Category Archives: Historical Christ

Historical Christ

How Do We Overcome Our Horizons (Biases)? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Those who take on the task of interpreting the ancient accounts of Jesus’s life are faced with a difficult task.  As we’ve seen from previous posts, the horizon of each individual must be faced and addressed before investigation begins.

But does the horizon of an individual render objective study of history impossible?  Clearly not.  What a historian must do is limit the influence of his horizon on the historical investigation, especially when aspects of his horizon may directly distort his interpretations.

Mike Licona, in his book The Resurrection of Jesus, offers six guidelines for historians who are attempting to limit the undue influence of their horizon.  Licona goes into some detail about each of these guidelines, but I will only introduce them and give a brief description of each one from Licona’s book.

1. Method can serve as a means toward achieving greater objectivity. Method encompasses many parts, including the manner in which data are viewed, weighed and contextualized; criteria for testing the adequacy of hypotheses; and the fair consideration of competing hypotheses. Of course, method is not a sure means for avoiding too much subjectivity, but it is helpful. . . . Therefore, attention to method may reduce the amount of control a horizon has on a historians research, but it alone is inadequate.

2.  The historian’s horizon and method should be public. It is certain that at least portions of the historian’s horizon can be public or open to scrutiny. For example, historians who hold to the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus most likely have a theistic component to their horizons, and this component may be challenged. Methodological naturalists, who do not allow for the possibility of the supernatural in historical investigation, should likewise have their horizons open to challenge. Moreover, historians should be clear about the methods they employ for achieving results.

3. Peer pressure may also be helpful in minimizing the impact of horizon on the historian’s work. Judges of a sporting event such as gymnastics seem to be able to lay aside or at least minimize their prejudices and national pride when acting in the capacity of a judge. How is this accomplished when national pride and prejudice can be so strong? Perhaps it is the knowledge that a number of other judges with similar strictures are also making judgments and that, if the judgment of a particular judge is far different than those rendered by the other judges, it may reflect a personal bias of a sort. Thus, peer pressure can act as a check on bias and can serve to minimize the effects of horizon.

In part 2 of this series, we will look at the final 3 guidelines for curbing the influence of one’s horizon.

Historical Christ

What Are Some Examples of Bias Affecting Historical Scholarship on Jesus?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the previous blog post, I cited Mike Licona’s analysis of horizons and their impact on historical interpretation.  In this post, I will go back to Licona and review just a handful of the numerous examples he gives of horizons affecting particular scholars’ historical analysis.

The scholars who Licona quotes are all affected by a strong anti-supernatural presupposition. Seeing these concrete examples should prove to be quite eye-opening to those outside the historical  research community.

The first example comes from Charles Hartshorne, a scholar who The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy refers to as “one of the most important philosophers of religion and metaphysicians of the twentieth century.” Licona describes Hartshorne making the “following comments in reference to a debate on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus between then-atheist philosopher Antony Flew and Christian philosopher Gary Habermas”:

I can neither explain away the evidences [for the resurrection] to which Habermas appeals, nor can I simply agree with [the skeptical position]. … My metaphysical bias is against resurrections.

According to Licona,

Flew himself later said, “This is in fact the method of critical history. You try to discover what actually happened, guided by your best evidence, as to what was probable or improbable, possible or impossible. And the miracles are things that you just take to be impossible.”

Continuing with examples, “A. N. Harvey confidently asserts that the biblical picture of Jesus is ‘incompatible with historical inquiry’ and requires a ‘sacrifice of the intellect’ to hold it.”  Harvey also writes, “An historical event which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable.”

Harrington adds that believing that the corpse will one day be reanimated and transformed is to “ask too much of my credulity.”

Licona then reveals the horizons of one the most famous NT scholars of the 20th century, Gerd Ludemann.

It is clear that the horizon of atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Ludemann is a driving force behind his historical conclusions when he a priori rules out the historicity of the ascension of Jesus reported in Acts 1:9-11 “because there is no such heaven to which Jesus may have been carried.”

Tabor makes similar remarks:

Women do not get pregnant without a male—ever. So Jesus had a human father…. Dead bodies don’t rise. . . . So, if the tomb was empty the historical conclusion is simple— Jesus’ body was moved by someone and likely reburied in another location.

Licona then cites Jewish scholar Alan Segal:

When a heavenly journey is described literally, the cause may be literary convention or the belief of the voyager; but when reconstructing the actual experience, only one type can pass modern standards of credibility.

