Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? (With Dr. Kirk MacGregor)

The Christian Case for Evidence and the Resurrection

All right, welcome to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Elias Ayala. And today I am super excited that we're going to have a real live scholar in the studio today to talk about a very, very important topic, especially those who are interested in apologetics, right?

The Bible tells us that we are to set apart Christ as Lord in our hearts, always being ready to give a reason for the hope that's in us. And one of the ways that we do that is we talk about the foundations of our faith, the evidentiary foundations of our faith.

And yes, as a presuppositional apologetics, I believe in the use of evidence. And so I am very excited to have with me Dr. Kirk McGregor. Now, before I kind of give the floor over to Dr. McGregor, I wanna kind of just give some background about Dr. McGregor.

He is a professor at McPherson College, okay? McPherson College. He is a historian of religion, a theologian and a philosopher of religion, and he is an award-winning teacher. He was named the 2017 and 2018 Professor of the Year and received the 2017 and 18 non-tenured faculty teaching award at McPherson College.

In addition, he was named the 2016 Outstanding Faculty of the Year at the College of Lake County before coming to McPherson. He also taught at James Madison University, Radford University, the University of Northern Iowa, and Western Illinois University, and Quincy University.

So he's been around. And yeah, yeah, he's written a few books as well. One that he is particularly well-known for is a book on Louis de Molina. And so Dr. McGregor is an expert, I would say, on the topic of Molinism.

And again, even though we disagree, he has helped me in understanding the perspective very much. Perhaps later down the line, we can have him talk a little bit about Molinism if people are interested in that as well.

But that is not the topic for today. I have Dr. McGregor here to discuss one of the central questions of Christianity, and that is the resurrection of Jesus. Did Jesus rise from the dead? And so today, I welcome Dr. Kirk McGregor from McPherson College to discuss that very topic.

So why don't you introduce yourself and maybe add some information that I haven't in my little introduction here. Well, thank you so much, Eli. It's a real pleasure being on the show today. The resurrection of Jesus has always been a topic that has interested me historically.

It's really one of the first topics that I ever worked on in my academic days in philosophy and religion. So as an undergraduate, I took a very important class with Dr. Edwin Yamouchi. Edwin Yamouchi is now retired.

He's an emeritus professor at Miami University in Ohio, and he's an eminent Christian historian, archeologist, biblical scholar, and he has written in defense of the historicity of Jesus' resurrection.

And so the project that I did for his class was a defense of Jesus' resurrection, which tries to look at the earliest evidence we have for that event. Now, since that time, I have written a few very important articles on this topic.

In 2006, I wrote a piece in the journal of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled 1 Corinthians 15, 3b to 6a and 7, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. And I think that that particular source, 1 Corinthians 15, 3b to 6a and 7, is one of the two most important sources for Jesus' resurrection.

And then I wrote an article more recently in the journal Scriptura in 2018, entitled The Ending of the Premark and Passion Narrative. And I think the Premark and Passion Narrative is the other most important piece of historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection.

Historical Evidence, Oral Tradition, and the Early Sources

All right, and that's good that we be familiar with the sources and that they're very early, and that's important when we're looking at whether, if we're asking the question whether a historical event occurred, we wanna get back to the earliest sources.

But of course, as you know, there's so much more involved in that. Why don't we define our terms first? What do we mean when we speak of evidence in general and historical evidence in particular? I mean, what makes something evidence?

Yeah, evidence would be any form of testimony or any phenomenon that makes an event or makes the hypothesis of an event more probable than it would have been without it. So we could say that my having clean teeth today is evidence that I brushed my teeth because my having clean teeth counts in favor of the hypothesis that I brushed my teeth this morning.

If I hadn't brushed my teeth this morning, you wouldn't expect for me to have clean teeth. And so in general, evidence for anything is really testimony, experimental discoveries, any type of data that would make some hypothesis more probable than it otherwise would have been.

