Latest / Paulogia / Research Neuters Habermas’ Resurrection Argument (feat Michael Alter)

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Research Neuters Habermas’ Resurrection Argument (feat Michael Alter) · Paulogia

0:00
SPEAKER_01: I use what's called the minimal facts argument.
0:02
SPEAKER_01: That's the most common name I use.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: I will use the data that an atheist New Testament scholar like Bart Ehrman is pleased to use.
0:11
SPEAKER_01: And I can name other atheist New Testament scholars, skeptics, Jewish New Testament scholars who are Jewish non-Christians.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: Maybe a few, but the list is a lot shorter than he's leading on.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: I'll use their data and the and the minimal facts argument, which I also I facetiously tease at a state university once in a while.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: I'll say, I call this my heads, I win tails, you lose argument.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: So they they lose either way.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: And everybody laughs.
0:35
SPEAKER_02: And everybody laughs.
0:37
SPEAKER_02: But is Gary right?
0:38
SPEAKER_02: Is the minimal facts approach to the resurrection unassailable?
0:49
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Pologia, where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians.
0:54
SPEAKER_02: And today we're returning to one of the most influential arguments in modern Christian apologetics, Gary Habermass's minimal facts approach to proving the resurrection of Jesus.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: My name is Gary R.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: Habermass.
1:07
SPEAKER_01: People say, What's your middle name?
1:08
SPEAKER_01: I say resurrection.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: It's actually Robert, but I say resurrection.
1:14
SPEAKER_02: If you're a regular to the channel, you're probably aware of my ongoing back and forth with Dr.
1:19
SPEAKER_02: Habermass and his general dismissal of me due to my lack of PhD.
1:24
SPEAKER_03: Just out of care, who was that critic that you had in mind there?
1:27
SPEAKER_01: So I I probably would rather not use the name on the air.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: It's not a well-known scholar, it's a popularist.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: Let's say that.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: Let the name of Moses be unheard and unspoken.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: Erased from the memory of men.
1:50
SPEAKER_02: During my critique of Gary's claims about his third volume of his Magnum opus on the resurrection, I came to be aware of a Jewish researcher and author who has quite independently been questioning the academic rigor of Gary's minimal facts approach in peer-reviewed journal articles.
2:07
SPEAKER_05: So finally, I pry these two names out of real seekers' mind.
2:14
SPEAKER_05: He gives me Michael Alter and Slade as as the two PhDs.
2:18
SPEAKER_02: Now, somewhat coincidentally, Alter did an interview with History Valley.
2:22
SPEAKER_04: Noble quotes.
2:23
SPEAKER_04: These are three quotes I want to think about.
2:25
SPEAKER_04: Paul Inns, Paul Augia, said the following recently.
2:28
SPEAKER_04: And Paul Paul Gia has a great website.
2:30
SPEAKER_04: He's a detractor, and he is blind.
2:32
SPEAKER_04: By the way, he is a former hardcore believer.
2:36
SPEAKER_04: Hardcore believer, and he chucked it all after years and years of research.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm pleased to say that turn of events has led to an email friendship with Mike Alter.
2:45
SPEAKER_02: And I'm so excited that he's agreed to join us today in full cartoon form on the heels of his completion of his 14th book.
2:52
SPEAKER_02: Welcome.
2:53
SPEAKER_02: Excited to be here.
2:54
SPEAKER_02: Mike, what brought you to your status of Rogue Galleries member for Gary Habermas?
3:00
SPEAKER_02: What's your origin story?
3:01
SPEAKER_04: Back in the 1980s, I was part of a Jewish fellowship in South Florida when our guest rabbi gave a talk about Key 73, a massive evangelical campaign aimed at converting North America, including a targeted push towards Jews.
3:16
SPEAKER_04: I wanted to understand what Christian missionaries were actually arguing so I could respond.
3:22
SPEAKER_04: This was long before the internet.
3:24
SPEAKER_04: So I spent years digging through university and seminary libraries, including Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and eventually Princeton Theological Seminary.
3:33
SPEAKER_04: Then around 2000, a biblical Unitarian looked at some work I'd written and told me something that shifted my focus entirely.
3:41
SPEAKER_04: None of this matters.
3:43
SPEAKER_04: The only thing that matters is the resurrection.
3:46
SPEAKER_04: I took that seriously.
3:48
SPEAKER_04: Over the next 12 years, I researched the resurrection and published my first work on it, which led me to investigate the well-known minimal facts argument and eventually met scholars like Jerry Habermat and Dale Allison.
4:00
SPEAKER_04: Awesome.
4:00
SPEAKER_04: Well, let's get into it.
