Moderated Dialogue - Q&A

Question for Dr. Ehrman: My question is for Dr. Ehrman. Thank you so much for your presentation! One of the comments you made is that historians can’t presuppose the belief in God. I am an historian, and in fact I am doing my Ph.D. dissertation right now in historiography, and I agree with you that you can’t presuppose belief in God. But you really can’t presuppose belief in the past, period, or that we can even partially know it. We have to be able to back that up. So the historian can’t have a presupposition; they have to back up whatever their metaphysical beliefs that they’re going to bring to the table. And so if you’re going to believe in God, like Dr. Craig, you have to justify that. But I don’t see that as outside the realm of historians, since historians have to cross disciplines often. I’d like to see how you address that.

Answer from Dr. Ehrman: Well, thank you for the question! I don’t believe that history is an objective discipline to start with. It sounded from your question that you agree with this, but we need to talk more about your take on postmodern theory. My view is that the historian does have to back up any presuppositions that he or she has. But my point is that for the historian to do his or her work, requires that there’d be certain shared assumptions. And it’s fine to say what those assumptions are, but there are some assumptions that have to be agreed on by people of various theological persuasions. And they have to be assumptions that are rooted in things that can be observed. God can’t be observed. So we might very well disagree on important historical events. There are people who, for example, in our world deny the holocaust, who say the holocaust never happened. Well, how does one demonstrate that the holocaust happened? Well, one gets together materials of eyewitness reports and photographs and movies, and you get information that historians agree is valid information, and you try to make a case. But it has to be the kind of information that historians of every stripe agree is valid information, such as eyewitness testimony. And appeals to the supernatural are not accepted in the historical community as being valid criteria on which to evaluate a past event. Part of the reason for that is because one could come up with alternative theological explanations. I see I’m out of time but I was going to give you an alternative theological explanation for the resurrection, but I’ll save it for another time.

Answer from Dr. Craig: Dr. Ehrman’s view seems to be that in order to do history you have to presuppose a kind of methodological atheism. And it seems to me that that’s not only false, but, as I say, it is literally self-refuting. Because if it is true that the historian can make no judgment about God, then he cannot make the judgment that it’s improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead. And therefore he cannot make any probability assessment of the resurrection on the background knowledge. This would be an inscrutable value. And if it’s inscrutable, then he cannot make judgments about its comparative probability to these fanciful, naturalistic alternatives he’s given us. So it seems to me that the historian has to be open, at least, methodologically. He can’t be a methodological atheist. And in any case, again, it’s not a debate about what historians can do. I, as a philosopher, I think, can certainly draw this inference on the basis of the historical evidence, and there’s nothing illegitimate or illicit about doing that.

Question for Dr. Craig: Dr. Craig, we need to [bad reception of the microphone], which

are: do you think there’s any problems, mistakes, or errors in the New Testament documents? And second, he’s suggesting that you say that because Mark is unembellished as a source, that Matthew did embellish as a source and you said that you think later sources like Matthew are embellished. So you need to answer that.

Answer from Dr. Craig: O.K., Dr. Ehrman is trying to play a little debater’s trick here on me, in which I simply refuse to participate. The criterion at issue is: if an account is simple, shows a lack of theological embellishment, and so forth, then it is more likely to be probable and credibly historical. And I think that’s true. But this isn’t a debate over biblical inerrancy. So my attitude toward whether I think there are any errors or mistakes in the Bible is irrelevant. That would be a theological conviction. Historically, I am using the same criteria that he is, and I am perfectly open to his showing that there are errors and mistakes in the narratives. That’s not the issue tonight.

Biblical inerrancy is a big issue in his personal life that led him to abandon his Christian faith. But I am not presupposing any sort of doctrine of theological inerrancy or biblical inspiration– nor are those scholars who think these four facts are established by the criteria of authenticity that he himself champions. So my attitude theologically toward the reliability or the mistakes in the Bible is just irrelevant tonight. The question is, what can you prove positively using the standard criteria? And my argument is that when you use those criteria, you can prove positively those basic four facts about the fate of Jesus subsequent to his crucifixion.

