Do we have a firm basis for believing that Jesus rose from the dead? Scholar and author Gary Habermas certainly thinks so. And he should know. He’s done more research about the resurrection than anyone and has written over 20 books on the topic.

Recommended Reading:

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus

by Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona

Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality

by Gary Habermas and J. P. Moreland

Did the Resurrection Happen?: A Conversation with Gary Habermas and Antony Flew (Veritas Books)

The Risen Jesus and Future Hope

by Gary R. Habermas

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I am your host, Randy Newman, and today my conversation partner is Gary Habermas, professor at Liberty Graduate School and Seminary. Dr. Habermas has authored or co authored or edited over forty books, half of which center on the topic of our conversation today, the topic of the resurrection of Jesus. He's contributed to many, many other books. He's been a professor at Liberty for many years n a visiting or adjunct professor at sixteen other graduate schools. Gary, welcome to Questions That Matter.

I'm glad to be on with you. We've got the best topic, and I can't wait.

Why Does the Resurrection Matter?

Good, good, good! Well, let's just start at the very, very basic. This is a podcast we call Questions that Matter. So let me ask, why does the resurrection matter?

Boy, it's almost like, how much time do you have? I could start giving a list of reasons, but at the basics, the resurrection is the center of Christianity. What's more central than center? Well, the center of the central is the Gospel presentation. In the New Testament, there's a Jesus who is the Son of God, who died on the cross for our sins, was raised from the dead, and Paul says, without that message, faith means nothing. Well, you have to look a long way to find anybody in the New Testament saying faith means nothing. But Paul says if there's nothing in which to put our faith, or nobody in which to put our faith, it's useless.

So you can start there and say it's the center of the center. One more thing: In the New Testament, the resurrection, in over 300 verses, is linked to almost every area of practice and theology of the Christian faith. But the point that it's linked the most often to, almost twenty times, is that believers will be raised like Jesus. So there's two reasons for you right there for it being the center: Number one, it's the central of the central doctrines, and secondly, our believers’ resurrection depends on the resurrection of Jesus. So two great reasons, one back in the first century and one today in each of our lives.

I love it. Great start for us. So one of the things that hit me as a skeptic, coming from a Jewish background. People told me that I really need to believe in the resurrection, which I thought was crazy until I started researching and finding, “Oh, this really has a tremendous amount of basis to it.” And I heard someone say that the resurrection actually changes Christianity out of the philosophy and religion realm and puts it in the history realm. Would you agree with that?

Well, I don't know how much it takes it out of religion because it always is a religious topic. But if the person's point was: This portion of Christianity is highly historical in nature, and unlike some Eastern religions that can be devoted to principles, even if they found out that the person who was supposed to have taught these things, let's say, never existed, they will frequently say, “Well, who cares? It's the principles I'm after, and I'm still living these principles.” I suppose what makes Christianity historical in that special way you're talking about is Christianity is not just principles whether true or false. They are principles based on an historical life, death, resurrection of Jesus Christ who was on the earth some 2,000 years ago. And in that sense, yes, Christianity is history in that sense.

And I've heard you lecture a number of times, and you frequently come back to, and this is embarrassing, I'm forgetting the exact wording and phrase that you use, but something like the minimal evidence or the minimal case or the smallest case. Am I anywhere close on this, Gary?

Yeah, I call it the minimal facts. Now I used to-

There we go. Minimal fact.

Yeah. I used to call it the core facts. And then later I realized that the name “minimal facts” probably says more to people, but sometimes I call it—you know, you're flipping around different words there. Sometimes I've called it the lowest common denominator approach. Because what I do is I'll say, if the New Testament’s inspired, of course this message is true. But if the New Testament is not inspired and what we have is what the critics in the universities and elsewhere say is a faulty, flawed message and the New Testament, it’s not inspired, it's not even reliable. If that's what we have, my approach says: Well, look, on an inspired Bible, Jesus is raised from the dead. We can all agree with that. If the Bible is inspired, then Jesus was raised from the dead. But on your Bible, not yours, Randy, but on the skeptic’s Bible that takes scissors and paste to the New Testament, on what remains as solid facts, my point is, I can show the resurrection happened with your Bible.

