On Maximalism and Dale Allison, David Pallmann is right; William Lane Craig wrong.

Recently Dr. William Lane Craig posted a podcast about Dale Allison in which he criticized a video by David Pallmann about Allison. In what follows I express strong disagreement with Dr. Craig on what is most important about Allison's work. The strength of that disagreement is, in a sense, a measure of the importance of the issues involved, and I am convinced that Dr. Craig and I agree about the centrality of Jesus' bodily resurrection to Christianity. I hope that anyone who reads this will recognize that fundamental unity between myself and Dr. Craig and will therefore take these remarks in the spirit of spirited disagreement between fellow believers. 

One of Dr. Craig's earnestly-pressed claims is that David is emphasizing the wrong things when he criticizes Allison's arguments. According to Craig, Pallmann is not seeing the forest for the trees. He's placing too much emphasis (says Craig) on Allison's rejection of the raising of the saints passage, which Craig calls a "trivial issue" as compared with what's "really impressive"--namely, says Craig, the fact that Allison affirms the empty tomb and Jesus' postmortem appearances, including one to the twelve. Craig even refers to Allison's book as "the most important book on the historicity of Jesus' resurrection."

Wow! That's quite a statement. The most important book? 

If so, we're in deep trouble. If by "the most important book on the historicity of Jesus' resurrection" one means, "A book written by a highly-regarded scholar, filled with lousy arguments, poor analogies, mere sneering at conclusions more conservative than Allison's own, and evidentially circular reasoning, all of which are all-too-typical of the pathologies of modern critical New Testament scholarship, but a book which nonetheless is very influential and which some conservative-labeled scholars are inexplicably eager to applaud," then yes, it's the most important book on the historicity of Jesus' resurrection.

But let's back up and start with the terms "minimalist" and "maximalist," which Dr. Craig focuses on. He claims that Pallmann gives a "terrible misrepresentation of both my views and the distinction between these two approaches." This strikes me as a very, very odd thing for Dr. Craig to say, because I personally coined the term "maximal data" and its cognates such as "maximalism" in the context of the resurrection debate, and I was the one who originally contrasted it with "minimalism." And I'm here to tell you that David Pallmann is accurately representing the distinction between the two approaches and that I'm surprised at Dr. Craig's statement that he is a maximalist. I'm especially surprised given that Dr. Craig and I had an exchange in 2018 on this very topic (see here, here, and here), in the course of which I explained clearly what I mean by referring to Dr. Craig as a "minimalist". (Note, as Pallmann himself has emphasized repeatedly, that the term "minimalist" is broader than just "minimal facts" a la Gary Habermas.) Moreover, at that time I made clear how Dr. Craig's minimalism contrasts with a maximal data approach or maximalism, as I coined and am using these terms.

Now I would think that Dr. Craig would remember our previous public discussion. I would think that he would at least remember that it occurred and might be relevant and would therefore, before claiming to be a maximalist, try to look it up and refresh his memory on what I meant by coining those terms. He certainly ought to know that Pallmann is intending to use this terminology in what one might call a McGrewvian context. I've been the initiator of concerns about minimalism (again, broadly construed), and I've initiated the fleshing out of the maximal case in contrast. I have explained at some length the importance of the role of Gospel reliability in the argument for the resurrection, which is a signature part of maximalism. To recap here briefly, a maximalist or max data argument uses the massive evidence for high Gospel reliability to support the view that the Gospel authors did not feel free to invent or embellish their stories. They were, moreover, temporally and interpersonally close to the facts they claim to record, and they were careful. This in turn supports the premise that the Gospel accounts of Jesus' appearances represent what the original alleged witnesses claimed and the premise that Acts accurately represents the context of danger and persecution in which they claimed it. Based on these premises, one then argues that the best explanation of these claims made in this context is that Jesus rose bodily from the dead and appeared bodily to his disciples.

This is in essence what Pallmann says. Dr. Craig, in his recent podcast, says that what really distinguishes minimalism and maximalism is 

that the minimalist accepts as evidence only those facts which virtually all New Testament scholars accept. The maximalist argues on the basis of his best assessment of the evidence, whether or not it's a minority view. My approach, which is laid out in my book, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, is maximalist. And this is most evident by the fact that I present extensive arguments for the historicity of the empty tomb, which minimalists do not appeal to.

