Licona vs. Fales: A Debate in 4 Parts – Part Two: Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?

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Licona vs. Fales: A Debate in 4 Parts – Part Two: Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?

June 4, 2025

The following episode is part two of the debate between atheist philosopher Dr. Evan Fales and Dr. Mike Licona in 2014 at the University of St. Thoman in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the first 30 minutes, Dr. Licona provides his positive case for the resurrection and then evaluates it alongside Dr. Fales’ hypothesis that Jesus did not rise from the dead but instead, the stories of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus recorded in the gospels are myths designed by the authors to provide both the Romans and Jews with solutions to their political problems. He finishes the session with a 30-minute audience Q&A.

Transcript

Hi, this is Kurt Chairs. Today we have part two of the Licona Fales Debate on the Resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Mike Licona is the presenter for this segment in which he provides his case for the historicity of the resurrection and critiques Dr. Fales's alternative hypothesis that the resurrection did not happen.

Instead, writers invented and recorded the stories, relayed in the gospels to solve their audience's political problems. Thank you for joining us. You are listening to the Risen Jesus podcast.

Oh, great. All right. Well, whether study in ancient Egypt or Rome, Alexander, or Jesus, historians deal with the data before them.

And in almost every case, we wish we had more. It's like being dealt a hand of cards. We often wish the cards we have were better, but we have to work with the hand we've been dealt.

When it comes to the data we have pertaining to Jesus's resurrection, the hand we've been dealt is better than we have for some events and inferior to others. So let's look at what we have. Clement of Rome and Polycarp are valuable because they were probably followers of the disciples Peter and John respectively.

So their view of Jesus and his resurrection very probably originate with Peter and John. Clement reports that Jesus's disciples became fully assured by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. And Polycarp mentions Jesus's resurrection five times in his letter to the church at Philippi.

We may think of Clement and Polycarp as jacks in our hands. They're good cards since they get us very close to the apostles, but we would have better sources if they were written by the apostles themselves. The four canonical gospels are biographies of Jesus written within 20 to 65 years of Jesus's death, a relatively short period considering most ancient biographies were written much longer after the individuals they featured.

For example, much of our knowledge of the ancient world comes from Plutarch. Yet the bulk of Plutarch's biographies were written 150 or more years after the deaths of those being featured. Not only are the gospels written fairly recent to when Jesus had lived, some of their sources are either apostolic or close to them.

The majority of today's scholars hold the traditional authorship of Mark and Luke, and that these, like Clement and Polycarp, had received their information from the apostles. Because they were written closer to Jesus by several decades, Mark and Luke are better cards than Clement and Polycarp. They're like queen in our hands, hands of cards.

Both speak of Jesus' resurrection and that it was something that involved his corpse. Early church tradition attributes the gospels of Matthew and John to have been written by Jesus' disciples after whom they were named. If that tradition is correct, we have two kings.

However, the traditional authorship of Matthew and John are less certain than for Mark and Luke, nevertheless they are still quite early sources, so we'll assign them a nine and ten in order to be fair. The majority of today's scholars hold that a traveling companion of Paul, perhaps Luke, wrote the Acts of the Apostles and that this was the same author for Luke's Gospel. The sermon summaries contained in Acts are, at minimum, representations of what the apostles had preached.

So Acts is a secondary source to the apostles along with Luke's Gospel. The sermon summaries in Acts, chapters two and thirteen speak of Jesus' resurrection and that it involved bringing his corpse back to life. So at minimum, with Clement, Polycarp, Luke, Mark, Luke, Acts, we have multiple secondary sources who knew the apostles and were reporting their claims that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

We have two queens, two Jackson, our hands. All four of them refer to Jesus' resurrection and the better cards even mentioned that it was a bodily resurrection. Now, of course, what we'd really like is a non-Christian source from the first century reporting that Jesus had been raised from the dead, right? Well, not really.

Think about this. If that's what we had, if we discovered a report written by a non-Christian who claimed that Jesus raised from the dead, we would think such a person was a moron if they continued to be a non-Christian and so therefore not reliable by any means. Moreover, if such a report actually existed, scholars would merely write it off as a forgery.

In reality, such a source would not be as attractive as we might think. But we do have something better. Paul, his letters are early, perhaps the very earliest literature on Jesus.

In fact, the time separating several of them from Jesus is similar to the distance between today and when Bill Clinton was president and O.J. Simpson was in the news. And Paul's letters contain even earlier source materials such as creeds and oral formulas. Thirteen letters in the New Testament are attributed to Paul.

Of these scholars are unanimous that Paul wrote at least seven. In these seven, Paul claims to be an eyewitness of the risen Jesus who had appeared to him. So Paul is at least a king.

However, when Paul had his experience of Jesus, he was not one of Jesus' followers, but rather an active enemy of the church who was in the process of persecuting Christians. Moreover, Paul knew the Jerusalem apostles who had walked with Jesus. And we have corroborating evidence that Paul was teaching the same gospel message they were teaching.

It's hard to imagine having a better source. So Paul is an ace. Let's take a moment and examine the evidence I just mentioned about Paul that he was teaching what the other apostles were teaching with the gospel.

In Galatians chapter one, Paul says he went to Jerusalem three years after his conversion experience and visited with Peter the lead apostle of the church and one of the three closest disciples to Jesus. Now it's interesting to note that when Paul mentions that he visited or met with Peter, the Greek word used here is hysterecy from which we get the English word history. So you see, Paul was not a follower of Jesus during his lifetime, and so he wanted to get the whole thing from those who had walked with him and who better than Peter at this point.

Paul adds that while he was there, he also saw Jesus' brother James. Now in Galatians chapter two, and again this is one of the undisputed letters of Paul, Paul says that he returned to Jerusalem 14 years later to meet with the pillars of the Jerusalem church. And he names them Peter, James, and John.

