Is there evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ? w/ Dr. Gary Habermas - Podcast Episode 90

Why the Resurrection Is Essential to the Gospel

To the Got Questions podcast. On today's episode, I was just telling him a few minutes ago that last year when we started the podcast, we kind of discussed as a team of who would we like to have on the podcast, and if so, on what topic.

And one of the people I mentioned was Dr. Gary Habermas. He is the world's foremost expert on evidence for the resurrection and the meaning of the resurrection. And today, here we are about approximately a year later after launching the finally able to make it work.

So, Dr. Habermas, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you very much. It's a good week for it and a great topic.

Yes. So, for those who may not be very familiar, Dr. Gary Habermas has dedicated his professional life to the examination of the relevant historical, philosophical, and theological issues surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus.

His extensive list of publications includes 45 books. He's also contributed more than 60 chapters or articles to additional books, and over 100 articles and reviews in journals and other publications.

In recent years, he has been a visiting or adjunct professor at about 15 different graduate schools and seminaries in the United States and abroad. So, Dr. Habermas is a distinguished research professor of apologetics at Liberty University.

So, the resurrection is a doctrine of the Christian faith that is crucially and vitally important. But I hear many, many people, when they're sharing the gospel, that they do an excellent job of explaining the meaning of Christ's death, but they just kind of mention the resurrection in passing.

So, why would you say, why is the resurrection so important? Why is any gospel presentation that lacks a thorough explanation of the resurrection inadequate?

Well, I'm glad you asked that. Because, I mean, the main reason, I give a lot of verses saying a lot of things, but the apostle Paul says, if Christ hasn't been raised, he says, our faith is we've not been forgiven of our sins.

So, I assume the death by itself gains nothing by Paul saying you can't even be forgiven for your sins. Twice in that passage, different Greek words, but same meaning, he says that the teaching the resurrection without it, Christianity is vain.

In fact, he ends his passage by saying we are of all persons most miserable. So, you know, it's pretty clear what's going on.

So, Dr. Habermas, your book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus was hugely helpful for me, because I mean, I believed in the resurrection, and I even knew to a certain extent the importance of it, but I never really heard a good presentation of the arguments for it, how much historical evidence there is for it.

But my question, what I kind of wanted to lead off with for you, what led you to dedicate much of your ministry life, your teaching life, to the resurrection?

Well, for me, the important thing was that it's the center of everything. I mean, when the New Testament is given a definition of the gospel, the resurrection is given top billing, it says without it, nothing else works, nothing else is true.

It's tied to almost every area of practice, almost every area of theology in the New Testament, over 300 verses on the subject, everything points to it. But as the key event in the gospel presentation, which I usually say is, whenever you look at the definition of the New Testament, the deity death and resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection, I think, has got to be right there at the top, because Paul says, with it, we've got nothing.

So that's it. I got into it, not because of this deduction, not thinking, oh, wow, let's go over the most important thing. I got into it because I went through years and years and years, many years of doubt, and the resurrection is what got me through the doubt.

So most of all, it was a move to help me with my own struggle. But as it came along, it was clearer and clearer. It was like I was saying, thank you, Lord, for letting me spend all my time doing the thing that's at the center of the universe in the gospel presentation.

So.

Minimal Facts and the Six Core Historical Claims

Yeah, exactly. So here, let me throw you a softball here, something that I know is definitely in your wheelhouse. What would you say are some of the strongest arguments or evidences for Christ's resurrection?

Well, I use what I call a minimal facts argument, and I teasingly say, even when I'm at university campuses, I'll say it's a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument, because I use data which are allowed by critical scholars, and I've surveyed thousands of them, and even if they are atheist, agnostic, other skeptical, or even, by their own definition, non-Christian commentators, they allow these facts.

And so I'm saying, well, if you allow these facts, then you ought to be prepared to deal with them. You ought to be, you know, tell me what your interpretation is, what do you do with them, and that usually gets us going.

So I'm using their data, which data are also found throughout the New Testament. So it's not that they're in the New Testament, because I use the New Testament critically. I use the New Testament the way critics would use the New Testament, and my point is, if you've got this much data on the critics' New Testament, you certainly have that and more on a more conservative view of the New Testament.

Let's give our listeners a few examples. If someone were to come to you and say, why should I believe in Christ's resurrection? What are some of the steps you take them through?

Well, I usually use six facts, they're always the same. I've used others over the years, but I've been using six for a long time. I would say it's the fact that Jesus died by crucifixion. That doesn't prove the resurrection, but it's a prerequisite.