So now when we're talking about history, for example, so when we're looking at events that occurred in the past, what do we do with people who say, well, there can't be really any conclusive evidence for events that have occurred in the past, especially if they occurred over 2000 years ago.

I mean, how can we really know about history? What would you say in response to people who are historical skeptics? I would say that the amount of time between the events taking place and now has nothing whatsoever to do with whether we can reconstruct the past.

The issue is how good our sources of evidence are. In other words, the crucial time gap is not the time gap between the events and today. The crucial time gap is the distance between the event and the evidence for the event.

And if that time gap is narrow and you take a look at various historical criteria of authenticity, which I'll talk about in just a minute, and it seems like an event well satisfies at least one of those criteria of authenticity, then it really doesn't matter whether or not a long time has passed since or a short time has passed since.

So the evidence for JFK's assassination is just as good today as it was back in the 1960s. So the passage of time hasn't done anything to invalidate the evidence. Okay, so the common accusation that a lot of people say, well, it's happened so long ago, we can't really know for sure events that happened so long ago is really an irrelevant statement because the question is not, it's not that the passage of time makes the evidence that we have bad.

The evidence is just the evidence. Right, exactly. Okay, okay, okay. All right, very good. Now, okay, so what about this issue? And this is common on the internet and there are people who state this with great confidence and it really shows their detachment from scholarship.

What could we say to help people who are struggling with the mythicists, the people who say, well, there's no evidence for the fact that Jesus even existed. If there is evidence, it's so small that we can't really be conclusive with regards to the existence of a historical person, Jesus.

Now, two things, is that claim taken seriously in scholarship, whether believing or unbelieving? And two, what are some evidences that we could equip people with to demonstrate that that's really not an issue or a problem for Christianity?

Yeah, well, it's not taken seriously by the vast majority and I'm talking over 99 .9 of critical biblical scholars. So by critical biblical scholars, I mean folks who attend the Society of Biblical Literature every year who are secular researchers on ancient Christian history or the history of religion or New Testament, people who would attend the historical Jesus section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

So far from the academy thinking that Jesus might be a myth, there is an entire section of this academic secular society devoted to trying to uncover more information about this historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth.

So the evidence for Jesus is actually far greater than the evidence we have for the founder of any other major world religion. And it certainly is as good, if not better, than the evidence for Julius Caesar or the Emperor Nero or Pontius Pilate or anyone else.

So if you're going to doubt that Jesus existed, you're going to basically have to, again, like you said, deny all knowledge about the past. So when you look at the life of Jesus, I tend to like to start with the very earliest sources.

So people tend to think that the earliest sources for the life of Jesus are the documents in the New Testament and that's actually not the case. What is the case is that scholars using a technique known as form criticism and a related technique called tradition criticism are able to look at documents and to see if there are any forms in that document.

Now, a form is a technical term. A form is a memorizable oral tradition, which if you try to change it, then the form no longer makes sense. So imagine an oral tradition, which is very tightly controlled by parallelism and meter and rhyme scheme and repetition of words, so that it would be easy to pass on from one person to the other.

It would be completely the opposite of the child's game of telephone. And if you try to alter it in any way, then the form would no longer make sense. And really we're acquainted with this all the time whenever you listen to popular music.

So whatever you think of, say, Katy Perry as an artist, the reason why I can listen to her songs maybe two or three times and have all of the words memorized is precisely because she is using exactly the same mnemonic devices as the ancients did in transmitting these forms, these memorizable oral traditions.

And so there are a multiplicity of memorizable oral traditions, which go back to the 30s, actually go back to the time that Jesus actually did and said various things. So a scholar like Bart Ehrman, who certainly is not a Christian in any sense, he would recognize that there are many, many oral traditions which come directly from the lips of Jesus that date back to the 30s.

And that's something that secular New Testament scholars would agree upon. So you first of all have that wide body of oral material, which is really our bedrock evidence because it is the very baseline.

