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What if I were to tell you that there are six facts about Jesus and the primitive Christian church that 90% of all critical scholars agree on, which prove Jesus bodily rose from the dead? According to apologist Gary Habermas, these "minimal facts" are:
Jesus died by crucifixion.
Jesus' followers believed they saw Jesus alive after his death.
Jesus' followers were transformed because of this resurrection belief and were even killed because of their resurrection faith.
Jesus' followers preached that they believed Jesus had raised from the dead very soon after his death.
Jesus' unbelieving brother, James, became a Christian after thinking he saw Jesus alive after his death.
The Apostle Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus, a persecutor of Christians) also became a Christian after thinking a bright blinding light was Jesus alive after his death.
There you have it! Proof that Jesus rose from the dead! So what's wrong with minimal facts apologetics and its approach to the resurrection? Aside from the fact that all six "facts" could be true and Jesus still not have risen from the dead? Aside from the host of other issues that have been well documented over the years? Such as (to name only a few):
We know enough about human psychology that perfectly reasonable, natural causes explain each of the six "facts" with more probability than the highly improbable hypothesis of a supernatural resurrection.
A supernatural resurrection violates the Standard Model of Particle Physics and, therefore, has very low explanatory power.
A proper investigation into this supposedly miraculous event was never conducted and is impossible to do so now.
Postulating that the Christian God exists and was specifically the antecedent cause of a supernatural resurrection is guilty of ad hoc assumptions that appeal to a God-of-the-gaps approach to history.
The entire argument is circular because it presupposes a (specifically Christian) theistic worldview and then uses its premises to prove a theistic worldview.
The entire argument is a non sequitur, meaning its conclusion (Jesus bodily rose from the dead) does not logically follow from its six premises. These "minimal facts" require a huge argumentative leap to move from people thinking Jesus rose from the dead to proving that he actually did rise from the dead.
Being that Jesus' earliest followers were mostly pre-scientific, uneducated, and superstitious idealogues, the entire argument appeals to irrelevant authorities who would not be considered experts in any of their metaphysical or temporal claims.
There is widespread disagreement among biblical scholars, theologians, philosophers, and historians as to what Jesus' earliest followers actually believed they experienced when claiming Jesus rose from the dead.
And it is this last point that is most relevant to a recent publication on the deceptive claims of minimal facts apologetics.
According to Gary Habermas (who claims to have compiled a list of some 3,400 scholarly publications on the subject of Jesus' resurrection), at least 90% of critical scholars believe all six minimal facts listed above are true. A recent SHERM Journal publication by Michael J. Alter and Darren M. Slade, "Dataset Analysis of English Texts Written on the Topic of Jesus’ Resurrection: A Statistical Critique of Minimal Facts Apologetics," exposes that this is simply not true.
Get 6 SHERM Articles on the Resurrection!
Purpose of the Analysis
Michael J. Alter collected and examined data relating to the authors of English-language texts written and published during the past 500 years on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection and then compared that data to Gary Habermas’ claims that 90% of critical scholars agree with his minimal facts. The article identifies 735 texts spanning five centuries (from approximately 1500 to 2020) and reveals that a remarkably high proportion of the English-language books written about Jesus’ resurrection were by members of the clergy or people linked to seminaries, which means any so-called scholarly consensus on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection is wildly inflated due to a biased sample of authors who have a professional and personal interest in the subject matter.
Of the 680 Pro-Resurrection books by 601 authors:
204 were written by ministers
146 were written by priests
249 were written by people associated with seminaries
Who are the So-Called "Critical" Scholars?
The term “critical scholar” is typically used in opposition to a “confessional scholar” (someone who conducts their research from a faith-based presupposition rather than from a “critical” or “objective” basis). For Habermas, however, a “critical scholar” is someone who studies in the relevant field, possesses a doctoral degree, is a professor, and is published in a peer-reviewed, non-consenting (i.e., a non-conservative, non-evangelical) publication. In this sense, Habermas seems to equivocate the methodology of critical scholarship with someone’s professional circumstances. Of course, a published professor possessing a doctoral degree in a relevant field of study does not alone qualify someone as engaging in critical scholarship. Interestingly, as shown in Alter and Slade's analysis, 70 out of 601 Pro-Resurrection book authors (11.65%) are people without degrees in a related field of study and are classified as laypersons.
Considering that numerous publications about Jesus’ resurrection appear in exclusively Christian periodicals and publishing houses, it is very likely that detractors and nonbelievers have been excluded from publishing their perspective on the subject.
Lying with Numbers
Bluntly stated, Gary Habermas would do well to learn how statistics actually work because his apologetic claims (intentionally?) lie through numbers. For example, Richard Carrier once highlighted the sample bias, absence of a true consensus, and exclusion of scholars in Habermas' methodology:
There it is revealed that it is not 75% “of scholars,” but 75% of writers (regardless of qualifications) who have published articles arguing specifically for or against the empty tomb (he never gives an actual count that I know of). But those who publish on a specific issue do not represent a random sample but could very well represent a biased sample (the more so when you include authors with no relevant qualifications), and so there is no way to assess the actual percentage of relevant scholars in the field who share those published conclusions. You would need a scientifically controlled randomized poll of verified experts. He hasn’t done that.
The SHERM article by Alter and Slade prove, with verifiable data, exactly what Carrier suspected long ago:
Habermas’ numbers merely expose the likelihood of a confirmation bias among credentialed “true believers” who conclude something that they already believed to begin with: Jesus raised from the dead. The data that Habermas has amassed is not proportionately pulled from all relevant subclasses of critical scholarship and is, therefore, unrepresentative of the actual historio-theological landscape. The data Habermas has gathered is not only tainted by virtue of his own professional biases (data gathered by advocacy groups like Christian apologetic institutions should be immediately suspect), but it is also tainted by virtue of having only been collected from one subgroup (those who have actually published on the resurrection) of the target population (critical scholars). Moreover, those who have published on the resurrection did so because they likely have very strong positive opinions about the matter. To claim that the majority of critical scholars believe Habermas’s minimal facts is simply unwarranted. Habermas indirectly surveyed a disproportionate number of Christian authors who, not surprisingly, were likely “true believers” long before engaging in “critical” research. Habermas’ minimal facts strategy implies that authors who have written on the resurrection (according to Habermas’s numbers, approximately 3,000 people) somehow represent all the different scholars in all the relevant fields of study who would have an informed opinion on Jesus’ resurrection. Apologists, theologians, ministers, and seminary professors do not qualify as a representative sample of scholarship, even if the sample size of publications is quite large. Having not actually drawn from relevant representative subclasses, the number of actual Christian-oriented publications is of no consequence.
There's actually quite a bit more that the article goes into, and you can review all the data sets for yourself (as well as other SHERM publications on the resurrection) by clicking the image below.