4:02
SPEAKER_04: Imagine proving the most extraordinary event in history without relying on faith, without assuming the Bible is true, without asking anyone to take your word for it, using only facts that even your harshest critics already accept.
4:17
SPEAKER_04: That is exactly what Gary Habermath claims to have accomplished.
4:20
SPEAKER_04: He identifies a short list of historical claims about Jesus, typically six, and argues they are so well evidenced that the scholarly world has essentially reached a verdict.
4:32
SPEAKER_04: Not a slim majority, in his own words, he thinks.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: Super fast.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: Crucifixion, experiences believed to be resurrection appearances.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: They began preaching immediately.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: Their lives were transformed, as Bart Erman says, turned the world on its ear.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: James becomes a Christian because he notices the resurrection of Jesus.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: Paul becomes a Christian on the way to Damascus to the resurrection of Jesus.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: Those are the six I use.
5:14
SPEAKER_04: Now, the truly persuasive element here is not that Christian scholars accept these facts.
5:21
SPEAKER_04: That would surprise nobody.
5:23
SPEAKER_04: The power of the argument, the part that makes audiences sit up, is the claim that even the skeptics agree.
5:29
SPEAKER_01: According to Habermat, the critical scholars who accept these facts can be atheist New Testament scholars, agnostic New Testament scholars, Jewish non-Christian New Testament scholars, but bona fide scholars, they're the ones I'm talking to here.
5:42
SPEAKER_04: This framing is doing enormous rhetorical work.
5:46
SPEAKER_04: It transforms what might otherwise be dismissed as a confessional claim into something that sounds like an objective cross-ideological consensus.
5:56
SPEAKER_04: If the atheists and agnostics also grant these facts, the argument goes, then the evidence must be genuinely compelling on its own terms.
6:04
SPEAKER_04: Habermath and co-author Michael Lacona laid out the rules in their influential 2004 book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus.
6:13
SPEAKER_04: They specified two criteria for a fact to qualify as minimal.
6:19
SPEAKER_04: First, it must be supported by strong evidential arguments, ideally from multiple independent lines.
6:26
SPEAKER_04: Second, the vast majority of scholars in relevant fields must accept it as historical.
6:32
SPEAKER_04: These two criteria are essential.
6:35
SPEAKER_04: They are the load-bearer pillars of the whole approach.
6:39
SPEAKER_04: Remember them because we are going to keep coming back to them.
6:42
SPEAKER_04: In that same book, Hybermath and Lacona state their method plainly.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: This approach considers only those data that are so strongly attested historically that they are granted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject, even the rather skeptical ones.
6:57
SPEAKER_04: They add a point that, in retrospect, becomes rather important.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: In a minimal facts approach, we also should focus our efforts on presenting evidence.
7:06
SPEAKER_04: Presenting evidence, these are their words, their own standard.
7:11
SPEAKER_04: The question we're going to examine is whether, over the course of 50 years, that standard was ever actually met.
7:20
SPEAKER_04: So, what does a consensus actually look like under the hood?
7:24
SPEAKER_04: Where is the evidence?
7:25
SPEAKER_04: Where is a smoking gun?
7:27
SPEAKER_04: If more than 90% of relevant scholars truly accept these minimal facts, that would be a remarkable achievement.
7:34
SPEAKER_04: A claim that bold should come with bold evidence, a published data set, a list of names, a methodology other researchers could replicate.
7:44
SPEAKER_04: At the very least, a clear explanation of how the counting was done.
7:48
SPEAKER_04: The burden of proof, the onus, lies squarely with the person making the claim.
7:53
SPEAKER_04: None of that exists.
7:54
SPEAKER_04: In nearly 15 years of making this argument across dozens of publications, lectures, and debates, Hibermath has never released the data behind his consensus claims.
8:05
SPEAKER_04: No spreadsheet, no public list of scholars counted, no breakdown of how many were conservative believers versus liberal critics versus agnostics versus atheists.
8:15
SPEAKER_04: No explanation of what specific scholars accept which specific facts.
8:20
SPEAKER_04: The number that anchors the entire Milfrax approach, the 90% something percentile, has never been independently verifiable.
8:29
SPEAKER_04: It cannot be fact-checked.
8:31
SPEAKER_04: This is not an obscure complaint from the margins.
8:35
SPEAKER_04: It is the most basic question you can ask about any claimed consensus.
8:39
SPEAKER_04: Show us the names and the numbers.
8:42
SPEAKER_04: To understand just how long this gap has persisted, let's walk through the record chronologically.
8:48
SPEAKER_04: This is not cherry picking.
8:50
SPEAKER_04: This is the consistently consistent published written record of a scholar's 50-year project.
8:56
SPEAKER_04: The pattern is unmistakable.
