attest to the same event. Moreover, you want these independent sources to be consistent with one another. You don't want them to be contradicting each other all over the map.

You want them to be agreeing with one another. So you want them to corroborate one another without collaborating with one another. Moreover, you want them to be unbiased toward the subject matter.

You don't want them to be skewing things in light of their own self-interest. If you're an ancient historian trying to establish what probably happened in the past, what kind of sources do we have when it comes to the Gospels? The Gospels are our sources for knowing about the resurrection of Jesus. Are they the kind of sources that historians would want when trying to establish what probably happened in the past? I think the answer to that question is no.

When were the Gospels written? Well, they are not contemporary to the events they narrate. Scholars debate when the Gospels were written, but by far the most common dating's are that Mark was written sometime around 65 or 70 AD. Luke and Matthew about 10 or 15 years later, John maybe 10 or 15 years later, John maybe around the year 90 or 95, Matthew Luke around 80 to 85.

These are the dates that are taught throughout the universities and divinity schools and seminaries of North America. In Europe, I take them to be right for reasons that I can give you if anybody really wants to know. It's complicated arguments.

If these dates are correct, it means that our earliest account of Jesus's resurrection is 40 years after the event. 40 years after the event. Well, Paul was writing before that, wasn't he? Yes, Paul was writing before that.

Paul talks about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians. Well, that's 20 years after the event, so that's better. The Gospels give us the narratives.

Paul makes reference to it, but there's a 20-year gap. You don't have somebody who was there writing about it. Second point, none of the authors were eyewitnesses.

Paul himself indicates that he was not an eyewitness, and none of the Gospel writers was an eyewitness. People of course call the Gospel books Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Well, they call the Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because we don't know who wrote these books and there's no point calling them Sam, Fred, Jerry, and Harry.

I mean, they're written by people. We don't know who they were written by. They are anonymous.

You might not think so because they have the title of the Gospel according to Matthew. Whoever put that title on it was an editor later. The original books are all anonymous written in the third person.

Moreover, the followers of Jesus were Aramaic speaking peasants from Galilee, lower-class men who were not educated. In fact, Peter and John in Acts chapter 4 verse 13 are literally said to be illiterate. They couldn't read and write.

Of course not. They were fishermen. They didn't go to school.

The vast majority of people in the ancient world never learned to read, let alone write. And their native language was Aramaic. These books are written in Greek.

By highly educated, rhetorically trained writers who are skilled in Greek composition. Probably not disciples and don't claim to be disciples. Where did these authors get their stories from? Well, if they were not disciples of Jesus, they must have heard the stories from somebody.

Who heard the stories from somebody who heard the stories from somebody who heard them from somebody. Stories about Jesus, including his resurrection, had been in circulation Year after year after year from the time that his disciples knew that he got killed and believed he got raised from the dead. They told stories to convert people.

They improved the story sometimes. They changed the story sometime. The stories got modified in the process of transmission over the course of decades before anybody wrote the stories down.

These stories are based on oral reports that have been in circulation for decades. What happens to oral reports in circulation year after year, decade after decade? They get changed. What evidence do we have that the stories about Jesus' death and resurrection got changed? You can read the stories yourself.

Simply read Mark's account of Jesus' death and then read John's account of Jesus' death and make a list of everything that happens in both and compare your lists. You will find that there are stunning differences. In fact, there are discrepancies.

Let me give you just a list of very quick examples. What day did Jesus die on? That's a simple question. And luckily, we're told in both Mark and John.

In Mark's Gospel, we're told that Jesus died the day after the Passover meal was eaten in Jerusalem. John tells us explicitly, chapter 19, verse 14, that Jesus died the day before the Passover meal was eaten, on the day of preparation for the Passover. That's different.

He couldn't die both days. What about the time? According to Mark, he died at 9 in the morning. According to John, he wasn't condemned to death until afternoon.

John 19, 14. These are accounts that differ from one another. Did Jesus carry his cross the entire way to Golgotha or did Simon of Cyrene carry it? It depends which Gospel you read.

Did both robbers mock Jesus or did only one of them mock him and the other come to his defense? It depends which Gospel you read. Did the curtain in the temple rip in half before Jesus died? Or was it after he died? It depends which Gospel you read. I can give you the references for all of these if you need me to, or you can look them up yourself.

I'm not making these up. Those are just differences about Jesus' death. What about differences in the accounts of his resurrection? Well, who went to the tomb on the third day? Did Mary Magdalene go alone or did Mary go with other women? It depends which Gospel you read.

If with other women, how many of them were there? What were their names? And which ones were they? It depends which Gospels you read. Was the stone rolled away before the women got to the tomb or not? What did they see in the tomb? Did they see a man? Did they see two men? Or did they see an angel? Depends which Gospel you read. What were they told to tell the disciples? Were the disciples supposed to stay in Jerusalem to see Jesus? Or were they supposed to go to Galilee? Depends which Gospel you read.

Did the women tell anybody? Or were they silent about it? Depends which Gospel you read. Did the disciples ever leave Jerusalem? Or did they never leave or did they leave and go to Galilee? Depends which Gospel you read. My conclusion, these are not reliable historical accounts.

There are too many discrepancies. The accounts are based on oral traditions that have been in circulation for decades. Year after year, Christians tried to convert others by telling them stories to convince them that Jesus was raised from the dead.

And they changed their stories while trying to convince people. These authors were not eyewitnesses. They're Greek-speaking Christians living many years after the fact.

They're telling stories that Christians have been telling all these years. There was nobody there taking notes. Some of the stories were invented.

Many were changed. For this reason, these accounts are not as useful as historians would like as historical sources. What I've given you so far is really just kind of child's play compared to the real problem of why historians cannot prove the resurrection.

And this is what I want to spend my last three and a half minutes on the real problem. Mike and I agree that what historians try to do is establish what most probably happened in the past. That is the task of history.

You can't prove the past. You can only give evidence for the past. And some evidence is more certain than other evidence.

All the historian could do is show most probably what happened. What are miracles? Miracles, by definition, are the least probable occurrence of an event. If a miracle was not least probable, it wouldn't be a miracle.

If somebody could walk across your lukewarm water in your swimming pool, that would be a miracle. If the water was frozen, it would not be a miracle. But if it's lukewarm, I can tell you none of you here could do it, and nobody in this world could do it.

That's six billion people, so what are the chances of one person being able to do it? It would defy the way nature naturally works. I'm not saying that there are natural laws that are written down someplace that you can't break or you get in big trouble. Scientists today don't talk about natural laws, but scientists do talk about highly predictable ways that this world works.

And one of the way it works is that if you are a sentient human being trying to walk across the lukewarm water in your swimming pool, you won't be able to do it. What if somebody could do it? What would be the chances? The chances would be infinitesimally remote. That anybody could do it.

Well, what if somebody could? Okay, let's say somebody could. The chances of them being able to do it are infinitesimally remote. Can you prove that this person probably did it? No, you can't prove it because you can't repeat the experiment of the past to show he did it.

That's the problem with history. It's not like the natural sciences. The natural sciences work by repeated demonstration.

And so, for example, if I wanted to show you that bars of iron will sink in that swimming pool and bars of ivory soap will float, all I need to do is to get 100 bars of both and start chucking them in. I'll chuck in 100 bars of iron, they'll sink every time. I'll chuck in the soap, they'll float every time.

That gives us a predictive probability of what will happen the 100 first time. That's how sciences work by repeated experimentation. Historians don't have that luxury.

Historians can only establish on the basis of surviving evidence what probably happened in the past and by definition miracles are the least probable occurrence or else they're not a miracle. This creates the dilemma for the historian and is the reason why historians cannot prove Jesus was raised from the dead. Historians by the very nature establish what most probably happened in the past, but a miracle by its definition is the least probable occurrence in the past.

The least probable occurrence cannot be most probable. This is the problem with the resurrection. Even if it happened, it defies imagination and cannot be accepted as a historically proven event.

