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:

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

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

Here are all of the earlier posts in the series.

Review of Dodd's "concise" narrative concept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A further troubling implication of Dodd on apologetic expansions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habermas on Dodd on Luke 24:36-49

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is what Dodd actually says about this passage:

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

Evaluation 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's it.

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

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

Gary Habermas's Misunderstandings of C. H. Dodd, Part 2: Two Tales

This is the second in a series on Dr. Habermas's faulty understanding of the work of C. H. Dodd. Thee first installment is here. 

When one understands Dodd's comments on the Gospel resurrection accounts correctly, one realizes that Dodd acknowledges so little that his work does not provide anything really helpful to the argument for Jesus' resurrection. Here, beginning on p. 102, available for free checkout, is the Dodd article on form criticism and resurrection narratives. His method of chiseling out very tiny snippets of "tradition" by means of form criticism is highly dubious, and even the snippets produced thereby are (as I'll argue in a later post) subject to further qualification indicating that Dodd thinks even they are non-historically expanded at important points.

Dr. Habermas consistently interprets Dodd in an overly optimistic manner. In the last post I discussed the fact that he seems not to understand that Dodd regards the entire story of Doubting Thomas as a Johannine invention. In this part I will show that Habermas doesn't seem to realize that Dodd thinks that the story of the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24) and of the meeting and breakfast by the Sea of Galilee (John 21) are also fabrications.

Habermas on Dodd on Emmaus (Luke 24) and the meeting by the Sea of Galilee (John 21)

In his recently published volume on the resurrection, Habermas has this to say about Dodd's view of these two stories:

It has already been noted that Jesus’s appearance to the women in Matt 28:8–10, then to the disciples in Matt 28:16–20 and John 20:19–21, are other examples of concise texts. On the other hand, Dodd judges that Jesus’s appearance to the two men on the way to Emmaus, as well as John’s three accounts of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene on her return trip to the tomb, to “doubting Thomas,” and at the seashore, do not quite make the same grade of “conciseness.” Habermas 846-847

Here we are faced with an unfortunate but unavoidable dilemma. Either Habermas does realize that Dodd thinks Doubting Thomas, the Road to Emmaus, and the appearance at the seashore are completely invented, or he does not. If he does realize it, the wording here would be so misleading as to be dishonest. But perhaps I should say if he did realize it, since I'm going to opt (in charity) for the other horn of the dilemma: He's radically misunderstood Dodd's statements about these three stories. This is still somewhat unpalatable, since for a scholar of Habermas's fame and standing, writing his magnum opus, seriously to misunderstand another scholar, in the course of an argument based in no small part on statements about what critical scholars believe and grant, is rather serious. But I'm afraid those are our only options. "Do not quite make the same grade of conciseness" (where "concise" narratives are, Habermas summarizes, "deemed likeliest to be reliable," p. 870) is hardly sufficient to describe the view, "Are completely made up." In the previous post I substantiated the fact that Dodd thinks Doubting Thomas is completely made up.

In this post I will argue that Dodd thinks the Road to Emmaus and the meeting by the Sea of Galilee are completely made up.

But first, why might Habermas use the phrase "do not quite make the same grade of conciseness"? At first sight, it is difficult to understand where Habermas gets that language since the claim that there are different "grades" of narratives that are all "concise" is found nowhere in the article by Dodd.

A possible explanation, but one which only points to a further misunderstanding, may be found in a footnote. In the main text on p. 847, Habermas says, concerning the group appearance stories in the Gospels,

The other mentions above are narrated accounts of the appearance(s) to the disciples, and as types or forms, these are usually differentiated by critical scholars.

Habermas follows this sentence with the following footnote (note 33):

Perhaps one would even want to make use of Dodd’s study above and differentiate the narrated appearances even further by distinguishing between the “concise” and the “circumstantial” accounts (or “Tales”), as well as the further differentiation between “Class I” and “Class II” examples of the concise narratives. The distinctions are found in Dodd, “Appearances of the Risen Christ,” particularly 102–9. (Emphasis added)

Habermas appears to be saying that "Class I" and "Class II" are two different types of concise narratives. But as we shall see, this is completely wrong. Class I narratives are, in Dodd, those he calls concise narratives. Class II narratives are the "Tales" in Dodd's classification. They emphatically are not a different "example" or "grade" of concise narratives. This is a very serious blunder in interpreting Dodd. 

It should have been obvious to Habermas that what he says here about Class I and Class II narratives must be wrong, both from the quotations that I give below from Dodd's article, and, if that were not enough, from this simple consideration: If Class II Gospel narratives are a "grade" of concise narratives in Dodd, rather than Tales, then there are no resurrection narratives discussed in Dodd's article that he classifies as Tales. There are no other candidates for Tales in the article besides those he discusses under the heading of "Class II." Yet Dodd makes it clear from the beginning that he intends to apply the distinction between "concise" narratives and Tales to the resurrection stories. So there have to be some resurrection stories that, according to Dodd, are Tales rather than "concise."

Apparently this point did not occur to Habermas, nor did he correctly understand Dodd's extremely clear statements that Class II narratives are the Tales, rather than another "grade" of concise narrative, and this may be what led to the incorrect statement that Dodd merely thinks that the Road to Emmaus and the meeting by the seashore don't quite make the "same grade of conciseness."

Dodd on Class I and Class II narratives

The very first sentences of Dodd's article, on p. 102, read,

The form critics distinguish with some unanimity two main types of narrative in the gospels. Their nomenclature differs, but if we say that there is a concise and a circumstantial type of narrative, we shall beg no questions.

Two main types: concise and circumstantial. 

Dodd then immediately makes it clear that "circumstantial" and "tales" refer to the same form-critical category:

[A]nyone can feel the difference in character between, let us say, the story of the Withered Hand or of the Blessing of the Children, and the stories of the Epileptic Boy and the Gadarene Swine. The latter trace the course of an incident from stage to stage with heightening interest, and make it vivid to the reader by means of arresting details, and traits of character in the actors and interlocutors….All such details are part of the art and craft of the story-teller, who, himself excited by the story he tells, seeks to kindle the imagination of his auditors. These stories are sometimes labelled “Novellen’, for which, perhaps, the best English equivalent is ‘Tales.’ Dodd, p. 102

In other words, "circumstantial" narratives are characterized by circumstantial details, which is what causes Dodd to classify them as "Tales." (As mentioned in the previous post, this is an extremely poor methodological principle, but it is, indeed, Dodd's principle, and one he considers almost beyond question.) 

Dodd continues:

In sharp contrast to these ‘tales’, the ‘concise’ type of narrative tells us nothing which is not absolutely essential to a bare report of what happened or what was said. pp. 102-103

So the Tales and the circumstantial narratives are the same type. and this is contrasted with the concise narratives (which I've referred to as "snippets").

Dodd then proceeds:

These two types of narrative which have been distinguished in the evangelical records of the ministry of Jesus may be recognized also in those parts of the gospels which follow upon the account opf the discovery of the empty Tomb on Easter morning. Here we are given a number of narratives of appearances of the risen Christ to certain of his followers. Some of these narratives have a character similar to that of the ‘Tales’. For example, the stories of the Walk to Emmaus in Lk. xxiv, and of the meal by the Sea of Galilee in Jn. xxi, are full of the kind of dramatic detail and characterization which we have noted in such stories as those of the Epileptic Boy and the Gadarene Swine. On the other hand there are other narratives which equally clearly show the traits of such ‘concise’ narratives as the Withered Hand and the Blessing of the Children. p. 104 

Nothing could be clearer: The Walk to Emmaus and the meeting by the seashore are not concise narratives at all according to Dodd but are instead what he calls "Tales."

Below on that page he outlines what he considers to be features of the concise narratives and then says,

I shall label narratives of this type, Class I, and those of the circumstantial type, Class II. 

In Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (HTFG), Dodd says the same thing. 

Two types [of narrative] are represented, the concise (analogous to so-called 'paradigms'...or 'pronouncement stories') and the circumstantial (analogous to the Novellen, or ‘Tales’). HTFG, p. 143

So, "circumstantial," "Tales," and "Class II" are all different labels for the same thing in Dodd. Class I and Class II are not different "grades" of concise narratives. Rather, Dodd uses the phrase "Class I" for "concise" narratives in his system and "Class II" for "tales," and the Emmaus Road and meeting by the seashore are in the latter category. Habermas has just made a mistake. 

Tales in Dodd are invented 

Well, okay, you may say, maybe Habermas makes a mistaken when he seems to imply that the walk to Emmaus and the meeting by the seashore, according to Dodd, are just a different "grade" of concise narrative rather than tales, but maybe "tales" is such a highly technical term for Dodd that it doesn't really mean that they were fictionally invented.

But what Dodd says in longer quotations really admits of no other interpretation than that he thinks these stories are fictional.

On the Road to Emmaus:

The Walk to Emmaus is a highly-finished literary composition, in which the author, dwelling with loving interest upon every detail of his theme has lost no opportunity of evoking an imaginative response in the reader. We observe also the precise identification of persons and places: the name of one of the travelers, Cleopas; the village of Emmaus, sixty stades from Jerusalem. All these are not traits of a corporate tradition. They are characteristic of the practised story-teller, who knows just how to ‘put his story across’. But further, the writer has used the captivating narrative as a setting for a comprehensive treatment of the theme of Christ’s resurrection in its character of a reunion of the Lord with his followers. The dialogue is so managed that it leads up to a basic programme for the study of ‘testimonies’ from the Old Testament, which was the foundation of the earliest theological enterprise of the primitive Church. The recognition of the Lord at table carries a significant suggestion to a community which made the ‘breaking o bread’ the centre of its fellowship. Not only so: The narrative is so contrived as to include, by means of ‘flash-backs’, the discovery of the empty Tomb, the angelic announcement, and the appearaance of the Lord to Peter…, so that the pericope as a whole forms a kind of summary ‘Gospel of the Resurrection’. It is clear, then, that we have no mere expansion of the general pattern, but a carefully-composed statement, which, in the framework of a narrative of intense dramatic interest, includes most of what (from this evangelist’s point of view) needs to be said about the resurrection of Christ….[T]he dramatic centre of the whole incident is the [anagnorisis]—for it seems proper in this case to use the technical term applied by ancient literary critics to the recognition-scene which was so often the crucial point of a Greek drama. pp. 107-108 (emphasis added)

When Dodd praises the "precise identification of persons and places," he is indicating that these are invented. He is praising them as literary creations. As he has said repeatedly in his article, this is not a matter of literal historical identification but rather of the art of the story-teller, with the intention of "putting his story across." Moreover, Dodd attributes the entire structure of the story to the literary and theological intention of the author to including everything that "needs to be said" about Jesus' resurrection in dramatic fashion in one story. And the dramatic recognition of Jesus itself is there for literary dramatic value. The dialogue is "managed" toward the author's purpose; the narrative is "contrived" for this purpose. It is not that the two on the road actually did mention to Jesus what had happened earlier that day. No, the author makes this up so as to be sure to include the earlier events in this one tale, in the form of flashback. It is not that Jesus, rebuking them for their lack of perception, really did teach them at length about the prophecies (which, by the way, Luke doesn't actually report in detail) but rather that Luke wants to make Jesus say this so as to support the way that the early church used the Old Testament. Dodd's point is that this is a well-crafted fictional story, contrived for theological purposes, rather than a story that comes from a reliable source and tells us what literally happened.

