Habermas now says that he never made a head count and never defined "vast majority"

Just a few days ago, a correspondent brought something very surprising to my attention: In a livestream which aired about 10 months ago, Dr. Gary Habermas stated that he never gave a numerical meaning to his frequent phrase "vast majority of scholars" when referring to his minimal facts and that he never did a head count for the percentage of scholars who affirm the minimal facts. The only head count that he ever did, he said, was on how many scholars affirm the empty tomb, which he does not consider a minimal fact. Watch starting here and here.

The combination of these statements makes little sense, since Habermas has always said that the reason he doesn't consider the empty tomb to be a minimal fact is that it doesn't quite meet the very high level of scholarly acceptance required for the minimal facts. This reason for not calling the empty tomb a minimal fact entails that he has in mind a higher minimal degree of acceptance that has to be met in order for something to be called a minimal fact. So his reasoning about the empty tomb is incompatible with his having (as he says in the livestream) no minimum scholarly consensus requirement in mind for calling something a minimal fact. In his recent book, a book that came out in the same year that he gave this livestream with Licona, Habermas says,

[L]ess stringency is sometimes what has separated the two lists, especially in being less severe in achieving such high percentages of scholarly agreement than the near-unanimous requirements for the events in the shorter list. Habermas, Gary R. On the Resurrection, Volume 1: Evidences (p. 93). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

He says something almost verbatim the same on pp. 22-23 in 2012, here.

Moreover, how could he know that the things he does consider minimal facts are affirmed by the "vast majority" of scholars but that the empty tomb doesn't meet that higher "vast" requirement if he didn't do at least some kind of head count on both? Since he has repeatedly said, and apparently acknowledges in the livestream that he has said, that the empty tomb is affirmed by 75% to 80% of scholars, a mere guesstimate or gestalt impression wouldn't distinguish this from something still higher, required for minimal fact status. (For this percent on the empty tomb, see p. 462, Kindle location 12907, of his recent volume 1 on the resurrection. See also Dr. Licona's reference to Habermas's estimates on the empty tomb in his 2010 book on the resurrection on p. 461, footnote 606.) If you were to pour out hundreds of marbles on a table and got the mere impression that a very high majority of them were white, this broad impression wouldn't give you the information to say confidently whether 80% as opposed to 90% of them were white.

To his credit, Dr. Licona pressed Dr. Habermas in the livestream, saying that they did give percentages in their jointly written book on the resurrection. Dr. Habermas dismissed this, saying laughingly that he thinks Licona wrote those parts! This is quite unfair to Dr. Licona. Regular readers will know that I have many, many disagreements and problems with Dr. Licona and his work, but in the case of their co-written resurrection book, it is certainly not true that Licona was the one asserting that virtually all scholars hold some position while Habermas was relying on Licona. If anything, it is Habermas whose unpublished, extensive scholarly survey is treated as the basis for claims about scholarly consensus in that book. See p. 74 of The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus.

That Habermas has indeed claimed a specific minimum cutoff of 90% required for a minimal fact is indubitable, making his current disclaimer not only obviously false but also truly strange. In fact (as my correspondent also pointed out to me) he makes such a claim right in his 2024 book, which was released in January of the same year in which the livestream occurred. Here is that quotation:

An oft-asked question relates to my repeated references that the “vast majority” of scholars or “virtually all” of these experts agree with this or that conclusion. Can these phrases be identified in more precise terms? In some contexts, I have already been more specific. At least when referencing the shorter list of minimal historical facts, I most frequently think in terms of a 90-something percentile head count. Of course, this only applies to those scholars who publish their views and accept the historical fact or a close approximation of it. Habermas, Gary R. On the Resurrection, Volume 1: Evidences (p. 94). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Habermas also uses the same phrase, "ninety-something percent," on p. 17 of this article from 2012. At one point in the livestream (here), Habermas faults philosopher Bob Stewart for having said that Habermas claims that his minimum for a minimal fact is 90 percent scholarly acceptance: "Bob's a great friend, but he thought I said 90. I've not said anything in print. People might get that idea but..." Yet a fairly simple search even of his recent work shows that he has indeed said this in print.

In his 2024 book he also repeatedly refers to counting scholars or tallying scholars in his research, as in the above reference to a "head count" and also here:

These very critical emphases should be kept in mind amid complaints that will no doubt arise from those who object to more conservative voices also being included in the counts. Habermas, Gary R. On the Resurrection, Volume 1: Evidences (p. 130). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It is no fault of scholarship if, even after counting many of their major writings in the tallies, the research still did not favor either the mythicists or their theories! Habermas, Gary R. On the Resurrection, Volume 1: Evidences (p. 130). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

He also describes his work as charting and cataloguing scholars and their positions:

As just mentioned, if anything, one potential fault in the opposite direction included the cataloging of many of the most radical positions in the survey here. This was the only classification of sources where many of the authors rarely had the specialized scholarly credentials or relevant peer-reviewed publications to be counted in the first place. Habermas, Gary R. On the Resurrection, Volume 1: Evidences (p. 100). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In the beginning, the study began with classifying the major publications on each of the relevant resurrection topics. This included cataloging the majority of these publications and charting the representative authors, topics, positions taken, and so on, concentrating on both well-known as well as obscure scholars alike across the entire spectrum of skeptical to liberal to moderate to conservative assessments. Habermas, Gary R. On the Resurrection, Volume 1: Evidences (p. 99). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In very similar words in 2012, Habermas explicitly relates his cataloguing work to a question--whether or not his 90-something percent claim is based merely on a guess. This means that he appears to be denying that in his own case the claim is based merely on a guess or gestalt estimate:

But are figures like these based on something between a rough guess and an estimate? Academics quite often report things such as “most scholars hold that” or “the majority view here is that.” Although similar phrases are found frequently in the literature, we may wonder how the knowledge of such conclusions were, or even could be, established....To answer this question in my case, what began as a rather modest attempt to update my resurrection bibliography grew by large increments until it developed into a full-blown attempt to catalog an overview of recent scholarship. The study dominated five straight years of my research time, as well as long intermittent stretches after that. "The Minimal Facts Approach to the Resurrection of Jesus," pp. 17-18 (emphasis added)

So it is undeniable that Habermas has defined "vast majority" as 90-something percent and has strongly implied, even using words like "counts," "head count" and "tally," that he is basing this claim on his own careful cataloguing studies, not on a mere impression. He even makes such statements in his very recent publication.

One hardly knows what to make of Habermas's very emphatic and unequivocal statements in the livestream that he never made any such claims about either a percentage or a count. Some have even suggested to me that he was somehow confused. What if that is true? This would be a major, major confusion. It's hard to think of any ordinary degree of confusion, compatible with still having the mental acuity to be an active scholar still giving public interviews and lectures, that would account for this blatant contradiction between his verbal statements and his own recently published work. Something very unfortunate is going on here, one way or another.

I've already addressed the suggestion that Habermas's disavowal doesn't represent a big change in his position, since one could make a reasonable guess based on a mere gestalt impression. But he has definitely claimed the contrary; his emphasis on his care concerning the empty tomb (not counting it as a minimal fact) only stresses all the more that he has claimed something better than a vague guess concerning the percentage of scholars affirming the minimal facts.

Habermas makes another statement in the livestream meant to excuse his position (in the livestream) that he never defined minimal fact in terms of a percentage of scholars who affirm the fact. He says that if he had chosen 85% for a minimum percentage (and presumably had given references and listed scholars, so that such claims could be checked), then perhaps someone would go and find three scholars in the list and somehow refute the claim for those three (because his interpretation was wrong? because the scholars changed their minds? Habermas doesn't specify) and then say that now it's only 84%. But this is a terrible reason for not specifying what percentage one has in mind, when the agreement of "virtually all" scholars is explicitly a criterion for the use of a proposition in one's argument. What this amounts to is saying that one doesn't want to give any specific meaning to a phrase like "vast majority" or "virtually all," while still availing oneself of the rhetorical force of such phrases, lest one's claims be refuted. Making one's claims rhetorically exciting but unfalsifiable is not supposed to be a goal of scholarship!

