Book Review - On The Resurrection: Vol. 1 Evidences by Dr. Gary Habermas
B&H Academic, 2024, 1054 pages.
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Generally speaking, people do not rise from the dead.
A few years ago, the state of Texas opted to widen and improve the rural Farm-to-Market road on which I live. And on most Texas FM roads, your mailbox is at the end of your driveway, not but a foot or less away from the shoulder of the road. And if you live off the highway in a small neighborhood of homes, the mailboxes will usually be grouped together along the side of the road as well. Makes for retrieving one’s letters something of an adventure, as the speed limit past our particular mailbox is 55. It is wise to look both ways before opening the lid!
During the construction on one particular stretch of the road, the state had to temporarily relocate a group of mailboxes to the other side.
They ended up putting them right in front of the gate of a small cemetery which was directly across the pavement. I wish I had taken a picture. It appeared as though a handful of dearly departed had, prior to their deaths, arranged to have their mail forwarded to their final resting place.
I could imagine some paranormal investigators, cameras and recording equipment in hand, perched on the branches of one of the cemetery’s aged oak trees in the small hours of the night, hoping to capture one of the entombed coming forth in nightly quest of their correspondence. But let’s say the avid investigators did capture something. What might it look like? Inconclusive, shaky, grey-green grainy night-vision images, some inaudible voice coming through a cloud of static maybe, a flash of light perhaps, but nothing like a clear, unmistakable physical body rising out of the ground walking toward the mailboxes.
But even they filmed a body coming out of its grave, it’s a sure bet the comments section underneath the video would filled with incredulous mockery or, perhaps compliments about the editing, but few if any would actually believe what they were seeing was real. With the ubiquity of video and editing technology today, anyone can make a video appear to be real.
And besides, generally speaking, people do not rise from the dead.
I once attended an open-casket visitation of a dear Christian woman who had succumbed to cancer. Her friends and family had been hoping and praying for a miraculous recovery. I will never forget the moment, though. There in the quiet of the church, as I was chatting with a friend, a loud voice from near the casket suddenly boomed like thunder through the sanctuary.
“MOTHER, ARISE!”
One of the woman’s sons who had been praying for his mom’s recovery stood over the coffin, with his hands holding hers.
She didn’t rise.
Because, well, generally speaking, people do not rise from the dead - not even the vast majority of Christians who have ever lived, folks who hold to and hope in the literal bodily resurrection from the dead.
I will hazard a guess and say that even if all the deceased in all the cemeteries throughout the world suddenly came out of their graves and headed heavenward, there would still be those who would try to explain what happened as mere a fluke of nature. Scripture even tells us that unless one accepts Moses and the prophets, they would not be persuaded by the truth of Jesus’ teachings, even if someone were to rise from the dead (Luke 16:31).
But What If Someone Did Rise From the Dead?
What would that look like? More importantly, what exactly would that mean? And what sort of evidence would we have if the event happened in the ancient past, in a place and time where there wasn’t photography, video, or audio recording technology?
As far as appearances, most depictions of the dead coming back to life portray the newly arisen as disturbingly decayed, a matted and bloody mess, like zombies, or a shining ghost or translucent spirit of some kind, maybe a skeleton or something of that nature.
As for what it might mean, much depends on who it is that has allegedly come back from the dead.
Interestingly enough, the tradition of the Old Testament (to which the Christian faith is anchored), communication with the dead was strictly prohibited. Deuteronomy 18:10-13 makes it plain.
Let no one be found among you who ... practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD, and because of these same detestable practices the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you. You must be blameless before the LORD your God.
In 1 Samuel 28:7-20, however, we read of the story of king Saul who does exactly the opposite of the above commandment and goes to consult the witch of Endor to summon Samuel from the dead.
Who was Samuel? The last of the judges of Israel and a prophet. His reappearing from the dead shocked the witch who summoned him and terrified Saul.
The question which is often asked is whether Samuel really came back from the dead or if it was a demonic deception, a familiar spirit (demon) conjured by the witch. Given the witch’s reaction (she cried out with a loud voice when she saw Samuel), it is clear she wasn’t expecting to see him.