Later in the article Dodd again strongly implies that Luke "makes" characters say things that they didn't really say, as part of his agenda to force a single narrative to include everything that he wants to say about the resurrection.

Luke intends here, as we have seen, to present a kind of comprehensive ‘Gospel of the Resurrection’ within the framework of a single narrative. In pursuance of this intention he makes ‘the Eleven and those who were with them’ cap the remarkable news which Cleopas and his companion have brought from Emmaus by announcing, ‘The Lord has indeed risen, and he appeared to Simon’. pp. 125-126 (emphasis added)

Similarly, in Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel, p. 141, Dodd says that Luke “makes the two travelers rehearse the main facts of Easter morning…” (emphasis added)

Concerning the meeting by the seashore, Dodd speaks similarly, leaving little doubt of his position on its historicity:

The account of the appearance of the Lord to seven disciples by the Sea of Galilee, contained in the appendix to the Fourth Gospel…, is recorded within the framework of a complex narrative, covering a considerable lapse of time from the evening of one day, all through the night, to the morning of a seconde day. The narrative comprises two distinct but interlocking incidents: the fishing of the disciples and breakfast on the shore. Each is told with a wealth of picturesque detail. The incidents are dramatic, the dialogue lively and in character….All this is strictly unnecessary to the main theme. It is characteristic of the story-teller, and reflects his interest in the story and his mastery of his craft. The centre of interest is the recognition of the risen Lord, but here the recognition is not immediate but spread over an appreciable period. It begins with the dramatic exclamation of the beloved disciple, which impels Peter to jump overboard, but it is not complete until the party has landed and Jesus, having invited them to breakfast, distributes bread and fish. The motive of the breaking of bread appears once again, as in the Emmaus story….[T]he pericope does not embody didactic passages in the story itself, which is a straightforward, uninterrupted, dramatic narrative. But it is made to lead up to a significant dialogue, in the course of which Peter receives his apostolic commission. Thus the motive of Matt. xxviii.19 and Jn. xx.21 reappears in a different setting. pp. 108-109 (emphasis added)

As in the Emmaus story in Luke, Dodd here treats the people in this appearance account as the fourth evangelist's characters and the plot as his plot. John makes the action lead up to a significant dialogue between Jesus and Peter. He spreads the recognition of Jesus over a longer period of time than it would take in a concise narrative. The details are created by the evangelist himself as part of a story-teller's craft. John makes the idea of an apostolic commission from Jesus appear in a "different setting" from the one in the concise narratives--in other words, a different dramatic setting. 

Dodd says the same thing about John 21 in HTFG:

There is a tendency [in the circumstantial narratives] to expand section E of the pattern [Jesus’ word of command] with didactic material, having in general the character of a last charge or ‘testament’ to the Church, or else to make the story an introduction to a discourse or dialogue having that character. Thus in John 20.19-21 the appearance of the Lord (which properly ends…with the word of command…) is made to lead up to the gift of the Spirit and the investing of the apostles with authority in the Church; and in [John] 21 the word of command is replaced by the long dialogue with Peter and the Beloved Disciple, 15-23, which is in some sort an equivalent for the commissioning of the apostles in John 20.21b, Matt. 28.18-20, ... Luke 24.44-9. HTFG, p. 144

In this quotation I have deliberately changed the Roman numerals for the references to Arabic, to make more immediately clear the parallels Dodd is drawing. Here once again we see the notion of the author himself expanding a portion of a pattern (there appears to be no idea that he is reporting what actually happened) and making certain things happen in the story for purposes of including material that the author desires to communicate to his readers. Notice too that here Dodd makes it quite clear that the sub-incident of Jesus' breathing on his disciples in John 20 is invented, even though it is portrayed as part of one and the same meeting that includes one of Dodd's concise snippets. This just emphasizes how little it really means that Dodd designates anything as a concise narrative. He's taking a pair of scissors and clipping out a few verses here and there while treating the entire rest of the very same episode as probably ahistorical. I'll have more to say about the "concise" narratives in a later post.

Here, too, Dodd is suggesting that the dialogue with Peter (and the Beloved Disciple) appears in this "Tale" of the meeting by the seashore as an "in some sort an equivalent" of the commissioning of the disciples in completely different stories. But of course the listed references portray entirely different settings and/or different content: The first meeting in Jerusalem on Easter evening, the Great Commission apparently given at a meeting in Galilee on a mountain (hence, not by the seashore), Jesus' words in Jerusalem (in Luke) on the subject of prophecy and of how his disciples are to be his witnesses. These are not "equivalent" at all. It is only in the form critics' mind, which thinks in terms of  motifs forming patterns in form-critical types, rather than literal historical occurrences, that they could be thought of as "in some sort equivalent."

Conclusion

These passages in Dodd remind me of a great phrase coined by the late blogger Steve Hays, referring to some theories of Dan Wallace about Jesus' words. Hayes referred to the view of Jesus in the Wallace article in question as "Silly Putty Jesus." 

Here in Dodd is the same idea. With no self-consciousness at all, Dodd matter-of-factly treats the people involved in these stories, including Jesus, as characters, literary silly putty. Dodd views the stories as literary productions in which things are "made" to happen by the author. The stories themselves, then, are inventions. There really is no room left in Dodd's exposition of these two "Tales" for any historicity to them, as separate incidents. What makes these stories what they are is what separates them from other stories of Jesus' appearances. The Doddean snippet of John 20:19-21 is a completely separate incident in John. Merely to say that Dodd allows for the existence of "concise" narratives that have some similar motifs (such as Jesus appearing, being recognized, commissioning his disciples, etc.) says nothing positive about Dodd's view of the historicity of these distinct stories, in which people meet Jesus under specific circumstances and have specific conversations with him. For Dodd, the Emmaus Road and the disciples' meeting with Jesus by the seashore are just inventions.

If you, like Habermas, do not see that, there's not much more I can do to convince you, but I think you should be able to see that from the extensive quotations given here.

Next up in this series: What Dodd really says about the meeting between Jesus and "the eleven" in Luke 24:36-49, and Habermas's erroneous summary of Dodd's opinion on that story.

More on independence after a recent conversation

Two days ago (5/20/24) I had a very interesting conversation about minimal facts with theist (but not at this time Christian) Youtuber and philosophy student Matthew Adelstein. Toward the end of our conversation he brought up the issue of independence, multiplying Bayes factors, and the very large cumulative Bayes factor in Tim's and my 2009 paper on the resurrection. Matthew was critical of this very large cumulative factor on the grounds a) that it's just too large for any empirical matter (I just disagree) and b) that if some non-resurrection explanation would explain some of the individual testimonies, it would probably explain more of them, so that there should be diminishing returns, and the individual Bayes factors should not be multiplied.

In our conversation, I felt that this very interesting and complex topic was arising too close to the end of our time together to receive a good enough discussion, so I indicated serious awareness of it and tried to make a somewhat different but related point about maximal data, which was the topic of our overall conversation. But I'm concerned that that looked dismissive, so I've decided to follow up here.

Here I'd like to restate that point that I was trying to make in the video and also discuss some more of the issues surrounding independence in the argument for the resurrection.

In the discussion context, I was urging the importance of the maximal data approach and mentioned that in Tim's and my original resurrection article, the Bayes factor that we used was explicitly based on the claim that the detailed, polymodal resurrection stories in the Gospels give us the content of what the original (alleged) witnesses claimed. Matt immediately stated that he thinks that Bayes factor is wildly over-optimistic anyway and gave as one of his reasons the problem of independence. The cumulative Bayes factor was calculated by multiplying individual disciple testimony factors together.

The point that I wanted to make in response in the video was this: Even the individual Bayes factors of 10^3 depended upon the polymodal and detailed nature of the claims. For any one ostensible witness, the question arises whether this is the kind of thing that he could be simply mistaken about, whether it was the kind of thing that, if he really experienced it, would reasonably lead him to think that Jesus was risen bodily (as opposed to unreasonably over-interpreting his experience), and whether it was the kind of thing that could have some other plausible non-resurrection explanation. The answers to these questions depend crucially upon the content of the testimony. If we don't have detailed testimony but just something like "He was seen by the disciples," that makes it much harder to argue for even a single strong Bayes factor in favor of the resurrection. And if many liberal scholars are right that the disciples didn't experience anything detailed and physical-like, as reported in the Gospels, in a group, then a "mistaken" option of some kind becomes much more plausible. (I note here that Matthew himself, earlier in our discussion, really pressed on the idea that the Gospels have signs of "development" and "apologetic additions," so he should be in a good position to realize how important it is to have a good answer to these claims that the most interesting parts of the Gospel narratives are just made up!)

So even before we get to the concern about independence and multiplying Bayes factors, the issues between minimalists and maximalists become relevant. In raising Tim's and my Blackwell article, I wasn't trying to inaugurate a debate about the actual cumulative Bayes factor we gave there; rather, I was trying to point out that even that long ago we were advocating a maximalist approach in the sense that we recognized the extreme epistemic importance of the detailed and extensive nature of the disciples' testimony, which can be found only in the Gospels (and Acts) if it is to be found anywhere.

Next, I want to point out that the detailed Gospel accounts are also related to the issue of independence and group appearances in a way that is positive for the resurrection case. In a series of technical articles, I've picked up on a suggestion that Tim made in the Blackwell article and run with it; this suggestion concerns a way of correcting for dependence among individual items of evidence. A slightly non-technical way to describe it is to say that we need to ask whether the individual items of evidence are more dependent upon one another given the affirmation of the hypothesis in question (in this case, the resurrection) or more dependent upon one another given its negation, and finally what the ratio is between dependence given the affirmation and given the negation of H. I argued here (in the journal Ergo) that independence given the negation sheds important light on the value of diverse evidence, long recognized in the philosophy of science. In two other articles (not currently available online for free) I discussed the use of the correction factor to correct for dependence in cumulative case arguments. (It appears that I now have permission to post the accepted manuscript version of both of these to a personal website. If I do that I'll post links here. Otherwise, if you are an academic, you probably have institutional electronic access to the journals in question. The Ergo article is available by open access.)