Answer from Dr. Ehrman: So apparently it’s O.K. to have theological assumptions about the resurrection, but it’s not O.K. to have theological assumptions about the historical sources that the belief in the resurrection is based upon. If the belief in the resurrection is based on certain sources which are in the Bible and if these sources by their very nature have to be inerrant, then naturally you would conclude that the resurrection had to happen. But Bill refuses to tell us whether he thinks that the Bible has errors in it or not. He won’t tell us that because he teaches at an institution which professors agree that the Bible is inerrant without any mistakes in all of its words. And so he cannot believe that the Bible has any mistakes. If he does think the Bible has mistakes, then I’d like him to tell us two or three of them. If he doesn’t think the Bible has mistakes, I would like know how he can say how he’s using the Gospels of the New Testament as historical sources. He can’t critically evaluate these sources, and the one thing that historians have to do is be able to critically evaluate the sources that they base their claims on.

Question for Dr. Ehrman: Thank you, Dr. Ehrman! Do you believe that theology is in any sense a valid source of knowledge or do you believe in philosophical naturalism? [Bad reception on the microphone.]

Answer from Dr. Ehrman: I think the theological modes of knowledge are perfectly acceptable and legitimate as theological modes of knowledge. But I think theological claims have to be evaluated on a theological basis. For example, you know the idea that these four facts that Bill keeps referring to showed that God raised Jesus from the dead. You could come up with a different theological view of it. Suppose, for example, to explain those four facts that the God Zulu sent Jesus into the 12th dimension, and in that 12th dimension he was periodically released for return to Earth for a brief respite from his eternal tormentors. But he can’t tell his followers about this because Zulu told him that if he does, he’ll increase his eternal agonies. So that’s another theological explanation for what happened. It would explain the empty tomb, it would explain Jesus appearances. Is it as likely as God raised Jesus from the dead and made him sit at his right hand; that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has interceded in history and vindicated his name by raising his Messiah? Well, you might think no, that in fact the first explanation of the God Zulu is crazy. Well, yeah, O.K., it’s crazy; but it’s theologically crazy. It’s not historically crazy. It’s no less likely as an explanation for what happened than the explanation that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob raised Jesus from the dead because they’re both theological explanations; they’re not historical explanations. So within the realm of theology, I certainly think that theology is a legitimate mode of knowledge. But the criteria for evaluating theological knowledge are theological; they are not historical.

Answer from Dr. Craig: Theological hypotheses like that can certainly be evaluated by the sort of criteria that I evaluated the resurrection of Jesus by. In particular, a hypothesis such as has just been suggested is, I think, both enormously ad hoc and highly implausible, whereas given the religio-historical context in which Jesus’ resurrection putatively occurs, I think it’s extremely plausible to think that this is the God of Israel’s vindication of Jesus of Nazareth’s radical personal claims to be the Son of Man and the revelation of God the Father to mankind. So granted, a miracle apart from the religio-historical context is inherently ambiguous. When you give that context, I think that provides the key or the clue to the proper interpretation of the miracle. So I do think that we need to evaluate theological claims philosophically and according to those same sort of criteria that I propose we use in evaluating explanations of these facts.

Question for Dr. Craig: I am very interested in the probability equation you gave. To say it’s probable that Jesus was resurrected, you must put numbers into that equation and get a answer greater than 0.5. I am very interested in what the actual number was and the margin of error for it. And how were the numbers for it determined?

Answer from Dr. Craig: Thank you for that question! Richard Swinburne, who’s a professor at Oxford University, has written a book on incarnation and resurrection in which he actually uses the probability calculus that I have just given. [13] He comes up with an estimate of 0.97 for the resurrection of Jesus in terms of its probability, and you can look at his book for that. I myself don’t use the probability calculus in arguing for resurrection of Jesus. The reason I brought it up is because of the response to the Humean sort of argument that Dr. Ehrman was offering, which I think is completely misconceived because he tries to say that the resurrection is improbable simply because of the improbability of the resurrection on the background information alone. In fact, I think that that probability is inscrutable, given that we’re dealing with a free agent. I don’t see how we can assess or assign specific numbers for those. So the way in which I argue for the resurrection is not by using the probability calculus. It’s by using what’s called “inference to the best explanation,” which is the way historians normally work. That is to say, you assess competing historical hypotheses in terms of criteria like: explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, degree of ad hoc-ness, concordance with accepted beliefs, and so on and so forth. And I’m prepared to argue that when you put the resurrection hypothesis next to naturalistic alternatives, you’ll be able to show on balance that the resurrection hypothesis comes out far outstripping its rival naturalistic theories—unless you presuppose some sort of methodological atheism to bar this. I think that’s what Dr. Ehrman does. In the same way that I am a believer and therefore find God’s existence quite plausible, as an unbeliever I think he finds that this is just absurdly improbable. But he’s not given us any reason to think either that God’s existence is improbable or that it’s improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead. In fact he can’t give an assessment of that probability, given his claim about the limits on the historian.

