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!