So he died by crucifixion. The disciples had real experiences that they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus. Thirdly, this event was proclaimed very early. One New Testament atheist, unfortunately, just passed away recently, but Garrett Ludeman says that the resurrection message was preached immediately after the occurrences.

I mean, that's pretty early, you can't beat that. Immediately is immediately. Four, their lives are transformed to the point of being willing to die, and sometimes critics jump on your being willing to, and I say my typical response is, I'm not reading their minds, I'm watching their feet.

And when you go into cities that you've already been in and gotten beat up, or you go into a sister city that's a short distance away, and you know you had a really bad experience a few miles away, and you keep going in there, it means they're more interested in presenting this message than they are worrying about what's happening to them.

So their lives were really transformed. And we do have early martyrdom texts for the three, maybe the three biggest, most influential names, mostly Peter, Paul, and James the brother of Jesus. So that's number four, that their lives were transformed.

And five and six, two skeptics, James the brother of Jesus and Paul, both became believers from Paul for sure and everything we can tell about James, they both became believers because they had experiences too, just like the rest, and they thought those experiences were appearances of the risen Jesus.

Those are the six I use. There's many other things. You talk about the empty tomb, you talk about the female testimony, you talk about the Jerusalem origin of the preaching, because that's important because people could disprove the empty tomb and other parts of the message by, you know, an afternoon walk to go to the tomb.

And so all that figures in, but I think those six things.

Are the key. Yeah, what I love how you present it is that these are things that are generally accepted among skeptics, people who don't necessarily believe in the Bible, that these six things are historically reliable.

And the thing at lunch today, I was discussing with someone and he said, you know, I almost find the conversion of James, the brother of Jesus, to be more convincing than Paul, because for James, who the gospels describe him and his brothers and sisters as someone they did not believe in Christ until after the resurrection, something amazing and powerful would have happened to happen to convince someone that their older brother was God in the flesh.

So the conversion of James and what he did in his life from that point forward is a powerful testimony to something happened to change the trajectory of his life.

Yeah, and right up until just shortly before the cross, there's no, well, there's no evidence that James became a believer until he shows up in what we call the upper room in Acts chapter 1 after the ascension.

It says over 100 Christians were gathered together, and there it says Mary and the brothers of Jesus. So they're right there in the room, and I wonder what they're doing in a room with the earliest Christians that they were still unbelievers, they didn't want to come to their town because they were embarrassed.

I mean, the Greek, the Greek there in Mark 3, and then again, not too helpful in Mark 6, John 7, there's three passages, and it says that when he came to town, the townspeople were basically embarrassed, saying, you know, what's this guy coming back to us?

Isn't this Joseph's son? But more importantly, the Greek indicates that they thought he was mentally ill. The Greek says he was beside himself, like he was like two persons, like, you know, schizophrenic or something.

So it was a pretty bad view, and the brothers, the text seems to say that they moved him out, they wanted to move Jesus out of their view, and the suggestion is that they were embarrassed by his being there.

You know, they were going to be branded, and he'd leave town, and they'd be called losers. You know, who knows the reason, but the gospel, the brothers seemed to side with the townspeople.

Common Skeptical Objections to the Resurrection

So another interesting way to approach this faith in the resurrection, what in your experience are some of the most common attacks on the resurrection in the sense of people who reject it, what are some approaches that they take, and maybe how can Christians be prepared to respond to those?

Well, there's a really, really major difference in the way people who are not trained in the area respond versus those who are trained, and it makes no difference to me whether the unbelievers are, let's say, whether they're—well, I could say any way you want to—if they don't know the subject matter, they make things up that skeptical scholars would never say.

The skeptics who are not trained will come up with different statements than the skeptics who are trained, and the skeptics who are trained will allow a whole bunch of material, because they see the reason for it.

Skeptics who are not trained frequently get upset with the skeptics, even if they're atheists and agnostics, they say, you're allowing too much, and so it depends on who you're talking about. If it's a skeptic who's not trained, they'll say, well, don't read verses back to me because it's a prejudiced text, and I don't accept your text, and I really don't think it even makes a difference if you gave reasons for the reliability of Scripture, because no matter how you say it, they see it as a prejudiced piece of material, and right down to anything you say that they can't explain, you know, could have been made up, could have been factitious, there's all kinds of problems, and the most common critique going back to before 1800 up until the present, the most common, just head count, the most common critique by skeptics is there are contradictions and other problems in the Gospels, and the problem with the problem is these same critics, if they're scholars, the critics who think there's problems in the text still think, some of them still think he was raised from the dead, so what I mean is they don't think that the problems rule out the data.

I mean, I'll give you an example. If you were doing a report on George Washington, the first president of the United States, and you go to the library, maybe there's a couple things in his life that everybody knows didn't happen.

