The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach

Licona opens with a problem he thinks the field has not solved. Resurrection research keeps producing sharply different verdicts. He blames the method, not the evidence.

The portrait problem

In 1910, George Tyrrell, Catholic modernist theologian, charged that historical-Jesus scholars kept painting self-portraits in first-century clothing. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus Seminar co-founder, calls this “academic embarrassment” — and Licona thinks resurrection research suffers the same disease, if not worse. He lists fifteen heavyweight scholars who have weighed in over three decades — Allison, Brown, Carnley, Catchpole, Craig, Crossan, Dunn, Ehrman, Habermas, Lüdemann, Marxsen, O’Collins, Swinburne, Wedderburn, Wright — and notes how little they agree.

An outside critique

The catalyst came from outside biblical studies. A. N. Sherwin-White, Oxford classicist, had bluntly told NT scholars that their Gospel-skepticism looked strange to working historians of antiquity. He thought attempts to reject the basic historicity of Acts “appear absurd,” and Roman historians had long taken Acts for granted. About the Gospels he wrote:

“It is astonishing that while Graeco-Roman historians have been growing in confidence, the twentieth-century study of the Gospel narratives… has taken so gloomy a turn in the development of form-criticism.” (p. 18)

John McIntyre, Edinburgh theologian, made a parallel charge. Historical positivism died in mainstream historiography a century ago, but it lingered on in biblical criticism with — in his words — “a quite devastating effect.” So two outside witnesses tell biblical scholars the same thing. They are working with tools the rest of the historical guild has retired.

Are NT scholars trained for this?

Licona presses an awkward question. How many biblical scholars have ever taken even a single undergraduate course on how to investigate the past? He grants that NT scholars are historically minded — Ernst Troeltsch, German liberal theologian, made a serious attempt at historical criteria — but the standard tools, the criteria of authenticity, were built to test sayings of Jesus, not events. And as Licona puts it:

“Criteria for identifying authentic logia are not very helpful in verifying Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon in 49 b.c. and Augustus’s defeat of Antony in 31 b.c.” (p. 18)

The Rubicon-Actium analogy will return throughout the book. You don’t verify an event with sayings-criticism.

The gap in the literature

Then comes the empirical anchor. Gary R. Habermas, Liberty University philosopher and Licona’s master’s-thesis director, has compiled a bibliography of roughly 3,400 scholarly journal articles and books in English, German, and French — all on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, all from 1975 onward. When Licona asked Habermas how many came from professional historians outside biblical studies, Habermas could name only a handful. None had laid out a real philosophy of history with a worked-out method. That was the niche. Licona started the project in March 2003.

Within months, three monumental volumes appeared — N. T. Wright, then Bishop of Durham, with The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003); James D. G. Dunn, Durham NT scholar, with Jesus Remembered (2003); and Dale C. Allison, Princeton Seminary, with Resurrecting Jesus (2005). Licona credits all three for taking method seriously. Yet a void remained, he argues, when measured against professional-historian standards.

The plan

The book promises “unprecedented interaction with the literature of professional historians outside of the community of biblical scholars.” Chapter 1 builds a method from general historiography. Chapter 2 answers the standard objections to investigating miracle-claims — Hume, McCullagh, Meier, Ehrman, Wedderburn, and Dunn. Chapter 3 surveys every source on Jesus’ death and resurrection written within 200 years of the event. Chapter 4 distills “historical bedrock” — facts so strongly evidenced they hold across ideological lines. Chapter 5 weighs six hypotheses against that bedrock: Vermes, Goulder, Lüdemann, Crossan, Craffert, and the resurrection hypothesis. Allison gets a separate appendix.

The volume revises Licona’s doctoral dissertation under Jan van der Watt, University of Pretoria. Allison called the resurrection question “the prize puzzle of New Testament research.” Licona means to move the puzzle closer to a solution.

Chapter 1 is the methodological foundation of the entire book. Licona thinks resurrection research has gone wrong because historians keep skipping the prior question — what does it even mean to know something about the past? Before he weighs evidence in later chapters, he wants the rules of the game on the table. He divides the chapter into two halves. Theory asks what we can know. Method asks how the historian decides between competing explanations. The whole defense of the resurrection in chapters 4 and 5 will rest on what is built here.

He opens with an epigraph from Luke Timothy Johnson — “Excessive epistemology becomes cognitive cannibalism,” but a little of it is important as a hedge against easy assumptions and arrogant certainty. That captures the tone. Licona is not interested in epistemology for its own sake. He wants enough of it to keep the rest of the book honest.

What is history? Licona surveys eight definitions and adopts the simplest one. Aviezer Tucker, philosopher of history, defines history as “past events that are the object of study.” Other scholars push back on that bare-bones approach. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus Seminar co-founder, prefers “the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse.” Hayden White, philosopher of history, argues the term is irreducibly equivocal — both an object and an account of that object. Licona sides with Tucker. The choice matters. By defining history as the past itself rather than as the historian’s narrative about the past, Licona quietly takes a realist position before he argues for it. Historiography, by contrast, names the philosophy and method of writing about the past — and on Tucker’s broad view, Josephus, Tacitus, and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List all count.

Theory

Licona begins with the obstacles. The past is forever gone. Historians cannot view it directly or reconstruct it precisely. Knowledge of it is mediated through someone else’s eyes and someone else’s agenda. Many ancient historians cared less about preserving their past than about being remembered themselves. Sources are selective by nature — Lucian complained when a writer gave only seven lines to a battle but lavished pages on a Moorish horseman. Neither Philo nor Josephus mentioned Claudius’s expulsion of Jews from Rome around AD 49–50. Only Suetonius and Luke caught it, and each in a single sentence. Reagan’s autobiography gives just two sentences to his first marriage. Licona’s wife’s grandfather wrote a diary entry on April 2, 1917 — the day the United States entered the First World War — and never mentioned the war.

From this Licona pulls a working principle. If history must be exhaustive to be knowable, it is unknowable. If it can be adequate to a question, it is knowable to a degree. An incomplete description is not for that reason an inaccurate one. The Evangelists never described Jesus’s physical features, but their silence is not error. They selected what served their purpose.

The list of obstacles continues. Memories fade and distort. Genres are flexible. Licona concedes the now-broad consensus that the canonical Gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman bios — a flexible form that allowed ancient biographers to rearrange material, invent speeches, and sometimes include legend. Eyewitnesses are unreliable: did the Titanic break in half before it sank? Did Wittgenstein throw a hot poker at Popper at Cambridge in 1946? The reports conflict. The past is fragmented — half of Tacitus survives, and almost nothing of Thallus, Asclepiades of Mendes, or Nicholas of Damascus’s 144-book Universal History. Quadratus‘s second-century apology would have vanished entirely had Eusebius not preserved a single paragraph.

“History is written by the winners” — Licona qualifies that slogan. Thucydides and Xenophon wrote from the losing side. He pushes back on Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels, who argue that early Christianity’s history was written by the proto-orthodox winners and that a Gnostic victory would have given us very different Gospels. Gnostic literature, Licona answers, is generally later than the New Testament. Pagels herself dates the Gospel of Thomas to the 80s and admits she does not know its authorship or its community link to the apostle Thomas. The picture of the early period that emerges from Acts and the Pauline letters is not a forgery of the winners.

Horizon

And so Licona names what he thinks is the single largest obstacle. He calls it horizon. A horizon is a historian’s preunderstanding — the cluster of knowledge, experience, beliefs, education, cultural conditioning, preferences, presuppositions, and worldview that colors everything she sees. “Horizons are like sunglasses through which a historian looks. Everything she sees is colored by that horizon.”

The sports analogy is blunt. Was the runner safe at second base? It depends on whose team your son is on. We accept or reject Jesus reconstructions by whether their Jesus matches the one we already prefer. No historian is exempt. Geoffrey Elton, Cambridge historian, put it plainly: the historian who thinks he has removed himself from his work is almost certainly mistaken. Georg Iggers, intellectual historian, has argued that objectivity in history is unattainable — only plausibility is on offer.

The problem is loudest in Jesus research. Michael Grant, classicist, called Jesus “a theme in which the notorious problem of achieving objectivity reaches its height.” James D. G. Dunn, Durham NT scholar, observes that decades of debate over criteria of authenticity have produced little agreement on the criteria, let alone their application. E. P. Sanders, Duke NT scholar, frames it the same way — agreement on the ground rules has been elusive.

Licona then catalogs what he sees as the field’s most consequential horizon — bias against the supernatural. Sarah Coakley, philosopher of religion, charges that contemporary New Testament scholarship is “often downright repressive — about supernatural events in general and bodily resurrection in particular.” Charles Hartshorne, process philosopher, writing during the Flew–Habermas debate, made the admission directly:

“I can neither explain away the evidences to which Habermas appeals, nor can I simply agree…. My metaphysical bias is against resurrections.” (p. 43)

Other examples pile up. Antony Flew, then an atheist, said the method of critical history simply takes miracles to be impossible. Gerd Lüdemann, Göttingen NT scholar, rules out the ascension a priori on the ground that there is no heaven for Jesus to ascend to. Crossan grants that God exists only metaphorically — and so, as Licona observes, Crossan’s horizon makes a resurrection verdict unreachable in advance.

Critics of this stance come from inside and outside the guild. N. T. Wright, then Bishop of Durham, calls the dogmatic anti-supernatural stance a fantasy world propped up by post-Enlightenment anxiety. Charles Quarles, NT scholar, argues that the Jesus Seminar’s criteria were slanted to preclude any portrait but the one already favored. The pattern goes back to George Tyrrell, Catholic modernist, who in 1909 said Adolf Harnack’s Jesus was only “the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face seen at the bottom of a deep well.” Albert Schweitzer, Strasbourg NT scholar, said it more pointedly still — every era found its own thoughts in Jesus, and the writing of a Life of Jesus reveals the author’s true self.

Dale C. Allison, Princeton Seminary, makes the most candid version of the confession. He notes that scholars typically hold in their fifties and sixties what they were taught in their twenties and thirties. He asks whether anyone can name a major historian of Jesus whose views shifted radically in midlife. Allison admits he sees what he expects to see. Football fans always spot more fouls against the team they root against. He goes further. If someone proved his sort of Jesus was wrong, he is not sure he would have the courage to redo the work.

Licona refuses to draw a despairing conclusion. Bias is both asset and liability. If reality is godless, anti-supernatural bias helps the historian; if reality is theistic, it cripples her. Theistic bias may even help a historian notice data that secular peers overlook. Partial objectivity is possible. Thomas Haskell, Rice historian, argues that even a committed polemicist can be objective if he honestly enters the thinking of his rivals. Wright says identifying a writer’s bias does not by itself discredit the information. C. Behan McCullagh, philosopher of history at La Trobe, puts it crisply — preference does not prevent true conclusions.

Six tools for managing horizon

Licona thinks total neutrality is unattainable, but transcending one’s horizon is possible — and conversion stories are the proof. Geza Vermes moved from Catholicism to Judaism. Eta Linnemann left Bultmannian criticism for biblical conservatism. Bart Ehrman moved the other way, from evangelical to agnostic. Alister McGrath, Oxford theologian, recalls his own move from atheism to Christianity as an “intellectually painful” rearrangement of all his mental furniture. The apostle Paul went from persecutor to missionary. People do change their minds.

To help that process, Licona names six tools.

One — method. The way data are weighed, contextualized, and tested against alternative hypotheses. McCullagh thinks methodological procedure is the only realistic check on the bias of preconception. But method alone is inadequate. Donald Denton, NT scholar, has shown that scholars working under the same method — tradition criticism, holism — still produce wildly different Jesuses. Crossan and Meier disagree under tradition criticism. Sanders and Wright disagree under holism. Method alone does not get you out of horizon.

Two — make horizon and method public. Resurrection-affirming historians have a theistic horizon that critics may challenge. Methodological naturalists should expect the same scrutiny.

Three — peer pressure. Like sporting judges in gymnastics, peers can keep individual subjectivity in check. But peer pressure can also entrench bad consensus. Graham Stanton, Cambridge NT scholar, conceded he should have been “less timid” 15 years earlier in challenging the form-critical orthodoxy that the Gospels were a unique mythical genre.

Four — submit ideas to unsympathetic experts. McCullagh argues that descriptions which earn the approval of impartial or hostile critics are unlikely to be biased. Alan Padgett, Luther Seminary, adds that we discover whether our preunderstanding helps or hurts only in the give-and-take of dialogue. The mechanisms are familiar — peer review, conference papers, public debate.

Five — account for the relevant historical bedrock. This is the technical center of Licona’s method, and it shapes everything he does later in the book. Some facts are so strongly evidenced that they are virtually indisputable. They meet two criteria. They are strongly evidenced, and the majority of contemporary scholars accept them as facts. Any legitimate hypothesis must explain all of them. If a hypothesis fails to explain bedrock, it goes back to the drawing board. The function is to put a check on narrative — to keep historians from writing fiction with a bibliography. Licona acknowledges the risk. Scholarly consensus has been wrong before, so this is a guideline rather than a law.

Six — detachment from bias. Ben F. Meyer, NT scholar and philosopher of history, calls detachment “of the highest importance.” McCullagh calls preconception attachment “the hardest of all to overcome.” Roy Hoover, NT scholar, gives the most uncompromising version — veracity must be the principal moral and intellectual commitment of any scholarship; one has to care only about how things really are. Detachment also means a willingness to entertain a hypothesis to the point of conversion before deciding against it. Brad Gregory, Notre Dame historian, captures the spirit with a Robert Solow line — just because a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible does not mean one should perform surgery in a sewer.

Licona illustrates the demand for falsifiability with a thought experiment. He has often asked evangelical Christians whether they would abandon their faith if archaeologists uncovered an ossuary containing the bones of Jesus, accompanied by a confession signed by the apostles. Many said no — they would not. Licona thinks Paul himself, in 1 Corinthians 15:17, says the bones would matter. The honest answer is yes; he would walk away. That admission becomes a touchstone of his self-disclosure later in the chapter.

Consensus, postmodernism, and what counts as truth

Licona is skeptical of unqualified appeals to consensus. The right test is heterogeneity. The Jesus Seminar’s verdicts mainly reveal what theologically left scholars regard as authentic — the Seminar is not heterogeneous enough to settle disputed questions. The Society of Biblical Literature, by contrast, gathers liberals, conservatives, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists from across the world. If a consensus is to carry weight, it must come from a body that diverse. Even then, consensus only counts where members have done the work — fewer than five percent of SBL members may have studied any given archaeological find seriously. He concludes bluntly that no consensus on the resurrection itself will ever exist. Either Jesus rose or he did not, and Christians and Muslims are not going to converge on the verdict.

What about postmodernism? Licona surveys three figures — Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, Groningen philosopher of history, and Keith Jenkins, Chichester historian. White treats narrative as construct: 9/11 looks tragic in New York and triumphant in some other capitals; the same events can be emplotted many different ways. Ankersmit calls historical narrative a metaphorical “substitute” for the past with no one-to-one correspondence to it. Jenkins is the most radical — historical narrative is unverifiable, and aesthetic preference adjudicates between accounts.

The standard reply, which Licona endorses, is that postmodern history is self-refuting. Perez Zagorin, Rochester historian, points out that Elizabeth Ermarth, in a postmodern manifesto, makes a string of confident factual claims about Renaissance, Reformation, Einstein, and the German Higher Criticism — and then admits her own text uses the language of representation it is supposed to undermine. Haskell shows that Jean-François Lyotard, French philosopher, while inveighing against representing the past as it was, then represents his deceased friend Souyri in detail — quoting his letters, attributing statements, characterizing him “in spite of himself.” The maps work, even if maps are not landscapes. Haskell’s parable of travelers in the French countryside makes the point. Two flawed maps still get them to Paris. We do not need a perfect map to recognize that some maps are better than others.

Postmodernism has lost. Brian Fay, Wesleyan philosopher, says historical practice today looks much like it did a generation ago. Even Jenkins concedes most historians have resisted the postmodern turn. McCullagh knows of no practicing historians who admit they cannot discover anything true about the past. Licona’s conclusion is the now-standard one. Naive realism is dead. Pure postmodernism has few followers. The middle position — realism with graded certainty — describes how most historians actually work. That is Licona’s position.

What is truth, what is a fact, who carries the burden

Licona endorses the correspondence theory of truth. Statements about the world are true insofar as they correspond to what is actually there. He notes the standard objections — perception is horizon-laden, historians cannot run a time machine, two people in a room can disagree about whether it is cold or warm — and answers each with the same point. The inability to verify a hypothesis affects what we know, not what is true. The coherence theory cannot do the work either. Two contradictory hypotheses can both cohere internally; coherence cannot distinguish fact from fiction. A modified coherence theory, which adds correspondence to the facts, just collapses back into correspondence.

What is a historical fact? Licona adopts Richard Evans, Cambridge historian‘s definition — something that happened and that historians attempt to discover through verification. He acknowledges that what counts as a fact is itself shaped by horizon and theory, and so circularity threatens. The six tools are his answer. They are six points at which the historian should pause while traveling the circle.

On burden of proof, Licona names three options. Methodical credulity assumes texts are reliable unless they show otherwise. Methodical skepticism assumes the reverse. Methodical neutrality places the burden on whoever makes the claim, whether the claim is for or against a hypothesis. Licona thinks credulity is best when intent, method, and integrity are clear — but in ancient sources those are rarely clear. Skepticism, he notes, would gut most ancient history. Craig Blomberg, Denver Seminary NT scholar, argues that consistent methodical skepticism applied to other ancient writings would force most accepted history to be jettisoned.

What follows is the move that organizes the rest of the book. Licona adopts methodical neutrality. The claimant carries the burden — but so does the skeptic the moment she proposes an alternative theory. A bare appeal to “hallucination” is not enough; an alternative also needs evidence. Licona illustrates the principle with a worked thought experiment about purple geese from Pluto and the inverted-V residue stream that might or might not corroborate the claim. The general rule is simple. The stronger the data behind a historical interpretation, the heavier the burden on anyone who holds a different position.

Is history a science, and what do historians actually do

Licona spends a few pages defending history as a discipline against the charge that it is too soft to count as serious knowledge. Scientists do not have direct access to last year’s experiments either; they rely on notes. Telescopic observation looks at ancient light. Geology and evolutionary biology depend on inference from fragmentary traces. Physics posits unobservable entities like quarks. John Zammito, Rice historian and philosopher, says it well — an electron is no more directly accessible than the Spanish Inquisition; both must be inferred from evidence, but neither is utterly indeterminable. Richard Evans concludes that history is a science in the weak German sense of Wissenschaft — an organized body of knowledge acquired by methods, published, peer-reviewed. Not in the strong sense that frames general laws.

What do historians actually do? They reassemble the remnants — manuscripts, artifacts, the effects of past causes — into a hypothesis that serves as a window into the past. Some windows are clearer than others. Tucker says historiography “does not reconstruct events; it cannot bring Caesar back to life or reenact the battle of Actium.” It offers the best explanation of present evidence, and it can aspire only to increasing plausibility. Historians ask not just what happened but why. N. T. Wright models the move when he argues that the empty tomb and the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus are necessary conditions for the rise of early Christian belief in the resurrection. That is the kind of causal claim Licona will return to in chapter 5.

Licona names his epistemological school. He calls it critical realism. The framework comes from Bernard Lonergan, Jesuit philosopher, was applied to New Testament studies by Ben Meyer, and has been adopted widely since. Critical realism holds two things together. There is a past that can be known to some extent. And it is known only through honest questioning, in a spiral relationship between the historian and the data, the hypothesis and the evidence. The historian provisionally holds both an underlying hypothesis and a set of facts, then adjusts them iteratively as the investigation proceeds.

Method

If theory makes the historian a better judge, method makes her a better detective. Licona surveys two general methods — argument to the best explanation and statistical inference — and then defends a graded scale for assigning historical certainty.

Argument to the best explanation

An argument to the best explanation, sometimes called IBE or abductive reasoning after C. S. Peirce, American philosopher, makes inferences and weighs hypotheses against specific criteria. The hypothesis that best meets the criteria is preferred and judged most likely to represent what occurred. Licona builds his version on McCullagh and lists five criteria.

One — explanatory scope. The hypothesis that accounts for the most relevant data wins on this dimension.

Two — explanatory power. The hypothesis that explains the data with the least strain, vagueness, and ambiguity wins. The historian, Licona says, does not want to push the facts as if forcing a round peg through a square hole. He warns that some scholars “use exegesis as a torture chamber where biblical texts and Greek words are stretched until they tell the historian what he wants to hear” (p. 109).

Three — plausibility. The hypothesis must be implied to a greater degree, and by a greater variety of accepted truths, than its rivals. Other disciplines should support rather than embarrass it.

Four — less ad hoc. A hypothesis is ad hoc when it leans on assumptions for which there is no evidence. The criterion flags rescue operations — moves designed only to keep an otherwise disconfirmed theory alive. McCullagh treats this as the historical analog of simplicity, where simplicity means fewer presuppositions rather than fewer factors.

Five — illumination. Sometimes a hypothesis solves problems elsewhere without making other settled findings harder to explain. Licona thinks the resurrection hypothesis can illuminate Jesus’s claims to divinity while leaving other things we are confident of about Jesus — his preaching of the kingdom, his parables, his reputation as a wonder-worker — undisturbed.