This isn’t passage isn’t contradictorily condoning the practice of necromancy by any means. But I do think it is one of those passages where we see God giving someone exactly what they wanted, as judgment against them. Samuel’s words terrified Saul, as he told the errant regent that because of his sin, he would be among the dead the following day. Bad news.
There are three other instances in the Old Testament where someone is brought back from the dead - in 1 Kings 17; 2 Kings 4; and 2 Kings 13.
But in all of these examples, nothing parallels with New Testament accounts of the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Samuel appeared as a spirit and went back to the grave. In the other three OT instances, those individuals raised from the dead eventually experienced death a second time.
Jesus, by contrast, was done with dying. He defeated death by His own death. He wasn’t a spirit, but had flesh and bones and could eat. And for reasons we are not told, His resurrected body still retained the wounds from His crucifixion. He wasn’t a nearly comatose zombie, nor did He appear as though He needed immediate medical attention. There was something wholly human and familiar and yet shockingly renewed and otherworldly about His post-resurrection body.
But who is Jesus? And what did His rising from the dead actually mean? If in fact He really did rise from the dead?
Examining the Evidence
Dr. Gary Habermas, the world’s leading expert on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth has recently released volume one of a planned four-volume set of his life’s labor of love pertaining to his historical investigation of the central event of human history. In a circuitous but impressive and thoroughly enlightening route through the halls of liberal academia, On the Resurrection is Habermas’s answer to Jesus’s question “Who do men say that I am?” yet mostly narrated through the voices of the New Testament’s most fiercest critics. While the critics themselves are not affirming Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God, if you read their words as a kind of hermeneutical or historical poetry (where words serve to have more than their surface-level meaning) you can clearly see secondary patterns of resurrection-affirming clues arise out of their otherwise skeptical denials.
“I heard a fly buzz when I died,” wrote the reclusive 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson. A clue that makes you read further. Wait a minute, she’s dead. How can she be recounting this story? Dickinson’s headstone in West Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts also further suggests she believed in something beyond this life. “Called Back.” By whom? To where? How specifically Christian her ideas about the afterlife were at the time of her death continues to be a source of debate and discussion to this day.
Habermas’s volume actually follows somewhat in the poetic footsteps of Dickinson’s postmortem recounting of a trivial detail about hearing a fly buzz at her death. Only this time, if you want to believe it or not, there is actual documentation of people who have in fact recounted details about what they have seen and heard after they’ve died.
And they actually lived to tell about them.
There is an entire appendix devoted to contemporary near-death experiences (NDE’s) in On the Resurrection. Whatever you may think of them, Habermas has extensive medical and scientific documentation of people, who, like Dickinson’s enigmatic verse suggests, recount seemingly trivial yet startling postmortem details about their surroundings, and even in some cases, far beyond their surroundings.1
One thing that kept coming to mind over and over again for me as I was reading Gary’s book was, “Ok, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, and this falsehood is really as obvious as these scholars suggest it is, then why the bloodied feet of liberal scholars from all this goad kicking? Shouldn’t the falsehood of the resurrection be obvious to the rest of humanity? Why expend so much polemical energy against it? Why not devote yourself to telling us instead what is true about God rather than just being against what He has revealed to us in Christ?”
“Saul, Saul…”
But is the historicity of the resurrection trustworthy, though? Or is it just religious or theological propaganda? Has Gary wasted his entire life weaving tenuous historical webs, making the evidence to appear more formidable than it really is? Is he, in a way, trying to make Lord of the Rings into an actual historical account of real hobbits?
I’ve read the book in its entirety and have never in my thirty-plus years as a believer in Jesus, ever read a book that so thoroughly documents the amount of historical ink that has been shed on the topic of Jesus’s resurrection. One thing the resurrection is not is a myth. People do not spend the entirety of their lives writing polemics against the wanton machinations of Zeus or the existence of the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon. Why not? If all god stories are more or less equal, why aren’t the unbelieving polemics against them all equal?
Gary’s weighty tome is a sort of literary Gethsemane in which we find a cadre of liberal critical scholars sweating drops of ink, trying to avoid drinking from the cup which God has given each of them.
Habermas’s work is also a crucible. It took me a month to read - about thirty pages a day. Anyone who wants to deny the historicity of the resurrection will henceforth have to wrestle with this formidable messenger. And in my estimation, no liberal critic or skeptic will walk away without a limp upon his own conscience.
