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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, I guess that settles that!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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