In his book on the resurrection, Dale Allison claims that, in the canonical Gospels, the post-Easter Jesus does not approach but just appears suddenly at once. He also claims that he cannot be followed. But there are specific counterexamples to both claims. If you're going to claim that there are significant parallels between your favored non-bodily explanation and the canonical Gospels, you need to be more careful to remember what's in the canonical Gospels!Image courtesy of freebibleimages.org

I'm continuing to go through telling admissions that Dale Allison makes (without realizing that they are telling admissions) about the apparition literature. These show that there is no significant similarity to what we find in the Gospel accounts, even though Allison suggests that there is. Yes, he also thinks the Gospel accounts are embellished...at just the points where they don't resemble apparitions!Thumbnail: Banquo's ghost at the feast as portrayed by the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Joy Strotz.

Dale Allison says that bereavement apparitions (sometimes called grief hallucinations) provide useful and enlightening "parallels" to the content of the Gospel stories when they describe Jesus' appearances to the disciples. Grief hallucinations are often a skeptical go-to theory to account for the beginning of Christianity. Allison himself uses these alleged parallels to support his own version of an objective vision theory--Jesus really appeared to the disciples, but in a non-bodily form.Even if we don't delve deeply into Allison's rather uncritical survey of literature on apparitions, based on his own admissions, are there really significant parallels?In this series I will show that Allison makes very telling admissions that show that such apparitions (even if they are objectively real) do not constitute a good parallel for the data in the Gospel accounts. Of course, neither Allison nor more skeptical scholars think that the disciples actually experienced what is found in the Gospels. But that is where the bait and switch comes in: Allison sometimes explicitly claims and often strongly implies that the apparition literature provides useful parallels for *what we actually find in the Gospel stories*. Then, when it becomes clear that it doesn't really fit at all well, he switches to dismissing the parts of those stories that don't fit his theory as being made up later.Today we'll see this dynamic at work concerning Allison's telling admission (which he doesn't recognize as a telling admission) that apparitions often speak *only briefly*.

A skeptic recently sent me a link to this article about an ancient novel, the Aithiopika (or Aaethiopica) of Heliodoros.https://www.jstor.org/stable/25010772?read-now=1&seq=22#page_scan_tab_contents(If you are interested in the article, you can log into Jstor using your Google account and read it for free.)Here is a copy of the novel in translation (along with some other works). Find "THE ADVENTURES OF THEAGENES AND CHARICLEA" to read it. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55406/55406-h/55406-h.htm#HELIODORUSDoes the "realism" of this novel serve as a counterexample to claims I have made about the Gospels and Acts, the non-existence of what I have called "hyper-realistic" novels at the time of the Gospels, and the reportage genre? In a word, no. Watch to learn more! (And if I say so myself, for such a dusty subject, the summaries and readings I include later in the video of parts of the Athiopika are rather amusing!)

In this final (for now) video on the question of what skeptical and moderate scholars grant about the resurrection appearances, I argue that the majority of skeptical scholars probably do not even grant a group vision-like appearance experience with some degree of intersubjective content. I discuss how I think Dr. Habermas got, and gave, the impression that at least a lot of skeptical scholars do grant at least that much.Here is the livestream that I cite repeatedly in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YSY_hcIB14&t=349sI had intended to read a quotation from E. P. Sanders in the video but forgot to put it in my notes. There are a number of such quotations in which Sanders expresses complete agnosticism about who was present and what the disciples saw. I have more in my notes. Here is just one:"If we are also unable, as I am, to think that early Christianity was deliberately based on fraud, we must be content with the simplest, vaguest sort of conclusion: something happened to the followers of Jesus, but we do not know what it was.”When someone emphasizes strongly that he's pushing for only the "simplest, vaguest sort of conclusion" that "something happened to the followers of Jesus, but we do not know what it was," I think we should believe him. Sanders also says, "We are unable to find a 'bedrock' description or a fundamental list of appearances.” "But Did It Happen?" _The Spectator_, April 6, 1996, pp. 12ffhttps://archive.spectator.co.uk/page/6th-april-1996/12It looks like only a very small number of scholars one could with any plausibility designate as "skeptical" grant even some kind of group experience. I also implied but want to stress even more: For Ludemann, Goulder, and Vermes, it is difficult to assess what degree of intersubjectivity they actually agree to and whether this meets Licona's definition of a group appearance experience. Those I've designated as "moderates," most or all of whom consider themselves actually to *believe* in some kind of supernatural or paranormal resurrection of Jesus (which is why they shouldn't be called "skeptics") but who make heavy use of critical methodology on the Gospels (which is why I call them "moderates" rather than just "Christians" or "conservatives") do accept some kind of group appearance, but not the kind in the Gospels.What effect would these facts about scholarship have on our ability to make a good argument for Jesus' resurrection *if* we think of what is granted in this way as a representation of what can be argued for "as historians"? Thumbnail, Jesus Visits the Disciples in Locked Room Without Thomas © Drawn to the Word/Paul Oman Fine Art. All Rights Reserved.www.paulomanfineart.comUsed with permission

