4S: Minimal Facts
Minimal argument
I genuinely congratulate Gary Habermas for getting his magnum opus out the door. It is a big deal that took a lifetime to achieve. Let's take a moment to appreciate what he accomplished. Salute!:
Unfortunately, that is not the end of the story. I firmly believe that Gary's minimal facts approach is deeply misguided. On the other hand, it might actually meet the intended brief since what Gary was trying to do was find and intellectually honest way to maintain his faith, and by extension, help other struggling Christians maintain theirs.
This is where all apologetics and theology live. They are terribly unconvincing to nonbelievers. But can be somewhat effective for shoring up the faith of Christian believers who are on the doubt bubble and who are in danger of falling away altogether. Even as Christians offer these increasingly desperate attempts, the fastest growing demographic is the religious nones. Let's take a look at why I believe the minimal facts argument fails to convert unbelievers, and is also failing to stop the exodus of believers from the church:
Too minimal
One of the strongest cases agains the minimal facts approach is that it depends on claims that even some none-believing scholars concede. At first glance, that is a resounding win for the approach. But that glance gives way to the problem on the other side of the apparent win. Those none believing scholars are still nonbelievers despite all that agreement.
Whatever it is the non-believing scholar believes, it is clearly insufficient for converting them into believers. These scholars are in a far better position to evaluate all of the claims at an academic level and they see where the bodies are buried, including the one that was supposed to have been resurrected.
If Gary's experts accept the minimal claims of the minimal facts and remain unconvinced, then the minimal facts are too minimal to do more than steady the faith of wavering believers. The academics who are Christians and who do believe in the minimal facts don't actually need that approach. It is also worth noting that not all Christians believe the animal facts approach is very good. Noted scholar, Jonathan McLatchie critiques it here:
This is one of the few places where Jonathan and I agree. If your interlocutor can agree with all of your claims and still not reach the same conclusion as you, there is something deeply flawed with the approach. Indeed, the deal with the obvious objections to the minimal fact argument, Gary has to appeal to many things that are not a part of the minimal facts. That is the surest indicator that the minimal facts are too minimal to carry the resurrection claims they are intended to prove.
Overstating the case
Gary solidly believes that the facts in his minimal facts case are well-supported by strong evidence. Again, I believe he is deeply misguided. Further, he overstates his case with regard to the percentage of people who accept the facts. In the conversation he had with Sean McDowell, Gary Claims that agnostic scholar, Bart Ehrman agrees with his fact, then later talks about where Bart disagrees. I've been reading Ehrman for a long time. I am familiar with where the disagreements lie. If I can't trust what Gary says about Ehrman's agreement, I don't see why I should trust his broader claims about scholarly agreement.
Even were we to accept the claims of scholarly agreement, that is not a strong enough foundation for the case. The appeal to authority is misleading because all of those scholars would each have to agree with all of the claimed facts, not just one or two. We do not know how many non-believing scholars accept all of the minimal facts. I suspect that number is in the single digits. So what we mostly end up with are people who already have a faith commitment to the resurrection giving agreement to the facts about the resurrection. It is less a proper appeal to authority and more an appeal to faith.
Too bible dependent
These scholars, including the skeptical ones, are mostly appealing to biblical texts as the grounding for the minimal facts. Almost none of them can be rigorously defended outside of the sacred texts. I find appeals to the testimonium flavianum to be downright embarrassing for the academic that cites them. We have good reason to be skeptical of that passage.
There is no need to cover the small handful of external mentions of Jesus. If you are not convinced by them, just know that they are the same citations Gary uses to support the resurrection. Most of them never call Jesus by name. And all are clearly simple allusions to what Christians were saying about their own faith rather than a citation of factual records. There is simply no way to ground any of these facts in anything that does not appeal to the biblical texts.
What qualifies as an account?
If you tell me something extraordinary without evidence, and I believe it, write it down, and pass it on, my writing is not an account of a fact. Your getting me to agree with you or getting me to transmit your story does not transform it from an unsound claim into a solid fact. My writing about it is not evidence. That other people believed it is not evidence. My writing it down is not an independent source. We have to get our terms straight and clear.
The gospels are not four independent sources. They are slightly different stories. But none of the stories can rise to the level of a reliable account of history, which I define as something that actually happened in the past. We could say that Mark was a source. But I'm not even sure that should qualify as a source.
Since none of the writers saw fit to mention their sources like actual historians did, we have to ask ourselves where they could have gotten their information. When it comes to the virgin birth, there is only one possible source for the story and that is the mother of Jesus. There simply can be no other source. We have no evidence that they received any information from her. So as far as we know, there is no source for the story.
As for the empty tomb, there can only be one source for the story and that would be the woman who arrived there first and saw it was empty. The more women who get involved with the story, the more the details change. We can ignore the question of whether the gospel writers were reliable and focus on the reliability of the only people who could have provided the information to them. Either one woman told different interviewers different facts or different women made up stories and told different interviewers. Either way, the reliability of the only witnesses possible is very much in question.