I might summarize volume one this way. Citing mostly liberal New Testament scholars who either marginally identify as Christians or who are agnostics or atheists, Gary carefully and exhaustively (some footnotes take up the entire page) demonstrates that these scholars all affirm that certain historical aspects of the Gospel accounts are as solid and as trustworthy as anything we have in the ancient world, exceptionally so, but these scholars all stop short of actually affirming that Jesus really rose bodily from the dead.
The first three chapters of the book are dedicated to the philosophy and methods of history in general, including a survey of the baleful impact of postmodern skepticism upon the discipline of academic historical research. Gary makes a compelling case that the denial of Jesus’ resurrection is not finally about historical evidence so much as it is a matter of one’s particular worldview. Using specific examples from the words of skeptical scholars themselves, Habermas shows conclusively how “their own previous interpretations and rules do not allow particular conclusions.”2
It brings to mind the searing words of the prophet Elijah echoing through the desert wilderness “How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him: But if Baal, then follow him” (1 Kings 18:21).
Especially limiting are the naturalistic presuppositions of many scholars who a priori exclude the possibility of anything miraculous occurring, past or present.
But Habermas isn’t just picking apart skeptics and their criteria here. He observes that both Christian and non-Christian alike are guilty of having biases and presuppositions that prohibit and hinder us all from a fair examination of the evidence. We all at times “halt” between two opinions. But as Habermas asks, “should we make up our minds before or after entertaining the evidence and the possibilities?”3
Israel had plenty of evidence given to them from YHWH Himself. But they refused it, given their love and devotion to Ba’al. It wasn’t a matter of evidence, but a matter of the heart.
So what then are the historical facts about Jesus and the resurrection upon which Gary argues a majority of liberal New Testament scholars agree? Habermas, to be clear, isn’t arguing that majority scholarly opinion constitutes objective truth. Quite the contrary. Nor is he tacitly suggesting the rest of the Bible is historically questionable because they don’t have the backing of contemporary historical scholarship. Not in the least. What Habermas has done, through his careful and well-documented analysis of liberal New Testament scholarship, is to present a formidable case that ought to make a skeptical reader think twice before dismissing the resurrection.
Namely that the most liberal of NT scholars affirm certain historical aspects surrounding Jesus of Nazareth as historically factual.
So again, what are these particular facts?
Crucifixion
Disciples’ Experiences, Thought to Be Appearance of the Risen Jesus
Early Proclamation
Transformation of Jesus’s Disciples
Conversion of James, Jesus’s Brother
Conversion and Life of the Church Persecutor Paul4
Habermas also surveys six more points, what he calls “known/accepted non-minimal facts.”
Jesus Was Buried
Jesus’s Death Led the Disciples to Despair and Lose Hope
Empty Tomb
Resurrection Message at Center of Early Christian Preaching
Resurrection Message Proclaimed Initially in Jerusalem
Christian Church Established and Grew with Sunday as the Primary Day of
Worship5
Through reading On the Resurrection I was once more reminded of just how “public” the early Christian faith really was, not to mention how very public the teaching and acts of Jesus Himself were in and around Jerusalem. These events were done in plain sight, at festivals, in the streets, in the wilderness, in the Temple, wherever there roamed a multitude. “But come on, Ray,” you might be thinking if you’re an atheist, “You’re talking about someone rising from the dead. That just does not happen. Much apologetics has made you insane. You just believe what you want to believe.”
Three quick rejoinders. One, I am not insane (even if I were, that has no actual bearing on whether or not Jesus really did rise from the dead). Two, I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t believe what they want to believe. And three,
Jerusalem.
As the apostle Paul told Festus, “I am not insane, most excellent Festus; on the contrary, I am speaking out with truthful and rational words. For the king knows about these matters, and I also speak to him with confidence, since I am persuaded that none of these things escape his notice; for this has not been done in a corner” (Acts 26:25). Italics my own.
Keep in mind where these events recorded in the Gospel accounts occurred for the most part. Jerusalem may have been small in the eyes of Rome, but it was no “corner” for the Jewish people. It was the epicenter of holiness, the place where the presence of God dwelt.
