Here’s a neat post from Ichtus77 on her blog of the same name. She lists 12 facts that are admitted by the majority of New Testament scholars across the broad spectrum of worldviews, including atheistic scholars.
Excerpt:
I am studying “the twelve facts” and want to get down what I’ve got so far. After the facts are displayed, we’re going to turn the whole thing into a logic puzzle.
Here are the 12 Facts:
- Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.
- He was buried, most likely in a private tomb.
- Soon afterwards the disciples were discouraged, bereaved and despondent, having lost hope.
- Jesus’ tomb was found empty very soon after his interment.
- The disciples had experiences that they believed were the actual appearances of the risen Christ.
- Due to these experiences, the disciples lives were thoroughly transformed. They were even willing to die for their belief.
- The proclamation of the Resurrection took place very early, from the beginning of church history.
- The disciple’s public testimony and preaching of the Resurrection took place in the city of Jerusalem, where Jesus had been crucified and buried shortly before.
- The gospel message centered on the preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
- Sunday was the primary day of worshiping and gathering.
- James, the brother of Jesus and a skeptic before this time, became a follower of Jesus when he believed he also saw the risen Jesus.
- Just a few years later, Paul became a believer, due to an experience that he also believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus.
These are the facts that you see admitted in debates by atheistic historians, like in the debate between James Crossley and William Lane Craig. These facts are admitted even by most atheist historians because they pass standard historical criteria, like early dating, embarrassing to the author, appears in multiple sources, and so on. Secular historians don’t accept everything that the Bible says as historical, but they will give you a minimum list of facts that pass their historical tests.
The resurrection puzzle is like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. People deduce what happened from the evidence that is considered to be unimpeachable. The “minimal facts” that EVERYONE accepts. You can even see secular historians assenting to these facts in academic debates like the one I linked above.
So the approach is like this:
1) Use historical tests to get a small number of undeniable historical facts
2) Try to explain the undeniable historical facts with a hypothesis that accounts for all of them
Like Sherlock Holmes says: “…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
It’s the Sherlock Holmes method of doing history.
So, Ichtus77 lists the minimal facts, and in the rest of the post she surveys the following naturalistic hypotheses to see how well they can account for the minimal facts listed above.
Here are the naturalistic theories:
- The Unknown Tomb theory
- The Wrong Tomb theory
- The Twin theory
- The Hallucination theory
- The Existential Resurrection and the Spiritual Resurrection theories
- The Disciples Stole Body theory
- The Authorities Hid Body theory
- The Swoon theory
- The Passover Plot theory
The main way that scholars argue for the resurrection is to list the minimal facts, and defend them on historical grounds, then show that there is no naturalistic hypothesis that explains them all. The naturalistic theories are impossible. Once you have eliminated them because they don’t account for the minimal facts, you are left with the resurrection hypothesis. Elementary, Watson, elementary.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
WLC only lists three (or four) of these facts in his debates. Where did 12 come from?
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He doesn’t list them all, only the ones he needs. The facts come from the literature, but it you look around in books by non-Christian scholars like E.P.Sanders, you can find them.
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Couldn’t the naturalist reply, “How do you know you’ve considered every possible naturalistic explanation?”
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No, because the burden of prove is on them to eitehr dispute the minimal facts or to propose a specific naturalistic theory. No phantom arguments are allowed. They have the burden of proof if they claim that there is a naturalistic explanation.
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“Couldn’t the naturalist reply, ‘How do you know you’ve considered every possible naturalistic explanation?'”
Sure. That’s why the Sherlock Holmes analogy doesn’t work. That method of deduction can only apply when the possiblities are limited and all choices are necessarily identified. The apologist’s position is rooted in the assumption that if no naturalistic explanation can do the job, then a supernatural explanation is not only acceptable, but is more probable. So if we can’t identify a naturalistic explanation, the answer must entail a supernatural explanation.
This invites yet another question that can also be asked here: “Have you considered every other supernatural explanation?”
That’s the logical problem but there’s also a factual problem.
The factual problem is that those 12 facts are not historical facts. The reason WLC only uses 3 of them when he debates is that if he used more, he’d get hammered on the historicity.
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See, the trouble with atheists is twofold.
First, they make no knowledge claims, and they are happy with this ignorance. So, they think that they have a position staked out when in fact they don’t have a position nor any reasons to believe it. It’s just blind faith. And they try to push the burden of proof onto others. What Citizen Ghost is really saying is that he has no knowledge whatsoever and that his ignorance refutes the minimal facts case we made. It’s not even worthy of a reply, because it’s just ignorance. His “I don’t know” is useless in a debate.