“Accounting for Dependence: Relative Consilience as a Correction Factor in Cumulative Case Arguments,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 95:3 (2017), 560-572, DOI 10.1080/00048402.2016.1219753.

“Bayes Factors All the Way: Toward a New View of Coherence and Truth,” Theoria (2016) 82:329-350. DOI 10.1111/theo.12102.

Matthew was emphasizing the plausibility of dependence on the negation of R: If something-or-other had the explanatory power to explain one disciple's testimony to a group experience, given that R was false, then that same something-or-other would plausibly explain some other disciple's testimony, given ~R. 

But that's not even close to being the only question. Consider the possibility of dependence on R given the following aspects of the testimony: 

--Jesus appeared to them in various groupings.

--Jesus didn't just appear visually in some paranormal-like way; rather, he was tangible and audible as well, to multiple people at a time, on more than one occasion.

--On multiple occasions, he gave long speeches and/or had detailed conversations with multiple people at once.

--On more than one occasion, he was able to eat and on one occasion even suggested to them that they give him something to eat in order to show that he was not a ghost.

--It seemed to them, in groups, that Jesus was physically present in the room, present in 3D, solid, standing before them with his feet on the ground, not floating in the sky or appearing from heaven.

Now, suppose that Jesus really rose bodily from the dead--R. (I am not counting as R merely his exaltation to heaven.) In that case, if one of his friends claims the above things, including that that person himself was present at such a group experience (T1), then the probability that another such friend will say the same (T2), given (R & T1), is greater than given R alone. T1 gives us information about when and how Jesus appeared to a group or groups, leading us to have greater reason to expect multiple testimonies indicating the same type of thing. An analogy would be this: Let H be, "Lydia McGrew lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan." Let T1 be some specific person's statement, "I saw Lydia McGrew at____church in Michigan on ____date, at the morning service." Let T2 be a similar testimony from some other person who goes to that church. P(T2|H & T1) > P(T2|H). There is helpful dependence among the testimonies given the truth of the proposition that I live in Kalamazoo, since the statement that I was really present on a particular occasion in a particular place in Kalamazoo, attested by one witness, gives us reason to believe that I was genuinely, physically encountered on that occasion by more than one person and hence that someone else will also be able to confirm this.

What all this means is that there is arguably dependence on R among the attestations by multiple disciples, not just on ~R. (And as I've pointed out in some recent videos, Acts 1 very carefully lists the eleven by name and reports that Peter urged the election of a replacement, who ended up being Matthias, so that there would be at least twelve people to attest to Jesus' resurrection.)

Moreover, the importance of the highly detailed stories in the Gospels to a cumulative Bayes factor is also relevant to dependence on the negation. Here's why: Above I mentioned that dependence on the negation involves some kind of subhypothesis of ~H, a something-or-other that would explain one testimony for H (though H is false) and would simultaneously explain multiple testimonies to H (though H is false). Something we emphasized in our Blackwell article is that the probability of a subhypothesis of ~H given ~H is an important issue when it comes to how helpful that subhypothesis is in explaining away evidence for H. (Actually I think I coined the term "subhypothesis" later than that article and used it in the Ergo article, which I wrote individually, but the concept is there, and the point about the probability given ~H was originally Tim's.) The specific subhypothesis of ~R that would act as the "something-or-other" mentioned above becomes more and more bizarre and improbable given ~H itself when it has to explain the detailed stories in the Gospels. This is extremely important. 

One skeptic (Arif Ahmed) has written a technical article about dependence given the negation of a miracle story with reference to an event like a magic show, someone appearing to walk across a swimming pool in front of a large audience.

But in the case of the Gospel stories, the disciples are all present together in a place where they are able to get close to Jesus. He invites them to touch him. He talks to them at length. Etc. This is far more difficult to account for than some kind of illusion, put across to an audience sitting at a performance, using modern technological resources for creating illusions. It's all very well to say that if something-or-other could explain why one person would describe such a group experience, even though Jesus wasn't bodily risen, it's somewhat plausible that multiple people who were allegedly present at the same event would say the same. But when we consider these details, what would such a something-or-other be? It's precisely here that group hallucination theories become so improbable. Even if you think that there are real group hallucinations in some sense (like a bunch of people simultaneously thinking they see some shape at a distance, which they identify with a saint), these kinds of detailed, polymodal, lengthy group hallucinations are the kind that we really can say we don't have any instances of. 

This supports the point I was making in the conversation--namely, the great importance of a maximal data approach. The minimalists like to brush off the hallucination possibility; what they don't seem to realize is that really wildly improbable hallucination theories aren't in fact needed to explain the facts found in a minimal facts case. For suppose that all that we had, instead, were summary statements like those found in I Corinthians 15--he appeared to the twelve, he appeared to this person, he appeared to that person. No criticism of the Apostle Paul. He's just giving a summary. He couldn't have known that in the 20th and 21st centuries people would be trying to lean on his summary instead of more detailed accounts! If we have no idea what their experiences were like, we are fairly free to develop some not-R subhypothesis that would explain such bare claims, even from multiple people. This, indeed, is what Bart Ehrman himself does. He says that he doesn't grant group experiences anyway, but that if they did have group experiences, they were merely seeing at a distance, like alleged Marian apparitions. Norman Perrin suggests that they had some feeling of theological enlightenment while they were together (that Jesus was "risen into their lives") and that this (he may also have in mind some kind of garden-variety mental imagery) was called "seeing" Jesus. 

Or suppose that we had to make our argument for Jesus' bodily resurrection while relying on "the appearance experiences" as understood by Dale Allison. Allison thinks that Jesus spoke only briefly and that the highly physical-like experiences, like his asking for food to eat and offering to let Thomas touch his scars, simply didn't happen. (Notice here the similarity to Matthew's own concerns about "apologetic development" in the accounts, shared by so many critical scholars.) In that case it's much  easier to find a subhypothesis of ~R that explains even multiple testimonies to that sort of experience. Indeed, that's Allison's whole point. In his opinion, the experiences were vision-like rather than physical-like. So some sort of exaltation followed by visions rather than a bodily resurrection (R) would make a better explanation of the fact that multiple people testified to...vision-like experiences. 

One more point: As I've argued in an older post, there is variation present in the maximal data resurrection evidence that we didn't really access in the Blackwell article. Remember that variation in testimony is helpful in avoiding dependence on the negation of H. This includes variation in the backgrounds of the people involved, their peer groups and influences on them, the geographical settings of the events, and the groupings involved. While the post refers specifically to conspiracy theories, the same point is relevant to "mistake" theories and dependence on the negation of H.

This has been a rather technical post, but I didn't want it to seem that I was brushing off Matthew's question about dependence on the negation, and I've decided to put this into a blog post, as that is a more permanent form (more so than Facebook) for such lengthy comments.

A maximalist use of the conversion of Paul

It's well-known that I'm highly critical of the Minimal Facts Argument for Jesus' resurrection. I consider it quite weak and therefore vastly oversold, due to its insistence on relying only on facts that are granted by a wide and diverse scholarly consensus. I've discussed this often and am preparing even as I write these words for a livestream in response to an alleged response from Drs. Habermas and Licona. Unfortunately, their "response" video was strikingly non-responsive. Indeed, it was pretty clear that neither of them understood the criticisms I've leveled, and it was unclear whether they were even familiar with those concerns.

The minimalist approach, whether in its MFA incarnation or in other versions, tends to rely heavily on the Apostle Paul as an alternative to relying on the Gospel accounts. The "creed" in I Corinthians 15 is especially prominent in all minimalist-type arguments. And when arguing for the bodily resurrection, it is quite common for minimalists to emphasize strongly that Paul had a bodily concept of the resurrection and that he stated that he and the Jerusalem apostles were preaching the same message. Hence, the reasoning goes, in all probability the Jerusalem apostles were preaching a bodily resurrection.

This may be a legitimate inference as far as it goes, but the problem is that it doesn't go very far. People believe all kinds of things, and the mere fact that the Jerusalem apostles and Paul believed that Jesus was raised bodily and had appeared to them bodily doesn't tell us whether they were reasonable to think so. Without further information as to the details of their claims, it is deeply unclear whether they jumped to conclusions, or, to put it in a more jargony form, interpreted some sort of (insufficient) experiences in the light of their theological expectations. (Compare the fact that you wouldn't be very impressed even if you were 100% sure that twelve people sincerely believed that they had conversations with aliens, in the absence of further details about why they believed this.)

On the other hand, in Tim's and my article on Jesus' resurrection published in 2009, we did give the conversion of Paul independent force for the resurrection of Jesus, by which we meant the bodily resurrection. In fact, we gave it a hefty-ish Bayes factor of 10³. While I would note that even that Bayes factor needs to be part of a more robust cumulative case in order to overcome even a modestly low prior probability (in other words, impressive as it sounds, that Bayes factor all by itself isn't going to support strong, justified confidence in a miracle), and while I admit to some ambivalence now as to whether that factor may have been overly optimistic, it is still worth revisiting the conversion of Paul to ask this: Do I still grant the conversion of Paul any significant independent force in favor of the bodily resurrection of Jesus? And if so, how does this differ from the minimalist reliance on Paul?

The issue of independence is at the heart of my critique of the minimalist use of Paul in favor of Jesus' bodily resurrection. As I've discussed, by using Paul's conversion and concept of resurrection to support the idea that "the disciples believed" that Jesus was physically risen, the minimalist runs into the problem that I've called the bottleneck issue. Briefly, if the probability that Jesus was risen bodily given only that the disciples believed that he was, based on some unspecified experiences, is not very high (or, to put it a little differently, if their mere belief based on largely unspecified experiences provides only a weak Bayes factor in favor of the truth of their belief), then merely piling on more and more evidence that they had this belief cannot possibly rectify the problem, since it provides no independent evidence for the truth of the belief. My criticism has already assumed that we are "given" that they had that belief. I'm arguing that even if we are "given" it, it doesn't provide much evidence (when details of their reasons and experiences are excluded) for the truth. If we're "given" it, we're given it at probability 1, so making its probability approach 1 more and more can't help us to get beyond the criticism. Hence the minimalist use of Paul to support the proposition, "The disciples believed that Jesus was risen bodily from the dead" provides no independent evidence for the truth of their belief aside from that proposition itself.