We do not have four independent accounts. We have minimally four tellings of a story that have no choice but to rely on one or two witnesses at most. And their testimony is highly questionable because they seemed not to be merely incorrect, but in the process of making things up. The kinds of discrepancies we see are not the kinds that an honest witness would get wrong. I have written extensively on this and might provide the text of that in the comments.
The bottom line is that it is a serious mistake to call the first four books of the New Testament four independent accounts. Again, writing stories about what religious people believe is not a factual account of actual events. I contend that the situation is much worse for the minimal facts argument: It is not just that we do not have four independent accounts of actual events, we don't even have one.
Just the facts
These are the six main facts that anchors Gary's thesis:
- Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.
- The disciples had experiences they believed to be of the risen Jesus.
- Some among the disciples died for their belief.
- James, a skeptic, was converted.
- Paul, a skeptic and persecutor of Christians, was converted.
- The earliness of the proclamation of the risen Jesus.
The facts rebutted
We have no evidence that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion outside of bible stories.
We have no idea what experiences the disciples had or what they believed about them.
We know almost nothing about how and why the disciples died beyond religious tradition which has reason to exaggerate such claims.
Outside of bible stories, we don't know if James was ever skeptical.
We have only Paul's testimony found in bible texts to corroborate his claims.
I will grant that one. But there was also equally early stories that he not only wasn't resurrected, he never came to earth in the flesh. Resurrection wasn't the only early story about Jesus. It is just the only one Christians want to consider.
Many of my objections stem from the fact that these claims come from biblical texts which make the argument somewhat circular. We believe the claims in the text because they come from god. Therefore, the claims in the text are true. We know about the claims because they come from the biblical texts. You have to accept biblical texts as evidence of the claims found in biblical texts. It is a tough and improper ask. Layer on top of that the fact that we have positive reasons for doubting the veracity of the claimants.
No witnesses
The 12 men who got the truth of the gospels directly from god in the form of Jesus during a three year apprenticeship never provided firsthand testimony in the biblical texts. Not one of the wrote a gospel, or anything else we can find. So painful was this fact to early believers that some took it upon themselves to impersonate Peter and possibly John in the form of fraudulent texts that are now a part of the sacred canon.
So clearly fraudulent were the gospel narratives penned by imposters that none of them made it into the canon. We don't have a single word dictated by the illiterate Peter about his time with Jesus. Such a writing does not exist. Instead, we have conjecture that surrogates like Luke and Mark wrote for Peter. But that is not corroborated in the writings themselves. The church just needs to believe it because otherwise, they have no witness testimony.
We don't even get a mention of the mighty deeds of most of those apostles in the canon. So we are running out of potential candidates that Gary could even consider a strong witness. That is why I think he declared that his best evidence comes from Paul.
Wait, what? Paul wasn't one of the 12. So how did he become an apostle at all? He does not meet the criteria provided in Acts. He has to appeal to a special commissions which we have no obligation to believe. Paul lists the people Jesus appeared to and inserted himself into the list. But none of the gospels mention that. And they were written well after Paul would have received his visitation.
We have further reason to disbelieve Paul's testimony. His list of witnesses included a specific order that Jesus appeared to people. His list disagrees with every gospel writer. Not one of them corroborate his list. In fact, they repudiate it with their narratives. Not one of those writers agrees with Paul on the appearances. Either they were just making up the details, Paul was making up the details, or all of them were making up the details. They cannot all be considered reliable witnesses. And Paul should not be considered any kind of witness. He wasn't there. He masterfully inserts himself into the story. But it boggles the mind why Habermas would elevate Paul's fiction over the gospels.
If I had to guess, I would say it is because he had no choice. Paul is the only writer who makes the claim that he was an eyewitness to the resurrection. Everything else is second-hand at best. At least Paul is taking ownership of the story and providing the only claim of eyewitness testimony we have. If you don't elevate Paul to the status of eyewitness, then you actually have no witnesses. All other witnesses are internal to the story in question.
Conclusion: Believers only
I will end where I often end these pieces: The minimal facts argument is perfectly serviceable for those who are already believers. Even many of them see the inherent problems in the argument. But if you are suffering from doubt paralysis as a believer, this argument might do the trick for you as long as you don't look too close at the weak spots.
It is hard to imagine that a person who does not already believe in resurrections in general and the resurrection of Jesus in particular would suddenly start believing because of this argument. It attempts to prove too much by offering too little of substance. The best you can do is say, "Wow! Those people way back then and way over there believed that Jesus rose from the dead." So what?
We should not ignore this rational dismissal too quickly. Those people way back then and way over there also believed that lots of people rose from the dead. Additionally, they believed that people were able to speak to the dead through actual necromancy, not the fake stuff that we see today.
They believed in so many superstitious things that it makes no differences to me what they believed about the resurrection. And epistemically, I don't think it should make any difference to you either. And that is all Gary is attempting to prove. So even if you grant it all, you just come up with the case that those people way over there and way back then believed something about the world that we don't believe today. So what?
I'm happy for Gary insofar as he completed his life's work. That is an achievement worth celebrating. So I feel bad that I can't promote it as a significant work. It is a minimal argument that will meet with minimal results outside of the people who already believe.
See you in the comments...
David Johnson
