Summary of the Licona / Ehrman 2009 debate on the Resurrection

Dr. Bart Ehrman and Dr. Michael Licona had an interesting debate in 2009 on the topic "Can Historians Prove Jesus Rose from the Dead?" Here's a link to the video and some comments.

Dr. Ehrman's channel / Dr. Licona's channel

Since they called each other "Bart" and "Mike", I'll take liberties and do the same.

In this debate, Mike presented 3 Historical "Facts", and then used 4 accepted methods of Historical Analysis to propose that the most reasonable, historical conclusion to draw from these facts is that Jesus, in fact, was Resurrected.

From there, Bart counters that the Resurrection can not be established as a "historical fact" by definition, because such an event would never produce the kind of criteria required for a historian to make any definite claims one way or another.

And the debate goes back and forth from there, with many interesting twists and turns that I really enjoyed actually, but naturally neither party managed to convince the other, nor in my view clearly "win" the debate. But let's look at some of the arguments in more detail.

Mike presents these 3 facts:

• It is commonly accepted by serious scholars that Jesus lived and was Crucified
• It is commonly accepted that the apostles believe Jesus appeared to them
• It is commonly accepted that Paul believed Jesus appeared to him

Mike claims that even Bart accepts and would not dispute these facts.

Mike proposes a couple of theories that would account for these facts, and then runs them each past a 4-way historical test. The first theory is that Jesus was crucified, and then both Paul and the Apostles hallucinated seeing him afterwards. The second theory is that Jesus was crucified, and then actually Resurrected as the Bible claims.

These theories are each run through the test of do they have:

• Explanatory Scope (account for all the facts)
• Explanatory Power (accounts for them well / with force)
• Plausibility
• Less ad hoc (does not use a lot of non-evidenced assumptions)

Mike contends that the Hallucination hypothesis fails the first 3 tests: it doesn't account for all the facts (the "group" hallucination of the Apostles?), it doesn't account for them well (the timing and conditions in which hallucinations tend to occur doesn't at all match Paul's experience), and it's not very plausible (again, the "group hallucination" thing). Happily it doesn't make a lot of random non-evidenced assumptions, so it passes on that count. 

Mike contrasts this with the Resurrection hypothesis, which matches all the facts, accounts for them with force, it's at least not implausible (there is no proof that resurrection can't happen), and again, is based on the available historical evidence and not mere speculation. That is, while it may be a wild conclusion to the skeptic, the Resurrection hypothesis does have much stronger "historical conclusion" power than the other leading hypothesis.

Bart at first comes back with this interesting position: it is in fact impossible by definition for a miracle to be established as "historical" fact, because History is about establishing what Probably happened, and Miracles are Improbable. So it's a logical impossibility to make this a historical conversation - case closed, end of story. But beyond that, there are several problems with this whole affair. The Gospels are not really as reliable as you think they are as historical sources, and Bart gives several statements on how they contradict in many places, and how he thinks they probably developed over time, including challenging the traditional authorship claims.

Mike points out that despite Bart's objections to the Gospels as reliable historical literature, this does nothing to Mike's argument since Bart still agrees to the 3 facts and the 4 tests.

Bart of course does not agree to the 3 facts. The first fact is irrelevant to the discussion since the method of Jesus death does not factor into historians view of whether he was resurrected. And fact 3 is really the same as fact 2 - the fact that Paul saw Jesus is a subset example of "people believing they saw Jesus after he died". So actually the only fact to be accounted for is that of people claiming to see Jesus after he died. Interestingly, Bart does not assert that these people did not make these claims; he believes they probably did. He just doesn't find the Resurrection to be a compelling explanation, and certainly not a historically verifiable one, since miracles cannot be historically verified. In fact, to claim the Resurrection, you must assume there is a God to do the resurrecting, so you've adopted a theological position to even propose the hypothesis, and now you're doing Theology, not History. Of course to refuse to assume a God in any historical circumstance is also a theological position, but I think Bart would assert that true historians are trying to establish what facts can be established, and at the point that God must be introduced to move forward, they stop claiming to be doing pure history.  Bart also questions the third fact on this note - how did Paul, never having met Christ, know that it was Jesus? [I'm not sure why Bart asks this - Acts 9 lays out that Paul asked the talking light on the road "Who are you, lord?" and the voice responded "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting."]