Licona walks the criteria through a worked clinical case. A robust 15-year-old presents with fever, vomiting, and lower-right abdominal pain. The first two medical students diagnose flu but lose on scope and power. A third invokes flu plus a martial-arts kick plus food poisoning — three layered assumptions that fail the ad hoc test. The attending physician diagnoses appendicitis. It explains everything, requires no extra assumptions, and matches the textbook. It is also not the only logically possible diagnosis. But it best fits the criteria, and that is what the historian is after. As Licona puts it:

“Historians are rarely able to demonstrate that certain hypotheses are impossible. They render conclusions by determining which hypothesis fulfills the criteria… better than its competitors.” (p. 113)

The criteria are not equal in weight. Wright tells a paleontologist parable — one reconstruction omits some bones to keep things simple, another includes them but ends up with a dinosaur sporting seven toes on one foot and eighteen on the other. Wright would prefer the simple version that sacrifices some scope. McCullagh proposes a ranking that Licona adopts. Plausibility comes first. Then explanatory scope and power. Then less ad hoc. Then illumination. If a hypothesis fails on plausibility — that is, conflicts with what is known elsewhere — even superior scope and power cannot save it. Licona adds one modification: illumination is a bonus when present but not required.

Statistical inference and Bayes

Licona considers an alternative — statistical inference, including Bayes’s theorem. Bayes weighs three components: the prior probability of the hypothesis, the likelihood of the evidence given the hypothesis, and the likelihood of the evidence given the hypothesis is false. Recent attempts to apply Bayes to the resurrection have come from Richard Swinburne, Oxford philosopher, and Tim and Lydia McGrew, philosophers of religion.

Licona is skeptical that Bayes can do the work for unique historical events. David Bartholomew, statistician, points out that the prior is essentially subjective; choose your prior small enough and no evidence can move it. McCullagh notes that virtually no historian uses Bayes. Tucker thinks the aggregation of probabilities requires more evidence than is usually available. William Lane Craig, Talbot philosopher, argues Bayes cannot be applied to miracle-claims because the relevant background information is inscrutable — persons, including God, are not vending machines. Stephen Davis, Claremont philosopher, calls Bayes a useful tool in some situations but a blunt instrument for the resurrection.

The Muslim-prior problem clinches the case. To estimate the probability that God raised Jesus, one needs the prior probability that the Judeo-Christian God exists and would want to raise him. A Muslim, working from the Qur’an, will set the relevant prior at zero. The frame is irreducible.

Frequency-counting is no better. McCullagh’s eight-point scale — extremely improbable, very improbable, fairly improbable, hardly probable, more probable than not, fairly probable, very probable, extremely probable — works for repeatable events. But the resurrection, if it occurred, would be unique. The historian cannot say it is “extremely improbable” because less than five percent of people return from the dead, since this would be the resurrection of the Son of God, not a random instance. Symmetrically, the Christian cannot claim “extremely probable” on the grounds that an omnipotent God could always succeed. There is not enough background evidence to draw either conclusion mathematically. And so Licona settles on argument to the best explanation as the method for the rest of the book.

Spectrum of historical certainty

Not all historical claims are held with the same confidence. Licona surveys fourteen scholars’ graded scales — Wright, Meier, Dunn, Meyer, Miller, O’Collins, Twelftree, Wedderburn, Fredriksen, the Jesus Seminar’s color codes, Rex Martin, Allison, Luke Timothy Johnson, and McCullagh. Each names degrees rather than a binary verdict. Licona then proposes his own scale, running from negative to positive verdicts. On the doubtful end:

“Certainly not historical, very doubtful, quite doubtful, somewhat doubtful, indeterminate (neither improbable nor probable, possible, plausible).” (p. 122)

And on the affirming end:

“Somewhat certain (more probable than not), quite certain, very certain (very probably true), certain.” (p. 122)

This spectrum of historical certainty is the operational rubric for chapter 5. Licona then sets the threshold for awarding the verdict “historical.” He proposes that historians may claim to know the past when their preferred hypothesis lands at or above a half step under “quite certain.” The placement depends on two factors — how well the hypothesis meets the five criteria, and how much distance separates it from competing hypotheses. A hypothesis judged only “probable” can still earn the verdict if its distance from rivals is wide. “Very certain” is reserved for hypotheses that meet all five criteria and put a respectable distance between themselves and competitors. “Certain” Licona reserves for contemporary events. “Hitler led the Holocaust” is certain. The evidence is so strong, and the distance from competitors so great, that the hypothesis is effectively incontrovertible. Holocaust deniers exist, but historians, Licona says, “should never wait for consensus” (p. 125).

Conclusions and a confession

Licona summarizes what he has built. There is no consensus on how historians know the past. The postmodernist case has not won. Realism with graded certainty describes how most historians actually work. Truth is correspondence; coherence by itself cannot do the work. Horizon is the largest single cause of conflicting reconstructions. Methodical neutrality places the burden on whoever advances a claim. Six tools — method, public horizon, peer pressure, unsympathetic experts, detachment, historical bedrock — discipline the inquiry without erasing the historian. There is no absolute certainty; only probabilities. The method of choice is argument to the best explanation, judged on five criteria. Historicity is awarded somewhere above “somewhat certain” on the spectrum.

Licona thought, when he started, that biblical scholars and philosophers might be ill-equipped to settle the resurrection question and that professional general historians would have a better toolkit. To his surprise, he found that general historians wrestle with the same epistemological and methodological problems and have not resolved them either. The verdict on his own field is sharp:

“A practice of history that is a sort of fantasy world where undisciplined imagination reigns… and exegesis serves as a torture chamber.” (p. 130)

The chapter ends with a striking section. Licona does the very thing his method requires of others — he makes his own horizon public. He grew up in a conservative Christian home and professed faith at age 10. He has never been seriously inclined to atheism or deism. He notes that his felt experiences of God’s nearness may be authentic but may also reflect long conditioning. He admits that his prior research was conducted more in the interest of confirming his faith than as open inquiry. He gives his stake in the outcome plainly. His desire is for the resurrection to be confirmed. If it were ever disproved, he would feel compelled to abandon Christianity and remain a theist with no specifically Christian commitments. He took three years to discipline himself to consider opposing views with empathy, asking God for patience, and reaching what he describes as “a neutral position for a number of brief periods” — a balance beam he could have tipped either way — for stretches of no more than two months at a time.

By contrast, he names the cost of the project. He holds a position of national leadership in the largest Protestant denomination in North America. He carries influence, is paid fairly, and finds satisfaction in the work. He acknowledges that should his research lead him to the conclusion that Jesus did not rise, he would be dismissed and his employment terminated. The point is the candor itself. “I am wrestling with this topic because I am committed to seeking, finding and following truth,” he writes. He thinks his interest in truth supersedes his fear of embarrassment. And he closes with the falsifiability declaration that anchors the whole book — if the resurrection of Jesus were disconfirmed, his Christian faith would not survive it.

That last sentence is methodologically striking. By his own stated principles, Licona has bet his career and his confession on the verdict the rest of the book is going to render. The reader is invited to assess everything that follows in light of the disclosure.

Licona begins with a courtroom story. His wife was injured in a car accident and sued for damages. During the trial, an attorney let slip the words insurance company — and the judge declared a mistrial on the spot. Some words are barred from a courtroom because juries cannot be trusted to weigh them fairly.

The same thing happens, Licona says, in historical Jesus research. Say miracle or resurrection in a scholarly room and certain colleagues jump up to object. You cannot go there as a historian. Licona thinks the courtroom-style ban is wrong. This chapter tests it against six well-known opponents.

What counts as a miracle? Licona offers a working definition: an event for which natural explanations are inadequate — not merely unknown, but inadequate by the nature of the event. The stakes are clear. If historians cannot investigate miracle-claims, the resurrection inquiry hits a dead end before it begins.

David Hume and uniform experience

David Hume, eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, wrote the classic in-principle argument against miracles in his 1748 essay Of Miracles. Hume’s claim is simple. Uniform human experience constitutes a “proof” against miracles. So when someone reports a dead man rising, the historian should ask which is more likely — that the witness lied or was deceived, or that a corpse really walked? Always pick the lesser miracle.

Hume backs this up with four supporting arguments: miracle-witnesses are never of high enough quality; past observations should govern future expectations; reports come from “ignorant and barbarous nations”; and competing religions cancel one another’s miracles. James D. G. Dunn, Durham NT scholar, endorses Hume’s basic prior-probability principle even today.

Licona’s reply runs through each move. The witness criterion fails first — apply it across the board and most ancient history vanishes. Most past events come from a single source and few witnesses are “beyond all suspicion.” The criterion would dismiss almost everything we think we know about antiquity.

The principle of analogy fails next. Ernst Troeltsch, German liberal theologian, gave it its later sharp form, and Dunn applies it directly to resurrection. But strict analogy would forbid concluding dinosaurs existed — none observed today. The reply that fossils remain only proves the principle has limits. Licona piles on five more drawbacks: it cannot recognize unique events; it smuggles in metaphysical naturalism; the historian’s “lake” of personal experience is too small a sample to ground a universal denial; and it confuses the genre of fable with the genre of testimony.

“We know the experience against [miracles] to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.” (p. 143)

That is C. S. Lewis on Hume’s circularity. Wolfhart Pannenberg, German systematic theologian, makes the same move. If you decide in advance that the dead stay dead, your verdict is not historical but ideological.

The antecedent-improbability move fails because it misidentifies the hypothesis. The Christian claim is not “Jesus rose by natural causes.” It is “God raised Jesus.” If God exists and intended this raising, the prior probability rises sharply. Antony Flew, the prominent twentieth-century atheist philosopher, conceded this point even before he later abandoned atheism.

The cancellation argument fails on inspection. Licona walks through the Apollonius of Tyana parallel — our only biography is from Philostratus, written around AD 225, roughly 130 years after Apollonius. Its key source, Damis, is regarded by most scholars as a literary fiction. The post-mortem appearance evidence is one dream from an unnamed person at an unspecified time. By contrast, the Gospel reports are far closer to the events. Statistician David Bartholomew, citing Charles Babbage — the “father of the computer” — shows the math: when independent witnesses converge, the probability of joint falsehood collapses fast.

And finally, Hume’s own statement on resurrection begs the question. He claims it has “never been observed in any age or country” that a dead man returns to life — yet the Gospels report exactly that. He must show the reports are mistaken, not assume it.

Licona grants Hume one debt. The Scottish skeptic warns historians against partiality toward miracle-claims in their own religion. That warning still stands.

C. Behan McCullagh and incommensurable worldviews

C. Behan McCullagh, Australian philosopher of history, is more sympathetic. His book Justifying Historical Descriptions lays out seven criteria for arguing to the best explanation. Strikingly, McCullagh’s first illustration is the resurrection — the very example, he says, that “illustrates the conditions most vividly.” He grants that resurrection has greater explanatory scope and power than its rivals. Yet he punts. The hypothesis is “less plausible and more ad hoc.” So the historian cannot decide.

Why the flinch? McCullagh appeals to Paul Feyerabend, philosopher of science, and the incommensurability thesis. Competing worldviews cannot share a common evidentiary domain. The supernaturalist and the naturalist see different facts. Dunn says something parallel — the resurrection is not so much a historical fact as a “foundational fact or meta-fact.”

Licona pushes back hard. Yet incommensurable worldviews are everywhere in historiography. Marxist and non-Marxist accounts of the American Revolution clash — yet no one says historians cannot write about it. So why punt on the resurrection alone?

Historians already make philosophical assumptions before any inquiry. Licona lists five: the external world is real; the senses give roughly accurate perception; logic helps us pursue truth; natural laws today operated similarly in antiquity; the past is at least partly knowable. These assumptions cannot be proved to certainty. Postmodernists deny the fifth, and realist historians proceed anyway. So why can a sixth assumption — that God exists and acts — not also be admitted? Licona points to recent astrophysics and molecular biology, plus three worldview-conversion stories: Antony Flew, cosmologist Frank Tipler, and the personal experiences reported by Dale Allison, Princeton Seminary, and Craig Keener, Asbury NT scholar.

And so the burden flips. Why should atheism or agnosticism be the default? If most people in modern society are theists, how can theism count as ad hoc? Licona’s preferred posture is methodological neutrality — assume neither God’s existence nor non-existence, and let the case proceed.

John P. Meier and the discipline-restriction move

John P. Meier, Catholic NT scholar, takes a different line in his multi-volume A Marginal Jew. Modern people may believe in miracles, Meier grants. But professional historians, working strictly within their discipline, cannot assign a “historical” verdict to a miracle-claim. The most a historian may say is this: no natural cause is known; the event sits in a religiously significant context; some witnesses claimed it was a miracle. After that, the historian must hand the matter off to the philosopher or theologian.

Peter Carnley, Australian Anglican theologian, agrees — the historian “must hold his peace.” So do Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, German NT scholars: events in the realm beyond death lie outside the historian’s reach.

Licona’s reply is constructive. He grants Meier the religiously significant context as one identifying mark. William Lane Craig, Christian philosopher, makes the same point — context raises the chance the event is a real miracle. Then Licona borrows from William Dembski, mathematician, the design-detection idea of specified complexity. Forensics, archaeology, cryptography, and SETI all use parallel criteria for inferring intelligent agency. So can historians.

Licona offers a two-criterion test for identifying a miracle. First, the event is extremely unlikely given the circumstances and natural law. Second, it occurs in a context charged with religious significance. The stronger the charge, the stronger the case.

Three thought-experiments make this concrete. First, Hume’s own Queen Elizabeth case, augmented — what if Elizabeth had also claimed to be a prophetess and predicted her own death and resurrection? Second, philosopher of history Aviezer Tucker‘s cancer-remission case, augmented with a “Katja” patient whose physician and entire staff each independently dream of an angel before her sudden cancer-free state next morning. Third, two scenarios involving “David,” a fifty-year-old atheist born blind. In one, sight returns at home with no context. In the other, a pastor knocks on the door and says three people felt prompted to share “Amazing Grace” — and at the words “was blind but now I see,” David sees. Same medical fact, different context. The physician is warranted in inferring miracle in the second case.

Licona presses further. Historians cross disciplinary lines all the time — archaeologists use ancient texts, biblical scholars consult medical experts on crucifixion. The “historian as such” wall is artificial. Physicists posit black holes, quarks, strings, and gluons — none directly observable. Historians can posit God as the explanatory entity behind a revivification by similar reasoning.

And he disaggregates the event from the cause. Historians can affirm that Jesus returned to life and leave a question mark over what caused it. They can do this with Carloman’s death in AD 771 — they know the date, but not whether Charlemagne murdered him. Same logic with Jesus.

Licona grants Ted Peters, Lutheran theologian, a real concession. Full theological resurrection includes eschatological dimensions — firstfruits of the general resurrection at the parousia — that historical method cannot verify. The historian can affirm bodily revivification but not the full theological cargo. Even Gerd Lüdemann, German atheist NT scholar, grants a striking point: if theology is paired with historical thought, it must either find a natural explanation or admit that on historical grounds a supernatural one is more plausible.

Bart D. Ehrman and the least-probable definition

Bart D. Ehrman, UNC NT scholar, raises five linked arguments. The Gospels are written 35 to 65 years after the events, are propagandistic, and contain discrepancies. By definition a miracle is the least probable event, so historians cannot affirm one. “Jesus was raised” is theological, not historical. Admitting Jesus’ miracles forces us to admit Muhammad, Apollonius, Honi the Circle-Drawer, and Vespasian. And the canons of historical research forbid affirming a least-probable event.

Licona defers the source-quality argument to chapter 3 and goes after the rest. The “least probable” move shares Hume’s flaw. Frequentist probability ignores the possibility of an external agent. Ehrman’s own third argument — that historians cannot speak about God — actually undercuts his second. If historians cannot say anything about God, they also cannot rule on the prior probability of God raising Jesus. William Lane Craig‘s Bayesian rebuttal sharpens the point. The relevant priors involve God’s existence and intentions, which Ehrman calls inscrutable. So Ehrman cannot declare resurrection improbable.

“What if a god exists who wanted to raise Jesus from the dead? That would be a game changer. In that case, a miracle such as Jesus’ resurrection may actually be the most probable explanation.” (p. 175)

On parity with other religions, Licona offers case-by-case deflation. The Qur’an does not report miracles by Muhammad — those reports come centuries later. Apollonius of Tyana’s case has already collapsed. Honi the Circle-Drawer first appears in Josephus with a tame story; the Jerusalem Talmud, written around three centuries later, adds the dramatic circle-drawing detail and dates Honi five hundred years earlier than Josephus does. Hanina ben Dosa’s miracle reports first appear around AD 200, roughly 150 years after his life — far longer than Mark’s 25-to-45-year gap. Vespasian’s miracles have a plausible naturalistic explanation.

Antony Flew, while still atheist, said the evidence for the resurrection is outstandingly different in quality and quantity from any other claimed miracle. Granting Jesus’ miracles does not commit one to all others. Each case must be evaluated on its own evidence.

And the “canons” of historical research? Licona produces three professional historians who deny they exist. David Hackett Fischer, Brandeis historian: “specific canons of historical proof are neither widely observed nor generally agreed upon.” Thomas Haskell, Rice historian: historiography “lacks even the possibility of defining a single canon familiar to all practitioners.” Michael Grant, classical historian: “every critic is inclined to make his own rules.”

The dispute over miracle-investigation is not theist versus atheist — McCullagh forbids while Tucker allows; Lüdemann is an atheist who allows. Within biblical studies, those who allow include N. T. Wright, then Bishop of Durham, Lüdemann, Raymond E. Brown, Catholic NT scholar, Gerald O’Collins, Jesuit theologian, Gary R. Habermas, Liberty University philosopher, and Craig. Those who forbid include Meier, Dunn, Wedderburn, Theissen, Winter, and Carnley. The line does not run where Ehrman thinks.

And so Licona lands a methodological hinge. Historians should aim for heterogeneous consensus on the historical bedrock — the inputs to any hypothesis — not on the conclusion. Some Muslim scholars deny the Holocaust against overwhelming evidence; some deny Jesus’ crucifixion against near-universal historian consensus. Horizon-driven holdouts cannot veto. This unlocks chapter 4’s “minimal facts” approach.

Wedderburn and Dunn on second-order facts

A. J. M. Wedderburn, NT scholar, in Beyond Resurrection argues that ancient evidence is fragmentary and laced with legend. No one claimed to witness the resurrection event itself. Witnesses encountered a risen Jesus and then interpreted the encounter as resurrection. The hypothesis “God raised Jesus” is “imponderable.”

Dunn supplies the underlying framework. Events belong to the past and cannot be observed. Data — surviving reports and artifacts — survive but never raw; they come soaked in the recorder’s horizon. Facts are modern interpretations of data. So the empty tomb and the appearances may count as “facts,” but the conclusion that Jesus was raised is, in Dunn’s words, “an interpretation of an interpretation” — at best a second-order fact.

Wedderburn adds a definitional worry. Paul’s view of resurrection differs, he claims, from the Evangelists’ and from later orthodoxy. Dunn agrees: what Luke affirms (flesh and bones), Paul denies. Wedderburn ends with “a regrettable and thoroughly unsatisfactory ‘Don’t know.'”

Licona’s reply has three moves. First, fragmentary data and possibly legendary elements do not bar all positive judgments. He concedes — strikingly — that Matthew’s raising of saints at Jesus’ death (Mt 27:51–54) and the angel(s) at the tomb may carry poetic or legendary elements. The question is whether a historical core can be identified. If yes, a judgment can follow.

Second, second-order facts are normal. Apply Dunn’s objection across the board and the legal system collapses — every juror is interpreting eyewitness interpretations of unobservable events. Imagine a historian arguing that the modern conclusion that the Union won at Gettysburg is a second-order fact and so unwarranted. He would be laughed out of the room. The objection only sounds plausible when applied to ancient events or miracles — but those are different objections (time-distance and miracle-distrust), and they call for extra care, not abstention.

Third, on the Pauline definition question, Licona signals where chapter 4 will land. Historians prefer earlier reports. Paul is earlier. If Paul’s view in fact involved the corpse — as Licona will argue — then the Wedderburn-Dunn split between Paul and the Evangelists collapses.

A turning point in the profession

Licona then surveys signs that the wider historical guild is shifting. The 2006 theme issue of History and Theory ran a collection on religion and history. David Gary Shaw, Wesleyan historian, opened by saying historians appear to be at “a sort of confessional watershed” — religion has turned out to be more important and permanent than the prevailing paradigms had supposed. Mark Cladis, Brown religion scholar, observed that secularization theories have not given an adequate account of the modern world.

Brad Gregory, Notre Dame historian, names the buried problem. Many academics treat the impossibility of miracles as obvious — but this conviction has “an aura of neutrality and objectivity, as if dogmatic metaphysical naturalism were somehow not as much a personal conviction as is dogmatic religion.” Gregory calls the result “secular confessional history” and urges historians to move beyond it. Ben Witherington, Asbury NT scholar, notes the same Enlightenment carryover in biblical studies.

“the epistemological ice age of antisupernaturalism appears to be coming to an end.” (p. 191)

This functions as Licona’s classicist-style outsider rebuke — A. N. Sherwin-White, Oxford classicist, made a parallel point about NT skepticism in chapter 1. The professional climate is opening up.

Burden of proof — risk, law, and Sagan’s Saw

Licona then weighs three competing models for how much evidence a miracle-claim should carry.

Risk assessment is the first. Investing $100 in a stock requires less research than investing $30,000. When stakes rise, evidence demands rise. But probabilities themselves do not change with our personal stakes — we are simply less willing to be wrong. This is closer to Blaise Pascal‘s wager — a practical commitment-prompt, not a truth-tracker. So risk assessment fails as a probability rule.

The legal system is the second. American and British courts use two standards. Civil cases use “preponderance of evidence” — more likely than not. Criminal cases use “beyond a reasonable doubt” — life and liberty are at stake. Some argue that resurrection’s worldview-changing implications demand the criminal standard. Licona reverses the move. In criminal court the defendant is presumed innocent. So the resurrection hypothesis would be presumed true, and only beyond-reasonable-doubt evidence could overturn it. That is methodical credulity, not neutrality. Conversely, presuming the hypothesis guilty and demanding beyond-reasonable-doubt before acceptance grossly misappropriates how the legal system actually works. Either reading collapses. So the civil standard — more probable than not — is the only viable legal-paradigm option, and most historians already use it.