These kinds of examples can go on and on.  Because these are historical scholars writing books about the life of Jesus, it is imperative for the reader to understand the anti-supernatural horizon of these writers.  This fact must be taken into account when reading their works.

Of course the same could be said of Christians who are writing on the historical Jesus, but everyone recognizes Christian scholars’ horizons, while non-Christians often try to deny they bring any presuppositions to their historical Jesus research.  This is obviously false.

Historical Christ, Philosophy

What Role Do Worldviews Play in Historical Research?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

When it comes to a person interpreting historical texts, particularly where ultimate issues (e.g., heaven, hell, God, sin) are at stake, that person’s worldview (or horizon) often plays a critical role.  What is involved in a person’s horizon?

Historical scholar, Mike Licona, provides a useful explanation of horizon in his book The Resurrection of Jesus:

Horizon may be defined as one’s “preunderstanding.” It is how historians view things as a result of their knowledge, experience, beliefs, education, cultural conditioning, preferences, presuppositions and worldview.  Horizons are like sunglasses through which a historian looks. Everything she sees is colored by that horizon.

What are a couple of examples of how these sunglasses cash out in our everyday lives?

Take baseball, for example.  In a baseball game, if there was a close play at second base, do you think the runner was safe or out?  It depends on whether your son is the guy stealing second or the shortstop tagging him.  When we read books about Jesus, we find ourselves in agreement or disagreement with certain authors usually based on whether the Jesus they reconstruct is like the one we prefer.

Are there historians who are exempt from their horizons?

For better and for worse, historians are influenced by their culture, race, nationality, gender and ethics; their political, philosophical and religious convictions; their life experiences, the academic institutions they attended and the particular community of scholars from which they covet respect and acceptance. They cannot look at the data devoid of biases, hopes or inclinations. No historian is exempt.

After making the claim that no historian is exempt, Licona provides a long footnote which chronicles various scholars’s views on horizons.  He is not alone in making his claim:

Allison (“Explaining,” 2005): “To observe the obvious, people’s arguments regarding the origins of Christianity are unavoidably driven by large assumptions about the nature of the world, assumptions that cannot often if ever be the upshot of historical investigation” (133);

R. Evans (1999): “We know of course that we will be guided in selecting materials for the stories we tell, and in the way we put these materials together and interpret them, by literary methods, by social science theories, by moral and political beliefs, by an aesthetic sense, even by our own unconscious assumptions and desires. It is an illusion to believe otherwise” (217);

McCullagh (The Truth of History, 1998): “I conclude that the cultural bias now being discussed, which does not involve false or misleading descriptions of the past, is inescapable, and provides the main reason for saying that history is subjective. In this way I agree that history is subjective” (35);

Meier (1991): “Whether we call it a bias, a Tendenz, a worldview, or a faith stance, everyone who writes on the historical Jesus writes from some ideological vantage point; no critic is exempt” (5);

Moore-Jumonville (2002): “In the end, differences in hermeneutical method around the turn of the century (as today) had to do with one’s presuppositions and the relationship one constructed between theology and criticism” (167);

A. G. Padgett, “Advice for Religious Historians: On the Myth of a Purely Historical Jesus” in Davis, Kendall and O’Collins, cds. (1998): “World-views don’t just give us the questions we ask; they also affect our understanding of the evidence and our historical judgment. There just is no such thing as data apart from some interpretation” (293-94);

Waterman (2006): “We as observers must bear in mind an inevitable bias in our own theological interests. The latter is the so-called ‘historian’s subjectivity,’ which is influential in choosing and judging historical materials” (86-87; cf. 12).

What do we conclude from this brief survey of the effect of horizons on historical interpretation?

Horizons are of great interest to historians since they are responsible more than anything else for the embarrassing diversity among the conflicting portraits of the past.  How can so many historians with access to the same data arrive at so many different conclusions? Horizons. Geoffrey Elton writes, “The historian who thinks that he has removed himself from his work is almost certainly mistaken.”

Are we able to do objective historical analysis?  Yes.  Can we mitigate the effects of our horizons?  Yes.  But just like the first steps an alcoholic must take in getting treatment, you first have to admit that there is a problem.  After all, those who deny there is a problem with horizons in historical research are likely to be the most impacted by their horizons.

Historical Christ, Resurrection

What Are the Parallels Between Jesus and the “Divine Men” of the Ancient World? Part 4

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Mythicists claim that the stories about Jesus were merely copied from other pagan myths circulating around the Roman Empire in the first century. If this is true, it does cast some doubt on the uniqueness of the Gospel accounts of Jesus, and it certainly makes one wonder if all the stories about Jesus were borrowed from other sources.