Bart throws out a couple of other hypotheses. One is the "twin" hypotheses based on the latter writings of a second century Christian sect, which he thinks is a little crazy, but in his mind is at least as plausible as bodily resurrection. And then also he posits his own version of the hallucination theory, where he insists that modern people in fact do experience group visions, such as sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary, etc. And he pointed out that the disciples and Jesus saw Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Olives, without assuming they had been resurrected. [Side note: this is where I really enjoy listening to Bart Ehrman. Being a former evangelical, he's very familiar with scripture, and is able to pull out examples from here and there and shine a new light on them.] Now Bart does not believe that they really are seeing Mary in these group visions, but he does seem to accept as scientific fact that group visions are possible.

Mike insists that actually God is not necessarily required for his argument, although he of course believes that to be a pretty good fit. And he agrees that the "twin theory" is pretty implausible and not taken seriously by historians due to how late the "twin literature" showed up on the scene. 

In concluding remarks, Mike states that he feels Bart hasn't really done much to take down his argument, despite some debate over whether all the facts are "necessary" for the argument (in Mike's mind they are), and he doesn't feel Bart has proposed another hypothesis that does nearly as good a job on the historical tests as the Resurrection hypothesis. In fact, what we see is mostly what we would expect to see if the Resurrection actually occurred. Bart conversely feels again that we are doing theology here, not history, which is fine, but we should be honest about it. And that as soon as we want to claim we are doing history, we should be very clear about just how fuzzy our sources are here, as our confidence in them certainly should impact our confidence in our conclusions.

Thoughts

I think Mike agrees that the Gospels can feel a little squishy in places, and he addresses this in other works. But he wasn't trying to build his argument on the Gospels, he was trying to build it on 3 commonly accepted facts, all of which point to a Resurrection. Jesus died on the cross like he said he would (and as Old Testament scripture hints at), his disciples saw him alive again as a group, friends and foes alike [wait, what foes who saw him?], and then Paul saw him, a man who would not have been grieving Jesus and would not have cause to hallucinate about him.

I think the weakest points in Bart's counter were that he doesn't really deal with Paul's vision very squarely, and that he has to lean on the, to my mind at least, "uncommon" assertion that group visions / group hallucinations are possible, but they don't represent any greater reality. Mike agrees that group visions may be happening today, but just uses it as further proof that something spiritually interesting is going on that skeptics should pay attention to.

I think the weakest points in Mike's argument are that they would only have any affect on a very logical, unemotional person who happened to have not given the Resurrection much thought up to now. Such a person might be convinced that, hey, a sound historical approach actually supports this conclusion. And there is some comfort in having a smart guy lay out that our Christian beliefs are not completely wacko as many secularists insist. So this is a helpful stepping stone. But if you have any emotional resistance to God and religious thinking at all, I think you would happily side with Bart on this one and move on.

Favorite quote:

I really enjoy contrarian Bart Ehrman quotes honestly, but in this match my favorite quote is from Mike, at the end of a miracle story that starts at the 50:27 mark , where he states 

"The uniform testimony of history is NOT that miracles don't occur. We have to cast our net outside of a skeptical subculture and when we do that to the more [/broader] ocean of human experience, we find that miracle claims start to come in quite frequently."

Mike Licona

The miracle story he quotes is really interesting and inspiring. 

One of the things that troubles me about modern Science is the quickness with which radical data points are discarded out of hand as unreasonable. It's very odd, because if you want to encounter unreasonable data points, go and really try to wrap your head around General Relativity and how the Speed of Light is constant, but Time is not. So for skeptical scientists to ignore some of the datum that life presents seems to me both unscientific and a little cowardly.

Anyway, fun debate to listen to and digest.