Answer from Dr. Ehrman: I am sorry. I have trouble believing that we’re having a serious conversation about the statistical probability of the resurrection or the statistical probability of the existence of God. I think in any university setting in the country, if we were in front of a group of academics we would be howled off the stage—

Dr. Craig: That’s not true.

Dr. Ehrman: Well, it may not be true at the school you teach at, but at the research institution I teach at —

Dr. Craig: Well, what about Oxford University, where Professor Swinburne teaches?

Dr. Ehrman: Well, Swinburne has shown that there’s 0.97 percent probability. And how many people has he convinced of this exactly? These are the kinds of arguments that are convincing for people who want to be convinced. They’re not serious arguments to be taken by people so they can actually say, “Oh yes, now I am going to believe because there’s 0.97 percent probability factor!” In fact that’s nonsense; you can’t demonstrate the existence of the supernatural by statistical models.

Question for Dr. Ehrman: What I wanted to ask is does the report of occurrence of miracles over time make the probability higher than the historians think?

Answer from Dr. Ehrman: Yes, that’s a good question. The question is: does the report of occurrence of miracles over time increase the probability? I’d say the answer is probably “no” because in every single instance you have to evaluate whether it’s a probable event or not. And it never can be a probable event. So that, if one thinks so, that it is a probable event, what I would like Bill to do is to tell us why he doesn’t think that Muhammad did miracles because we certainly have reports of that. Why doesn’t he think Apollonius of Tyana did miracles? He quoted Larry Yarbrough, who, in fact, probably has never read the Life of Apollonius. I know this because I had an argument with Larry Yarbrough about it. He has never read the texts. I don’t know if Bill has read the texts. They’re very interesting; they are Greek texts; they are widely available. They report Apollonius of Tyana did many of things that Jesus did; he could cast out demons, he could heal the sick, he could raise the dead, at the end of his life he ascended to heaven. And Apollonius of Tyana was just one of the hundreds of people about such things were said in the ancient world. So if we allow for the possibility of Jesus, how about allowing the possibility for Apollonius? Or Honi the Circle-Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa or the Emperor Vespasian? Or you could name the list as long as your arm of people. Now the reason we don’t know about these people is because, of course, the only miracle-working Son of God we know about is Jesus. But in fact in the ancient world there are hundreds of people like this, with hundreds of stories told about them. We discount them because they’re not within our tradition. That’s why my alternative explanation of Zulu sounded implausible to Bill because in his tradition it’s the God of Jesus, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who must be involved in the world. And, of course, people from other religious traditions say other Gods are involved. So this isn’t just a question about whether God is involved. Which God is involved? And as I pointed out earlier, it’s just a very happy circumstance that it happens to be the God, the God that Bill can historically demonstrate its existence, who happens to be the God that he converted to when he was 16.

Answer from Dr. Craig: The reason that we don’t believe in many other miracle claims is not because one is not open to them. On the contrary, I am completely open to the idea that God has done miracles apart from Jesus. But with respect, for example, to Muhammad, there isn’t any evidence for such things. There’s no claim in the Qur’an that Muhammad performed miracles. The first biography we have of Muhammad comes from at least 150 years after his death, and I am not sure that even there, there are miracle claims. With Apollonius of Tyana, these are myths and legends that have no historical value whatsoever. They are post-Christian inventions, where Apollonius is a figure that is deliberately constructed to compete with early Christianity. So the reason one doesn’t believe in miracles in those cases is because there isn’t any good evidence for it. But by contrast, most New Testament scholars, as Bart Ehrman knows, do believe that Jesus of Nazareth carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms. Whether you believe they’re supernatural is an additional step. But there’s no doubt today that Jesus of Nazareth was what he thought was a miracle worker.

Question for Dr. Craig: Dr. Craig, one of the points you made earlier on in considering the probabilities, you have to weigh the probabilities for the resurrection against other probabilities or other explanations you made that we have in the Gospels. And Prof. Ehrman has this story that he doesn’t believe and he hinted what he does think happened. And so I just want to read a couple verses from the Gospel of Luke and open up a chance for you to potentially comment on these verses and say, based on what Prof. Ehrman said, did your view or did his view make better sense of these verses? So this is from Luke 24, and it’s when Jesus appeared to the two men on the road to Emmaus and they don’t recognize him. He’s speaking to them, and they don’t recognize him. And they just said that all these things have happened and we’re confused and we don’t know what’s going on. And he said to them, “Oh, foolish men and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He appeared to be going further, but they constrained him saying, ‘Stay with us for it is toward the evening and the day is now far spent.’ So he went in to stay with them. While he was at the table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. Their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished out of their sight. They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?’”