Belief in the resurrection, if you believe in the resurrection, it is for theological reasons. The resurrection is a theological assertion about what God did to Jesus. It is not and it cannot be based on historical proof.

Thank you. Well, thanks, Clark. I appreciate that.

In my opening statement, I constructed a case for Jesus' resurrection using two major building blocks. Facts and Method. So I'd like now to review those building blocks in light of what Bartja shared with us.

I start off with facts and I said there are three facts that are granted by virtually every single scholar in the world from various different backgrounds because the supporting data is so strong. Of course, we're not going to get a hundred percent agreement on this. And there are people who deny the Holocaust.

There are people who deny that Jesus ever existed and say that he was just a myth. I'm talking about serious and sober minded scholarship here. The people who deny the Holocaust deny that Jesus ever existed.

You won't find many scholars doing this. I mean, you'll find them mainly on the internet where your only credential is that you've got to be breathing. In fact, the few scholars that do say that Jesus never existed, they remind us of contestants on the early episodes of American Idol.

They think they're great. They think they've got some good stuff, but everybody else is rolling their eyes and kind of smiling. I'm talking about sober minded scholarship here.

Virtually every scholar, nearly 100% of all scholars in the world who studied the subject agree on those three facts. Jesus' death by crucifixion, the appearances to the disciples, and the appearance to Paul. Now, Bartja responded in his opening statement that there were two major problems for historians proving that Jesus rose from the dead.

The first he talks about, and he says, the gospels are not reliable historical accounts. He says they're not contemporary. They were written Mark plus 40 after Jesus, Paul plus 20 years after Jesus.

So they're not contemporary. They're not eyewitnesses. They're anonymous.

They're written by Aramaic rather than Greek speaking individuals. There are numerous discrepancies in the accounts, and so therefore, again, they're not reliable historical accounts. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that all of these are red herrings in relation to our discussion this evening.

Now, a red herring is a term that has been borrowed from the sport of fox hunting, in which a dried smoke herring that's red in color is dragged across the path and into the woods in order to draw off the scent of the hounds. In logic, a red herring is an irrelevant argument. It's interesting, but it's irrelevant for the particular discussion at hand.

And if we're not careful, that interesting discussion can drag us off on the rabbit trails off of the trail that we've agreed to debate this evening. Now, let me explain why I believe that these are red herrings, because I don't believe Bart intends them in this manner. Despite his hesitations that he has articulated concerning the Gospels, he still regards them as being reliable enough to arrive at the three facts that I've presented this evening.

So let me give you an example. Jesus' death by crucifixion. Here he says, well, was Jesus crucified the day of the Passover meal or the day after the Passover meal? Depends which Gospel you read.

Did he carry his cross all the way or did Simon of Cyrene help him? Was he crucified at 9 a.m. or at noon? Did both thieves that he was crucified between curse him or just one? The temple veil, did it split at his death or after his death, depends which Gospel you read. And yet, despite these differences in the Gospels, Bart writes, and let me quote him here, one of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate. Now, what about the appearances to the disciples? Well, who went to the tomb? You know, was it one woman, Mary, or were there many women, and what were their names, and how many of them were there? When they got to the tomb, did they see one or two angels, or was it a young man, or were there so forth? Did they go back and tell the disciples, or did they remain silent? And did Jesus first appear to his disciples in Jerusalem, or was it in Galilee? Depends which Gospel you read.

And by the way, a lot of these discrepancies can be easily addressed and answered. Some aren't so easy to address, but many of them are easy in terms of these resurrection narratives. Yet, despite these differences within the resurrection narratives that Bart's pointed out, he writes, and I quote, why then did some of the disciples claim to see Jesus alive after his crucifixion? I don't doubt at all that some disciples claim this.

We don't have any of their written testimony. But Paul, writing about 25 years later, indicates that this is what they claimed, and I don't think he is making it up. And he knew at least a couple of them whom he met just three years after the event.

This is from his book, Jesus Interrupted, which just came out a month ago. What about the appearance of Paul? He writes, there is no doubt that Paul believed that he saw Jesus is real, but glorified body raised from the dead. So again, despite these differences in the Gospels, he still regards them as being reliable enough to arrive at the three facts that I presented this evening.

And it's upon these three facts that I've presented my case for the resurrection of Jesus, and none others. In fact, in Jesus Interrupted, he presents these same objections to the Gospels that he's articulated this evening, and yet right after doing that, here's what he writes. How is it possible to use such sources to find out what really happened historically? In fact, there are ways.

Scholars have devised some methodological principles that, if followed closely and rigorously, can give us some indications of who Jesus really was. So again, we do have methods to, even if we believe that the Gospels have some of these problems that Barthes articulated, they're not unsalvageable. I mean, historians can still get stuff out of the Quran, even though we may not believe that it's divinely inspired and is problematic.

So what I'm saying is when we applied strictly controlled historical procedures, we can go to the Gospels, which I presented this evening, facts which both Bart and I agree upon with nearly 100% of modern scholars. So that's why I'm saying the red herrings. So we both agree on these three facts, where we disagree is on what we do with these three facts, and that's what brings us to my second major building block method.

Now in my opening statement, I said that historians should assess a number of hypotheses using four important criteria, explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility and less ad hoc. And the hypothesis that best fulfills these four criteria is what probably occurred. Now Barthes seems to be guided by a different method.

For him probability, the real problem that he says is that in order to prove something, you can't prove the past events, but you show what most probably occurred. I agree if we're speaking of proof in the term of absolute or 100% certainty. And again, that's not how I'm using it this evening, it's not how historians use it.

There's a number, I'm sorry for the small fun, I wanted to show you just a few quotes from professional historians, a lot of them writing it for history and theory, and they use proof in terms of historical proof. You can prove something, but what they're saying is reasonable or adequate certainty, and that's certainly the sense that I'm using this evening, reasonable or adequate certainty. I mean, we can't prove that we were born when we think we were with 100% or absolute certainty.

Someone could always argue that we were all created just five minutes ago with memories in our minds of events that never occurred and food in our stomachs from meals we never ate, and we wouldn't know the difference. Well, we can't disprove that. We can't prove something with 100% certainty, so I'm talking about reasonable and adequate certainty here.

But Bart's method seems to go on a sort of frequency probability that what occurs most frequently, or the uniform testimony of history is how we should regard probability. For example, he says, listen, billions of people haven't walked on water, and so of course the inference or implication is that Jesus probably did not. And likewise, billions of people haven't been raised from the dead, so Jesus probably did not raise from the dead.

But I believe that this is a haphazard and dangerous way of calculating probability because it doesn't give any room for external agents. Let me give you an example. Let's suppose that he was talking about the lukewarm water by the pool.

Let's suppose that I've got my family by the pool. And years ago, when my son was really young, I take him by the hands and I support his weight, and I walk along the side of the pool while I hold him over the water, and he walks on water. Well, see, I'm an external agent assisting him in doing that, and the fact that billions of people can't walk on water says nothing whatsoever pertaining to whether my son walked on water.

What if God exists and wanted to raise Jesus from the dead? That's a game changer. And the fact that billions of people haven't been raised from the dead only shows that people cannot come back to life by natural causes. But no one ever said that Jesus came back to life by natural causes.

The claim is that God raised Jesus from the dead, and if God raised Jesus, well then wanted to raise Jesus, well then it becomes the most probable explanation, doesn't it? So now he says that miracles by their very definition are the least probable explanation. Again, this is where I believe that we have problems here, because that's a haphazard way of defining probabilities of just articulated. So we see that there are some methodological challenges to this means of determining the probability.

But that's only the beginning of the problems with this approach, because there are also empirical challenges. You see, when we say that billions of people haven't walked on water, or billions of people haven't been raised from the dead, we're saying that the uniform testimony of history is that these things don't occur. And I beg to differ with that.