So on my Bible, the inspired one, Jesus Christ was of course raised. But on your Bible, maybe it's Thomas Jefferson's Bible or maybe it's a Bible somebody else used, and they have substantially less than what the Bible records, I can take those key verse facts and show the resurrection happened. And someone could say, “Well, how do you know your facts in your Bible are going to be the one that's in their unreliable Bible?” And I'll say, “That’s the point of my research. 90 something percent of all scholars can see these facts because they're so well attested. They're all in your unreliable New Testament, and those facts which the critics say are absolutely true, all of those facts are tested by the data, and therefore we can use them to talk about the resurrection.” So I call it the minimal facts, but I do use other names.

So give us just a few. What are some of those minimal facts that we can rest our belief in the resurrection on?

Well, sometimes I've been as low as three. Sometimes I've been as many as six or maybe a couple more. You go, “Why do your numbers change?” Well, the numbers change because people who believe in an unreliable, uninspired New Testament will give me far more than these. My point in several of my publications is that so-and-so and so-and-so, they might give me twenty facts which we can rely on. And then I will teasingly say to them, in dialogues or in university lectures, I'll say, “Oh, man! You’re conservative.” I'm teasing, right? And I go, “You’re conservative. You’re going to give me 20 facts? Wow, you're gullible. I don't need your 20. I have used a dozen before. Now let's reconsider: I don't need a dozen, I could use a half dozen. I can use one third of the facts you're going to give me, and I still have enough for the resurrection.”

And if you said, “Well, what would those half dozen look like?” I would name them like this: Number one, Jesus died by crucifixion. Now, granted, that doesn't help us with the resurrection. Everybody dies. But if Jesus wasn't dead, He couldn't be raised. So I start with the crucifixion. And number two, the disciples had real experiences that they believed to be appearances of the risen Jesus. They had real experiences that they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus. So you've got these events, and you have to explain them, these experiences. Number three, they were proclaimed very, very early. So the key word there, the first E is experiences. The second E is early.

And we now know, and critics, critics allow this, Jewish New Testament scholars. You mentioned Jewish a little while ago. Jewish New Testament scholars will allow that this material began to be taught immediately after the events in question. So when someone says, “Well, yeah, but your first record is the Gospels, and they can be all the way to 65 years later with John.” Well, let me tell you something: In the ancient world where the first known biography of Alexander was almost 300 years later, and the earliest sources we have about Buddha are about 600 years later. Sixty five years for John and 40 years for Mark is very early. But what I'm saying is—that's still early. But what I'm saying is we can get back, according to skeptics, to right after the proclamation, they say days and months after they know this message was being preached.

So that's three, crucifixion and two E's experiences and early. Fourth, the disciples’ lives were turned upside down by these events, to being willing to die. And someone might say, “Well, how do you know they were willing to die? These guys have been dead for 2,000 years. Can you read their brains?” And I'll say, “I don't need to read their brains, I only have to watch their feet. When you keep going back into a town that you've been beaten up in and run out of town, and in one case, for Paul stoned, and his disciples saw he was dead. And you go back to those geographical areas again and again. Guess what? You're more concerned about presenting your gospel than you are about your life.” So the fourth point is extraordinary transformation, to the point of being willing to die.

Now we cannot prove that all the disciples, Christians—wish we could, but we can't prove that all twelve disciples died as martyrs, with Matthias taking Judas's place. We can't prove that. However, the big four, of the big four, the most influential ones, Peter and John from the twelve and James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul. Three of those four, Peter, James the brother of Jesus and Paul, were together in Galatians 1 shortly after the cross. We have first century sources for their martyrdoms, so being willing to die? Easy.