Sagan’s Saw is the third. Carl Sagan, Cornell astronomer, said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Licona runs three tests. First, the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969 was extraordinary, never previously occurred, and reached most of the world via a medium known to distort truth. Yet most accepted it without extraordinary evidence — only credibility and known intent. Second, if his wife reports talking to a neighbor he believes her without question; if she reports talking to the President, still extraordinary, he believes her on the same grounds. Third, if she reports speaking with an alien, real tension appears. But the rational response is not “extraordinary evidence required.” It is to reexamine one’s reasons for believing aliens cannot exist. Additional evidence may be needed — but it addresses the percipient’s horizon, not the public probability.

The same logic governs the Muslim scholar who rejects Jesus’ crucifixion despite strong historical evidence. The horizon clash means more evidence may be needed for that reader — but the historian’s burden is unchanged.

“It is the responsibility of the historian to consider what the evidence would look like if she were not wearing her metaphysical bias like a pair of sunglasses that shade the world.” (p. 196)

And so a miracle-claim is sufficient when four conditions hold: the source intends to report a miracle, the context is religiously charged, the report bears traits favoring historicity, and no plausible naturalistic theory exists. No extraordinary evidence is required.

“There is a difference between demonstrating the historical superiority of a hypothesis and convincing a particular historian to give up a deeply held view.” (pp. 196–197)

Where the chapter lands

Licona sums up what each opponent forced him to clarify. Hume forced criteria for identifying a miracle without “opening the floodgates of credulity.” McCullagh forced a defense of the historian’s metaphysical horizon. Meier forced sharper identification criteria and an honest concession that resurrection in its full theological sense — eschatological firstfruits, atonement — lies beyond historical reach. Ehrman forced careful handling of probability and parity across religions. Wedderburn and Dunn forced the recognition that facts are interpretation-laden. The burden-of-proof analysis lands on the civil standard.

The verdict. Historians are not prohibited from investigating the resurrection. They cannot grant it in its full theological sense. But they can ask the question. Ben Meyer, Canadian NT scholar, gets the last word — the historian who refuses even to consider the miraculous possibility “cannot know whether or not the possibility he dutifully omits to consider offers the best account of a given constellation of data.” That is the door this book walks through.

Chapter 3 is the source-criticism chapter on which the rest of the book stands or falls. Before Licona can argue for the resurrection, he has to answer a prior question — what counts as evidence at all? He commits to a hard rule. Any source he uses must mention Jesus’ death or what happened to him afterward, and must be dated by at least some scholars to within a hundred years of Jesus. Then he ranks each one on a seven-tier scale, from “highly probable” down to “not useful.” Christian sources are scored for whether they preserve independent apostolic testimony. Non-Christian sources are scored for whether they add anything historians cannot already get from the Christian material. The verdict is sharp. Paul plus the oral formulas embedded in his letters are the most promising material — and one passage, 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, sits alone at the top.

Licona opens with a fable from Christian Meier, German ancient historian. A farmer picks up Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, reads a few pages, sets it down, and sighs that he wishes he had Kant’s worries. There comes a moment, Meier was saying, when the philosopher of history has to step aside and let the practitioner do the work. Chapters 1 and 2 were Kant. Chapter 3 is the field.

The Canonical Gospels

The Gospels go first because they carry the most detailed resurrection reports — but Licona will not lean heavily on them, and he explains why. He starts with a genre debate, because everything else turns on it. Up through the 1980s, much of NT scholarship treated the Gospels as a unique mythological genre — sui generis, in a category of their own. The Jesus Seminar in 1992 still assumed mythic embellishment and “plausible fictions.” Licona flips the burden. If the Gospels are myth, claims of historicity bear the burden of proof. But if they are history, claims of myth bear the burden.

The flip is not just rhetorical. Charles Talbert, Baylor NT scholar, opened the door, and Richard Burridge, King’s College London classicist, walked through it. Burridge set out to disprove the thesis that the Gospels were ancient biographies — and reversed his opinion during the research. Graham Stanton, Cambridge NT scholar, wrote that Burridge’s book made it impossible any longer to deny the Gospels are a subset of ancient bios. Ancient bioi were not novels. They covered a subject’s death, teachings, moral philosophy, and politics, and they were rooted in historical fact even when they shaped material to persuade. David Aune, Notre Dame NT scholar, sums up the consensus — biography praised its subject one-sidedly but stayed “firmly rooted in historical fact rather than literary fiction.”

Dating and authorship come next, and Licona concedes more than apologetic treatments usually do. Luke Timothy Johnson, Emory NT scholar, calls the dating problem “real and insoluble.” Traditional ascriptions are “insecure,” especially for Matthew and John. Even so, scholars like Robert Gundry, Craig Keener, Asbury NT scholar, Ben Witherington III, Asbury NT scholar, and Elaine Pagels, Princeton historian of religion, have argued for some form of eyewitness origin behind one or more Gospels. James D. G. Dunn, Durham NT scholar, says the traditional attributions of Matthew and John “deserve respect.”

Licona will not let traditional authorship carry the argument. He sets a programmatic rule for the rest of the book — methodical neutrality. Approach every text “with neither approval nor skepticism,” and let claims bear the burden of proof. Inspiration plays no role in his investigation. Final rating for the canonical Gospels — possible. They probably preserve some apostolic tradition, but Licona will lean instead on earlier material that can be traced to the apostles with more certainty. The move is methodologically conservative. It lets him meet skeptics on common ground.

Paul’s Letters

Paul matters for two reasons. His letters are early — written between roughly A.D. 48 and 65, eighteen to thirty-five years after the crucifixion. They predate the Gospels. And Paul claims to have known the leading Jerusalem disciples — Peter, James, and John — to whom the risen Jesus had also appeared. He claims his own appearance on the Damascus road. So whatever Paul preserves about the resurrection has a near-direct line to apostolic testimony.

Paul also acts as a test case for bodily resurrection. The Gospels describe a corpse that vanished from a tomb, ate fish, and could be touched. A minority of scholars argue Mark invented the empty tomb and Luke and John invented a physical Jesus to answer the Docetists. Paul becomes the control. If Paul thought the resurrection was spiritual only, the Mark-as-inventor theory strengthens. If Paul thought it was bodily, the theory collapses. Licona returns to that test in chapter 4. Here he just notes that Paul “highly probably” preserves apostolic testimony — and the full weight will fall on the oral formulas Paul quotes.

Pre-NT Oral Traditions

Before working through the formulas, Licona handles three other candidates for material that predates the New Testament writings.

The Q hypothesis goes first. Most scholars think Matthew and Luke share material absent from Mark, and the simplest explanation is a common source, conventionally labeled Q. Licona accepts the hypothesis as reasonable but reminds the reader that no manuscript of Q has ever been found, and Q is not mentioned in any ancient source. Some scholars — John Kloppenborg, Toronto NT scholar, James Robinson, Claremont NT scholar, and Burton Mack, Claremont NT scholar — go much further. They call Q a “sayings Gospel” with its own community, and Mack argues that the Q community was a non-Christian Jesus movement that knew nothing of the crucifixion or resurrection. Licona is brutal. Q lacks a clear crucifixion mention too — would Mack also conclude the Q community knew nothing of the crucifixion? Q was preserved by churches that did celebrate the resurrection. Edward Adams, King’s College London NT scholar, calls Mack’s reconstruction “speculation that borders on fantasy.” Luke Timothy Johnson calls it “pure flimflam.” Final rating — unlikely.

The pre-Markan passion narrative comes next. Marion Soards, Louisville Seminary NT scholar, surveyed thirty-five scholars who had reconstructed pre-Markan passion material in detail. Not a single verse was agreed on by all thirty-five. Of the eighty-seven verses in Mark 14:32-15:47, only eight had above seventy percent agreement. Even John Dominic Crossan, Jesus Seminar co-founder, concedes the disagreement. Final rating — indeterminate.

The speeches in Acts are more promising. About twenty-two percent of Acts is principal speeches; more than half the book is direct speech. The question — did Luke summarize what was actually said, or compose freely? Licona compares three ancient historians. Thucydides, Greek historian, reconstructed speeches as the occasion demanded while keeping the general sense. Polybius, Greek historian, was stricter — record what was actually said, however ordinary. Lucian, Greek satirist, said the speech should fit speaker and subject. The test case is Emperor Claudius’s A.D. 48 Senate speech, preserved in two versions — Tacitus’s Annals 11.24 and a bronze plaque dug up at Lyons in 1528. Both share a core. Both differ. For Acts, Stanton notes Semitic material behind the early speeches, and Richard Bauckham, St. Andrews NT scholar, observes that the speeches read “strikingly independent” of Luke’s Gospel. Final rating — possible.

Then come the oral formulas — short snippets, confessions, kerygmatic summaries, baptismal lines, scattered across the New Testament. They almost certainly predate the documents that contain them. Less than ten percent of the Greco-Roman world could read or write, and oral tradition was the dominant medium.

Romans 1:3b-4a confesses that Jesus was “born from the seed of David according to the flesh” and “declared the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.” Dunn lays out the formula-markers — antithetic parallelism, parallel aorist participles, an untypical Pauline term, the Semitism “spirit of holiness.” Ernst Käsemann, German NT scholar, adds Semitic verb-fronting. The markers point to a Jerusalem origin formed before Paul wrote to a Gentile audience. Final rating — possible-plus. Luke 24:33-34 has the disciples returning to Jerusalem and finding the Twelve saying “The Lord has really risen and has appeared to Simon” — an appearance Luke never narrates, but Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 15:5. Looks like a formula Luke quoted. Possible. The “God raised Jesus” pattern shows up in twenty-two New Testament passages plus Polycarp; the death-and-resurrection twofold pattern in another nine or ten. Romans 10:9 contains the explicit “confess that” trigger. Many regard this cluster as the earliest nucleus of the resurrection tradition — earlier than any letter. Possible.

1 Corinthians 15:3-8 — the load-bearing source

This is the one. It is the only source in the chapter to receive Licona’s top rating of highly probable. The bedrock argument in chapters 4 and 5 stands or falls on it. Licona spends about twelve pages here. The investment is intentional.

Paul writes — “For I delivered to you of primary importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas then to the Twelve, then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, from whom most remain until now, but some have fallen asleep, then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. And last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”

Licona’s headline claim is direct.

“In nearly every historical investigation of the resurrection of Jesus, 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 weighs heavily and is perhaps the most important and valuable passage.” (p. 223)

The argument breaks into three parts — earliness, tradition status, and Jerusalem origin.

Earliness first. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians in A.D. 54 or 55. If Jesus died in A.D. 30, Paul is writing within twenty-five years of the crucifixion — and the passage itself signals that he is quoting older material. “What I also received.” If the formula was already established when Paul received it, it goes back further still.

Tradition-status, four threads. First, the verbs. “I delivered” and “I received” are the technical pair used in rabbinic schools for the formal transmission of tradition — Pharisaic vocabulary Paul knew well, since he tells the Galatians he had been zealous “for the traditions of my fathers.” Second, the language is not Pauline. “For our sins” appears nowhere else in Paul except a single Galatians line. “According to the Scriptures” is unique in his letters. The perfect-passive “he has been raised” is rare. “On the third day” appears only here. “Appeared to” is restricted to this passage and one other. “The Twelve” is a phrase Paul never uses elsewhere — he says “the apostles.” Third, the formula has structural parallelism — first and third lines longer, framed by Scripture, followed by short repeating clauses. Fourth, when Paul finishes quoting and resumes his own voice, he switches from “the gospel” to kerygma — “official proclamation.” The shift suggests he treats the quoted material as official church preaching.

Why Jerusalem? Several converging reasons. Paul says elsewhere that spiritual teaching came from Jerusalem. He challenges the Corinthians not to think the word of God came out from them. The Jerusalem leadership had supreme doctrinal authority — Paul submitted to it. Larry Hurtado, Edinburgh NT scholar, points out that the named figures — Cephas, the Twelve, James — are listed without explanation. That is “ingroup community tradition,” shaped where these names meant something. Outside Jerusalem, you would expect more explaining.

The dating tightens when Licona asks when Paul could have received the formula. Five candidate occasions stretch from his Damascus conversion onward. The most likely is Galatians 1:18 — three years after his conversion, he went up to Jerusalem and stayed fifteen days with Peter. The verb Paul uses is historēsai, the root of “history,” meaning “to inquire,” “to learn by inquiry.” Echoing C. H. Dodd, Cambridge NT scholar — Paul did not go up to Jerusalem to chat about the weather, and Peter did not waste a fortnight on small talk. If that is when Paul received the formula, the tradition goes back to within four to six years of the crucifixion — and it comes from the people who claimed to have been there. Dale C. Allison, Princeton Seminary, puts it sharply.

“Paul knew Peter and James and presumably others who claim to have seen the risen Jesus. First Corinthians 15:3-8 is not folklore.” (p. 232)

The cumulative point lands hard. Paul had repeated, sustained contact with the Jerusalem leadership. Seyoon Kim, Fuller NT scholar, lists eleven probable Jesus-tradition references in Paul’s letters plus another thirty possible echoes. Licona’s verdict — what we have amounts to a “certifiably official teaching of the disciples on the resurrection of Jesus.”

The consensus is striking. Gerd Lüdemann, atheist NT critic, concedes the point.

“The discovery of pre-Pauline confessional formulations is one of the great achievements of recent New Testament scholarship.” (p. 233)

Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, German NT scholars, write that the tradition “goes back very close to the events themselves” and rests on the testimony of Paul, “an eye-witness who knew many of the other witnesses.” William Lane Craig, Talbot philosopher, calls the underlying fact “astounding” — Paul talked with Jesus’ brother and one of his principal disciples, both of whom claimed to have seen Jesus risen. Final rating — highly probable. The only such rating in the chapter.

Non-Christian Sources

Licona moves to the pagans and Jews, and the news is mostly thin. Of nine candidate sources, only three rise above “not useful” or “unlikely.”

Flavius Josephus, Jewish historian, born around A.D. 37, mentions Jesus twice in Antiquities. The shorter reference at 20.200 mentions “the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, whose name was James” in passing while describing Ananus’s illegal behavior. John P. Meier, Notre Dame NT scholar, gives five reasons to accept it as authentic. All Greek manuscripts contain it without variation. The reference is so blasé that no Christian inventor would have written it that way — a Christian would have said “the brother of the Lord.” Josephus’s account of James’s death conflicts with the second-century version in Hegesippus, which a forger would have aligned. The large majority of scholars accept 20.200 as Josephus’s words.

The longer reference — the famous Testimonium Flavianum at Antiquities 18.63-64 — is more contested. Louis Feldman, Yeshiva University classicist, catalogued eighty-seven scholarly discussions on its authenticity between 1937 and 1980. Three positions are on the table — fully authentic, fully forged, or partly authentic with Christian additions. The third has the majority. Three lines are usually flagged as additions — “if indeed one should call him a man,” “He was the Messiah,” and the explicit resurrection passage. Origen said Josephus was not a Christian, which makes the unmodified text a problem.

Meier offers a stripped-down reconstruction that keeps the bulk of the passage minus the three flagged lines. Licona pushes further. One of the lines he keeps is a quieter resurrection reference — “they reported that he appeared to them alive.” His reasoning — Josephus was raised in Jerusalem in the late thirties through fifties, while the apostles were preaching publicly there. Acts mentions priests and Pharisees joining the Christian movement. Josephus’s father was a priest. He says he was familiar with Pharisaism by nineteen. He had every chance to hear the resurrection claim. A Testimonium that lets him acknowledge what Christians were reporting — without endorsing it — fits the data better than one that pretends he never heard the claim. N. T. Wright, then Bishop of Durham, agrees that more of the original is probably preserved than is sometimes allowed. Final rating — possible, with caution.

Tacitus, Roman historian, writes in Annals 15.44 that Nero scapegoated the Christians after the fire of Rome, and that their name came from “Christ, who, during the reign of Tiberius, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate.” Robert Van Voorst, Western Theological Seminary NT scholar, writes that Tacitus’s “basic accuracy has never been seriously impeached.” The insulting tone toward Christians makes a Christian forgery unlikely. Final rating — possible.

The rest go down quickly. Pliny the Younger wrote to Trajan around A.D. 111 about handling Christians in his province — interesting for early Christology, but it adds nothing about the historical Jesus. Not useful. Suetonius mentions a “Chrestus” instigating disturbances among Jews in Rome under Claudius — possibly Jesus, possibly not. Not useful. Mara bar Serapion, a Syrian Stoic, asks what the Jews gained by killing “their wise king” — but the only manuscript is seventh-century. Not useful. Thallus wrote a Mediterranean history around A.D. 55, preserved through Julius Africanus and finally cited by Syncellus around A.D. 800 — three hands, seven hundred and fifty years. Africanus reports Thallus tried to explain the crucifixion-darkness as a solar eclipse. Possible, faintly. Lucian mocks Jesus in passing in On the Death of Peregrinus, around A.D. 165 — Meier dismisses it as “common knowledge in the air.” Not useful. Celsus’s anti-Christian True Word, preserved through Origen, mentions the crucifixion and resurrection but clearly depends on the Gospels. Unlikely. The Babylonian Talmud’s b. Sanhedrin 43a says Jesus was hanged on the eve of Passover after a forty-day herald — but the Talmud was finalized in the fifth century, and Bart D. Ehrman, UNC NT scholar, warns scholars cannot quote a Talmud passage as first-century evidence any more than they could quote a modern editorial about colonial America. Unlikely.

The non-Christian survey is honest about what it does not deliver. There is essentially no independent pagan or Jewish attestation of the resurrection itself. What these witnesses confirm is narrower — that Jesus existed, was crucified under Pilate, and that the Christian movement persisted afterward. Licona is not overselling. He is downgrading.

Apostolic Fathers and Other Early Christian Writings

Licona turns to the post-apostolic Christian writers. The test for inclusion is sharper than usual — not “does this give us a window onto second-century diversity?” but “does this preserve anything from the original apostles?”

1 Clement gets the most attention. The letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth is roughly the size of 1 Corinthians, and several early sources connect Clement to Peter — Irenaeus of Lyons, second-century bishop, says he was the third bishop of Rome and had conversed with the apostles; Tertullian, North African theologian, says Peter ordained him; Clement of Alexandria, second-century theologian, calls him “the apostle Clement.” Licona judges it more probable than not that Clement knew Peter. The dating is contested. The traditional date is A.D. 95-97; some scholars argue for the late sixties. The strongest early-date argument, picked up by Clayton Jefford, Apostolic Fathers scholar, is that 1 Clement chapters 40 and 41 describe the temple as still standing in the present tense — advice that only makes sense if the temple events are still happening. Licona refrains from a verdict on the date. What matters more is the Petrine connection. Final rating — possible-plus.

Polycarp of Smyrna, second-century bishop, wrote a letter to the Philippians around A.D. 110. Irenaeus reports that Polycarp had been instructed by the apostles, especially John, and as a young man Irenaeus heard Polycarp recount Jesus’ miracles learned from John. If true, Polycarp’s letter is a window onto John’s teaching. But only Irenaeus links them. Final rating — possible. The Letter of Barnabas, attributed by four ancient writers to Paul’s companion, is rejected by Eusebius and most modern scholars — the hostile attitude toward the Jewish law clashes with what Galatians says about Barnabas. Possible-minus.

The other noncanonical Christian writings get short treatment, mostly downward. The Gospel of Thomas is the most discussed. Helmut Koester, Harvard NT scholar, dates it as early as A.D. 50; Pagels around 90-100; Jesus Seminar fellows in the fifties. Craig Evans, Acadia Divinity NT scholar, argues for a late-second-century Syrian origin — Thomas quotes or alludes to more than half the New Testament, including redacted Synoptic forms, and is bound up with Syriac material like the Diatessaron. Nicholas Perrin, Wheaton NT scholar, identifies hundreds of Syriac catchwords linking Thomas’s logia. Licona sides with Evans and Perrin. Thomas may preserve a few authentic sayings, but its disembodied “resurrection” reads as Gnostic enlightenment, not corpse-raising. Possible for some apostolic content overall; unlikely for resurrection investigation.

The Gospel of Peter gets unlikely. Koester argued for independence; Crossan went further with his “Cross Gospel” hypothesis — a passion narrative supposedly composed in the forties and standing behind both Peter and the Synoptics. Licona pushes back hard. The Petrine resurrection narrative is fantastic — guards see two angels descend, the stone rolls itself away, Jesus emerges with his head extending up into the sky, and his cross follows him out and speaks. On normal text-growth assumptions, that is later, not earlier. J. K. Elliott, Leeds NT scholar, notes the consensus — Peter is dependent on the canonical Gospels. The Gospel of Judas, unveiled in 2006, was originally written by the Cainites — a mid-second-century Gnostic group that made heroes of biblical villains. Unlikely. The revelation dialogues — the Epistle of the Apostles, the Treatise on the Resurrection (the Letter to Rheginus), and the Apocryphon of James — are all dated mid-to-late second century. None preserves apostolic kerygma. Unlikely. Pseudo-Mark, the longer ending of Mark 16:9-20, was almost certainly added later by a scribe softening the abrupt original ending. N. T. Wright’s speculation about Mark’s lost ending is interesting, Licona says, but too flimsy to use.

Conclusion

The hierarchy of evidential weight is straightforward. Paul and the oral traditions in his letters are the most promising material. The canonical Gospels, 1 Clement, Polycarp, the Acts speeches, and the Gospel of Thomas come next, at varying levels of usefulness. The bulk of the non-Christian sources, the Gnostic writings, and the revelation dialogues offer little or no independent value.