In order to discuss this claim, I will call to the stand one Bart Ehrman, a man who is no friend to Christianity. Ehrman was interviewed by Ben Witherington in a seven-part series last summer after Ehrman’s book, Did Jesus Exist?, was published.

In part 3, Ehrman cited the work of Jonathan Smith who claimed that there were no unambiguous accounts of dying and rising gods in the ancient world.  Witherington follows up with another question about the resurrection of Jesus:

In what way is the Jewish notion of a resurrection a different idea than either the fertility crop cycle idea, or what is sometimes said about pagan deities that either disappear or die?

Ehrman answers:

One of the reasons for thinking that the belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection is not exactly like what you can find in pagan myths about their gods is that it is solidly rooted in Jewish apocalyptic beliefs of the first century. This should come as no surprise, since Jesus and his followers were not pagans with pagan views of the divine realm, but first-century apocalyptically minded Jews.

In some pagan circles, there was a belief in fertility gods, who would spend some time in the underworld and some time in this world, alternating year after year. These gods were closely connected to the crops: they (both the crops and the gods connected with them) die in the winter and come back to life in the Spring. And they do that year after year.

That obviously is not like the early Christian belief in Jesus, who does not go into the underworld then return to this world year after year. Instead, Jesus was believed to have gone to the underworld for three days and then to have been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven where he is to stay until he returns. This is not rooted in pagan mythology, but in apocalyptic theology.

After reading through Ehrman’s answers and checking other sources, here is my conclusion on the alleged parallel accounts of “divine men” of the ancient world.  There are similarities to the accounts of Jesus, but they are on the surface, and somewhat trivial.  Given the tendencies of people throughout history to repeat archetypes and themes in their stories, it is not surprising that we would find some of these repeated in the stories about Jesus.

When we start to dig deeper into the Jesus stories and try to find parallels in ancient accounts, we find that the similarities end.  In particular, the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus are both unique in ancient history.  There just aren’t other pagan accounts that mirror these important aspects of the Jesus narratives.

Given that the evidence does not support the mythicist contention that the Jesus stories were completely cribbed, I submit that  there is no good reason to doubt the historicity of the person of Jesus based on alleged parallel accounts.  Bart Ehrman and I can agree on this point.

Historical Christ

What Are the Parallels Between Jesus and the “Divine Men” of the Ancient World? Part 3

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Mythicists claim that the stories about Jesus were merely copied from other pagan myths circulating around the Roman Empire in the first century. If this is true, it does cast some doubt on the uniqueness of the Gospel accounts of Jesus, and it certainly makes one wonder if all the stories about Jesus were borrowed from other sources.

In order to discuss this claim, I will call to the stand one Bart Ehrman, a man who is no friend to Christianity. Ehrman was interviewed by Ben Witherington in a seven-part series last summer after Ehrman’s book, Did Jesus Exist?, was published.

After Witherington’s initial question about parallel accounts of “divine men” in the ancient world, he zeros in on the alleged accounts of dying and rising gods.  He asks, “Why do you think this theory of dying and rising gods became so popular in the 20th century, and what caused its scholarly demise?”  Here is Ehrman’s answer:

Yes, for a long time it was widely thought that dying and rising gods were a constant staple of ancient pagan religions, so that when Christians claimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, they were simply borrowing a common “motif” from pagan religions. This view was first popularized by Sir James George Frazer at the beginning of the twentieth century in his enormously influential (and very large) book, The Golden Bough. (As I explain in Did Jesus Exist, Frazer did in his day what Joseph Campbell did in ours – popularized the view that at heart, all religions are basically the same).

This view was exploded by Jonathan Z. Smith in the late 1980s, chiefly in an article on the “dying-rising gods” in the scholarly and authoritative Encyclopedia of Religion. Smith showed that the notion that there was a widespread category of gods who died and rose again was, in fact, a modern myth, not based on a careful reading of ancient sources.  In his own words:

“The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation , must be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts. . . .  All the deities that have been identified as belonging to the class of dying and rising deities can be subsumed under the two larger classes of disappearing deities or dying deities. In the first case the deities return but have not died; in the second case the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity.”  (cited in Jonathan Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. Lindsay Jones, (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005 [original: 1987]), 4:2535).