There are several points to be made here. Dr. Craig's use of the empty tomb, while (as David Pallmann has repeatedly acknowledged in a longer video on the resurrection) distinguishing Craig's type of minimalism from Habermas's minimal facts argument, does not exemplify the use of a minority view. At least according to Habermas and Licona, a majority of scholars (they say somewhere between 75% and 80%) admit the empty tomb, though it isn't admitted by the super-super-majority of scholars across the critical spectrum that Habermas supposedly required for a minimal fact. I've argued extensively that Habermas is an unreliable interpreter of scholarly works, and I've pointed out that Habermas now claims that he did no head count for the actual minimal facts, though he says that he did do a head count for affirmation of the empty tomb. As we'll see below, in 2015 Craig definitely stated that all the facts that he uses in his resurrection argument are admitted by a majority of scholars. I doubt that Dr. Craig has acquired some new evidence that the empty tomb is definitely a minority view among NT scholars. In fact, I myself don't claim to know that the empty tomb is a minority view. Given that there are plenty of conservative-labeled New Testament scholars, and given that some liberal scholars also admit the empty tomb, perhaps it is actually granted by more than 50%, which would mean it's not a minority view. 

Moreover, as I pointed out back in 2018, even in his 1989 book Craig relies (for arguing for the bodily resurrection) on the unanimity of the Gospel narratives in narrating that Jesus was physically present with his disciples after his resurrection, which is somewhat different from relying on their robust reliability to support the premise that these things were really what the disciples claimed. What he does there seems to correspond to what some have called multiple attestation to a motif, which is still a broadly criteriological type of argument rather than a maximalist argument. He also does this in 2008 in Reasonable Faith, as I'll explain later in this post.

Moreover, while in his book published in 1989 Dr. Craig did choose to harmonize the resurrection narratives, he has much more recently, in 2015, clearly laid out his own metalevel principles for arguing for the resurrection and has declared that doing so is unimportant to his method.

I’ll concede for the sake of argument virtually all the errors and inconsistencies in the Old and New Testaments that [the skeptic] wants to bring up, while insisting that the documents collected into what was later called the New Testament are fundamentally reliable when it comes to the central facts undergirding the claims and fate of Jesus of Nazareth. For the apologetic task it doesn’t really matter whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which day of the week he was crucified, how many angels were at the tomb, and so on. So long as the central facts are secure, the unbeliever ought to become a Christian.

I note that harmonization is relevant not only to inerrancy (which he mentions in the context) but also to high reliability, though high reliability does not entail inerrancy. (For more on the relationship between inerrancy and high reliability, see my book The Mirror or the Mask, chapter IV and elsewhere. In short, inerrancy is one variety of high, holistic reliability but not the only variety.) In that same 2015 podcast Craig stressed that the only kind of Gospel "reliability" that is important to his argument for the resurrection concerns narrowly and specifically "the central facts undergirding the claims and fate of Jesus of Nazareth." He stressed further that "the central facts undergirding the inference to Jesus’ resurrection are granted by the wide majority of New Testament scholars today, even those who think that the Gospels are rife with errors and inconsistencies." Note the reference to "the inference" to Jesus' resurrection. If Dr. Craig is claiming in 2025 that he now considers some minority view as crucial to the inference to Jesus' resurrection, this represents a major shift in his position since 2015, and I don't know what that minority view might be.

Craig's remarks in 2015 on "conced[ing] for the sake of argument" all the alleged errors and inconsistencies in the Gospels that the skeptic wants to bring up are perfectly consistent with his statement in 2008 that the Gospels could be unreliable (overall) while still supporting his resurrection argument, since all that matters for that argument are a few central facts. Here is an explicit statement from the preface to Reasonable Faith, 3rd edition, pp. 11-12:

Keeping the book at approximately the same length was made possible by the deletion of the chapter on the historical reliability of the New Testament, a chapter which a former editor had insisted, despite my protestations, be inserted into the second edition. The inclusion of this chapter (itself a solid piece of work written at my invitation by Craig Blomberg) perpetuated the misimpression, all too common among evangelicals, that a historical case for Jesus’ radical self-understanding and resurrection depends upon showing that the Gospels are generally reliable historical documents. The overriding lesson of two centuries of biblical criticism is that such an assumption is false. Even documents which are generally unreliable may contain valuable historical nuggets, and it will be the historian’s task to mine these documents in order to discover them. The Christian apologist seeking to establish, for example, the historicity of Jesus’ empty tomb need not and should not be saddled with the task of first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically reliable documents. You may be wondering how it can be shown that the Gospel accounts of the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb can be shown to be, in their core, historically reliable without first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically trustworthy. Read chapter 8 to find out. (emphasis added)

This is an explicit methodological statement about the role that the reliability of the Gospels does not play and should not play in the argument for Jesus' resurrection. Craig could not be clearer: That argument should not be made to depend on arguing that the Gospels are reliable.