8:59
SPEAKER_04: In his doctoral dissertation, Harbin wrote that his historical facts were held as being historical by the majority of theologians.
9:07
SPEAKER_04: No explanation of how he determined that majority.
9:11
SPEAKER_04: No data, no proof.
9:12
SPEAKER_04: In 1984, he published Ancient Evidence for the Life of Jesus, an escalated claim.
9:18
SPEAKER_01: His core facts, he wrote, are even more widely accepted by virtually all critical scholars as knowable history.
9:25
SPEAKER_04: His supporting evidence, a footnote listing 11 scholars, all believers, no methodology disclosed, where is the beef?
9:34
SPEAKER_04: Hey, where's the beef?
9:35
SPEAKER_04: In 1987, debating Anthony Flew, the same claim, facts generally agreed by practically all critical scholars, no supporting data.
9:45
SPEAKER_04: In 1989, 1992, 1996, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2012, 2015, 2016, the same pattern repeats with clockwork regularity.
10:04
SPEAKER_04: The language tightens and the confidence grows.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: Majority becomes virtually all, virtually all becomes almost unanimously recognized.
10:14
SPEAKER_04: But the evidentiary foundation of those words never materializes.
10:18
SPEAKER_04: Let me say that again, because it is important.
10:21
SPEAKER_04: From 1976 through 2024, across more than a dozen major publications, the claim gets bigger, the language gets stronger, and the evidence remains exactly the same, non-existent.
10:37
SPEAKER_04: Gary is consistently consistent, and what he consistently fails to provide is verifiable and falsifiable data.
10:46
SPEAKER_04: Remember those two criteria?
10:48
SPEAKER_04: Strong evidential support and near-universal scholarly consensus?
10:52
SPEAKER_04: In 2004, Hypermath and the Connor wrote that they should focus our efforts on presenting evidence.
10:59
SPEAKER_04: After 28 years of publication, at that point, the evidence for the consensus that underwrites the entire argument has not been presented.
11:07
SPEAKER_04: And it has not been presented since.
11:10
SPEAKER_04: So, where does this leave us?
11:13
SPEAKER_04: With a crucial question, if not a systematic methodology, then what?
11:17
SPEAKER_02: How did Habermath arrive at his numbers?
11:21
SPEAKER_02: You may recall the introduction to one of my recent videos.
11:24
SPEAKER_02: It's almost become a meme at this point, where Gary revealed his secrets.
11:28
SPEAKER_03: How did you go about keeping track of all the scholarly opinions?
11:32
SPEAKER_01: First of all, I'm not trying to sound cocky, but the Lord's giving me a good memory.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: I teach PhD courses without notes.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: First method, good memory.
11:41
SPEAKER_01: Second method, as I would go through, I have a notebook here on my right.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: I forgot about that.
11:46
SPEAKER_01: It's got little tiny sheets of paper, little tiny squares.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: Second method, tiny sheets of paper.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: And thirdly, I would categorize them in notes.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: Third method, categories and notes.
11:58
SPEAKER_01: And fourthly, I remember a very good memory.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: It's just there.
12:02
SPEAKER_02: Fourth method is also good memory.
12:05
SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
12:06
SPEAKER_04: Then came the line that may be the most important sentence in this entire discussion.
12:11
SPEAKER_04: When Dale Glover suggested this was similar to any expert who lives and breathes a subject for decades, Habermath agreed and summarized his approach to the data behind the most widely cited resurrection argument in modern apologetics.
12:28
SPEAKER_03: It's not just a guess or anything like that.
12:31
SPEAKER_03: Scholars have this kind of intuition, which is an informed intuition.
12:37
SPEAKER_04: Informed intuition, not a database, not a peer-reviewed methodology, not a verifiable count and intuition, a good one.
12:46
SPEAKER_04: Habermath believes earned through decades of reading.
12:49
SPEAKER_04: And that may well be true.
12:51
SPEAKER_04: Experts in any field developed reliable instincts about where the literature stands.
12:56
SPEAKER_04: But informed intuition is not what Habermath has been selling for 50 years.
13:00
SPEAKER_04: He has been selling a number, a 90-something percentile headcount.
13:05
SPEAKER_04: The word headcount implies that heads were counted.
13:09
SPEAKER_04: They were not.
13:10
SPEAKER_04: The practical consequence is straightforward.
13:12
SPEAKER_04: Without a published data set, without a list of which scholars were counted, without transparent criteria applied consistently, the middle facts consensus cannot be fact-checked.
13:24
SPEAKER_04: No independent researcher can look at Habermatz's numbers and confirm or deny them.
13:30
SPEAKER_04: The claim is, in the language of the sciences, unfalsifiable.