And then as you go up, and I'm going to assume here kind of latest possible dates, if you go up, then you think about the Gospel of Mark, which would be written between 65 and 70 CE. If you think that there was an early version of the Gospel of Thomas that was written around 50 CE, you have the Q document written around 50.

And you also have other documents, which scholars call M. This would be a document that Matthew would ultimately use in writing his Gospel and a document called L, which Luke ultimately used in writing his Gospel, as well as a document known as the Sign Source, which is kind of the best memorable deeds of Jesus.

And all of these come before the fall of Jerusalem or during the time of the fall of Jerusalem. So all of these are 70 or before. This would put them in the very first generation. This is when people who saw Jesus and heard Jesus were still alive.

And then you have in sort of your third layer of material, things that use those earlier sources, like the Gospel of Matthew, which most scholars would date between 80 and 85, Gospel of Luke, which would be dated around the same time, Gospel of John between around 90 and 100.

So just given that information, all one needs to ask is, are any two of these sources independent of each other? One of the most important historical criteria of authenticity is multiple independent attestation.

And that means that if you have two sources, which are in a position to report accurate history and they're independent of each other, then you know beyond reasonable doubt that the event occurred. So the example I share with my students, if you had a newspaper reporter from the Boston Globe and a newspaper reporter from the Houston Chronicle, who both flew up to the Rose Garden to hear President Trump give an address and they didn't know each other, they never contacted each other, and they both flew back to their respective cities and they both reported independently that Trump did or said something, then we would know beyond reasonable doubt that Trump said or did it.

And we know in the case of the sources with regard to the life of Jesus, that between 30 and 40 of these, if you're counting all of the different oral traditions, are independent of each other. And so you have multiple independent attestation for the life of Jesus fulfilled 30 to 40 times over.

So to doubt Jesus historicity is absolutely insane. And And that's a quote you could take to the back. Yeah, and if you wanna add anything to that, it's also interesting that sources outside of Christianity do report Jesus.

So there are nine non-Christian extra biblical sources that I make sure to acquaint my students with who do talk about Jesus. Josephus has a couple of passages on Jesus. If you could just hold it right there, I do apologize for interrupting.

I want to go to those outside sources, but I just wanna clarify. So you're saying that the best things that we could appeal to for evidence or early witness of Christ is of course the New Testament, but you're saying that there are sources with, there are sources within the source of the New Testament.

Correct. That can be derived out of the text that gives us a knowledge that this is based upon earlier testimony that goes further back to the text itself. Yes, absolutely right. Okay, and so it gets us very, very close to the events, to the lifetime of Jesus, well, within the lifetime of Jesus and things like that.

Okay, so there's a source within the source and you would say one example of that would be 1 Corinthians chapter 15, right? Yes, absolutely. Okay. So 1 Corinthians 15, specifically verses 3B to 6A and 7.

So scholars have taken a look at this formula and have been able to determine that verse 6B, most of whom are still alive, though some have died, that was Paul's parenthetical remark that he added when he wrote 1 Corinthians in around 55 CE.

But by careful analysis of the grammar as well as the style, the repetition of words, the mirrored parallelism, we know that there is an ancient creed that Paul passed on to the Corinthian congregation.

And if you cross-reference 1 Corinthians 15 with Galatians 1, we know that he received this creed from Peter and James in the year 35, which is only five years after the event. Now, if Paul received this creed, which we're gonna talk about in a minute, from Peter and James in the year 35, then the creed has to have been formulated before that.

So we're talking worst case scenario about a source that goes back five years after Jesus' death and probably goes back within, say, either weeks or months of Jesus' death. And this is a source which is eyewitness testimony.

The persons whose names appear in this creed are the very individuals who drew up this creed. These were all members of the early Christian community in Jerusalem. So when you're reading this creed, it truly is a statement of eyewitnesses.

And that's not my judgment. That is the judgment of the Jewish New Testament scholar Pinchas Lapid. So this creed, Paul prefaces it by saying, for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.