I mean, did he cut down the cherry tree and then tell his father, I have to tell the truth, yes, I cut it down? Well, they'd say, well, anything good, anything you can give, and you know, Jonathan, I mean, George Washington was an honest guy.

He told his dad the truth, but he probably made it up to make him look good. Our believers probably made it up to make him look good, so I don't think you're going to improve their view by giving evidence for scripture, so they think that by citing the text, it's prejudice.

Now, Bart Ehrman, the well-known atheist New Testament scholar, virtually every other skeptic, they're going to tell you, whenever you do a report, you go to the earliest sources, and Bart Ehrman says, the best sources for these teachings are in Paul.

They're in the New Testament, and he says, so I get asked once in a while, do I accept these things because, quote, unquote, the Bible says so, and Bart Ehrman says, I don't accept anything because the Bible said so, but the reason I accept the X, Y, Z verses I'm using is because I know where the accounts are evidenced and where they're not, and I'm only using the evidenced accounts, and then he makes a comment.

He said, if I'm studying the Civil War, i .e. George Washington or somebody similar, he said, if I'm studying the Revolutionary War or the Civil War or whatever, he says, I'm not going to stop from reading the letters from the soldiers or taking their interviews because they're prejudiced.

They've got to be lying. They're Americans, so therefore, everything they say is exaggerated. He said, that's not how you work. He said, even if there's issues, you work with the issues, but you have to use the earliest sources you have, and the Gospels are early, and the Epistles are even earlier.

JS That's an excellent example just of how, even if you don't believe the New Testament is the inerrant, infallible Word of God like we do, from a historical perspective, that doesn't mean it can just be thrown out, because it is literature speaking to the proper subject in the proper time period, so it has some weight to it.

WV Sure. Back to the story of you doing a report on George Washington. What if you pulled all the books on George Washington from the library, and they're on your desk, and someone tells you, do you know there are errors in every one of those books about George Washington?

Would you go, oh my, and get up and walk away? No, you would use the sources. If there's two sources that tell how he did something, or two sources that say how he did something else, you try to get to the bottom of it and figure it out, and maybe one source says, this guy was involved in blah, blah, blah, and you find out the guy died before the Revolutionary War started.

Well, you're answering the questions yourself, so we dig in and we do the research. We don't say I won't use the text, but my point is, no book that you get history from in a library is going to be inerrant.

It's going to report, I mean, unless it's a paragraph long, and that's the end of it, I mean, you're going to fall into problems, and if you reject all sources like that, you're not going to do any research.

So we have to be, every reporter, everybody investigating a murder, everybody in a bank robbery, or whatever, you've got to deal with witnesses that say, it was a red car. No, it wasn't. It was a green car.

We've got to sort these things out, but it doesn't stop you from getting data. So even these critics, they'll raise problems, but they don't think the problems keep you from learning what happened.

The Strongest Evidence for the Resurrection

So here's kind of a dream question for me. So I consider you the world's foremost expert on evidence for Christ's resurrection, but for you, you personally, what is most convincing to you? If you were to narrow it down to one thing, what to you is the most convincing evidence for the.

Resurrection of Jesus Christ? I would say that what I call the second minimal fact that the disciples had experiences that they believe were appearances of the risen Jesus, and no other theories or suggestions can explain what else they saw other than a.

Resurrection. Nothing else can explain how their lives so radically transformed.

Well, we know that radical life change can happen for a bunch of reasons that aren't always very good, and I wouldn't say that the transformation alone proves it, but I would say what really shows it is those experiences which can't be explained away.

The next thing I would tell you would be the earliness of the proclamation. We have resurrection proclamations from the 30s AD, the 30s. Now, how would you get the 30s? Mark is 40 years later, often said to be the earliest.

The epistle of 1 Thessalonians is probably the earliest at plus 20. Mark at plus 40 is the normal date. Why do you say years later when the earliest is plus 20, 1 Thessalonians? And the reason is because scholars know how to trace the account.

Again, I said earlier that Gert Ludeman, the atheist New Testament scholar, said the reports of Jesus' resurrection happened immediately after the appearances. I don't know if immediately means two days, five days, ten days.

In Acts, the first sermon, you've got Pentecost, and if Luke is right in Acts 1 that Jesus appeared for 40 days and Pentecost is 50 days, as far as we know, nobody's talking for 10 days. So, I don't know how long immediate is, but it was right after the fact.

In fact, some critics will even say the story started that year or it started within one year at the latest. So, I'd say that's probably the next most important thing is how early the account is. But the fact that the disciples had experiences that can't be explained away.