A maximalist approach, however, does allow us to make use of Paul's conversion in a different way that doesn't run into this bottleneck problem. The maximalist is prepared to argue for the reliability of the book of Acts. This provides a great many advantages, including access to the serious risks that provided the context in which the disciples made their proclamation and, in the early chapters of Acts, direct evidence that they were preaching the bodily resurrection of Jesus from early on, with no need to infer this indirectly from Paul's letters and his relationship to the Jerusalem apostles as attested in his letters.

Even more importantly, the defense of the reliability of Acts and of the proposition that it comes from a companion of Paul who didn't mess around with the facts means that we can argue with confidence that Paul claimed what we find in the conversion accounts in Acts 9, 22, and 26. These include several very salient points relevant to the evidential force in favor of Jesus' bodily resurrection. Among others, 1) Paul was wide awake, walking down a road at about midday, when the conversion experience abruptly happened. So this couldn't have been a dream. (Contrast any sort of visionary experience stories that begin, "I was reading my Bible alone in my study..." where the person might have dozed off.) 2) Paul was with other people, who presumably could attest to his abrupt, completely unexpected, odd behavior. 3) These other people allegedly saw the light and would have been able to attest that Paul had to be led afterwards because he was temporarily blind. (In the interests of time and space, I'm not going into detail on the question of what they heard. I take the view that they heard a voice but that it was a voice-like sound to them without comprehensible words. This would be another intersubjective element, but I'm not giving it much weight here because of the alleged contradiction concerning it.) 4) Very important: Paul claimed that Jesus not only identified himself but also explicitly endorsed the teaching of the very sect Paul was persecuting by saying, "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting." This gives content to Paul's experience which, combined with our independent evidence (e.g., from the Gospels and from the early chapters of Acts) that the Christian sect Paul was persecuting taught that Jesus rose bodily, serves as independent evidence for that content, since the best explanation of Paul's conversion and of his account of what occasioned it is that his experience was veridical. 

The point is a little subtle, but I hope that it is clear. Paul's conversion provides independent, significant evidence for Jesus' bodily resurrection only insofar as it does something more and quite different from providing evidence that the disciples and Paul believed that Jesus was physically risen. In a maximalist use of Paul, we take it that, via the reliability of the Gospels and Acts, we have more than enough evidence already that they were teaching that Jesus was physically risen. Then we take it that the detailed accounts in Acts of the circumstances and content of Paul's abrupt conversion really come from Paul. They weren't embellished by the author of Acts. Then we argue that it is quite difficult to explain this abrupt conversion with these detailed aspects on the basis of a non-veridical category (that is, some category according to which Paul was mistaken and did not actually have communication with Jesus). But if Jesus himself said, in a supernatural communication with Paul, that he was to be identified with the group that was preaching that he was physically risen, then this is evidence that he was, indeed, physically risen.

Now whether this gives us an independent Bayes factor as high as 10³ or not, my point here is that it avoids the bottleneck issue, because it isn't just piling on more and more evidence for what the disciples thought, when a very salient question at issue (in the absence of details of their experiences) is whether they were rational to think that. Moreover, if (given the reliability of Acts) the accounts in Acts really do tell us what Paul claimed, then we understand further why Paul himself was rational in thinking that he had a supernatural communication from Jesus on the road to Damascus. His conviction is quite understandable given the details of the experience.

In contrast, the minimalist approach even to Paul's conversion is extremely tentative, a point that is especially notable given the great importance of Paul to the minimalist approach itself. In The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, Michael Licona is quite explicit that he treats the conversion accounts in Acts merely as "possible" sources concerning the nature of Paul's conversion, sources of "limited historical value," and that the reason for this is because there is no scholarly consensus concerning how much liberty Luke felt free to take in writing Acts (pp. 382, 394). (Licona is surely right about this absence of scholarly consensus. Bart Ehrman, for example, absolutely insists that we evaluate Paul's conversion based only on the epistles, and only on a subset of those, and must exclude the accounts in Acts as likely elaborated by the author. Ehrman then, with unintentional humor, complains about the maddening, frustrating limitation of our information about such a historically important event as Paul's conversion!) 

As I have pointed out before, the presence of a large and diverse scholarly consensus, whatever minimalists at times say to the contrary notwithstanding, is undeniably given epistemological weight in their methodology. They treat it as a limiting factor and a necessary condition for our being historically highly confident (confident "as historians") about specific propositions.

Cutting oneself off from the details of the Pauline conversion claims found in Acts cuts one off from the very factors that give significant, independent epistemic force to Paul's conversion. At that point we no longer know what exactly Paul claimed that Jesus said to him on that occasion and how clearly it endorsed what the apostles were already preaching. We don't know whether Paul was alone or with others when it happened, whether there was anything intersubjective about his experience, or whether he could possibly have been asleep at the time. We don't know (without Acts) whether his experience at the time of his conversion had (even to him) clear verbal content as opposed to feelings or impressions.

Another contrast between the maximalist case and the minimalist use of Paul's conversion is worth mentioning: On Paul's own account, unlike the disciples, he had no opportunity to touch Jesus. He wasn't invited to do so. He did not see Jesus eat or have a long conversation with him over a meal, and others were not aware of the various modalities of Jesus' presence in the same way that he was. For example, the others on the road didn't see Jesus. (Unlike in the Gospel accounts, where an entire group is conversing with Jesus at once.) I have found that it is very unpopular for me to say that in very notable respects, Paul's experience was more vision-like (though arguably objective) than the reported experiences in the Gospels. I have received a lot of pushback on this from some fellow believers, but I think it's important. The argument that Paul's experience was veridical and that it confirms Jesus' bodily resurrection is thus different in kind from the argument that the disciples really had bodily experiences of a bodily risen Jesus. Say what you will, Jesus did not seem even to Paul to be standing right there in the dust of the Damascus Road along with everybody else, plainly visible to everyone, plainly tangible, etc. And there is a reason for that: Jesus had, according to Acts, already ascended into heaven. After that the Bible accounts afford no indication that he ever walked around in his body on earth again, and indeed the biblical accounts would lead us to think that he didn't do so (Acts 1:11) and won't do so until his eschatological return. So he probably didn't do so with Paul. 

In contrast, the minimalist approach elides this distinction by referring to Paul as "an eyewitness" of the resurrection and treating him as being like the disciples in this respect, without qualification. This elision is a gift to the skeptic, or to someone like Dale Allison who thinks that the disciples had only visionary-type experiences of the risen Jesus. Evidentially, it is important to emphasize the differences between Paul's experience and the disciples' experiences. They were rational in believing that Jesus was physically risen because they had experiences both individually and in varying groups in which Jesus presented himself in a fully polymodal fashion, just as we present ourselves to one another in ordinary physical meetings. They had every reason to believe (given that they experienced what they reported) that anyone who walked into that room could have seen Jesus, and anyone who bumped into him could have touched him, just as with any other physically present person. 

Paul was rational in believing that Jesus was physically risen for a more indirect reason: He already knew the tenets of the sect he was persecuting and that (per the earlier chapters of Acts) they included the physical resurrection of this man Jesus. Paul then (according to his report, as recounted in Acts) had an experience of being struck down abruptly in the middle of the day, out of nowhere, while accompanied by others, by a light from heaven (which the others saw). He then heard a voice and saw something (perhaps Jesus as a human figure above him), and the voice explicitly stated that it was the voice of Jesus as preached by the group he was persecuting. When their brief dialogue was over and the light receded, he found that he was blind. Given the overwhelming and explicit nature of this experience, its partial intersubjectivity, and its occurrence while he was wide awake (as his companions could attest), it was quite understandable that he concluded that it was veridical and hence that Jesus really had risen from the dead, as preached by the Christians. But this was not because he personally had the opportunity to verify the nature of Jesus' body by interacting with it as the disciples did. The arguments are different. The disanalogy can and must be emphasized, while at the same time we can acknowledge that Paul's detailed claims have independent force in favor of the physical resurrection.

I hope that this has been a useful fuller explanation of how a maximalist "does" the argument from the conversion of Paul for the resurrection. 

On the minimal facts for the resurrection, Part 3: How did we get confused about what scholars grant?

My purpose in this post is two-fold. First, for those interested in "McGrew history," I want to explain a timeline of how it came about that, for a time, Tim and I were confused about how much scholars across the spectrum grant about the resurrection. That confusion made it into our 2009 article, which has in turn caused some people to think that we ourselves were doing something significantly like an MFA in that article. (This has sometimes led to a frustrating attempt to play "gotcha" by quoting certain comments about consensus from that article and then claiming that it is very strange, or ironic, or something like that, that we have since then emerged as critics of the MFA.) Even at the time, we were self-consciously not doing an MFA. We knew that our argument was not an MFA and that it was crucially relying on the polymodal details of the disciples' claims. But we were mistaken about how much scholars grant, and we referred to that incorrectly (though with some qualifications) in the article. How did that happen, and how did we get un-confused? Some people may find that history interesting.

Second, I want to warn about a very real possibility and ask people doing the MFA to be much more careful. People who state the MFA can cause confusion in others about how little the majority of NT scholars really do grant. 

I realize that that part of my post is going to upset some people, so I want to say a couple of things about that right here at the outset, while perhaps I still have readers' attention: When I discuss below some places where I think that Gary Habermas has been unclear on this point, I am not at all saying that he has been intentionally unclear. I think it has been unintentional. I would call it something like getting carried away or getting overenthusiastic in stating the argument, thus describing the disciples' experiences in ways that go beyond what skeptical and liberal scholars grant, and then returning to claim that the argument depends only on what the vast majority of scholars all across the ideological spectrum grant. 

Also, I am not saying that Habermas is always unclear. Sometimes he is very clear about how limited the appearance minimal fact really is. I fully acknowledge this. 

And finally, I am not saying that Habermas explicitly says that skeptical scholars grant more than they really grant. However, I am saying that in some of what he writes, which is influencing apologetics, he does give that impression (no doubt accidentally), especially if what he writes is read by someone who doesn't already know that skeptical scholars and "critical" scholars would never grant that much. In these writings he is supposedly informing the reader of how much is granted by many scholars and how surprising it is. So you shouldn't need to know already what is and isn't granted in order to avoid getting confused!

Although this may sound harsh, I would like to request that you would refrain from commenting on this post if your only purpose is saying something like, "Habermas is clear over in this other place!" or "Anybody should know that skeptical scholars wouldn't grant that, so you'd really have to have something wrong with you to be confused!" or even, "But I can find some other way to construe this article or this passage, so it isn't unclear, so you're wrong!" The fact that you can find some other way to construe a passage doesn't mean that it isn't unclear and doesn't mean that intelligent people of good will couldn't get confused by reading it. It doesn't prevent my warning from being well-taken.