The maximalist argument as I have explained, used, and advocate it is self-consciously Paleyan, relying on the plethora of evidence for Gospel reliability to support the contention that the Gospel resurrection accounts represent at least what the alleged witnesses claimed about the resurrection and that the Acts accounts of the early church represent accurately the circumstances of persecution in which they claimed them. Not only does Dr. Craig not do this, he explicitly says that it is outdated. In Reasonable Faith, Dr. Craig discusses the Paleyan approach but rejects it as unsuitable for present use:

A review of [Christian apologists case for the resurrection during the Deist controversy] and of the reasons for the decline of this form of apologetics will be useful in preparing the way for a contemporary assessment of the resurrection. Too often Christians today employ an apologetic for the resurrection that was suitable for use against eighteenth-century opponents but is today ineffective in dealing with the objections raised by modern biblical criticism. (Reasonable Faith, 3rd edition, p. 333)

This statement is ambiguous as between "ineffective" in a purely sociological sense and "ineffective" in an epistemological sense. In either event, it is the maximalist contention that a revived Paleyan approach is epistemologically well up to the task of dealing with the spurious objections of modern biblical criticism. Moreover, the maximalist contention is that we need to do that rather than attempting, as do all forms of minimalism, including Craig's, to do an end run around those objections by relying on some other method for supporting some set of "core facts" or "central facts" while dropping holistic Gospel reliability from our argument.

Chapter 8 of Reasonable Faith, to which Dr. Craig refers in the above quote, uses (as David Pallmann points out repeatedly in his longer video on the resurrection) the historical "criteria of authenticity" and a few other selective lines of evidence such as the use of the phrase "the first day of the week" to argue for the empty tomb (pp. 361-371). He stresses in particular the criteria of multiple attestation and embarrassment, the latter related to the story that women first found the tomb empty. And in general, as announced up-front in his preface to that book, that is Dr. Craig's approach: He doesn't use the reliability of whole Gospel documents, even to defend a proposition about what the alleged witnesses claimed. 

Digression: I wish right here and now to head off a potentially confusing and time-wasting claim that I am somehow misrepresenting Dr. Craig on the criteria of authenticity. I am well aware that Dr. Craig rightly argues in Reasonable Faith against a particular type of negative use of the criteria--namely, the use that says that if some saying or event in the Gospels doesn't meet these criteria, it probably didn't happen. I've quoted him on that point and discussed at length his approach to the criteria in my book The Eye of the Beholder, chapter VIII. There I point out that there is a different type of negative use--namely, to hold that we simply can't make a strong argument concerning the historicity of something in the Gospels one way or another (either for or against) and therefore have to leave the historical case up in the air as far as a historical argument is concerned if the saying or pericope doesn't meet "the criteria of authenticity." I argue there that this is epistemologically problematic as well and that it reflects a failure to understand the way that high, holistic reliability supports even events and sayings that are attested in just one Gospel. I relate problematic default historical agnosticism to the refusal, for example, to use sayings of Jesus that are attested only in the Gospel of John. (See this subsequent discussion in 2023 by Dr. Craig on why he doesn't use John 14:6 and the implication that a "good historical case" or "very good case" cannot be made for its authenticity. This, presumably unconsciously, bears out the very point I was making in The Eye of the Beholder.)

The point here is just this: A maximalist understands that the high holistic reliability of the Gospels is indeed important to the resurrection argument, because to have a really strong argument it is important to support the proposition that the Gospel accounts reflect at least what the original alleged witnesses of the resurrection claimed, in detail, about their experiences. In that taxonomy, which uses the terms as I originally coined them and have consistently used them, Dr. Craig is a minimalist because he does not approach the argument in that way and has made a methodological virtue out of not doing so. So Pallmann is right on this. And once again, I pointed all of this out back in 2018 in response to Dr. Craig's similar remarks at that time. 

High, holistic Gospel reliability, though a distinctly minority position, is indeed supported by the best assessment of the evidence, as I've argued at length in four books and as others, such as Timothy McGrew, Peter J. Williams, and many 19th-century thinkers, have argued as well. In order to be a maximalist, Dr. Craig would need to admit and retract his remarks in 2008 and 2015 about what is and is not important to the inference to the resurrection, recognize both the evidence for and the implications of high, holistic reliability of all of the Gospels, including John, and integrate it into his resurrection argument. Doing so would lead to other changes in his work, including a different position from the one he took in 2023 concerning unique sayings in the Gospel of John and a willingness to rely on those sayings, despite the objections to John made by modern biblical criticism. A maximalist is ready and willing to refute those objections.