And here are the words delivered. Got my Greek New Testament here in front of me. So the word delivered, peridoka, and then received, perelebon. Those are technical rabbinic terms for passing on sacred tradition.

So right out of the gate, Paul is admitting that this material is not his own, but that he received it from an earlier source. And by correlating this with Galatians, we know exactly when. So it's a six-line formula.

It goes like this. Line one, that Christ died in behalf of our sins according to the scriptures. Line two, and that he was buried. Line three, and that he has been raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

Line four, and that he was seen by Cephas, then by the 12. Line five, then he was seen by over 500 brothers and sisters at one time. Line six, then he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. So if you look at this formula, what you have is eyewitness testimony, amazingly, from Cephas, that's the Aramaic name for Peter, the group of 12, that would have been with Matthias as number 12, because Judas was off the scene, a group of 500 believers at one time, James, the younger brother of Jesus, who had not been a follower of Jesus during his earthly career, and a larger group called all the apostles.

Now, when you look at this, some things stick out like a sore thumb. First, the creed uses several terms, which are not found anywhere else in Paul's writings. So we know that Paul is quoting from an earlier source.

Examples of what are called hapax legomena, things that are found just here, they're not Pauline traits, they are indicating that Paul is quoting from an earlier source, would be the phrase, in behalf of our sins, the phrase, according to the scriptures, the phrase, he has been raised, the phrase, on the third day, and the phrase, the 12.

Even more than that, you have a number of layers of parallelism. Notice that you have grammatically unnecessary features, unless you're trying to make it easy to memorize, then you would need the features.

So you have four instances of that, hati, that, that, that, that. That he was buried, that he was Right, right, right. Followed by four instances of ita, then. So that isn't just by coincidence. Even more than that, there is a mirrored parallelism.

In other words, if you look at those six lines of the creed, and fold it in half, then the structure of the first half is the same as the structure of the second half. So the first line of the creed gives you a piece of information, and then the grammatically unnecessary phrase, according to the scriptures.

Now, probably this was put in as a mnemonic device, without necessarily any particular scriptures being in mind, because early Christians had not yet found proof texts like Isaiah 53 or others to be able to attach any significance to Jesus' death.

But they thought, well, they're in there somewhere, we just haven't found them. So that Christ died in behalf of our sins, according to the scriptures. You don't need that grammatically. And that he was buried, line two, shorter line.

Line three, and that he has been raised on the third day, according to the scriptures. So you'll see that there's a parallelism between lines one and three, in that they end with a grammatically unnecessary phrase, according to the scriptures.

Now, do we have exactly the same tendency in lines four through six? The answer is yes. In line four, you have, and that he was seen by Cephas. And then you have, instead of saying, and that he was seen by Cephas and the 12, that would be a more easy, that would be a smoother way of speaking.

Instead of saying that, it said, and that he was seen by Cephas, then, ita, so you have this word then, followed by a group of people in the dative case, in the Greek, toistodeka, that's by the 12th. So that's grammatically unnecessary.

All the creed would have had to say to communicate the same information is that, and that he was seen by Cephas and the 12th. That's the most straightforward way to do it. But instead it is, ita toistodeka, then, and then a group of people in the dative case.

Then you have line five, then he was seen by over 500 brothers and sisters at one time, then line six, then he was seen by James. Notice it doesn't say, then he was seen by James and by all the apostles.

That's the easiest way to do it, it says, then he was seen by James. Then, again, the same word, ita, again, followed by a group of people in the dative case, all the apostles. And so you've got a mirrored parallelism in that lines one, two, and three of the creed, line one and line three, you've got a clause followed by a grammatically unnecessary phrase, shorter clause in between, lines four through six, exactly the same thing.

Clause followed by grammatically unnecessary phrase in four and six, shorter one in five. Yes. So everything you're saying here is demonstrating that in 1 Corinthians 15, this is evidence of oral tradition that stands behind the text itself, just to give people context.