Dr. Craig interjects: And what is your question now about the passage? I am not clear what the question is.

Question for Dr. Craig continued: The question is: you know Prof. Ehrman has argued that these ancient documents aren’t necessarily only for the purpose of establishing historical evidence for things, but they can be used more rhetorically. So the question is, could these verses be painting a picture of Christian origins whereby, as Dr. Ehrman argued, the early followers of Jesus opened the scriptures and find references to a suffering servant who is vindicated by God? Because if you notice from these verses, they didn’t say our hearts burned within us because we touched his flesh and we really heard him and that means God performed a miracle and we have the evidence and we have to tell everyone. They said, our hearts burned within us when he opened the scriptures.

Answer from Dr. Craig: I think that that would be a plausible way of reading that passage, what you just suggested. But, of course, that isn’t at the heart of my case this evening. I am not constructing the case that I’ve given tonight on the basis of passages that would be like that or that would be disputable. I am constructing it upon these four fundamental facts which are, I think, credibly attested by multiple, independent attestation and the criterion of embarrassment and which most New Testament scholars would agree with. So I am not staking anything I said tonight on the historicity of the appearance on the road to Emmaus or the interpretation that you’ve lent of it. That’s just not part of my case.

Now in general, however, let me say with respect to this idea of turning to the scriptures and finding Jesus there, I think that the whole case that I laid out for the four facts is what invalidates that. We have got good, early, independent sources that in fact Jesus was buried by a Jewish Sanhedrist in a tomb, that that tomb was found empty on the Sunday morning after the crucifixion, that various individuals and groups of people had these appearances of Jesus, and that they then came to believe that he was risen from the dead. And these passages that are in the Old Testament are so obscure and so difficult to find that it is highly improbable that they are the source of the belief in the resurrection, as Dr. Ehrman thinks. Rather they can only be discovered in hindsight. Having come to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, now you go searching in the scriptures to find the proof texts and the validation of that. But the opposite hypothesis is the old Bultmannian view that somehow by searching the scriptures, they came to believe in these things. But the problem with that is that these passages in the Old Testament just are too obscure, too ambiguous, for them to come up with the sort of resurrection belief on that basis. Jewish followers of a Messiah figure like Jesus, confronted with his crucifixion, would either go home or get themselves a new Messiah, but they wouldn’t come to believe that he was risen from the dead.

Answer from Dr. Ehrman: Yes, Bill keeps talking about our good, early sources and keeps overlooking the facts that these good, early sources are 40, 50, 60 years later and that the place that these authors got their information from was the oral tradition that has been in circulation year after year after year when stories were being invented and stories were being changed. And so I don’t think we need to rely too much just on those four facts. The idea that these passages were so obscure that nobody could possibly land upon them: these are passages from Isaiah and the Psalms. These are not passages hidden away in Malachi someplace. These passages are central passages to Jewish life and worship, and the followers of Jesus demonstrated that they went through the scriptures to understand what it all meant. This also, by the way, is found in good and early sources that the followers of Jesus did exactly that. So I think that is a completely plausible explanation for how in fact Christians came to believe in the resurrection.

Question for Dr. Ehrman: I am glad I had this opportunity. I think we missed a few opportunities to applaud! Dr. Ehrman, can historians verify a miracle if there were eyewitnesses of evidence that a miracle took place? Given your historical method, has any miracle ever occurred, and if so, which ones? And if not, might it be that you willfully refuse to believe in miracles?