13:34
SPEAKER_04: You are asked to trust that the world's foremost resurrection apologist has accurately gauged the views of thousands of scholars across multiple languages and decades based on his memory, his tiny squares of paper, and his informed intuition.
13:51
SPEAKER_04: And here is where it becomes truly ironic.
13:53
SPEAKER_04: If an independent researcher like me, working without university resources or institutional support, can compile a data set of roughly 7,000 English language sources on the resurrection with each author's credentials, institutional affiliation, denomination, and degree document in a spreadsheet form.
14:13
SPEAKER_04: If one person can do that on their own, then why in 50 years, with the backing of a university and the help of graduate assistants, has Habermath never done the same?
14:24
SPEAKER_04: The transparency gap is not a technical limitation, it is a choice.
14:30
SPEAKER_04: Now, let's try something.
14:32
SPEAKER_04: Let's grant Habermath his number.
14:34
SPEAKER_04: Let's say, for the sake of argument, that something like 90% of public scholars on the resurrection do affirm his minimal facts.
14:43
SPEAKER_04: The consensus is real.
14:45
SPEAKER_04: 90 plus percent.
14:47
SPEAKER_04: That still leaves a question that the minimal facts approach never adequately confronts.
14:52
SPEAKER_04: Who are these scholars and why might they already agree?
14:57
SPEAKER_04: This is the problem of the sample pool.
14:59
SPEAKER_04: It may be the most damaging objection to the entire enterprise because a consensus is only as meaningful as the population it represents.
15:08
SPEAKER_04: What matters is not the front-end number, how many scholars agree.
15:13
SPEAKER_04: What matters is the back-end reality, who those scholars are and what interests they bring to the table.
15:19
SPEAKER_02: Consider a parallel.
15:20
SPEAKER_02: In Florida, men on death row are housed at Union Correctional Institution in Railford.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: If you polled them on whether the death penalty should be abolished, you would find near unanimous agreement.
15:31
SPEAKER_02: If you polled the surviving family members of the victims, you would likely find the opposite.
15:36
SPEAKER_02: Both polls would show a vast majority.
15:39
SPEAKER_02: Neither would tell you whether the death penalty is just.
15:42
SPEAKER_02: What matters is the sample.
15:44
SPEAKER_04: So what does the sample look like when it comes to the resurrection scholarship?
15:49
SPEAKER_04: In 2021, I published a statistical analysis of English language book written about the resurrection of Jesus over the past five centuries.
15:58
SPEAKER_04: This was not a casual literature review.
16:01
SPEAKER_04: It was a systematic catalog of 735 texts by 643 authors, published in a peer-reviewed article, now available at nearly 400 libraries worldwide, according to WorldCat.
16:13
SPEAKER_04: I documented each author's degrees, institutional affiliations, denominations, and professional roles.
16:20
SPEAKER_04: Pro-resurrection books outnumbered contra-resurrection books by a factor of roughly 12 to 1.
16:26
SPEAKER_04: Of the 601 pro-resurrection authors, 204 were ministers, 146 were priests, and 249 were affiliated with seminaries.
16:36
SPEAKER_04: On the other side, the 55 contra-resurrection books were written by just 42 authors, 28 of whom held no relevant academic degree at the time of publication.
16:48
SPEAKER_04: Read those numbers again.
16:50
SPEAKER_04: The field is not populated by disinterested historians arriving independently at the same conclusion.
16:57
SPEAKER_04: It is overwhelmingly populated by people with a professional, institutional, and personal stake and the resurrection being true.
17:05
SPEAKER_04: The next year, I published an expanded 119-page follow-up with about 40 more sources added and even more detailed variables.
17:14
SPEAKER_04: I found that 92% of the books in the data set were pro-resurrection, and 93% of the authors were pro-resurrection.
17:22
SPEAKER_04: I showed my work.
17:23
SPEAKER_04: I provided verifiable and falsifiable data.
17:26
SPEAKER_04: Insured, I presented the evidence.
17:28
SPEAKER_02: Frankly, given this, it's surprising that any fact fails to make Gary's 90% threshold.
17:34
SPEAKER_02: No fact would even need contra-resurrection affirmation to make 90%.
17:38
SPEAKER_02: And in fact, could even withstand some pro-resurrection rejection.
17:43
SPEAKER_04: When Habrimat says virtually all critical scholars accept his minimal facts, the pool from which those scholars are drawn is a pool in which the overwhelming majority of participants have a vocational commitment to the very conclusions being tested.
18:00
SPEAKER_04: Many work at institutions that require statements of faith.
18:04
SPEAKER_04: Many hold positions where publicly doubting the resurrection would end their careers.
18:09
SPEAKER_04: Consider the institutional pressures.