Imagine today someone walking up the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., telling the multitude of gathered congressmen and senators and civil servants that soon not one stone of the iconic centerpiece of the American political tradition would be left on top of another. After being excoriated by the unbelieving publicans for what they perceived to be the ramblings of an anarchic madman, this radical anarchist then cries out that even if they killed him, he would raise himself from the grave three days later.
There you kind of have the feel of the impact Jesus’s words had on the religious leaders of His day, not to mention His own family, who thought Jesus was out of his mind (Mark 3:21).
Speaking of the various creeds formulated by the early church, including the one cited by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, Habermas emphasizes how important it is that these creeds were early, that is, they were composed within less than a decade of the events they describe. The Apostle Paul, for example had likely received the 1 Corinthian creed in all likelihood within three years after Jesus’s crucifixion, and that Paul received it from Peter, James (the brother of Jesus), and John while he was in Jerusalem.
Habermas writes, “if these two observations here obtain, namely, that many of the major credal traditions such as 1 Cor. 15:3-7 are both very early and that they originated in the eyewitness apostolic environment in Jerusalem, then this would be a huge mountain to climb for any scholars who wish to dismiss the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, particularly if there is also an absence of viable naturalistic hypothesis.”6
It’s like a former congressman from our above analogy who mocked the Capitol madman and assisted in putting him to death, returning to D.C. not but a few years after the madman was killed by the state to meet with the madman’s closest disciples and affirming their message.
If the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s resurrection are later fabrications of anonymous authors, one would be hard pressed to explain why, in the very austere and rigorously strict culture of first-century Temple Judaism in Jerusalem why there isn’t a single shred of textual evidence in existence today exposing these alleged fraudulent accounts of a resurrected-from-the-dead, veil-rending, homeless Rabbi from Nazareth, who for the most part, embarrassed and convicted the religious status quo to their core.
Granted, this is something of an argument from silence, but in this particular instance, the silence is quite deafening (I think Habermas said this in the book somewhere, but I cannot find the quote if he did!)
“But Some Doubted”
On the Resurrection really is a who’s who of most every reputable New Testament scholar since the late 19th century who has ever attempted to cast a hermeneutical pall of doubt over the resurrection. I picture Habermas as a street detective from inner-city Detroit with his office walls covered with black-and-white mug shots of skeptical NT scholars from David Strauss to Bart Ehrman. It’s like he has sat each one of them down and in his own gritty compassionate style, tirelessly and relentlessly interviewed them with such rigor and thoroughness, that they inevitably had to confess that yes, much of what they’ve studied about Jesus is finally historically trustworthy. “Your own ink betrays you,” Gary says. “Fess up.”
Though Gary tells you, the judge, that none of the contemporary scholarly skeptics he’s interviewed ever conceded the resurrection of Jesus really did happen, the stacks and stacks of his witnesses confessions piled up on both sides of your bench about the general historical reliability of the Gospel accounts and New Testament are not just airy nothings.
And this brings us to what I think are two of the more convincing and impressive historical criteria about Gary’s extensive survey. Enemy attestation and embarrassment.
What is “enemy attestation?” In a nutshell, it’s like two NHL players competing for the Stanley Cup who get into a center-ice brawl in double-overtime. In interviews after the game, these fierce competitors, with their sweating faces, cut and bruised, either willingly or begrudgingly, concede a few undeniably positive aspects about their arch rival’s puck-wielding prowess.
The criteria of embarrassment is akin to when a player of the losing team admits during an interview that he made a few mistakes; mistakes which he claims probably cost their team the game. “I should not have tried to score from center ice,” he laments. “Kind of showing off. Pride goes before a fall, I guess. I let the team down. And it probably was not a good that I was off-sides when we were tied with only a few seconds left in overtime.” His first-person concession of his failures would be solid evidence in support of sports journalists who watched the game but did not see the interview, who held similar independent conclusions regarding the player’s mistakes impacting the outcome of the game.
On the Resurrection itself is a thoroughgoing compendium of “enemy attestation” from liberal New Testament scholars going back to the late 19th century and all the way up to the present day.