I've got a friend in Florida whose name is Lloyd Reed. He's the Director of Collegiate Ministries for the Florida Baptist Convention. He's told me the story three times the last time I wrote down the particulars, the details.

In June of 1987, Lloyd was involved in a very serious automobile accident. He put him in a hospital. He was in a coma for 21 days.

July 4th, 1987 was the 21st day. His church was having a 4th of July picnic around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. They all got together and had special prayer for Lloyd.

And guess what? Around 4 o'clock in the afternoon, Lloyd came out of his coma. But it gets even better. You see, there were three other patients in the same room with Lloyd also in a coma.

And after he came out of his, all three of those on the same day came out of their coma. One had been in a coma for six months, the other two for over two months. Miracles occur today.

I could give you a number of accounts like this. And I'll bet if I asked in this room, I'm talking about radical miracles now like that. I'll bet a number of you have either experienced them yourself or you know someone personally who has experienced one.

The uniform testimony of history is not that miracles don't occur. We got to cast our net outside of a skeptical subculture. And when we do that into the more ocean of the riches of human experience, we find that miracle claims start to come in quite frequently.

So we see that this way of determining probability is not only methodologically challenged, but it's empirically challenged. Finally, Bart makes a theological objection here. And he says that miracles, when we say that God raised Jesus from the dead, we're making a theological conclusion, not a historical conclusion.

Well, let me give you a parallel in science. What physicists often look at the phenomenon in the universe and they posit theoretical entities in order to explain that phenomenon. Black holes, quarks, strings, gluons, they've never been observed, probably never will.

But they do a really good job of explaining what's behind the curtain. Well, if scientists can do that, so can historians. And first of all, what I'm saying is that what historians can do, what I've done this evening is I've taken facts which virtually everyone agrees on and subjected them to controlled historical method and saying when we do this, the resurrection is the best explanation by far, and thus it's probably what occurred.

Now, I could stop at that because a lot of times historians can come to conclusion, historical conclusion without knowing the cause of that conclusion. For example, in the early second century, Plutarch wrote about Scipio Africanus' death. He said we really don't know how he died.

He said they're competing accounts. Some said he died of natural causes, other said he died of being poisoned, other said no, some thugs came in at night and smothered him while he slept. But Plutarch goes on and says we may not know how Scipio the cause of his death, but we all see Scipio's body lay dead.

So in the same way, a historian could conclude that Jesus rose from the dead without making any assertions pertaining to his cause. Now, I do believe that we could. I'm justified as a historian to go further and posit a theoretical entity, God.

And it does a really good job of explaining what's behind the curtain. So I'm not doing theology here anymore than physicists are doing philosophy by positing black holes. I'm just trying to make sense of the facts here.

And I think most people would agree if Jesus rose from the dead, God's a pretty good candidate for it. So let me conclude. I've constructed a case for the resurrection of Jesus using two major building blocks, facts.

I use Jesus' death by crucifixion, the appearances to the disciples, the appearance to Paul. We both agree on these facts, where we disagree is what to do with them. I said that we need to assess these using four important criteria, explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, and less ad hoc.

The hypothesis that best fulfills those four criteria is what probably occurred. And so we've seen that my case for the resurrection of Jesus still stands. And Bart's case against it has failed under critical scrutiny.

Thanks. Okay. Well, this is where things start getting very interesting indeed.

So thank you for that response. And I've been eager to respond to both of your talks, Mike. So I have a lot of things to say.

More than I probably will be able to say in these 15 minutes, unless I really hustle. So let me start with where Mike started. That most historians agree that you can't approach history without presuppositions, but you should try to separate yourself off from your conclusions as much as possible and separate yourself from the desired outcome of your investigation.

Fine. Now, let's ask whether Mike or I or neither of us is doing that. Mike wants to maintain that, in fact, he has separated himself off from the desired outcome of his investigation.

And so I ask, is it just an accident that the outcome of his investigation leads him precisely to where he started? He started believing in the resurrection of Jesus. He engaged in historical exercise, discussing the resurrection of Jesus, and he concluded that Jesus was raised from the dead. Is this an accident? Is it a result of historical method? Well, I can contrast this with me.

I started out my historical investigation believing that Jesus was raised from the dead and that historians could prove it. This was my view for many years, having gone to Moody Bible Institute and having taken classes on apologetics and having, in fact, given numerous speeches in which I tried to demonstrate that Jesus was raised from the dead. This is where I started from.

I, too, decided to look at the historical evidence for it as dispassionately as I could, and I came to the opposite conclusion. My study did not lead me back to the place where I started. Mike's dead.

Is that an accident? I don't know, but I somewhat doubt it. Let me talk about Mike's facts and Mike's methods. Mike gives three facts, and these sound impressive because there are three of them.

And any time you've got three, you just need a poem and you've got a sermon. His three facts are that Jesus died by crucifixion that his disciples claim to see him alive afterwards and that he appeared to Paul. I submit to you these are not three facts pertaining to the resurrection.

One of the three has nothing to do with the resurrection, and the other two are the same. The crucifixion of Jesus is irrelevant to the question of whether he was raised from the dead. Yes, of course he had to be crucified, but crucifixion isn't necessary for the resurrection because he could have been stoned to death and been raised from the dead.

He could have drowned and been raised from the dead. He could have fallen off a cliff and be raised from the dead. The crucifixion is not anything that is related inherently to the question of resurrection.

So I don't know why that's being cited as a fact. If the fact is that Jesus died, well that's not much of a fact. We're all going to die.

The crucifixion is not in any way a fact related to the resurrection per se. He's got two facts that relate to the resurrection, which are that the disciples claim to see him alive afterwards and that he appeared to Paul. Both of those are the same thing.

There are people who claim to see Jesus alive afterwards. One of whom was Paul, one of whom was Cephas, one of whom was James. There are a group of people who claim to have seen Jesus alive afterwards.

It's not two facts, it's one fact. So the question is what kind of evidence is sufficient to explain this one fact? Let me point out a couple things about this fact. Mike was hedging a little bit when he wanted to say that we have strong evidence that these people claim to have seen Jesus alive afterwards because Christians were willing to die for this belief.

That's a very common apologetic claim and I would like to see Mike's evidence for it. You might think well it's natural to think that the disciples all died for their faith because that's what you've heard. Well what are your sources of information for that exactly? Where do you find that in ancient accounts? What evidence is there for it actually? What evidence is there that all of Jesus' disciples came to believe he was raised from the dead? What's the evidence of that? What's the evidence that any of them died for it? With respect to the appearance to Paul, I have another question that is somewhat unrelated to that one.

Two questions actually. Mike wants to insist that he wants to stick to strictly historical procedures when investigating these facts. So I have a question that I want to ask him and I want him to follow strict historical procedures in answering it.

When Jesus appeared to Paul allegedly, how did Paul know that it was Jesus? How did Paul know it was Jesus? Paul was not one of Jesus' earthly disciples and didn't know what he looked like. So how did Paul know it was Jesus? I don't want a supernatural explanation. I don't want him to say God told him it was Jesus.

I want a historical explanation. Secondly, does an appearance to somebody prove that somebody has been physically raised from the dead? Does an appearance to somebody prove that there's been somebody who's dead? Does somebody who's dead, appearing to somebody prove that person's been raised from the dead? If so, what do you do with the gospel accounts of the transfiguration? Jesus goes up on the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James, and John, where did Moses come from? Was Moses raised from the dead? Well, most people don't think so. Most people think this is some kind of visionary experience unless you think Moses was raised from the dead.

If it's a visionary experience, how do you know that the apostles didn't have visionary experiences? I would say that it is prejudicial to call visionary experiences hallucinations. Hallucinations is a derogatory term, and I'm not going to use that because I don't believe in hallucinations. But at the end of my talk, if I have time, I'm going to talk about the possibility of visions.

People having visions. They have visions in the New Testament. Paul has a vision.