And he says his reason for going was he wanted to run the gospel message past them. I want you to remember this. He wanted to run the gospel message past them that he was preaching to ensure that he was preaching the same thing they were preaching.

And he said they added nothing to what I had to say, they gave us the right hand to fellowship. In other words, fist bump Paul, good job brother, keep up the good work. So according to Paul, they certified these Jerusalem pillars of the church, Peter, James, and John certified that he was teaching the same gospel message they were teaching.

Now of course this doesn't mean that they were happy with everything Paul was teaching, but it does mean when we come to the gospel message, the foundation of the Christian faith, that Paul was right in line with that they were preaching. Now of course, you know, we can look at this and say maybe Paul was lying in order to confer authority on himself. So that's why historians look for corroborating sources, and we have that when it comes to this claim of Paul.

Remember just a moment ago we mentioned Clement of Rome and Polycarp, and that these were probably trained by the apostles Peter and John respectively. So it's a great interest to observe what they write about Paul. Clement places Paul on par with his mentor Peter while Polycarp says Paul, and I quote accurately and reliably taught the message of truth.

Now these are precisely the sort of comments we would expect if Paul was telling the truth when he was teaching what the Jerusalem apostles were teaching when it came to the gospel. So we can know at least when it comes to minimum to the gospel message Paul was preaching what they were preaching. And I could give you some more information as well, I just, I'm limited in time.

Now it'd be nice if we had a record somewhere where Paul said, hey, I want to tell you what this gospel message is I've been preaching. Well this is another one of these cases when we have a really good card in our hands because we have precisely that. First Corinthians, another undisputed letter of Paul in chapter 15, Paul opens up by saying, I want to remind you of the gospel message that I preach to you.

So this is the sort of connection that historians love having. That's verse one, in verse three Paul quotes an oral tradition that's earlier than the letter in which it appears of course. And he says, I delivered to you a first importance what I also received.

So of course he's talking about oral tradition here. And here's what he goes on to say, I apologize for the small font but I wanted to leave it this way because one of the ways, there's several ways of identifying this is oral tradition. One giveaway is those words delivered and received.

Those were technical terms for oral tradition. Another way is to see what's called parallelism. And so you know like today we might have a hymn, Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now I'm found, was blind but now I see. You'd immediately know that I'm saying a poem or a hymn or something because of the rhythm and the rhyme, right? Well the ancients had in their oral tradition, they had a thing called parallelism, long short, long short which you can see here. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures and that he appeared.

So and then later on in verses 11, 12 and 14 Paul uses the word karegma which means formal public proclamation. So there are three, and that's a changed word, you don't see it in English. But when Paul says I want to remind you of the gospel message I preach to you, he uses the term yu and galitzel.

But when he says, hey this is what we preach to you, he uses kareusel. I mean it referring back to this tradition here. So this is certainly the apostolic preaching Paul is saying that part of that gospel message.

Now accompanying this creed is a list of those to whom the risen Jesus is said to have appeared. Peter the 12, more than 500, James, all of the apostles. And then Paul adds his own name to the list.

So from this we can have historical certainty that shortly after Jesus' death a number of people claimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead and had appeared to them in individual and in group settings to friends and at least one foe. And we can go a step further. Paul discussed the nature of Jesus' resurrection.

He says this succinctly in Romans 8, 11, the spirit who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies. The spirit who raised Christ in his mortal body will also raise your mortal bodies. If you go on I could give you stuff from 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4, but I'm really pressed for time.

This was also the apostolic preaching as preserved in the sermon summaries in the book of Acts. In Acts chapter 13 the author reports, and I'm just going to say the author Luke, most scholars believe it was a traveling companion of Paul, but there's no real consensus on who the traveling companion was. Church tradition says Luke, a lot of scholars believe it was Luke.

It's just one of those things in history. We just cannot be a certain off, but I'm just going to call him Luke. In chapter 13 Luke reports Paul is saying Jesus' resurrection as a fulfillment of prophecy.

Citing Psalm 16 verse 10, you will not allow your holy one to decay. Paul says this Psalm could not apply to its author David, since David died and was buried in his body decayed, but Jesus died and was buried in his body decayed, but his body did not decay, rather God raised it up. That's a claim to a historical event, and it's the same author of the resurrection narrative in Luke's Gospel.

So we can know that this bodily resurrection was the apostolic preaching. It's difficult to deny that Luke communicated in clear terms that Jesus' bodily resurrection was a historical event. Now we may ask how seriously the original apostles took this teaching.

Well, it's hard to imagine them being more serious. Here's Paul in his own words. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless.

You are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all people to be most pitied.

Few verses later he says, If from human motives I fought with wild beasts at Ephesus, what does it profit me? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Now Paul is crystal clear that the Christian life is only worth living if we are going to be raised from the dead at the general resurrection. And if Jesus was not actually raised, he says, there will not be a general resurrection.

But Paul continues by saying Jesus was raised, therefore the dead will be raised at the general resurrection, therefore the Christian life is worth living. Paul's argument is perfectly clear when we understand Jesus' resurrection as a historical event. At least that's what they were communicating, that it was an event that occurred in history.

But his argument becomes incoherent when we try to understand it in any other way. So let's review what our historical investigation has yielded thus far. We've actually been dealt a pretty nice hand.

It has yielded three items that are secure. 1. Jesus' disciples, original disciples taught that he had been raised from the dead and had appeared to individuals in groups, to friends, and to at least one enemy. 2. Jesus' original disciples taught that Jesus had been raised in his transformed physical corpse.