Do the vast majority, or virtually all, scholars across the critical spectrum grant appearances of Jesus to his disciples *that seeemed to them like what is told in the Gospels*? Emphatically not. When skeptical and even moderate scholars grant some kind of group appearance or other, they absolutely do not grant that it seemed to them like Jesus was eating with them as a group, having long conversations, and so forth. Not even that *phenomenology* of the experiences. (Yes, of course, if they're skeptics they don't agree that that really happened, but this denial goes farther than that.)Yet in a popular article in 2018, Dr. Habermas very strongly implied that virtually all scholars agree that the disciples had experiences as if Jesus was "having conversations with friends just like any of us might do" and that this was what convinced them that Jesus was risen.https://stream.org/surprising-scholarly-agreement-facts-support-jesus-resurrection/No wonder people get confused about how far the minimal facts argument can take us.Next time I'll talk about who does and doesn't grant even a vision-like or non-physical-like type of group experience, and spoiler--that doesn't seem to include a majority of skeptical scholars, either.

Dr. Habermas has astonishingly now claimed that he never gave any definition of "the vast majority of scholars" and that, except for the empty tomb (which he emphasizes is not a minimal fact anyway) he never made any head count of how many scholars affirm a proposition. Here is a blog post I did on this issue recently, with links.https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/08/habermas-now-says-that-he-never-made.htmlIn this video I discuss this same topic, what we can say with confidence, and what may be the explanation. It's clearly false that Dr. Habermas never made such claims. He definitely did. That can be documented. But perhaps he did not, in fact, make rigorous head counts. It's especially noteworthy that Volume 3 of his magnum opus, which is supposedly all about scholarly views, explicitly says that it does not document head counts. What, then, might have led to his implications, over decades, that he did so?Those using the minimal facts argument for the resurrection need to face this issue, which affects the argument even taken on its own terms.

In this final video in the series I discuss the use of fudge factors. These are ad hoc changes in a hypothesis of unstated symbolism that occur while the theorist still states that the resemblance between the numbers, events, passages, etc., is just too much for coincidence and hence favors some sort of intentional but unstated symbolism by the author.I discuss two places where people have overtly used such fudge factors.At the end I make a comparison to the claim that the two Temple cleansings in John and the Synoptics are just *too similar* to each other to be two different events, even though they are just generally similar. Enjoy!Thumbnail image fudge licensed under creative commons, copied from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge#/media/File:Vegan_Chocolate_Fudge.jpg

We're talking about the "Gilbert and Sullivan" problem for dreaming up far-fetched symbolic meanings for narrated Gospel details. "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." This week we see the "it's too easy" objection by considering this: If you can use "the sevenfold gift of the spirit plus the ten commandments, and then take the triangular number of that" as an unstated symbolic meaning of the 153 fish in John 21, you could dream up something just as "good" (that is, just as far-fetched and silly) if the number were something else.This is another way to see that using our creativity to come up with unstated symbolic meanings is a bad method.

What do I mean by saying that it's too easy to come up with theories of unstated symbolism in the details of the Gospels? And why does the fact that it's too easy create a problem for those theories?A song from an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan says, "If everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody." If you're willing to go far enough to come up with an unstated symbolism theory for the details of the Gospels (such as the view that John is symbolizing some particular theological idea by dyschronologically moving the Temple cleansing), then there is virtually no limit to the additional theories you can come up with. The choice among them is arbitrary. And that's a Gilbert and Sullivan problem.Thumbnail by Studio Ellis & Walery:[1] Alfred Ellis (1854-1930)[2] & Walery (Stanislas Julian, Count Ostrorog, either senior (1830 - 1890) or junior (1863 - 1935).)[3] - Scanned from the 1914 edition of François Cellier & Cunningham Bridgeman's Gilbert and Sullivan and Their Operas., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3987877

