Habermas on the Resurrection

The premier work on the topic:

The life and death of Jesus Christ is at the very centre of the Christian message. But without his resurrection from the dead, we are left with no real gospel at all. Instead, “we are of all people most to be pitied” as the Apostle Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 15:19.

Since it is the core doctrine of the Christian belief system, it has of course been attacked and refuted from early on. Plenty of critics have sought to disprove it. So for 2000 years now theological, apologetic and scholarly works on the resurrection have appeared. Some notable recent treatments include The Resurrection of Jesus by Michael Licona (IVP, 2010) and The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright (T&T Clark, 2003).

Of interest, the noted atheist Antony Flew abandoned his misotheism toward the end of his life and wrote a book in 2007 about his change of heart, stating that he had to follow the evidence where it leads. In it he said that Wright had made a solid and convincing case for the resurrection. Wright’s 800-page book has been a leading work in this area.

But now we have the newest and arguably the best and most exhaustive defence of the resurrection available. The 4-volume, 4000-page set is called On the Resurrection. Penned by New Testament scholar Gary Habermas, it is published by B&H Academic. Two volumes are now available, with a third soon to appear. A fourth one is still in the works.

The three volumes so far are these:

Vol. 1: Evidences – 2024, 1054 pages
Vol. 2: Refutations – 2024, 882 pages
Vol 3: Scholarly Perspectives – available in May, 2025, 992 pages

The details of volume 4 are not yet available. When complete, this set will be the gold standard for all things pertaining to the resurrection of our Lord. It is hard to see how it will be surpassed, at least any time soon. And Habermas has already written a number of useful volumes on the topic:

The Resurrection of Jesus: An Apologetic (Baker, 1984).
The Risen Jesus and Future Hope (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (with Michael Licona) (Kregel, 2004).
-Did the Resurrection Happen? A Conversation With Gary Habermas and Antony Flew (edited by David Bagget) (IVP, 2009).
Risen Indeed: A Historical Investigation into the Resurrection of Jesus (Lexham, 2021).

So his new four-volume set is the magnum opus of his long and renowned career. I look forward to having the complete set whenever they all finally appear. But be forewarned: the set will take up a good part of your shelf space, and it will substantially drain your wallet (each volume being around $100, at least here in Australia).

As the titles listed above indicate, the first volume deals with the biblical, historical and theological evidence for the resurrection of Christ. In his Introduction he says this about what is to be found in this set:

The research and preparation for these four volumes on the death and resurrection of Jesus grew from a PhD dissertation on these same subjects that preceded this present study by decades. Long after the dissertation, I began assembling a resurrection bibliography on these subjects, currently standing at some 4,500 sources. These entries largely date from 1975 to the present and were originally gathered to simply update the sources in the dissertation by describing the more recent state of the questions. At the outset, this effort did not extend very far beyond updating references and taking some notes, but this slowly grew into the current, full-fledged document, one chapter at a time.

 

Questions have arisen often pertaining to the number of sources studied that contributed to the bulk of this overall topic. The bibliographic texts noted above were often reviewed, with more than 2,000 of them becoming the primary basis for these four volumes. Originating separately long after the dissertation, this present project was built on this research foundation of specific works on these subjects. The majority of these 2,000 works were dissected in all their significant, exhausting plethora of details. These research notes themselves are anticipated to be published in volume 3 of this work, as they chart the views of major critical scholars, reaching close to 1,500 manuscript pages and covering 140 separate categories or questions regarding the last days of Jesus’s life. This project has developed into sort of a who’s who on the resurrection pertaining to these researchers and their positions on these various issues. A large number of additional reference texts were also invoked, as they are always necessary for research. So far, the overall post-dissertation part of the project has taken roughly twenty years and still counting, with much work still needing to be completed.

Image of On the Resurrection, Volume 2: Refutations
On the Resurrection, Volume 2: Refutations by Habermas, Gary (Author) Amazon logo

Volume 2 looks at the many objections, criticisms and refutations presented over the centuries to the doctrine. Old and new challenges are discussed in great detail, with more recent figures like Hume and Bultmann and Barth given a fair amount of attention.

All the usual critiques are carefully dealt with. Consider just one: the idea that the resurrection of Christ is simply in the same category as various dying-and-rising god myths and legends. Familiar names from Egyptian mystery religions come to mind for example, such as Isis and Osiris.

Habermas says we need to carefully assess two primary questions in this regard:

First, were there any examples of dying-and-rising gods before the first century AD and the time of Jesus? The minimal required characteristics for these stories of the gods have been developed and debated throughout this chapter. But the candidate must at least, in the same tradition, clearly be reported to have died and then have been seen alive afterward. Second, could any or all of these ancient accounts of dying-and-rising gods, or even the general Mediterranean ethos itself, have influenced in any significant way(s) the many New Testament accounts that report that Jesus did in fact die, clearly followed later by his own resurrection appearances, suggesting that Jesus was some sort of a copycat account?