Right, right, right. All right, and that brings it earlier on. There is a question, or maybe a comment someone has, maybe you could address, and I have it on the screen there. This person says, according to the scriptures, that phrase, they're not sure what you mean when you say that it's not necessary grammatically.

And so how do you work into the What I mean by that is, if you were to try to communicate that Jesus died for our sins, you could just say that, Jesus died for our sins. You wouldn't need according to the scriptures.

Similarly, if you were trying to communicate that Jesus was resurrected on the third day, you could just say that. You wouldn't need according to the scriptures. So the fact that you have this clause according to the scriptures, especially when no particular scriptures were yet in mind, shows that even though they did believe that somehow that this was foreshadowed by the testimony of the Hebrew Bible, nevertheless, that they're using it more than anything else as a way to make sure that people keep this creed memorized.

The New Testament as a Library and the Question of Non-Christian Sources

Okay, now, okay, so I wanna get to this issue of the closeness of the oral tradition to the events. I'm gonna jump back there, but another common thing that people hear is, well, you can't use the Bible to prove the Bible.

You get this in common discussions online and whatever. And of course, as a presuppositionalist, I might have a different way of tackling that. But many people do ask the question, well, what sources outside of the Bible refers to Jesus and how can they enlighten the fact that what the Bible is recording with regards to Jesus, and you have that early testimony, how do we take this extra biblical material and bring it together to provide a stronger case?

Well, there are two things I would say. First of all, is that the whole reason why in the study of ancient history, you have what are called the criteria of authenticity. So I gave one earlier, criterion of multiple independent attestation.

There are about nine others. New Testament scholars typically use five of them frequently in their research, like the criterion of dissimilarity, the criterion of embarrassment, the criterion of formal criticism, the criterion of coherence.

But what these criteria are designed to do is to filter out any potential bias of the source. So if you have these criteria, then it makes absolutely no difference whether or not the source is a Christian source or a non-Christian source, as long as the sources are independent.

If you had two independent individuals who both came to believe in Jesus, it doesn't matter that they both came to believe in Jesus. That's sufficient evidence for the existence of Jesus and whatever facts that they would happen to agree upon.

And the same goes for all of the other historical criteria as well. Now concerning using the Bible to prove the Bible, I think that's just ridiculous. People don't take into consideration that the Bible is really a library.

So each of the documents in the Bible, not only can you get to the sources underlying them, which is really what I'm most interested in as a historian, but if you're looking at the sources within the New Testament, they have different levels of independence and interdependence among them.

And scholars know exactly what these relationships of independence and interdependence are. And each of these documents originally circulated by itself in various communities, and these were not collected under two covers and called the New Testament until around the year 367 CE.

So the New Testament is a library of all of these independent and interdependent works. It's very much like if you would go over to the library and look at the shelf on psychology, and you would find a number of works there that are independent and interdependent of each other.

And somebody would say, well, you can't use the library to prove the library. That's just dumb, okay? So the fact of the matter is you've got these multiple sources here and we know how to use them. We know how to filter out any potential bias and therefore that settles the matter.

Now, if anyone wants, it seems like the reason why people talk about non-Christian evidence is not really because it's in any way needed, it isn't. Once you've got those historical criteria, then you can automatically filter out the bias.

But if you want non-Christian sources, then as I indicated, people like Josephus, who was a Jewish historian who was born just after the time of Jesus, lived through the Jewish war, was actually a participant.

Tacitus, who lived in the second half of the first century. Roman historian, Suetonius. The early material from the Sanhedrin. So you have early Sanhedrin material, which give a very negative perspective on Jesus.

A skeptic of early Christianity and cynic who mocked Jesus named Celsus. A guy by the name of Phlegon, who was a Greek freedman. So you have, and Maravar Serapion, who was a Samaritan historian. We tend to forget that Samaritans were interested in history too, even though people oftentimes give Samaritans a bad name.