Last two can be put together. Two skeptics who were unbelievers before and believers after, they thought they met the risen Jesus, namely Paul and James the brother of Jesus. They are two special cases that have to be included here as data for the resurrection, so that's it.

Crucifixion, real experiences, proclaimed early, totally transformed lives, James and Paul. Those are the six I go with, and if they they allow me to throw one more in that's not as well accepted by the critics, but is well established by the evidence, and those are the two things I use for what my minimal facts are. Far and away the most important thing is there's got to be many facts favoring each one of them. And secondly, it's lower on the list, but because the facts are so good, critics are willing to admit it. Well, critics aren't so much willing to admit a seventh fact, but the evidence for it is as good as the other six. That's the empty tomb. That's another E. I often call these the three E's: Early experiences, eyewitness testimony very early, and the empty tomb. And they have to be explained.

The Resurrection Is Indeed a Reliable Fact of History

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So these are what you consider your minimal facts, and if you wanted you could come up with even more. I think this is really very powerful. In fact, I think maybe sometimes the challenge for us, if we're talking to skeptical friends, is to not overwhelm them, to kind of build the case gradually, so that it doesn't feel like we're burying them with facts. You mentioned about skeptics checking this out, and again, coming from my Jewish background, I remember reading this article once of a Jewish New Testament scholar who was not a Christian, but he was a New Testament scholar, Pinchas Lapide, and he did research and came to the conclusion that the resurrection is indeed a reliable fact of history. Now, he didn't embrace Jesus as the Messiah, and he didn't give his life to Jesus, but historically, as a scholar, he had to say that it was valid historically. You’ve had some interaction with people along those same lines, right? Didn't your conversations with the philosopher Antony Flew go along these lines as well?

Yeah. Let me go back to Pinchas Lapide. He wrote that book, I think, in 1982, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective. And he does say the resurrection happened, and while he does not think that Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews, interestingly enough, he seems to embrace a theory that's very common among intellectual Jews for over 100 years now. It's a theory that says Jesus is not the Jews’ Messiah, but Jesus is the gentile Messiah. So he has a fairly high view of Jesus, for a person who's not going to accept him as their Messiah. But then a second Jewish scholar, Geza Vermes—they're both deceased now. But Geza Vermes was a professor of Jewish history at Oxford, and a short time before he died, he just wrote a little book on the resurrection, and he says he's an agnostic on the event itself, what is the experience. But the interesting thing about that, which still makes it so positive, is he admits all the facts I use, and he takes on the naturalistic theories. Could this have happened? Could it be hallucination? Could the disciples have stolen the body? And he goes through each one of them, says they're ridiculous, and he kind of makes fun of them in a way, and he says there's no naturalistic theories that can explain the Resurrection. So he just leaves it there.

And then the person you're talking about, Antony Flew. Interesting we’re talking about Jewish people here, Randy? Because Tony Flew married a Jewish woman. And I think, I'm not sure-

Oh, I didn’t know that.

But I think she was an atheist, too. And he called his daughters Jewesses. That's how Tony referred to his daughters.

Oh, my.

And he was an atheist. And we debated on the Resurrection three times. And I'm not saying it's Gary Habermas, I'm not saying it's the Resurrection, nothing like that, but shortly after our third debate, I think it was about a year and a half later, I heard a rumor that he had become a theist, and I called him and he said, “Yeah, I think I'm becoming a theist. I'm open to the evidence. The evidence really favors God.” And he goes, “Hey, listen, can I talk to you some other time? Because I got a publishing deadline.” And I said, “Oh, sure. I’ll call you back.” So about a month later, I called him back, and he said, “Yep.” He said, “For a while, I thought I was just an atheist with big questions, but now I realize I'm a theist.”

And as far as I know, he never believed in the resurrection or Jesus. He had a lot of alone time. He knew the facts, the Christian facts of the gospel. Who knows what might have happened in private? But I have no reason to think he became a Christian. However, I interviewed him when he became a theist. It was shocking news for the intellectual community. He was the best known philosophical atheist in the world. And he did say, in that interview, that he thought the resurrection was the best attested miracle claim in the history of religions.