Ehrman summarizes the findings of Smith:

Smith’s findings were based not on new discoveries, but on a more careful reading of ancient sources. Unfortunately, even though these findings have made a major impact on the research of New Testament scholars and other scholars of Christian antiquity, they appear to be unknown to the mythicists, many of whom continue to make the now dated claim that the resurrection of Jesus was simply invented along the lines of the common pagan myth.

More from Witherington and Ehrman in part 4 of the series.

Historical Christ, Resurrection

What Are the Parallels Between Jesus and the “Divine Men” of the Ancient World? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Mythicists claim that the stories about Jesus were merely copied from other pagan myths circulating around the Roman Empire in the first century.  If this is true, it does cast some doubt on the uniqueness of the Gospel accounts of Jesus, and it certainly makes one wonder if all the stories about Jesus were borrowed from other sources.

In order to discuss this claim, I will call to the stand one Bart Ehrman, a man who is no friend to Christianity.  Ehrman was interviewed by Ben Witherington in a seven-part series last summer after Ehrman’s book, Did Jesus Exist?, was published.  In part 1 of this post series, we reviewed Ehrman’s response to alleged parallel accounts of “divine men” in the ancient world.  After allowing that there are some parallels, Ehrman argues

that all of these figures about whom such stories were told were also different in key ways from one another. They were not all the same. The stories varied from one person to the next. The stories about Jesus are different in many ways from the others (just as each of them is different from the others).

Why is this important?  Why are the differences among accounts of ancient “divine men” damaging to mythicist claims?

This is important to bear in mind because mythicists often claim that everything said about Jesus can be paralleled in the myths and legends told about other divine figures on earth. And that simply is not true. A number of the key stories about Jesus are in fact unique to him, including some of the most important.

What are some examples of stories that are unique to Jesus?  According to Ehrman,

even though there are numerous instances of divine men who are supernaturally born, there is no instance of a divine man being born to a “virgin,” as happens in the case of Jesus, for example in the Gospel of Matthew. The entire point of most of the pagan supernatural birth stories is that a (mortal) woman is made pregnant by a God, precisely by having sex with her (often in human form, though sometimes Zeus preferred being in the form of a swan, or a snake, or…. some other animal, for some odd reason). I don’t know of any instances in which a woman gives birth as a virgin.

So too: the resurrection. The Gospel understanding of the resurrection is that Jesus came back into his body (a one-time corpse) which was then transformed and raised and exalted (explicitly in Luke-Acts) to heaven. This reanimation of the body type of resurrection is not attested, so far as I know, for any other divine man in antiquity.  This is an important point because mythicists want to claim that all the stories about Jesus were simply taken over from the pagan environment. And this is simply not true.

Neither the virgin birth, not the resurrection of Jesus, find parallels in other ancient accounts of “divine men,” according to Ehrman.  As these are two of the most crucial aspects of Jesus’s life, not finding these in other ancient accounts deals quite a blow to the mythicist assertion that everything written about Jesus’s life was just copied from other sources.

In part 3, we will continue looking at Bart Ehrman’s interview with Ben Witherington.  More to come!

Historical Christ

What Are the Parallels Between Jesus and the “Divine Men” of the Ancient World? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Mythicists claim that the stories about Jesus were merely copied from other pagan myths circulating around the Roman Empire in the first century.  If this is true, it does cast some doubt on the uniqueness of the Gospel accounts of Jesus, and it certainly makes one wonder if all the stories about Jesus were borrowed from other sources.

In order to discuss this claim, I will call to the stand one Bart Ehrman, a man who is no friend to Christianity.  Ehrman was interviewed by Ben Witherington in a seven-part series last summer after Ehrman’s book, Did Jesus Exist?, was published.  When asked in the seventh interview post what his research revealed about the alleged parallel stories, Ehrman first affirms that there are some similarities:

There are several points that need to be made, I think, about all the parallels that exist between the stories of Jesus and other supposed “divine men” of ancient Greece and Rome. The first is that there were indeed a number of similarities between the ways Christians talked about Jesus and the ways pagans (and in some instances, Jews) talked about other “sons of God.” There is no point denying this (it comes as a huge surprise to my students). We have stories of other “divine men” from antiquity who were thought to have been supernaturally born; to have been preternaturally wise, religiously, while still youths; to have engaged in itinerate preaching ministries; to have done miracles such as miraculously feeding the hungry, casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead; and at the end of their lives to have ascended to heaven. These other stories do exist (and not just about Apollonius of Tyana.)

Not surprisingly, there were other stories in the ancient world of men supernaturally born, who engaged in preaching ministries, who performed miracles, and who ascended to heaven.  In fact, even though I am not a historical scholar, I would wager to say that these kinds of stories have existed throughout the history of mankind, even up to the present day.