Look: I'm saying that intelligent people of good will who don't already know what the consensus does and doesn't contain could pretty easily get confused about this from such passages as those I'll quote, and some have gotten confused. Therefore, MFA users need to be more careful. Is that really such a threatening statement that you have to try to read the passages with a magnifying glass, cherry pick certain sentences, insist that we focus only on this sentence or that sentence, in order to find some way to say I'm being sloppy, misrepresenting, or that we must have been nuts ever to have been confused, etc.? If you think about it, it's kind of a moderate point. I'm not saying that Dr. Habermas was or is or ever has been dishonest about this matter.

I'm also saying that the context itself is part of what is confusing. You have to look at the flow of the article or passage. You can't legitimately insist on restricting attention only to the briefest statement of the minimal fact, look at nothing else, and say, "See, there, he doesn't say anything more in that list of the minimal facts, so that's all that matters." No, that isn't all that matters, if he then goes on to rely importantly on something more in the exposition of the argument, while claiming that he's only relying on what virtually all scholars grant! 

I'm saying, here are some illustrative passages from Dr. Habermas that are quite understandably confusing to a reader, so please be more careful than this. It's not necessary and not helpful for MFA proponents to oppose such a point to the death. If you have no objection to being clear, just try to make it extremely clear that the majority of scholars don't really grant much of interest about what the disciples' experiences were actually like. 

What's the problem? If the problem is that the MFA won't look very strong if we state openly that most skeptical and liberal scholars don't grant much about the nature of the disciples' appearance experiences, that is not my problem. 

Another thing: It doesn't refute anything I'm saying in this post to point to places where either MFA proponents or skeptics say something like, "That the disciples really had resurrection experiences is widely granted, even though some try to explain these naturalistically." That's not the point. Just saying that (or similar things) isn't enough to clear up the confusion. I'm concerned about the potential (and in some cases actual) confusion people have about what the subjective nature of the experiences was like and how much is and isn't granted on that point. Of course skeptics will try to explain the experiences (whatever they were like) naturalistically. The question is, do virtually all scholars grant that the disciples had highly physical-like experiences like those recorded in the Gospels? Well, no, they don't! Everybody who actually knows the scholarly literature knows that. But unfortunately in statements of the MFA, that is not always well explained. When that is combined with eye-popping statements about the amazing scholarly agreement about the resurrection appearances, that can lead to confusion on that point--what do the "vast majority of scholars" concede about what these experiences were like? 

Onward to personal history.

How the confusion about scholarly consensus got into our 2009 article

In 2007-2008 when Tim and I were writing our article on the resurrection for the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, available here, Tim had read far more of Dr. Habermas's work than I had. Our article (as anyone who has read it knows) was already going to be quite long, due to the generosity of William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, the editors, in giving us page space. Obviously we weren't going to include in a single article an entire defense of the reliability of the Gospels!

We knew quite well that we wanted to base our argument in part upon the specifics of the disciples' testimony as given in the Gospels. After all, you can't base an argument on testimony unless you specify the content of the testimony! We knew that we wanted to use the polymodal nature of that testimony--that the disciples claimed that they could touch Jesus, hear him, and see him, that they had long conversations with him, that they ate with him in groups, and so forth. We considered that salient and important. And we therefore knew that we were structuring our argument differently from the MFA. For one thing, we talked about the "testimony of the women" rather than the "empty tomb." I can remember our discussing that specifically. While the testimony of the women of course included their claiming that they found the tomb empty, it included more--their claims of seeing Jesus, talking to an angel, and so forth. Moreover, we decided that instead of saying that the disciples had experiences, as the MFA does, we would instead conditionalize on their testifying to their experiences. Along that axis, we regarded ourselves as (in a sense) being less generous than the MFA in the facts we were conditionalizing on, since the MFA says that they actually had experiences. 

I can remember our discussing the question of what scholars do and don't grant and Tim's being quite definite that, especially given the modestness of our assumption that this was just what the disciples claimed, Habermas's research about the surprising degree of scholarly consensus would support it. He was basing this on his reading of a number of different works by Habermas, such as the older debate with Flew, The Verdict of History, The Historical Jesus, etc. (The latter two of these contain several pages that are identical on this topic.)

So we proceded to write the article, and we put a sentence in it, in particular, that contained something incorrect:

Indeed, much of our argument could be made without even the general claim of reliability, since as we shall point out many of the salient facts are agreed upon by scholars across the spectrum. But we have chosen to frame the argument this way since we think the general reliability claim is quite defensible and since this allows us to tackle the philosophically interesting questions regarding evidence for the miraculous on the same plane where Hume leveled his famous attack.

This is a qualified statement. We don't say that the assumption of reliability is totally unnecessary nor that we are basing our argument only on what is granted. (Why make the assumption if it's totally unnecessary?) But the statement does give the impression that we think that a lot of the things we're going to be using are granted by scholarly consensus. As I recall, I in particular was thinking that our argument was focused upon the resurrection narratives, so even if other narratives in the Gospels were not true, as long as we could take it as given that the resurrection narratives represent what the witnesses claimed, the argument would go through. Of course, lots of scholars certainly don't grant that the resurrection narratives do represent what the disciples claimed, so ... But we didn't know that.

Another quotation contains some isolated sentences that, taken out of their immediate context, could be regarded as causing confusion about what we, ourselves, were doing, but that one actually (in context) makes it quite clear that we weren't doing an MFA. Here are those sentences in context.

It is true that this conclusion is conducted under an initial constraint; it is predicated on the assumption that in matters other than the explicit claims of miracles, the gospels and the book of Acts are generally reliable – that they may be trusted as much as any ordinary document of secular history with respect to the secularly describable facts they affirm. And where they do recount miraculous events, such as Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, we assume that they are authentic – that is, that they tell us what the disciples claimed. This calculation tells us little about the evidence for the resurrection if those assumptions are false. We have provided reasons to accept them, but of course there is much more to be said on the issue. This limitation, however, is not as severe as might be thought. “General reliability” admits of degrees, and we have deliberately kept our salient facts minimally stated with the intention that they should not require reliance at every point on the smallest details of the biblical texts. The weight placed on our textual assumptions varies from one fact to another and even from one aspect of a given fact to another. The facts we have designated as W are perhaps the most vulnerable to a challenge based on textual skepticism. Some aspects of D – for example, that the disciples made specific claims regarding the physical details of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances – depend more heavily on the authenticity of the sources than others – for example, the witnesses’ willingness to die for their belief in the resurrection, which is supported by extrabiblical sources. 

"Minimally stated," "not require reliance at every point on the smallest details"!! See, the McGrews weren't relying on the details of the Gospels! They explicitly said so! Um, no, just read on a little bit further. We immediately illustrate the "at every point" qualifier by explicitly stating that the aspect of D concerning the disciples' "specific claims regarding the physical details of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances" does depend more heavily on the authenticity of the sources. So you'd really have to be quote-mining to get out of that paragraph the idea that we weren't relying on details. 

I hope that no one will do that, at least not after reading this post.

We also made repeated references to the polymodal nature of the disciples' testimonies and to the crucial role they are playing in setting the Bayes factor for D (the testimony of the disciples):

Second, to explain the facts the hallucination theory would have to be invoked for more than a dozen people simultaneously (Luke 24:36-43).26 The plausibility of a collective hallucination is, for obvious reasons, inversely related to the amount of detail it involves.27 Given the level of polymodal interactive detail reported in cases like the one in Luke 24, the probability of coincidence is vanishing. A third factor exacerbates this problem: the hallucinations would have to be not only parallel but also integrated. According to the gospels, the risen Jesus interacted with his disciples in numerous ways including eating food they gave him (Luke 24:41- 43) and cooking fish for them (John 21:1-14). In such contexts, the disciples were interacting not only with Jesus but with one another, physically and verbally. The suggestion that their parallel polymodal hallucinations were seamlessly integrated is simply a non-starter, an event so improbable in natural terms that it would itself very nearly demand a supernatural explanation. Finally, these detailed, parallel, integrated hallucinations must be invoked repeatedly across a period of more than a month during which the disciples were persuaded that they repeatedly interacted with their Lord and master here on earth.

When we consider the fact that at least thirteen men were willing to die for the claim that Jesus of Nazareth had risen again, it is important to consider what sort of account they gave of what had happened in order to know what it was that they were willing to die for. First, the accounts of Jesus’ appearances to the disciples are not vague nor “spiritualized” but rather circumstantial, empirical, and detailed. Not only do they purport to give a number of his statements, discussed below, but they state expressly that he deliberately displayed empirical evidence that he was not a spirit but rather a physical being. It was therefore a physical resurrection claim that the disciples made: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; touch me, and see; for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.” And when they still do not believe, he asks what food is available and eats a piece of fish and a honeycomb. Later he cooks fish for them and invites them to breakfast (Luke 24:39-43; cf. John 20:27; John 21:9-13). 

So it's very clear that we are relying on DT (stated again below). That much you can see in the article explicitly and emphatically.

At the same time, there were several references to consensus in the article, and the first quotation above gave an impression that some important part of our argument could go through based only on what was granted by consensus, without Gospel reliability. The article thus contained hints (for someone who happened to know that the consensus doesn't grant all that much) that we were somewhat confused about something concerning consensus. As indeed we were: How much did the consensus really grant about the claims made by the disciples and the women?

Time went by after the publication of that article, and I began in the following years, revving up especially in 2014, delving into New Testament studies. The more I looked into things, the more I realized that it just wasn't the case that a majority of scholars granted what I've more recently dubbed DT. DT, as stated in an earlier post, is this:

DT: The Gospel accounts and the account in Acts 1 of Jesus' resurrection appearances and of the finding of the empty tomb reliably represent what the disciples/alleged witnesses (both male and female) claimed about their experiences at that time. This includes such matters as that Jesus ate with them more than once, that they were able to touch him, that he appeared to them multiple times and to varied groups, that he had lengthy conversations with them, and so forth.

Interestingly, the publication of Michael Licona's resurrection book in 2011-2012, fleshing out the MFA, was part of what really raised questions for us about what is granted by scholars. I want to say right here that this is one place where Licona himself is virtually always, perhaps always, clear and consistent--he makes it clear what scholars across the spectrum don't grant. There is a somewhat interesting tradeoff here between Licona and Habermas, the two major architects of the MFA. Habermas, at least in his earlier work, repeatedly states that he's quite willing to defend Gospel reliability, and I believe that he means "reliability" there in its older, unqualified sense, not in any redefined sense. It is even possible that it is his willingness to defend old-fashioned Gospel reliability that leads Habermas to be, sometimes, incautious and unclear (as I'll argue in the second part of this post) about what is and isn't granted by a majority of scholars. Licona, on the other hand, is more inclined than Habermas is (or at least than Habermas was in his earlier writings) to try not to go too far beyond the consensus of scholarship about what historians can know objectively from the Gospels. Anyone who reads my work knows of my many criticisms of Licona's work on Gospel literary devices. At the same time, this greater closeness to scholarly consensus in his own work and greater caution about defying it may be what causes Licona to be clearer than Habermas about what is not granted by scholars.