Peter, James, and John have a vision. Visions happen without physical people being present. Why not visions of Jesus? I'll get to that toward the end.

After the three facts, which I think can be reduced to one fact, Mike wants to talk about historical method. He has four criteria, explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, and an explanation that is not ad hoc. He maintains that hallucinations don't pass these methodological criteria, but his hypothesis does.

The best explanation that passes all four criteria is that Jesus really was raised by God from the dead. This does have explanatory scope and explanatory power. Does it have plausibility? Plausibility is the big issue because unless you posit the existence of God, you cannot claim that it's plausible that Jesus was raised from the dead if he were truly dead.

The only explanation for Jesus being raised from the dead that I know of is that God raised him from the dead. That's fine if that's what you believe. But you believe it because it's a belief.

Historians cannot prove what God has done. God is beyond historical proof. God could do anything he wants and there'd be no way for us to know.

We don't have criteria by which to evaluate the way that the Almighty works in this world. If you think you do know how the Almighty works in the world, it's because you're a theologian. It's not because you're a historian.

Historians have no access to the divine realm. Mike wants to claim that he is not talking as a theologian but as a historian, but I submit to you that's precisely what he's doing, and I think he contradicted himself. When at one point he wanted to say that of course it was God who raised him, and then later he wanted to say he's not talking theology.

If you talk about what God's doing, that's theology. It's not history. The historian can tell you that Jesus was crucified.

Historians, I agree with my completely. Historians will tell you that Jesus was crucified. This is, I believe, about as a certain historical datum as you can get from the ancient world that Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate.

The historian can describe to you the process of crucifixion and can tell you what probably happened when the crucifixion took place. What the historian cannot tell you is that Jesus was crucified for your sins. Now you may believe that Jesus was crucified for your sins.

I think most of you do believe that. That's a theological claim. It's not a historical claim.

The historian has no access to whether Jesus died for your sins or not. The historian can tell you what happened during the Protestant Reformation between the Catholics and the Lutherans, but the historian cannot tell you which side God was on. The historian cannot tell you that the reason the Protestant Church succeeded is because God was behind it.

The theologian thinks that, if they're not Catholic, but not the historian. Mike, in short, is doing theology, not history, and as a final demonstration of that, if Mike wants to claim that the appearances of Jesus have to be explained by the physical resurrection, then I want to ask him, what about the miracle claims of other religious traditions? Do you accept them as well? What about the claims of Muslims about miracles? Forget about the Muslims. Let's go back to the ancient world.

What about the pagans? We have pagan holy men who are said to have been able to heal the sick, cast out demons, raise the dead, who ascended to heaven. Apollonius of Tiana was seen by a follower afterwards. It is well documented.

Do we say that the only possible explanation is that he was raised from the dead? Somehow I don't think so. So what's the difference? If the difference is, if he's going to claim the difference is, well, we have four accounts for Jesus. Then it turns out that my initial statement was not a red herring because these four accounts are problematic.

We need an explanation with explanatory power. I think that is plausible. I think virtually any explanation for the appearances is more historically probable or plausible than a claim for the resurrection unless you're a theologian and want to assert on theological grounds that Jesus was raised from the dead.

But if you're just sticking with the criteria that historians follow, any explanation is more probable than a miracle. Let me give you two. People have visions of people who have died.

A man will see his wife two weeks later after she's died. We'll see her in his bedroom. Sometimes these visions can actually be hugged and touched and talked with.

They do happen in groups. The Virgin Mary shows up to hundreds of people at the same time and you can interview them today. Do you think she really shows up? I don't.

Do they, do they think she showed up? Yes, they do. Visions, even by multiple people, happen all the time. It is not at all implausible that after his death, Jesus was experienced in a vision by one or more of his disciples that explains the appearances without appealing to miracles.

Let me give you a second. Rather crazy idea. I'm not claiming this is what happened, but it does strike me as interesting.

In the Syriac tradition, Jesus was allegedly known to have a twin brother, Didymus Judas Thomas, looked just like him. Here's the hypothesis. A few weeks after the resurrection, somebody from a distant saw Judas Didymus Thomas and said, there's Jesus.

And he disappeared. A couple of days later, someone else saw him. There's Jesus again.

People thought they saw Jesus. He died. He must have been raised from the dead.

Is that plausible? Not really. Is it more plausible than a resurrection? Yes. Any historical explanation is more plausible than a resurrection because the resurrection is a miracle and historians cannot prove miracles.

Thank you. Ten minutes to answer seven objections. Okay.

Let's hit right into it. We do. He still agrees with me on these three facts.

He hasn't disputed those. Again, it's the method where we disagree. Now, he said, I mentioned about detaching myself from my desired outcome.

And he says, okay, Mike started with belief in the resurrection. He ended there and Bart started believing with belief in the resurrection, but he jettisoned it along the way. And so who's doing the more historical investigation? This is a red herring, ladies and gentlemen, questioning whether I was able to overcome my bias.

I really did agonize with it. I don't expect people to believe this. But as a second guesser, this is something that was very important to me.

And I can say that I got to a point during my investigation that I could have gone either way. Now, again, it doesn't matter to anyone else here. It does matter to me.

But for Bart to say that he didn't struggle with bias on this, come on. Give me a break on this. To say he's not biased is like Nancy Pelosi saying she's not partisan.

Are we really to say that as an evangelical, attending Princeton Theological Seminary, that when he got challenged on his evangelical views, he didn't feel any prayer pressure whatsoever to give up those views to conform more to what his professors were thinking? And what about any book that's written against the traditional view of Jesus today? You make a mint on these kind of things. Bart has certainly made a boatload from his. So, I mean, come on, I don't think we're really in a position to question one and others motives here.

And what about atheists who have given up their belief, like Craig Keener, who is a New Testament scholar, written the largest commentary on John. Fantastic commentary is given up as atheistic views and now believes in the bodily resurrection of Jesus or an Edilinomon, who was a bolt money in liberal, who now is a conservative, believing in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. They overcame their bias according to Bart's method.

So, you can see it really doesn't matter. I mean, it bias matters, but we can really get off track. What really matters is our arguments and our method that we're using here.

Now, this isolation objection here that I really only had one fact here because Jesus' death by crucifixion doesn't prove that he rose from the dead. Bart here is confusing necessary and sufficient conditions. If I were trying to show that Adolf Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, I'd have to show that Hitler was the Chancellor and President of Germany during that time.

That would be necessary, but it wouldn't be sufficient to establish that Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust. You'd also need other facts, such as the testimony of Nazi guards. You'd need the testimony of death camp survivors, which, by the way, would not be disinterested.

And you would need all of those. All of them would be necessary, taken in isolation, but none would be sufficient. You'd need all of them, the collection of them.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is how historians do every historical investigation, and this is how I've done mine this evening. Now, he says, what about the appearances, these apparitions, like the one to Moses with the transfiguration? What about apparitions of Apollonians of Tiana, of the Virgin Mary, and what about these people today who, in group appearances, see and touch and experience their loved ones? Now, he doesn't want to call those hallucinations because he says this is a derogatory term. I'd like to go to the most recent comprehensive study on the subject of hallucinations, published last year by the American Psychological Association by Elman and Leroy, titled Hallucinations, the science of idiosyncratic perception.

And here they say that hallucinations, up through the first half of the 20th century, yes they were, it was a derogatory term. But in the profession of psychology, it's no longer derogatory that it's a normal experience that we all have, or I shouldn't say all of us, about 15% of the general population have, and you can be totally mentally healthy and experience a hallucination. Now, a little on hallucinations here, about 15% of the general population, some personalities are more prone than others to experience hallucinations.

Females are typically more prone to experience them than males, according to Elman and Leroy, and the older you get, the more likely you are to experience a hallucination. By the way, whether you want to call it vision or hallucination, let's just, I'm going to use hallucination, bark and use vision, but we are all talking about the same thing here. So it should come as no surprise that senior adults who are breathing the loss of a loved one are amongst those members of those groups who have the highest percentage of members experiencing hallucinations.