What should we make of these parallels?  Do they lead us inevitably to the conclusion that the stories about Jesus were manufactured, that Jesus never existed?  Ehrman argues that

the fact that Jesus was talked about in ways similar to how others were talked about does not mean that he (or they) did not exist. Some of these stories are told about figures who are absolutely and incontrovertibly historical (Alexander the Great; the Emperor Vespasian; Apollonius; and so on). If you wanted to tell stories about a figure you considered to be more than human, to be in some sense divine, these are the kinds of stories you told.

As Ehrman rightly points out, these kinds of stories were often told about real, historical people.  Given that fact, concluding that Jesus never existed, as the mythicists do, is a completely unwarranted move.  We cannot determine that a person never existed because they were said to have been born supernaturally, performed miracles, and ascended to heaven.  If this is the criteria we use to determine whether people existed, we are going to have to redact a lot of historical figures from our history textbooks.

In part 2 of this series, we will continue to look at Ehrman’s exploration of this topic in Ben Witherington’s blog post.

Historical Christ, Resurrection

Should We Calculate Prior Probabilities to Determine if Jesus Was Resurrected?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I am aware that there are philosophers who employ Bayesian analysis to determine probabilities that historical events occurred, but I am becoming skeptical of the value of these analyses.  A Bayesian analysis requires a calculation of the prior probability that a historical event occurred, without considering any of the evidence we have that the event occurred.  But how we do calculate prior probabilities for a historical event?

I think the problem was clearly illustrated in a debate between Greg Cavin and Mike Licona.  Cavin mounted an attack on the resurrection of Jesus by arguing against the prior probability of it.  Remember that prior probability calculations ignore the actual evidence for the event.  Here is Licona’s summary of Cavin’s argument (note: Greg Cavin has contacted me and denied that he made the argument presented below, so I have edited the comments below to represent a generic argument made by a generic atheist named Bob; even if Cavin did not make this argument, I have heard arguments like it made plenty of other times by other atheists):

[Bob’s] first argument is the probability that Jesus rose is astronomically low, since, even if God exists, he doesn’t have a tendency to raise people from the dead. In support he said that, of the estimated 100 billion people who have lived and died on the Earth, the historical evidence is inadequate to suggest that any have been raised from the dead. So, even if the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection were good, there would still be only a 1 chance in 100 billion that Jesus was raised.
Bob argues that the prior probability of Jesus rising from the dead is 1 in 100 billion.  Given this low prior probability, there is no need to even look at the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.  The evidence doesn’t matter because it can never overcome 1 in 100 billion odds.  Here is Licona’s response:
I replied that historians don’t use prior probabilities in historical inquiry.  One cannot calculate the prior probability that the U.S. would drop nuclear bombs on Japan during WWII, since in all of human history no nation had dropped a nuclear bomb on another before or since WWII.  Moreover, I’ll be 51 in two weeks.  That’s a lot of days in my life. Yet Sunday was the first day I had ever spent in Temecula, California. Given my “tendency” not to go to Temecula, one should conclude that I wasn’t there that evening.  Historians examine a historical report then look at the evidence for the event occurring.  Thus, prior probabilities are the wrong tool for historical inquiry.  It’s like using a calculator for an archaeological dig.
I think Licona’s response is compelling.  You cannot determine whether a historical event occurred without actually examining the evidence for it.  Calculating prior probabilities may be an interesting exercise, but I doubt that it is the best way to approach historical inquiry.  It just doesn’t matter that resurrections are rare.  In fact, even Christians claim that resurrections are rare in history.  But that fact just has no bearing on whether Jesus rose from the dead.
Archaeology, Church History, Historical Christ

Can Historians Use Anonymous Sources?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

A common complaint about the reliability of the letters and books contained in the New Testament is that we don’t know, for sure, who wrote all of these documents.  In particular, the four Gospels are singled out as being anonymous since there is nothing in the text of the four Gospels that says, “So-and-so wrote this Gospel.”

There are many historical scholars who do believe that we can identify the authors of the Gospels and most of the other letters in the New Testament, but what if we could not?  What if the authors of these documents were unknown?  Would we have to throw out the contents?  Are they worthless, in that case, for historical investigation?