3. Jesus' original disciples intended for us to understand Jesus' resurrection as a historical event. These are the claims of the early Christians. So the resurrection hypothesis is to say that Jesus' bodily resurrection is a historical event.

Now the task of the historian is to discover what happened. Is Jesus' resurrection the best hypothesis, or is a superior hypothesis available? Well, I've treated all the major hypotheses offered by contemporary scholars in my large volume on Jesus' resurrection. So I won't treat them here given time limitations.

What I will do in the time that remains is to assess the alternative hypothesis offered by Professor Fales. We'll call it Evans' Hypothesis. Now since Evans denies the occurrence of miracles, he must deny the historicity of Jesus' resurrection.

So, Evans contends the gospels are myths designed to provide both the Jews and the Romans with the solution to their particular political problems. How was the Christian myth to do this? Well, Evans suggests the problem for Judea was Roman dominance, whereas Rome's problem was establishing the legitimacy of the Caesars and finding political principles that could coherently organize a society that had lost its tribal structure and become the largest and most powerful empire. Evans says the Gospel of Matthew presents the clearest picture of this and offers the royal figure of Jesus as a solution to conquer and conquer alike.

An answer to the question was Jesus actually raised from the dead, Evan answers. To entertain this question is to reveal a complete incomprehension of Matthew's purpose. A misunderstanding so fundamental has virtually to preclude recognition of the truth's Matthew means to convey.

The Gospel texts were never intended by their authors to be reflections on the personal or biological fate of individuals. Their concern was with social and cultural survival. Now, how does Evan arrive at this conclusion? He provides several major reasons for which I only have time to provide replies to three in this paper, but I intend to address the others in our discussion period.

First, Evan contends that the Gospel stories of Jesus appear to be patterned after the Old Testament. He says virtually every element of the Passion story is anticipated in the Old Testament. So much so that one can piece together the Passion narrative from passages from Psalms, Zechariah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah.

I certainly agree, but this argument proves little. In Jesus' day, the Messiah was expected to perform certain signs, and later rabbis taught that signs offered by the prophets anticipated those to take place during the Messianic era. Jesus' miracles in the Gospel's fit, hand, and glove with these.

Thus, his miracles were meant to identify him as the Messiah and that God's kingdom was present in him. Therefore, when considered alone, this element of Evan's hypothesis is just as suggestive of Jesus' Messiah's ship as it is of borrowing from the Old Testament. Evan's second argument is there is no evidence in the archaeological record supporting the story of Israel's exodus from Egypt and crossing the Red Sea, suggesting the author of Exodus never intended for his readers to understand his book as historical recollections of actual events, and that they were created as political myths articulating the divine origin of the Israelite nation.

If so, Evan contends this would provide a precedent of the New Testament stories of Jesus. So what about the lack of archaeological evidence from the Exodus? In two volumes, Israel and Egypt and ancient Israel and Sinai, James Hoffmeyer of Trinity, provides several reasons for the lack of archaeological data related to the Exodus, such as the Egyptian practice of neglecting to mention their enemies and even scratching their names from the historical record out of contempt in order to erase evidence of their existence. Moreover, the minimal belongings and resources of nomadic peoples do not lead to rich archaeological finds.

For example, tents and skin cantines don't leave their mark in the archaeological record. I'll add that while wishing we had more epigraphical and archaeological evidence for the Exodus, we have to acknowledge that this is the state of affairs for much of antiquity that far in the past. So, there are many examples, but just because of time constraints, I'll give you one here.

Around 71 BC, Marcus Krasis was fighting Spartacus in the servile war, and Plutarch reports that he built a wall to hem in Spartacus, and that this wall was 40 miles long. Well, this is probably an exaggeration on Plutarch's part, but that doesn't undermine the fact that there was this impressive and huge wall that was built to hem in Spartacus. Yet surprisingly enough, there's not a trace of this wall that remains.

And yet, no one questions that this wall was built, and this wall that was built, it was built more than 1,100 years after the Exodus. I could mention other things like, I don't know, you know, Caesar, Julius Caesar's victory over Pompey, at Farsalis in 48 BC, tens of thousands of people died on that field. And yet, because of the lack of archaeological evidence, we haven't even been able to identify what field that was with any kind of certainty, because no evidence has been found there of a big battle taking place.

And again, this is more than 1,100 years after the alleged Exodus. Despite a dearth of artifacts, Hoffman contends the Exodus story in Genesis is compatible with what is known from Egyptian history. He provides more than 10 references in the epigraphical and archaeological data, suggesting the presence of Semites in Egypt from the 22nd through 16th centuries, and that many Semites came to Egypt for relief during times of drought and famine.

This coincides well with the reports about the patriarchs in Genesis. Hoffmeyer also shows that Semites and other non-Egyptians were appointed to ranking positions in the Egyptian government during this period, rendering plausible the story of Joseph. Moreover, a surprising number of people in the biblical account of Exodus have Egyptian names.

Six are of certain Egyptian origin, including Moses and another 12 are of probable Egyptian origin. Now, while all of this does not prove the historicity of the Exodus account, the historical verisimilitude is striking and renders the account at least as plausible. And many times, that's all historians can hope for when investigating events that are reported to have occurred so long ago.

So the lack of archaeological evidence for the Exodus by no means suggest reports of it are myth. In fact, as I was reading others like Hoffmeyer and Kenneth Kitchen, another major Old Testament scholar, they were saying that the tendency was not to take myth and make it history, but to take actual historical events and make them a little mythological in that. Evan's third major argument appeals to figures in the ancient Near Eastern religions that bear close parallels with Jesus and so suggest the Christians borrowed from them.