In 2014 Tim contributed a debate review to this volume on the debate between William Lane Craig and Alex Rosenberg. By that time, he and I were uneasy enough about what was and wasn't in scholarly consensus that Tim thought he needed to issue a caution. Being the tactful fellow that he is, he merely noted that the scholarly consensus, depending on its extent, might not be robust enough to bear the weight being placed on it.

Are a majority of historical scholars agreed that groups of people who were intimately familiar with Jesus’ appearance simultaneously experienced what they believed to be extensive, coordinated, polymodal interactions with him? This claim goes beyond the strict letter of the early creed embedded in 1 Corinthians 15, though it is certainly consonant with it. I am uncertain how far the consensus extends in this direction, and it obviously matters for the evaluation of the hallucination hypothesis. There are ample resources for addressing that hypothesis in the Gospel accounts. But that brings us back to the question of the broader historical trustworthiness of the resurrection narratives in the Gospels. So without knowing more about the details of the scholarly agreement, it is difficult to pass judgment on the explanatory step in Craig’s argument.

In a footnote, Tim specifically tagged our 2009 article as going farther than minimal facts:

For a somewhat different approach to the question, not based solely on 'minimal facts,' see Timothy and Lydia McGrew, 'The Argument from Miracles,' in Craig and Moreland, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (2009), 593-662."

By February, 2015, I was quite convinced that the MFA premise about "the appearances" did not imply that DT was granted by skeptical scholars, and I was particularly bothered about the inclusion of people in the "consensus of scholarship" who quite explicitly deny DT and hold that all that physical stuff is later embellishment. I felt that there was a lot of confusion going on. So I published this post stating outright what the "appearances" claim didn't include and arguing that this significantly weakens the argument. 

In April, 2018, I put out this longer critique of the MFA. In 2018, someone (I forget who it was) pointed out the sentence quoted above from the 2009 article that "much of" our argument could go through without the reliability assumption. Therefore, in May of that year, I put out this explicit retraction of an incorrect implication about the extent of consensus. 

Let me add though that anyone familiar with my criticisms of the MFA from 2015 to the present should automatically know that Tim and I have figured out that consensus doesn't extend to DT! That's at the heart of my critique.

I hope that all of this history is of some interest to someone. 

Now I want to ask and (in the next section) answer a question: Someone might say, how could you, or Tim, or any intelligent person of good will, possibly get confused about what Habermas was saying he'd found to be included in scholarly consensus? After all, we find Habermas making clear statements like this:

The nearly unanimous consent of critical scholars is that, in some sense, the early followers of Jesus thought that they had seen the risen Jesus. "Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What Are Critical Scholars Saying?" Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 3.2, p. 151.

Note the careful wording "in some sense." Or this:

The vast majority of scholars agree that these persons certainly thought that they had visual experiences of the risen Jesus. "Resurrection Research From 1975 to the Present," p. 152.

Note the emphasis upon visual experiences. Or this, from the later Habermas-Flew debate:

I recently finished a study of about 1,400 sources on the Resurrection, all written in German, French, and Enlish from 1975 to the present, to see where critical scholars are today. By far more scholars think that something really happened--that the disciples had real experiences. They believed they saw the risen Jesus. While a majority of scholars in recent decades admit that Jesus appeared in some sense, they often avoid talk about bodily resurrection. They sometimes talk as if--these are my words--there was some kind of shimmering holographic image of Jesus--some manifestation of light. So that’s probably the typical approach today from critical scholars that are somewhere in between Tony and me. 

Obviously, a mere shimmering holographic image or a manifestation of light is not like the polymodal appearance experiences recorded in the Gospels, especially since none of the Gospels say anything about Jesus glowing or shimmering. Replacing an experience of a tangible Jesus with a "manifestation of light" is a pretty big downgrading of the appearance premise. Habermas doesn't apparently realize the epistemic implications, but he states openly here something that pretty clearly implies that the majority of scholars don't grant DT.

So what was the matter? How could any person of good will be confused? Well, quite simply, because Dr. Habermas sometimes is unclear. I will document below that we are not the only ones to be confused.

Unclear statements that lead to confusion about scholarly consensus 

I want to clarify again my purpose here: My purpose is to answer, "How could any intelligent person of good will be confused by the statement of the MFA about the extent of scholarly consensus?" and also to ask advocates of the MFA to be more clear in all their presentations that the scholarly consensus does not extend to saying that the disciples even claimed experiences like those found in the Gospels.

What I'm going to do is to quote and discuss statements from three different works by Dr. Habermas, going backwards chronologically, that I think could understandably cause confusion on this point in those who read them. This is not intended to be disrespectful to him but to raise this warning and concern about the possibility of unclarity.

I could discuss more works in more detail but am going to take the space only for longer quotations from three to show that this is something that Habermas does on more than one occasion. Here I mention only briefly his earlier debate with Antony Flew, but there are ways that one could get honestly confused from that. There is also his use of the physical details of the Gospel reports in the Philosophia Christi response to the work of Dale Allison (2008). He argues in the main text that the Gospel accounts of the resurrection appearances are disanalogous to the apparitional literature: "Jesus appeared many times, to individuals as well as to groups of up to five hundred persons at once, was touched, ate food, and had normal, sometimes rather lengthy, conversations with his followers." At that point he has the a footnote:

Some of these details, especially those in the last half of this sentence, are questioned in the critical literature. But again, as I have said, we are only comparing the various sorts of reported phenomena here, not debating the data on their behalf. After discussion, if certain scholars think that particular items here should be bracketed, that could of course affect their reaction to the conclusions here. But I still maintain that there would be enough remaining that most scholars would still allow various levels of differences between the appearances and the apparitional literature.

Habermas is right in the main text to call out Allison on allowing so many paranormal accounts to pass muster as what the original alleged witnesses claimed while being so skeptical on this point concerning the Gospels. At the same time, Habermas does an odd back-and-forth here himself: First he uses the details of the Gospel accounts to point out disanalogies to apparitional reports. He then admits in the footnote that the most important of these details are "questioned in the critical literature" but then vaguely says that "there would be enough remaining" to create "various levels of differences" between the appearances and the claims of apparitions. But what does this mean? What "level of difference" from the apparitional literature would remain if we stuck, for example, to what is granted by the large majority of scholars? Habermas doesn't claim in this article to be doing an MFA, but if something more than an MFA is necessary to respond to Allison's bodily resurrection skepticism (or agnosticism), that is a fairly significant apologetic limitation, especially if Allison's paranormal sympathies become more popular. Naturally, in Allison's response, he says that Habermas can't justifiably assume that the Gospel accounts are unembellished accounts of witness claims. This is (I agree with Habermas) a double standard on Allison's part, but it was inevitable that he would make that move, given his own place on the NT scholarly spectrum, and the scholarly consensus certainly isn't going to stop him. Habermas's instinct to move beyond the MFA in his response to Allison, then admit that what he's using is questioned by some scholars, but then say that he thinks enough is agreed upon to do the job, raises the question rather urgently: Just how much is granted by the majority of scholars?

There are even clearer instances, though, of confusing language, spanning several decades. Here is a particularly strong statement from a 2018 popular post on The Stream about the very topic of surprising scholarly agreeement on the resurrection.

About 40 years ago, I began writing about what I have called the Minimal Facts Argument. I wouldn’t want you to think it’s a “minimally-sized” argument in any way, or that only a few facts from the day are available. Rather it’s an argument for the resurrection of Jesus based on that small, “minimal” core of facts that all academically credible researchers agree on. Using between three and seven historical events that are recognized by these scholars, it builds on what we may learn from these data.

Not too long ago I listed six of these events in a dialogue with an agnostic New Testament scholar. I used the historical facts that 1) Jesus died by crucifixion, 2) his early followers had experiences a short time later that they thought were appearances of Jesus, 3) and as a result, they were transformed to the point of being willing to die for this message. Further, two former unbelievers 4) James the brother of Jesus and 5) Saul of Tarsus (later the apostle Paul) both similarly thought that they had seen the risen Jesus, as well; and 6) This Gospel message of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ began to be taught very soon after these events. [snip]

How Do We Move from the Minimal Historical Facts to Jesus’ Resurrection Appearances?

Using only the six facts about Jesus and his disciples listed above, backed up by the evidences that confirm them, we have a scenario that points very strongly to Jesus’ appearing to his disciples after he died by crucifixion. Actually, we can boil the case down to those two ingredients. Did Jesus actually die on the cross? Then was he seen afterwards, having conversations with friends just like any of us might do? If Jesus was walking around and talking, seen by groups of witnesses (such as reported in the most scholarly-tested text, 1 Corinthians 15:3-7), then His appearances are solid!

Some might question whether historians can use the New Testament texts at all. Do critical scholars allow that? Actually, they cite these passages as often as conservative Christians do. The difference is that critical scholars generally only make use of those accredited citations that satisfy their reasons, such as those that we just mentioned.

The result of it all is that we have six solid, agreed facts, backed up with good historical reasoning. Rather incredibly, these six facts are enough to argue strongly against all of the major non-supernatural alternative hypotheses to Jesus’ resurrection. This is the primary reason why only a minority of critical scholars today still even attempt to argue these natural suppositions. Incidentally, they were popular primarily in the Nineteenth Century.

But these six facts are also the strongest affirmative reasons for believing that Jesus appeared to His followers both individually and in groups after His death. That so many eyewitnesses reported these experiences is admitted by virtually all critical scholars. You would have to look hard to find very many dissenters.

I want to talk especially about the latter part of this quotation. After introducing these facts as those that this vast consensus agrees on, Habermas characterizes two of those facts like this:

Did Jesus actually die on the cross? Then was he seen afterwards, having conversations with friends just like any of us might do?

Now, this is just getting carried away. It is definitely not agreed on by any sort of vast scholarly consensus that the disciples even claimed that Jesus had conversations with them just like any of us might do! Yet I think if one is honest, one should admit that this looks like its intended as a restatement of the "appearance" minimal fact! Habermas continues:

If Jesus was walking around and talking, seen by groups of witnesses (such as reported in the most scholarly-tested text, 1 Corinthians 15:3-7)...