In relation to the Gospel accounts, one cumulative example of “enemy attestation” includes the religious leaders attributing Jesus’s miracles to “Satan or Beelzebub (Mark 2:1-12; 3:22; Luke 13:10-17).”7 Those who opposed what Jesus was doing actually observed His miracles. Rather than claiming these miracles somehow to have been fabricated, however, they tacitly concede their miraculous nature by attributing them to the agency of a fallen angelic being, rather than avoid the implication that YHWH Himself was in their midst.
Another multiply-attested example includes Pilate giving permission to Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus’s body (Mark 15:42-45; John 19:38; Matt. 27:58; Luke 23:52). This account supports minimal fact #1, that Jesus died by crucifixion. Here we have multiple attestation that the confirmation of Jesus’s death came in part through a secular Roman governor who had little or no interest in the religious affairs of the Jews over whom he ruled, unless the situation might personally affect his good standing with Rome. Regarding Jesus’s death by crucifixion, Habermas quotes non-Christian New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan who vehemently denies Jesus’s bodily resurrection, but nevertheless affirms Jesus’s death by crucifixion as solid historical bedrock. “That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”8 Habermas also cites another skeptic scholar, Gerd Lüdemann, who unquestionably affirms that “the fact of Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.”9
The criteria of embarrassment in relation to the Gospel accounts is summarily exemplified in the short statement from Matthew 28:17 regarding Jesus appearing alive to His disciples, “but some doubted” and in the words of a few of the disciples themselves upon first hearing the news from the women that their Teacher was alive again, “And these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them” (Luke 24:11). These were the future leaders, the pillars, the foundation stones of the Church, and yet when the news of their central hope first reaches their ears, their hearts and minds are blinded by unbelief. Not exactly flattering accounts.
Though Habermas provides a treasure-trove of example after example related to these and several other historical criteria used by both liberal and conservative NT scholars alike, I’ll conclude here with a final example here of embarrassment. It is the account of Jesus in His hometown (Mark 6) where we are told “He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands upon a few sick people and healed them” (6:5). He could not perform a miracle? Could He not overcome the unbelief of sinful human beings? If He rose from the dead, then why is it Mark says He could do no miracle in His hometown? Truly, such an account serves to render this passage in Mark as historically trustworthy. Someone attempting to fabricate the account of a Messianic figure would likely not have included such a detail.
Miracles Aren’t History?
I truly appreciated reading Habermas unpacking the sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit notion put forth by liberal critics that say we must ignore or bracket theological or miraculous aspects of the New Testament. As he notes, “no sufficiently well-evidenced naturalistic backdrop demands that we ignore either the religious arguments or a reality beyond this one.”10
I’ve often heard the claim in different forms, especially from atheist and NT scholar Bart Ehrman, who attempts to cordon off history from theology, as if there were a clear epistemological line between the two. He himself doesn’t seem to know where the line is drawn. When I personally asked Ehrman during our live Atheist & Christian Book Club meeting a few years ago what he thought the disciples really saw, he affirmed that they saw something, but that they were simply mistaken. So is the claim that the disciples were mistaken a purely historical claim or does it also include Ehrman’s tacit theological assumptions as well? If the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth did not happen, Christianity collapses in a house of historical cards. It’s my personal belief as a Christian and as an apologist, that theology is inextricably tethered to history, as an anchor is to a boat. The Christian claim is that the God of the universe, Maker of the heavens and earth, came down to us in the Person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, at a particular place, in a particular time, and dwelt among us. That is at once both solid history and sound theology.
He has left us with plenty of evidence, both in the physical universe and in the Gospel accounts and New Testament letters.
You’ve Got Mail
And Jesus Himself has made a way to our mailboxes, ensuring that His letters have indeed been written and delivered specifically to me and to you. We cannot, however, check the mail when we’re dead. The lid has been lifted. He has risen! Our sin has been forgiven. As Habermas concludes, “the details presented here provide several credible paths that establish the thesis that Jesus’s disciples actually witnessed literal appearances of the risen Jesus…”11
Habermas, On the Resurrection, 963- 1008.
Ibid., 828.
Ibid., 828.
Ibid., 1011-12.
Ibid., 1013-15
Ibid., 376. Italics original to the author.
Ibid., 258.
Ibid., 301.
Ibid., 301.
Ibid., 961.
Ibid., 962.