Licona is honest about what historians do not have but would like — a letter certified to be from Jesus or any original disciple, pre-Christian writings from Saul of Tarsus, contemporary Jewish material on Paul’s conversion, official Roman or Jewish documents on the apostolic preaching. None of that exists. What does exist is still substantial. There are reports of Jesus’ resurrection from at least one eyewitness — Paul — and probably more, in the Jerusalem kerygma he preserves. The reports are very early. They provide multiple independent testimonies. They include testimony from a man who had been hostile to the Christian message before his conversion.

“Paul and the oral traditions embedded throughout the New Testament literature provide our most promising material.” (p. 275)

What those sources yield, Licona says, the next chapter will show. Chapter 4 will distill the historical bedrock — the facts so well-attested that even skeptics grant them — and chapter 5 will weigh the resurrection hypothesis against five rivals. Everything that follows leans on the ratings assigned here. The bedrock argument is built on 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, and 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 has just been certified.

Chapter 4 is the load-bearing chapter of the book. Everything in chapters 1 through 3 was preparation. Licona laid out a theory of history, a method for adjudicating between competing explanations, and an argument that miracle-claims belong inside historical investigation rather than outside it. Now he asks the prior question. What are the actual facts on the ground? What do we have to explain?

His answer is a category he calls historical bedrock. A bedrock fact must be strongly evidenced and granted by a near-unanimous consensus of contemporary scholars writing on the subject. If a hypothesis cannot account for every bedrock fact, it fails. The methodological precedent belongs to Gary R. Habermas, Liberty University historian, whose unpublished bibliography of academic literature on Jesus’s resurrection from 1975 forward in German, French, and English runs to roughly 3,400 sources, with positions tracked across more than a hundred topics in a 600-page document. From this database Habermas distilled twelve facts, then six “minimal facts,” and more recently three. Licona builds on that foundation but is careful to distinguish bedrock from a flat consensus approach. A claim does not become a fact because most scholars agree. The strength of arguments and their resilience under counterargument are what carry the weight. Dale C. Allison, Princeton historian of early Christianity, puts it well — he is much less interested in counting noses than in reviewing arguments.

What follows has two stages. The first is bedrock about Jesus’s life — the religious context inside which the resurrection question has to be asked. The second, longer stage is bedrock about Jesus’s fate — three minimal facts plus two second-order facts that any plausible hypothesis must explain. The hypothesis-weighing comes in chapter 5. This chapter is just establishing the explanandum.

Jesus’ Life as Historical Background

Before Licona narrows in on the events surrounding Jesus’s death, he establishes a religious context. Three claims about Jesus’s life clear the bedrock bar, and a fourth — Jesus’s predictions of his own death and vindication — falls just outside it.

The first is that Jesus performed deeds that he and his followers interpreted as miracles and exorcisms. Graham Twelftree, leading authority on Jesus’s miracles, has argued that the evidence here is so strong it counts among the best-attested historical facts about Jesus. Six lines of evidence converge. There is the polemic in Mark 3:22–30 — opponents accusing Jesus of casting out demons by Satan, a charge no one would invent. There are extrabiblical reports from Josephus (calling Jesus a worker of “amazing deeds”), from Celsus (calling him a magician), from the Talmud (sorcery), and from Acts (Jewish exorcists trying to use his name). There is multiple attestation across all Gospel sources — Mark, Q, M, L, John, and Josephus — and across multiple literary forms. The reports are early. Mark places Jesus’s miracles within forty years of his death, while the miracles attributed to figures like Apollonius of Tyana, Honi the Circle-Drawer, and Hanina ben-Dosa stand at least 125 years from the alleged events. John P. Meier, Catholic biblical scholar, sums it up: the miracle traditions are so widely attested in sources and literary forms by the end of the first generation that wholesale fabrication is, practically speaking, impossible.

The second is that Jesus saw himself as God’s eschatological agent — the figure through whom the kingdom of God was breaking in. The key sayings are early and multiply attested. In Matthew 12:28 and Luke 11:20 he states it plainly: if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom has come. To John the Baptist’s disciples he answers — in language drawn from Isaiah 61 and 4Q521 — by listing the works of the messianic age that he is presently doing. If those sayings are authentic, then Jesus believed his miracles confirmed his messianic identity and that the kingdom was arriving through him.

The third claim sits just outside the bedrock. Licona thinks Jesus predicted his violent death and his vindication or resurrection, and offers six arguments for it. The Last Supper sayings are pre-Pauline tradition. The Markan Aramaic original of Mark 9:31 contains a paronomasia. The “Son of Man” self-designation runs through the predictions, appears across every Gospel layer, and shows almost nowhere outside the Gospels — making invention difficult to explain. Raymond E. Brown, Catholic NT scholar, asks the right question: why would the early church retroject this title onto Jesus on a scale that vastly outpaces other titles, and then leave almost no trace of it elsewhere in the New Testament? The Gethsemane scene is acutely embarrassing. Jewish and Christian martyr literature — 2 Maccabees 7, 4 Maccabees 6, Acts 6–7, Rabbi Akiba, Polycarp — is full of fearless heroes who taunt their executioners. The brothers in 2 Maccabees keep speaking even after their tongues have been cut out. Jesus, by contrast, anguishes. He asks for the cup to pass. He cries from the cross that God has forsaken him. Not a portrait the early church would have invented.

Licona evaluates three counter-objections. The objection that historical investigation cannot allow predictive powers misses the point — even a historian who rejects miracles can grant historicity, since the cultural context (Jesus had made enemies of Jewish leaders, considered himself a prophet, and had just watched John the Baptist executed) makes the predictions naturally plausible. The objection of vaticinia ex eventu — predictions invented after the fact — runs aground on the six positive arguments. The third — why didn’t the disciples anticipate it? — is the weightiest. Licona’s answer: a dying-and-rising Messiah was alien to first-century Jewish expectation, and the Evangelists themselves report the disciples’ weak faith with painful candor.

Even so — here is the methodological discipline — Licona declines to use Jesus’s predictions as bedrock. The majority of scholars do not regard them as historical, so they fail the second criterion. They function only as additional context. What this section accomplishes is a religiously charged context for the resurrection reports. Licona adds an honest anti-bias self-check. A religious context like this also creates the conditions for delusion and legend. He cites the healing services of Ernest Angley and Benny Hinn. Naturalistic explanations remain reasonable a priori. The context only becomes positive evidence for resurrection if the resurrection hypothesis turns out — in chapter 5 — to be a better explanation than every naturalistic alternative.

Jesus’ Death by Crucifixion

The first bedrock fact about Jesus’s fate is that he died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. Licona builds the case in four lines and then dispatches a series of survival theories.

Roman crucifixion was the worst thing the empire could do to you. Reserved for slaves, soldiers, the lower class, the violently rebellious, and political insurrectionists, it was almost always preceded by torture. Late first-century BC and first-century AD writers — Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Livy, Philo, Josephus — describe whips, fire, and “all sorts of tortures” applied before nailing. Lucian writes of a man whipped, blinded, and tongue-cut before crucifixion. Josephus reports a man whipped to the bone in Jerusalem just before AD 70, and a group whipped until their intestines were exposed. The author of Martyrdom of Polycarp describes flesh torn until veins and arteries became visible. Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher, describes crucified victims as battered and ineffective carcasses, maimed and misshapen, drawing breath amid long-drawn-out agony. Cicero, Roman orator, calls crucifixion the most cruel and disgusting penalty, the worst extreme of tortures, the terror of the cross.

Against this background the four lines of evidence stand out clearly.

The first is multiple attestation. Jesus’s death by crucifixion is reported by Christian and non-Christian sources alike. The relevant section of Josephus, Antiquities 18.3, is very probably authentic in its original form. Tacitus, Annals 15.44, mentions it. So do Lucian of Samosata, who specifies Palestine, and Mara bar Serapion. So do all four canonical Gospels, plus other New Testament books, plus noncanonical literature. There is no ancient evidence to the contrary.

The second is earliness. Paul mentions Jesus’s death by crucifixion no later than AD 55 in 1 Corinthians and Galatians, and preached the same message to the Corinthians around AD 51 — within twenty-one years of the event. The earliest surviving report is the pre-Pauline tradition embedded in 1 Corinthians 15:3. Virtually all scholars who have written on it hold that Paul there hands on tradition he received from others. It is widely agreed to have been composed very early, to reflect what the Jerusalem apostles taught, and to count as the oldest extant tradition pertaining to Jesus’s resurrection. As Licona puts it, it is quite amazing to think we are reading what was likely taught by Jesus’s original disciples.

The third is the credibility of the Passion Narratives. Already in the discussion of Jesus’s predictions Licona made the embarrassment argument from the comparison with Jewish and Christian martyr literature. Here he adds plausible peripheral details. Lucian describes crowds following crucifixion victims — matching Luke. John 19’s report of leg-breaking to expedite death is confirmed by Cicero and inverted (forbidden in order to prolong suffering) by the Gospel of Peter. The 1968 discovery of Yehohanan ben Hagakol, the skeletal remains of a crucified victim found in Jerusalem with one shin smashed (whether from execution or from later removal is debated), gives concrete archaeological backing. Josephus notes that Romans normally left bodies for birds and dogs but in Jerusalem made an exception — Jews “had taken great care in their burial of the dead, burying the crucified prior to sunset,” consistent with Deuteronomy 21:21–23. Quintilian, Roman rhetorician, writes that the executioner does not forbid the burying of those who have been crucified.

Licona also engages two skeptical readings of John’s use of Hebrew Scripture. Alan F. Segal, Jewish historian of religion, observes that no messianic text renders the death or crucifixion of the Messiah inevitable — the connection must come from the experience of Jesus, not the other way around. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus Seminar co-founder, argues that many crucifixion details are “prophecy historicized” rather than “history remembered.” Licona’s reply: the reverse is at least equally possible — what we are reading is “history prophesized,” with the Evangelists drawing on Psalm 22 and other texts because those texts illuminated what they had actually witnessed. The crurifragium and side-piercing details are unique to John, but John is also alone in mentioning the use of nails — and nailing was the standard mode. The other Evangelists were simply not interested in graphic crucifixion details.

The fourth line of evidence is the very low probability of surviving crucifixion. Licona finds only one account in antiquity of someone surviving — Josephus, who saw three friends crucified, pleaded with Titus, had all three taken down, and arranged Rome’s best medical care. Two of the three still died. Even if Jesus had been removed prematurely and given medical care, his chances were quite bleak. There is no evidence he was removed alive or given any medical attention.

The scholarly consensus on Jesus’s death is essentially unanimous. John McIntyre, Scottish theologian, observes that even scholars who depart from almost every other historical content of Jesus’s life have found it impossible to think away the factuality of his death. The hostile-witness concessions are striking. Gerd Lüdemann, German atheist NT scholar, calls Jesus’s death by crucifixion indisputable. Crossan calls it as sure as anything historical can ever be — there is not the slightest doubt. Geza Vermes, Jewish scholar of Second Temple Judaism, calls the passion of Jesus part of history. Paula Fredriksen, NT historian, calls it the single most solid fact about Jesus’s life — that he was executed by Pilate, around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved for political insurrectionists.

Survival theories

The remaining work in this section is dismantling survival theories. Licona engages two seriously and one as a curiosity.

J. Duncan M. Derrett, legal historian, asserts that Jesus may have survived because crucified victims can be taken down alive and “perfect recovery is common” given proper care. Licona’s reply is that severely injured plus proper medical care plus time is one situation, but severe torture plus crucifixion plus no medical care is an entirely different one. Derrett does not show how the second situation could have led to perfect recovery.

“[Such a Jesus] would never have convinced his disciples that he was the risen prince of life. Alive? Barely. Resurrected? Never.” (p. 313)

That is Licona paraphrasing the classic critique by D. F. Strauss, nineteenth-century German theologian — the image of a half-dead crucifixion-survivor stumbling out of his tomb, pushing a heavy stone with nail-pierced hands, walking blocks on wounded feet, knocking on the disciples’ door, and somehow convincing them he is the firstfruits of the general resurrection. Allison agrees: how a flagellated, half-dead victim of the hideous torture of crucifixion could impress others as triumphant over death is hard to envisage.

The medical literature has weighed in. A 1986 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that interpretations assuming Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge. Leinster, surgeon at the University of Liverpool, observes that the circumstantial details — Jesus eating with the disciples, preparing breakfast — suggest a real presence rather than a psychological experience. Hallucinations, he dryly notes, do not commonly prepare breakfast for those experiencing them. The more idiosyncratic Barbara Thiering, Australian Dead Sea Scrolls researcher, has argued from a “pesher method” that the vinegar at the cross was snake poison and that Jesus survived to be in Rome by AD 64. Craig A. Evans, Acadia NT scholar, responds that he is not aware of a single competent scholar on the planet who agrees with Thiering.

Jesus’s death by crucifixion is the first bedrock fact. It is multiply attested across literary forms — annals, historiography, biography, letters, creeds, oral formulas, hymns. The earliest report is traceable to the Jerusalem apostles. The Passion Narratives are credible on the criteria of embarrassment and plausible peripheral detail. Survival probability is vanishingly low. The few who have ventured to question this fact have produced very weak arguments.

The Post-Mortem Appearances to the Disciples

The second bedrock fact is that after Jesus’s death, a number of his followers had experiences they were convinced were appearances of the risen Jesus. This is the longest section of chapter 4, and the most substantively decisive. Licona builds it in two large arcs. First, an extended exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 — the earliest tradition we have, the one Paul received from the Jerusalem apostles. Second, an examination of the Gospel-and-Acts data: how Mark uses (and does not use) appearance traditions, why women appear as eyewitnesses, what to do with the doubting disciples in Matthew 28, and what the fates of the apostles imply about their belief.

The 1 Corinthians 15 tradition

Most scholars grant that 1 Corinthians 15:3b–5a is oral tradition that Paul received from others. The Greek formula is rhythmic and creedal — that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared. Whether some of those phrases (“for our sins,” “according to the Scriptures,” “on the third day”) belonged to the original tradition is debated. Whether 15:5b–7 — Cephas, the Twelve, more than five hundred at one time, James, all the apostles — is the same tradition or a combined one is also debated. Whether Paul’s own appearance in 15:8 was added by Paul or already in the tradition is debated as well. None of these debates touch the core claim. The death-burial-resurrection-appearances sequence is very early. It probably traces to the leadership of the Jerusalem church.

Paul’s parenthetical comment that most of the more than five hundred remained alive at the time of his writing — around AD 55 — is a remarkable detail. It functions as an open invitation: ask them. The list moves in chronological order. It anchors the appearances in history rather than presenting them as visionary worship-experiences.

The two appearances most often challenged are the one to more than five hundred and the one to James. Neither is clearly reported elsewhere. Robert W. Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, dismissed all three of the James, Twelve, and five-hundred appearances. The James appearance looks like an attempt to put James on equal footing with Peter and Paul. The appearance to a large crowd suggests a visionary worship experience like Pentecost. Licona’s reply is structural. Discrepancies in narratives written later than Paul cannot count as problems with the earlier Pauline report. Allison’s chart of parallels between the four-line formula in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 and Mark 15:37–16:7 and Acts 13:28–31 shows variations on a common pattern. Paul, Allison concludes, is perhaps not so far removed from the gospel traditions as is sometimes implied. The individual appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 receive multiple attestation. Peter’s appearance is alluded to in Mark 16:7 and Luke 24:34. The Twelve are reported in Luke and John. The appearance to James is found only here and in an unreliable fragment of the Gospel According to the Hebrews — but the fact that James drops out of the narrative tradition while showing up in this very early creedal list implies independent tradition.

The “third day” phrase has occupied considerable ink. A. J. M. Wedderburn, German-trained NT scholar, notes that Hosea 6:1–2 is never expressly quoted in the New Testament as fulfilled in Jesus’s resurrection — the text expressly cited is Jonah 2:1. Could “third day” derive from a pagan dying-and-rising-god concept? Tryggve Mettinger, Swedish Old Testament scholar, has concluded that the notion of resurrection “on the third day” is difficult to derive from a fixed pre-Christian triduum — the evidence is too scanty. Licona finds Matthew using “after three days,” “on the third day,” and “three days and three nights” synonymously. In Matthew 27:63–64, the Jewish leaders ask Pilate to guard the tomb “until the third day” even though Jesus had said “after three days” — incoherent if the phrase were literal. The phrase functions as a figure of speech meaning “a short period of time.”

What was the nature of these appearances? The Greek word usually translated “he appeared” is ὤφθη — the aorist passive of ὁράω. The Jesus Seminar read Paul’s ὤφθη as a Christophany not involving the resuscitation of a corpse. Licona’s counter is decisive. The same Luke who reports Stephen’s and Paul’s experiences (post-ascension, heavenly setting) clearly interprets the disciples’ encounters as a literal corpse-resurrection — empty tomb, “flesh and bones,” eating, ascension into clouds, body that did not undergo decay (Acts 1:9–11; 10:39–41; 2:30–32; 13:35–37). Selective reading of Luke is unnecessary and unattractive. The word study is inconclusive on its own — context decides. Luke’s use of ὁράω more often refers to physical sight, and his clear reading of Jesus’s resurrection as bodily settles the question. The same applies to Paul.

Paul and the empty tomb

Some scholars — Lüdemann among them — have argued Paul did not know of the empty tomb, and that if the empty tomb was invented later, then the original resurrection might have been understood as ethereal. Licona presses back from several directions. Richard B. Hays, Duke NT scholar, observes that Paul’s silence shows nothing except that empty-tomb stories were not part of the traditional kerygma. It certainly does not mean Paul or any other early Christian could have conceived of a resurrection from the dead in which the body remained in the tomb. Robert H. Gundry, NT scholar, notes that the tradition lists events — death, burial, resurrection, appearances — rather than narrative, so it had no occasion to mention the empty tomb. Allison runs a reverse argument from silence: had the Corinthians whom Paul sought to correct known or imagined Jesus’s corpse to be still in the grave, then surely, given their rejection of physical resurrection, they would have brought this forward as a point in their favor. Paul would have had to answer it. He did not. N. T. Wright, English NT scholar, sums up the structural point: the mention here of “buried then raised” no more needs amplification with “and the tomb was empty” than the statement “I walked down the street” needs amplification with “on my feet.” The death-burial-resurrection-appearances sequence implies the empty tomb. As Habermas puts it, what goes down in burial comes up in resurrection.

The tradition itself — considered in isolation — cannot secure either bodily resurrection or the empty tomb. But it is also improper to conclude the empty tomb was a later invention unknown to Paul or to the tradition-formers. The 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 tradition tells us Jesus died, was buried, was raised, and appeared. Other Pauline texts, examined later, fix the nature of resurrection as bodily.

Are the appearance lists really legitimization?

One school of skepticism holds that the lists of appearance-recipients are not historical reports but power-rivalries. Funk and the Jesus Seminar wrote that competing claims of “first appearance” — Paul and Luke awarding it to Peter, Matthew and John 20 to Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of the Hebrews to James — suggest not historical reports but a rivalry among leaders. John Painter, Australian NT scholar, argued that primacy of appearance became the ground for authority in the Jerusalem church.

Licona’s reply is methodical. Matthew and John give the first appearance to women — not to Peter, the chief authority figure. Luke is ambiguous about who received the first appearance, narrating the Emmaus disciples instead of Peter. Why introduce Cleopas (otherwise unmentioned in the New Testament) instead of James, if legitimization were the point? Peter, James, and John are the inner circle in the Synoptics (Mark 5:37; 9:2; 14:33), and Paul names “James, Peter, John” as pillars (Galatians 2:9). The Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Mary debates are late second-century material, not first-century evidence. David R. Catchpole, English NT scholar, observes that the Emmaus disciples are not commissioned to do anything of note and are not expected to be anyone of note — they and their story do not belong in the setting where appearances are exploited for personal ecclesiastical validation.

The structural argument is decisive. The Greek words ἔπειτα and εἶτα (“then,” “next”) are most commonly chronological in the New Testament and in Paul. The phrase “ἔσχατον δὲ πάντων” in 15:8 — “last of all” — is chronological. A positional-importance reading collapses on inspection: the five hundred cannot rank as a higher-authority group than James and “all the apostles.” Wedderburn — no friend of resurrection apologetics — finds insufficient reason to doubt the tradition. James and other members of Jesus’s family did not believe in him during his ministry (Mark 3:21; John 7:5), but James clearly played a leading role in the early Jerusalem church (Galatians 1:19; 2:9). Paul gives no hint that he had any cause to doubt James’s claim. Licona’s challenge: if appearance-legitimization were really an early Christian practice, where are the clear examples from the first hundred years of the church? None are forthcoming.

Mark’s silence about appearances

Mark is the earliest Gospel and most scholars hold it originally ended at 16:8, where the women flee the tomb in fear and “said nothing to no one.” Does this silence mean Mark did not know about the appearance traditions? Licona’s preferred reading runs through a parallel with Mark 1:44, where Jesus tells the healed leper to be silent on the way to the priest. The Greek is almost identical. The point is not that the women never told anyone, but that they did not stop to tell anyone on their way to the disciples. ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ (“for they were afraid”) fits Mark’s other uses of φοβέομαι, where fear accompanies an encounter with divinity rather than paralyzing the witness.

That Mark knew of appearance traditions is highly probable. He wrote AD 65–70, decades after oral resurrection traditions began circulating. The 1 Corinthians 15 tradition predates him by a decade or more. Mark mentions Jesus’s resurrection multiple times, and Mark 14:28 and 16:6 both promise Jesus will meet his disciples in Galilee. Craig Keener, Asbury NT scholar, draws a literary parallel: the Iliad predicts but does not narrate the fall of Troy. That Mark probably ends without resurrection appearances hardly means Mark wanted his readers to doubt they occurred.