Yeah, I remember hearing about that, because, if I'm correct, his basic textbook was kind of like the standard basic intro philosophy textbook used in many, many universities, and he was a very clearly stated atheist. And then when he became a theist, didn't he write a book, that the cover of the book looks like it says, “There is no God,” but then “no” is crossed out and it's replaced with “a.” Isn't that correct? There is a God is the title of the book?

You’re very accurate. There is… It was like “no God.” It was crossed out. If you look closely at the cover, in the background of those words is Tony Flew's face. And “no God,” “no” is crossed out, and “a” is written there. So the title of the book, I'm looking at it right now on my shelf. There is a God is the title. And it was published by Harper.

Research on The Topic of the Resurrection

Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, I just have to go back for a little bit about Pinchas Lapide’s proposal of two different covenants, one Messiah for the Gentiles and one for the Jews. As a young Jewish believer, when I heard that, I was like, “Ooh, maybe I didn't need to make such a drastic move and maybe I didn't have to risk rejection from the Jewish community,” which I was certainly getting. But, you know, just a little bit of study of the New Testament ruins that two covenant or two messiah theory, when you look at, if no other place, how about Romans 1:16? “I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It's the power of God for salvation, to the Jew first and also for the Gentile.” If Jesus isn't for Jewish people, then He’s not for anybody. But that's a different podcast. When I have Jewish believers on, I'll save that for them.

You've been doing research on this topic of the resurrection for so many years. Are there some new things that you're just discovering, let's say in the last five years, that have been revolutionary or eye opening for you?

Yeah. Great question, Randy. And, for the sake of the audience, sometimes people ask me to send them questions for interviews, or they'll say they'll send it to me, and I'll say, “I don't need them. Let's do it off the cuff. It's better.” That was your question. You came up with it. I think it's a great question.

If I had to pick one thing that's really changed in recent years, I already referred to it. But the third point of my six, the third fact: Number one was crucifixion. Number two, they had real experiences. Number three, the second E. First E experience. The second E, early. Critics used to say, “We get this message in Paul's epistles, and Paul's epistles predate the Gospels, and Paul's epistles start, most scholars say, with 1 Thessalonians, about 50 AD, and go from 50 to 60, depending on when, how soon after 60 Paul was martyred.” So if the first epistle is 1 Thessalonians in 50, they'll say—the old answer is, “Well, now we're back to 50 AD. The proclamation of the resurrection came out prior to 20 years later,” not 40 for Mark or 65 for John. But the biggest change is the critical scholars…. It's been there for decades, but they started mining these things. It's like knowing gold’s in the walls of this cave, but you start pulling the gold out because gold all of a sudden is worth a lot, and you’re going to go back. Well, this is real gold, and people pulled these things out, and they realized that the New Testament is full of two or three dozen little creedal statements that record the earliest Christian preaching.

Bart Ehrman, the famous atheist New Testament scholar, atheist, New Testament scholar, specialist. He says these little creedal statements. They’re sometimes called traditions. They were around, he says, from Jerusalem probably prior to Paul's conversion. Now, everybody puts Paul's conversion at plus two or three after the cross. Whatever year you're going to give the cross. Most popular years are 30 and 33 AD. But whatever…. We have to go to and from the cross. And once the cross happened, Paul’s conversion is two to three years later.

Bart Ehrman says that these creeds were around in that little interval from the crucifixion to Paul's conversion. They were there at the 2-1/2-year mark. And moreover, Randy, he says Paul probably knew these creeds, and the reason they're in his epistles, starting with 1 Thessalonians in 50 AD, is that Paul knew these creeds, and he incorporated the ones that used to make him angry before he became a Christian. Now he knows they're true. It's like putting a brick wall up and putting key little diamonds in the wall. You're going to put it right into the wall. Paul puts these creeds right into his books, and those creeds go back…. Some critics…. I could give you names. It won't make it make any difference to your audience a lot. But skeptics, who say those creeds go back to immediately after the resurrection days.