I return here to a topic that I think is important, though I'm taking an unpopular position: I think that there is probabilistic tension between the occurrence of *unstated* symbolic or allusive meanings in the details of the Gospels' narratives. This does not mean that it is *strictly impossible* that a detail could be both historical and intended by the author to have an unstated symbolic meaning. I just think it's unlikely. I think there is a pretty good reason why skeptics (and for that matter some Christians) try to use claims that the author put something in as an allusion to the Old Testament (e.g., the claim that Matthew put in the slaughter of the baby boys in Bethlehem to allude to the infancy of Moses) as an argument against the historicity of that incident or detail. And I think we should hesitate before dismissing such claims merely by saying, "That doesn't necessarily mean it's not historical." No, it doesn't *necessarily* mean that, but there is some tension nonetheless.In this video I explore this tension in terms of genre. If the Gospels' genre is, as I think we have ample evidence that it is, memoir reportage coming from people very close to the facts, whose primary purpose was testimonial, then this is some evidence against unstated symbolic meanings or unstated Old Testament allusions in the events and details of the narratives. In fact, the Gospel authors aren't subtle, because they aren't worrying about making a work of Art with a capital A. If they want to tell you that something fulfills prophecy, they don't hesitate just to come right out and tell you that, so you don't miss it.Here I use some references to works of fiction, including Chaim Potok's excellent novel _The Chosen_, to make these points. Enjoy!

In this last video in this series about Dr. Habermas's misinterpretations of liberal scholars, I discuss what I call "pseudo-updating" of references to Dale Allison, apropos of the conversion of James. Allison apparently changed his mind after he wrote in 1985 accepting the idea that Jesus' brother James was converted by a post-resurrecion appearance. In both 2005 and 2021 Allison expressed great doubt about that proposition, thinking it at least as likely that James became a follower of Jesus first and only after that had some sort of resurrection experience.Habermas triumphantly quotes Allison's now-outdated statement from 1985, footnotes both it *and Allison's more recent writings on the same topic*, but neglects to tell readers that these later references are to pages in which Allison contradicts what he said in 1985!If you are interested in other instances of serious misinterpretation of scholars in Habermas's work, see this series on C.H. Dodd:https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2024/05/gary-habermass-misunderstandings-of-c-h.htmlSee also this post on a truly egregious misinterpretation of David Wenham, in which Habermas quotes half of a sentence by Wenham, purports to summarize Wenham in the rest of the sentence, but summarizes him wildly inaccurately. (Wenham says that Paul may have taken his Damascus Road appearance to have been more physical than his own other visions of Jesus at other times in his life, which he does not characterize as resurrection appearances. Habermas summarizes this as Wenham saying that Paul might have thought that his own Damascus Road appearance was more physical than other resurrection appearances!)https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2025/07/another-egregious-instance-of.html

Bart Ehrman has insisted that he never thought and never said that Paul went to Jerusalem to interview Peter or that Peter gave Paul eyewitness testimony about Peter's resurrection experience. That's very likely true. Ehrman seems to have a fair complaint against Habermas for over-claiming on those points, and such over-optimistic interpretation is only too typical of Habermas, as we've already seen in this series.But that's only part of the story. In fairness to Habermas, I have to say that Bart Ehrman is retconning what he said in his book _Did Jesus Exist?_ about "all" (Ehrman's words) of the traditions that Paul explicitly says he "received." This would include the first verses of I Corinthians 15. Ehrman now emphatically denies that he ever said or ever though that that list of resurrection appearances was extant prior to Paul's conversion. He says that he only conceded that these traditions were in existence prior to Paul's writing his epistles. But here he's wrong. He did write things in _Did Jesus Exist?_ that Habermas quite fairly took to mean that this list was in existence prior to Paul's conversion.Watch to get all the details.Here's the interview between Ehrman and Paulogia where he makes these disavowals:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQmwC4jLzWE