Two points: Perhaps this was just unclear writing, but I must note that I Corinthians 15 says nothing about either walking or talking. But let that go. Maybe Habermas meant "such as reported..." to refer solely to "seen by groups of witnesses." Okay. But what is a reference to "walking around and talking" doing at all in a statement of the minimal facts argument? To be blunt, it simply doesn't belong in the article, period. Neither does the reference to having conversations with friends. These are not granted by the majority of scholars. The majority of scholars don't even grant that the disciples claimed that this was what their experiences were like. 

I'm sorry to have to say this, but this article is radically unclear about what is and isn't granted by a consensus. Making matters worse, since it makes such a big deal about how surprising this consensus is, and since it's intended to inform people about this surprising consensus, someone who wasn't an expert might easily shrug off his own surprise about how much scholars grant!

Now move backward in time to a more scholarly piece from 2001. This article is about renewed interest among scholars in hallucination theories as alternatives to the resurrection. Early on, Habermas says,

 Lastly, I will present a multifaceted critique of these positions, using only data that can be ascertained by critical means, which the vast majority of scholars will accept.

But here is one of his criticisms of the hallucination theories:

What about the natural human tendency to touch? Would not one of them ever discover, even in a single instance, that his or her best friend, seemingly standing perhaps just a few feet away, was not really there?

Now, it simply is not granted by the vast majority of scholars that Jesus appeared to the disciples to be standing close enough to them to be touched. It isn't even granted by the vast majority of scholars that the disciples claimed this. It isn't even granted by the vast majority of scholars that Jesus appeared to be standing on the ground when he appeared to them. And if someone says that Habermas meant "which the vast majority of scholars will accept" to modify only "critical means," what are the "critical means," which the "vast majority of scholars will accept" by which it is ascertained that Jesus appeared to the disciples to be close enough to touch? In any event, it shouldn't be necessary to get that nitpicky with the sentence to avoid confusion. Here is another criticism of hallucination theories:

The wide variety of times and places that Jesus appeared, along with the differing mindsets of the witnesses, is another formidable obstacle. The accounts of men and women, hard-headed and soft-hearted alike, all believing that they saw Jesus, both indoors and outdoors, provide an insurmountable barrier for hallucinations.

The vast majority of scholars do not grant that Jesus appeared both indoors and outdoors. Nor, if we confine ourselves to "critical means," are we going to be able to get this out of the texts by widely allowed "critical means." It isn't even clear that the vast majority of scholars grant a wide variety of times and places. Nor do the vast majority grant that he appeared to both men and women. (Remember that there's a big difference between even granting the empty tomb, discovered by women, and granting that he appeared to a group of women.)

I submit, again, that someone of good will and intelligence, reading this article, could easily get confused about what the vast majority of scholars grant.

Last, I'd like to go over some quotations from Habermas's book The Historical Jesus, 1996. Because these cover several pages, I can't quote the pages in their entirety. This means that if someone is determined to say that I must have left something out that prevents these pages from being at all unclear, he can say that. I encourage anyone to read the book for himself. Please, again, remember that all I'm saying is that an intelligent person of good will could be confused by these pages if he didn't already know in some independent way what the consensus of scholars does and doesn't include. It shouldn't be necessary to take a magnifying glass to the pages and find some one-word qualier here or there in order to avoid getting confused. (Note that above, I have owned that someone could be confused by our 2009 statement about scholarly consensus even despite our use of the phrase "much of our argument.")

Habermas, of course, lists his facts in brief form, giving both a list of twelve "known facts" and a shorter list of four "minimal facts." The appearance claim is included in both and is worded in the usual minimal way that is compatible with either "thick" or "thin" apostolic experiences. He emphasizes, as usual, that these facts are granted by virtually all scholars.

There are a minimum number of facts agreed upon by practically all critical scholars, whatever their school of thought. (p. 158)

Earlier, twelve facts were enumerated as knowable history, accepted as such by almost all scholars. It is this writer's conviction that even by using only four of these accepted facts, a sufficient case can be made for the historicity of the resurrection, which will strengthen the earlier apologetic. p. 161

In passing, the phrase "strengthen the earlier apologetic" is just incorrect, taken epistemologically, and is an example of what I called in the last post conflating epistemology and sociology. While it may look more impressive in some rhetorical or sociological sense to use a very small number of premises, it does not actually strengthen the case for the conclusion.

In any event, Habermas has here staked out, as usual, the claim that he's going to do this with only things granted by virtually all scholars.

The appearance fact, as usual, is stated in minimal-sounding terms:

The disciples had experiences which they believed were literal appearances of the risen Jesus. (p. 158)

However, Habermas confusingly states multiple times that the appearance fact is especially important because it concerns the nature of the appearances:

Of these four core facts, the nature of the disciples' experiences is the most crucial. As historian Michael Grant asserts, historical investigation actually proves that the earliest eyewitnesses were convinced that they had seen the risen Jesus. p. 163

One major advantage of these core facts is that, not only are they critically accepted as knowable history, but they directly concern the nature of the disciples' eperiences. As such, these four historical facts are able...to both disprove the naturalistic theories and to provide major positive evidences which relate the probability of Jesus' literal resurrection. p. 164

The statement that the minimal facts "directly concern the nature of the disciples' experiences" simply isn't true in any interesting sense. If one sticks only to the minimal fact as stated, the only thing it tells us about the nature of the appearances is that they convinced the apostles (somehow) that Jesus was literally risen. (By the way, elsewhere at around this same time, Habermas seems to use "literally" to mean "objectively" rather than, necessarily, "physically"--in other words, in such a way that it would be compatible with an objective vision as well as with bodily resurrection. My understanding is that he takes it as a majority-granted but not supermajority-granted fact that the disciples believed Jesus to have been physically risen. It isn't clear whether here by "literally" he means "physically" or just "objectively.")

The emphatic statement that the minimal fact of the appearance experiences "directly" concerns the nature of the disciples' experiences is highly confusing. If the reader doesn't already know in some other way that Habermas is attempting to state the appearance fact in a vague way in order to garner the largest critical acceptance for it (and why should the reader think that, going into this topic?), he could certainly get the idea that this minimal fact, granted by nearly all scholars, includes the idea that the disciples had experiences of some rather specific nature which strongly supports the resurrection. It would be unfair to ask the reader, who thinks he is learning about scholarly consensus on the matter, to take it that what is granted by scholars is only what is given in what is the briefly-stated list. It definitely appears that the further statements that this core fact "directly concerns the nature of the appearances" is a further spelling-out of what is granted by the scholars.

This interpretation seems all the more warranted given that Habermas strongly insists that the minimal facts alone can rule out all naturalistic theories and that this is why these were abandoned in the 19th century:

These known historical facts...answer the various theories which have been proposed in order to account for Jesus' resurrection on naturalistic grounds. These hypotheses, chiefly popularized by liberal scholars in the nineteenth century, are rarely held today by critics, especially since they failed to account for the historical facts surrounding this event (such as those just mentioned above). p. 159

He illustrates this supposed ruling out concerning the hallucination theory in the following way:

First, using only these four historical facts, the naturalistic theories can be disproven....The disciples' experiences disprove the hallucination and other subjective theories both because such phenomena are not collective or contagious, being observed by one person alone, and because of the wide variety of time and place factors involved, p. 164

Do virtually all scholars grant a wide variety of times and places? Do virtually all scholars even grant group appearances? In a recent video Michael Licona has related from personal communication with Habermas that Habermas has said that about 75% of scholars grant group appearances. Some group appearance or other. Since we don't have Habermas's underlying survey and literature interpretation data, and since his estimate relies upon his own interpretation of various articles, even this is open to legitimate question. My own suspicion, based on reading Habermas's other work (such as the original debate with Flew), is that the "creed" in I Corinthians 15 is doing much of the work. Could it be that, if a scholar grants that the "creed" there is pre-Pauline and early, Habermas automatically counts that scholar as "granting group appearances" which "rule out" hallucination? That inference contains a couple of jumps in and of itself. 

In any event, it's not even clear that the "creed" in I Corinthians 15 contains a wide variety of times and places, especially not for group appearances. It mentions only two, even if the skeptic grants the (natural but not absolutely necessary) interpretation of the appearance "to the twelve" to mean "to the twelve all at once," which scholars may not grant. I really don't think we should take it that the vast majority of scholars grant a "wide variety of times and places" at which appearances took place. (The reference to places makes one think of "indoors and outdoors" quoted above, which is far too specific to be widely granted.)

Moreover, the reference to scholars abandoning naturalistic theories in droves after the 19th century does leave one scratching one's head. What did virtually all of the unbelieving scholars in 1996 believe, then? Did most of them believe in ghosts? Did they nearly all adopt an "objective vision" theory? But that requires at least the belief in God. Did they all adopt some paranormal theory? Or is Habermas implying that most of them were so impressed by the minimal facts (which they granted) that they threw their hands up and admitted that they were unable to account for the data and didn't know what happened? This overstatement about the abandonment of naturalistic theories, together with the emphasis upon "the nature" of the disciples' experiences, could certainly lead to unclarity concerning what virtually all scholars grant.

I note, too, that in 2001 Habermas stated that hallucination theories were making a comeback, even by his estimation, but by 2018 he was once more stating that only a minority of critical scholars believe naturalistic theories. Remember this, from the article in The Stream? "Only a minority of critical scholars today still even attempt to argue these natural suppositions. Incidentally, they were popular primarily in the Nineteenth Century." 

In the course of the discussion earlier in the same chapter in The Historical Jesus, Habermas brings in the sermons in Acts and cites C. H. Dodd in support of the claim that,

Next to I Corinthians 15:3ff., the most crucial texts for historical purposes are several early passages in the book of Acts (especially Peter's speeches)....Many scholars have argued that in these early texts we have a clear summary of the earliest apostolic kerygma. pp. 148-149

He also cites, on a different page (p. 141), a long list of facts that one could deduce from the sermons in Acts, including that the disciples ate with Jesus (Acts 10:40-41). He lists this same proposition about eating with them on p. 168, again giving this same reference.

Could it be that Habermas is treating the historicity of the sermons in Acts, taken to be historical declarations of the original witnesses, as included in the evidence he can use to rule out hallucination? I'm strongly in favor of using these passages, but I take a maximalist approach. It should not be included in the evidence relied on in a MFA, when one is emphatically declaring that one is relying only on what is granted by the majority of scholars. Whether Habermas is doing this is left unclear in these pages, though if he is doing so, that would help to explain some of his overstatements. 