Second, they make assertions without being specific or proving evidence. Like this: “The factual problem is that those 12 facts are not historical facts. The reason WLC only uses 3 of them when he debates is that if he used more, he’d get hammered on the historicity.” This sounds nice to an atheist because they are used to believing things on blind faith, and judging arguments by how insulting they are, rather than by logic and evidence. A bare assertion is enough for them to believe things, if it’s what they want to believe. If Ghost really had anything valuable to say, he would pick one or more of the 12 claims and refute it, or come up with a naturalistic theory and show how it accounts for the minimal facts. But that would take knowledge, and you won’t get that from an atheist.
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Have you come across the writings and theories of Barbara Thiering, an Australian theologian? I first heard of her during a “New Agey” TV documentary about archaeology, which featured her statements that Jesus was an Essene, so I got her books, Jesus the Man, and Jesus of the Apocalypse, out of our local library. Her ideas mesh with a lot of the stuff put out by Michael Baigent (a Freemason), who with Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln wrote The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and Laurence Gardner, who wrote Bloodline of the Holy Grail. I read these in order to be informed because I was encountering their ideas in articles and readers’ letters in the newspapers and on TV. The authors are very good at putting forward something as a speculation, repeating it and then citing their ideas as historical fact!
Theiring’s books lack popular appeal, but Baigent’s and Gardner’s became best-sellers. Baigent sued Dan Brown for plagiarising his theories in the Da Vinci Code, but lost the case. Baigent’s and Gardner’s books were hugely popular in the ’90s, and were lapped up by “New Agers” and others who place more credence in the Gnostic Gospels than in Biblical texts which they claim were censored and corrupted by the church to fit the church’s theology.
Barbara Thiering’s theories and her “Pesher” approach are extremely fanciful and require a lot of mental gymnastics to fit! Her theories about the crucifixion and resurrection are something else! Of course, there’s a total denial of core Christian doctrine.
Why I mention all this is because, even though the afore-mentioned books have faded somewhat from the public eye, the ideas of Thiering, Gardner, and Baigent & co. influenced popular thought through their misinformation and disinformation (as in the Da Vinci Code), and you’ll find aspects of their ideas popping up in anti-Bible arguments posted by atheists and “New Agers” on comment threads and in debates.
A couple of links to info (thanks to Google and Wiki! You can Google for more!):
On Thiering:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_the_Man_%28book%29
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/13759.htm
On Thiering, Baigent and Gardner’s theories and books, this Wiki item gives an overview that is helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_bloodline
This is a bit of an expose of Baigent’s dodgy ideas:
http://priory-of-sion.com/posd/baigent.html
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Yes, these people are not credible new Testament scholars. This is nothing more than a conspiracy theory that is not taken seriously, even by skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan. People already on the far naturalistic fringe of radical scholarship.
I just did a quick web search to see what other scholars in the center and on the right think of her, and found this:
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I agree completely – I also came across that item subsequent to posting my comment. I suppose the people who lap up this stuff are the same people who go for sensationalist conspiracy theories and gossip! However, I do find some of their ideas coming out in letters, articles, comments, etc., where they are stated as though they are proven, historical fact, and Dan Brown compounded the problem. The troubling aspect is how these ideas have infiltrated “popular thought” (if one can call it thought – sorry, I’m being snobbish!). I saw a letter to a newspaper citing something from the Da Vinci Code as “factual” evidence to back up the writer’s views! “New Agers” also like citing these ideas to “disprove” the Biblical Gospel accounts. Well, at least we know that ultimately, truth will prevail…
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WinteryKnight — Your list of naturalistic explanations doesn’t include my relocation hypothesis. But let me be the first to state, as I have before, that it was never intended to explain all of the facts you list.
On a much more important point, you included the twin theory in your list. Contrary to what you write, the twin theory does explain all of the genuine evidence. The claim, “then show that there is no naturalistic hypothesis that explains them all,” is false.
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Thanks for sending in your naturalistic theory, and I think that’s playing fair. I do get angry when people say that I have to refute theories they haven’t presented.
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Knight,
What about those historical facts which when considered as a whole argue against the Resurrection Hypothesis leading a person to the reasonable conclusion that one Jesus was not rasied from the dead? It seems intriguing that Craig, Habermas, and others never include these “facts” in their presentation. And, of course, why would they?
Thanks.
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Well, Thom, that’s why both of those scholars do debates with people who disagree with them. In those debates, non-Christians have the opportunity to introiduce their own minimal facts and propose their own naturalistic explanations. This is the adversarial system in action, with each side putting its best case forward. That’s why so many Christians love debates, whereas atheists like Richard Dawkins decline to participate in them. Christians like to hear both sides, and people like Dawkins only want to hear one side – theirs.
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