In Dr. Gary Habermas's recent volume on the resurrection, he claims that the members of the Jesus Seminar show a degree of "respect" for the story of Jesus' first appearance to his male disciples in John 20:19-23 which is "rather amazing." He also implies that they show *some* degree of respect, though a lesser degree, to the story of Doubting Thomas later in that chapter.It is demonstrable, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the Jesus Seminar has *no* respect for either of those stories. None whatsoever. They are absolutely explicit, in the very work Habermas is citing, that they consider both stories to be completely fictional and lacking in any historical value. Habermas has apparently been confused by their use of technical form-critical terminology, in which they label the first of those stories as "concise" and the Doubting Thomas story as "intermediate." Habermas apparently thinks that these indicate some degree of historicity to the stories, since the Jesus Seminar also has a category of "legend," which is not the label they use for either of these stories. But in the Jesus' Seminar's usage, the categories of "concise" and "intermediate" should not be taken to indicate any degree of historical respect at all, and "legend" is just being used as a literary term, not an indication that things in that category alone are completely made up.In this video I also refer repeatedly to my series on Habermas's misunderstandings of the moderate liberal scholar C.H. Dodd. That series is here:https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2024/05/gary-habermass-misunderstandings-of-c-h.htmlAnd here is where you can go to check out the book of the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar:https://archive.org/details/actsofjesuswhatd00robe/page/n3/mode/1up?view=theater

I'm reading further quotations from the book of Jesus Seminar conclusions cited by Gary Habermas. According to Habermas, the Seminar acknowledges that a group appearance of Jesus to his disciples is attested by multiple, independent sources. This is not the case. We saw last time that Habermas misunderstands lists of sources by the Jesus Seminar, jumping to the conclusion that these are supposed to be independent sources, when in fact in those places the Seminar is just listing all sources that tell about some event or type of event.Here we see that the Seminar has its own non-independence theory of the origin of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' appearance to the eleven--namely, that they were imaginative embellishments of an appearance to Peter alone and/or of Mark 16:7, in which an angel says that Jesus will meet a group of the disciples in Galilee.Such imaginative embellishments are like the branches of a tree, with the single source (which is not reality itself, but some other account or claim--like the claim that the angel made such a statement), do not constitute independent attestation. So we can see in this additional way that the Jesus Seminar does not acknowledge multiple, independent attestation to a group appearance by Jesus to his core male disciples.Here is the Jesus Seminar book in question:https://archive.org/details/actsofjesuswhatd00robe/page/n3/mode/1up?view=theaterTree thumbnail from Wikipedia. By Łukasz Smolarczyk - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3402545

Does the Jesus Seminar acknowledge that group appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples are multiply, independently attested? Short answer: No.But unfortunately, in volume 1 of his recent set of books on the resurrection, Gary Habermas emphatically says that they do. Here I read several of the places where Habermas says so and also undeniable quotations where they say to the contrary. Habermas has committed a very serious interpretive mistake: He has looked at pages where the Jesus seminar lists "sources" or "accounts" of events surrounding the resurrection and has simply *assumed* that these lists must be places that the Jesus Seminar scholars are granting to be *independent* accounts. This is a highly dubious assumption, which Habermas should not have made to begin with, and the evidence of their discussion in the following pages is unequivocal to the contrary, but unfortunately he doesn't seem to have read and understood those following pages. These lists are simply of accounts in the Gospels and some extra-canonical sources. That's it. Just lists of accounts. Not lists of independent accounts.You can borrow _The Acts of Jesus_, cited by Habermas, and check out for yourself the pages he and I cite, on OpenLibrary.https://openlibrary.org/account/login?redirect=/books/OL697165M/The_acts_of_Jesus/borrow?action=borrow

Does the Jesus Seminar acknowledge that group appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples are multiply, independently attested? Short answer: No.But unfortunately, in volume 1 of his recent set of books on the resurrection, Gary Habermas emphatically says that they do. Here I read several of the places where Habermas says so and also undeniable quotations where they say to the contrary. Habermas has committed a very serious interpretive mistake: He has looked at pages where the Jesus seminar lists "sources" or "accounts" of events surrounding the resurrection and has simply *assumed* that these lists must be places that the Jesus Seminar scholars are granting to be *independent* accounts. This is a highly dubious assumption, which Habermas should not have made to begin with, and the evidence of their discussion in the following pages is unequivocal to the contrary, but unfortunately he doesn't seem to have read and understood those following pages. These lists are simply of accounts in the Gospels and some extra-canonical sources. That's it. Just lists of accounts. Not lists of independent accounts.You can borrow _The Acts of Jesus_, cited by Habermas, and check out for yourself the pages he and I cite, on OpenLibrary.https://openlibrary.org/account/login?redirect=/books/OL697165M/The_acts_of_Jesus/borrow?action=borrow

