I’m still reading Dale C. Allison’s Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and its Interpreters. In his search for reports of experiences that are in some way analogous to the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, Allison draws heavily from the literature of parapsychology and the investigation of psychic phenomena. In a somewhat apologetic footnote (p. 297), Read More…
Month: March 2017
First Thoughts on Dale Allison
I’ve been reading Dale C. Allison’s Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and its Interpreters. It’s an odd and fascinating book. Only the second half of it is directly about the resurrection; the first half is comprised of other essays related to the historical Jesus, though they’re interesting in varying degrees in their own right. Read More…
More than the Minimal Facts
I’ve been trying to figure out the inner working of William Lane Craig’s and Michael Licona’s arguments for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. They try to present their arguments – especially in debates – as being essentially simple and straightforward, but there’s actually a lot going on underneath the hood. Take, for example, Read More…
The Problem of Missing Examples
In their presentations of the case for the resurrection of Jesus, Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, and Michael Licona generally use two parts: a set of supposedly widely accepted basic facts, and a process of historical methodology. The historical methodology itself has three separate elements: methods for determining the basic set of facts, methods for Read More…
The Contemporary Case for the Resurrection: Major Contributors
Is there sufficient evidence to rationally compel one to believe that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact? The issue has been explored in various ways by philosophers, historians, and New Testament scholars. In the contemporary world, the key scholars who have explored the historicity of the resurrection on the side of the Read More…
Beginning the Search
I’ve been researching the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus, so I thought I’d start posting my notes online, in case anyone else might happen to be interested. I first started reading about the historical case for the resurrection in 2010, after I discovered the works of William Lane Craig. I originally encountered Craig’s Read More…