18:11
SPEAKER_04: According to the Association of Theological Schools, roughly 270 member institutions cycle through approximately 2,600 doctoral degrees and 3,000 full-time faculty positions each year.
18:24
SPEAKER_04: These are the people producing the literature.
18:26
SPEAKER_04: Hypermath counts.
18:27
SPEAKER_04: Many of them face publish or perish, pressures that flow overwhelmingly in one direction.
18:33
SPEAKER_04: Their scholarly output is not independent of their theological commitments.
18:38
SPEAKER_04: Those commitments are, in many cases, a contractual condition of their employment.
18:43
SPEAKER_04: Now, having a professional interest in a conclusion does not automatically make someone wrong.
18:48
SPEAKER_04: Oncologists have a professional interest in cancer being real, and they happen to be correct.
18:53
SPEAKER_04: But the relevant question is not whether interested parties can be right.
18:57
SPEAKER_04: The question is whether a headcount of interested parties constitutes evidence that they are right.
19:03
SPEAKER_04: It does not.
19:04
SPEAKER_04: A large sample drawn from a bias pool does not become unbiased by virtue of being large.
19:11
SPEAKER_04: This is sometimes called the law of large bias.
19:14
SPEAKER_04: A biased sample, no matter how big, produces biased conclusions.
19:18
SPEAKER_04: Gary's bibliography has grown over the decades from 1400 sources to over 4,500.
19:24
SPEAKER_04: The number sounds impressive because it's meant to.
19:27
SPEAKER_04: But if the sampling method is flawed, a larger sample just gives you a large amount of bad data.
19:34
SPEAKER_04: And now let's talk about who is not being counted at all.
19:38
SPEAKER_04: Hypermath limits his research to three languages, English, French, and German.
19:43
SPEAKER_04: These happen to be the three dominant languages of Western Christian scholarship.
19:48
SPEAKER_04: Missing entirely from his data set is Arabic, the scholarly language of roughly 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide.
19:57
SPEAKER_04: This is not a trivial omission.
19:59
SPEAKER_04: Islam explicitly denies that Jesus died on the cross.
20:03
SPEAKER_04: Muslim scholars have published extensively on this topic, likely numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands, of works.
20:10
SPEAKER_04: Every one of those scholars would reject the very first item of Haber Mathis' minimal facts list, that Jesus died by crucifixion.
20:18
SPEAKER_04: If Arabic language scholarship were included, the percentage of scholars accepting the full list of minimal facts would plummet.
20:26
SPEAKER_04: Well below 90, below 80, perhaps below 50.
20:31
SPEAKER_04: The virtual universal consensus would evaporate.
20:34
SPEAKER_04: When Dale Glover dismissed this concern by claiming that Arabic's not an academic language.
20:40
SPEAKER_04: He universally illustrated the exact bias the objection was raising.
20:45
SPEAKER_04: Arabic has one of the deepest scholarly traditions in human history, spanning philosophy, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and theology.
20:55
SPEAKER_04: For centuries, it was the leading academic language globally.
20:59
SPEAKER_04: The perception that does not count is a product of Western institutional assumptions, not linguistic reality.
21:06
SPEAKER_04: To make this concrete, think about parallel cases.
21:09
SPEAKER_04: If 5,000 Muslim scholars wrote books about Muhammad's miraculous night journey, you would likely find over 90% affirming the journey as historical.
21:19
SPEAKER_04: If you polled a thousand leaders of the Church of Latter-day Saints about whether Joseph Smith received gold plates from the angel Murani, the affirmation rate would be similarly overwhelming.
21:30
SPEAKER_04: No one would accept those poll results as evidence that the events actually occurred because a sample is self-selecting.
21:39
SPEAKER_04: The same logic applies to Christian scholars writing about the resurrection.
21:43
SPEAKER_04: Those who will understand will understand.
21:46
SPEAKER_04: And there is one more layer to the sample problem.
21:49
SPEAKER_04: And it may be the most circular of all.
21:52
SPEAKER_04: Recall the two criteria.
21:54
SPEAKER_04: In his 2024 book, Hybermath specified that for a fact to qualify.
22:00
SPEAKER_04: As minimal.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: The vast majority of published contemporary scholars with credentials in relevant fields of study have to acknowledge the historicity of the event.
22:10
SPEAKER_04: Read that carefully.
22:11
SPEAKER_04: Anyone who does not acknowledge the historicity of the event is, by definition, not part of the count that determines whether the event meets the threshold.
22:21
SPEAKER_04: The consensus is measured only among those who already agree.
22:26
SPEAKER_04: Dissenters are not refuted, they are defined out of the pool.
22:31
SPEAKER_04: This is circular reasoning dressed up in the language of methodology.
