Not Just a Story: A Defense of the Resurrection
Part 1
By Mykhailo Abakumov
What really happened to Jesus Christ, the founder of the world’s largest religion? For over two thousand years, millions of people worldwide have proclaimed, “Christ is risen!” But what lies behind this declaration? The well-known atheist and former Christian Dan Barker explains his position: “I no longer believe it... the Jesus of history is not the Jesus of the New Testament. Some scholars believe the whole story is a myth, and others feel it is a legend based on some simple core facts that grew over time.”[1]
So is it a legend, a deception, or a historical fact? And how can we find an answer to this question? If Jesus truly rose from the dead, it would mean that His message was true, pointing to the existence of a just God, our sinfulness, and our need for forgiveness. It is no surprise, then, that debates continue to rage among scholars on this issue. These debates can be distilled into another question: Can historians establish the truth of a miracle?
The central claim of skeptics such as Barker is that the facts do not support the event of the Resurrection, and that naturalistic explanations are more plausible. But is that really the case? I will show that this claim is far from the fact and demonstrate why the alternative explanations for the resurrection of Jesus fail for historical, philosophical, and scientific reasons.
How do we know anything about the past?
To understand why the resurrection is the best explanation for the historical data, we first need to understand how historians work to uncover the truth about the past. They use two key tools: the historical method and inference to the best explanation.
Historical method in a nutshell
To investigate past events, historians employ the historical method, which consists of a number of criteria. Of course, historical events are not empirically verifiable, but through certain reasonable analyses, we can arrive at a rational conclusion about events in history.
New Testament experts Gary Habermas and Michael Licona summarize the main criteria for establishing historical facts as follows:
1. Testimony attested to by multiple independent witnesses is usually considered stronger than the testimony of one witness.
2. Affirmation by a neutral or hostile source is usually considered stronger than affirmation from a friendly source, since it is not biased in favor of the person or position.
3. People usually do not make up details regarding a story that would tend to weaken their position.
4. Eyewitness testimony is usually considered stronger than testimony heard from a second- or third-hand source.
5. An early testimony from very close to the event in question is usually considered more reliable than one written down years after the event.[2]
These five criteria are based on common sense and are already applied in our everyday lives. For example, if participants in a car accident admit in their testimony that they were drunk while driving, this increases the credibility of their account, as people are unlikely to invent details that undermine their position. Later, we will apply these criteria to establish the facts about what happened with the historical Jesus.
How inference to the best explanation works
Having first established the facts, historians can move to the second step and ask what best explains all these facts. This is where various alternative hypotheses come into play, attempting to tie all the available data together. To evaluate which hypothesis is the most plausible, historians use a second tool, which is called inference to the best explanation.
When determining the best explanation for the facts, historians also rely on common-sense criteria that we intuitively apply in our daily lives. For instance, we don’t try to explain a crime by invoking ten perpetrators if the data can be equally well explained by one. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes the main criteria historians use as follows:
1. The best explanation will have greater explanatory scope than other explanations. That is, it can account for more phenomena—it explains more of what we see.
2. The best explanation will have greater explanatory power than other explanations. That is, the theory makes what we see more likely—it fits the evidence better.
3. The best explanation will be more plausible than other explanations. That is, it will fit better with background beliefs (what we already know about the world and the beliefs of people at the time the event occurred).
4. The best explanation will be less contrived than other explanations. That is, it will not require as many ad hoc hypotheses. (We will not need to accept additional ideas to justify our hypothesis.)
5. The best explanation will be disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs than other explanations. That is, it won’t conflict with as many accepted beliefs.
6. The best explanation will meet conditions 1–5 so much better than the others that there’s little chance that one of the other explanations will do better in meeting these conditions.[3]
In a later installment, I will demonstrate how this works in practice when analyzing various alternative explanations for the resurrection. In part two, we’ll examine the Easter events themselves.
Notes
[1] Dan Barker, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 2008), chap. 16.
[2] Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2004), 40.
[3] William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010), 244-245.
— Mykhailo Abakumov is a lecturer in Systematic Apologetics and Christian Ethics at Tavriski Christian Institute. He is a graduate of the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute of Religious Studies in Kyiv and a graduate student in Christian Apologetics at Houston Christian University. He serves as the Director of the Reasonable Faith Chapter in Ukraine and is an international speaker defending the Christian faith across Eastern Europe.
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Great beginning article to a most important subject. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, our faith is futile and we are still in our sins. That's the challenge Paul wrote the Corinthians that grabbed my attention as an atheist. I look forward to the next part of this article. Thanks!