Second, if one wants to build legitimate fuzzy edges into one's claim so that it is still falsifiable but is not poised on a knife edge, all one has to do is to pick a lower bound that is lower than one thinks the evidence actually bears. So, for example, if Habermas thought that at least 90% of scholars in his survey do affirm some minimal fact, but he thought it would be legitimate to include a fact as a "minimal fact" even if some lower percentage affirm the proposition, then all he would have to do is to pick a lower number as the lower bound. E.g. At least 85%. When choosing a lower bound, it's easy to allow a margin of error. In fact, though he doesn't recognize this in the livestream, this was presumably why he said "90-something percentile" rather than, say, 95%. If he really believed that almost every single scholar affirms some fact, close to (say) 99%, then saying "90-something percent" tells the reader what sort of standard for scholarly consensus he is using, even if he thinks the propositions in question exceed that criterion of consensus by a margin. Of course no one is going to have any grounds to criticize him merely because agreement turns out to be even greater than a lower bound he gives.

It almost seems like at this point we're going to have to distinguish "published Habermas" from "livestream Habermas" when we attribute something to him, abandoning the assumption that statements from these two sources are consistent.

Now, given all the other problems with the MFA, this is from my perspective icing on the cake (or another straw on the camel's back, or whatever metaphor you want to use). Even if Dr. Habermas had been consistent in the livestream with his own published work, claiming to have done at least a pretty good head count and claiming, as he has before, that his minimal facts are affirmed by 90-something percent of all scholars across the ideological spectrum, these other problems would remain. These would include his own major, published errors in interpreting the scholars he claims to summarize. See here, here, and the top six videos in the playlist here. Suppose that at some later point in time a document is published under Dr. Habermas's name, purporting to give us a list of scholars that he surveyed, how he was classifying them (conservative, skeptical, etc.), and giving the positions he was attributing to them, thus purporting to document his published statistical claims. Given the extreme problems in interpretation that I have documented in his published work, the value of such a chart would be highly dubious.

So severe are these interpretive problems, so systematically inclined does Habermas seem to be to over-optimism and quote mining, so tempted to conflate what he thinks a scholar should affirm with what the scholar actually does affirm, so inclined to over-rely on the "creed" in I Cor. 15 and the supposedly exciting fact that some liberal scholars think it's early, that I have come to wonder whether he has for many years been classifying someone as "affirming group appearances" if that person merely affirms that the first few verses of I Corinthians 15 were composed very early in the history of the church. Obviously, the latter doesn't at all entail the former, and there are scholars (Bart Ehrman is one for sure) who have affirmed the latter (the earliness of the so-called "creed" in I Cor. 15) but do not grant the former (group appearance experiences). There are some comments in the livestream which appear to back up that suspicion of mine. More on that in a later post.

From my perspective, even if all of this were cleared up, there would also remain the weakness of the minimal facts case in defense of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, given the vagueness of (even a group) appearance claim in the absence of any bodily details included in the claim. That is to say, since the MFA doesn't make use of the idea that (at least) the disciples said that they had strong bodily-type experiences in their group meeting(s) with Jesus (touching him, his eating, etc.), or that the phenomenology of their group experiences included such things, the case is very weak as a defense of the bodily resurrection, as opposed to a vision or some non-bodily paranormal experience, such as NT scholar Dale Allison postulates.

But from the perspective of people who still use the MFA in their apologetics work, these recent statements by Habermas are a very big deal, because they strike at the heart of the MFA considered on its own terms. One doesn't have to pay attention to my specific epistemological concerns to know this: The claim that it has been documented that a vast majority of scholars, including skeptics (see Licona's and Habermas's co-written book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, pp. 45-46), affirm the minimal facts and the argument that group hallucinations are extremely improbable (pp. 109, 187-188 in The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus and Licona's The Resurrection of Jesus, pp. 196, footnote 203, and 493) are very important to the MFA. And MFA practitioners have always relied on Habermas's allegedly vast and careful cataloguing research to support statements about what the vast majority of scholars affirm. If, as Livestream Habermas says, he really hasn't documented that these propositions (including one or more group appearance experience) are affirmed by the vast majority of scholars, including skeptics, that cuts the legs out from under the MFA.

Moreover, even if Livestream Habermas is now extremely confused (rather than trying to gaslight) about what he has claimed in writing, it's possible that he's right about what he hasn't rigorously documented. What he has claimed in his own publications, including the most recent, is documentable. What he has actually done in his private research to back up the claims remains, as of August, 2025, somewhat obscure. (Aside, that is, from several disastrously failed interpretations of specific scholars that I've already documented, such as his claim that the Jesus Seminar acknowledges that group appearances are multiply, independently attested. This hardly inspires confidence in any of his unpublished catalogues and lists that remain behind the scenes.) Maybe he has documented some things by his survey of scholarship (say, vast scholarly support across the critical spectrum for the disciples' belief that Jesus was risen in some sense or other) but not others (say, vast scholarly support across the critical spectrum for their having a group appearance experience with intersubjective elements).

I will probably publish a post later on an interesting bit in the livestream where Dr. Licona tries to define "group appearance" in terms that include some intersubjective element and suggests that at least one group experience is a minimal fact. (In Licona's 2010 book, p. 372, at least one group appearance is stated to be historical bedrock. The gloss of some degree of intersubjectivity is an interesting indication of what he means by that.) In such a later post I'll probably also talk about the possibility (hinted at in the livestream, here) that at this point in time Licona will take upon himself the burden of claiming, based on his own research, that there is "very strong" scholarly consensus on the minimal facts, presumably including a group appearance thus defined. This despite the fact that he simultaneously says that he hasn't done the "bean counting" and that Dr. Habermas has studied more than he has of the scholarly landscape--a rather odd comment in the very context where Habermas has just disclaimed having done the "bean counting" either! The question of whether and in what sense Licona and/or Habermas wants to say, and (more important) can defend, at least one group appearance as a minimal fact commanding strong scholarly consensus deserves a post of its own.

Meanwhile, what is the way forward for practitioners of the MFA? Well, if you use the minimal facts argument and your eyes are popping (as they should be) over the news of what Habermas said in this livestream, I do have one suggestion: Consider the maximal data approach instead. Come to the dark side. We have (maximal) cookies!

Another egregious instance of misreading from Habermas's volume 1 [Updated]

In a couple of weeks I'll be starting a new video series on my Youtube channel about the really serious misreadings of skeptical scholars in Habermas's Volume 1 on the resurrection. These follow a pattern of overly optimistic readings of scholars like the participants in the Jesus Seminar, with Habermas routinely thinking incorrectly that they are conceding "amazing" amounts of ground on which a case for the resurrection can be built.

But just today I came across an example in the same volume that is so bizarre that I think it needs to be mentioned separately to show that apparently Habermas, far too often, just cannot read and interpret accurately what he is reading, whether from more liberal or more conservative scholars. In this case the scholar is David Wenham (not to be confused with his father John Wenham). David Wenham is, as far as I know, a Christian scholar. I haven't investigated his work in great detail, but I think he is at least conservative-labeled. So this is an illustration of misreading a Christian scholar.

Habermas is talking about Paul's view of his own experience on the Road to Damascus:

A few researchers have even gone as far as to argue that Paul thought of his own appearance as even “more ‘objective’ and ‘physical’” than the other resurrection appearances! Habermas, Gary R. . On the Resurrection, Volume 1: Evidences (p. 581). Kindle edition.