The early scholars, the critical critics, will say days, weeks, or months after the preaching. Well, since the preaching started in the spring of the year, springtime, resurrection, we know that. That means by the end of that first year, by December, our calendar, by the end of that first year, this story was out and about. So that's the biggest revolution, is how early early means. It doesn't mean the Gospels plus 40 to 65. It doesn't mean Paul plus 20 to 30. It means immediately afterwards. That's how early the proclamation is. And critics have to account for that.

And those are recent agreements or affirmations by scholars. In other words, the time gap between the actual events and when they got written seems to be getting smaller. It's just that we're discovering more and more evidence for it. Is that right?

Yes. And when you say more and more evidence, you go, “Yeah, well, you crazy evangelicals, you’ll put any early date on anything!” Yeah, well, look, I won't give names because people just don't care who the names are. But tell that to… I'm thinking of two atheist New Testament scholars right now. We've already discussed two Jewish New Testament scholars, Geza Vermes and Pinchas Lapide. That's four right there. Tell people who do not believe in the message that this isn't early, and they'll tell you, go read their books, where they give evidence for it. It's amazing.

Wow. By the way, I have to just insert a… Oh, go ahead. You go.

By the way Pinchas Lapide, who you brought up. Pinchas Lapide himself read, he said, the best known of these creeds. 1 Corinthians 15:3 and following. The best known. Pinchas Lapide says, the non-Christian Jewish scholar with a PhD in New Testament. He said, “The evidence is so good for 1 Corinthians 15 that we can accept Paul's creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3 as eye witness testimony. Pinchas Lapide said. That's an outstanding comment!

We hope you can join us for a special event that the C.S. Lewis Institute is hosting on Christian faith, the arts, and the imagination. We're very excited to be having Andrew Peterson, musician, writer, founder of the Rabbit Room, join us for an evening exploring how faith and the imagination and the arts all blend together. Obviously, this is an important theme in the life and work of C.S. Lewis, so it's a topic that's near and dear to our heart. We'll explore questions like: How does making things, creating things, reflect our being created in the image of God? What does it mean to be an artist, to be a Christian artist? How can art glorify God? There’ll be a Q&A time. It's going to be on Friday, June 18, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. It's a live online event, so it's free, but you do need to register for it. So please go to cslewisinstitute.org/art for this live streaming event and register. And we think it will be a great blessing for you.

I love it. I love it! Man, this is great! This is reinforcing things, as you might guess. For me, again, coming from a very non-Christian background, I needed a lot of evidence as a young believer. I needed to really be convinced. And it was the things that I was reading, Josh McDowell's work, other people, about the resurrection, that really helped move me from kind of skeptical to a confident believer.

Let me insert a little commercial, if anybody… I was intrigued and delighted with the film that was put together based on Lee Strobel's book The Case for Christ. And you're in there. Of course, it's not really you. It's an actor playing you. I thought that was fun, but it's about Lee Strobel's investigation about the resurrection as a very, very skeptical journalist. And I thought the movie was great. It's one of my favorite things to recommend to nonbelievers. I was a little fearful when I heard they were coming out with a movie, because not all movies made from a Christian perspective are great. But I really was pleased with it.

I almost laughed when I saw your name in there. And I've encouraged undergraduate students, I've actually required some undergraduate students, to watch the movie and tell me very honestly if they thought it was cheesy or if it was good. And they all love it. They're all surprised and shocked, but they really love it. So that's just a little long commercial. Sorry for that, but let me [UNKNOWN 28:01] in a different direction for you, Gary.

That’s okay. Randy. I'm a lot better looking in that movie, because it's not me.

I wasn't going to say that, but I'll let our audience decide that.