Next, since this is about emphases and who is majoring on the minors and minoring on the majors, let's consider something that Pallmann does that Dr. Craig gets really exercised about: Pallmann's mention of what Dale Allison says about the possibility that John may be dependent on Mark. I'll let you listen to what Dr. Craig has to say, beginning about minute seven. To summarize: Craig is deeply bothered that it seems to him that Pallmann is implying that Allison is saying that John is probably dependent on Mark in John's account of the meeting between Mary Magdalene and Jesus after the resurrection. In fact, Allison seems to think that John is probably not dependent on Mark for this story. Pallmann uses some of Allison's remarks to emphasize a methodological bad habit of New Testament scholars which I've also emphasized--namely, the assumption that literary dependence equals complete factual dependence.

Dr. Craig very strongly objects to this, seeing it as an egregious misrepresentation of Allison, since Allison thinks in the end that John is probably not dependent on Matthew for this story. In the podcast, Kevin Harris says that he got in touch with Pallmann, and that Pallmann clarified that he realizes what Allison is saying but meant to use it to illustrate a methodological point about the relationship between literary and factual dependence and independence. Craig is not mollified; he grumbles that he still thinks Pallmann should make a clarification.

Now, frankly, if we're going to talk about what is trivial (see below concerning the raising of the saints and Craig's use of "trivial"), I think this is making a mountain out of something just slightly taller than a molehill. Pallmann quotes Allison accurately as making a conditional point--namely, that if John is wholly dependent on Matthew, then we have only one source for the appearance to Mary Magdalene. (Allison takes Matthew to be definitely indicating that Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene in the appearance to the women in chapter 28--an interpretation I would somewhat dispute. But let that go.) My own criticism of Pallmann's argument here would be somewhat similar to and somewhat different from Craig's: Given the way that Allison words his sentence, his statement is trivially true. He says that "if John does nothing but rewrite Matthew...then the latter would be our sole source." This is tautological, given the words "does nothing but." For that reason, I would say that this passage of Allison's isn't the best example of the phenomenon--a real phenomenon, which really needs to be called out--that Pallmann is rightly deploring. As I've emphasized often, critical scholars often do assume (especially among the Synoptics) that if, say, Matthew is partially literarily dependent on Mark for the wording of some passage, Matthew can't have any factual information of his own about that incident which he is also including. But since Allison has said "if John does nothing but rewrite Matthew" then he's defined the conditional in such a way that it automatically entails that, in that case, John would not be factually independent. And as Craig points out, Allison then goes on to indicate that he's dubious about the conditional. So, yes, it would be better if David would use other examples of the phenomenon he's criticizing. (Since Allison has a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, I would suggest that that might be a fertile field for such examples, though I haven't made that search myself.)

But this is hardly worth the burning indignation that Craig spends on it. In fact, I was struck by the fact that in the very video that Craig is criticizing, Pallmann points out a far more serious and more explicit misinterpretation, by Allison, of Tim's and my article on the resurrection: Allison states that in our resurrection article in the Blackwell anthology (edited by Craig himself and J.P. Moreland), we "presume the detailed facticity" of the resurrection stories in the Gospels (Allison, 2021, p. 352). Allison strongly implies that we are therefore arguing circularly, since if we assume (as a premise) that these stories are factual, why then of course Jesus rose from the dead. But as David points out, and as our article itself makes quite clear, and as I have pointed out before, our assumption rather is that the stories represent what the disciples claimed. We then ask what the best explanation is of their making such claims under particular circumstances of persecution. Perhaps Craig is planning to do more podcasts on Allison (Kevin Harris's wording about "picking up next time" at the end may indicate as much), and perhaps in one of these he will strongly condemn Allison's inexcusable misrepresentation of us. If so, one would have liked to get a small preview of that; as it stands, it looks like Craig is straining at a Pallmannian gnat and not even noticing an Allisonian camel, despite the fact that Pallmann draws attention to the camel.

Onward now to another complaint by Dr. Craig--that Pallmann is making too big a deal of Allison's rejection of the historicity of the raising of the saints. Craig says, "The fact that Pallmann would focus on so trivial an issue as this, when Allison has so many important things to say in this book, shows that he really doesn't have a sound grasp of the central issues." Craig even goes so far as to tell us what we should be talking about instead! "Allison's book is the most important book on the historicity of Jesus's resurrection. And we should be talking about Allison's arguments for the historicity of Jesus's empty tomb and postmortem appearances of Jesus and so forth." "These are the important conclusions of his study that we really should be talking about."