Women as eyewitnesses

The Gospels report women as the first witnesses of the empty tomb. This counts as a strong embarrassment-criterion argument because women’s testimony was held in low regard in first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman society. Richard Bauckham, English NT scholar, surveys the Greco-Roman view: educated men regarded women as gullible in religious matters and especially prone to superstitious fantasy and excessive in religious practices. Jewish sources suggest similar attitudes — and Luke 24:11 explicitly reports the disciples not believing the women. Bauckham concludes:

“Since these narratives do not seem well designed to carry conviction at the time, they are likely to be historical.” (p. 351)

If a fabricator wanted to invent witnesses, why women? Joseph of Arimathea, a Sanhedrin member, was already in the burial story and would have been a far more credible witness in that culture. The fact that women are absent from the 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 tradition (which predates Mark) and from the Acts kerygmatic summaries shows that the church was indeed willing to drop them from the official preaching — and yet the Gospel narratives keep them. The double-embarrassment runs deeper still: the women are witnesses and recipients of revelation, while the men are thickheaded. These are not the kind of reports invented to boost confidence in church leadership. The embarrassment argument weighs heavily for the historicity of the appearance to the women, and counterarguments carry too little weight.

Doubt in Matthew 28

Matthew 28:17 contains a puzzle. Seeing him, the disciples worshiped — “but some doubted” (οἱ δὲ ἐδίστασαν). Licona prefers the doubting-disciples reading. διστάζω means “two thoughts,” and its only other New Testament use is Matthew 14:30–31, Peter walking on water — faith mixed with fear. Mark 9:24 (“I believe; help my unbelief”) and Luke 24:41 (the disciples “still unbelieving from joy and astonishment”) capture the same dual-thought pattern. Licona’s vivid analogy: it is like seeing your dead mother walk into the room — overcome with joy yet remembering you buried her. Peter Carnley, Australian theologian, has argued that Matthew 28:18’s “Jesus came near and said” is editorial addition implying a Christophany from heaven. Licona’s refutation traces the construction across 33 Synoptic occurrences and shows the phrase is not used elsewhere to bolster orthodoxy. Matthew 28:6–10 already has the women holding Jesus’s feet — the physical encounter is already there. If Carnley were right, Matthew would have omitted “but some doubted” rather than retaining the embarrassing detail.

The fates of the apostles

The strength of the disciples’ conviction is corroborated by their willingness to suffer. They were not just claiming appearances. They were willing to endanger themselves publicly proclaiming the risen Christ. The sources tell us about persecution. Acts has numerous reports of disciples suffering. John 21:18–19 implies Peter would die by crucifixion. Mark 10:35–40 and Acts 12:2 describe James the son of Zebedee martyred under Herod. John 15:19–21 and 16:1–3 anticipate persecution.

The earliest non-canonical evidence is 1 Clement (around AD 97), which describes Peter and Paul as “greatest and most righteous pillars” who endured “many afflictions” and, “having borne witness,” went to “the due glorious place.” Paul: seven times chained, exiled, stoned, having become a preacher both in the East and in the West, having testified before the leaders. The linguistic argument is finely tuned. The phrase “ἕως θανάτου” (“unto death”) appears 16 times in the Septuagint and can mean either death or near-death — Mark 14:34 uses it of Jesus’s grief “to the point of death” without his actually dying, while Polycarp uses it of Jesus’s actual death. The participle “μαρτυρήσας” (“having borne witness” or “having been martyred”) may not have acquired the technical sense of “martyred” until the mid-second century. Context settles it. 1 Clement 6 mentions Christian women martyred — the Danaids and Dirce, Christian women raped before being killed, Dirce tied to bull horns. Similar language about Peter and Paul implies their actual martyrdoms. Polycarp’s letter (around AD 110) mentions Paul, Ignatius, Zosimus, Rufus, and “the rest of the apostles” as in their place with the Lord, with whom they also suffered. By AD 110 there are strong traditions that Peter and Paul died for their testimony.

“The case is strong that they did not willfully lie about the appearances of the risen Jesus. Liars make poor martyrs.” (p. 370)

Licona draws a careful distinction. Modern martyrs die for what they have been told is true. The apostles died for what they themselves had reportedly witnessed. They suffered and were willing to die for what they knew to be either true or false. Could they have been arrested and killed against their will, possibly even recanting privately? Their continuous public proclamation tells against this — and there is no recantation report for any of the Twelve other than Judas. Had any apostle recanted, Celsus and Lucian would have used the fact as ammunition. They did not, because there was none to use.

Bedrock conclusion on the appearances

Licona’s conclusion is conservative but firm. Subsequent to Jesus’s execution, a number of his followers had experiences — in individual and group settings — that convinced them Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to them in some manner. This is granted by a nearly unanimous consensus of modern scholars and joins the historical bedrock. Specifically: Peter had such an experience individually. Paul, an adversary, had one. At least one occasion existed where a group of Jesus’s followers, including the Twelve, had such an experience. Other appearances — to women, to Thomas, to the Emmaus disciples, to the multiple groups in 1 Corinthians 15 and John — historians may exceed their warrant in assigning much confidence to.

The hostile-witness concessions are striking. Fredriksen calls the disciples’ conviction that they had seen the Risen Christ part of historical bedrock — facts known past doubting. E. P. Sanders, Duke NT scholar, says that Jesus’s followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in his judgment, a fact. Wedderburn calls it an indubitable historical datum that sometime, somehow, the disciples came to believe they had seen the risen Jesus. Habermas summarizes: most contemporary scholars agree that, after Jesus’s death, his early followers had experiences they at least believed were appearances of their risen Lord. Scholars differ only on the perceived nature of those experiences.

The Conversion of Paul the Persecutor

The third bedrock fact concerns Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor who became Paul the apostle. Licona’s central thesis: the conversion of Saul to an aggressive Christian missionary, largely responsible for the early spread of the church, is a historical fact that any responsible hypothesis must adequately explain.

The triple multiple attestation is striking. Paul’s own letters (around AD 50–60, twenty to thirty years post-event): Galatians, 1 Corinthians, Philippians. Acts (three accounts: chapters 9, 22, 26; AD 60s–90s, thirty to sixty years post-event). And a pre-existing tradition circulating in Judea within three years of Paul’s conversion — Galatians 1:22–23, where Paul reports the churches of Judea had heard “the one who once persecuted us now preaches the faith which he once tried to destroy.” We are reading, in Galatians, what the Judean churches were already saying within three years of the event itself.

Paul’s letters on his own conversion

The decisive Pauline texts are Galatians 1:11–19, 1 Corinthians 9:1, 1 Corinthians 15:8, 2 Corinthians 4:6, and 2 Corinthians 12:2–4. In Galatians 1:11–19 Paul describes the gospel he preaches as coming “through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (διʼ ἀποκαλύψεως), and adds that God “was pleased to reveal his son in me” (ἀποκαλύψαι τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐμοί). After this he went to Arabia, then back to Damascus, and only after three years went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas — staying with him fifteen days, seeing no other apostle except James the Lord’s brother.

The subjective-vision interpretation reads ἀποκαλύψαι ἐν ἐμοί as inward illumination rather than external appearance. Licona pushes back. ἀποκάλυψις elsewhere in the Pauline corpus is used for physical revealing. In 2 Corinthians 12:1 Paul speaks of “visions and revelations” of the Lord and is uncertain whether the experience was in or out of body — implying more than a mental phenomenon. The phrase ἐν ἐμοί is genuinely ambiguous. Licona surveys 13 Pauline uses (Galatians 1:24; 2:20; 1 Corinthians 9:15; 14:11; 2 Corinthians 11:10; 13:3; Romans 7:8, 7:17, 7:18, 7:20; Philippians 1:26, 1:30, 4:9; Colossians 1:29) — the meanings vary widely. “To reveal his son to me” is plausible.

The methodological move here is critical. Ambiguous passages must be interpreted in light of clear passages by the same author. We should never do violence to multiple clear texts in order to make them agree with a desired interpretation of a text that possesses significant ambiguity.

1 Corinthians 9:1 — “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” — confirms Paul believed he had seen Jesus, with no narrative detail. 1 Corinthians 15:8 — “And last of all as to one untimely born he appeared to me” — places Paul in chronological sequence after every other named appearance, again with no detail.

2 Corinthians 4:6 is the closest Paul comes to describing his experience. God, who said “Light will shine out of darkness,” is the one who has shined in our hearts with the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Murray J. Harris, NT scholar, notes the many similarities in thought and diction between this verse and the three Lukan accounts of Paul’s conversion in Acts. The crucial argument: Paul writes that God has “shined in our hearts” — including the hearts of the Corinthian believers, who were not on the Damascus road. But 1 Corinthians 15:8 says Jesus appeared to Paul “last of all.” So whatever the inward shining is, it cannot be the only aspect of Paul’s experience. An objective appearance also occurred.

2 Corinthians 12:2–4 — “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago, whether in or out of the body I do not know, God knows, was taken up to the third heaven” — is sometimes proposed (by Funk and the Jesus Seminar among others) as Paul’s account of the conversion appearance. The dates rule it out. Fourteen years before 2 Corinthians (around AD 56) lands at AD 42, but Paul’s conversion is no later than AD 38 even on the latest possible dating. This is a different event.

The Acts accounts and the differences among them

Acts gives three accounts of Paul’s conversion (chapters 9, 22, 26). Each describes a flash of light brighter than the sun, a voice — “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” — companions who experienced part of the event but not all of it, and a commission to preach to Gentiles and Jews. Licona’s methodological caveat: scholars are split on whether Luke was a traveling companion of Paul and on how much literary freedom Luke took with his sources. Without consensus, the Acts accounts are cited as “possible” rather than as firm bedrock. The persecution, the appearance, the commission, and the Damascus location are common to both Paul’s letters and Acts. Allison observes that Luke had access to a traditional call-story that goes back ultimately to Paul’s own narrative.

Three differences among the Acts accounts are usually flagged. Did the companions hear the voice? Acts 9:7 says yes; Acts 22:9 says no. Were they standing or on the ground? Acts 9:7 has them standing; Acts 26:14 on the ground. The conversational details differ. Licona walks through word studies. ἀκούω in Luke-Acts can mean mere hearing or listening with understanding — a plausible harmonization is that those with Paul saw the light but did not understand the voice. ἵστημι can mean stopped, stationary, or present-with — Luke 7:38 uses στᾶσα for the woman behind the reclining Jesus, where it means “remained.” A plausible reading: the men remained with Paul speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. The conversational differences reflect Luke’s paraphrasing, not word-for-word reporting.

The bottom line on Acts: it reports both visual and auditory components of Paul’s experience. The experience differed from a purely subjective vision because traveling companions partook in some way. Marcus Borg, Jesus Seminar fellow, holds that since the companions did not share the experience, it was a private vision. Licona answers that Paul’s “last of all” in 1 Corinthians 15:8 distinguishes his appearance from later visions, and Acts 9:10 contrasts Ananias’s vision (ἐν ὁράματι) with what happened to Paul. The methodological principle: in considering Paul’s conversion, Paul on Paul is more valuable than Luke on Paul. Acts must be used consistently with Paul. Acts 13:28–37 has Paul preaching clear bodily resurrection — Jesus executed by Pilate, removed from the cross, buried, raised, did not undergo decay. Selective use of Acts is illegitimate.

What Paul believed about Jesus’s resurrection body

This subsection is the longest exegetical excursus in chapter 4 and is methodologically critical. The bedrock fact about Paul’s conversion is modest — he converted because of an experience he interpreted as an appearance of the risen Jesus. But what did Paul mean by “resurrection”? Did he understand it as a corpse being raised, or as something ethereal? The answer matters because if Paul read resurrection as bodily, his testimony tells against ethereal-vision hypotheses. Licona engages six Pauline passages and argues throughout that Paul understood resurrection as something that happens to a corpse — but with transformation.

Romans 8:11 sets the trajectory: if the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, that same Spirit will give life to your mortal bodies. Five Pauline parallels link Jesus’s resurrection to believers’ resurrection (Romans 6:5; 1 Corinthians 6:14; 15:12–23; 2 Corinthians 4:14; 1 Thessalonians 4:14). The future tense ζῳοποιήσει (“will give life”) is used elsewhere in the New Testament with God as eschatological life-giver. Douglas Moo, NT scholar, notes that the resurrection reference in the protasis forces the future verb to refer to bodily transformation. Ernst Käsemann, German NT scholar, agrees the promise is not for the present life. Even Dunn — usually a friend of more spiritualized readings — affirms that salvation will be completed not by escape from the body but by redemption of the body, with Christ’s resurrection providing the pattern. Romans 8:23 confirms it: we eagerly wait for the redemption of our body. Believers’ mortal bodies will be raised as Jesus’s was.

1 Corinthians 15:42–54 is the central battleground. Paul answers two questions: how are the dead raised, and what will future bodies be like? It is sown in corruption, raised in incorruption. It is sown a natural body (σῶμα ψυχικόν), raised a spiritual body (σῶμα πνευματικόν). What dies and goes down in burial comes up in resurrection, having been transformed. Paul’s τοῦτο in 15:53–54 — “this perishable” body, “this mortal” body — has Paul, as Licona puts it, almost grabbing his own arm to indicate continuity. There is no exchange of one body for another.

“Today, if a child dies of SIDS, the parents would not need to make a point of an empty crib. It is implied.” (p. 406)

The same logic, Licona argues, holds for Paul on the empty tomb. For Paul, bodily resurrection is so clear that the empty tomb does not need explicit mention. Lüdemann’s claim that 1 Corinthians 15:50 makes it questionable whether Paul was interested in the empty tomb is mistaken.

The decisive contention is whether the ψυχικόν–πνευματικόν contrast means physical versus immaterial. Wedderburn and the earlier Dunn read it that way. The RSV and NRSV translate accordingly. Licona’s response is one of the most striking pieces of work in the book — a word study spanning eleven centuries of Greek literature, from the eighth century BC to the third century AD. ψυχικόν appears 846 times across that range. Across all 846 occurrences Licona failed to find a single instance where ψυχικόν meant “physical” or “material.” πνευματικόν appears 1,131 times. The phrase “spiritual body” appears in Democritus, Chrysippus, Comarius, Clement of Alexandria, Pseudo-Plutarch, Pseudo-Galen, Ptolemaeus, and Philo. With one possible exception (Chrysippus), it never means “immaterial body” anywhere in the corpus.

The New Testament data is consistent. Richard B. Hays, Duke NT scholar, observes that ψυχικοί refers to human beings living in their natural state apart from the Spirit of God — they just don’t get it. The NRSV is inconsistent, rendering ψυχικός as “physical” in 1 Corinthians 15:44 but “unspiritual” in 1 Corinthians 2:14. Paul is not contrasting material with immaterial substances. Humans can be natural or spiritual. The contrast is one of mode of existence — animating power. The present body is animated by heart and lungs; the resurrection body will be animated by God’s Spirit. The Apostolic Fathers confirm the picture. Ignatius calls Jesus “physician, who is flesh and spirit,” about Jesus’s divine and human natures rather than an ethereal body. Smyrnaeans 3.1–3 describes Jesus risen “in the flesh,” touched by his disciples to show he was not a δαιμόνιον ἀσώματον (a bodiless daimonion). Had Paul wanted a material–immaterial contrast, the σαρκικά / πνευματικά opposition was right there — he uses it himself in 1 Corinthians 9:11. He could also have used ἀόρατος (“invisible”). He did not.

1 Corinthians 15:45 says Adam became a “living soul” but the last Adam became a “life-giving spirit.” Licona paraphrases: Adam became a natural entity that is living, while Jesus became a spiritual entity that is life-giving. Future tenses in 15:46–49 and 15:52 confirm transformation at the general resurrection. Since Paul uses ζῳοποιοῦν here on the same subject as the future bodies of believers, Paul holds that a transformation of the present mortal body will occur. Jesus is the firstfruits — Paul thought Jesus’s mortal body had been raised.

The “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom” of 1 Corinthians 15:50 does not contradict Luke 24:39’s “flesh and bones.” The phrase appears five times in the New Testament and twice in the Septuagint, and is common in rabbinic literature. The primary sense is mortality, not physicality. “Flesh and blood” is a figure; “flesh and bone” is not. Paul’s incorruptible body is not ethereal — otherwise Paul contradicts himself in Romans 8:11, 23; 1 Corinthians 15:42–53; and Philippians 3:21.

Philippians 3:21 is decisive on its own. Christ “will transform our humble body to be in similar form to his glorious body.” The Greek μετασχηματίσει is rendered “transform” or “change” by every modern English translation. The decisive test is to substitute readings into the verse. “Christ will transform our humble body” works. “Christ will exchange our humble body” does not — exchange with what? Transformation is the reading that works. Colossians 2:9 (disputed Pauline authorship) describes Jesus as the one in whom the fullness of deity dwells “bodily” (σωματικῶς) — if Pauline, the present-tense verb implies post-ascension Jesus still has a body.

2 Corinthians 4:16–5:8 is, on the testimony of C. F. D. Moule, Cambridge NT scholar, the most difficult passage in the New Testament. Licona’s reading: Paul mentions both stages — disembodied intermediate state for those who die before the parousia, and bodily transformation for those alive at the parousia. Seven impressive parallels with other Pauline texts make this the simplest reading. Paul did not change views; intermediate-disembodiment-then-bodily-transformation is consistent throughout the corpus.

Licona’s master conclusion on the six passages: placing on one side of the scale a few possibility peas — like the highly ambiguous Galatians 1:11–19 — is no match for the brick of secure evidence from numerous Pauline texts on the other. The tip of the scale is not a gentle one. Paul never regarded the final post-mortem state of believers as one of disembodiment.

Why Paul matters

Five reasons Paul is so important for this investigation. He is the earliest known author to mention Jesus’s resurrection. He has numerous extant texts that give clues about the nature of resurrection. His letters are the only verifiable reports by a verifiable eyewitness of the risen Jesus himself. He personally knew the other disciples claiming postresurrection appearances. And he was an enemy of the church when his experience occurred — an adversarial witness, willing to suffer continuously, even unto martyrdom.

Roy W. Hoover, Jesus Seminar fellow, has dismissed Paul’s testimony because Paul never met the Jesus of history and so cannot count among Jesus’s enemies. Licona’s reductio: by Hoover’s logic, no one fighting against the Nazis in World War II — no concentration camp prisoner — could consider Hitler an enemy unless he had personally met him. Michael Martin, atheist philosopher, objects that Paul was a zealous religious believer and not a religious skeptic, so Paul’s report should not get special weight. Licona answers with a Muhammad analogy. Sources for Muhammad’s experience are 200-plus years removed in biographies and hadith. Luke’s accounts of Paul are 31 to 60 years removed; Paul’s letters are even closer. Paul’s experience is corroborated by other named eyewitness claimants of risen-Jesus appearances. Muhammad stood alone in his Gabriel claim. Muhammad had already been dissatisfied with paganism before his revelation — there was no conversion from polytheism per Muslim sources. Paul went from strict Pharisaism to opposing it. Historians need not deny that Muhammad had an experience he interpreted as supernatural — and the same liberty applies for naturalistic explanations of Paul.

Paul’s bedrock value is exactly this. People usually convert to a religion because they have heard the message from a secondary source and believed it. Paul’s conversion was based on what he perceived to be a personal appearance of the risen Jesus. Today we might believe in the resurrection on secondary evidence, trusting Paul and the disciples. But for Paul, his evidence was primary — he had what he perceived as the risen Jesus appearing directly to him. The appearance to Paul is added to the historical bedrock.

The Conversion of James, Jesus’ Skeptical Brother

James presents a puzzle. He grew up in the same household as Jesus, did not believe during Jesus’s ministry, and yet became one of the leading figures of the Jerusalem church and was martyred for his faith. Habermas had James’s conversion on his earlier list of facts virtually undisputed by specialists, though he eventually dropped it from the three-fact minimal list. Licona treats it as a second-order fact rather than bedrock — but the case for it is strong.

The evidence for James’s pre-resurrection skepticism comes from three Gospel pericopes. Mark 3:20–35 has Jesus’s family declaring he is out of his mind and trying to seize him. Mark 6:2–4, 6a names the brothers — James and Joses and Judas and Simon — and has Jesus saying a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his house. John 7:1–5 has Jesus’s brothers urging him to go to Judea and reveal himself to the world (“if you are doing these things”) and concludes “for not even his brothers were believing in him.” The taunting tone of 7:3 — “if you are doing these things” — parallels the mockery at the cross in Matthew 27:40.

Painter has argued against this reading at every point. He claims Mark 3 refers to the Twelve, not to Jesus’s family. He reads the brothers’ urging in John 7 as positive — work-related, Father-related. He argues the imperfect tense οὐδὲ ἐπίστευον lacks the definitive sense of unbelief that the aorist would carry. Licona’s refutations are detailed. Mark 3:20’s “coming home” makes “his own” most naturally Jesus’s family. The taunt-tone of John 7 contradicts Painter’s positive reading. The imperfect οὐδέ + verb appears ten times in the New Testament, none in John, and where the construction does occur (Mark 14:59; Luke 18:13) it has the definitive negative sense Painter denies. Comparing John 2:11 (the disciples believed — aorist ἐπίστευσαν) with John 7:5 (the brothers did not believe — imperfect ἐπίστευον) yields exactly the contrast Painter is trying to evade. John 7:7 says the world cannot hate Jesus’s brothers but hates him, contrasted with John 15:18–19 where disciples are hated for their relationship to Jesus — so the brothers in John 7 are not Jesus’s disciples.