In any event, Dodd (whom I have now looked up on the subject, though one shouldn't have to) is moderately positive about the idea that the sermons go back to "the kerygma of the apostolic church," though even that doesn't make for acknowledgement of DT. Dodd is quite definite that the sermons don't represent what Peter himself said on some particular historical occasion. The degree of historicity of the speeches in Acts is extremely controversial among critical scholars. I myself think it is very solid and have argued as much, but I'm considered very conservative, and I'm self-consciously bucking critical consensus. Colin Hemer has an entire appendix on the subject in his wonderful book on Acts, but he certainly makes it clear that by no stretch of the imagination is any strong historical thesis about those speeches granted by a large consensus of scholars across the ideological spectrum! I doubt that you could get even a bare majority to agree that they are substantially historical as some kind of vaguely "apostolic" teaching, and you almost certainly couldn't if you added that they are substantially historical as uttered by Peter on specific occasions.

Perhaps Habermas would try to say that it is only certain portions of these sermons in Acts that he is treating as the testimony of the apostles. But the nearest one gets to a list of such shorter portions is footnote 31 on p. 149, after the sentence, "The death and resurrection of Jesus are at the center of each sermon." The verses selected are those that assert the death and resurrection of Jesus. But Habermas provides no evidence of large majority or even majority scholarly consensus that the content in these verses (including the statement that Jesus ate and drank with them) was actually attested to by the disciples. The closest he comes is to say this: "Critical research has shown that these texts reflect early, largely undeveloped theology, perhaps from theJerusalem community" (p. 149) and to cite both Dodd and John Drane as stating that the language in these speeches appears to be rougher and earlier than the language of the book of Acts. Again, that's all very interesting, but to claim that these verses are earlier proclamation, much less that disciples literally claimed to have eaten with Jesus in a group (!), is stronger, more contentful, and more controversial than the minimal fact of the appearance claim, and such a stronger statement does not enjoy large scholarly consensus, however it is supported. Merely to say that it has been supported by "critical means" just isn't enough to make it legitimately accessible in an argument allegedly based only one the minimal facts.

In the earlier debate with Flew, Habermas also states that Dodd holds that

the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection appearances (and the earlier reports included in them, in particular) should be utilized as records of what the eyewitnesses actually saw. (Did Jesus Rise from the Dead, p. 24)

The parenthesis here is especially puzzling. Surely it should be "or the earlier reports included in them," should it not? It is quite odd to make a distinction between the Gospel accounts of the resurrection appearances and some hypothetical "earlier reports included in them" and  then to state that a critical scholar grants that both of these should be utilized as records of what the eyewitnesses saw. The whole point of making such distinction is to claim that the eye of critical scholarship can discern an underlying, earlier layer within the accounts, which is to be taken as more likely authentic. (In fact that kind of procedure is typical of Dodd's whole approach to NT studies.) If one is going to say that the Gospel accounts and such a hypothetical pre-Gospel layer should be taken as accounts of what the eyewitnesses saw (or even claimed that they saw), why make the distinction? This parenthetical only makes the reference to Dodd more confusing, but a person of good will could certainly come away with the impression that Dodd, at least, acknowledges DT. I've looked up that Dodd paper as well (which, again, one shouldn't have to do to get clear on this), and this is an overly optimistic statement. Dodd is intrigued by the story of Mary Magdalene in John and its freshness, thinking that maybe it goes back to some very early human statement, yet he insists that John is a fabricator of scenes, and he says that the scene with Doubting Thomas is made up. (This use of Dodd also raises the point, yet again, that Habermas's claims about scholarly consensus are based upon Habermas's interpretations of a large number of scholarly papers, which no doubt could be challenged in individual cases, perhaps in many cases. The fact that I've found Habermas to be overly optimistic in his interpretation of Dodd here is reason for caution in this area.)

In any event, Dodd is generally regarded as a scholarly moderate. A few cautious moves in a conservative direction by C. H. Dodd do not make for a heterogenous consensus of virtually all scholars!

The inclusion of such supporting evidence from a critical scholar here or there, without clarity as to exactly what role it is playing in the supposedly minimal facts argument, Habermas's repeated insistence that he is relying only on what is granted by the vast majority of scholars, references to the minimal facts as directly concerning the "nature" of the disciples' experiences, and extremely strong statements about ruling out all naturalistic theories, create a situation ripe for confusion about what the majority grants. Habermas summarizes with this very strong statement about what his argument has accomplished and how:

Since these core historical facts (and the earlier accepted facts in general) have been established by critical and historical procedures, contemporary scholars cannot reject the evidence simply by referring to "discrepancies" in the New Testament texts or to its general "unreliability." Not only are such critical claims refuted by evidence discussed in other chapters, but it has been concluded that the resurrection can be historically demonstrated even when the minimum of historical facts are utilized. Neither can it be concluded merely that “something” occurred which is indescribable due to naturalistic premises or to the character of history or because of the “cloudiness” or legendary character of the New Testament texts. Neither can it be said that Jesus rose spiritually but not literally. These and other such views are refuted in that the facts admitted by virtually all scholars as knowable history are adequate to historically demonstrate the literal resurrection of Jesus according to probability. pp. 165-166 The Historical Jesus (emphasis in original)

Again, this is only conjecture, but one can't help wondering if Habermas thinks that supporting arguments that he believes have been established by "critical and historical procedures" can be included in the evidence used to rule out alternative theories, even if those supporting propositions are not granted by a majority of scholars. (Hence, for example, might he think that he can assume that the reference to the disciples eating and drinking with Jesus in Acts 10 has been "established by critical procedures" and that he can therefore take it to be an authentic proclamation by the original witnesses, and that he is therefore allowed to rely on it in ruling out hallucination?) That simply will not do if one is going to say that one is using "the minimum of historical facts" and that "the facts admitted by virtually all scholars as knowable history" are sufficient for one's argument. That's not "the facts admitted by virtually all scholars, plus a lot of other material that isn't admitted by virtually all scholars, but that supports the facts admitted by virtually all scholars, and that I think has been established by critical historical procedures, so even non-conservative scholars should agree with this additional material, even if they don't..." Obviously, more specific propositions (such as that the sermons in Acts came from the apostles themselves, that the disciples claimed that they ate and drank with Jesus, or that Jesus appeared to people both indoors and outdoors) support the proposition that the disciples had appearance experiences. (Some of these propositions even entail that they had appearance experiences. Stronger statements often entail weaker statements, but not vice versa.) But even if such a stronger proposition is allegedly mined out of the New Testament by "critical means" and endorsed by some critical scholar or scholars, and even if it supports a "minimal fact," that absolutely does not mean that it is fair game for use in an argument that purports to use only what is granted by a broad, heterogenous, critical consensus of scholars. I hesitate to attribute a mistake on this point to Habermas, but it does occur to me that such a mistake might be the origin of the ambiguity and unclarity that are the topic of this post.

Now, I've had a number of people say to me, "I've never been confused about what the scholars grant." But just to show that this is not merely a theoretical possibility, nor is it merely a theoretical-possibility-plus-the-weird-McGrews-who-must-have-been-crazy-at-the-time-or-something, here are two examples of popular posts by people who pretty clearly are confused in this way. It doesn't matter who they are. That's not the point. They seem to be thoughtful people, they appear to be people of good will, doing apologetics to the best of their ability, and trying to use the MFA to argue for the resurrection.  I've heard verbal presentations of the MFA that show the same confusion.

First, this one. This is a post called "Minimal facts 5-8 explained." So it's purporting to, you know, explain the minimal facts. And here's the insistence on scholarly consensus. Notice that the author explicitly says that the scholars don't actually believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

Minimal facts are those facts about the resurrection account that the majority of scholars, even skeptical ones, believe to be true. While these same scholars may not believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead, they do concede these points in the account are accurate.

The link, btw, is to Licona and Habermas's book on the MFA. Here's the first statement of the appearance fact:

The disciples had experiences which they believed were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.

Aaaand, here's the alleged explanation of that "minimal fact," in its entirety:

The disciples report seeing, eating with, walking with and touching the risen Jesus. They did not mean this to be interpreted as a spiritual resurrection. They saw a bodily risen Jesus. We see this when Thomas physically touches Jesus (John 20:24-29). Jesus also eats fish with his Disciples ( John 21:9-14).

Need I say more? 

Here's another example, claiming to present the minimal facts approach to arguing for the resurrection:

The minimal facts approach to the resurrection was originated by biblical scholar Gary Habermas....It is based on his research of 1,400 in-depth scholarly writings regarding the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Habermas relies only on those facts supported by multiple sources and accepted by the vast majority of scholars.

Please notice that word "only." Here's his statement of the appearance fact, apparently copied verbatim from Habermas:

The disciples had experiences which they believed were literal appearances of the risen Jesus. 

He emphasizes the consensus:

The fact that such a large percentage of scholars accepts these twelve points is quite compelling. 

Aaand, here's his refutation of the hallucination theory, in its entirety:

This theory claims the witnesses did not see a resurrected Jesus, they saw a hallucination. The problem with this theory is that Jesus appeared to more than 500 people, in different locations and circumstances (eating, walking, talking) for forty days. Hallucinations do not repeatedly happen to different groups of people for extended periods. The resurrected Jesus even told Thomas to touch him.

Then He (Jesus) said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe” (John 20:27, emphasis added).

Not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead (Acts 10:41, emphasis added).

And He (Jesus) said to them, "Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have" (Luke 24:28-39, emphasis added). 

I wonder how in the world he could have gotten confused into thinking that this refutation of the hallucination theory is fair game to use in the minimal facts argument? 

The fact that these aren't scholarly presentations only underscores the problem. Who, if not non-specialists, needs clarity most? It is precisely those who are not NT scholars themselves who are going to look to apologists and scholars to tell them what the argument is, what the majority of scholars grant, and so forth. Obviously, the MFA is not meant to be presented only from NT scholars to NT scholars! 

Imagine what could happen if a non-Christian non-specialist converts to Christianity on the basis of the MFA, being especially impressed by (what he thinks is) the vast consensus of scholarship on the nature of the disciples' appearance experiences, and then finds out later that he misunderstood and that much less was granted by critical scholars. How is that going to play out?

Once again, I'm not saying Habermas is in any way trying to mislead anyone. But I think it's undeniable that for some reason he sometimes gets carried away when he states his case and makes important use of propositions that he's not entitled to lean on in this type of argument, and that this does cause confusion. 

I'm going to say something rather strong, in conclusion: If you read this post, and you go away, and you present the MFA, and you do not make a self-conscious attempt to make it clear just how little is granted by the scholarly consensus about the subjective content of the disciples' experience claim, then you will be to blame. Because whoever you are, even if you're not anybody famous, you are reading this post. 

And if you're worried that, if you clarify that the vast, heterogenous, scholarly consensus contains very little about the nature of the disciples' experience claims, that will cause the argument not to sound impressive, then I have a suggestion: I suggest you go back to that "outdated" Paley-style approach and consider using it. 

If you do, I'll be here, more than happy to help!