That seemed like such a strange thing for anyone to think or say that alarm bells immediately went off, given past experience of Habermas's interpretation problems. The two researchers cited in the footnote to this exclamation-mark-emphasized sentence are William Lane Craig, in his older book on evidence for the resurrection, and David Wenham in his book on Paul. 

Update: I thought that this was clear when I first published the post, but it's come to my attention that it apparently was not clear to some defenders of Habermas: This brief discussion of page numbers to Craig's book is an aside. It is not what I am calling "egregious." It is not a big deal objectively. It is not a big deal to me. I never intended to suggest that it was. I was merely discussing the page numbers briefly for the sake of completeness. What is egregious and hugely problematic is the interpretation of Craig and, even worse, of Wenham. It has been suggested to me that a different edition of Craig's book has a discussion of the Damascus road (which I found on p. 58 of the edition that I personally own) on p. 158. For some reason I've not been able to get archive.org to yield the right link to the 1989 edition. But suppose that it's true that the discussion of the Damascus road is on p. 158 in that edition. If so, that's great! This short aside on page numbers is not the important part of this post. The truly wild misinterpretations are the point of this post. So please, let's have no confusion about this. 

As to Craig, the page number that Habermas cites (p. 158) appeared initially to be an incorrect page number, since on p. 158 of the edition of Craig's book that I own, there is nothing about the nature of Paul's Damascus Road experience. P. 58 in my copy (which I carefully looked up precisely because the page number issue isn't the big deal, so I wanted to try as hard as possible to find out what passage of Craig's book Habermas had in mind) is plausible, but on that page Craig doesn't say anything like Habermas's summary in the main text, merely emphasizing that there were some objective aspects to the Damascus Road event, according to Acts, such as the fact that Paul's companions could see a light.

Well, that misinterpretation of Craig in this connection is bad enough. Where did Habermas get the idea that Craig thinks Paul thought that his experience on the Damascus Road was more physical than the other resurrection appearances? My initial guess as to how Habermas came to misinterpret Craig this way was that it was an epicycle on the citation and misinterpretation of Wenham--Wenham citing Craig and then Habermas also citing Craig at this point since Wenham cites him, even though neither of them is saying what Habermas thinks they are saying. Wenham cites this article  by Craig, "The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus." In that article, Craig suggests that Paul's experience might have been as physical as those portrayed in the Gospels, not more so. It appears that this article was incorporated into the 1989 edition of Craig's work on the resurrection, and perhaps Habermas was thrown by Craig's reference there to Paul's doctrine of the resurrection as possibly being more physical than that taugh in the Gospels (due to the great robustness of Paul's theological concept of the resurrection body and perhaps due to the fact that in the Gospels Jesus occasionally disappears), even though Craig is not saying that Paul took his appearance experience to have been more physical than the other appearances. (In fact, as Habermas notes elsewhere, Craig takes the Damascus Road appearance to have been semi-visionary.) 

The real jaw-dropper is the use of the snippet-quote from David Wenham. Habermas completes that snippet quote in his own words--"than the other resurrection appearances." But that isn't what Wenham says at all, in the very place from which Habermas is quoting, namely, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity, p. 369. Here is what Wenham actually says,

The fact that Paul includes himself in the list of witnesses to the resurrection does not prove that he regarded his experience as identical in character to that of the earlier witnesses. But even if he did, this does not necessarily mean that he saw the earlier experiences as visionary. The opposite inference is arguably more probable, namely, that he did not see his own experience as simply a vision but as something more ‘objective’ and ‘physical’ than the visions that he later experienced and did not categorize as resurrection appearances. (emphasis added)

This is almost unbelievable. Wenham isn't at all suggesting that Paul thought that his own experience on the road to Damascus was more physical than other resurrection appearances. Instead, he's suggesting that Paul thought that his experience on the Damascus Road was more physical than his own later visionary experiences, presumably those such as the one Paul tells about that occurred when he was in Jerusalem, in which Jesus told him to leave quickly, that he was sending him to the Gentiles (Acts 22:17-21) or the one in which he (if he is the man in question) was caught up to heaven and heard things that it is not lawful to repeat (2 Cor. 12:1-4). Wenham is pointing out that Paul doesn't consider other visionary experiences of Jesus that he had to be resurrection appearances. Hence, Wenham reasons, perhaps Paul thought that his initial experience was in some sense more bodily than those and hence more similar to the appearances to the other apostles. (Digression: That isn't my own view. I instead emphasize what Wenham says in the first sentence--that we shouldn't assume too quickly that Paul's inclusion of himself in a list of those who saw the risen Jesus means that he thought he had the very same kind of experiences that they did. I think this is a very important point.)

What Wenham is saying here is absolutely clear. All you have to do is to read the entirety of Wenham's sentence! How exactly it happened that Habermas took a snippet of that sentence, assumed he was understanding it, completely misunderstood it, and summarized it with such an incorrect ending, is just another of those mysteries.

The undeniable fact, however it came about, is that this is a wild misinterpretation of what Wenham clearly says. It's to the point now that I really don't think that we can accept any summary of any scholar that comes from Dr. Habermas that we haven't checked out for ourselves. His research, which is to a great extent a series of statements about the state of scholarship, what this person and that person thinks, etc., is just riddled with severe errors.

Advocates of the minimal facts argument need to know this fact and need to think about what to do in light of it.

Bayesian analysis, the resurrection, and a partition

This post displays up close the charts used in this Youtube video, which is a follow-up to this recent stream. In the video, which I won't try to reproduce here, I go into more detail about why it is important to use R and ~R in evaluating the evidence for the resurrection (that is, to compare the theory that the resurrection happened to the theory that it didn't happen) rather than comparing R only to some conjunction of specific, alternative explanations of the evidence (e.g., "Jesus didn't rise and the body was stolen and Peter had a hallucination and the stories in the Gospels were invented or embellished, etc.").

A partition, as I emphasize here and in the stream, is a set of mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive propositions.

I argue that comparing the explanatory power of R to that of a "best naturalistic alternative" is epistemically uninformative and obscures the real evidential situation, as would be the case if one did something similar in any non-religious historical case. The video contains various perhaps-surprising probabilistic facts such as...Two incompatible theories can both be confirmed by a body of evidence. Just because there is an odds form of Bayes' Theorem without a partition, it doesn't follow that you can calculate the actual posterior probabilities of the two theories involved without using a partition. 

Here are the images:

Odds form of Bayes' Theorem with a partition:

Bayes factor without a partition:

Chart showing routing of evidence through undesigned coincidences and traditional authorship

 Here is the chart that I used in my Youtube video released on 2/23/25.

Evidentialism and Apostasy, Round 2

Some years ago I wrote a post on whether evidentialism requires apostasy if a Christian believer discovers that he lacks good evidence for Christianity. In that post I endorsed a couple of ministries as examples of places where someone could find evidence for Christianity. At the time I didn't have as much of my own content out on the New Testament, and I also didn't know that William Lane Craig, whose ministry is Reasonable Faith, would endorse (sadly) the idea that the Gospels contain at least some fact-changing literary devices. So, although Reasonable Faith does have a lot of good content on the site, I would now mention that as a qualification on my endorsement of the ministry as an example of where to go to find strong content if you have doubts about Christianity. Also since then Apologetics315 (which I mentioned as another example) has been acquired by another ministry so that only one part of it (the podcast, I believe) is still under the same management.  

On the plus side, the ministry TalkAboutDoubts has been launched since then, run by Jonathan McLatchie, and geared specifically to those who are either good-faith non-Christians looking for answers or Christians troubled by doubts. TAD is strongly evidentialist. Here is my playlist on evidentialism on my Youtube channel.