Over the next few weeks I'm going to look at some rather severe problems with Dr. Gary Habermas's interpretations of more liberal New Testament scholars, as represented in Volume 1 of his magnum opus on the resurrection.Regular viewers know that I have a lot of criticisms of the Minimal Facts Argument for the resurrection. In many of these I'm discussing the epistemology of the argument--e.g., the mistaken idea that acknowledging that the disciples had *some sort of experience* that led them to believe that Jesus was risen is automatically helpful to the argument for the resurrection, aside from the details of their experiential claims.https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2021/11/on-minimal-facts-case-for-resurrection.htmlBut in this short series I'm targeting something else: Since so much of the appeal of the MFA depends on stating that even liberal scholars grant this or that, and since the basis for this is often Habermas's review of written articles and books by these scholars, it's a big problem if he's misunderstanding those scholars in an overly optimistic fashion. Unfortunately, that's exactly what we find, repeatedly. This happens, unfortunately, so often, and reveals so much difficulty correctly evaluating and representing what the liberal scholars are saying, that a rule of thumb is this: If Dr. Habermas says or writes something about what "even the Jesus Seminar grants" or "even this skeptical scholar grants" that sounds surprising or too good to be true, you should be cautious about accepting that claim.It gives me no pleasure to have to say these things, but I think it's important to do so, if for no other reason than that the Minimal Facts Argument is so popular in apologetics.But this means that in the series I will probably be using words and phrases like "egregiously inaccurate" or even "careless." If you honestly think that this will simply be angering, or if you think that this must stem from some bad motive such as a desire to engage in personal attacks, I would seriously suggest that you not bother watching the series. But I would like to think that there is some openness to consider such intra-Christian criticisms soberly and fairly.

In this final installment of my series on the Pharisees in the Gospels, I reply to the last argument I could find in Dr. Keener's commentary on John. This is an attempt to use redaction criticism to line up John's account of the messengers from the Pharisees and treat it as a redactive adaptation (i.e. at least partially non-historical) of statements in Luke and Matthew. The astonishing thing is that these statements in Luke and Matthew aren't about messengers coming to John the Baptist at all! In fact, they aren't even about anyone explicitly asking John the Baptist any questions at all! On the face of it, the scene in John's Gospel in which messengers from the Pharisees come to John the Baptist is unique and *not* a parallel passage to anything in the Synoptics. Nonetheless, Keener treats it as if it is a parallel and then tries to argue that John both "eliminates" the crowds following John the Baptist and also "narrows" the interest in John the Baptist's identity and whether he's the Messiah from the crowds to the Pharisees. Obviously, John the Baptist was a figure of great interest to many people in that region. The Synoptics record that the crowds as well as Herod Antipas speculated (after John's death) about whether Jesus might be John the Baptist risen from the dead. With his popularity and fiery preaching, John the Baptist was a natural focus of curiosity. It should be unsurprising that *both* the crowds *and* the religious leaders (of various kinds) wanted to know if he thought of himself as the Messiah. John's Gospel isn't "narrowing" anything by reporting that priests, Levites, and Pharisees were all involved in a delegation asking him about his self-conception, while Luke reports that the common people were wondering if he was the Messiah.This argument illustrates just how badly conceived and badly argued redaction criticism really is, lacking in commonsense recognition of human motives and their outworkings in the Gospels.

Today I'm discussing one of the remaining arguments that Craig Keener gives in his commentary on John for thinking that John exaggerates the role of the Pharisees in a partially non-historical way. We've already seen in detail that statistical arguments about the number of times the Pharisees are treated as the opposition, or even the extent to which they work *alone* as the opposition in John, do not support this thesis at all. Here I address a priori history--a sheer insistence that the Pharisees *would not* have sent some priests and Levites to question John the Baptist and *would not*, even working in conjunction with the chief priests, have sent Temple guards to arrest Jesus. Strangely, Keener even acknowledges and cites passages from Josephus that independently confirm that in pre-70 Jerusalem Pharisees *were* involved in the ruling coalition and *did* send messengers, but Keener still holds on to the a priori claim that what John describes wouldn't have happened.