They all work together. They have experiences that can't be explained away. Their lives are transformed. They're reported very early. And how about these two skeptics, you know, who Paul persecuting James being a family member, each kind of skeptic is different, you know.

James grew up with them. You know, can you imagine James, yeah, mom, I didn't make my bed this morning, but how come you don't yell at Jesus? And she said, because his bed's always made. I mean, how much would you have to hear that before you get upset?

You can understand James's attitude, I guess. But the fact that he came and the fact that Paul was a pure persecutor and he came, I mean, all six are very important.

Defending the Resurrection with Gentleness and Respect

So, obviously I'm very into apologetics. I mean, you're a professor of it and much of your writing has been on either defense of the resurrection or even other issues in the Christian faith. So, often I will tend to go towards defending it, especially this time of year where we see lots and lots of questions of why do you believe this stuff or why should I believe in the resurrection?

But to you, what is the key to arguing, defending the resurrection, but doing as 1 Peter 3 15 says, to do so with gentleness and respect? Because sadly in the Christian community, I see a lot of people even making really good arguments for the resurrection, but not doing it with gentleness and respect.

And every time I've heard you speak and share on it, that's something I would describe of you. You're very gentle and respectful in how you respond to atheist critics and skeptics. So, what is the key to doing that the right way?

Well, I mean, thank you. I'm glad to see that. My grandmother used to say, you're going to catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And I don't think going off on people and getting angry at them, I think it's happened one time in hundreds of interviews where I got upset with an interviewer that was trying to trip me up.

And it was only after about the fourth time he did it that I got upset. Generally, I don't, I mean, in hundreds of interviews, you don't see someone go on for more than an hour. And if the person were local, I told some skeptics, I wish you lived next door to me.

I wish you liked football. You'd be welcome to come over on a Sunday afternoon to watch it with me. I told one of the best known skeptics in the world, an atheist. He was a big football fan, still is.

And I said to him, if you come over on Sunday and sit with me, I said, you and I can talk and talk and talk during the game. And I said, at the end of the season, someone's going to be converted and it's not going to be me.

I said that to him and he just laughed. He said, that's funny. He said, I'd love to watch football with you. So I try to get that kind of spirit of, you know, not being belligerent and starting fights before you even start the discussion.

That's powerful. And other verses on, may our speech be grace seasoned with salt, or speaking the truth in love.

While you're talking, if the person says something like, I mean, this won't happen, but if the skeptic says something like, all right, I'll grant the resurrection, but I don't think he was a son of God.

I think where the seasoned with salt thing comes in is you can't just say, all right, well, I understand and let it go. I think you have to kindly, but I think you have to confront it and say, well, here's several evidence cases where Jesus thought he was deity.

Why don't you tell me what you think is going on here? And my guess is they're going to get themselves in a corner pretty soon. But what I mean is I can't just let it go. They might tell me something like, well, I don't believe in inerrancy or something.

I'd say, well, I never expected you to do that. And I wouldn't, you know, I may not say something to everything, but especially if the person is going to say something about the deity, crucifixion, resurrection, I'm going to challenge them nicely and ask them as you would a friend, what do you have to say back about it?

Well, Dr. Gary Havermas, thank you so much for being on the show again. I cannot recommend your book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus more highly. It was hugely impactful for me. I know it will be for others.

And we'll include some links where you can learn more about Dr. Havermas and his ministry, his writings, his publications, because hugely beneficial. If you have any doubts, any concerns about trusting the resurrection, I cannot recommend a better source.

And if you're wanting to know how to better defend it to others and do so in a winsome manner, Dr. Havermas is well worth emulating there as well. So, Dr. Havermas, thank you again for being on the show today.

Thank you. If I can add real quickly, my website is Garyhavermas .com. Easy to remember. Garyhavermas .com. I also have a YouTube channel. There are hundreds of items combined on those two. And apparently some people like them because I've had, I don't know, I think it's over 7 million hits on my website.

So people are getting the information and that's what it's there for. I don't sell a thing. If somebody wants a book, I send them to one of the distributors. I don't, you know, I don't have them on my website or YouTube.

It's not advertised. It's all about the gospel. So I get a lot of questions answered too. So I hope it's all about ministry and not about me trying to make money or something. I think that's ridiculous.

Fantastic. And we'll.

Include links to where you can learn more, including his website and his books and so forth. The show notes for this episode at podcast .gotquestions .org, and also at the description on YouTube when this video goes live.

So thank you again, Dr. Havermas. It's been a privilege having you on the show. This has been the Got Questions podcast. Got questions? The Bible has answers, and we'll be finding them.