In the last few days I've had a discussion of evidentialism and the "internal witness of the Holy Spirit" on social media, and I decided that some comments that I made there should be presented in blog post form as well. 

My interlocutor was endorsing the idea of an internal witness of the Holy Spirit (IWHS) that, in his words, "supersedes all rational argument." (Similarly, William Lane Craig calls the IWHS "defeater defeating.") But my interlocutor made a few stipulations: He stipulated that the IWHS may work in a way that is indistinguishable from ordinary means like prayer, Christian fellowship, taking Sacraments, etc. It may, he said, just be the holistic effect of all of those. It could be, but need not be, some sort of separate, sensible or mystical experience or feeling within the person himself. 

I said that using the phrase "supersedes all rational argument" gives the impression that even if the evidence is objectively against Christianity, the IWHS can and should just swamp that fact in the mind of the believer, and I expressed disagreement with any such view. In response he said that of course the evidence, if all is known, objectively supports Christianity but that humans are fallible and limited and that all he meant by "supersedes all rational argument" is that it would supersede the fallible and limited attempts at argument in an individual believer.

He then challenged me with the hypothetical case of a believer who previously based his Christian faith strongly on the minimal facts argument for the resurrection (MFA). I've been highly critical of the force of the MFA, contending that it has been oversold to apologists, lay Christians, and skeptics. My interlocutor asked me to envisage a case in which a believer comes to recognize the weakness of the MFA but for some reason is prevented from finding any better argument. He asked rhetorically if this person should just apostasize.

With that background, here is my lightly revised answer, which I hope will be helpful to someone.

If all you mean is that it supersedes incorrect reasoning due to fallibility and/or lack of information, then this is unhelpful to the person himself in the situation. In fact, a big emphasis upon mere human fallibility and the absence of full information can just as easily (and just as (un)reasonably) undermine Christian faith even when the person does have good information and strong arguments. The Christian with good evidential arguments is still fallible and still lacks omniscience. These facts by themselves don’t justify seeking or hoping for some non-rational guidance toward the truth, and they don’t do so any more in a Christian who has realized that his former arguments for Christianity are weak than in a person who currently thinks that his evidence is strong. In fact, I’ve actually seen people paralyzed by a reflection on mere human limitation so that they are hesitant to accept good arguments. So it’s really quite pointless, and I would say pernicious, to say that there is an IWHS that “supersedes all rational arguments” and then, upon being challenged, to punt to mere human limitation and say that’s what one means.

I definitely don’t think the person in your scenario is obligated to deconvert, at least not instantaneously. But your scenario is overly simple. For example, there are evidences for theism that a person can see for himself, even if all he can articulate self-consciously is something along the lines of, “This all had to come from somewhere,” “Where does beauty come from?” “Humans are radically different from animals, so where did human minds come from in the first place?” etc.

There are also (and this is very important) ways in which the Gospels and Acts have verisimilitude that a person can see for himself. Obviously it helps a lot if he has someone else to point that out to him (which is part of why I do it), but part of the beauty of internal evidences is that they are in principle available to anyone who has the documents in question and has commonsense knowledge about what truthful testimony is like.

You’ve made your concrete hypothetical scenario include his knowing the minimal facts case for Jesus' resurrection and then realizing that it isn’t that strong. But that in itself provides him with some resources for his own investigation. He can also see, if he looks into it, that there is no evidence for merely vision-like experiences on the part of the twelve. So when we abandon the attempt to make much of the “consensus of New Testament scholars” on what the twelve experienced, we are (interestingly) freed up to recognize that scholarly consensus is very messed up, constructing experiences that are contrary to what we find in our closest original sources. He can recognize that a scholar like Allison (say) is reconstructing the resurrection accounts in a circular fashion by arguing that the physical parts were added later just because they are the physical parts. In other words, rejecting the MFA contains in itself some guidance toward the right maximalist path—recognizing the epistemic poverty of mainstream biblical scholarship and focusing on the sources we actually have. Recognizing that the MFA is weak, in large part because it relies on an “appearance fact” that is supposedly “granted by a large majority of scholars,” does not entail continuing to defer to “the consensus of scholarship.”

 The person in your scenario like all of us (I might add) should seek earnestly and sincerely after truth. And because truth in this area—how can a man be right with God, how can he be forgiven, how can his life have meaning, what happens after death, etc.—is so overwhelmingly important, he has an obligation not to settle for a shallow agnosticism. I think he should be able to see for himself the hollowness of Internet skeptics or even pseudo-Christians like Dale Allison.

 You and I both know of deconverts who claim that they “knew all the arguments,” and it’s baloney. They didn't know all the arguments, and they are without excuse, because they could quite readily have found better arguments, or made a better evaluation of the evidence they already had.

You can always dismiss all of these points one at a time by saying, “What if he doesn’t notice that? What if he ‘for some reason’ can’t see any of that? What if…” on and on, including the stipulation that our hypothetical person somehow never stumbles, even in an earnest and long search, upon anything like the ministry of Talk About Doubts or any of the stronger other books and content that are out there.

But remember (this is very important) that you can say something very similar about a person who has never heard of Jesus in the first place. What if a person, from childhood and on into adulthood, is isolated from knowledge of Christianity? What if no missionary comes to him? What if he has no Internet? What if he’s raised to be a suicide bomber? We can always stipulate extreme epistemic disadvantages vis a vis some truth, in this case, the truth of Christianity.

A person who never hears about Jesus and is entirely embedded in an incompatible religion is in a situation that we might call maximally epistemically disfavored. If he grows up and lives and dies without hearing the name of Christ, we have to trust in God’s justice and love as to his eternal destiny.

Or what if a person is somewhat mentally disabled and can’t understand much in the first place, even as an adult?

There is an Amazonian tribe that I have read about that did have missionaries come to them, but the missionaries were not able to make any headway, even after translating the Gospel of Luke into their language, because the tribe has no sense of history beyond (if I recall correctly) three removes back. They would ask, “Did you see these events happen? Did you know someone who saw them happen? Did you know someone who knew someone who saw them happen?” And if the answer to all of these questions was “no,” they immediately lost interest. The social and psychological block on the ability to know history any further back than that was so great that one of the missionaries lost his own faith as a result, because he couldn’t handle the fact that God would allow such ignorance to persist and block the knowledge of the truth of Christianity for an entire people group.

So there’s no reason not to apply a similar point about our own need to trust God concerning a person’s eternal destiny to a person who is much less epistemically disfavored, as in your scenario. (And in this case, as in cases of people who have never heard, we just have to admit that we don't know how God is going to work in this person's life.) This person in your scenario at least has the relevant historical documents and can to some degree evaluate them for himself, and he knows that historical inquiry is possible, Indeed, the very possibility that you raise of an intellectual deconversion implies that he is a thinky kind of person and intelligent and informed enough to realize that this is an important issue and that he needs to be earnestly seeking the truth about it, not settling for some kind of shoulder-shrugging or even bitter and gleeful agnosticism.

But understand something: You have asserted that the IWHS is (at least often, for many people) not detectible but consists in the holistic effect of things like going to church, having Christian friends, taking the sacraments, and prayer. From the epistemic perspective of our hypothetical person who has realized that his former arguments for Christianity are weak and who does not have some kind of mystical, overwhelming experience, all of these factors of social and ritual activities are mirrored in religions that are incompatible with Christianity. From an epistemic perspective, he can’t say to himself, “I have a community of faith here, I have sacramental rituals here, I have prayer practices here, therefore there is some appreciably high probability that Christianity is true.” Perhaps you would agree with that. Your IWHS, especially in its indetectible form, is going to look like something that many other religions have, indeed, that almost all other religions and their practitioners have. But in that case, if you stipulate that after trying for some time to find better evidence, that’s all he has to go on, if you insist on dismissing one after another all the points I’ve made above about his ability to discover more evidence (saying “well, suppose he can’t find that” “suppose he can’t see that” etc.), then in the long run the mere fact that he’s previously been praying, meeting with other believers, confessing sin, and so forth, doesn’t give him reason to believe that their shared beliefs are true. Nor would it be right or accurate for someone to point him to these things as if their mere existence is significant evidence in itself.

