Monthly Archives: August 2017

8 Lessons Learned from the Minimal Facts Argument

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We’ve made it through Gary Habermas’s minimal facts argument from The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (dismantled here). As we catch our breath, let’s sift through the debris to identify the poor arguments and lessons learned. Some will be familiar, but I hope that a few will help crystalize errors about which you hadn’t been fully aware. These are both problems to avoid in our own arguments and errors to find in others’.

1. It’s a story

I can’t count the number of times that “It’s just a story!” went through my mind as I read this book. For example, Habermas says:

Surely the disciples did have some kind of experience (p. 128).

Yeah, in the story. That doesn’t make it history.

All we can start with is that it’s a story. We have lots of stories—about Alexander the Great and about John Henry. About George Washington and about Merlin the magician. Which are history and which are not?

It’s not like we have security-camera evidence documenting the gospel story. The default position for this and indeed for all supernatural stories is that it is not history. Only with overwhelming evidence can we conclude otherwise.

2. The natural trumps the supernatural

A plausible natural explanation always beats a supernatural explanation.

Habermas seems to have no idea how profoundly crazy his claim of a supernatural creator of the universe is. My response to his claim: like who? To whom can we compare this creator so we can ground Habermas’s claim in something we already accept?

There is no universally accepted supernatural creator of the universe. There isn’t even a single supernatural claim that’s universally accepted. (By “universally accepted,” I’m thinking of something like “germs cause some disease.”)

[The resurrection] is the only plausible explanation that accounts for [the historical data] (p. 141)

Habermas’s claim doesn’t look like anything that either science or society has accepted. What it does look like is all the other religions that Habermas himself rejects. He nonchalantly tosses out his supernatural explanation with unjustified confidence without even acknowledging that it’s a startling claim. To him, I suppose it isn’t. The objective outside observer doesn’t share that view, and if that’s part of his audience, he needs to recast his argument.

3. Avoid straw man arguments

The minimal facts argument is only effective when presented to someone who is eager to accept the resurrection or who has thought little about how historical claims are weighed. See the earlier post to see that evaluation, but we can probably agree that you must respond to your opponents’ best arguments, not caricatures of them.

4. “Given the story up to this point …”

A common argument for the historicity of a Bible story begins by demanding that we take the story up to a certain point as a given. For example, “Given the Jesus story up through the crucifixion, how do you explain the empty tomb?” (The challenge is often abbreviated as “How do you explain the empty tomb?” with the story assumption taken for granted.)

No, it’s a story! You can’t prove that one part of a story is correct by appealing to another part of the same story. This is the yellow brick road problem (“Of course there’s an Emerald City. Where else would the yellow brick road go to?”). Only when you have historical evidence do you have an argument.

The apologist might argue that “Jesus was crucified” is hardly a remarkable claim and assume that as a starting point. But that’s like demanding, “Oh, c’mon—surely you can give me ‘Dorothy went into her house during a tornado.’ Lots of people have done that.” No, the whole thing stands as a unit. Picking apart a legend and demanding that the commonplace bits must be history (without actually providing the evidence) doesn’t work.

Given the empty tomb, the immensely large rock, Jesus being dead, and the guards ensuring that he was put in dead and no one took the body as historical facts, then we can consider the resurrection. But those are big givens, which I won’t grant. Just because the gospels sort of say that doesn’t make it history.

To be concluded with four more lessons learned in part 2.

At Lourdes, you see plenty of crutches
but no wooden legs.
— John Dominic Crossan

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/26/14.)

Photo credit: Keene Public Library

 

Responding to the Minimal Facts Argument for the Resurrection (2 of 2)

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Gary Habermas, a department chair at Liberty University, is known for his minimal facts argument for the resurrection of Jesus. We’ve exposed some weak thinking behind his first two facts in part 1, and we’ll now look at his remaining facts. You folks at home can join in as we play “Spot that Fallacy!”