So hallucinations are experienced in different modes. You can hear something, you can see something, smell, taste something, feel something, have the sense of something like you're falling, that's a kinesthetic hallucination. Now, what about the disciples experiencing hallucinations here? Well, we already saw him open his statement, Paul's an unlikely candidate for it because he hated the church, he hated Jesus, certainly not grieving over his death.

I show that in terms of the group appearances, no, that's very unlikely because you can't participate in the hallucinations of another. So in order to compensate for this, you're going to have to say that all the members, the disciples, I'm talking about the appearance to the 12, which is the best that tested of all of them, and it's that one that virtually every scholar in the world agrees that they had this experience, the 12. So consider this.

They're all males, they're all different personality types, probably of different age groups, and yet what we're looking at here are these disciples, not a whopping 50%, like with senior adults bereaving their loved one, but 100% and unthinkable 100% have the experience, and they just so happen to have it simultaneously. And they just so happen to have it in the same mode, visual, because Jesus appeared to them. And I suppose that this is possible, you could say, and Elman and Leroy, Leroy emailed him, he responded, he said, we didn't touch on collective hallucinations because there's hardly anything out there on the subject.

So I guess you could say it's possible that this happened, but if you're going to go that far, and lack in explanatory power and accept that, why don't you just go home tonight and say, we all experienced the hallucination of tonight's debate. Listen, it's very difficult for the hallucination hypothesis to account for the known historical facts. Resurrection does it very well, however.

And as John Adams once said, facts are stubborn things. So when we talk about these group appearances, we can see that rather than calling the question of the resurrection hypothesis, they actually show us that reality is far more complex than a lot of skeptical scholars would have us believe today. Now in terms of the plausibility, he says, you got a positive God? No, I don't have to posit God in a resurrection hypothesis to get to the conclusion.

I just have to be open to it. I think that you cannot presuppose the existence of such a God and you shouldn't operate or exclude it either, or else you're really just weighing in with your own personal worldview and bias. What historians need to do is adopt a position of openness and say, let's let the facts speak for themselves.

If you don't do that, you place yourself in a dangerous position where you allow yourself to be guided by your biases and your worldview and bad philosophy corrupts good history. Now in terms of the, let's see here. He says, well, the theological assertion, if you do talk about God, you're not doing history, Mike is doing theology.

Again, I think as I just articulated here, what you're doing is you are, that Bart is confusing a historical conclusion with its theological implications. What I've shown here is when we apply strict historical method to facts which virtually everyone agrees, the only plausible conclusion here or one that really fits with all the four criteria is the resurrection hypothesis. This is the only one that works.

And so I can arrive at this historical conclusion. Now I could arrive there and just say, Jesus was raised from the dead. Again, without saying God raised Jesus from the dead, and I think I'm totally within my right as a historian to do that and leave a question mark there.

If I want to go further, I just simply do what physicists do and positive theoretic quantity. And as I said, God is, I think, is a good candidate for the position there. So I don't think there's a problem with that.

Again, I think he's confusing a historical conclusion with its theological implication. Let's see. Judas Dittemus Thomas, I guess that's the last one.

Judas Dittemus Thomas, what about that in this other literature? Part knows that this literature is quite late. In fact, there's a scholar that he highly respects. I don't have time to show it.

But there's a scholar that he highly respects, and he says, this scholar says that if you want to know about Jesus, you've got to go to the canonical gospels because the others just don't tell us about the first century church or about Jesus. You have to go to the canonical literature. The scholar was Bart Erman.

And so, again, another red herring we have here. We got to go with where the evidence points. And we got to use the best sources.

Bart has already said that by using strict and controlled methodological procedures, we can find out about Jesus a number of things about him. I've tried to do that this evening, and I want to encourage you. Don't look at the biases here this evening.

Yes, I have a bias. I've not made any pretense to the contrary, but I have worked hard at minimizing that bias. And I want to say focus on the method.

Thank you. Well, I think I assume Mike's having the same problem I'm having, which is that there's so many things to talk about. That it would take a very long time to talk about them, but when you actually scribble them down as quickly as you can, you realize, well, maybe this will only take two minutes.

So, how long do I have for this? Ten? Wow, no problem. Okay, good. So, all right, three facts.

I'm insisting that Mike doesn't have three facts pertaining to the resurrection. He has one fact. The crucifixion is not related to proof for the resurrection, because Jesus could have died in some other way.

Now, you know, Mike didn't actually answer that objection when I said he could have been stoned to death and raised from the dead. As it turns out, crucifixion is not a necessary condition. The only necessary condition for a resurrection is death, not death by crucifixion.

And if Mike wants to insist that there's a difference between necessary and sufficient conditions, and that what he's giving is the three necessary and sufficient conditions, I will claim that in fact that that is wrong. There are thousands of necessary conditions for the resurrection. Let me just give you a few so you can start churning your heads and start thinking of others.

One necessary condition in addition to the crucifixion would be that Jesus lived. That's one. Number two, he lived in Palestine.

Number three, he was a Jew. Number four, he was brought before Pontius Pilate. Number five, he was condemned to death.

I could go on and on. These could be seen as necessary conditions as much as the crucifixion. The crucifixion is just as irrelevant to the question of the resurrection as is the question of whether Jesus was a Palestinian Jew.

Yes, he was a Palestinian Jew, but what's it have to do with the resurrection? There were lots of Palestinian Jews and there were lots of people who got crucified. Some Christians don't quite have a handle on this because in the movies it looks like only Jesus really gets crucified. Crucifixion was such a common practice in ancient Rome that when Titus overthrew the city of Jerusalem and slaughtered the opposition, he ran out of lumber.

He crucified so many people. Crucifixion is not relevant to the question of whether Jesus was raised. The two points of relevance are that Jesus appeared to his disciples, so they claimed, and that he appeared to Paul, so he claimed both of those are claims about appearances.

They're the same claim. Mike has one fact that he's trying to explain. He doesn't have three facts.

I tried to point out that his attempt to explain these based on his methods, his four methods which I'm happy to accept as methods. No problem with these methods, but that his attempt to explain this fact with his methods falls short. He hasn't explained the plausibility issue about the resurrection.

The only thing that makes the resurrection the plausible explanation is if you believe in God. You have to believe in God in order to have a resurrection. When Mike says that he doesn't have to appeal to God for the resurrection, but he has to be open to the hypothesis of God, let me ask him.

What other option is there if God didn't raise Jesus from the dead? Is there another historical option that I haven't thought of that has never come out before? That Jesus physically got raised from the dead after having been completely dead and then been brought to life? Is there some other way to think of that other than God? I haven't heard him tell me what that might be, and I would love to know what it could be. You have to appeal to God if you're going to say that Jesus was raised from the dead, and the problem is God is beyond the ability for the historian to deal with. Historians can't deal with the divine realm.

They can only deal with the human realm. They can't deal with the divine realm, and resurrection by its very nature has to do with the divine realm. Let's talk about hallucinations for a little while.

I'm happy if Mike wants to say that visions are the same as hallucinations. Okay, fine, then let's talk about hallucinations and or visions. He pointed out that one of the most common forms of hallucination is a bereavement over a lost one.

Somebody you love died. What was Jesus exactly to the disciples? He was their deeply loved master, whom they thought was going to do great things. The Gospels are consistent in their claims about what the disciples thought about Jesus.

Sometimes they don't understand him. They don't quite get it, but they at least understand that Jesus is the Messiah and they expect great things from him. What happens to Jesus? Does he do these great things? No, he goes to Jerusalem and gets arrested and gets crucified.

This radically disconfirmed what the disciples thought Jesus was going to do. Some of them may have thought that he was going to spark a revolution against Rome. Some of them thought that he might be God's power to overcome the Roman presence in Palestine.