If a person in that situation does deconvert, due to his love of truth, while (I will stipulate) continuing for the rest of his life to search for the truth about eternal things, not turning into a deconvert of the usual unpleasant and dismissive type, then we have to trust that God will deal with him justly and lovingly, just as we would trust that for a person raised a Muslim, a Hindu, an animist, raised on a desert island with no religion, etc. Because all of these people are, we are stipulating, evidentially disadvantaged through no fault of their own.

In all of these cases we can hope and even pray that perhaps God would grant to the person an epistemically valuable non-natural experience—for example, some kind of highly unusual dream that suddenly starts occurring, is repeated over and over again, doesn’t have the properties of ordinary dreams, and that directs the person toward a place where he can find better information. (This, I’m told, sometimes happens to Muslims.) That would have some evidential value. Or a private experience with a publicly verifiable tie-down—e.g., "Go to this place and you will meet this person, this is his name," etc., and then you go to that place and meet the person thus described, whom you never have seen before in your life. But we don’t know whether God will do that for any of these people.

So a robust evidentialism does not imply an obligation to deconversion merely upon realizing that one’s former arguments for Christianity are not strong. A person who realizes this should reflect carefully upon what resources he still has available to him and what evidential weight they have, and he should seek to find more information. If we stipulate a case where a person who realizes that is epistemically disfavored in a whole variety of ways that block his acquiring and understanding better evidence for Christianity, even while/after earnestly seeking and pondering, then there is no point in bringing up an IWHS that works “through” his Christian religious practices. And the gerrymandered scenario thus constructed really ends up being importantly similar to more radical cases of epistemic disfavor that we might stipulate, even though in those cases the person in question wasn’t a Christian in the first place. So the idea that a believer has some special anointing or presence of the Holy Spirit isn’t epistemically relevant to the person who is actually in the situation, nor is it relevant to what we should think about what God will definitely provide for him.

(The following paragraphs were not, in this form, contained in my original comment in the social media conversation.) Our own confidence about what God will or won't do for a person depends heavily upon other theological commitments. For example, suppose that you hold to a "once saved always saved" view. Then you'll hold that if this person has really at some time accepted Jesus as Savior, God definitely will do something that will bring him to heaven, even if you don't know what that "something" is. Or to take another example, if you're opposed to any sort of at-death or after-death experience to bring people the truth, then you may hold that both the person who has never heard and an earnest person who deconverts will go to hell and that this doesn't in any way impugn the justice of God. How one thinks election works out in the real world makes a big difference, too, so Calvinism vs. Arminianism come into play. 

I am concerned here mainly to argue that the "internal witness of the Holy Spirit" that "supersedes all rational arguments" really doesn't play a helpful role here. Another point (that I had made earlier in the dialogue in question) is that if you do opt for an IWHS that is detectible as some kind of overwhelming, indescribable, defeater-defeating experience, that doesn't help either, because we know for a fact that a lot of really sincere Christians (myself included) have to say honestly that we don't have such an experience. So the idea that all Christians have this is empirically refuted.

The relationship of evidentialism to the possibility of deconversion is thus complicated. It is possible to envisage a person who is so evidentially disadvantaged that his commitment to truth understandably leads him to some type of deconversion. But it is somewhat artificial to envisage a person who is really that epistemically disadvantaged, especially if he already has access to (say) the Gospels and Acts and the Pauline epistles and is intelligent enough for intellectual deconversion to be a relevant category. If one does insist upon such a scenario, then it's doubtful that God has promised an IWHS that "supersedes all rational argument" and that should prevent that person from deconverting. Instead of postulating such an IWHS, we should trust in the justice, love, and mercy of God in this person's life, just as we would in the case of someone who had never heard of Jesus, and hold the person responsible for continuing to search for evidence about the truth of these matters of ultimate importance.

Gary Habermas's misunderstandings of C. H. Dodd, Part 4: The "concise" narratives themselves

 Apologies for the delay after the previous post in this series. I've been considering writing a professional philosophy article in the meanwhile and also doing some presentations which have taken my time and energy. This may be the last blog post in this series.

Here are all of the earlier posts in the series.

Review of Dodd's "concise" narrative concept

As mentioned before, Gary Habermas vastly overestimates the concessions made by form critic C. H. Dodd concerning Jesus' resurrection appearances. Habermas misunderstands what Dodd means by various concepts and statements, including Dodd's distinction between Type I and Type II narratives. Habermas thinks that a narrative in Luke 24 is "probably" one of Dodd's "concise" narratives when in fact Dodd says that it is not but rather the "concis" aspects are heavily overlaid with apologetic embellishment. Habermas appears not to understand that Dodd thinks that several crucial resurrection stories are complete inventions by the evangelists. Sometimes this is because Habermas doesn't realize that Dodd classifies a narrative as a "tale." In another case it is because Habermas doesn't understand that Dodd says a story is not a tale, but only because it is less literary than a "tale" as he defines it, with a less realistic character, not because it is more historical than a "tale." All of this is explored in the earlier posts.

Now we come to the resurrection narrative class that Dodd calls "concise," which Habermas takes (with somewhat more excuse) to mean "historical." As a form critic, Dodd is focused on seeing if he can find some extremely short set of verses, some snippet clipped out of what appears to be a continuous narrative, in which he thinks he can discern a brief bit of "tradition" that goes back to the early church. 

This procedure, contra Dodd, is highly subjective and unsound, and by no means should scholars imply that Dodd really has some objective way of finding such snippets of tradition buried under layers of "apologetic" accretion.

But now we must ask: When it comes at least to these snippets, does Dodd take them to be historical? Or does Dodd at least take them to be what the original disciples (who would have been the relevant witnesses of the events they contain) claimed, while sincerely believing what they claimed?

The answer, it turns out, is no. Dodd's article can be legally checked out for free for one hour at a time (renewable) from Open Library, here.

Dodd thinks even the concise bits of narrative contain apologetic add-ons

On p. 105 Dodd lays out in parallel columns the three narrative bits that he is characterizing as "concise." These are Matt. 28:8-10, Matt. 28:16-20, and John 20:19-21. I encourage you to look up those passages and notice how extremely limited they are, to begin with. For example, the first snippet from Matthew is literally only three verses, meaning that Dodd has snipped off the previous verses that are narrated continuously with it--the women coming to the tomb and seeing an angel there and receiving the angel's message. That portion is not included in Dodd's "concise narrative." As Dodd himself notes (see later in this post), even the names of two of the women who went to the tomb are not included in these three verses.

By laying out these three snippets in parallel columns, Dodd is able to explain how he thinks that they exemplify the elements that he treats as included in a polished-down "concise" bit of tradition. These are 1) the situation (disciples bereft of their Lord), 2) the initial appearance of Jesus, 3) a greeting from Jesus, 4) their recognition of Jesus, 5) a word of command from Jesus. 

The very brevity of these snippets and of these narrowly-defined elements guarantees that any lengthy conversation with Jesus is ruled out a priori by Dodd's method of analysis, even though such a lengthy conversation or discourse from Jesus (mentioned in different contexts in both John and Luke), given in a setting where multiple people are present, provides some of the best evidence that Jesus was risen bodily. As we have seen in previous posts and will see again here, this is a feature, not a bug, of Dodd's entire approach. Dodd's approach involves a priori historical distrust of anything that is of apologetic value for the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus, which guarantees that what is left after Dodd gets done snipping is not of any significant evidential value for that conclusion! See here for a recent video I did on the phenomenon of treating anything of apologetic value as epistemically suspect.