Painter also appeals to external sources. Clement of Alexandria — Painter himself calls him perhaps the least critical of early fathers. The Gospel of Thomas — second-century, even the Jesus Seminar does not regard the relevant scene as historical. The Gospel of the Hebrews — Bart D. Ehrman, NT historian, calls it “highly legendary.” Allison notes it places James at the Last Supper, for which there is otherwise no evidence. The passage can be no guide to what really happened. Painter’s case, Licona writes, is desperate — he must assign problematic interpretations to the canonical Gospels and appeal to three sources of dubious value. John 19:25–27 confirms the picture: at the cross, Jesus entrusts his mother to the Beloved Disciple rather than to James. Had James been part of the spiritual family at the time, surely he would have been given that responsibility. Even allowing that the brothers might have been hiding in fear, the brother need not have been at the cross to receive responsibility — Peter is given a feed-the-flock charge in John 21 without having been at the cross.

The case is bolstered by multiple attestation across two Markan pericopes and one Johannine pericope, and by embarrassment. After the resurrection, James becomes a top-three Jerusalem leader and head of the Jerusalem church. Why would all four canonical Gospels paint a negative picture of his pre-resurrection state during or after his leadership? It would only undermine the church authority the Evangelists would be expected to support. Lüdemann himself uses exactly this kind of reasoning for Peter’s denial: no Christian would have sullied the reputation of the Jerusalem leader, so the tradition has a solid historical foundation. The same reasoning applies — even more so — for Jesus’s brothers’ disbelief.

James after the resurrection has the brothers among the followers in Acts 1:14, James as leading spokesman in Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–21; 21:17–26; Galatians 1:19; 2:1–10), Paul reporting his activities to James (Acts 21:18), and “the brothers of the Lord” mentioned as believers in 1 Corinthians 9:5. James’s martyrdom is reported by three sources — Clement of Alexandria (preserved in Eusebius), Hegesippus (also preserved in Eusebius), and Josephus, Antiquities 20.200. Josephus describes how Ananus the high priest — taking advantage of the gap between Festus’s death and Albinus’s arrival — assembled the Sanhedrin and brought forth James the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, accusing him of breaking the law and having him stoned. The Josephus passage is accepted by a large majority of scholars. Darrell L. Bock, Dallas NT scholar, asks the right question: what law was it James broke, given his reputation as a Jewish-Christian leader careful about keeping the Law? It would seem likely that the charge related to Christological allegiance and blasphemy — fitting both the stoning penalty and the parallel with how Stephen was handled.

James’s martyrdom is multiply attested across independent sources. The historian is warranted in concluding James was probably martyred for his Christian faith. The reason for his conversion is most directly given in 1 Corinthians 15:7 — “then he appeared to James.” There is no surviving narrative apart from the dubious Gospel of the Hebrews fragment. Catchpole observes that for James to become an integral part of the earliest community at a very early stage, and later the leading pillar-type witness during Peter’s presence, requires explanation. The appearance to James was not one that could work from already existing sympathy or commitment. Hershel Shanks and Ben Witherington III agree: James was a convert because at some juncture he saw the risen Jesus, for nothing prior to Easter can explain his having become such a follower of Jesus, much less a leader of his followers. Allison offers an alternative — James and the brothers may have heard from Mary or others of postresurrection appearances, with the appearance to James coming after his conversion. Either way, the conversion needs an explanation, and a postresurrection appearance is the best one on offer.

The roster of scholars who grant the appearance to James is heterogeneous — Habermas’s list includes Betz, Conzelmann, Craig, Davis, Derrett, Funk, Hoover, Kee, Koester, Ladd, Lorenzen, Lüdemann, Meier, Oden, Osborne, Pannenberg, Sanders, Spong, Stuhlmacher, and Wedderburn. Licona adds Allison, Byrskog, Ehrman, and Wright. Although the majority of scholars writing on Jesus’s resurrection grant the appearance to James, the number who actually comment on the matter is small. Licona is therefore reluctant to include it in the historical bedrock. He treats it as a second-order fact — admissible if the bedrock alone proves elusive in producing a best explanation.

The Empty Tomb

The empty tomb is not part of Licona’s bedrock either, but it is well-evidenced enough to count as a second-order fact. Habermas’s database shows roughly two out of three scholars writing on the empty tomb since 1975 grant historicity with a view toward resurrection. Among those granting the historical empty tomb but explaining it on naturalistic grounds, Licona names Allison, Bostock, Carnley, Ehrman, Fisher, Grant, and Vermes — all granting historicity while doubting bodily resurrection caused the emptiness. The heterogeneity argument applies here too.

Two distinctions separate the empty tomb from the bedrock three. First, it does not enjoy a near-unanimous majority — a respectable minority opposes it. Second, there is less heterogeneity among those granting it. Most still divide along theological party lines. Habermas himself flags an “alarming comment”: he has compiled 23 arguments for the empty tomb and 14 considerations against, and the listings divide along party lines. This may indicate scholars are allowing their horizons to exert excessive influence on their historical work. Licona declines to pursue lengthy treatment of the empty tomb here, both because of its non-bedrock status and because the bedrock-three already give the chapter its hypothesis-weighing power.

The empty tomb is granted second-order status. It can supplement the bedrock if a best explanation needs it, but the case for or against the resurrection is to be conducted primarily on the three near-unanimous facts.

Conclusions: The Three (Plus Two) Bedrock Facts

The chapter closes by stating the explanandum cleanly. Three facts pertaining to Jesus’s fate are bedrock — strongly evidenced and granted by a near-unanimous consensus of scholars writing on the subject.

First, Jesus died by crucifixion. Second, very shortly after Jesus’s death the disciples had experiences that led them to believe and proclaim that Jesus had been resurrected and had appeared to them. Third, within a few years after Jesus’s death, Paul converted after experiencing what he interpreted as a postresurrection appearance of Jesus to him.

Bedrock for Jesus’s life adds context. Jesus thought of himself as miracle-worker and exorcist. He thought of himself as God’s eschatological agent. He had a special relationship with God for inaugurating the kingdom. He awed crowds with deeds interpreted as miracles or magic.

Two more facts sit just outside the bedrock as second-order data. The appearance to James, Jesus’s skeptical brother, who became a leader of the Jerusalem church and was martyred. And the empty tomb, granted by roughly two-thirds of scholars writing on the subject.

Outside the bedrock entirely — Licona thinks they are historical but the consensus does not — are Jesus’s predictions of his death and resurrection, and the bodily nature of Jesus’s resurrection. The Pauline word study has shown, against Wedderburn and the earlier Dunn, that Paul understood resurrection as something that happened to a corpse, with transformation. Given Paul’s high esteem for tradition that most likely came from the Jerusalem church, it is highly likely that if Paul taught the resurrection of the body, so did the Jerusalem apostles. But the nature of Jesus’s resurrection does not belong to historical bedrock. It is a strong inference from the bedrock, not part of it.

What chapter 4 has produced is the explanandum for chapter 5. Three minimum facts — death, appearances, Paul’s conversion — that any responsible hypothesis must explain. Two second-order facts — James and the empty tomb — that may be brought in if a best explanation requires more support. The next chapter takes six hypotheses and weighs them against this bedrock.

Chapter 5 is where the book has been heading. Method has been built. Sources have been rated. Bedrock has been excavated. Now Licona puts six hypotheses on the table and weighs each one against five criteria. Five of those hypotheses are naturalistic. The sixth is the resurrection itself. Each gets a fair hearing. Each gets a grade. At the end, Licona ranks them in order from best to worst. The result will surprise readers who expected the rivals to do better than they do.

The chapter has the shape of a tournament. The five rivals enter first and are weighed against one another and against the bedrock. The resurrection hypothesis enters last. Three findings drive the result. Only one hypothesis passes all five criteria. Three of the rival hypotheses tie for third place. And — most striking of all — an honest agnostic position that simply throws up its hands ranks higher than three more confident naturalistic alternatives. Licona’s quiet point is hard to miss. The historian who weighs the rivals and concludes “I don’t know” is reasoning better than the historian who runs with the psychohistorical reconstructions on offer.

The Five Criteria, Recapped

Before any hypothesis is graded, Licona lays out the rules. He has used these criteria all along, but here he stacks them in order of weight. Plausibility is the most important. A hypothesis must fit with what is otherwise known to be true. Explanatory scope is next — does the hypothesis cover all the bedrock, or only some of it? Explanatory power follows close behind — does the hypothesis explain the bedrock without straining the data? Then comes less ad hoc, which asks whether the hypothesis multiplies untestable assumptions. And finally there is illumination — does the hypothesis shed light on related questions? Illumination is a bonus, not a hurdle. A hypothesis that fails it is not penalized.

Licona also tightens his grading. Earlier in the book he previewed a granular scale running from very strong down to very weak. Here he abandons the gradient for a binary — pass or fail. A criterion is met or not. The result is a clean comparative table where readers can see at a glance which hypotheses survive and which collapse.

The bedrock itself is small but firm. Three facts. Jesus died by crucifixion. Very shortly afterward, his disciples had experiences that convinced them he had been raised. Within a few years, Paul converted after experiencing what he took to be an appearance of the risen Jesus. Second-order facts — the appearance to James, the empty tomb, the predictions of death and resurrection, the apostolic claim of bodily resurrection — are held in reserve. Licona will weigh hypotheses on bedrock alone first, and only return to second-order facts if the bedrock fails to discriminate. As it turns out, the bedrock alone is enough.

One more piece of the framework matters here. Licona allows that a historian can identify a miracle when two conditions are met. The event is highly improbable on natural causes alone, and it occurs in a context charged with religious significance. That second condition will do important work later — chapter 4 already established that Jesus’s life was densely charged with religious significance. Theological details about the eschatological body or the divine cause are bracketed. The historian asks only whether Jesus rose bodily, not who or what raised him.

The spectrum of historical certainty runs from certainly not historical at the bottom to certain at the top, with seven steps in between. Historicity is awarded at quite certain or higher. Two conditions must be met. The hypothesis must beat its competitors on the five criteria, and it must beat them by a significant margin.

1. Geza Vermes — Historical Agnosticism (VH)

Geza Vermes, Oxford NT scholar and Jewish-studies expert, jettisoned his Christian faith in 1957 but kept studying Jesus for the rest of his life. His shelf is long — Jesus the Jew, The Religion of Jesus the Jew, Jesus in His Jewish Context, and finally The Resurrection, published in 2008. Licona takes that last book as the canonical statement of Vermes’s view. The position is striking. Vermes accepts that the empty tomb really was empty. He accepts that the disciples really had visionary experiences. He simply concludes that the historian cannot tell what produced either fact. Hence the hypothesis is agnostic. Vermes himself does not propose what happened.

The argument runs in three steps. First, the empty tomb is historical because the tradition names women as the first witnesses — women whose testimony carried no legal weight in the first century. A fabricator would have picked better witnesses. Second, the appearances are historical because Paul, the Gospels, and Acts agree on them, and Paul reports them as a tradition he received from his predecessors. Third, none of the natural explanations on offer survives scrutiny. Vermes considers six — body stolen by an outsider, body stolen by disciples, wrong tomb, swoon, swoon plus emigration, spiritual rather than bodily resurrection — and rejects them all. He also rejects literal bodily resurrection on the ground that it does not meet legal or scientific standards. What is left is honest puzzlement. Pentecost, on Vermes’s reading, was a “powerful mystical experience” that turned terrified disciples into ecstatic preachers and convinced them their crucified teacher was somehow still with them.

Licona finds the position more honest than the alternatives but ultimately self-undermining. Vermes dismisses N. T. Wright as “blind faith” without engaging the argument and waves off skeptics like Robert Price as “extreme” without explaining why. He grants that female testimony establishes the empty tomb historically, then disqualifies the same testimony for failing first-century legal standards — as if Vermes were prosecuting before the Sanhedrin rather than writing for historians. His exegesis also strains. To argue that Jesus thought of resurrection as disembodied existence, Vermes leans on a single saying, then in successive sentences calls the saying inauthentic, then treats it as authentic, then concludes from it that resurrected persons are “purely bodiless beings.” Licona finds the move careless. Vermes seems to know where he wants to go and hurries there.

The verdict is unusual. Because Vermes refuses to specify what produced the appearances, his hypothesis cannot be graded for explanatory power in the ordinary way. Licona treats VH as silent on Paul’s conversion, which is bedrock. That silence is fatal for explanatory scope. VH is also vague on whether the appearances were natural or supernatural, which makes plausibility hard to assess. But Vermes’s restraint pays one dividend. By refusing to invent psychological reconstructions, he avoids piling up untestable assumptions. The hypothesis fails scope, power, and plausibility — yet it passes the criterion of being less ad hoc than its rivals. Illumination it does not provide. The summary line on Vermes is simple. He passes one criterion that matters, and his agnostic restraint will turn out to be enough to put him second among all six hypotheses.

2. Michael Goulder — Conversion Visions (GH)

Michael Goulder, NT scholar at Birmingham, advanced what has been the most popular naturalistic explanation of the last hundred years. The position appeals to social science. Various psychological conditions, on this view, brought about the experiences of the risen Jesus in Peter, Paul, and the others. Goulder’s signature move is to compare the disciples’ experiences to two modern conversions. Susan Atkins, a Charles Manson associate, experienced what she described as Jesus appearing to her in a flood of light during a wretched night in prison. Arthur Koestler, a parapsychologist, reported a strange episode of self-detachment after a night of poker losses and broken-down cars. For Goulder, Peter’s hallucination was cut from the same cloth. Peter shared his experience, the others had similar ones, and group-style “communal delusions” — like sightings of Big Foot, UFOs, and Mary — did the rest. Paul, on this account, harbored secret doubts about Judaism and may even have had a Gentile childhood friend, which prepared the ground for his own hallucination on the Damascus road. Later embellishments produced the empty tomb story and the bodily appearance traditions. The decomposing body of Jesus, on Goulder’s view, never left the tomb.

Licona’s analysis lands hard. The Susan Atkins parallel does not survive contact with the data. The transfiguration episode, which Goulder treats as a Peter hallucination, includes James and John as fellow witnesses — and that is exactly the sort of group experience the psychological literature does not support. Hallucinations, on the standard clinical definition, are private mental events with no external referent. About fifteen percent of the general population reports one in a lifetime. Among recently bereaved senior adults, that figure rises to about half — but only fourteen percent of those bereavement hallucinations are visual, which works out to roughly seven percent of the bereaved having a visual hallucination.

Then comes the literature review that drops the floor out from under group-hallucination theories. Gary A. Sibcy, licensed clinical psychologist with a Ph.D., surveyed two decades of peer-reviewed psychiatric and psychological literature and could not find one example of the very phenomenon these hypotheses require. The professional consensus is unambiguous.

“I have yet to find a documented case of a group hallucination, where multiple persons shared a sensory perception with no external referent.” (p. 484)

The implication for the appearance to the Twelve is brutal. For Goulder’s hypothesis to work, all twelve men of varying ages and personality types would have had to hallucinate simultaneously, in the same visual mode, of the same risen Jesus rather than something else. The math is staggeringly improbable. And the appearance reports include not only sight but voice, touch, and sometimes shared meals — multi-modal sensory experiences that the clinical literature flags as exceptionally rare even for individual hallucinations. Bergeron and Sibcy’s review of the field pushes the difficulty even further: a peer-reviewed psychology literature spanning two decades records no documented cases of collective hallucination involving multiple sensory modalities. The hypothesis is not merely improbable. The phenomenon it requires has, as far as the clinical record shows, never been observed at all.

The Big Foot and Marian-apparition analogies fail for a different reason. People who claim to have seen Big Foot saw something — a bear, a hoaxer in a costume, a strange shadow — and misidentified it. They were not hallucinating. They saw something with their ordinary eyes and mistook it. Marian apparitions like Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje resist easy psychological reduction; Kenneth Samples, conservative Protestant who has interviewed key figures at these sites, leans supernatural for theological reasons. None of them is a documented natural group hallucination. Goulder also revives an older theory about a doctrinal split between Paul and the Jerusalem leadership — Paul teaching bodily resurrection, the Jerusalem church teaching something more spiritual — but Paul himself insists on identical teaching with the other apostles in 1 Corinthians 15. William Lane Craig, philosopher and apologist, points out that Goulder’s reading of Peter’s psychology — guilt and grief over having failed his Lord — flips the actual situation upside down. Peter’s problem was not that he had failed Jesus. It was that Jesus had failed him. The first sensible thing Peter had done in years was to disown the pretender. From there, anything other than a real resurrection should have settled the matter.

The verdict is mixed but heavy on the failures. The hypothesis passes explanatory scope — Goulder does try to account for every piece of bedrock — and it passes illumination, since it does shed some light on religious experience generally. But it fails explanatory power because the hallucination model strains the data. It fails plausibility because group hallucinations are not documented in the professional literature, because Paul was not grieving and was not psychologically prepared for a vision of the man he was hunting, and because the Pauline–Jerusalem split has been long since rejected. And it fails on being less ad hoc — Goulder’s account multiplies psychoanalyses of Peter, of the disciples as a group, of Paul, and of later Gospel writers, none of them with a scrap of supporting evidence. The summary on Goulder is simple. He passes two criteria, and only one of them matters.

3. Gerd Lüdemann — Subjective-Vision Hallucinations (LH)

Gerd Lüdemann, German NT scholar, converted from Christianity to atheism and now writes with the energy of a man on a mission. His 1994 book The Resurrection of Jesus aims, in his own description, to prove the resurrection’s nonhistoricity and to encourage Christians to change their faith accordingly. The hypothesis is close to Goulder’s in shape but more sharply argued. Peter, on Lüdemann’s account, was a victim of self-deception — a grief hallucination triggered by sorrow, guilt, and a dependent relationship with Jesus that had been violently cut short. Peter then communicated his experience to the others, who succumbed to a “shared hallucinatory fantasy” in group ecstasy. The five hundred witnesses Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 15 Lüdemann reads as a “mass ecstasy” generated by suggestion — the famous medieval St. George legend, in which Crusaders all reportedly saw the saint on the walls of Jerusalem, is invoked as a parallel. Even Jesus’s own brothers, including the previously skeptical James, get caught up in the contagious excitement. Paul’s vision on the Damascus road resolves a long internal conflict. Pre-conversion Paul, on Lüdemann’s reading, was a competitive overachiever secretly attracted to the Christian gospel and unconsciously yearning for an apostolic role, which he duly invented during a hallucination near Damascus.

One concession Lüdemann makes deserves attention. Despite his confidence that the resurrection did not happen, he is unambiguous about the experiences themselves.

“It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death.” (p. 372)

That is a hostile witness conceding bedrock, and Licona makes good use of it. Whatever caused the experiences, the experiences themselves are not in dispute. Lüdemann himself confirms what every hypothesis on the table must explain.

Licona’s analysis is a slow demolition. Lüdemann’s whole approach is what Licona calls methodical skepticism — the rule that any naturalistic proposal with an ounce of plausibility wins by default over any supernatural one. That, Licona points out, is not a method but a worldview. Lüdemann never weighs the supernatural hypothesis. He simply rules it out by saying a decaying corpse cannot be made alive again and there is no heaven for Jesus to ascend to. The harvest of psychohistorical conjectures that follows is so unconstrained that Licona calls it historical fiction. Dale C. Allison, RH-friendly but agnostic-leaning, made a similar critique years earlier — Lüdemann’s conjectures are conjectures, not knowledge, and the field has rightly grown leery of psychohistorical reconstructions of figures long dead. Allison also pressed an empirical point that Lüdemann’s bereavement-hallucination model passes over too quickly. The clinical literature on grief visions describes fleeting, often comforting episodes — a sensed presence, a glimpse, a momentary voice. There is no close phenomenological parallel in the bereavement literature for the kind of extended interactive encounters the Gospels report, in which the deceased is touched, eats, walks, converses, and commissions the survivors to a global mission. Whatever the disciples experienced, the bereavement template does not fit it well. Mark Gilderhaus, historian, catalogs what happens when historians do attempt psychohistory at scale. The Bullitt-and-Freud psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, which traced Wilson’s failures to an inability to satisfy his demanding father, is one cautionary example. A 1962 reading of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a psychosexual drama in which Russian phallic weapons threatened Western penetration is another. Such projects, Gilderhaus says, produce comic results.

The St. George parallel collapses on inspection. The story is found only in The Golden Legend, written around 1260, and medieval writers regularly meant such reports literally, metaphorically, allegorically, or mystically all at once. There is no way to tell whether the reporter intended a hallucination claim. The walking-on-water disciples — sleep-deprived in a storm at night — have nothing in common with the Twelve in the upper room or with Paul on the Damascus road. The Marian apparitions Lüdemann appeals to are not natural psychological events that have been demonstrated; if anything, they are difficult cases that resist easy reduction. The 1964 White Christmas suggestibility study, which Lüdemann does not invoke but which his picture would need, found that 49 percent of female secretarial students “heard” a record that was not playing — but only 5 percent thought the record had actually played. None of them all had the same auditory experience. To get a documented case of mass shared hallucination, the literature simply has nothing to offer.

The Pauline argument fares worst of all. Lüdemann reads Romans 7 as Paul’s autobiographical confession of internal struggle with a stern Jewish God. Licona points out that Romans 7 says nothing of the sort — there is no sign Paul was disenchanted with the God of Israel before Damascus, and Galatians 3:13 with Deuteronomy 21:23 makes the move look stranger still, since a crucified man would have looked accursed to a Pharisee like Paul. The “Jewish prohibition on disembodied souls” that Lüdemann uses to explain Paul’s bodily-resurrection language actually cuts the other way. If Paul had hallucinated, his Jewish background would have produced an image of Jesus in an intermediate disembodied state, since the last day had not yet come. Bodily-resurrection language makes more sense if the appearances were taken as actual revivification. And on Paul especially, Lüdemann never considers that the same data — the Damascus encounter — could be explained by a real appearance. He never weighs the alternatives. Licona’s analogy is the inept psychologist who diagnoses a stomach virus as a parasite because the previous patient had one.