But in any event, we've got at least nine different, depending on how you count them, at least nine different non-Christian sources, which date from the acceptable time to report accurate history, which are each independent of each other.

So we have nine more independent sources here for the existence of Jesus. And the reason why I say at least nine is because it depends on how you figure the Gnostic works into this. We have a lot of Gnostic Gospels, around 40.

And some of these, in terms of their earliest forms, go back to the acceptable window. So you pretty much close the acceptable window about a hundred years after the event, around 130. But you've got the Gospel of Thomas by that time, at least in its earliest form.

You've got the Gospel of Mary by that time, at least in its earliest form. It's disputable in terms of when you want to date the other Gnostic texts. But if you wanna say that the Gnostics are real Christians, then they would get lumped into the Christian category.

If you wanted to say that they're so different that they're not real Christians, then they get lumped into the non-Christian category. That's right. All right, very good. Now, I wanna focus real quick on the issue of Josephus, because Josephus is brought up a lot, especially when we're talking about external sources for Jesus.

I wanna read the Josephus quote, and I want you to respond. Why is it not a good idea to use Josephus, or maybe it is a good idea to use Josephus' quote that's kind of infamous, because many people believe it to be an interpolation.

So I'm gonna just read it real quick. This is Josephus. About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.

He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him, accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him.

On the third day, he appeared to them, restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him, and the tribe of the Christians so called after him has still to this day not disappeared.

Now, that is obvious that I can see why someone might not accept that as a viable source for Jesus. So what is the issue? Here's a question that I have before you even get to that. Are there any textual variants of this quote that say anything different than what we have here in Josephus?

Yes, in other words, you're not reading from the updated critical edition of Josephus, which does not contain the passages in that testimony, which are obvious interpolations. So this was an issue of how much of Josephus we can trust before the year 1972.

So before the year 1972, our earliest manuscripts of Josephus were medieval, like back in the 1200s and in the 1300s. And that's a long time since Josephus lived. So at some point, various Christian monks had gotten a hold of this text and had decided to put in phrases that no first century Jew who did not support Jesus as the Messiah would have said.

For example, that he did miracles, that he was the Christ, he was the Messiah, that he appeared to them alive again on the third day as the prophets have foretold these and 10 ,000 other wonderful things concerning him.

So the debate before 1972 was given the fact that the rest of the passage of Josephus reads like Josephus' style. If you look at the rest of Jewish antiquities and Wars of the Jews and his other works, then is it the case that you can just delete these lines and trust the rest of it?

Or does this call the entire thing into question? And really scholarship was split about 50 -50 prior to 1972. And in 1972, the Israeli scholar Shlomo Hines at Hebrew University discovered a much earlier manuscript of Josephus and the most earlier manuscript of Josephus does not contain any of those disputed passages.

And we know that the earlier manuscript of Josephus was not preserved by Christian hands, was actually ironically preserved by Muslim hands. So that basically settled the issue. So today Real quick, I do apologize.

So even though that text of Josephus has been tampered with, it is still a good source to use as a witness to the existence of Jesus, although not everything that Christians believe about Jesus. Right, right.

In other words, the version of Josephus that you read from is probably William Whiston's version or a similar version. Paul Meyer has since come out with sort of the authoritative issue on Josephus. And with the Meyer text, it doesn't contain any of those passages because that's just no longer our earliest source.

So it's kind of like if you read the King James version of the Bible, which contains certain interpolated passages, and you read, say, the New Revised Standard of the Bible or the New International Version, which removes all of those interpolated passages.

So in terms of the critical edition of Josephus that scholars work with that doesn't contain any of those elements, but does contain everything else, that scholars all the way across the spectrum from someone like John Dominic Crossan, who certainly has no interest in promoting the historic Christian faith, he relies wholeheartedly on the Josephus passages as in the earliest texts.

