A friend of mine recently drew my attention to a series of articles by Richard Carrier titled “Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story” in which the author explains why he, as a historian, considers the proofs usually adduced by Christian apologists for the resurrection of Christ as being poor at best and specious at worst.
Carrier relays a claim for the resurrection’s historicity he encountered in a debate with Douglas Geivett:
“Nevertheless, Christian apologist Douglas Geivett has declared that the evidence for the physical resurrection of Jesus meets, and I quote, ‘the highest standards of historical inquiry’ and ‘if one takes the historian’s own criteria for assessing the historicity of ancient events, the resurrection passes muster as a historically well-attested event of the ancient world,’ as well-attested, he says, as Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 B.C. Well, it is common in Christian apologetics, throughout history, to make absurdly exaggerated claims, and this is no exception.”
Carrier lists five ways that the evidence for the crossing of the Rubicon and the resurrection differ in quality. He then says:
“It should be clear that we have many reasons to believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, all of which are lacking in the case of the resurrection. In fact, when we compare all five points, we see that in four of the five proofs of an event’s historicity, the resurrection has no evidence at all, and in the one proof that it does have, it has not the best, but the very worst kind of evidence—a handful of biased, uncritical, unscholarly, unknown, second-hand witnesses. Indeed, you really have to look hard to find another event that is in a worse condition than this as far as evidence goes. So Geivett is guilty of a rather extreme exaggeration. This is not a historically well-attested event, and it does not meet the highest standards of evidence.”
Now my point here is not to debate the resurrection (which I and the majority of my readers affirm). Rather, I want to explore the historicity angle as a whole. The claim on the part of most Christian apologists—Reformed or not—is that what sets our faith apart from just about any other religion is the fact that it is based not on some alleged religious experience that some guru had in private—as the apostles testified, “These things of which we bear witness were not done in a corner.” No, it is upon an event that transpired in space-time history that Christianity is founded, such that our faith is actually falsifiable if that event can be disproven. Other religions make no such claim, and open themselves up to no such potential falsifiability.
That being said, however, the question is worth asking, “Is the historical case for the resurrection so strong that the unbiased seeker will be compelled to believe it actually transpired?”( I am not asking whether the inquirer will savingly believe the gospel, but simply about intellectual assent on the part of the inquirer to the historical fact of the resurrection.)
For the sake of discussion, I will put forth the thesis that the answer to the question of whether the historical data sufficiently proves that the resurrection happened is “No.”
Do you agree or disagree? And how much does it really matter?