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. As to Craig, the page number that Habermas cites (p. 158) is pretty obviously an incorrect page number, since on p. 158 there is nothing about the nature of Paul's Damascus Road experience. P. 58 is more 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 citation of Craig in this connection is bad enough. Where did Habermas get the idea that Craig thinks Paul thought that his experience was more physical than the other resurrection appearances? (My best guess is that it's 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. But in fact, Wenham cites a different work of Craig's anyway: His article "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.)
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.
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