Two Christian Experts on Jesus’ Resurrection Admit There Is Not Much Evidence

They had to evoke faith to believe in Jesus’ resurrection

The majority of Christians are not scholars. We should not expect them to be anyway. Apart from their own experience, their knowledge about their religion usually comes from their pastors, who learned it from their professors in the seminary or other Bible scholars.

Therefore, when lay Christians say there is strong evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, what they usually mean is that they trust Christian scholars who do research on Jesus’ resurrection.

For this reason, it is important for Christians to know that two leading resurrection scholars, both profess to be Christians, actually admit there is no compelling evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.

They are Dale Allison, Ph.D., and Michael Licona, Ph.D. They both published academic works discussing Jesus’ resurrection.

Sean McDowell interviewed them recently, and the video is available on YouTube. The quotes I provided in this article came from the interview transcript.

So what exactly did they say?

There could be embellishments that were added to the resurrection accounts

Allison:

So if I look at Mark, I think Mark is the earliest and not only is it the earliest but it’s the least apologetically helpful. That is, if I look at Matthew, he’s got a guard at the tomb and he’s also got Jesus somehow rising before the stone is removed, and then if you go to John and to Luke, then you get some men who show up also to confirm what happened to the women.

Allison admits that the Gospel of Mark provides the least information to make Jesus’ resurrection convincing. The three other Gospels contain more details, but those details could have been intentionally inserted to make other possibilities (such as the claim that Jesus’ body was stolen) less attractive.

Licona agrees:

In terms of … embellishments or apologetic stuff being in Matthew, Luke, and John, I mean it’s possible … Historians can only go so far, and when I look at the resurrection of Jesus and study it, I’m only looking at those things. I’m not trying to get down deep in and dig real deep in the dirt to try to sift through a lot of stuff. I’m trying to see what are the bare-bone facts that we can look at that are really strongly supported by the data. And what’s the best explanation for those facts? so I don’t rule out what Dale just said. It could have some of that in there, but like Dale said, it really doesn’t change anything in terms of an empty tomb. If it were empty, you could still have a story that you know you have details embroidered into it to make it more flowery.

Basically, Licona admits the only detail he could be certain of is the empty tomb. The rest could be “embroidered into it to make it more flowery”.

It is apparent by now that neither Allison nor Licona believes in the inerrancy of the Bible. Evangelical Christians are probably not bothered by this. They could just appeal to the doctrine of inerrancy and don’t feel compelled to agree with these two scholars.

The next two points are more fatal if evangelical Christians are willing to consider them seriously.

Skeptics have good reasons to not believe in the resurrection

Allison:

I’m more sympathetic to the atheist, and so I’m always asking: What does somebody who [does] not agree with me think … At the end of the day, I say God raised Jesus from the dead. All right, so I’m in the Christian Camp. It’s just that I think it’s harder to get there with purely historical reasoning…

If I were a skeptic, and this is what I argued in the book. I said I wouldn’t deny that the tomb was empty or that people thought they saw Jesus. What I would say is: Well the tomb was empty and it was probably because of tomb robbers, and that would explain why the stone is rolled away and why it happened in the middle of the night and so on. And you could say: Well, that’s not probable. But then the retort to that is: Well, you Christians are saying some guy rose from the dead; that’s not very probable either.

In other words, Allison admits that the resurrection hypothesis is just as improbable, if not more improbable, than the theft hypothesis. The bare facts that historians could establish do not strongly favor either position. So Christians cannot really say that skeptics are biased against the resurrection.

The question for Christians, therefore, is: Why would you believe in an interpretation that requires supernatural intervention when there is another one that does not require it?

To use an example, if you see a magician performing tricks in front of an audience, and you think you figured out how he pulled it off (sleight of hand, etc.), would you seriously play with the idea that perhaps the magician was indeed a miracle worker, and demonstrated a real miracle or sorcery?

Probably not.

Then why do you still believe that Jesus was miraculously resurrected when there are other explanations that do not require miracles?

The next argument is even more fatal to the belief in Jesus’ resurrection.

If there is comparable evidence in other religions, these scholars would hesitate to believe in them

Licona could not be more explicit here:

If I were a Muslim, and let’s just say that the evidence we had for Islam being correct was on par for what we have for the resurrection, and that we did not have that evidence for the resurrection. So if you just kind of flip flopped and they had the evidence for the truth of Islam that we have for Christianity, but we didn’t have what we have, would that be enough to persuade me as a Christian to become a Muslim? And I honestly don’t know that’s the case because I don’t like Islam. It’s not attractive in the least to me.

In other words, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is just part of the reason for his Christian belief. If the same evidence appears in other religions like Islam, he does not know if he would be convinced.

Allison says something similar, but he uses the so-called rainbow body as an example. The quote is a bit long, but it’s worth reading and pondering on it.

I had learned that this thing called rainbow body has a long history in Tibet, and it’s ongoing. So this is the notion that certain sages or saintly people upon death … shrink and within a few days their bodies are gone. Although some corpses sort of stop halfway, and as I say in a book, there are some pictures of these. It’s a truly weird phenomenon.

Here we have a religious tradition in which bodies disappear and they are bodies of, you know, holy people, and it’s an ongoing tradition. Two of these supposedly happened within the last 25 years. Right. And one of them we know was written up within two years after it happened. Another one we know that the Dalai Lama has said, “Yeah, I talked to people involved. I really think it happened.”

So the question is where do these ideas come from? And from my point of view, it’s a completely open question. You know Christians. We’re always saying to atheists, “You need to think about the evidence. You need to be honest. You need to face the facts. You know. Have an open mind. Don’t be a closed-minded person.” Okay. So all right. Let’s do that here we go let’s turn it around on ourselves and say, “Let’s be fair-minded with the data. What the heck does it say?” My conclusion is I have no idea.

Do you see that? When faced with intriguing but seemingly compelling evidence of non-Christian miracles, they just throw their hands up and say, “I don’t know” or “I have no idea”. But when it comes to Christianity, they actually make a living out of defending its reliability.

Why?

When McDowell asked Allison and Licona why they believed in Christianity, this is what they said.

Licona:

I didn’t become a Christian because of the evidence for the resurrection. I became a Christian at age of ten, and certainly, my epistemological processes weren’t really developed at that point.

Allison:

I am what my parents were. That’s not a good reason for anything. The truth is: most Muslims are Muslims because their parents were. I mean if you look at the chief contributing factor to religious belief, it’s parental affiliation. Right. So that should bother me. But if I’m honest with myself, I’m gonna give the answer I just gave.

Because they were brought up as Christians.

Some of the issues that Allison and Laconi discussed ultimately led to my deconstruction. See the story below.

Conclusion

The two scholars, who spent years studying the resurrection of Jesus, and wrote books about it, could not genuinely declare, “Yes, the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is compelling, and is sufficient to convince me that Christianity is true. No other religion enjoys such a high level of evidence.”

Instead, they both admit that there are limitations to the historical evidence of resurrection and that their own subjective experience was the main reason for remaining in the Christian faith.

Where does that leave the rest of the Christians?

If you are not a Medium member yet, please consider signing up using my referral link. I will get a small commission at no extra cost to you.