They all seem to think that Jesus was going to do something great. Rather than doing something great, Jesus was crucified. Their beloved master.

It would not be surprising giving the data that Mike himself has given that they had visions of him afterwards. If 15% of the population has visions, and usually if it's a loved one, well, I would say the disciples qualify. Paul is a different matter.

Paul is a very interesting case, one that I think requires a lot of investigation because we have very limited evidence of what exactly Paul experienced. Paul is very reluctant to tell us exactly what it was. Of course, the book of Acts has three accounts of the vision on the road to Emmaus, I'm sorry, the road to Damascus, but these accounts have internal tensions between them.

They're hard to reconcile with one another. Paul apparently had some kind of experience, but I continue with my question that Mike has an answer. Sticking at it from a strictly historical point of view without appealing to anything divine, how did Paul know it was Jesus? How did Paul know it was Jesus? Finally about visions of multitudes of people.

I pointed out that in fact multiple visions happen all the time. They happen in our day as research clearly shows, and as most of you know, they happened in biblical times when Peter, James and John saw Moses and Elijah, three people, not one person. Moreover, in modern times we have multiple appearances of Mother Mary.

Happens every year, whether we happen to believe it or not, the people who see these things believe it. I think the best explanation is that the disciples of Jesus had visionary experiences and they interpreted these as in fact being visions of Jesus who was alive afterwards. A couple of other quick questions as they occur to me.

Mike wants to say, wants to claim that the best attested resurrection appearance of Jesus was to the 12. Does he really believe that? Did Judas Iscariot see Jesus? If not, who were the 12? This is a later tradition that stands in conflict with other traditions. The reason that it matters that the sources are at odds with one another is that in any particular case you have to ask whether you can trust them.

If he wants to insist that the vision to the 12 was the best attested, then I want to know whether he thinks Judas Iscariot was one of the 12. Remember, in the book of Acts, this is before they elect the 12th member and it's before Paul converts. So if he really thinks he appeared to the 12, explain that to me please.

I also have set out another plausible explanation for how people thought they saw Jesus alive afterwards. There is an established tradition in Syriac Christianity that Jesus had a twin brother. Maybe they saw the twin.

You think, well, that's crazy. Yes, that's a little bit crazy. Is it as crazy as the idea that a man is raised from the dead? Well, no you say because God did raise Jesus from the dead.

That's fine. That's your theological judgment. But on historical grounds, we know that twins are mistaken for one another.

What historical grounds are there for a resurrection? The historian cannot appeal to God and without God you cannot have a resurrection. Thank you. We're going to allow the men to stay seated at their table and we're going to take questions for a few minutes and you'll see two gentlemen, Duke Hale and Lanny Wilson roving with microphones.

So what we're going to do is give some questions directed to the members and then we'll allow a couple of general questions. And again, please make it a question, not a treatise. Let's start over here, Duke.

Who over here on this side has a question for Dr. Ehrman? Okay, over here. Thanks gentlemen for the evening. I have a quick question for Dr. Ehrman.

One of the things that you mentioned about how the disciples were uneducated and how they probably spoke Aramaic and that the New Testament is written in Greek. Couldn't they have just gone out and gotten really good scribes and dictated to them who put it down in really good Greek and it wouldn't call into question their testimony? Who are you imagining? The gospel writers you mean? Well, I'm talking about really the testimony of say the disciples that they wanted to or you could even say whoever wrote the gospels, we'll go with that. But about that this is basically that you have these people who had these real experiences and it just seems to me that maybe you're saying that, hey, these disciples, how could they have been the real sources if they couldn't read or write? Do you see what I'm trying to say? Maybe I'm not articulating it very well.

No, it's a great question. I'm just trying to get clear because depending on which question you're asking, I'm going to have a different answer. That's why I'm just trying to clarify.

I think your question is if suppose you've got eyewitnesses who are Aramaic speaking and they can't read or write. They can't read or write and they narrate their experiences to a Greek speaking scribe who copies it down and then writes the gospel. Is that your idea? Yes, sir.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. Yeah, thanks.

I've got several things to say about that. One is that, well, for one thing, there's no source in the ancient world that suggests that that's the way it happened. The old sources suggest that these were actually written texts written by disciples.

This is from the second century. So we don't have any traditions of dictation going on. Second thing, if what's going on is dictation, then I don't think you could really say that dictation is going on because the way dictation works is you speak a word and somebody writes it down.

So it would have to be something like somebody kind of gives the gist of the idea and somebody composes a story around the gist of the idea because otherwise it's not dictation. Dictation is when somebody sitting here actually writing down my words and so that doesn't work for the gospels. The bigger thing is that scholars for 150 years have realized that these gospels all have similar sources because there are word-for-word agreements among Matthew, Mark, and Luke that are impossible to account for unless they're copying one another, somebody's copying somebody else.

So it doesn't look like these are independent witnesses that have all seen the same thing and are given their different sides of it. What specifically looks like happening is Matthew and Luke are using Mark as one of their sources. And so the question is where does Mark get his stories from? Well, who knows? The standard explanations that he simply got it from the oral tradition unless there's some evidence to think that there's some other reason to think not.

Let's go for over on this side of question for Dr. LaCona. Raise your hand. Anyone? Okay.

Lanny? Hi, Dr. Do you think that there's any difference between the miracles that you say occur today, say in a hospital, versus the miracles that we see in the New Testament? Good question. I don't see anyone walking on water today. But I think a difference here would be the context in which these miracles occur.

Today, let's suppose we got a blind man who's 50 years old. He's walking down the street. He was born blind.

He's an atheist, never prayed. He's walking with his wife. Let's say that all of a sudden for no reason, he gets a sight.

But was that a miracle? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not. Probably more like an anomaly, I would tend to think.

But let's suppose you take the same blind man walking down the street with his wife at the same time, and some guy, a total stranger walks up and says, in the name of Jesus, you will now see. And at that very moment, the guy gets a sight. Well, is that a miracle? I think so.

The difference is the context in which it occurs. It's charged with religious significance. Something in which Bard and I will disagree here, and I will admit, it's not part of the three facts.

It's not part of historical bedrock. There is disagreement among scholars on these things that I'm about to say. But I do believe that they are historically defensible.

And that would be that the context in which Jesus did his miracles. I believe it's historically defensible that Jesus did have a self understanding that he was divine. And I do believe that we have a very good case historically can be made.

In fact, I've got six arguments I could give to show that Jesus predicted his violent, imminent death and subsequent resurrection by God. And if the resurrection of Jesus happens within this context of Jesus' unique claims about himself, in fact, you could even forget the deity thing. You could even take effect Jesus' beliefs of himself as chosen by God as a special agent and that he does perform these things that appear to be miracles and exorcisms.

At least, amazing deeds. That's how he and his disciples interpreted it. And he predicts his violent death and subsequent resurrection.

And all of a sudden, all the historical evidence points, that's what occurred. Again, that changes things. That sets up a context that's far different than what we have with miracle claims today.

Let's, on this side, question for Dr. Erman. Lanny, right here? This is a little bit different question than the topic of resurrection, but Dr. Erman, in your book, Miss Quoting Jesus, you say, once readers put a text in other words, however, they have changed the words. And that reading a text is the act of putting a text in other words.

Consequently, you say, to read a text is necessarily to change the text. Now, if it's the case that readers change the text by reading it, and since I've read your book, it follows that I changed your book by reading it. Is there any way that I can know what you actually said? I wish, I wish you wouldn't have changed my book.

Well, obviously, this is the problem of communication. If you have any questions, though, feel free to email me. But if I read your email... I'm changing your words as you say them.

In the spirit of our consistency, let's give a question to Dr. Lacona. Right here, Duke, let's wait for the mic if you would, sir. Good evening.