Yeah.

But here's where I want to push this is how has this affected you personally? I don't mean just academically and intellectually being convinced. How has all of this strengthening of your belief in the resurrection played out in your own spiritual growth in your own life?

Randy, that is one of the very best questions I could be asked, because as my life goes on and I'm hoping that the things I write will live on past me and make a difference in people's lives, I am really interested in the question of, “Where do we go from here?” “All right, so for twenty-something books of your forty-something,” usually half my books are on the resurrection. That's true. “All right, so you beat the historicity of the resurrection like a drum. And all right, we're all panting, we're tired. We've debated it. All right! So it's a fact. What difference does it make?” And I tell my grad students, I only teach at the PhD level now, and that's significant because I tell PhD students, anywhere from a third to a half of them are already professors. And I'll say to them, “Our lives…. As much as we're into evidence, our lives are into ministry. If we can't make a difference in people's lives, something’s wrong.”

Let me tell you a few ways that resurrection impinges on our personal life. One I mentioned earlier in this interview. The fact that it's connected to the resurrection more than any other fact in the New Testament is the resurrection of believers. Paul says, for example, in 1 Thessalonians, when someone dies, take Lazarus in John 11, when someone dies, we grieve. But Paul adds, “Not as those without hope.” Resurrection is the difference between grieving without hope and grieving with hope. The difference between never seeing them again and you could be with them for eternity. That bridge between death here and eternal life there is the resurrection. And to give you a specific example of Paul in 1 Thessalonians told on the fact that believers will be raised from the resurrection.

I'm remarried now, but in 1995, the mother of my four children died of cancer. She was a very small stature person. I watched as cancer took half her body weight. Our four kids were at home. She was only 43. It was incredibly horrible. And yet, Randy, I don't know what I would have done if it weren't for the message of the resurrection. And so I've got this in print:

I've got a few make-believe discussions between God and me on the front porch while my wife was upstairs with a child monitor, and every time she turned over… My kids were in school, and every time the child monitor, I'd run upstairs and check the noise in the room, and all she did was turn over. I was trying to be that attentive, but I had a make-believe discussion with God. And I asked God, “Why is she up there dying? And He said, “What kind of a world is this?” And I said, “Well, I don't know, Lord. A world where Jesus is raised,” and He said, “That’s good! That’s good. This is a world where My Son died. And Gary, I'm like you.” And I said, “How?” And He said, “You’re watching your wife die. I watched My Son die.” And I thought, “Lord, that's quite a comparison. That's amazing.” And then I said, “So, Lord, are you telling me she's going to die? Is that the conclusion?” We'd already been told it was terminal. And I said, “Is that what you're telling me? She's going to die?” And I imagined Him saying to me, “Gary, there's a difference between something happening right now e but not being forever,” and like the last card I got after her death that I put away, and it's hard for me to even look at it, but the last card I got said, “What is it going to be like when you're in heaven and you're going to be walking down the streets of heaven hand in hand with your loved one who passed away?”

Randy, I could not handle it. I couldn't read the card for months. I couldn't repeat it to anybody. But to me, that statement right there, that's what difference the resurrection makes. But if you want more. Colossians 3:2, Paul says because Jesus has been raised, you've been raised with Him. Because He’s in the heavenly, He’s on the right hand of God, you should live in the heavenlies and quit talking like you talk. Quit doing what you do. This is the book of Colossians. Quit doing what you do. Stay away from it. Purify yourself. And be like Jesus, who you'll be with some day.

So there's two applications, that Jesus is with us in life and death, and secondly, He’s with us in our everyday actions. We should bring our actions to be in line with what He showed with His resurrection.

Well said, well said! And that's a good place for us to conclude. Gary, thank you for being part of this podcast today. And let me just sign off by saying to all of our listeners, please check out our website, cslewisinstitute.org, and find lots and lots of resources there to help you grow in depth in your walk with the Lord, so that you can love Him with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Amen.

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