Even the claim that Pallmann places a major focus on the raising of the saints passage is false. To put this in perspective, Pallmann's discussion of Allison on the raising of the saints is six minutes out of what was originally a six hour video! Even if Craig doesn't know that and knows only of the shorter segment on Allison that Pallmann posted separately here, he should recognize that Pallmann's entire discussion of what Allison says about this passage is methodological. And the methodological point is, Pallmann emphasizes, more important than the specific passage. He's quite clear that the important issue isn't whether or not Allison affirms the raising of the saints but rather the extreme weakness of Allison's argument from silence and his strong implication that the passage is just so obviously false that it would be completely unreasonable for anyone to think otherwise. Now that is important. Bad arguments from silence are rife in New Testament studies (I think it's Bart Ehrman's favorite argument), and this argument from Allison is a good example of that trend. Allison says,

My verdict is different. We can be almost pontifical here. Matthew 27:51b-53 recounts “a miracle unsurpassed anywhere else in the Gospels or other books of the Christian scriptures.” Indeed, if it happened, it is “the most amazing event of all time.” But it did not happen. The astounding series of prodigies has left no trace in the other gospels, Acts, Paul, Josephus, or, for that matter, any other pre-Matthean source. It stands alone, half a century or more after the incredible events it reports. Yet the stupendous marvels depicted in Mt. 27:51b-53, had they firm grounding in known fact, would quickly have become a bedrock of Christian apologetics, especially as the text speaks of “many” saints and “many” witnesses. p. 168

I won't repeat Pallmann's debunking, relying in part on Jake O'Connell, of this overheated evaluation by Allison. Suffice it to say that Allison greatly exaggerates what Matthew claims (by among other things making assumptions about what must be meant by "many" in the passage) and then leans hard into the argument from silence once that exaggeration is in place. The methodological point is relevant, again, because Allison is indeed doing it here and because exactly this kind of thing comes up again and again and again in doubts about the New Testament. (I've recently been reading some arguments by the skeptical physicist Brian Blais, in which he appears to imply that Jesus' ascension would have been recorded by non-canonical sources if it really happened. Is Blais suggesting that we would have drone footage? Or perhaps that it would have been reported in an ancient copy of the The Jerusalem Post by a special reporter who was following the disciples around?)

But Allison's strong dismissal of the raising of the saints is important, in a negative sense, for another reason, one that Craig fails to recognize. Allison writes,

Once the nose of the camel of fiction is inside the tent of resurrection, who knows what else may enter?

            My judgment is that far more than a nose has entered. Detailed demonstration of this claim would be tedious, and it would add too many pages to an already lengthy book. Here it suffices to ask, How do we account for Mark 16 if Matthew’s special material in 27:62–28:15 is historically true? One can understand someone adding, for theological and apologetical ends, the guard (Mt. 27:62-66; 28:4, 11-15), the sealing of the tomb (28:66), and an earthquake (28:2). But how do we explain someone subtracting those things, which are also missing from Luke and John? I am unable to conjure a satisfactory motive. Mark’s far simpler account of Jesus’ burial and resurrection commends itself as being earlier. Matthew’s much more elaborate and apologetically oriented narrative, which even features a trinitarian formula, impresses one as later, as full of secondary developments, as indeed being on its way to the Gospel of Peter, with its spectacular, colorful details that nobody mistakes for history.

            Everyone who has read the apocryphal gospels knows that some Christians, in the second century and later, were motivated to invent religious fictions, including fictions about the Easter events. My argument in this chapter is that those inventors were not without first-century predecessors who, among other things, contributed to the canonical traditions about Jesus’ resurrection.

            The scope of their contributions is, of course, in large measure the subject of this entire book. To what extent is the special Matthean material an aberration? Do the stories of Jesus offering himself for inspection in Lk. 24:36-43 and Jn 20:26-29 betray later apologetical interests? Does Mark’s angel derive, not from a vision recalled, but from a story improved, from a creative hand making a theological upgrade? Questions such as these are all the more pressing when one takes into account the numerous tensions and even contradictions that reveal themselves when one inspects the canonical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection side by side. Such contradictions and tensions raise acutely the issue of how often invention has intruded into historical recall. (Allison, 2021, pp. 180-181)

Allison is clear. On his assessment, Matthew's account not only of the raising of the saints but also of other aspects of Jesus' burial and resurrection is not only fiction; it is "on its way to" the quite unhistorical apocryphal Gospel of Peter. (Allison argues that the raising of the saints passage would not have been recognizable by Matthew's original audience as non-factual. On that point I agree with Allison.) According to Allison this entry of fiction into Matthew's Gospel should lead us to recognize that there were first-century inventors who added apologetic elaborations to the appearances of Jesus in other Gospels as well. Allison states elsewhere in the book that the places in Luke 24 and John 20 where Jesus offers himself for inspection are the result of apologetic invention:

Now I personally remain hesitant to find history in the demonstrations of Luke 24 and John

20–21. I rather detect Christian apologetics here, an answer to the criticism that Jesus was merely a specter or hallucination. (p. 229)

It is Allison himself who spends an entire chapter on the raising of the saints in Matthew 27. If anyone is treating this as a non-trivial matter, it's Allison, and the above quotation tells us why: Allison is drawing a moral about the unreliability of the resurrection accounts themselves. Similarly, Allison states as if it is self-evident that the account of Jesus' appearance to the eleven and those with them in Luke 24 is "full of Lukan redactional traits" (p. 219, n. 40), by which he means that the author has just made stuff up, in particular those aspects of the story that would militate against his suggested parallels with the apparition literature. (I am documenting this in detail in a video series that I'm currently doing on my Youtube channel. The series started this past Sunday with this video.)

In other words, Allison is drawing a conclusion about the character of the Gospel authors: Namely, that they and other Christians whose invented stories they sometimes use have no aversion to making up things that further an apologetic purpose. This is a very important issue. Were the authors in fact like this? Craig, in his enthusiasm, insists that it's almost a good thing that Allison "is quite willing to admit the presence of unhistorical legend in the Gospels" because this makes his "affirmation of the burial story, the empty tomb, the postmortem appearance, all the more impressive." I would say that Allison not only admits the presence of unhistorical legend in the Gospels, he thinks they are probably riddled with such legends and contradictions. He positively parades and insists upon this conclusion, treating with unprofessional contempt the scholar John Wenham, just because he dares to harmonize the Gospel resurrection narratives. 

That some, such as [John] Wenham, Easter Enigma; O’Connell, Jesus’ Resurrection, 166–77 (who confesses on p. 27 to belief in “the full inerrancy of the Bible”); and Schnabel, Jesus in Jerusalem, 350–70, are still endeavoring to iron out every discrepancy is dispiriting. They are trying to erase knowledge. It is as though Strauss never wrote, and as though the successes of redaction criticism in attributing differences between the synoptics to editorial agendas are a mirage. Explanation can lie only in adherence to outworn theories of biblical inspiration, theories the deists successfully pulverized long ago. (p. 181, n. 79)

In this bit of petty, condescending psychologizing Allison treats David F. Strauss, of all people, as some kind of authority on alleged Gospel contradictions. Again, a maximalist doesn't just evade such references to higher criticism; he recognizes them for the nonsense that they are and answers them. See here, here, and here. (One wonders too, in passing, why the deists are metaphysical authorities on biblical inspiration.) Even more to the point, it is apparently beyond Allison's ken that someone would think, for historical reasons, that the Gospel resurrection stories embody that reconcilable variation that is (as William Paley and T. R. Birks pointed out) a hallmark of truthful witness testimony. Even though John Wenham is indeed an inerrantist, he makes it clear in the book Allison cites that that is not why he tries to harmonize the stories. I myself am not even an inerrantist, and I do (broadly speaking) the same sort of harmonization that Wenham does in chapter 6 of my book Testimonies to the Truth: Why You Can Trust the Gospels. 

Query: Is blatant ad hominem appropriate for the most important book on the historicity of the resurrection?

Historical considerations that support harmonization are lost on Allison, who ploughs ahead with his triumphant declaration that the Gospel resurrection stories (particularly those that most strongly support bodily resurrection) contain such obvious fictional elements and irreconcilable contradictions that we are clearly justified in adopting a merely visionary view  of the "resurrection" appearances, which were far less bodily than the Gospels portray them as being. (Allison thinks the disciples saw a non-bodily but veridical vision of Jesus.)

Is that not important? Is that merely trivial? According to Craig, what is really important is that Allison affirms the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances, including at least one to the twelve. And according to Craig, this glass-half-full is what we should be celebrating and emphasizing, and Pallmann just has his priorities confused.

This is Craig's most serious mistake in the podcast. And ironically, given Craig's attempt to claim that he is a maximalist, this mistake is absolutely typical of minimalism. A major feature of minimalists is their excited, sometimes over-the-top, optimistic evaluation of the importance of some agreement between themselves and liberal scholars, and a failure to process how little that agreement really amounts to. 

I would argue that Craig has it exactly backwards as far as what is most important in Allison's work. One of the most important things about Allison's book is his persistent attempt to flatten the quality of the evidence for Jesus' bodily resurrection and the reports of other uncanny events. Nowhere is this more evident than in his treatment of "rainbow bodies" in Buddhism, which is relevant to Allison's "admission" of the empty tomb. If it is really just some kind of weird paranormal thing that sometimes happens to gurus and other highly spiritual human individuals that their bodies disappear, then that could have happened in Jesus' case and be no particularly strong evidence for a true resurrection.