He writes, So far as I am aware, every one of Jesus's miracles has multiple precedents in the war of the ancient Near Eastern religions. precedents often so strikingly similar as to leave little doubt about a shared repertoire. In support, he cites James Frazier's 1906 book, The Golden Bow.

Now, a lot of work has been done since 1906. I'm thinking of Roland de Vous's work from 1933, which was very extremely influential. Gunter Wagner in 1967, Jonathan Smith 1987, Mark Smith 1998, T. N. D. Medinger 2001.

All of these major, major works on the topic and those are just some of the major ones. I mean, the plenty of others have been written on these. The consensus of scholars today is that the Christians were not influenced by the ancient Near Eastern religions, and there are numerous reasons why.

Let me just give you three. First, the Jews of Jesus' day were very pious. To give you an idea, Josephus reports that the Roman governor Pilate, who we all know, and he was only there a few years, and he was responsible for Jesus' death, Pilate brought into Jerusalem some Roman standards that bore the image of Tiberius Caesar.

Now, Roman standard was the Roman Eagle, and it was on a pole, and they'd bring that in. And these were highly revered by the Romans. If one was lost in a battlefield, they would go out and spend years looking for it.

Well, on this occasion, Pilate added the image of Tiberius Caesar to these Roman standards, brought him into the city, and the Jews were fit to be tied with this because images were in their holy city defiling the city. And so they protested to Pilate for several days. Pilate was in Caesarea at the time.

Josephus said many of them went to Caesarea. They protested to Pilate for several days, and at one point Pilate brought soldiers in, and he was just threatened and said, if you do not disperse immediately in Caesar's protest, I will execute all of you on the spot. At this, the Jews laid on the ground, bared their necks, and said, we would rather die than be witnesses to our city being defiled by images of Caesar.

So you get kind of the idea about the Judaism in which the Christians were birthed out of, and so we can understand why, as we read in Acts and the undisputed letters of Paul, why the early Christians debated over things such as whether Jewish Christians needed to be circumcised, and whether Jewish Christians could eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols, whether Gentile male Christians needed to be circumcised, and whether Jewish Christians could even eat while seated alongside a Gentile Christian. Now, if you're going to debate over the sensitivity of the Jewish law like this in the early times of Christianity, do you really think these same people? Is it plausible to think that they are going to engage in wholesale barring from the ancient Near Eastern religions to form the foundation for their belief systems? Think about present-day Muslims who are sensitive to any depictions of their prophet Muhammad. Now, think about these same Muslims hanging paintings and statutes of Muhammad in their houses and in their mosques, and you'll get a little sense of how unlikely it is that the early Christians borrowed from the ancient Near Eastern religions, and pagan myths.

Second, the closest parallel figure to Jesus is unimpressive. Asclepius is the closest of all the ancient figures who predate Jesus, and yet asclepius, for the most part, is only a healer. So, in order to make the borrowing argument more attractive, one must find several other figures in which to find parallels to Jesus.

You've got to get Dionysus to create wine and have a divine paternity for to be threatened with death at his birth. You've got to get asclepius as a healer and one who raised someone from the dead, Apollonius of Tiana as someone who was raised from the dead, and then Heracles is someone who ascended to heaven on a horse. Now, while such a move is popular on the internet, it is not impressed scholars, and it's easy to see why.

I want you to consider that it's a thousand years from now. The year is three thousand fourteen, and a historian proposes that says the following. Number one, JFK and George W. Bush both got their degrees from Harvard.

Abraham Lincoln was a tall, lanky Illinois senator and lawyer who became president who served during wartime, got elected to a second term, and abused power while in office. You've got David Palmer was portrayed as the first U.S. black U.S. president in the television series 24. Nelson Mandela was the first black president of South Africa.

Therefore, Barack Obama was a myth because he enshrined all of these qualities in himself. And in fact, what even supports us further is that Barack Obama, myth developed during his lifetime. I mean, while he was president, they were saying that he was a Muslim who wasn't born in the United States.

And think about this, we've got a theme that goes throughout the story of Barack Obama, the theme of a paradigmatic child who was raised fatherless who became the leader of his nation, and this is symbolic of the American experience, both individually and nationally. It was symbolic to say that the U.S. offered its citizen and alien alike the opportunities to become free and successful. Therefore, ancient biographers writing on Obama didn't mean for us to understand this in a historical sense.

It was political myth in order to give us the symbolic of the American experience. Now, you could really have fun with this, of course, if you just put a little time into it. Ad hoc speculations are quite easy when we talk about modern mythologizing.

You can do it. I've done this with Clint Eastwood's movie, Grand Torino, and shown similarities to how Jesus and Walt Kowalski are similar figures. You can do this with anything if you want.

But modern mythologizing is easy, and it's even easier to do with figures like Jesus because he existed so long ago. It's easy until you look very carefully at what the earliest Christians had to say. So let's do that now that brings me to my third point.

If the earliest Christians had political myth in mind, as Evan suggests, they certainly communicated it in the worst possible way. As I mentioned earlier, Paul argued that the truth of Christianity and the afterlife, hope of afterlife for believers, were contingent upon Jesus' resurrection being a historical event. And it's important to recognize that Paul may have written this as much as two decades or more before the Gospel of Matthew was written.

It's also revealing that ancient skeptics answered claims of Jesus' resurrection being historical. You have people like Matthew who reports that the Jewish leaders in his day were saying the disciples stole Jesus' body. Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century said the Jewish leaders were still continuing with that report in their day.

Tertali in a few years after said that the report was going around that the gardener reburied Jesus' body, and Kelsus a little earlier than that around the middle of the second century said that Jesus faked his death. Now notice that every last one of these are responses to a claim of a historical resurrection. And then notice how the Christians responded to them.

They didn't say, no, no, wait a minute guys. We're not really saying that Jesus actually rose from the dead. We're saying that this is political myth.