After laying the snippets out in columns showing how they treat the supposed elements of a concise narrative, Dodd makes the following important statement:

It is to be observed that the bare pattern is expanded at certain points, but in so brief a way as not to alter the character of the pericope. The expansions add nothing fresh, but emphasize what is already in the pattern, though scarcely explicit. Thus, in all three pericopae there is at least a hint of an element of doubt or fear. In Matt. 28:17 it is explicit: ‘some doubted’. In Matt. 28:10, it is implied in the words ‘Fear not’. In Jn. 20:20 nothing is said of any doubt in the minds of the disciples, but the Lord ‘showed them his hands and His side’, thus setting at rest, by proof tendered, a doubt which was there though unexpressed. (p. 105, emphasis added)

The importance of the first sentence could easily be missed. Dodd is saying that there are fictional details added even to these concise snippets. Dodd's assurance that these inventions "add nothing fresh" and do not alter the form-critical categorization of the pericope is not very reassuring once one realizes that Jesus' showing of his hands and side is, according to Dodd, such an add-on.

If there were any doubt of this interpretation, a statement later in the article makes it even clearer. In the context of this later comment, Dodd is emphasizing the absence of specific names of witnesses within the very brief snippets. He goes so far as to suggest that the names of the women stated in Matthew 28 (Mary Magdalene and the other Mary) may not have been there in the tradition originally, and brings in support of this the fact that he has separated out just a couple of verses which don't happen to include the names. What is the point of this? For Dodd, it is that these concise snippets are appealing to the audience to believe what is attested on the basis of trusting the apostolic body corporately rather than particular, named individuals.

[T]he intention in general seems to be to present the facts as attested corporately by the apostolic body (using that term in the widest sense), in the spirit of I John 1:1-3. Credence is invited, not on the testimony of a given witness, but on the authority of the apostolic tradition embodied in the Church. Where we have apologetic expansions of the narrative, they are directed towards meeting the objection that the disciples may have had insufficient grounds for making the claims they do make. (p. 128, emphasis added) 

This final sentence bears pondering. Notice Dodd's use of the phrase "apologetic expansions," which undoubtedly refers to non-factual expansions. That is always how Dodd uses the term "apologetic." This serves as a gloss on the term "expansions" in the earlier quote in the same article about these same passages. Something more is striking here: Dodd is here explicitly saying that someone who was shaping this very early tradition made up details and inserted them even into these early, concise snippets in order to convince potential believers that the disciples themselves had good reason to believe that Jesus really was risen. And apparently whoever did this, on Dodd's view, had no qualms of conscience about doing so.

Consider the fact that one of my greatest concerns about the minimal facts approach centers precisely on the question of whether or not the disciples were rational in believing that Jesus was physically risen. Here we find C. H. Dodd, one of Gary Habermas's prime exhibits of a critical scholar who supposedly makes big concessions that favor the case for the bodily resurrection, saying that the early Christians falsely inserted details even into their short, early, orally transmitted resurrection traditions in order to make potential converts think that the disciples were rational in their belief that Jesus was risen.

The implication of this, of course, is that they didn't have true details to tell that would demonstrate that the disciples were rational. Why engage in "apologetic expansion" to say that they had this or that bit of concrete evidence if you have real details that make that point? So Jesus' showing his wounds in the first appearance in John 20 and the women's grasping his feet in Matthew 28 serve this purpose. In his first discussion of these passages Dodd comments:

….[I]n [Matt.] 28.9 the fact that the women touch his feet may be held to carry an implicit assurance that there is a real Person before them. It is perhaps legitimate to say that this type of resurrection narrative carries within it, as an integral element, a suggestion that the appearance of the Lord does not bring full or immediate conviction to the beholders, who require some form of assurance: the sight of his wounds, contact with his body, or his word of authority. (p. 106) 

Taken in conjunction with the later statement about "apologetic expansions" that "are directed towards meeting the objection that the disciples may have had insufficient grounds for making the claims they do make," it is hard to doubt that Dodd is implying that the physical contact and sight of wounds, at least, are places where such "apologetic expansions" enter even the "concise" stories.

Here once again we are up against a fundamental problem with the attempt to use critical scholars' admissions to provide data that will sustain a strong resurrection apologetic. Since it is a given to such scholars that the parts of the resurrection stories that are most epistemically useful for defending the bodily resurrection (and even the apostles' own rationality in believing that proposition) are the parts that were made up, we should not expect them to allow some portion of these stories past the critical gatekeeping that will strongly support the conclusions that Christian apologists are aiming for.

A further troubling implication of Dodd on apologetic expansions

Since I have other projects and limited energy, and since I'm not sure how many people are reading, this may be the last post in this series. Therefore I'm going to include this section here so that it doesn't just get left out.

For now, one or two comments about Habermas's references to "sermon summaries in Acts," for which he cites a different piece by Dodd on apostolic preaching. (Available for check-out here.) That piece includes statements by Dodd that cause great excitement in minimalist circles, such as that (in his opinion) there are signs of an Aramaic original lying behind certain specific verses included in the speeches in Acts and that Peter's speeches in Acts represent "the kerygma of the Church at Jerusalem" (Apostolic Preaching, p. 21).

What is less well-known, however, is that in this same work Dodd strongly emphasizes that these sermons shouldn't be thought to have been spoken by Peter himself on the occasions in question. Nor is he merely referring to the idea that these may have not been verbatim records. Rather, he casts into explicit doubt the idea that it was Peter who preached these things on these recognizable occasions.

We may with some confidence take these speeches to represent, not indeed what Peter said upon this or that occasion, but the kerygma of the Church at Jerusalem at an early period. (Apostolic Preaching, p. 21, emphasis added)

In this context we should probably take special note of the exceedingly restrained, understated phrasing of Dodd's wording concerning the speech to Cornelius' household, and this despite his suggestion of an Aramaic original for a portion of this speech:

We may perhaps take it that the speech before Cornelius represents the form of kerygma used by the primitive Church in its earliest approaches to a wider public (p. 28). 

Note that again this is cast in terms of "the kerygma used by the primitive church in its earliest approaches" rather than something Peter said on a concrete occasion. 

Notice too that even though a very brief reference to the apostles eating and drinking with Jesus does occur in this speech to Cornelius (Acts 10:41), every single instance in a Gospel resurrection story where Jesus is portrayed as eating and drinking with his disciples is treated as an invention in Dodd's other work on resurrection appearances, whether we're talking about the scene in Emmaus, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, or in Jesus' first appearance in the upper room. If Jesus really ate and drank with them (or seemed to do so) in his appearances, we shouldn't be surprised to find at least one narrative of his doing so, containing more detail than the brief mention in Acts 10:41. Yet Dodd dismisses all of the eating and drinking narratives.

Along these same lines, Dodd also airily suggests (p. 20) that the entire second arrest of the apostles in Acts 5:17-40 is a "doublet" invented out of whole cloth and thus that what the apostles say to the Sanhedrin on that alleged occasion is also invention that merely doubles an earlier speech. 

None of these qualifications and assumptions of invention appear to be noted by Habermas.

But there's more: Consider the point made in the previous section--that Dodd appears to think that very early Christians thought nothing whatsoever of inventing and adding details to make it appear that the apostles were justified in believing what they preached. While it blunts the rhetorical edge of this a bit to attribute it vaguely to the early church or to anonymous formers of the earliest "concise" traditions, one wonders how much of a conscience Dodd thinks the "apostolic body" itself had.