So strong is Allison's commitment to evidential flattening that we once again get snarky motivism when Allison confronts the possibility that some Christians might not be equally impressed by the evidence for rainbow bodies:

According to Robinson [LM: here Allison is agreeing with Robinson] if it [the paranormal disappearance of a body] happened in modern Tibet, it could have happened in ancient Palestine. This line of reasoning should, of course, work the other way around, too. If one believes that Jesus’ tomb was vacant because his corpse became transformed and entered a new state of existence, then might one not be more broadminded about the Tibetan claims? One guesses, however, that many Christians would be loath to take this road, for, if I may generalize, their non-pluralistic theology discourages them from finding close, positive correlations between their Lord and non-Christian religious figures.²⁷

I have left in the footnote number, because it is another unprofessionally contemptuous footnote apropos of the fact that Jake O'Connell says that only in the case of Christian miracles is the evidence "not extremely weak." It is of course fine for Allison to disagree with O'Connell about alleged non-Christian miracles. But there is something more than disagreement here:

O'Connell avows that the evidence for Christian miracles alone is “not extremely weak.” I cannot enter into this large, critical subject here. I can only express my vigorous dissent and record my judgment that this is uninformed, condescending religious imperialism.

Well, I guess that settles that!

Pallmann rightly emphasizes this flattening tendency on Allison's part and the fact that it is not tenable. (See my videos on rainbow bodies here and here.) My arguments, needless to say, do not arise from a felt need to be non-pluralistic. One would like to see Dr. Craig acknowledge the strength and importance of  arguments against Allison on rainbow bodies and the highly problematic nature of Allison's discussion of rainbow bodies. (Problematic, I hasten to add, in an evidential, not merely a theological, sense.)

This sort of insistent, not to say bullying, epistemic flattening in Allison is a good deal more important than his self-consciously unenthusiastic admission of the empty tomb. Craig does not mention, and I don't know if he's aware, that Allison barely concludes that the empty tomb story is more probable than not, stating concerning the empty tomb that "“Indications are not lacking” and “with great hesitation” seem to me to be just right" (p. 163). Craig refers in the podcast to Allison's "conviction" that Jesus' tomb was found empty. One would not normally refer to Allison's tentative tilt in that direction as a "conviction."

This brings me to the final reason why Craig is wrong about what's most important about Allison's book. Though phrases using the word "appearance" appear multiple times in Craig's podcast with reference to what Allison supposedly is convinced of ("the historicity of...Jesus' post mortem appearances," "his postmortem appearances," "the appearance to the twelve, which is the most important resurrection appearance," etc.), and though Craig tells us repeatedly that what we really should be talking about is how great it is that Allison is convinced of the appearances, he never once mentions that Allison is also convinced that the group appearances in particular were not like the extended, detailed, polymodal group experiences that we find in the Gospels. In fact, Allison appears to be a lot more sure of that than he is of the empty tomb!

If Jesus' showing his wounds, suggesting that the disciples touch him, and asking for and eating food to demonstrate that he isn't a spirit are just fake apologetic additions, as Allison holds, in what sense are we talking about "the appearance to the twelve" as many members of Craig's audience would hear that phrase? Perhaps Craig is planning to mention something about this later, but I would say that this information should have been proffered now, up front, without any downplaying or minimizing of its importance.

As I'm pointing out in my most recent video series, a salient feature of Allison's scholarly approach is that he deletes from the evidential record of Jesus' appearances any features that don't fit well with his triumphant-but-non-bodily appearance model (which my husband has humorously called the Caspar Invictus theory of the resurrection), airily declaring on that very basis that these are apologetic inventions, and then tells us that the visionary theory fits well with the evidence. This is, epistemically speaking, breathtakingly circular.

Is this not important? Should we not be talking about this? I would say that it's a good deal more important than the mere fact that Allison thinks that the disciples, in a group, had some kind of appearance experience or other. (Digression: Some of Allison's fans will try to say that all that Allison is doing is expressing metaphysical humility or uncertainty about the nature of bodily resurrection. This is not accurate. Allison is quite clear that the in-your-face bodily aspects of the Gospels' group resurrection narratives are probably made up. If one knew that, of course one would have reason to doubt that Jesus appeared bodily to the disciples. Allison also sneers on pp. 260-261 at the idea that Jesus rose in a body with internal organs, carbon atoms, and genitalia.) 