 

The popular religionsgeschichtliche Schule of interpretation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at least thought that the first question could be answered affirmatively: these dying-and-rising cases were indeed thought to exist.’ On the other hand, today it is probably the case that the majority of scholars who specialize in these subjects have decided negatively on the first question, favoring the notion that there were few, if any, clear cases of dying-and-rising gods before Jesus. Most prominent researchers presently appear to doubt that specific cases may be located and identified with assurance, at least when careful definitions are allowed.

 

There are numerous possible candidates for ancient dying-and-rising gods, but the chief view appears to be that in every or virtually every case, the clear factual and dating constraints are missing, plus the causal data to bridge the strands between the various arguments are often lacking or just collapse under scrutiny. This results in the breakdown of the hypothesis, making the stories quite susceptible to other cogent explanations.

And briefly, as to the second question: “Very few, if any, specialist scholars at present, regardless of their own religious convictions, respond positively that any ancient dying-and-rising ethos inspired the Christian options of Jesus’ deity, death, and resurrection appearances.”

He devotes many more pages dealing with each of these two broad questions, and then says this in part in his conclusion:

So we close this chapter with a qualified agnostic position on whether there were actual dying-and-rising gods before Jesus, with perhaps a slight edge in the direction of the negative position. But this is admittedly quite a problematic issue to solve definitively. Still, it is clear for a large number of reasons that these ancient tales did not create or even significantly influence the New Testament teachings of Jesus’s death and resurrection. For this conclusion there are many favorable reasons and almost unanimous scholarly agreement.'” Finally, a large number of recent and often quite influential researchers also agree that the liberal religionsgeschichtliche tradition retains exceptionally little weight today.

The final chapter of the book, Appendix 3, briefly looks at Islam and the resurrection of Jesus. As with other critics, including non-religious ones, the attempt is made to say the gospel accounts contain too many contradictions and conundrums to be worth believing. Says Habermas:

But we have seen that this tactic fails for at least three reasons. (1) These claims of contradiction regarding the New Testament texts can all be answered anyway. Many scholarly volumes and thousands of pages have shown that this is the case in both general as well as specific cases.

 

(2) Claimed contradictions and other such problems virtually never disprove events anyway. Ask any police officer, lawyer, physician, or journalist if conflicting stories indicate that a particular accident, crime, disease, or football game never occurred. Highly trained professionals are experts at sorting out likely scenarios even in situations where the claims are far from unanimous.

 

(3) Finally, as pointed out above, using the minimal facts method bypasses this issue with claimed contradictions altogether because it utilizes only those facts which are exceptionally well established historically, to the point where virtually all critical scholars concede them. If they are sufficient to establish Jesus’s death and resurrection, then the basic case for these events is shown to be true.

Hopefully these short quotes will give you a bit of a feel for what is found in these books – at least in the first two volumes. I hope to write further articles on this set, sharing more of what is contained therein, so stay tuned. As mentioned, if you are pressed for time, short on available bookshelf space, and financially poor, these volumes may not be for you.

But aside from those minor details, these volumes belong in your home! Thank you Dr. Habermas for your many decades of service on this area of scholarship.

[1653 words]

2 Replies to “Habermas on the Resurrection”

  1. Thanks Bill for this review. I will try to obtain a copy of at least one of the volumes with my limited financial resources.
    Two issues arise from your review:
    1. The “dying-and-rising god” motif of Egyptian mythology as an “explanation” of the resurrection I have long regarded as missing the whole point of the resurrection, for two reasons:
    (a) The feature of the resurrection for the apostles, the one that really gripped them, was that Christ was a dying and rising MAN, not a dying and rising god. By MAN came death; by MAN came the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor 15:21)
    (b) Unbelievers, liberals, and the like have long contended that the deity of Christ was a slow development, not evident in the C1st, and for some not even evident until the C3rd or the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.). On that thesis, how could a “dying-and-rising god” be the source of the resurrection story in the C1st?? Unbelief involves an inherent lack of coherence, and is self-contradictory.

    2. What Egyptian myth gave rise to the Emmaus road story? What motif of mythology is the source of the Stranger on the shore narrative, along with a barbecue breakfast (John 21)? What myth lies behind the accounts of the women visiting the tomb?

    This allegation of mythology takes me back to my student days, when I had a lecturer in Hebrew constantly telling us that everything in the Bible was borrowed mythology. But looking at the resurrection in particular this whole notion is entirely fatuous.

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