Dodd certainly doesn't say that these inventors did not include members of the twelve, or Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. In fact, the whole question of whether there was any conscientious scruple about such wholesale invention of apologetically important details (or even of Gospel stories like Doubting Thomas) never seems to occur to Dodd. Or perhaps it would be most accurate to say that for Dodd, it's already settled: Not only the evangelists but the tradents of the early church had no such scruples. 

That being the case, does Dodd allow for the very real possibility that even the apostles themselves sometimes knowingly lied in order to add details that never happened, to convince potential converts? Dodd doesn't address this question directly, because he keeps referring to the "kerygma" and the "Jerusalem church," but I see nothing whatsoever in Dodd that pulls against this conclusion, and a great deal that fits with it. 

Here is a supreme irony: Supposedly the one thing that the minimal facts argument definitely does is to show that the vast majority of critical scholars at least admit that the apostles themselves were sincere about whatever-it-was that they told people. The big question then becomes, what do they think the apostles themselves told people?

But this deep dive into Dodd suggests that even that assumption may be insufficiently nuanced. It may be that scholars like Dodd think that the apostles were sincere about some kind of "big picture" that they told the people but had no qualms about making the evidence for a bodily resurrection look better than it was by lying additions, things that they knew were not part of what they actually experienced, like Jesus eating with them, showing his wounds, or allowing them to touch him.

If that is correct, then we have not even gained from the admissions of critical scholars the bare assumption of sincerity in everything that the disciples told people about their experience. Yes, some, perhaps many, liberal scholars will agree that they believed that Jesus was physically risen. But did the disciples themselves sometimes fictionally "improve upon" the evidence on which that conclusion was based? Even for Dodd, rather a moderate among critical scholars, that possibility is lurking in the wings.

Of course, I think such a suggestion is ludicrous. But then, I am willing to argue that the Gospels and Acts represent definitely what the earliest apostles, the people actually involved in the events, claimed. And I am willing to argue that Acts is historically reliable (not, for example, making up a "doublet" of the Apostles being arrested a second time), making clear the context in which they testified. And I'm willing to argue that multiple lines of evidence support the idea that the early church didn't think literal truth was dispensible. These include, for example, taking seriously the introductory verses of Luke and the Beloved Disciple's protestation of truthfulness in John 19:35.

Scholars like Dodd seem to call into very strong question the possibility of knowing the content of the disciples' claims. In fact, they pretty much unanimously dismiss the most important details of the Gospel resurrection stories as inventions by someone-or-other. And it now looks to me like they aren't all that convinced of the disciples' own sincerity either.

That being the case, remind me again: How does a case based solely upon what the majority of critical scholars grant supply strong evidence for the resurrection? 

Gary Habermas's Misunderstandings of C. H. Dodd, Part 3: Jesus' Appearance to his male disciples in Luke 24:36-49

Habermas on Dodd on Luke 24:36-49

This is Part 3 in a series on the misunderstandings of C. H. Dodd by Gary Habermas in Habermas's recently published volume on the resurrection. You can find parts 1 and 2 by going here here.

In those posts I've documented that Habermas radically misunderstands what Dodd says about the story of Doubting Thomas (John 20:24-29) and the stories of Jesus' appearances on the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-25) and to the group of seven male disciples by the Sea of Galilee (John 21). Habermas repeatedly implies that Dodd is granting some significant degree of historicity to stories that Dodd is in fact dehistoricizing. In this way he implies that Dodd's form criticism strengthens the case for the resurrection, which supposedly means that one can argue for the resurrection while using only things that critical scholars already accept. 

Here I'll focus on Habermas's over-optimistic understanding of Dodd's position concerning the first appearance to "the eleven" (possibly just a group title as used here) in Luke 24:36-49. Here is what Habermas says about Dodd's position on this passage:

An older but quite influential study on the appearance narratives in the Gospels was published in 1968 by the celebrated Cambridge University New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd. Distinguishing between “concise” and “circumstantial” Gospel resurrection appearances, Dodd argues that the former were “drawn directly from the oral tradition” and were shorter and more succinct, whereas other accounts involved greater freedom to give additional details. “Concise” resurrection appearance texts include Matt 28:8–10, 16–20; John 20:19–21; and probably Luke 24:36–49…. Applying Dodd’s influential study to our two texts here, Luke 24:34 is definitely an early tradition. Luke 24:36–49 is most likely considered a concise appearance account in the Gospels, at least in its core details. In the latter text, while apologetic aspects do appear, the core aspects of conciseness are also present, though modified. Habermas, On the Resurrection, p. 846, emphasis added.

As documented in a previous post, Habermas is aware that the designation of "conciseness" has some sort of relationship to historicity in Dodd, though he doesn't fully understand the ramifications of this. (For example, he thinks that if a narrative is designated "concise," that means it is fully historical, according to Dodd, which is not correct, and he thinks that if a narrative is not designated as a "tale," that means it's not entirely invented, which isn't correct either.) So Habermas's statements here that Luke 24:36-49 is "probably" or "most likely" a "concise" narrative according to Dodd give the impression that Dodd regards the narrative as probably historical, or probably mostly historical. The phrase "core details" is important, and I'll return to it shortly.

In point of fact, Dodd says that the passage is "of mixed character," and he does not list it in his examples of Class I (concise) narratives. His explanation of what he means by that "mixed" designation shows that he's calling into question the historicity of the narrative overall. Moreover, Dodd definitely regards those "apologetic aspects" of this passage, which are some of the most important in the Gospels, as unhistorical additions, which (if we're trying to use Dodd) rules out the use those very aspects (e.g., Jesus eating fish) to support the conclusion that Jesus rose bodily from the dead.

C. H. Dodd on Luke 24:36-49

Here is what Dodd actually says about this passage:

Luke 24:36-49 We have here a pericope of mixed character. The main items in the pattern of ‘concise’ narratives re-appear, though much modified….The process of recognition is greatly spun out. At first the disciples are terrified (cf. Matt. 28:10) and think they are seeing a ghost. Jesus tenders proof by pointing to his hands and feet (cf. John 20:27). They are still incredulous, and He tenders final proof by eating in their presence….The concluding word of command is here replaced by a longish address consisting of (a) instruction regarding the use of testimonies from the Old Testament…(b) a commission to preach…and (c) the assurance of the help of the Spirit….It is clear that we have here an extensive working-over of the common pattern….The pericope is thus no longer a simple, traditional story of the appearance of the Lord: it is a piece of controversial apologetic set in the framework of such a story. The simpler narratives conveyed something of the naïve, spontaneous sense of the primitive believers that something almost too good to be true has happened. Here we are aware of something different: the faith must be defended by argument, not against the natural doubts of simple people, but against a reflective and sophisticated skepticism. Yet it would not be right to class this pericope with the ‘Tales’. There is no detail in the narrative (with one exception) which is not strictly necessary to it as a piece justificatif. The one exception is the statement that the Lord ate broiled fish. It would have been sufficient for the narrator’s immediate purpose to affirm that Christ ate food in the presence of His disciples. The added detail is the kind of trait that marks the story-teller….It may perhaps best be characterized as an example of the ‘concise’ type of narrative in which apologetic motives have caused everything else to be subordinated to an elaborate presentation, not indeed of the [anagnorisis—discovery, climactic dramatic moment] itself, but of the grounds upon which such recognition was based. It is certainly more remote from the original tradition, orally handed down, than the typical narratives of Class I, but the obvious work of an author has not altogether disguised the form of the tradition which underlies. Dodd "Appearances of the Risen Christ" in More New Testament Studies, pp. 111-113 (emphasis added)

Evaluation 

In the quotation from Dodd, we see immediately that Dodd is not saying that this passage is "probably" or "most likely" a "concise" narrative. That wording (Habermas's) gives the impression that Dodd is simply less confident in characterizing the passage as "concise" than he is concerning some other passages but that he thinks it probably is "concise."