Answer from Dr. Ehrman: Good, good question! Thank you! Let me try it again. “Even if you have eyewitnesses”. Suppose from the 1850s, we have an account of a pastor of a church in Kansas who walked across this pond during the fourth of July on a celebration, and there were twelve people who saw him do it. The historian will have to evaluate this testimony and have to ask, did he probably do it or not? Now these eyewitnesses might have said that he did it. But there are other possibilities that one could imagine. There might be stones in the pond, for example. He might have been at a distance, and they didn’t see him. There were other things that you could think of. If you were trying to ask for probabilities, what is the probability that a human being can walk on a pond of water unless it’s frozen? The probability is virtually zero because in fact humans can’t do that. And if you think humans can do that, then give me one instance where I can see. None of us can do it. No one on the face of this planet can do it. Billions of people who have lived cannot do it. And so is the historian going to conclude that probably Joe Smith, the pastor of this church probably did it? I don’t think so. Historians aren’t going to conclude that because the miracle simply is a violation of the way nature typically works. And so you can’t ever verify the miracle on the basis of eyewitnesses. Let me say, secondly, though, we’re not talking about somebody in 1850s. We’re talking about somebody who lived 2000 years ago, and we don’t have eyewitness reports at all. And the reports we have are from people who believed in him. They’re not disinterested accounts. They’re contradictory accounts, and they’re accounts written 30, 50, 60 years later.

Answer from Dr. Craig: I agree that the resurrection of Jesus is naturally impossible. But that’s not the question. The question is, is it improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead? And Dr. Ehrman can’t even make that judgment because he claims that the historian cannot make statements about God. So he’s caught in a self-contradiction tonight. On the one hand, he wants to say the historian can say nothing about God, but on the other hand, he wants to say that it’s improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead; and that’s simply self-contradictory.

One of the embarrassments of Hume’s argument was that he held that a person living in the tropics should never accept testimonies from travelers that water could exist in the form of a solid, as ice. So that the man, based on the Humean argument, would be led to deny perfectly natural facts for which we would have abundant evidence simply because it contradicted what he knew. And in exactly the same way, this argument that he’s giving is one that really would be a positive impediment to science, if you say that we can never have enough testimony—enough evidence—to cause us to believe in something that contradicts the normal workings of nature.

Question for Dr. Craig: Thank you! We’re talking about independent, unbiased disclosure of evidence here. So I wonder if both professors can find from outside of canonical Christian writings evidences that support their viewpoints.

Answer from Dr. Craig: The fact is we’re not talking about disinterested sources. But you see, that’s characteristic of all of ancient history. People in the ancient world didn’t write disinterested stories; everyone had a point of view or an axe to grind. So the historian has to take that into account when he does his historical investigation. So scholars do that with respect to the Gospels. They ask, what is the credibility of these events given that they come from Christian believers? And one way to circumvent that problem is through multiple, independent attestation, because if a tradition or an event is independently and multiply attested in very early sources, then it’s highly unlikely that it was made up because you wouldn’t have it independently attested. And so scholars will typically accept an event that’s attested by, say, two independent sources or three. But in the case of empty tomb and the burial, we’ve got like five or six independent sources for this. So apart from a prejudice against miracles, there’s no good reason for denying the historical core to those narratives, especially when you remember that we’re not talking about sources that are 30, 40, 60 years later. We’re talking about traditions on which those are based that go back to within five or seven years after the crucifixion. Compared to the sources for Greco-Roman history, the Gospels stand head and shoulders above what Greco- Roman historians have to work with, which are usually hundreds of years after the events they record, usually involve very few eyewitnesses, and are usually told by people that are completely biased. And yet Greco-Roman historians reconstruct the course of history of the ancient world. And, as I said from N. T. Wright, he would say that the empty tomb and appearances of Jesus are just as certain as the death of Caesar Augustus in AD 14 or even the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. And even if you think that’s an exaggeration, I think they are far better attested than many other events in ancient history which are commonly accepted as historical.

Answer from Dr. Ehrman: So you’re asking for non-canonical sources. I think one reason Bill didn’t want to answer is because the non-canonical sources don’t bear out his position. The non- canonical pagan sources in fact never refer to the resurrection of Jesus until centuries later. Jesus actually never appears any non-canonical pagan source until 80 years after his death. So clearly he didn’t make a big impact on the pagan world. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus but didn’t believe in his resurrection. There are non-canonical Christian sources that talk about the resurrection, but unfortunately virtually all of them that narrate the event, although they are non-canonical Gospels, narrate the event in a way that disagrees with Bill’s reconstruction. They don’t believe that Jesus was physically, bodily raised from the dead. For evidence of that simply read the account of the Second Treatise of the Great Seth or read the account the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter; just go down the line. We do have one account in which Jesus comes out of the tomb. It’s in the Gospel of Peter; it’s an apocalyptic account. Jesus comes out of the tomb as tall as the skyscraper; following him is a cross which speaks to the heavens, clearly a legendary account of very little use to historians wanting to know what happened.

Moderator: We now may applaud!