22:36
SPEAKER_04: It is like claiming that virtually all voters support the winning candidate after you've excluded everyone who voted for someone else.
22:44
SPEAKER_04: The result is guaranteed before the counting begins.
22:47
SPEAKER_04: So where does that leave us?
22:49
SPEAKER_04: The sample is overwhelmingly composed of people with professional and theological reasons to affirm the resurrection.
22:56
SPEAKER_04: It excludes the entire Arabic-speaking scholarly world.
23:00
SPEAKER_04: And the very criteria for being counted require prior agreement with the conclusion.
23:06
SPEAKER_04: When Habermath reports that 90 plus percent of scholars accept his minimal facts, he is not describing a discovery.
23:14
SPEAKER_04: He is describing an artifact of his own selection process.
23:19
SPEAKER_02: For decades, the minimal facts approach derived its rhetorical force from a single powerful promise.
23:26
SPEAKER_02: This is not just what Christians believe.
23:28
SPEAKER_02: This is what everyone agrees on.
23:30
SPEAKER_02: The argument worked precisely because it claimed to operate on common ground.
23:36
SPEAKER_02: Strip away faith commitments, strip away biblical inerrancy, strip away denominational loyalty, and you are still left with a core set of facts so well evidenced that even the skeptics can't help but concede them.
23:49
SPEAKER_02: That was the selling point.
23:50
SPEAKER_02: That was what made the argument different from every other resurrection apologetic.
23:55
SPEAKER_04: And the number was the proof.
23:57
SPEAKER_04: Here are Hibermass's own words, published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2012.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: At least when referencing the most important historical occurrences, I frequently think in terms of a 90-something percentile headcount.
24:11
SPEAKER_04: A percentile, a headcount, language that communicates precision, measurement, and rigor.
24:17
SPEAKER_04: For years, that number circulated through apologetics as though it were a verified statistic.
24:23
SPEAKER_04: Audience heard 90% of scholars, including skeptics, and drew the natural conclusion, someone had done the work, someone had tallied the positions, someone had the receipts.
24:34
SPEAKER_04: But then some of us started pointing out that no data set had ever been published.
24:40
SPEAKER_04: I did.
24:41
SPEAKER_04: You did, Paul.
24:42
SPEAKER_04: Even apologists like Lydia McGrew challenged his use of consensus language.
24:47
SPEAKER_04: And when Dale Glover pressed Habermath directly on how the 90% figure was determined, the answer changed.
24:55
SPEAKER_01: I only know of one place I've done that.
24:57
SPEAKER_01: And there's a difference between prescriptive and descriptive.
25:03
SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'm frequently asked in interviews, they may say this, the interviewer, I'm not asking you, did you set up a criterion?
25:12
SPEAKER_01: I'm asking you, where do you think the scholars that you've cited line up?
25:18
SPEAKER_01: And I'll and I'll say, Oh, they could they could well be over 90.
25:25
SPEAKER_01: But that's descriptive.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: I don't say anywhere in my in print that I know of, I don't say I only take the 90% who concede this fact or that fact, you know, like the keyword only or something like that.
25:42
SPEAKER_01: No, I'll I'll say things like, I don't count those um where they're at when I say a high majority, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were over 90.
25:55
SPEAKER_01: That's descriptive.
25:57
SPEAKER_01: Prescriptive would be you gotta be this high to be in the study.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: And that I don't I don't think um I I don't think I've ever said that that I'm aware of.
26:08
SPEAKER_04: And this new framing, the 90% figure was never a threshold that facts had to clear in order to qualify as minimal.
26:17
SPEAKER_04: It was merely his description of where he thinks the scholars fall.
26:22
SPEAKER_02: Gary's vibes.
26:23
SPEAKER_04: I wouldn't be surprised if there were over 90.
26:27
SPEAKER_04: That's not a finding.
26:28
SPEAKER_04: That's a feeling.
26:29
SPEAKER_04: The most influential consensus claim in modern resurrection of politics, the number that has anchored 50 years of arguments turns out to be something closer to, I wouldn't be surprised.
26:41
SPEAKER_04: It's not verifiable, it's not falsifiable, it's an impression.
26:45
SPEAKER_04: Habermass seemed to understand the stakes of this admission.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: In the same interview, he explained.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: I'd never have a minimum that they have to abide by.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: Then I would be skewing the data to say, oh, everybody's over 90.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: Wink wink.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: They had to be over 90, or I wouldn't put them in the book.
27:02
SPEAKER_04: He was trying to distance himself from the appearance of cherry picking, but in doing so, he confirmed something far more damaging.
27:09
SPEAKER_04: There was never a systematic count at all.
