This Timeline Forever Changed The Easter Resurrection Debate

Easter is right around the corner, so there will be more than the usual attention paid in the media and elsewhere to the debate about whether Jesus actually was literally resurrected from the dead three days after being crucified, or was it merely something imagined — or manufactured — by His disciples.

Professor Gary Habermas (Screenshot from YouTube).

Professor Gary Habermas notes in the following excerpt from his best-known lecture that, when he was doing his dissertation in the 1970s, you would be laughed at for claiming a literal resurrection.

Five decades later, scholarship on the issue has been fundamentally changed to the point that a majority of scholars who specialize in this work, whether they are skeptics or believers, agree that the tomb was empty and that something happened.

“A lot has happened in the last 30 years in resurrection studies. When I went to graduate school, in the middle ages, in the 1970s, if you talked about, pick a topic, if you talked about the empty tomb, there would be a lot of snickering and nobody evangelicals who published in this area would accept it,” Habermas explains at the outset of the lecture.

“If you talked about resurrection appearances of Jesus, Rudolph Bultmann died in 1976. He and Karl Barth dominated a century of theology. Bultimann was a skeptic and people were still in his shadow when I was in grad school. If you mentioned appearances, everyone would laugh.

“Today, the majority of New Testament scholars, theologians, historians and philosophers who publish in the area believe in the empty tomb, almost two-thirds.”

That Is A Huge Shift

That’s a huge shift that has received virtually no coverage in the Mainstream or Right Media or even in conservative Blogdom.

A big part of Habermas’ contribution to this shift in the years after receiving his PhD from Michigan State University is his timeline analysis — based entirely on scholarship that skeptics and believers agree on — that makes a persuasive case that within months of His death, Jesus’ disciples were proclaiming His literal resurrection and the early church was teaching that and related doctrines in the form of oral Creedal Statements that were easily memorized and were later incorporated in the New Testament writings.

The following excerpt from the lecture at the Veritas Forum some years ago is a bit longer than usual here on HillFaith, at 28 minutes, but for anybody even remotely interested in the question, he provides a memorable analysis that is well-worth hearing:


 

Are You Following HillFaith Yet?

1 Comment

  1. […] This Timeline Forever Changed The Easter Resurrection Debate […]

Leave a Comment