And on the other side, people like N .T. Wright and really everywhere in between. So it's not a disputed issue anymore, except that I think that most people aren't aware of the advance in scholarship from the 1970s to today.

Yeah, and I think that's an issue with online apologetics. I just had someone just sent me a message this morning about the problem of evil being a big issue, a logical problem. And not many people, yeah, yeah.

Not many people are aware of the fact that it is no longer Religion, correct. Yeah, it's not considered a serious issue that there's a logical problem of evil. And that's why you have the probabilistic problem of evil or the emotional problem of evil.

So again, so the internet skeptics types are still stuck in old, old scholarship and are just not up to date, right? And I think that's very important in regards to discussions on the historical Jesus and the resurrection and things like that.

We need to make sure that our information is updated. All right, now let's zero in now. So I'm an unbeliever. You've invited me out to a cup of coffee, right? And for some reason we're in my office, right?

Okay, and I'm saying, hey, listen, how do you know Jesus rose from the dead? I mean, you're a Christian, you believe that this crazy miracle happened. How would you begin a conversation with someone like me?

Bayesian Probability, God's Existence, and the Resurrection

I would say that even though the intrinsic probability of a person's resurrecting from the dead is low, nevertheless, when you look at the probability that Jesus resurrected from the dead, given the evidence, then that probability is actually quite high.

And it's astonishingly high, high enough so that the rational person ought to believe in it. So I'm gonna try to get technical here for a minute. If I can use this board behind me, I thought this might come up.

So I'm gonna see how much I can write here. See if I move my hand here. All right, so if you're trying to establish the probability of the resurrections, this just means the probability of the resurrection given on the condition of the evidence, then that would be equal to the probability of the resurrection intrinsically.

That's the intrinsic probability times the probability that the evidence should be exactly the way it is if the resurrection occurred, divided by the same thing, P of R times P of E given R, plus the probability that the resurrection did not happen.

Let's call that not R. See, I'm running out of room here. Times the probability of the evidence being what it is if the resurrection did not occur. And so what you're saying here is that, yes, I agree with the skeptic that this probability right here, the probability that Jesus resurrected from the dead intrinsically is low because the probability of anyone resurrecting from the dead is going to be low.

But this low probability can be completely offset if this factor right here is even lower, and this would be the probability that the evidence should be exactly the way it is, and yet the resurrection not have happened.

So what is the probability that the evidence is exactly the way it is, given that something other than the resurrection happened? And if you can show that this approaches zero, then notice the structure of this equation.

It's like X over X plus Y. And if you can show that Y approaches zero, then this ultimately will go to X over X. Doesn't matter what X is, how low it is. X over X would be one, which is absolute certainty.

And so the philosopher of religion, philosopher of religion at Oxford University, Richard Swinburne has written on this subject. He's published a book with Oxford University Press called The Resurrection of God Incarnate, in which he uses this type of logic and says, how likely is it, how likely is the resurrection on the evidence?

And he computes it to be 97%, 0 .97. Are you referring, is what you're referring to here related to Bayesian probability theory? Yeah, yeah. So what I've just given is basically a Bayes theorem defense of how I would approach a non-believer.

And the reason why I would do that is because a lot of people shy away from it because it's math and people have math phobia. But the reason why I tend to like it is because it's easier than going through, there are these historical tests that scholars use when looking at competing historical hypotheses.

And there are such tests. The philosopher of history, C .B .N. McCullough has written a whole book on that called Justifying Historical Descriptions, where he lists between six and seven tests that scholars use when trying to determine what's the best explanation.

And you can, as William Lane Craig has done, try to use those tests to show that the best explanation is that Jesus resurrected from the dead. But you can also do it this way as well. And there definitely, there needs to be the evidence considered with the background information of the existence of God.

And so Right, right. In other words, what exactly does your evidence include? So what exactly is the background information of the world? So since, you're right, since the background information of the world is key, if I wanted to be more complex and more confusing, I'll be at a bit more complete.