Historical scholar Mike Licona, in his book The Resurrection of Jesus, says “no.”  Licona first answers the charge that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses:

Bracketing the fact that a number of scholars have taken a contrary position, this challenge is not unique to the New Testament literature.  No surviving account of the life of Alexander the Great was written by an eyewitness.  Tacitus and Suetonius were not eyewitnesses to the majority of the events they reported.  Nevertheless, historians remain confident that they are able to recover the past to varying degrees without ever knowing who their sources were.

Historian C. Fasolt argues that Paul’s letter to the Roman church is helpful as a historical source “only on the assumption that it was written by Saint Paul.”  Is Fasolt right?  Licona notes historian M. S. Cladis’s response to Fasolt:

This is going to be news to countless social historians of the religions of the ancient Mediterranean basin who investigate archaeological and textual work without always knowing the specifics of the exact agents involved.  Indeed, these historians are investigating the society that shaped the agents, even if they do not know most of the agents’ names (and all that this means).

They collect, analyze, and interpret evidence from a variety of sources—monuments and tombs, literary texts and shopping lists—in order to learn something important about the socio-historical circumstances in which people, like Paul, lived, moved, and had their being.  The historian of antiquity, then, can learn much about the past from the ‘Letter to the Romans’ whether or not that text was actually written by Paul.

Here is the takeaway point: even if we grant that the books and letters of the New Testament are anonymous, we can still gather important historical information from those texts.  Anonymity of the sources is not a death knell for historical New Testament studies, and should not be used as some kind of sweeping indictment of the texts.  We can know what happened to Jesus and his disciples two thousand years ago, using the New Testament documents as our sources.

Historical Christ

Will There Ever Be a Historical Consensus that Jesus Was Resurrected? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you are a Christian who is waiting for the day when most historical scholars, both Christian and non-Christian, affirm that the evidence does indeed indicate that Jesus was resurrected, I’m afraid you’ll be waiting until the Second Coming, when there will be no doubt.  Why is that?  If, as we say on this blog, the historical evidence for the resurrection is so strong, then shouldn’t every scholar be lining up behind it?

In part 1 of this two-part series, we started looking at the writings of historical scholar Mike Licona on the issue of consensus in historical Jesus studies.  Excerpts are taken from his book The Resurrection of Jesus.  We pick up where we left off.  

Given the challenges of historical consensus, especially with regard to the historical Jesus, what should we expect in the future?  According to Licona,

It is highly unlikely that a consensus will ever exist pertaining to the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. While strong agreement exists regarding a number of “facts” often used as evidence to support the resurrection hypothesis, no consensus will ever exist for the conclusion that the resurrection hypothesis is an accurate description of what actually occurred.

After all, how likely is it that historians who are Muslims and atheists will confess that the resurrection hypothesis is the best explanation or that Christian historians will confess that the resurrection hypothesis is not the best explanation? Yet, either Jesus rose from the dead or he did not; and historians holding one of these positions are more correct than those holding the other.

Because of the uncertainty of historical knowledge, many historical descriptions will never receive a stamp of approval from the consensus of the relevant scholars.  This should not restrain the historian from stating that his or her hypothesis is probably true.

Licona concludes that a consensus that Jesus was resurrected will elude us for the foreseeable future.  This fact does not mean that Jesus did not rise from the dead, only that consensus across a broad spectrum of scholars is impossible given the major influence of worldviews.  After all, an admission that Jesus rose from the dead would usually entail a radical realignment of the worldview of a non-Christian scholar.  Although this may happen from time to time, it is highly unlikely to happen at a high enough rate to create a consensus.

As Christians, where does this leave us?  I think it means that we are free to point out where there is a positive consensus about the historical facts about Jesus, but we must realize that those facts will only give us a minimal list of true facts.  Beyond the minimal consensus facts, we may argue for additional facts using solid historical criteria, but we should not expect non-Christian scholars to always agree with our arguments.

We also now have an idea why there are such divergent views on the historical Jesus.  Although scholars may agree on a short list of facts, many of them feel free to argue for additional “facts” that suit their worldview.  As lay people reading books written by historical Jesus scholars, we must always be on guard for the author’s worldview nosing its way into the book.

Another implication is that reading historical Jesus works from one side of the philosophical or theological spectrum will never be enough to get a reasonable view of the historical evidence.  Readers must force themselves to pick up works from the other side of the spectrum as well. 

A co-worker of mine once told me he longer believed in the historical Jesus of Christian tradition after reading a book by a liberal Jesus scholar.  When I asked if he read works by believing Christians or conservatives, he answered “no.”  He just assumed that the scholar he read had the final word.  As Licona has shown, no scholar has the final word.  We must all engage the evidence for ourselves.