Fact 3: The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed: Paul was an enemy of the church but became a persuasive theologian and prolific church builder. His belief came from first-hand experience, and his martyrdom was documented by six sources.

But what of this could only be explained by an actual resurrection? So Paul gets religion and spreads the word—this isn’t surprising and happens in our own day. The sources we have are Paul’s own writings, Acts, and the writings of church fathers many decades later, all of which we must be skeptical of.

Was Paul knocked to the ground with a vision of Jesus? Maybe it was a complete fabrication. Maybe he just imagined it. Maybe the story grew in his mind until he wrote it down years later. The natural explanations are much more plausible than the supernatural one.

Fact 4: James the brother of Jesus was changed. Habermas takes us on a scavenger hunt through the Bible to pick up various pieces to create a life story for James that supports his preconception.

  • James and the rest of Jesus’s family weren’t believers. In fact, they thought he was crazy (Mark 3:21).
  • Next, James saw Jesus after his resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:7).
  • Then James became a leader in the Jerusalem church (Acts 15—a vague reference).
  • Finally, James died as a martyr. Habermas must go outside the Bible to Josephus and Eusebius for this factoid. Their stories being contradictory points to the martyrdom of James as legend.

The James story varies depending on what pieces you pick up. Mark makes clear that the family of Jesus didn’t believe and never says that they changed their minds. We see this in John as well, where Jesus commanded “the disciple whom he loved” to take care of his mother after he died (John 19:26–7). Why would Jesus do this if his brother James was available? Both of these gospels were written long after the death of James. They never mentioned James as part of the inner circle, and perhaps that was because he wasn’t.

And what does “James, the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:19) mean? That James was the biological brother of Jesus or simply that James was one of the Christian brethren, as in “brothers and sisters loved by God” (1 Thessalonians 1:4)?

The basic facts of James’s life are tentative enough. The story can’t support the additional claim that he saw the risen Jesus.

Fact 5: The tomb was empty. This is a bonus “fact” because it isn’t as widely accepted as Habermas claims the previous four are. He says that “75% of scholars on the subject accept the empty tomb as a historical fact,” but we’ve already exposed the weakness of that argument.

He’s quick to use the flawed Naysayer Hypothesis:

It would have been impossible for Christianity to get off the ground in Jerusalem if the body [of Jesus] had still been in the tomb. His enemies in the Jewish leadership and Roman government would only have had to exhume the corpse and publicly display it for the hoax to be shattered (p. 70).

First, I argue that it was a legend, not a hoax (that is, that it was inadvertently rather than deliberately false). Second, show me that valid contradicting evidence always stops a religion. Third, remember that the gospel stories were written decades after the events they claim to document. By that point, the legend had a life of its own. What the leadership might’ve done (or even did do) years earlier is irrelevant at that point.

Testimony of women

Women were the first to discover the empty tomb. This is startling, we’re told, because women’s testimony was never allowed in court, but what Habermas fails to show is that courtroom testimony is ever part of the story! He says that women playing this central role would never be part of an invented story, but I never argue that the story was invented.

Habermas’s argument completely fails when we consider that tending to the dead was women’s work in that culture. Having women—remember that these were trusted members of the inner circle—find the empty tomb was both unsurprising and culturally mandatory (more here).

Straw man responses

Habermas sets up and knocks over the typical list of imagined responses (that I never make) such as the disciples stole the body, someone else stole the body, witnesses went to the wrong tomb, Jesus didn’t die but only swooned, the disciples were deceived by delusions or hallucinations, and, my favorite: Jesus was an alien. It’s curious that he treats the obvious one—that it was a legend—so superficially that there’s nothing more for me to address.

A slam-dung argument

If a body of any sort was discovered in the tomb, the Christian message of an empty sepulcher would have been falsified. Anything but an empty tomb would have been devastating to the Resurrection account (p. 71).

Can this guy have no appreciation of how religion actually works? He imagines it to be a house of cards, knocked down by a single contrary word.