27:12
SPEAKER_04: The number that audiences treated as empirical was, from the beginning, an estimate.
27:17
SPEAKER_04: The problem is not that estimates are illegitimate.
27:20
SPEAKER_04: Scholars make informed estimates all of the time.
27:23
SPEAKER_04: The problem is that for 50 years, this estimate was never clearly labeled as one.
27:28
SPEAKER_04: Search Habermass's publications from 1976 to 2024, and you will not find a single passage where he states in clear and unmistakable language that the 9% figure is an impression rather than a measured result.
27:44
SPEAKER_04: The language consistently points the other direction.
27:47
SPEAKER_04: Headcount, virtually all, almost unanimously recognize these phrases do not communicate uncertainty.
27:54
SPEAKER_04: They communicate confidence rooted in data.
27:57
SPEAKER_04: When a researcher spends decades using the language of measurement and then under scrutiny explains that the language was actually meant loosely, that is not a clarification.
28:08
SPEAKER_04: That is a revision.
28:09
SPEAKER_04: Calling it descriptive versus prescriptive does not resolve the issue.
28:14
SPEAKER_04: It repackages it respectfully.
28:17
SPEAKER_04: It is a semantic word game played after the fact.
28:21
SPEAKER_04: And note what the semantic shift does to the argument.
28:24
SPEAKER_04: Hypermath is not merely moving the goalposts.
28:27
SPEAKER_04: He has removed them entirely.
28:29
SPEAKER_04: Anyone can kick a field gold when there are no goalposts to miss.
28:33
SPEAKER_04: Recall what makes the middle facts approach distinctive.
28:37
SPEAKER_04: It is not simply a case for the resurrection.
28:40
SPEAKER_04: What makes this approach special, what gives its name and its reputation, was the claim that the facts in question are minimal in the sense that virtually everyone across ideological lines already accepts them.
28:53
SPEAKER_04: Remove that claim, and you no longer have a minimal facts approach.
28:58
SPEAKER_04: You have a resurrection argument built on facts that one prominent apologist believes most scholars probably accept based on his memory and intuition, drawn from a sample he has never made public.
29:12
SPEAKER_04: Without verified data, the middle facts are not established facts except that cross ideological boundaries.
29:18
SPEAKER_04: They are claimed facts promoted within apologetics circles, resting on one scholar's unverifiable assertion that the consensus exists.
29:29
SPEAKER_04: The middle facts approach is not built on what critics grant.
29:33
SPEAKER_04: It is built on what believers claim critics grant.
29:38
SPEAKER_04: That is not common ground.
29:40
SPEAKER_04: That is a phantom.
29:42
SPEAKER_02: If I may interject my own non-scholarly complaint about this whole situation, when a lay person like myself hears someone say the consensus of scholars in field X believe position Y, what I'm imagining is that I could grab any random group of scholars from Field X and they will affirm proposition Y.
30:01
SPEAKER_02: I'm not imagining that the consensus of scholars in field X believe proposition Y really means of the people who've written a book about proposition Y, the consensus of those people confirm proposition Y.
30:15
SPEAKER_02: And that's the shift Gary has made and expects us all to come along.
30:19
SPEAKER_02: So when asked what scholars should be considered in the pool of those to consider, Gary will list the fields.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: With the terminal degree, usually means a good doctorate, in a field that is relevant to resurrection studies.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: So you could have a PhD in philosophy, you could have a PhD in history, you got a PhD in New Testament, PhD in theology, PhD in classics, PhD in archaeology, PhD in comparative religion.
30:45
SPEAKER_01: And all those fields give you tools to be able to evaluate these arguments.
30:52
SPEAKER_02: So we now know that when Gary says this, he means anyone in the field of philosophy, history, New Testament, theology, classics, archaeology, comparative religion who write about the resurrection specifically gets added to his mental vibe check.
31:07
SPEAKER_02: What Gary does not mean is that if you took a hundred random historians, they would affirm his facts, or that a hundred random philosophers would affirm his facts, or that a hundred random classicists would affirm his facts, or that a hundred random archaeologists would affirm his facts, and so on.
31:23
SPEAKER_02: As I go deeper into these topics and meet people who work in these fields, there's not a chance in the world that this could be true.
31:31
SPEAKER_02: At least that's my vibe, which makes it my vibe versus Gary's vibe.
31:36
SPEAKER_02: As long as I've been waiting for it, it turns out Gary publishing a list of his citations of people who took time to write about the resurrection won't demonstrate anything useful.
31:45
SPEAKER_02: The people who are fully trained and qualified in these fields have an opinion about these topics, whether they've taken time to write about them or not.
31:53
SPEAKER_02: Only an actual survey of all of them, or at least a representative sample, can cache the check that Gary has been writing for 50 years.