On the contrary, Dodd is actually pretty definite about what he thinks of the passage. It is "of mixed character," which is to say that, on his view, it does not fit clearly and unambiguously into his category of Class I. This is because it has too much information in it. Dodd designates tiny snippets as "concise" (Class I) only when they include, within just a very few verses, all of the motifs that he has identified as being present in a "concise" form. Dodd explains at the beginning of the essay that a "concise" narrative in his form-critical taxonomy must use the "fewest possible words." It must tell nothing "which is not absolutely essential" (Dodd, "Appearances," p. 103). Luke 24:36-49 simply doesn't fit that form, because it's too long and, from Dodd's perspective, too elaborated. 

As in the case of the story of Doubting Thomas, the Road to Emmaus, and the meeting by the seashore, here too we find Dodd treating Jesus and the disciples as fictional characters subject to the manipulations of the author. The author thus "spins out" the process of recognition rather than recording a process of recognition that he has reason to believe actually happened. The author replaces the "word of command" by inventing the idea of Jesus' giving a longish address. Again, this all lies within the author's control.

Most important of all, all of the material in the story that is of value in actually defending the bodily resurrection is, according to Dodd, invented and added fictionally. The "unsophisticated" form of recognition (which apparently is supposed to be pretty epistemically uninteresting!) is here, says Dodd, replaced by fictional elements that are intended to create a "controversial piece of apologetic" with the intention of defending the resurrection against a sophisticated skeptic. 

Indeed, the very idea that the recognition by the disciples was based on something that made it reasonable for them to think that Jesus was present in a literal body is something Dodd rejects. According to Dodd, the "grounds upon which such a recognition was based" in the passage are precisely the elements the author has invented to expand the recognition motif to meet a sophisticated form of skepticism.

No slightest breath of a thought enters Dodd's mind that the resurrection might be really defensible against sophisticated skepticism! 

This point is going to be important in the next post as well, where we see how Dodd treats even the resurrection snippets that he calls "concise narratives." In a bizarre evidential reversal, Dodd back-solves to find and eliminate as an elaboration anything that has evidential value, even from those narratives. The five elements of a "concise" narratives are 1) the situation (the disciples bereft), 2) the appearance of the Lord, 3) the greeting, 4) the recognition, and 5) the word of command (Dodd, "Appearances," p. 104). But Dodd's assumption is that anything beyond the briefest and least evidentially helpful statements of these elements has definitely been added to the story. As I will emphasize again in the next post, once even the concise narrative has been further whittled down to its most non-specific elements, and once these are treated preferentially precisely because they are non-specific, there is nothing left that could not be well explained by an extremely brief, non-physical, visionary or ghostly experience.

I think we really need to challenge the identification of "of apologetic value" with "made up." This is undoubtedly the way that Dodd thinks of the matter, and it is in a sense a kind of question begging against the very possibility of an evidentially robust case for the resurrection. If Jesus really did rise bodily from the dead, it's not at all improbable that he would make this manifest to at least some of his followers, in which case they would likely make known to others the means by which they recognized that he was risen bodily. An indispensible step in rejecting the assumption that anything of apologetic value is historically dubious is to recognize when someone (in this case, Dodd) is making that assumption. Trying to co-opt Dodd's form criticism as a tool to strengthen the apologetic case for Jesus' bodily resurrection, rather than recognizing what Dodd is really doing, is therefore misguided.

It is not surprising, given his assumptions, that Dodd strips away from Luke 24:36-49, quite systematically, all elements of the story that make this appearance a unique event taking place at a particular time and place and involving particular details of interaction between Jesus and the disciples. He treats all these as ipso facto unhistorical. This is especially evident when we remember that, as shown in the previous post, the story of the Road to Emmaus is, per Dodd, one of the "tales" and completely fictional. The day and time of this appearance to "the eleven and those who were with them"--evening of Easter Sunday--have been set by the Emmaus story immediately previous. Recall that Dodd even said that the dialogue between the two from Emmaus and the group back in Jerusalem (after they run back to Jerusalem) has been "made" by the author, so that those in Jerusalem are made to "cap" the story told by Clopas and his companion by saying that Jesus has appeared to Peter. Luke 24:36 says that Jesus is suddenly there among them while they are having that discussion. Since that is fictional, and since that is the way in which the time and day of this appearance in vss. 36-49 is indicated, this one is cut free from any specific location in space and time.

Did you want to make this appearance specific, unique, by reference to the reaction of the disciples, their fear, their thought that they are seeing a ghost, and Jesus' response to it? Nope, none of that is left either. That is all a part of the "elaborate presentation" that the author has invented to defend the resurrection against sophisticated skepticism.

But Dodd says this doesn't belong with the tales. Doesn't that mean that he considers it probably historical or somewhat historical, or something exciting?

Not really. We saw this issue in the case of Doubting Thomas. Recall that the Doubting Thomas story is, in Dodd's view, completely invented, but that he doesn't class it with the "tales" only because Doubting Thomas is (he thinks) a stock character and not psychologically sophisticated and because the story doesn't seem to him to be literarily interesting. Since "tales" is not only a historical designation but also a literary designation for Dodd, a pericope that doesn't have a lot of the "storyteller's art," a lot of realism, doesn't get designated as one of the "tales" even if Dodd thinks it is invented.

Something similar is going on here. Dodd explicitly says that the reason he doesn't designate this as one of the "tales" is that the story contains only one extra detail (the specific statement that Jesus ate broiled fish) that goes beyond what is required to fulfill the author's apologetic motive. So everything that makes this scene unique is (according to Dodd) invented as part of its apologetic embellishment, but only the broiled fish is made up in a way that Dodd considers artistic. The author could have fictionally included the fictional claim that Jesus ate (for apologetic reasons) without saying what he ate. Without more such purely artistic inventions, Dodd decides not to characterize this story as one of the "Tales."

To quote again the sentences that say that in some sense or other this is sorta kinda a "concise" narrative, "It may perhaps best be characterized as an example of the ‘concise’ type of narrative in which apologetic motives have caused everything else to be subordinated to an elaborate presentation, not indeed of the [anagnorisis—discovery, climactic dramatic moment] itself, but of the grounds upon which such recognition was based. It is certainly more remote from the original tradition, orally handed down, than the typical narratives of Class I, but the obvious work of an author has not altogether disguised the form of the tradition which underlies." In other words, it's neither literarily concise nor literarily a tale, in Dodd's form-critical terms. It's invented, but not invented in the particularly literary style of a tale, and Dodd believes that he can still descry, deeply buried under the author's fictionalizations, some of the elements of "tradition," such as an entirely generic appearance, greeting, recognition, and word of command.

This statement about not entirely disguising the form of the tradition is the only thing actually found in Dodd that Habermas could mean by "most likely a concise narrative at least in its core details." But this is a confusing use of the phrase "core details." How many people who are familiar with this passage would spontaneously say that the disciples' fear that Jesus is a ghost, his assurances to the contrary, and his eating are not "core details" of the story? Indeed, the very word "details" (in Habermas's phrase) contradicts the word "core" here if by "core" one means the same thing that Dodd means by the "form of the tradition that underlies." For by that phrase Dodd means only those generic elements that are not detailed. 

Dodd's conclusions about Luke 24:36-49 are 1) that it isn't really a concise narrative because it is so apologetically embellished and hence so "remote from original tradition" but 2) that one can abstract a few wholly generic elements that it shares in common with the narratives he designates as concise, and 3) that one can't call it a "tale" because, though it's heavily fictionalized, it isn't literarily interesting enough. 

That's it.

Once again, we see that Habermas's intense desire to interpret Dodd as optimistically as possible has led to a confused and confusing summary of what Dodd actually says.

Next post: The bad news (for the apologist wanting to use Dodd) even about the "concise" narratives, according to Dodd.