If we can agree that the reality of man is spiritual, why then is it necessary for a physical resurrection of Jesus? The question? You know, like Bart said a moment ago in his last speech that Jesus, why crucifixion, why not stony? Well, I don't know, come in now from a theological perspective when I say that God seemed to choose crucifixion ahead of time. That was the mode that he chose, but could he have done it through stony? I don't see why he couldn't have. In terms of why couldn't... If your question really is getting to, how do we know that Jesus was raised bodily rather than spiritually or as a disembodied spirit? I think that it's not that God couldn't have raised him that way.

The question historically would be, is how was Jesus raised? And I think the evidence does show that he was raised bodily. It's not part of the three facts or the historical bedrock that every scholar is going to agree on. He has serious dispute amongst this.

But I do think that the scholars who believe that it's a spiritual or immaterial resurrection and disembodiment are simply mistaken. I think Paul is quite clear that he believes in bodily resurrection. If you look at 1 Corinthians 15, he makes statements like, I think when you get to verses 52, 53, 54, he says this perishable.

And he's talking about our own resurrection and at least four or five times throughout Paul's writings, he says that our resurrection is going to be patterned after Jesus. So when he says that ours is going to be bodily, then he would also mean that Jesus would be bodily. So when he says this perishable will put on the imperishable, and the Greek term he uses there is a further clothing, like to put on this coat over my shirt.

It's a further clothing. This mortal will put further clothes itself with immortality. So there's not a disembodiment.

There is a clothing over. You go to Romans 8, 11, he says, the spirit who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies. And later on verse 23, he talks about the redemption of our bodies.

Philippians 3, 21, he says, our citizenship is in heaven from which also we eagerly wait a savior, the Lord Jesus who will transform, transform our humble bodies to be in conformity with his own. So according to Paul, it's a transformation of our current body. It's not an elimination of it in order to get some other one.

That's his view. And because Paul knew the disciples, the Jerusalem disciples, and I mean I could go into more in terms of, I wish I had time, but how Paul used tradition and how he felt you could see where he, in 1 Corinthians 7, where he would not change the Jesus tradition. He was very, very careful to distinguish between his opinion, Jesus tradition, and an apostolic ruling which had the same degree of authority as the Jesus tradition, but he distinguished the two.

And so if he's going to be that careful, he's not going to be making up something like bodily resurrection if the disciples in Jerusalem are claiming a spiritual or immaterial resurrection. So I think it's pretty clear that Paul is saying bodily resurrection. I think by inference you can get very strongly back to the Jerusalem apostles saying the same thing.

And indeed when you look at the, it's very consistent with what the resurrection and the four gospels have, it's bodily resurrection. There's an empty tomb. I'm not saying that I've proven an empty tomb here.

I want to be careful of that, but I'm saying that what Paul is saying, what bodily resurrection is consistent, completely consistent with what the gospels present in their resurrection narratives. We're going to take a couple more directed to either men. You want, okay, plenty bring.

Yes, I see that hand. Yes. Yes, this question is for Dr. Ehrman.

Is it Ehrman? Ehrman. Either one. Yeah, okay.

Both will be cashed, right? Yes. Okay. I'm having trouble with your probability argument and here's my problem.

You have a premise, it seems like there's a thousand or a billion people die, and then you infer, therefore, it probably doesn't happen. It seems like there has to be another premise in there that's a nonhistorical premise of the nature of probability. So when you charge Dr. Lycona with given an historical explanation for the resurrection, it looks like when you give historical explanations, it requires a philosophical premise.

So what sort of premise do you have to get the conclusion that certain things are less plausible from the fact that a thousand occurrences have happened? Okay, I'm going to keep the microphone because I'm going to need an explanation because I'm not quite sure I'm grasping it. So I'm saying that if you throw a thousand bars of iron in the water and they all sink, that it's plausible that if you do it a thousand and one times, it'll sink. That's saying the same thing twice, right? No, I'm saying that you throw another one in.

It's possible that you can expect that it's going to sink. Right, but the premise doesn't entail that. I don't know what you mean.

For example, I can observe a thousand occurrences of the sun. This is David Hume's problem of induction. I can observe the sun rising and setting for millennia, but that doesn't get me to the conclusion it will probably rise tomorrow without a philosophical assumption.

That's right. Anything that pulls off assumption can't be proven. Yes, but see, that's the problem between scientific demonstration and historical demonstration because with the bars of iron and with the rising of the sun, you are talking about predictive probabilities of what's going to happen next.

Whereas with history, you're not talking about predictive probabilities of what's going to happen next. You're talking about probabilities of what already did happen. You can't use scientific method in order to establish historical plausibility.

Right, but that doesn't sound like a historical position because history just tells us what certain things did happen. Then you're trying to infer problems. Which is fine, I'm not saying you can't do that.

It sounds like you're using philosophy to do that. History doesn't tell us what did happen. History tells us what probably happened.

That's what you're after, right, what did happen. We have no access to what did happen. Okay, well, we have access only to what probably happened.

What probably happened? We're going to take two more questions. This is the lightning round. So over on this side, Dick, question for either gentleman.

For both, actually. Whoever would like to take it first, that'd be fine. Dr. Erma, you earlier mentioned that you put a lot of value in the fact that there's a lot of inaccuracies, as you call it.

Let's just take, for example, how many people did the women actually run into? One guy, two guys, an angel, that sort of thing. But could either of you address how the differences, there are a lot of differences between how we today require a chronological, modern, western point of view in storytelling versus perhaps how the stories may have been constructed in a more Middle Eastern narrative of that time period. And how that might account for perhaps some of these discrepancies.

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think the problem is that we tend to read these stories as if they're modern histories written by people with concern for meticulous detail. And so we expect them to conform to 21st centuries of standards of historiography, and they don't do that.

I think if we admit they don't do that, then that's fine. Then we allow the discrepancies to stand. But then we're left with the problem that as 21st century historians, we still want to know what happened.

And these are the sources that we have available to us. We don't have other sources. We have sources that were written with a different understanding of historiography.

So the mistake is, when people read these sources and say this is something that definitely happened, that might be a modern 21st century concern, it may not even be the concern of the ancient person. But if you press that logic too far, then I think you're going to have problems if you want to say that Jesus was definitely raised from the dead. Because then you're applying your 21st century of historiographic model to what you're now saying are pre-modern understandings of historiography.

Dr. LaCona. Ancient biographies, the Gospels are a subset of Greco-Roman biography. Richard Burch has an excellent book on it.

It's called, What are the Gospels? It's been very influential within the world of New Testament scholarship. And ancient biographers did vary in the amount of liberties that they would take when writing biographies. They certainly took liberties at times.

And that's why you do have some of the discrepancies, like the day Jesus was crucified. I think that John probably altered the day in order for a theological, to make a theological point there. But that doesn't mean that Jesus wasn't crucified.

We can look at certain things. And there are certain questions that we're not going to be able to answer, such as the posture of the angels, where they were inside or outside the tomb when they were talking to the women. You know, when the Titanic sank, you may be interested to know that when it sank, there were eyewitnesses and they disputed one another.

They contradicted one another on whether the ship broke in two prior to sinking or whether she went down in tact. Now, how on earth could you make a mistake like that when you are sitting in a lifeboat and watching her sink? But yet they did contradict one another. That didn't warrant the conclusion that the Titanic didn't sink.

What you do is you say there's a peripheral detail for which we just can't know the answer and didn't know the answer until the Titanic was discovered. Same thing with what we find in the Gospels. There are going to be some things with these differences that we just aren't going to know the answer to.

We're not going to be able to figure it out. There are some things in history we just can't prove. But I disagree with Bart here to say that, therefore, we can't prove that Jesus was raised.

You may not be able to prove how many women went to the tomb or what their names were. But everybody agrees that these women were the ones who went to see Jesus and that they had an experience that they perceived was of Jesus appearing to them. No one is really denying that in academia today.