In his 6-hour-long video on the resurrection (which I make no claim to have watched in full!), David Pallmann repeatedly and rightly emphasizes that minimalist arguments for the resurrection are much weaker than the maximalist argument that he (and Tim and I and several others) favor. Where does the rubber meet the road when it comes to Jesus' bodily resurrection, Craig's "core facts" argument, and Dale Allison? As already noted, Craig uses what could be called the argument from multiple attestation to a motif concerning the bodily narratives. He argues that it is unlikely that we would find so many explicitly bodily resurrection appearance accounts if all of the appearances were non-bodily visions, and that it is unlikely that, if the appearances were not bodily, truthful accounts of non-bodily-like experiences would so thoroughly have disappeared and would have been so completely replaced by bodily-like experiences (Reasonable Faith, p. 383).

I do not wish to overstate my disagreement with Craig. I agree with this argument, as far as it goes. I think this argument has some force, as far as it goes. I've sometimes even made this argument myself. But note: I do not concede, not even for the sake of the argument, that the Gospels are riddled with fictional, apologetic embellishments and elaborations. As important background for my own resurrection argument, I strongly contest that view of the Gospels. I am prepared to argue that the authors were far more conscientious and careful than Allison thinks they were. 

What would the epistemic state of affairs be if one took instead Allison's view of the (un)reliability of the Gospels? What if the argument for the resurrection took place against a background assumption of that view? Remember: If you grant something for the sake of the argument, then in that incarnation of the argument, you're still granting it. (I sometimes think people forget this.) Probabilistically, when you grant something, you're treating it as if it has probability 1, and everything else in the argument has to take place with that granted proposition as certain background knowledge. So what if we knew for certain that the Gospels are full of apologetic additions and embellishments and that the authors and their sources had no qualms about including these as if they were true? I would say that the question, "What happened to any true, non-bodily accounts of what the disciples' experiences were really like, and why did the tradition develop in just this direction?" would still be a somewhat relevant question. I would concede that the Bayes factor for our having these strongly bodily-like appearance Gospel accounts instead of non-bodily-like Gospel appearance accounts would not be entirely neutral (forceless). However, the force of the case would be greatly weakened. If Allison or anybody else (including skeptics who don't even claim to affirm the resurrection in any sense) were to bite the bullet and say that this consistent bodily development of the tradition and weeding out of non-bodily-like accounts was due to some mere historical contingency like the widespread triumph of a particular faction within early Christianity, that would be ad hoc, but it would be on the cards that the Bayes factor for a real bodily resurrection of Jesus might be weak enough that it couldn't overcome a low prior probability for that proposition. A lot more would, in the absence of a really powerful Bayes factor, then depend on the prior probability of the resurrection. And that would be a result of granting for the sake of the argument the unreliability of the Gospels.

More: Given the critical scholarly view of the Gospels, the prior for the resurrection would also be affected. How's that? Well, the strength of something like the "liar, lunatic, or Lord" trilemma is influenced by the strength of the evidence that Jesus really claimed to be God. As I've mentioned in The Eye of the Beholder, Dr. Craig is rather surprisingly dismissive of Lewis's trilemma (Reasonable Faith, p. 328), stating that instead of "trot[ing] out" this trilemma, we have to be prepared instead to study the criteria of authenticity and do the requisite "spadework" of "sorting out those claims of Jesus that can be established as authentic." (Again, see here.) Since the trilemma is relevant to the prior, and since it would indeed be weakened by a view of the Gospels such as Allison and many critical scholars hold, granting that view would weaken certain lines of evidence that could otherwise bolster the prior. Something similar is true of arguments from fulfilled Messianic prophecy, which would otherwise be relevant to the prior for Jesus' resurrection. The idea that certain details, like the casting of lots for Jesus' clothes, were invented ex eventu would be more probable if the Gospels are filled with apologetic inventions.

I say all of this to emphasize that the view of the Gospels that Allison (and so many NT scholars) hold is not something that we can just avoid tackling for purposes of making a strong resurrection argument--a point that David Pallmann emphasizes. And it is this realization that lies at the heart of the minimalist/maximalist divide. Minimalists, including Dr. Craig, make a significantly weaker case for the bodily resurrection than maximalists, because they refuse to incorporate high, holistic Gospel reliability and the arguments for it as part of the background for their argument. This is not even remotely counterbalanced by the few minimal things that Allison is willing to affirm, nor by his reasons for affirming them.

Dr. Craig's enthusiasm for Allison's work and his insistence that we should be celebrating agreements with Allison rather than strongly criticizing his work are misguided. 

Therefore, in the immortal words of Antonin Scalia, I dissent.

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.