Look, we're trying to solve a problem between the Romans and Jews here, get with the program. No, they went and they continued to defend a historical resurrection. And in fact, when we expand this into the life of Jesus, they flat out denied they were telling myths.

So whether we think that 2nd Peter and 2nd Timothy were actually written by Peter and Paul, they are still early Christian literature. So listen to what 2nd Peter 1 16 says. He says, we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His Majesty.

2nd Timothy 4, 1 through 4 says pretty much the same thing. So we have every reason to think the earliest Christian generation regarded the reports of Jesus' resurrection as history rather than myth. The consensus of scholars here, in this case, is solidly founded.

Evans appealed to the ancient Near East is to turn the clock backward and to navigate the theological backwaters that were abandoned by scholars decades ago. So how can we determine what actually occurred with Jesus? Historians are in the same boat as archaeologists, geologists and evolutionary biologists. We can't get into a time machine, return to the past and verify our conclusions.

And so historians employ strictly controlled historical method in which they assessed hypotheses. By how well they fulfill four important criteria. The hypothesis that best fulfills these criteria is regarded as what probably occurred.

So let's assess two hypotheses, the two under consideration this morning. Evans' hypothesis and the resurrection hypothesis. We'll begin by reviewing three items our historical investigation revealed.

Number one, Jesus' original disciples taught he had been raised from the dead and had appeared to individuals groups, to his friends and to at least one enemy. Number two, Jesus' original disciples taught he had been raised from the dead in his transformed physical corpse. And number three, Jesus' original disciples intended for us to understand his resurrection as a historical and actual event.

We'll now assess both of our hypotheses according to four important criteria. The first criterion is explanatory scope. This is the ability of a hypothesis to account for the most number of knowable facts.

The resurrection hypothesis of course does this very well. But what about Evans' hypothesis? It fails to account for why Paul left what he believed was the true faith, Judaism, and joined what in his mind was the cultish following of a dead false prophet only to jeopardize his eternal soul. Moreover, it doesn't account for why Paul and the apostles spoke of Jesus' resurrection as being a historical event.

Even if the gospel authors had other objectives in mind, and I don't think they did, Paul and the apostles are our earliest and most reliable and important sources. And they clearly intended for us to understand Jesus' resurrection as a historical event. Thus, Evans' hypothesis is inferior to the resurrection hypothesis in its explanatory scope.

The second criterion is explanatory power. This is the ability of a hypothesis to account for the facts without forcing them to fit or without an excessive amount of ambiguity. Stated another way, given the truth of the hypothesis, we would expect certain things and those things are what we get.

The resurrection hypothesis, of course, would perform well here. But this is where Evans' hypothesis finds itself in a lot of trouble. For its very odd that if the earliest Christians intended to communicate that Jesus' resurrection was a political myth, that no one appeared to either teach it or to interpret it in this manner.

Neither Paul nor the other apostles nor their critics nor the Christians who responded to them. And the early Christians flat out denied they were telling myths. Evans' hypothesis certainly appears to be a forcing of the facts to fit his hypothesis, and the extent data is not what we would expect given the truth of Evans' hypothesis.

Accordingly, Evans' hypothesis is inferior to the resurrection hypothesis in its explanatory power. The third criterion is less ad hoc. Ad hoc is a Latin term meaning for this.

A hypothesis is ad hoc when one of its elements was created in order to accommodate certain data. Ad hoc elements are often easily spotted since they appear in the form of non-evidence assumptions or excessive speculation. Historians object when a hypothesis seems designed in order to accommodate data that appear to disconfirm it.

Evans' hypothesis is very ad hoc since it's largely based on modern mythologizing and seeks to address reports that speak of Jesus' miracles in resurrection in historical terms, reports that would disconfirm Evans' hypothesis. In contrast, there's nothing ad hoc about the resurrection hypothesis. Our fourth and final criterion is plausibility.

Plausibility is the degree to which a hypothesis is compatible with our relevant background knowledge. In our case at hand, background knowledge certainly includes myth being created as a foundation for nations, such as you have these used for Greece and you have Romulus for Rome. But these myths were usually for many, many not centuries after the founding of the nation.

Now, I'm not claiming that myth cannot rise quickly. We know that it can and it does rise quickly. However, I'm unaware of any instances in antiquity where myth was created to the extent Evans suggests to form a religious movement while the eyewitnesses were still alive.

That's not to say it couldn't have happened. There's a first time for many things, but the plausibility factor is not good. What about the plausibility of the resurrection hypothesis? Well, this is admittedly difficult to assess.

One would have to know whether God would want to raise Jesus. However, when we consider the occurrence of miracles, such as those I provided in my first paper, Jesus' performance of deeds that astonished crowds and that both he and his followers regarded as divine miracles and exorcisms, Jesus' claim about himself to be God's eschatological agent and his predictions pertaining to his imminent death and resurrection, we certainly have a context in which we might expect a God to act. This provides us with a degree of plausibility.

So how do these hypotheses compare in our final analysis? The resurrection hypothesis is clearly superior to Evans in its explanatory scope, explanatory power, and it's less ad hoc. I don't think either hypothesis can claim an upper hand in possessing a greater degree of plausibility. In fact, it may even be the case that when it comes to the resurrection hypothesis, it's inscrutable.

How would we know ahead of time whether God would want to raise Jesus, even if we grant His existence? So it's just difficult to assess with the resurrection hypothesis. So the resurrection hypothesis is clearly superior to Evans' hypothesis and its ability to fulfill the criteria for the best explanation. This is historical method in action.

