Bill Pratt | April 21, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt We celebrate Easter because it commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians believe that Jesus was killed by crucifixion on a Friday and then actually came back to life on the following Sunday. Some may ask, “So what?” Why is it important that Jesus rose from the dead? There are many answers [...]
Bill Pratt | June 19, 2010
Image via Wikipedia Post Author: Bill Pratt Quite a bit of historical evidence exists for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this post, I will follow the lead of historians Gary Habermas and Mike Licona and give you five key facts that the majority of modern historians agree upon (see their book The Case for [...]
Bill Pratt | September 8, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt I sometimes hear skeptics say that they need extraordinary evidence to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. The reason they need extraordinary evidence, they claim, is that the resurrection is an extraordinary claim. It is true that the resurrection is an extraordinary claim, but there are many extraordinary claims made [...]
Bill Pratt | August 3, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt I have been having an interesting discussion with a gentleman on the issue of the empty tomb. We’ve touched on some of the evidence, but I decided to present a brief synopsis of William Lane Craig’s arguments for the empty tomb (from Jesus Under Fire). Here goes! The historical credibility of [...]
Bill Pratt | July 30, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt I just finished reading a wonderful book by New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg, called The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. In his chapter where he discusses the miracles recorded in the Gospels, he had this to say about the scientific objection to miracles. In short, the scientific objection to the credibility [...]
Bill Pratt | April 4, 2009
So what about their arguments? Were they effective? First let’s examine Mike Licona. Licona has argued this historical approach for proving the resurrection in a book entitled The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, co-authored with Gary Habermas. The approach is fairly straight-forward and effective at making a historical case for the resurrection. Licona, along with Habermas, [...]
Bill Pratt | April 3, 2009
Last night, Darrell and I attended the debate between Bart Ehrman and Mike Licona at SES in Charlotte. They debated whether historians can prove Jesus rose from the dead. Here is my summary of the arguments that each of them presented. Licona opened the debate with a historical argument that goes like this. First, he [...]
Bill Pratt | April 2, 2009
In another hour, Darrell and I are off to see Bart Ehrman and Mike Licona debate the following topic: Can Historians Prove Jesus Rose From the Dead? The debate starts at 7 PM tonight at Southern Evangelical Seminary. We’ll give you a rundown in the next couple of days.
Bill Pratt | March 2, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt In this series of posts, we have shown that the NT writers claimed to be eyewitnesses or associates of eyewitnesses; we have shown that we have multiple witnesses, and we have shown that the eyewitnesses were trustworthy. How? They included embarrassing details about themselves and difficult details about their subject of [...]
Bill Pratt | December 5, 2008
There is an interesting post detailing historical evidence for an early belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Why is this important? Critical scholars have often held that belief in Jesus’ resurrection was a later development after legends grew about Jesus’ life decades and even centuries later. Evidence of early belief helps defeat this claim and show that the [...]