32:02
SPEAKER_02: If any postgrads are looking for thesis ideas, you can have that one.
32:06
SPEAKER_04: Let's walk back through what we found.
32:09
SPEAKER_04: Gary built the most influential resurrection argument over the last half century on a single powerful foundation, that a small set of historical facts about Jesus are so well evidenced that virtually all scholars, including skeptics, agnostics, and atheists, accept them.
32:26
SPEAKER_04: From that foundation, he argues that the resurrection is the best explanation for what everyone already agrees happened.
32:34
SPEAKER_04: The argument is eloquent.
32:36
SPEAKER_04: It is persuasive.
32:37
SPEAKER_04: And it depends entirely on the consensus being real.
32:41
SPEAKER_04: We've examined the published record going back to 1976 and found that the consensus claim has grown steadily over 50 years, while the supporting evidence has remained at exactly zero.
32:54
SPEAKER_04: Geary is consistently consistent.
32:57
SPEAKER_04: No data, no evidence, no proof.
33:00
SPEAKER_04: There is no published data set, no public list of scholars counted, no transparent methodology that any independent researcher can examine, replicate, or challenge.
33:11
SPEAKER_04: We examined how the number was derived and found that Habermass's system consists of piles of articles, shopping bags of paper, teeny squares of no paper, and a good memory.
33:22
SPEAKER_04: His own summary of the process is that scholars develop an informed intuition.
33:28
SPEAKER_04: The 90% figure was never the product of a count.
33:32
SPEAKER_04: It was a feel-in.
33:33
SPEAKER_04: We examined the sample from which the consensus is drawn and found it overwhelmingly composed of clergy, seminary faculty, and Christian academics, many of whom work at institutions requiring confessional statements of faith.
33:47
SPEAKER_04: Pro-resurrection authors of books outnumber skeptical authors by 12 to 1.
33:52
SPEAKER_04: The entire Arabic-speaking scholarly world is excluded.
33:57
SPEAKER_04: And the criteria for inclusion require prior agreement with the conclusion.
34:01
SPEAKER_04: The sample pool is biased at the front end, which means the output is unreliable at the back end.
34:07
SPEAKER_04: A larger number of sources cannot fix that.
34:10
SPEAKER_04: The law of large bias is not a technicality.
34:14
SPEAKER_04: It is the crux of the problem.
34:16
SPEAKER_04: And when we examine what happened when the pressure finally melted and found that Habernath retreated into a semantic distinction between descriptive and prescriptive, that amounts to admitting the number was never a measured finding.
34:30
SPEAKER_04: I wouldn't be surprised if there were over 90.
34:33
SPEAKER_04: It's not data.
34:35
SPEAKER_04: It is not verifiable.
34:36
SPEAKER_04: It is not falsifiable.
34:38
SPEAKER_04: It is an impression dressed up in the language of a headcount.
34:41
SPEAKER_04: Strip away the consensus and middle facts approach loses the one feature that distinguished it from every other resurrection apologetic.
34:50
SPEAKER_04: Without verified agreement across ideological lines, these are not minimal facts in any meaningful sense.
34:57
SPEAKER_04: They're claims that one tradition's scholars affirm drawn from a sample designed to produce that affirmation, measured by a method that has never been disclosed and defended by a number that turns out to be a guess.
35:11
SPEAKER_04: None of this means the resurrection did not happen.
35:14
SPEAKER_04: That is a separate question entirely, and people of good faith will continue to disagree about it.
35:19
SPEAKER_04: What it means is that the minimal facts approach does not deliver what it promises.
35:26
SPEAKER_04: It promises common ground and delivers a closed circle.
35:30
SPEAKER_04: It promises transparency and delivers 50 years of trust me.
35:35
SPEAKER_04: It promises that even the skeptics agree, but it is never showing us what skeptics agree to what, can it by whom, and verify by what process.
35:45
SPEAKER_04: In scholarship, truth requires more than assertion.
35:48
SPEAKER_04: It requires evidence.
35:49
SPEAKER_04: As Habermath and Laclona themselves wrote.
36:10
SPEAKER_02: Check the description for links to Mike's publicly available research, as well as to a PDF of all the relevant receipts on Habermas's work over the decades and the data presented here.
36:20
SPEAKER_02: As always, I encourage you to check the sources, read the primary texts, and research your own conclusions.
36:27
SPEAKER_02: I've been battling with Gary for a long time now, so if you want to hear more, tap on the Pologia vs.
36:33
SPEAKER_02: Gary Habermask playlist, thumbnail on screen now, and I'll see you over there.
36:37
SPEAKER_02: Until next time.
36:40
SPEAKER_02: Later.