That's a widely agreed upon fact. And I think when you put these together, what you do is you take the knowable facts. Forget the peripherals.

You take the knowable facts. You form hypotheses. And you weigh hypotheses according to not an a priori objection to miracles or an a priori definition to miracle that excludes a possible conclusion.

And thus making it possible that you could never get it wrong, that you could never get it right. And make it so that you may not even be able to do accurate history that way. But rather you weigh hypotheses according to those four important criteria that I've outlined and reiterated this evening.

That is how we determine the probability of a hypothesis and not due to philosophical and theological speculations pertaining to whether or not a miracle is probable. At this time, we're going to allow each man to give a closing statement since Dr. Lykona went first. We're going to allow Dr. Ehrman to go last now, the final word.

But in just a moment, each man will have five minutes to give a closing statement. Let me encourage you strongly to please don't leave. Once they finish, they will go and have a moment to catch their breath before they go downstairs to our bookstore.

Even after they exit, please stay seated for just a few moments because we've got a final special commentary to provide. But at this time with a five minute closing statement, a summation of his arguments, Dr. Lykona, if you would approach the podium, and you may begin. Well, thank you, Alex.

And again, I'd like to thank Bart Ehrman for a pleasant debate tonight. I do want to reiterate that although we don't agree on a number of things, which is obvious, I do respect him. And I really like him as a person.

We've had dinner twice now, and he's a fine guy. You're taking up my time now. Now, in terms of the facts, there was one that seems that he has disputed.

It's about the 12, and he said, what about Judas? How are we to count for the 12? Well, most scholars, if you read the commentaries on this, say that what we're looking at here when he says appears to the 12, aside from the Matthias question taking on Judas's place on the 12, most scholars believe that the 12 is pretty much a nickname that the inner group of disciples experienced or gained over time. Much like you call the Pac-10 today, but there's more than 10 teams. Now, in terms of, that's the only fact that seems to be disputed, but again, I think that's pretty well established here.

Now, in terms of the method, he says, all right, what about Judas did to Miss Thomas? And he says, really, is this crazy? Is this more crazy than Jesus was raised? Well, I don't think the resurrection hypothesis is crazy. We've taken the noble historical facts, not the peripherals, but the noble historical facts, subjected them to strict historical criteria. And we found that the resurrection hypothesis is by far the best explanation of the known facts, giving those four important criteria.

So I don't think it's all crazy, but I do think that Judas did him as Thomas says, or the twin theory is, I do think that that's kind of crazy, and there's one major problem with it. There's no evidence for it. What about when he says, okay, resurrection implausible because you must posit God? And then I said, no, you just have to remain open.

He says, well, no, what other option is there than God? And I'd say, well, you could posit that there was an alien responsible for the thing. Maybe he was doing his PhD project from a parallel universe and trying to convince people that Jesus was raised. I don't think that's very plausible, but it's possible here.

Again, I'm just saying, when God raised Jesus from the dead, I'm positing God as the theoretical entity, and it does quite well at explaining what's behind the curtain. And again, I think, aside from logic chopping, I think we all agree that God is probably the best explanation. I can't prove that God raised Jesus from the dead with any reasonable or adequate certainty, but I think we can prove that Jesus was raised from the dead with reasonable and adequate certainty.

And besides, whether it's an alien or God or whoever it may be, it doesn't really question whether the event had occurred. It only questions the cause of the event, and tonight's debate isn't on the cause. It's on whether historians can prove that Jesus was raised.

What about these hallucinations? I said it's hallucination. He's fine with that. And he says it's very common that bereavement today leads to these, and it happens in group appearances, and certainly Jesus' disciples were very bereaved over Jesus' death, agreed.

But again, I think my refutations for that still stand. We're not talking about bereaving senior adults amongst the highest percentage and a whopping 50%. We're talking about an unthinkable 100% of these disciples' experience in it, appearance to the 12th, and it just so happened that it occurred simultaneously.

And just so happened, it was in the same mode, visual. Again, I really believe that this strains at rationality and that this kind of proposal doesn't even approach having a reasonable chance of being true. In fact, these group apparitions, I don't disagree that they occur.

I think that they do occur, but we've seen that they're not hallucinations. I think that this really shows that these group apparitions are evidence for a spiritual dimension. They do suggest that there's an afterlife.

Therefore, they give plausibility to the resurrection hypothesis. And in terms of the miracles that are occurring today, if they occur today, then it gives more plausibility that they occurred in the past. And therefore, that adds plausibility to the resurrection hypothesis.

And again, probability about the 1000 ivory bars and natural causes, again, it excludes the possibility of a natural agent. And we can't exclude the possibility of God raising Jesus from the dead. We just have to be open to that if we're going to be objective historians.

And so I'm not going to throw out a historical conclusion because some skeptical scholars can't stomach the implications that there is miracles involved. So again, I think that my case for the resurrection of Jesus still stands. And I believe that Bart's case against it this evening has continued to fail under critical scrutiny.

Thank you. Well, thank you very much. And I've enjoyed this debate very much.

And, you know, Mike, I don't care what they say about you. I think you're OK, too. Historians base their findings on sources.

The more sources the better, the less biased sources the better. The more the sources corroborate one another the better. The less they have collaborated with one another, the better.

Historians don't have that kind of source for the resurrection of Jesus. They have sources that were written decades later by people who were not there to see these things happen, who have heard stories about these things by word of mouth. These stories circulating by word of mouth have been in the oral tradition year after year after year, decade after decade, and you know what happens to stories as they circulate orally.

Stories change. The stories about Jesus changed in the oral tradition. No one doubts that because we have lots of stories about Jesus from the early church that nobody thinks actually happened.

Where did these stories come from from the infancy gospel of Thomas or the gospel of Peter? Someone made them up. In our earliest sources, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we have stories, many of which are at odds with one another. Why? Because people are changing the stories.

These are not simply peripheral changes of unimportant details. Often the changes in the stories about Jesus are of the greatest moment. The gospel of John is the only gospel that explicitly identifies Jesus as God, and the only gospel in which Jesus himself calls himself God.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, do not have Jesus call himself God. If our earliest gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke thought Jesus was God and thought that he called himself God, wouldn't that be a rather remarkable thing to leave out of a gospel? They just forgot to report that part. It seems to me that the important aspects of the gospels have been changed over time, and this includes the stories of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

It's not a red herring to consider the quality of our sources. The sources are the only things that we have. I also want to emphasize that we have other sources about other people in antiquity that talk about their miracles.

If you want to grant these Christian sources what they have to say about miracles, then what do you do about the sources that talk about Apollonius of Tiana, or Honey the Circle Drawer, or Harnina Bendosa, or Vespasian? Most important though, historians base their findings on probabilities. Mike wants to argue that there are four methods that one follows, one of which is plausibility, without hypothesizing the existence of God or, if you will, without believing in God, the resurrection doesn't make sense. Mike might want to argue that an alien could have done it.

I would like to know what historical grounds he has for deciding that the alien hypothesis is worse than the God hypothesis. I can think of theological grounds for thinking this, but what are the historical grounds for thinking it? This, in fact, is a theological judgment. Mike, on several occasions, couldn't stop himself by admitting that he thinks God is involved.

Why crucifixion? Because that's what God chose. Why the resurrection? Because God did it. Mike is operating as a theologian.

This is fine. Theologians can talk about the resurrection of Jesus and emphasize that it's the most important aspect of the Christian religion. But when they emphasize that Jesus was raised from the dead, they're making a theological judgment about something that God did.

They are not making a historical judgment that can be verified by historians. If historians could verify it, university professors who teach history would all believe it. They don't believe it.

Thanks for joining us today. If you'd like to learn more about the work and ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona, visit RisenJesus.com, where you can find authentic answers to genuine questions about the reliability of the Gospels and the resurrection of Jesus. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast, visit Dr. Lacona's YouTube channel, or consider becoming a monthly supporter.

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