The benefit of this approach is that it cuts through rhetoric and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of hypotheses and having performed similar analyses with all of the major natural hypotheses being proposed today by scholars, I can say that the resurrection hypothesis comes out on top every time. Accordingly, Jesus' resurrection probably occurred. Thanks, I'll take some questions.

So I'm curious what you'd say to this. So instead of taking the early Christians to be putting forward the resurrection as some sort of myth, we know that there are lots of cases where people and cults just convince themselves of things. So I don't know that much about the Jones-Tam people, but let's just suppose that they believe Jim Jones was God or something.

I take it they would sincerely believe this, they would act in accordance with this. You might even put out propaganda. Why isn't that have equal, if not more explanatory power and scope, it seems pretty non ad hoc.

It seems pretty plausible given that we see lots of other cults doing this sort of thing. Well, they're not claiming that Jim Jones rose from the dead or anything like that. So there are some differences here.

It's what we're trying to establish. I mean, there's no question that followers of other religions and worldviews, you know, die for their causes. Communists died for their cause.

Muslim terrorists are dying for their cause. Christians are being martyred around the world at a greater rate than ever in the history of the Church, or at least the numbers. So these things are happening, but that just simply proves that they had sincere beliefs in their cause.

It doesn't prove that their beliefs are true. You know, we got to look at all the evidence here. I mean, a Christian dying for their faith today just proves that Christian believed it to be true.

The disciples are saying they actually saw Jesus. They're also claiming they saw him in group settings, and group hallucinations are extremely rare, if not impossible. Plus, you got Paul.

So you're considering all these things together. You can come up with alternate explanations for some of these different things, but you got to consider them all together. So it's kind of like saying, let's say it's a year from now, okay? And I hear Bill Craig's coming next year, and who's he going to be talking with? Okay, so there'll be four of them talking.

And let's suppose while you're talking, maybe some of you are coming back and you're here. And you say, well, I remember when that knucklehead Lacona was here last year. And, you know, he and Evan had some dialogue for the entire day, and someone says, I didn't know Lacona and fails had a dialogue last year.

I mean, why should I believe you on that? Well, we've got three bits of evidence here. In fact, we got Mike's boarding pass from Atlanta to St. Paul for the day before, so that's evidence. We've got a graduate assistant from Evan saying that he was filling in for Evan for several days while he went out of town.

And then we got me who was an eyewitness, and I said, I was there. I attended it. You know, maybe it's Mike saying, I attended it.

And say, well, yeah, but eyewitnesses, they're not always reliable. And that boarding pass that Mike had, maybe he was coming to St. Paul to visit his friend, friends Ed and Shelly Komojevsky. And maybe Evan's grad student, he was filling in, but Evan went somewhere else.

And doesn't mean he was in St. Paul. Well, you know, you have to look at all three of these together, and you say, together the best explanation is that Mike and Evan had a dialogue on the 24th of June of last year. And that's what you got to do with the resurrection hypothesis.

You take into consideration these earliest Christians were claiming that Jesus rose and had appeared to them. These experiences occurred in individual and in group settings and even a skeptic. And they were concluding that Jesus was raised physically bodily from the dead.

So it's when you put all those together, resurrection hypothesis becomes the most probable explanation by far. You'd have to do that with the Johnstown thing. What's the hypothesis that the religion was correct? What evidence do we have that the religion was correct? So I was thinking in this sort of case, the evidence we have is kind of being recorded by people, I don't know how many years after the fact, 20 or 30.

On the case of Paul, yeah, it's a case of Paul. It's probably within 25 years, but of course the others are still alive at this point. And this is the message that we can certify.

This is what the disciples were preaching. And it goes back to them. Sure.

Even though it's 25 years later, it's like me reporting that I went to Baltimore Orioles versus the Cleveland Indians. So on July 9th, 1971, it's my first baseball game. I'm still alive.

I still remember that. I may not remember what I had for breakfast a week ago, but I do remember my first kiss. I do remember the first baseball game I went to.

The disciples may not have remembered what they had for dinner a month prior, but you would remember if you saw your friend rise from the debt. Thanks very much. I had a comment or a question about whether the early Christians could have developed this myth just as a political solution.

I understand where you're coming from, but it seems to me that if someone is developing this myth, they need to portray it as truth. If they admit that it's a myth, it loses a lot of its rhetorical force. So I'm thinking of, like, nowadays we have lots of debunking going on.

If I were to hear that something like the Rosa Parks story was actually a myth, that wouldn't be particularly surprising. But using it as true, portraying it as true, makes it a lot more powerful. I mean, someone couldn't just say, look, we should fight for equality because someone like Rosa Parks could have done something like refuse to sit at the back of the bus.

It's much more powerful if you see it. Look what she did. This is what all of us can do.

So even if the early Christians were trying to create this myth, wouldn't they try to portray it as true? You would try to portray it as true, sure. But when it comes to the resurrection, why would you say, if you're Paul, and he's saying, why do I fight the wild-beasted Ephesus if the dead aren't going to be raised? Look, I can know that the dead I am going to have eternal life. I can know that this life isn't where it's all at.

I'm not putting my hope in this life. My hope is in the afterlife. It was a rough life back then.

I've heard some Christians say, even if Christianity wasn't true, it would still be worth living. Or if there was no afterlife, it would still be worth living because God is so good and blesses us. I don't buy that.

Even if God didn't give us an afterlife, that might work for us in this country. But what about other countries? You want to be a Christian in Saudi Arabia, if there's no hope of an afterlife? These guys lived a very difficult life. They endured torture and imprisonment and amazing hardships that would be inconceivable for us today.

And they did this for a political myth. I know some people are willing to do that for their cause. But are you really going to hang everything and say, hey, this life is not worth living.

Christian life is not worth living if there's no afterlife. And if Jesus wasn't raised from the dead, there's no afterlife for us. So let's eat and drink for tomorrow.