The verdict on Lüdemann mirrors Goulder. The hypothesis passes explanatory scope — Lüdemann does try to cover all the bedrock — and it passes illumination on ancient religious experience. It fails everywhere else. Explanatory power fails because the hypothesis stretches the data on Paul. Plausibility fails because the appearances to Jesus’s brothers and to James, who in Jewish terms would have regarded their crucified relative as a heretic, do not credibly arise from contagious group excitement. And less-ad-hoc fails decisively, because Lüdemann posits multiple psychological conditions in friend and foe, in different settings, without supporting evidence. The summary line on Lüdemann is the same as Goulder’s. Two passes, one of them serious — and three failures on the criteria that matter.

4. John Dominic Crossan — Resurrection as Metaphor (CsH)

John Dominic Crossan, Jesus Seminar founder, has written more on the historical Jesus than perhaps any other member of his generation, and Licona devotes more pages to him than to any other rival. Crossan’s view is unusual. He does not say the resurrection did not happen. He says the historical question — whether Jesus’s corpse came back to life — is the wrong question. The right question is what the resurrection means. The early Christians, on Crossan’s reading, were not making a claim about a corpse. They were making a claim about God’s power and presence continuing through Jesus. Resurrection language is poetic, not literal. Paul, Crossan says, would regard the idea of a literally revivified body as theologically distasteful. The empty tomb story Crossan attributes to Mark, who invented it. The body itself, on Crossan’s view, was probably not even buried in a tomb — it was likely left exposed, scavenged. By Easter Sunday morning, those who cared did not know where it was, and those who knew did not care.

The mechanism Crossan offers for the appearances is selective. Paul’s Damascus experience he treats as a real but trance-induced episode, drawing on the anthropological work of Erika Bourguignon and her students on cross-cultural patterns of altered consciousness. Paul’s trance, says Crossan, was the only actual appearance — the dominant model of the experience of the risen Jesus. The other “appearances” were not visions caused by belief but the other way around. They came after belief in God’s continuing power through Jesus, not as the cause of it. The narratives we have in the canonical Gospels are then “profoundly political.” They are dramatizations of authority. Peter’s race with John to the empty tomb in John 20 is a duel over leadership in the early church. The awkward note in Luke 24 that the Lord has appeared to Simon is meant to give Peter priority over the Emmaus pair. The appearances, on this view, “detail the origins of Christian leadership, not the origins of Christian faith.”

What persuades Crossan most is the early Christian theology of the harrowing of hell — Jesus’s descent to free the souls of the righteous dead. He finds it in the Odes of Solomon, in two ancient church frescoes, in the Gospel of Peter, in 1 Peter 3 and 4, and in the strange passage at Matthew 27:52–53 where tombs open and dead saints rise at Jesus’s death. If any of this were taken literally, Crossan says, there would have been hundreds of empty tombs in Jerusalem on the first Easter. The whole thing must therefore be parable. The corporate harrowing of hell, in Crossan’s reading, is the original Christian eschatological vision, later marginalized because it could not be reconciled with the appearances of the singular risen Jesus to disciples before his ascension.

Licona’s analysis runs long because Crossan’s argument is many-layered. Three of Crossan’s six initial concerns about a literal resurrection — that it requires a theistic worldview, that it misreads the cultural setting, that it generates source difficulties — Licona treats as legitimate warnings. The other three are red herrings. Saying the literal view creates a stumbling block for unbelievers, or that it ethically privileges Christianity, or that it neglects meaning, are pragmatic complaints, not historical ones. Amy-Jill Levine, Jewish NT scholar, is invoked here in a striking line — exclusivism is not “morally dubious,” and the demand that scholars subordinate their conclusions to pluralism is itself the more dubious move. The ethical objection puts the cart before the horse. The question of what to do with a historical conclusion comes after determining whether the conclusion is sound, not before.

The source case for Crossan’s hypothesis is fragile. The reconstructed Cross Gospel that Crossan dates to the 40s exists nowhere in the manuscript record. It is detected, on Crossan’s account, primarily through the Gospel of Peter, a single late and disputed document of the seventh-to-ninth-century Akhmim fragment. Charles Quarles, NT scholar, has shown that the Gospel of Peter contains features only later Christian literature has — including the cross appearing alongside Jesus and the oversized risen figure. Crossan applies the principle “less extraordinary means earlier” consistently to canonical texts but flips it for the Gospel of Peter. The metaphor reading of Paul faces equally severe problems. Paul calls Jewish unbelievers “condemned” in Romans 10 and uses the language of crucifixion in straightforwardly literal ways elsewhere. Why would resurrection language alone drop into metaphor?

Pinchas Lapide, Jewish scholar who eventually accepted the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection, made a memorable observation here. He could not understand modern Christian theologians who seemed ashamed of the materiality of the resurrection.

“Some modern Christian theologians are ashamed of the material fact of the resurrection. Their attempts at dehistoricizing it are simply not understandable to me.” (p. 545)

To turn the solid villagers of Galilee, who saw their teacher executed, into a community of jubilant believers takes more, Lapide says, than dehistoricizing reinterpretation. The harrowing-of-hell sources Crossan relies on all postdate Paul and Mark; even Crossan and his co-author admit Matthew’s strange tomb-opening passage cannot bear the weight Crossan needs it to bear. And on Mt 27:52–53, Licona suggests the passage reads better as poetic device about a great king’s death than as a literal historical claim — Crossan’s preferred reading is actually available to a defender of bodily resurrection.

The verdict on Crossan tracks Goulder and Lüdemann. Crossan accounts for all the bedrock and so passes explanatory scope. He provides illumination on the kinds of stories ancients could tell. But he fails explanatory power because the political-dramatization reading runs against the plain sense of the texts; he fails plausibility because his case rests on dubious or hypothetical sources; and he fails on being less ad hoc, both because his psychohistory of Paul depends on a “fudge factor” — Paul’s trance somehow yielding pro-Christian content despite Paul’s pre-conversion hostility — and because Crossan applies redaction-criticism rules selectively to favor his preferred sources.

5. Pieter F. Craffert — Altered States of Consciousness (CfH)

Pieter F. Craffert, South African NT scholar at the University of South Africa, brings a different toolkit. His The Life of a Galilean Shaman draws on neuroanthropology and what he calls a postmodernist openness to multiple realities. The argument runs at two levels. First, Craffert distinguishes between “viewer-independent” properties of an object — its chemical makeup, its physical mass — and “viewer-dependent” properties that exist only because of cultural agreement. Money is his standard example. A hundred-dollar bill is observer-independent in its paper and ink, but observer-dependent in its purchasing power. Many of the events in the Gospels, Craffert argues, are “cultural events” of the second kind. They were real to those who experienced them but they are not the sort of thing you could photograph. Treating such events as hard biographical data, he says, is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

The proposed mechanism for the appearances is the altered state of consciousness — ASC, in Craffert’s shorthand. Drawing on the neuroanthropological work of John Pilch, Craffert argues that visions, dreams, and apparitions were typical and culturally expected experiences in the first-century Mediterranean world. The disciples, on this view, entered an ASC and saw the risen Jesus in a vision their culture taught them to expect. Even the eating-and-touching scenes do not require a physical body, since human brains can generate visionary bodies without external stimuli. Did the resurrection happen? Craffert says it depends on what “it” refers to. If “it” is a vision in its ancient setting, the answer is yes. If “it” is a literal corpse coming back to life, the answer is no.

Licona’s analysis works on several fronts. The first is naturalistic bias hiding inside postmodern language. Craffert’s “multiple realities” rhetoric is selective. He admits all sorts of viewer-dependent realities except the supernatural one. Brad Gregory, Notre Dame historian, was already on record in 2006 noting that social-scientific theories of religion are not metaphysically neutral — they are committed to naturalism in advance. Craffert’s principle of analogy explicitly excludes ad hoc divine interventions. That is fine as a working assumption, but it cannot be smuggled in as if it were a neutral methodological commitment. The second front is Wiebe’s empirical work. Philip H. Wiebe, philosopher and longtime student of religious experience, has identified ten qualities that typically distinguish ordinary states of consciousness from altered ones. Objects do not disappear when you close your eyes. Solid bodies do not occupy the same space. The senses do not mesh. Other observers see the same thing. Effects persist after the experience ends. The resurrection narratives in the canonical Gospels match the ordinary-state profile on six of the ten markers — they describe full-color, three-dimensional figures other people also saw, with effects that carried into ordinary reality afterward.

The group-trance literature is also thinner than Craffert claims. Pilch appeals to the work of Felicitas Goodman, but her cited apparitions of the dead are all individual experiences. The lone group case she mentions is a Marian apparition at a Coptic church in Egypt — and nothing in that report suggests the percipients were in an altered state. Pilch’s other source, Belinda Gore, has written instructions for inducing altered states. The protocol involves a quiet location, comfortable posture, smudging with herbal smoke, an offering to the drum or rattle being used, and rhythmic auditory stimulation at 200–210 beats per minute for fifteen minutes. There is nothing in the Gospel narratives that suggests the disciples were doing any of this. The texts almost always flag a vision as a vision when they mean one — a dream, a trance, a sight in the night. The resurrection narratives carry no such markers, with one exception: Luke 24:23, where the women report seeing a vision of angels at the tomb. The same author then has Peter and Paul preaching the bodily resurrection in the clearest terms in Acts 2 and 13. Luke knew the difference, and used it.

The walking-on-water case Craffert offers as his ASC case study generalizes badly. Were the feeding miracles also ASC events? Was the wedding at Cana a hypnosis-induced shared illusion? The Lazarus story is especially awkward — Lazarus is called from the tomb, told to be unwrapped, and continues living so visibly that the Jewish authorities plan to kill him. These reports are at home in ordinary states of consciousness, not altered ones. ASC over-application, Licona argues, asks too much of the texts. It is easier to suppose, if one wants to be skeptical, that the stories are urban legends with theological spin.

The verdict on Craffert is the worst of the rivals. The hypothesis fails explanatory scope, since Craffert offers no real account of Paul’s experience — Paul was hunting Christians, not in a state of cultural expectation that would generate a vision of their crucified leader. It fails explanatory power, since the texts do not present the events in alternate-reality terms. It fails plausibility because postmodern historiography in this strong form has been largely rejected by working historians. It fails being less ad hoc, since the ASC mechanism plus the implicit naturalistic exclusion stack together into a heavy ad hoc burden. It passes only illumination. The one-line summary on Craffert is striking. He is the only rival to fail every weighty criterion. Even Vermes, who simply throws up his hands, scores better.

6. The Resurrection Hypothesis (RH)

The resurrection hypothesis enters last. Licona acknowledges the major recent defenses — N. T. Wright, RH ally and author of Resurrection of the Son of God, Gary R. Habermas, RH ally known for the minimal-facts approach, William Lane Craig, philosophical apologist, and Dale C. Allison in his more measured way — but he applies his own method consistently rather than borrow theirs. The hypothesis comes in two variants. RH-V holds that Jesus appeared in an objective vision — a real ontological appearance not perceived by the ordinary senses, something that could not have been videotaped. RH-B holds that Jesus appeared in his transformed but bodily revivified corpse, something that could have been videotaped. Licona’s working definition keeps both options open. Following a supernatural event of indeterminate nature and cause, Jesus appeared to a number of people in individual and group settings, to friends and foes, in no less than an objective vision and perhaps within ordinary vision in his bodily-raised corpse.

Four standard objections to RH need answers before the criteria are applied. The first is the challenge of legend. Did the resurrection story develop the way the Alexander the Great legend developed in the centuries after his death? Lucian gives the textbook example. He once made up a vulture flying out of the philosopher Peregrinus’s funeral pyre, only to hear an old man retell the same story a year later as if he had witnessed it. Samuel Byrskog, NT scholar, distinguishes the Latin terms fundamenta and exaedificatio — the basic facts of an ancient narrative had to be true, while the embellishments could be plausible without being factual. The bedrock — crucifixion, disciples’ experiences, Paul’s conversion — survives even when reported in tertiary sources. Myths about the assassination of John F. Kennedy abound, but Kennedy was in fact shot by somebody. Heterogeneous consensus on the bedrock provides a secure foundation despite later embellishment.

The second objection is Ockham’s razor. Goulder argues that historians should prefer the simplest explanation, and a naturalistic one is simpler than a supernatural one. Licona answers in four parts. The method already includes constraints against credulity, so adding an a priori naturalism is overkill. The “naturalism of the gaps” components in Goulder, Lüdemann, Crossan, and Craffert are no simpler than a supernatural component, since they require multiple compounded conjectures. If the resurrection actually occurred, ruling it out in advance prevents the historian from knowing what really happened. And RH itself does not presuppose the supernatural — it remains open. Goulder, by contrast, must assume at least five conjectures: Peter’s hallucination, the disciples’ communal delusions, Paul’s secret doubts, the Pauline–Jerusalem split, and the late invention of the empty tomb and the bodily appearances.

The third objection is “not enough evidence.” Provisional knowledge is the universal condition of historical work, not a special problem for the resurrection. Stephen T. Davis, philosopher of religion, gives the homely analogy. If you saw him with long hair last week and short hair today, you can reasonably infer he had a haircut, even if you did not witness it.

The fourth objection comes from Bart Ehrman, agnostic NT scholar, who has argued that the canonical Gospels are not contemporary, not disinterested, and not consistent. Licona replies in stages. No surviving life of Alexander the Great is by an eyewitness. Tacitus and Suetonius were not eyewitnesses to most of what they reported. Mark and Luke preserve eyewitness testimony without being eyewitnesses themselves. The 35-to-65-year gap between Jesus and the Gospels is, by ancient standards, remarkably short. There are nine principal sources for the historiography of Caesar Augustus; only three are contemporary, two of those cover Augustus only to age nineteen or twenty, and four of the nine come from a hundred to two hundred years after his death. Within 150 years of life, the same number of non-Christian sources mention Tiberius and Jesus. Adding Christian sources, Jesus outpaces Tiberius forty-two to ten. The Gospels stand head and shoulders above what Greco-Roman historians usually have to work with.

Discrepancies are the standard discrepancy objection. Did Jesus carry the cross alone or did Simon of Cyrene carry it? Was the woman at the tomb alone or with others? Did the women see one young man, two men, or an angel? Licona walks through the standard harmonizations — angels are sometimes called men in biblical idiom, focus on the speaker can elide a second figure, ancient Greco-Roman bios allowed considerable flexibility — and lets the discrepancies stand where harmonization fails. The point is that the discrepancies are peripheral. Titanic survivors disagreed on whether the ship broke in half before sinking, but no one doubted the ship sank. Paul Maier, classical and biblical historian, makes the same observation about the burning of Rome. Suetonius, Dio, and Tacitus disagree on whether Nero sent men openly, secretly, or not at all, and they disagree on where Nero watched the fire from. Yet no historian doubts that Rome burned.

The most striking move in this section is Ehrman’s own concession. Ehrman grants the bedrock.

“One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate.” (p. 600)

He does not doubt that some disciples claimed to see Jesus alive after the crucifixion. He does not doubt that Paul believed he saw the risen Jesus. If Ehrman’s own salvage operation on the canonical sources yields the very bedrock that RH is built on, his blanket complaint about Gospel reliability cannot count as an argument against the hypothesis.

RH passes all five criteria. On explanatory scope, it accounts for crucifixion, disciples’ experiences, and Paul’s conversion without strain. On explanatory power, it explains the bedrock without pushing the data — and RH-B exceeds RH-V on this score, since it accommodates the empty tomb, the appearance reports, and Paul’s bodily-resurrection language with no friction. On plausibility, the situation is more delicate. Plausibility depends on background beliefs, and there is no consensus on what is otherwise known to be true about God. Tor Egel Førland, Norwegian philosopher of history, makes the point cleanly — when it comes to God, there is no consensus on “what else we know.” Bracketing worldview, Licona argues that the dead-don’t-return generalization does not apply to RH directly, since RH is not the claim that Jesus returned by natural causes. It is the claim that he returned by a supernatural one. If a supernatural being wanted to raise Jesus, RH is the most plausible explanation. And the religious-significance condition from chapter 4 is firmly in place — Jesus performed acts he and many of his contemporaries regarded as miracles, and he believed himself in a special relationship with God who had chosen him to inaugurate the eschatological kingdom. In that context, RH is implied by the bedrock if it occurred. Vermes, by contrast, has no plausibility advantage on Paul, since VH simply does not explain Paul.

On being less ad hoc, RH carries no more philosophical baggage than naturalism does — Licona points out that metaphysical naturalism is itself a philosophical construct, no less so than theism. Vermes’s hypothesis matches RH on this criterion, but does so by silence. On illumination, RH solves the puzzle of the early high Christology that Larry Hurtado, Edinburgh NT scholar, has called perhaps the most puzzling and most notable feature of the earliest Christian treatment of Jesus. Why did first-generation Jewish Christians develop a divine devotion to Jesus, when nothing in their Jewish background had primed them for a divine Messiah? Licona’s suggestion is straightforward. If Jesus spoke of himself in divine terms during his ministry — and the canonical Gospels suggest he did — then a literal resurrection that vindicated those claims removes the mystery. The pieces fit. RH is placed on the spectrum of historical certainty at “very certain.”

Licona offers a useful analogy for what the historian is and is not concluding. Carloman, brother of Charlemagne, died in AD 771 after a brief co-rule. Historians know he died. They do not know whether he died of natural causes or whether his more famous brother had a hand in it. The two questions are separable. The historian can establish that the death occurred without adjudicating the cause. RH works the same way. Licona has argued that Jesus rose from the dead. He has not argued for who or what raised him, or by what mechanism, or precisely what kind of body emerged from the tomb. Those are questions a historian, qua historian, cannot answer.

The Final Ranking

The grid that emerges from the chapter is simple to read. RH is the only hypothesis to pass all five criteria, including all four of the most important ones. It outdistances its rivals by a significant margin. RH explains the bedrock without breaking a sweat, while its rivals strain to explain it with limited success — and Vermes, alone among the rivals, simply gives up.

The full ranking, in order from best to worst, runs as follows. RH comes in first, the only hypothesis to pass all five criteria. Vermes comes in second. He passes only one criterion — being less ad hoc — but that criterion is weightier than illumination, and his honest agnosticism keeps him from the multiplied conjectures that sink the more confident naturalistic alternatives. Goulder, Lüdemann, and Crossan are tied for third. Each passes only explanatory scope and illumination, the two lighter criteria, and each fails on power, plausibility, and being less ad hoc. Craffert comes in last. He fails every weighty criterion. He passes only illumination.

The result is striking and Licona lets it land. An honest agnostic position — Vermes’s “I don’t know” — outranks three confident psychohistorical reconstructions of the resurrection. The historian who weighs the rivals carefully cannot legitimately choose them over saying nothing. Three of the five naturalistic alternatives are, in this strict comparative sense, worse than no answer at all.

Licona’s spectrum places RH at “very certain,” one step below “certain” itself. The legitimate reasons for rejecting that placement, he says, are philosophical and theological rather than historical. If supernaturalism is false, or if a non-Christian religion is exclusively true, RH is ruled out. Bracketing worldview, the historical conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead follows. Licona is candid that horizons remain decisive in real life. For some Christians no disconfirming evidence will ever be enough; for some atheists no confirming evidence will ever be enough. Both stances, he says, are unreasonable. Those who find naturalistic alternatives flawed but still cannot bring themselves to assent to RH could legitimately withhold belief — that, he says, is a more honest and respectable position than running wild with imaginative reconstructions and calling them history.

Three explicit limits remain. The historian cannot adjudicate the cause behind the resurrection — who or what raised Jesus. The historian cannot describe the precise mechanism. And the historian cannot specify the precise nature of Jesus’s resurrected state. The conclusion is bracketed in the right places. The hypothesis Licona has defended is narrow, methodologically modest, and provisional in the way all historical knowledge is provisional. He acknowledges that he has weighed only a representative sample of naturalistic hypotheses. Others might emerge worth examining. And, he says, even prudent assessment can sometimes point to the wrong conclusion. Conclusions must be held provisionally.

The final paragraph belongs to John Adams, who in 1770 took the legal case for the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre. The courtroom was crowded and electrical. Adams lost more than half his clients in defending the soldiers. From that hostile room, this is what he told the jury.

“Facts are stubborn things; whatever our wishes, inclinations, or passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” (p. 609)

Licona ends with the same posture. Resurrection is the prize puzzle of New Testament research, and his hope is to have made the puzzle solution a little clearer.

Chapter 6 is the closing chapter, and Licona uses it to do three things. He recaps where the argument has been, names what he thinks the book uniquely contributes, and points to the questions the next generation of scholars should pick up. He opens with a striking number — roughly thirty-four hundred academic books and articles in the last thirty-five years have tried to answer what happened to Jesus after the cross, and the field still cannot agree. His diagnosis is that almost none of those works were written by historians outside biblical studies. Plug in their toolkit, he says, and the puzzle starts to come apart.

Where the argument has been

Chapter 1 borrowed a working method from professional historians — realism, methodical neutrality on the burden of proof, and inference to the best explanation against five named criteria. Chapter 2 cleared away the standard objections to historians investigating miracle-claims, defining a miracle as an event for which natural explanations are inadequate and that occurs in a religiously charged context. Chapter 3 ranked the sources, with Paul’s letters and the oral tradition embedded in 1 Corinthians 15 sitting at the top. Chapter 4 then established the historical bedrock — three facts almost every specialist grants. Jesus died by crucifixion. Very shortly afterward his disciples had experiences they took to be the risen Jesus appearing to them. Within a few years Paul, formerly hostile, converted on the basis of the same kind of experience. Chapter 5 weighed six hypotheses against that bedrock. The resurrection hypothesis fulfilled all five criteria. Its strongest competitor, Geza Vermes‘ agnostic shrug, met just one. Licona’s verdict — the resurrection is “very certain” on his historical scale, a result, he admits, higher than he expected.