Consider the Great Disappointment of 1844, where tens to hundreds of thousands of Millerites woke to the day that should never have dawned, the day after William Miller’s prediction of the end of the world. Some left the sect, poorer but wiser. Others refused to believe that they’d been following a ridiculous interpretation of reality and formed other sects, including the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

Or consider a more recent example. Pastor Jamie Coots died from snakebite in 2014 after refusing medical treatment. That was his ninth snakebite. He and his congregation knew better than anyone that God doesn’t protect believers against snakebite, and that if you handle poisonous snakes, you risk getting bitten and dying. I wonder if, as Coots lay dying, any friends said, “You have strong faith, brother.”

But the good news is that snake handlers finally got the message, right?

Of course not. Snake handlers who think it through must know that all available evidence points to either no God or a God uninterested in protecting Christians from the obvious consequences of snake handling, but few will admit this. They make themselves immune to the evidence.

You’ll be relieved to know that Pastor Jamie Coots’ son Cody picked up where his father left off. Unsurprisingly, he was bitten a few months later, his sixth snake bite.

Back to Habermas’s argument, the legend has little interest in what actually happened decades earlier—whether the tomb was empty, full, or nonexistent. Even if there were disconfirming evidence, the early religion could’ve shrugged it off just like snake handlers do. That Habermas doesn’t understand this makes me question how serious he actually takes his scholarship.

For some lessons learned from studying this argument, go here are “8 Lessons Learned from the Minimal Facts Argument.”

The resurrection of Jesus is the cornerstone of Christianity, 
which stands or crumbles depending on whether this event actually occurred.
— Habermas and Licona,
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, p. 149

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/21/14.)

Photo credit: Ted

Responding to the Minimal Facts Argument for the Resurrection

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Gary Habermas claims that the resurrection is well evidenced because most scholars accept it. That claim crumbles for many reasons (more here), but let’s move on to consider his larger argument, the minimal facts approach to the resurrection as documented in The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Mike Licona (2004).

I like the idea. Habermas wants to minimize the number of facts necessary to build his foundation and use only claims granted by “virtually all scholars on the subject, even the skeptical ones.” He thinks four such “facts” are sufficient to show that the resurrection actually happened. (Going forward, I’ll use Habermas as a stand-in for the two authors.)

Let’s see if the argument holds up.

Fact 1: Jesus died by crucifixion. Habermas points to the gospels, which are first-century writings that all report a crucifixion. From outside the Bible, he gives Lucian, Mara Bar Serapion, and the Talmud, but these all appear to be second-century writings and don’t add a lot. An earlier non-Christian source is Josephus, but Josephus’s two references to Jesus appear to have been added or modified by later scribes (more here).

Habermas concludes, prematurely, “Clearly, Jesus’ death by crucifixion is a historical fact supported by considerable evidence.” The story does gradually became widespread, though this was long after the time of Jesus. That doesn’t make it “historical fact.”

Fact 2: The disciples believed that Jesus rose and appeared to them. The disciples went from cowards hiding from the authorities to bold proclaimers of the gospels, even to the point of martyrdom.

Yes, that’s what the story says, but let’s be skeptical about stories. We don’t take at face value the story about Merlin being a shape-shifting wizard. We don’t even unskeptically take the very un-supernatural claim that Arthur was king of England. Why then take elements of the supernatural Jesus story as history, even the natural ones?

In the second place, the “Who would die for a lie?” argument (that the disciples’ deaths is strong evidence) also fails. In brief, the historical evidence for apostles’ martyrdom is weak (more here).

Finally, the claim that the gospels document eyewitness history is also suspect when we don’t even know who wrote them (more here).

The gospel mentions emboldened disciples, but until we have good evidence otherwise, this is a story rather than history. Both “But they were eyewitnesses!” and “But they died for their faith!” are poorly evidenced claims.