We die. Get all the ice cream you can get today. Do what you want today because this is the only time that you're going to have to enjoy yourself.

But Christ was raised. Therefore, we will have an afterlife. And so the Christian life is worth living.

This is the kind of argument that would be saying. How could you say it in any clearer terms? This is true. I really mean it.

I mean, you could always come back and say, well, that's what you would say, though, if it was political myth. So, but this is the kind of stuff that we would really expect for them to be pushing this point and to take a look. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless.

Eat and drink today. Get it all today. There's no tomorrow.

It's pretty clear that they mean business with this. Yeah. So my question is about the nature and significance of the project where the project is looking at the historical evidence and then trying to figure out which hypothesis is probable on the historical evidence.

And I mean, I have to admit it is interesting in some sense because I'm sitting here listening to you and it's interesting. So, I mean, there's something interesting about it. But I'm trying to understand what the epistemological takeaway should be.

And here's what seems odd about it. What you're arguing is that given a certain set of evidence, this hypothesis of the resurrection is more probable than other hypothesis on that evidence. And what's odd about that is neither side of the debate thinks that that's all the evidence, right? So, what's driving the naturalist position is not just the historical evidence.

It's this whole research program and a whole worldview that is supposed to be, you know, the evidential basis of it is just far, far broader than the historical evidence. And on the other side, I would think that what's driving the Christian belief is not just this historical evidence, but all sorts of evidence like the experience of God in one's lives, the experience of other Christians and their testimony about their own lives and the effects of religious belief on their own lives, et cetera. So, I'm sort of wondering out loud, what's the significance that a hypothesis is probable on a restricted set of evidence when nobody thinks that's the evidence that they're going on? Nobody on either side of the debate.

And I, that sounds like you said... I would say nobody would do that. I mean, you've got people like Pinkis Lapita was a Jewish scholar. He was not a Christian.

And he said he didn't think Jesus rose from the dead, but after doing his investigation, he concluded he did rise from the dead. He didn't take Jesus as his Messiah. He thought Jesus was the savior for the Gentiles, and the Jews would still wait for Messiah.

But there have been people who have, and I know people who have come to faith because they've become Christians because they saw the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, couldn't discount it in a reasonable manner, and became Christians as a result. So, for some, they are looking at that, at the evidence. Now, in terms of the worldviews, I agree with you.

There is more if we look at worldviews. Now, if you want to take the naturalist worldview, which I don't think is a reasonable worldview. I mean, I guess it's reasonable.

I wouldn't say it's unreasonable, but I don't think that's where the evidence sits. I think miracles occur, as I argued in my first paper. Miracles do occur.

We live in a theistic reality. So, I guess if you want to stay with an atheism or a kind of reality that says the supernatural doesn't occur, you got to ignore all the testimony of the supernatural that's gone out there. And I think you just, as I've mentioned in the other one, you're allowing your worldview to guide your historical investigation, and that has some dangers that are made.

What I tried to do with this is say, all right, worldview does impact, and historians are the first to admit this, philosophers of history, that is, to say that worldview or one's horizon is going to impact your historical investigation. And you've got to do your best to manage that horizon if you're going to do an investigation with integrity. So, I laid out that those of you who have read my book, Six Different Steps to Take.

One could take in order to manage that bias. You never get to a point where it's totally bias-free. And it's up to the person, the individual, on how unbiased they really are serious about being.

But if they can be unbiased, then at least put their desired outcome on the shelf while they progress in their historical investigation. Like for me, I wanted to confirm Jesus' resurrection, but I wanted truth more than anything else, to be honest with you. And it's like if the historical investigation did not support the resurrection of Jesus, if it disproved it, I was getting ready to get rid of my faith, jettison my faith, if the resurrection hypothesis was disproved.

Or if another hypothesis was far more probable than the resurrection hypothesis. Maybe it would come to a point where I couldn't really confirm the resurrection hypothesis. It couldn't be confirmed or disconfirmed, and then it's just faith.

And I'm guided by my worldview there. But I just wanted to see if I really allowed myself to be guided, just purely by a historical method. What would it yield for me? That's interesting.

That's not the answer I expected. That last answer about how personally that would have been moving to you one way or another. Evidently it would have been moving you off your belief.

Because I would have thought that this would, you would just approach this as one part of the evidence you have for your belief. And you might say, okay, well maybe the evidence tips the other way. Maybe this historical evidence tips the other way.

But that doesn't give me reason to get off my belief given the total evidence. I mean similar to some ways that the Christians approach the problem of evil. They think that they have to make it out.

That the probability of God on evil is somehow greater than not. Or at least even or whatever. But that's to treat the evidence of evil as the total evidence that they've got.

So it's just sort of an odd thing going on if you're treating this as what should I believe as opposed to something else? Like what's the relationship between this proposition to this evidence? But then if that's the question then again, like what's the significance? What's the broader significance? I mean I'm framing my question like devil's advocate. Like I think, oh there is no significance. That's not how I mean it to come across.

I'm just trying to understand, you know, how you understand your own project. I suppose people would treat, individuals would treat it differently. I would say for me, when I went into my project of research for my doctorate work, I was like you said.

I was doing it to confirm the resurrection. And then as I started reading philosophers of history and professional historians outside the community of biblical scholars, they said that really hurts your investigation. To have that kind of a bias, that's what you're setting out to do.

And they said that's what most historians do anyway, but that's what they do. Well, for myself, as my wife can tell you, one of my idiosyncrasies is I second guess everything. Stupid little things.

Ridiculous little things. And it plagues me in my, it's just an idiosyncrasy in my life. And if it's going to plague me on little things, it's going to plague me on something as important as my worldview.