What the book uniquely contributes

Licona names five things he thinks his volume put on the table. First, it bridges philosophy of history into biblical studies, where reflective method is rare. Second, it takes the question of whether historians are even allowed to investigate miracle-claims further than any prior treatment in historical-Jesus studies. Third, it includes a lexical study most readers will skip and shouldn’t — Licona surveyed every surviving occurrence of the Greek word psychikon from the eighth century BC to the third century AD, eight hundred forty-six instances in all, and could not find one that meant “physical” or “material.” That single finding takes the most popular skeptical reading of 1 Corinthians 15:44 — buried physical, raised non-physical — off the table. Fourth, the book argues at fresh length that Jesus himself predicted his violent death and bodily resurrection. Fifth, the conclusion is at once stronger and more modest than apologetic readers expect: the bedrock is best explained by resurrection, but the method does not pronounce on the cause or on the exact nature of the risen state.

Where the field needs to go next

Licona flags three open jobs. The first is the appearance to James, Jesus’ skeptical brother — granted by most scholars and yet barely studied. The second is the long list of pagan dying-and-rising figures. The “no parallels” consensus, Licona warns, really only covers Semitic agrarian gods. He names twenty-two pagan and heroic figures worth a careful look, with five — Aristeas, Apollonius, Protesilaus, Theseus, and Trophonius — closest to a possible parallel. The third is downstream. If Jesus really was raised, then the Gospel reports of his miracles, his claims to divinity, and his predictions of imminent death and resurrection all gain prior plausibility, and historical-Jesus scholarship should recalibrate accordingly.

The closing line of the book is a challenge. Because the resurrection hypothesis is built on bedrock the whole guild already grants, anyone who rejects the conclusion has to come at the method instead.

The Appendix is the only place in the book where Licona steps outside his five-criterion comparison framework to deal with a single scholar at length. The reason is simple. Dale C. Allison, Princeton Seminary, is not like the other interlocutors. He is the most methodologically rigorous, hermeneutically self-aware, and bedrock-friendly agnostic-leaning specialist working on the resurrection. He concedes most of what Licona’s case requires, then refuses the inference. Licona thinks that refusal cannot be left unanswered — and that engaging Allison as a hostile witness would misread the book Allison actually wrote. So the Appendix is structured as a friendly dispute. Allison and Licona agree on the data. They disagree on the threshold.

Licona spends an unusually long opening on what he admires in Allison. Allison concedes that scholars of every theological camp bring bias to historical Jesus questions and devotes twenty-six pages of his book to disclosing his own horizon. He even lists the reasons he wants the resurrection to have happened — the truth of his Christian beliefs hangs on it; he likes the sort of God who would do such a thing; it provides hope for life after this one; it makes a statement for the goodness of creation. Reverse-bias evidence is on the table too. Allison’s Jesus research has changed his theology. He now thinks Jesus was wrong about a number of things, including a failed promise to return quickly. Licona praises Allison’s familiarity with the secondary literature as stunning and credits him with making a genuine effort toward objectivity. None of the other agnostic scholars in the book gets this kind of opening.

Allison’s Position: Bedrock Conceded, Verdict Withheld

What Allison grants is substantial — and for Licona’s case, decisive. The disciples had real experiences they took to be appearances of the risen Jesus, and some of those occurred in group settings. Paul converted from persecutor to promoter because of an experience he perceived as the risen Jesus appearing to him. The experiences were not merely psychological. Allison’s verdict on the standard naturalistic reductions is unambiguous:

“These appearances actually occurred. They were more than psychological phenomena.” (p. 625)

The named opponents are striking. Allison rejects Michael Goulder, Gerd Lüdemann, Göttingen NT scholar, John Dominic Crossan, Jesus Seminar co-founder, and Pieter Craffert. These are the four leading proponents of psychological-projection accounts of the appearances — the standard secular alternatives to Licona’s case. The most sophisticated agnostic-leaning specialist in the field rules them all out. The disciples saw Jesus, Allison says, and Jesus saw them.

The bodily-resurrection point is just as important. Allison locates Paul squarely inside the Jewish tradition — bodies taken up into heaven (Enoch in Genesis 5, Elijah in 2 Kings 2), resurrection texts about bones and graves and dust. He reads 1 Corinthians 15 as teaching the transformation of corpses, not their abandonment, and parallels it with 2 Baruch 51:10. The “spiritual resurrection” reading favored by some critics — the idea that Paul meant only continuing presence or symbolic vindication — Allison dismisses. He says he knows of no evidence for it.

The empty tomb gets the same treatment. Allison evaluates seven arguments for historicity and seven against, and judges only two on each side weighty. The two that carry weight against — fictional capacity in early Christianity, and known legends about missing bodies — do not, he thinks, defeat the two that carry weight for. The first weighty argument for is structural. If Jesus’ body had remained in its tomb, the appearances would only have led to belief that God had vindicated Jesus and assumed him into heaven, not that he had been raised bodily. For bodily resurrection to be the conclusion, belief in an empty tomb was necessary. The second is the women-as-discoverers point — fiction would not feature low-status women as primary witnesses. Allison’s verdict is a “decent case” for, a “respectable case” against, with the historicity case “slightly stronger.” On the bottom line:

“As for the story of the empty tomb, I remain theologically in permanent irresolution.” (p. 630)

So why doesn’t Allison go further? His own bottom line is that the data are ambiguous. Something extraordinary may have happened with Jesus, but he thinks there is not enough firm data to know what it was with absolute and unhesitating conviction. Worldview must therefore make the determination — believers may hold to bodily resurrection without intellectual guilt, while others may withhold belief with good conscience. Yet Allison’s positive verdict still goes further than most readers expect. The disciples’ experiences entailed more than sensing an invisible presence. They saw him. He appeared before their eyes. Allison is even inclined to believe the tomb was empty because Jesus had been raised bodily.

Licona summarizes the result this way. Allison thinks the data are sufficient to make resurrection belief reasonable, but not strong enough to compel it or to judge unbelief irrational. That sentence is the linchpin of the appendix. Allison is not saying the case is weak. He is saying it is necessary-but-not-sufficient.

The Parallels-Experience Argument

The most discussed and most original move in Allison’s book is his treatment of apparitions. Allison was driven to the apparition literature by personal experience. He had sensed the presence of a dead friend. His father’s apparitions had been witnessed by family and friends. From there he worked through the modern bereavement and apparitions research, and what he found is the empirical engine of his agnostic-leaning verdict. Cross-cultural reports of post-mortem appearance experiences are well documented. Most occur in dreams. The most common type is what Allison calls a “strong sense of presence” — the felt nearness of a deceased spouse. But occasionally the dead seem to appear physically, and percipients touch and hug them and report them as warm.

Allison argues that some of these apparitions are ontologically authentic — that is, viewer-independent rather than mere psychological projection. Between two and twelve percent are shared by others present. Some percipients are not in grief. Religious belief is not a common trait. Some apparitions provide information unknown to the percipient at the time, or appear before the percipient has learned of the death. Allison adds his own first-person anchor:

“These things really happen, and in my case I know this from first-hand experience.” (p. 627)

From this body of data Allison builds his cautious challenge to standard apologetics. If apparitions of the dead are well documented, sometimes occur in groups, sometimes involve touch, sometimes carry information unavailable to the percipient — and if some are arguably real rather than psychological — then the appearances of Jesus may not stand alone. They may have a wider human phenomenon to be set against. Allison is careful. He calls this a heuristic exercise, not a reductive explanation. Apparitions are not a “Rosetta Stone” for the resurrection. He even catalogs five grief-and-bereavement mechanisms that might lie behind the early Christian appearance traditions — continuing-presence experiences, survivor guilt, idealization of the dead toward sinlessness, blame-projection, retelling-of-tragic-death patterns. The evolution of the Jesus tradition, he suggests, is consistent with what bereavement researchers call “memorialization.”

Licona’s response begins with a concession. Allison’s apparitions material is fresh and intriguing. The accounts cannot easily be dismissed. Some may indeed be ontologically objective rather than psychological. Several features that show up in the literature also show up in the resurrection appearances — group settings, non-grieving percipients (Paul above all), information unavailable to the percipient (Ananias in Acts 9). And Licona is willing to grant the larger philosophical point. If veridical apparitions exist, they suggest a spiritual dimension and an afterlife and challenge metaphysical naturalism. That finding, Licona says, adds plausibility to the resurrection hypothesis rather than subtracting from it.

Then comes the statistical counter. Allison’s own data make the parallels collapse on the features that matter. Apparitions are observed by groups two to twelve percent of the time. They are observed by enemies of the deceased less than one percent of the time. They are touched 2.7 percent of the time. They are accompanied by belief that the person was raised bodily from the dead less than one percent of the time. The Jesus appearances exhibit all four features at once. When you multiply those probabilities together, the conjunction is roughly one in 3,800,000. And there are no cases in the literature with all four features. Licona’s verdict is direct:

“Any hypothesis proposing that the postresurrection appearances of Jesus were no different than standard experiences of apparitions of the dead lacks plausibility.” (p. 635)

The collective-experience point sharpens further when contemporary psychology is brought in. Peer-reviewed work by clinical psychologists Gary Sibcy and Joseph Bergeron has shown that there are no documented cases of group hallucination involving multiple sensory modalities. Hallucinations are private mental events. Multiple percipients seeing, hearing, and touching the same figure at the same time is not a category the psychological literature recognizes. That is a fatal disanalogy with the resurrection appearances, which include multiple group settings and tactile features.

Licona presses one more disanalogy with help from Gerald O’Collins, Gregorian University theologian. None of the bereavement percipients in the standard literature became missionaries proclaiming what they had seen. None founded a religion. The disciples did. Even if Jesus’ messianic identity is granted only as a starting point, the leap from a private apparition of a dead loved one to a public, life-reorganizing, world-evangelizing movement has no parallel in the data Allison surveys. Licona thinks Allison would probably agree.

The empty tomb adds the final disanalogy. Apparitions do not produce empty graves. The disciples’ bodily-resurrection conviction emerged not just from appearances but alongside the well-evidenced fact of an empty tomb — and the unanimous earliest reports in Acts 2 and Acts 13 already speak in bodily-resurrection terms. Gary R. Habermas, Liberty University philosopher, makes the same point, and Allison himself concedes it. Once the bodily-resurrection conviction is granted as part of the data — and Allison grants it — the apparitions parallel can no longer carry the weight an agnostic verdict would require.

Allison’s own restraint should be noticed. He does not actually claim apparitions explain the appearances of Jesus. He calls his use of the literature heuristic. He grants that the resurrection appearances are unique and that they fit a resurrection better than they fit even an ontologically objective apparition. That admission is the appendix’s quiet turning point. The most sophisticated apparitions argument in the field, on its own author’s account, fails to function as a reductive alternative to the resurrection.

Evidential-Threshold Concerns

If the data are not in dispute, what is? Licona thinks the deepest disagreement is about the threshold a historical conclusion has to clear. Allison sets the bar high. He says that nothing in the resurrection data is firm enough to compel “absolute and unhesitating conviction.” Because that level of certainty is unreachable, Allison concludes that worldview must decide. Licona’s reply is the methodological hinge of the whole appendix:

“Even humility can be employed immoderately, resulting in an agnosticism that fortifies itself against mounting evidence.” (p. 632)

The argument is straightforward. Absolute and unhesitating conviction is not a standard historians actually meet on nonreligious questions either. We do not have it for Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon, the date of Augustus’s defeat of Antony, or the cause of Lincoln’s election. The standard historians actually use is what Licona calls adequate certainty — a strong-enough case to render a judgment, with the judgment held provisionally and revised when better evidence arrives. Applying a higher threshold to miracle-claims than to nonreligious historical claims is not neutral methodology. It is a covert worldview commitment. Allison’s higher standard, applied to the rest of ancient history, would dissolve almost everything we know.

Allison hedges the threshold further. Even if every detail of the canonical resurrection narratives were accepted as historically accurate, he says, we would be left with precious little. Licona thinks this is true only if the goal is an exhaustive narrative — and historians rarely seek that. Historians ask adequate questions and look for adequate answers. If every detail of the resurrection accounts were granted, we would in fact know quite a lot — that Jesus was raised bodily, that God was involved, that there was an empty tomb, that Jesus appeared to women and to Peter and to the disciples in groups in both Jerusalem and Galilee, that he was physical enough to be touched and to eat, and that he could communicate with them as before. What we still would not know is what Jesus looked like at the moment of resurrection, where he went immediately afterward, what he did between appearances, or why Mary did not at first recognize him in John’s account. Historians do not require omniscience. The fact that some questions remain open does not void the answers we have.

The “cosmic joke” hedge is the third move Licona challenges. Allison invites us to imagine that someone has somehow proved beyond all doubt that the tomb was empty and that Jesus came back to life — and then notes that even this would not prove God did it. Aliens might have done it as a prank. Licona quotes William Lane Craig, philosopher of religion, in reply: only a sterile, academic skepticism resists the inference that if Jesus was raised, God raised him. But Licona adds his own move, which matters more. The aliens hypothesis contests the cause of the resurrection, not its historicity. Historians can conclude an event occurred while leaving its cause an open question. Many do this all the time. So the cosmic-joke hedge is a red herring against historicity even if it stays alive against cause.

The strongest of Allison’s threshold moves is the “not impossible” hedge. He notes that several alternative explanations for the empty tomb are not impossible, even though there is — in his words — not a shred of evidence for any of them. Licona’s reply uses a parallel that any historian can feel the force of. Barbara Thiering, Sydney NT scholar, has built a survival hypothesis around a creative reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls — Jesus was crucified, did not die, and continued in ministry afterward. The hypothesis can be propped up with Josephus’s report that on at least one occasion a crucified victim survived. It cannot be disproved beyond all doubt. By Allison’s own standard, it is “not impossible.” Yet no working historian would suspend judgment on whether Jesus died because of Thiering’s hypothesis. Why not? Because the evidence for crucifixion-and-death is overwhelming. Allison’s “not impossible” standard, generalized, would defeat any historical conclusion. Licona’s positive commitment is short:

“Historians are not obligated to utterly disprove all other hypotheses before awarding historicity to a particular one.” (p. 634)

What historians do, instead, is weigh hypotheses against each other on best-explanation criteria. When one hypothesis clearly emerges, it is held provisionally as the accurate description of the past — held in a way that respects the evidence’s weight without requiring metaphysical certainty. That is the standard the rest of historiography uses. There is no good reason to abandon it for resurrection research.

Philosophical-Theological Reservations

Allison has hesitations about bodily resurrection that go beyond the historical evidence. They are philosophical and theological. Licona engages them anyway, because they shape Allison’s verdict even if they do not strictly belong to the historical question.

The first hesitation is what philosophers call the molecule problem. Our bodies are made of atoms that are constantly being replaced. The molecules in any body now are not the molecules it had twenty years ago. If God raised the molecules a body had at the moment of death, problems emerge whenever those molecules had also belonged to someone else. Licona walks through a thought experiment to make the puzzle concrete. Suppose Joseph is killed by a lion that is later eaten by a man named Matthew. Some years later Matthew dies on a journey, his corpse is eaten by worms, the worms by birds, and one of the birds by a man named Lucian. When Lucian dies, the molecules he carries have belonged to Joseph, then Matthew, and now him. Whose molecules are they at the resurrection?

The second hesitation is dualist. Allison agrees with what he calls the reigning intellectual dogmas — that human identity is not constituted by the present physical body. He sees no obvious reason why the dead would need to return to corpses. Even if Jesus was raised bodily, Allison thinks the same probably will not happen to the rest of us. And if not for us, then he wonders why for Jesus. The result is a tilt toward a less-than-literal understanding of future resurrection.

Licona’s pushback on the molecule problem refuses the all-or-nothing framing. We do not actually need a single solution. If God can raise the dead, God can presumably resurrect the molecules unique to each person and substitute new ones for the molecules that overlapped between persons. Or God could make replica bodies. Or God could recover the molecules a person had at age ten. Or — picking up Paul’s claim that mortal bodies will be simultaneously raised and transformed — God could transform what we have into what God desires. Licona is not committing to any of these solutions. He is simply showing that Allison’s hesitation is unnecessary. The puzzle is a puzzle. It is not a defeater.

On the dualist hesitation, Licona’s most striking move is to use Allison’s own theology against Allison’s own conclusion. He cites N. T. Wright, then Bishop of Durham:

“The resurrection, in the full Jewish and early Christian sense, is the ultimate affirmation that creation matters.” (p. 638)

And then he quotes Allison saying nearly the same thing — that bodily resurrection makes a compelling statement for the goodness of creation, that God does not abandon matter but redeems it, and that Genesis 1 has it right that the creator of matter must also be the redeemer of matter. Allison’s own theology, in other words, supplies the rationale that defeats his dualist hesitation. If the doctrine of creation is true, there is good reason for God to redeem bodies, not abandon them. Licona’s coup-de-grâce is mild but firm. Even granting that we may not know God’s reasons for raising bodies, that limitation is not a sufficient reason for denying the future resurrection or the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Coherence does not require comprehension. Mystery does not equal incoherence.

Underneath this section is a methodological principle Licona has been pressing since chapter 1. Philosophical hesitations about miracles are not historical objections to miracles. They are worldview commitments that shape how a historian weighs evidence. Allison is unusually honest about this — he names his hesitations as philosophical rather than evidential. Licona thinks the appropriate response is to grant the philosophical disagreement and then show that the historical case is not undone by it. Bodily resurrection’s coherence does not stand or fall with our ability to solve the molecule puzzle. The fact of an empty tomb does not change because we are unsure how the molecules sort themselves at the general resurrection.

Where Licona Agrees with Allison

The honest reading of the appendix has to register how much Licona concedes to Allison. The list is long, and it is not the kind of concession one finds in apologetic literature. Allison’s epistemological humility is admirable. His self-disclosure of horizon is exemplary. His grasp of the secondary literature is, in Licona’s word, stunning. His apparitions material is fresh and intriguing and cannot be easily dismissed. Some apparition reports are credible and not reducible to psychology. The data, taken together, suggest a spiritual dimension and challenge metaphysical naturalism. That challenge — Licona is explicit — adds plausibility to the resurrection hypothesis rather than detracting from it. Allison’s empty-tomb verdict (decent case for, respectable case against, slightly stronger for) is endorsed. Allison’s reading of Paul on bodily resurrection is endorsed. Allison’s hesitations are characterized as fair to the data. Allison is credited with a willingness to bracket his theological horizon during historical inquiry — the rare scholar who actually does what he says he is doing.

Licona makes a candid concession about his own bedrock too. The disciples’ belief that Jesus had been raised bodily is not part of the bedrock he uses for his hypothesis comparison in the main book. He brings it into the appendix only because Allison concedes it. That is a significant move. It is a way of saying that even on a stricter base than his own, the case still holds against Allison.

The appendix closes with what Licona calls a taxonomic split, and it is the cleanest division of Allison’s position anyone has produced. Licona splits Allison’s view into two evaluable hypotheses. AH-1 is the conclusion Allison actually reaches when he integrates the data with his theological presuppositions and worldview — and that conclusion is, in functional terms, that Jesus rose. AH-2 is what historians can adduce on Allison’s account when those presuppositions are bracketed — and that view leaves the natural-versus-supernatural cause undetermined. Licona scores both against his five best-explanation criteria — explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, less ad hoc, illumination. AH-1 ties RH on four of the five criteria. The only daylight is on “less ad hoc,” because AH-1 imports unargued theological presuppositions. AH-2 fails on power and plausibility because it refuses to commit to a cause, but it passes “less ad hoc.” On the full scoring, RH alone passes all five. AH-1 ranks immediately below RH and above every skeptical hypothesis in the field — including the views of Géza Vermes, Oxford NT scholar, Lüdemann, Crossan, Goulder, and Craffert. AH-2 ranks above the strictly naturalistic hypotheses but below RH.

Licona’s verdict on the comparison is brief:

“AH-2 must be judged as inferior to RH.” (p. 640)

The methodological lesson generalizes. Whenever Allison is cited as a source of “we just do not know,” readers should specify which Allison — the bare-historian (AH-2) or the integrated-presupposition (AH-1) — because the two conclusions diverge sharply, and Allison himself acknowledges they do. AH-1 is, in functional terms, a nuanced version of the resurrection hypothesis. The agnostic verdict belongs to AH-2 alone.

The appendix ends where it began. Allison is the most respectable opponent Licona engages, and Licona engages him generously. But the parallel-experiences argument fails to defeat the resurrection hypothesis once the cumulative case is properly weighed. The four features that converge in the Jesus appearances — group, enemy, tactile, bodily-resurrection-implication — produce a conjunction that has no parallel in the apparitions literature. Bergeron and Sibcy’s psychological work closes the door on the multi-modal collective-hallucination route. The empty tomb closes the door on apparition-only readings. And the philosophical hesitations Allison brings to bodily resurrection do not survive contact with his own theology of creation. What is left is Allison’s “we just do not know” — and Licona thinks that verdict reflects worldview hesitation more than evidential under-determination. Larry Hurtado, Edinburgh NT scholar, Stephen T. Davis, Claremont philosopher, Wright, and Habermas have all argued the same in their own keys. Licona has done it in Allison’s. The case is not “compelling” in Allison’s strong sense. It is good enough — adequately certain — and that is what historians actually require.