The sources

Habermas gives Paul as one important source. It is rather incredible that Christianity was so strongly shaped by Paul, someone who wasn’t even a disciple of Jesus. Paul claimed to have known Peter, James, and John and claimed apostolic authority, but some random dude is just going to step in and declare that he’s got it all figured out, and he becomes part of the canon? Paul is authoritative just because he was influential, not because of any irrefutable sign from heaven.

Habermas argues that 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 is an early creed and so is very close to the events it claims to document. But a creed is simply a statement that is taken on faith, not evidence or an argument. His argument that these verses look distinct from the rest of Paul’s epistle could just as easily argue that they were added later. Note also that Paul’s Jesus story reads as mythology and is not grounded in history (more here).

Other authorities are church fathers Clement and Polycarp. Habermas argues that they were taught by the apostles, but his evidence comes from 150 years after the death of Jesus.

The innocence of a child

The credulity of Habermas is a little hard to believe. He says:

[The disciples] denied and abandoned [Jesus], then they hid in fear. Afterward, they willingly endangered themselves by publicly proclaiming the risen Christ (p. 56).

It’s just a story, and an untrustworthy one at that since we have a poor view of the original events (more here). Is this history? Show us.

Habermas again:

The apostles died for holding to their own testimony that they had personally seen the risen Jesus. Contemporary martyrs die for what they believe to be true. The disciples of Jesus died for what they knew to be either true or false (p. 59).

Habermas says that what we read is consistent with apostles seeing a risen Jesus, but of course that’s begging the question. Habermas assumes what he’s trying to prove. The honest interpretation is that we just have a story about Jesus and his apostles, and the stories of martyrdom developed decades later. Neither is history.

Naysayers

Here’s a common error that Habermas repeats several times.

If the news spread that several of the original disciples had recanted, we would expect that Christianity would have been dealt a severe blow (p. 60).

This is the Naysayer Hypothesis—the idea that a false story would have crumbled after the corrections of naysayers, those people who knew the truth. Here again, Habermas starts with the assumption that the Jesus story is correct and then wonders what would happen in various situations. This is backwards. Instead, start with the documents that we know exist and see where the evidence points.

I list 10 reasons why the Naysayer Hypothesis is flawed. To give just one, ask yourself why anyone who knew that Jesus was not divine would spend his life stamping out the brush fires of Christian belief throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.

And one final quibble: notice the word “recant” above. The only people I’ve heard who suggest that the disciples deliberately invented the story (and had something to recant) are apologists. I presume that the Paul and the gospel authors honestly believed, just like Christians today.

Since the original disciples were making the claim that Jesus rose from the dead, his resurrection was not the result of myth making. His life story was not embellished over time if the facts can be traced to the original witnesses (p. 60).

And again Habermas starts with an assumption, this time that the gospels come from the disciples’ eyewitness accounts. Habermas acts as if he can’t tell a story from history.

Continue with the remaining two “facts” here.

Our objective is to arrive at 
the most plausible explanation of the data.
— Habermas and Licona,
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, p. 83

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 02/19/14.)

Image credit: British American

 

You Think You Understand What Leviticus Says Against Homosexuality?

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gay wedding

This is the continuation of our look at three interesting articles on same-sex marriage. Part 1 looked at a recommended secret weapon that Christians use against same-sex marriage, and part 2 reviewed an article titled, “How gay marriage harms people.”

In this final post, we’ll critique that article’s remaining three points and review a fascinating analysis of what the anti-gay passages in Leviticus actually meant.

Three more flabby Christian arguments against same-sex marriage

7. “Children long for and tend to be healthier when raised by their biological mother and father.”

And children tend to be healthier in a two-parent rather than single-parent household. So if a divorced lesbian is a single mother with a child and wants to marry another woman, step out of the way. (Or is the health of children just another smokescreen?)

It’d be great if every marriage were strong, divorce was unnecessary, and every family lived in a safe and nurturing neighborhood and had no financial worries. But it’s an imaginary world where every family is perfect, and some children grow up without their biological parents. We need to get out of the way of institutions, like same-sex marriage, that could help.

8. “It should not be surprising that, once gay marriage is declared legal, those who oppose it are seen as enemies of the law.”

How? Because no longer can you write an anti-gay article without risk of prison? I think you just did.

If you want to speak out against same-sex marriage, I will support your right to do so, even as I write articles to show how hateful, agenda-driven, and thoughtless your arguments are. If you don’t like the fact that the public square is a challenging place for those with unpopular ideas, then stay away.

But if your complaint is about the Kim Davises of the world unable to impose their religious views on other people or Christian bakers punished for telling same-sex couples “We don’t serve your kind here” when asked to bake a wedding cake, then I have no sympathy. Christians don’t get an exemption from the law.

9. As Acts 5:29 says, “We must obey God rather than men.”

Do what you have to do. But know that in the real world, the secular Constitution upholds the laws in the U.S. Violate those laws, and you’re punished. Being a Christian and sharing your moral opinions are legal here thanks to the Constitution, not God.

 

See also: Does the Bible Reveal Objective Truth About Homosexuality?

 

If the prohibition in Leviticus was so important, we should understand what it meant

The final article is “When a Man Lies with a Man as with a Woman” by Stephen J. Patterson (published in The Fourth R, May–June 2012). Dr. Patterson is a professor of Religious and Ethical Studies at Willamette University.

This article outlines three meanings of male-male sex in the Ancient Near East. The first meaning was domination during wartime, as seen today in rape in prison. This was violence, not gay sex.

The second meaning was sexual pleasure, something a man would do with a slave or servant in the absence of a female partner. A man wasn’t debased in this activity as long as he acted as a man, not a woman—that is, that he was the actor, not the recipient.

This activity was sometimes considered exploitative, however, both because the servant might not be able to refuse and because it demeaned him to be the recipient in homosexual activity.

The third meaning was religious. In the Ancient Near East, where a successful harvest was uncertain, fertility rituals were common. Priests were the gods’ agents on earth, and fertility was ensured by planting one’s seed in a priest, who was imagined to be androgynous like the god he represented.

In none of these cases of male-male sex from biblical times was homosexuality a factor. Indeed, the opposite was assumed. In the case of rape during wartime, the actor was taking the role of male, humiliating his opponent by forcing him into the feminine role. In the case of recreation, the man is acting as a man, with the servant assuming the role of the woman. And in the case of the fertility ritual, the man is planting his seed in an (imagined) female. While gay sex as we understand it today was likely practiced, it isn’t part of these three meanings and isn’t discussed in the surviving literature.

Given this background, let’s apply it to the prohibition “don’t lie with a man as one does a woman” in Leviticus. Patterson says that most scholars think that this kind of homosexuality is in the third category, the fertility rite, because of the word used to condemn it, “abomination.” This is the word used for religious offense. Judaism had no fertility rite like this, and a rite that called on other gods, as this one did, would obviously be offensive to Yahweh.

What about the issue at hand, using the Bible to criticize homosexual relationships as we understand them today? Patterson says that while we can’t be certain that we understand the original meaning of the relevant passages in Leviticus,

We can say very clearly what the Levitical prohibition does not mean. It does not forbid falling in love with another man and having intimate sexual relations with him. Male-male sex just did not have that connotation in the Ancient Near East. . . . Male-male sex in the Ancient Near East does not mean “I love you.” It means “I own you.” Today, of course, it is different. Male-male sex can mean “I love you.” To such a thing Leviticus offers no comment.

Not only have Christians themselves dispensed with the Levitical ritual laws, but even if they were still in force, they say nothing to inform the Christian on the correct response to modern homosexuality or same-sex marriage.

Christian fundamentalism:
the doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful,
infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity
that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life. 
— Andrew Lias

Image credit: masterdesigner, flickr, CC