And so I tend to be a doubter. I tend to be someone. I mean, I go through periods of doubt in my Christian faith.

Very honestly. I don't think it's because of a lack of evidence. It's like, you know, why don't I get this thing wrong? And it's just my personality with that.

So I did start off in it trying to prove, with the objective of proving the resurrection. And about a year into my five and a half year project with that, I was like, no, I can't do this. I've really got to shelve that desire and seek this honestly.

And let me see if this can put my doubts to rest one way or the other. And if it points away from Christianity, I'm out of this thing. Because for me, the eternal destiny of my soul is the most important thing in my life.

And Christianity isn't true. I want to know truth. And so I don't tell this to a lot of people, but when I was doing my doctoral work, I'd be out praying because I've still convinced God existed.

And I'd say, God, Christianity's true. I am completely open. Show me.

And I will leave. You know, and that's one of the reason I wanted to debate some of the leading people out there, like a barter man and a lane pegas and this, because they're smarter than me. They'd see things that I wouldn't see.

And I would pray before a debate and say, hey, if I'm wrong, I don't care if you have to humiliate me. Just do it so I can see truth and follow truth. And at that point, I was leading apologetics for the Southern Baptist Convention.

And hardly anyone knew I was praying these kind of things. My wife and Bill Craig and Gary Habermas and my doctoral supervisor and maybe one or two other people has about it. But I was really after truth.

So that's why I was trying to do that with history. And to bracket my worldview and go with where I thought the evidence pointed. I've got press and then you see it.

I'm not sure we get all three of these. Two questions. First one, when you say given these historical, these points of historical data, we can know with historical certainty that Jesus resurrected from the dead.

So my first question is, what do you mean by historical certainty? Do you mean something like we couldn't possibly acquire any other evidence via historical means that would make it would disconfirm it or make it improbable? And the second question is about whether you're skeptical enough and consistency in this relation. So multiple people have at the same time seen Marian apparitions have testified to that. Mormons claim that Joseph Smith got golden tablets and several people have witnessed this.

They've all written it down. And how clear could they be then to sign a statement altogether saying that they'd all seen this sort of thing? Do you know with historical certainty that that stuff happened to? And given that evidence, and what do you do in those kinds of cases that you can't do in this kind of case? Good questions. In my book, I've got a spectrum of historical certainty.

Like in the middle is indeterminate. And then you have, I forgot what I have, but you have increasing uncertainty. And then you have like on the positive side, more probable than not probable.

And then, you know, I don't know. You just keep going up and then you got certainty. And it's like absolute certainty when it comes to historical investigation.

It's just off the table. You can't have it. Because like I said, you can't get into a time machine and go past to verify it.

Of course, again, like I said, archaeologists, geologists, evolutionary biologists during the same dilemma. So we go by certainty. Now, where is the point where you say historical certainty? Well, historians use different terms.

But it's usually maybe like when you get to a little, just a step above, more probable than not. Is kind of what I found is where most historians would place it. More probable than not.

How do you determine something is more probable than not? So I feel familiar for the best explanation in a manner that's superior to competing hypotheses, but does so by a pretty significant margin. If you do that, then, you can get pretty high up on that, on that spectrum. So when it comes to Marion apparitions and Joseph Smith and the Golden Tablets.

So the major Marion apparitions would be Lords, medjugore, and F cahamite, right? Those would be the three big ones. And even, huh? Guadalupe. So it's a fourth one.

All right. And to my knowledge, at least as of a few years ago, five years ago, the Catholic Church at that point had not authenticated any of these and said, you know, these were actual Marian apparitions. So, and they have some strict criteria before doing these things.

Now, is that right? As a divine appearance, or as an actual appearance of Mary, because that's what I'm referring to. Okay. Well, with those, I mean, for me, I haven't studied them enough to know with these.

I'm not Catholic in my theology, so I'm open to that being Mary. I think that it's certainly a supernatural appearance to me from what I've read about these things. It seems to be a supernatural occurrence.

That's something that occurred there. Can we confirm it was Mary? That seems a little more difficult. In the case of Joseph Smith, I think a naturalistic explanation is e readily at hand because, boy, there's a lot there.

But when you're looking at the witnesses of a golden plates, how did they witness them? And the letter we have from a governor from back then who heard the story from these witnesses and how it occurred was that they kept asking Smith, show us these plates, show us these plates. And finally, Smith says, all right, we'll do it. And they go on this building.

And he has one of these top hats like an Abe Lincoln hat. And he tells them one by one to go up there and to look in and God will show and reveal the plates to them. And so they look into it and they come back and they all say, you know, we didn't see anything.

And Smith says, Oh, ye of little faith, you know, try again. They go up, Oh, okay, I see them. And then later on, 11 of those witnesses of those 11 witnesses, eight of them left Mormonism.

And the only three that remain were part of Smith's family. So I think there's a readily a naturalistic explanation at hand for that. It's a little difficult, you know, with the Marian apparitions.

But I don't doubt that those Marian apparitions at Lord's Fatimod Medigore. And Guadalupe occurred. I just don't know what they were.

Now, I'm not convinced by some things like I remember someone sent me a picture from Florida where this was probably 10 years ago, maybe a little longer where they said some people were down there and you looked at one of the buildings that had the glass that's like all glass, but it's like mirrors and it had like a formation of what could be the Virgin Mary. They said, what do you think of this? I said, I think it's an interesting reflection. That's all it is.

Or, you know, when they saw a grilled cheese sandwich with the thing, you know, you want to pay money for that? I don't think that's a Marian apparition there. But some of the things that have more supernatural kind of elements to it, I'm open to those. 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. This has been the Risen Jesus Podcast, a ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona.