Carrier vs. Licona in Topeka, KS

Mike Licona leads with a moving anecdote or two which I'll not repeat here. He then lays out a series of criteria for historical analysis. Eventually, he gets into his main historical argument, which he explicitly bases on the Pauline corpus rather than the gospels. He starts building up a minimal facts argument based on the scholarly consensus as to the crucifixion around 30CE and Paul's subsequent conversion to Christianity a couple years later. Unsurprisingly, he moves on to the various claims put forth in 1 Cor 15, which Paul seems to have received from earlier Christians. He then attempts to preempt Carrier by making an argument that the standard historical criteria make the resurrection hypothesis the best explanation of Paul's conversion and the claims that Paul reported to have received from the early church. [Editorial note: Another equally useful explanation would be that the early church sincerely believed that which it passed on to Paul, but that there were no actual eyewitnesses behind the creed, only oral traditions which grew up in precisely the same way that glurge e-mails do.]

Rick Carrier starts off with an effective illustration to help people come to see the difference between claims which require ordinary evidence "I own a car" and claims which require far more evidence "I own a nuclear missile" and claims which require the best possible evidence "I own an interstellar spacecraft." He goes on to address miracle stories in general, such as those surrounding St. Genevieve, and the reports of magical events at the Temple of Delphi and the sacred olive tree of Athens. He goes on to make a parallel between the gospels and earlier legends, such as the stories of Romulus and Osiris. He then makes the difficult argument (given the audience) that the early disciples were schizotypal visionaries, prone to subjective religions experiences unbeknownst to those of us who are psychologically healthy and normal. Specifically, he argues that Paul was preaching a gospel based on his own personal religious visions combined with his interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. He goes on to argue that Paul hallucinated precisely what he needed in order to quickly resolve his internal emotional conflict, assuming that he was riddled with guilt over his persecution of the early Christian Church.

Instead of rebuttal, this debate goes straight into cross-examination. They each ask difficult questions of the other and work hard to bolster their own case while tearing down their opponent's case. I love this format and wish that more debates would adopt something like it.

Overall, this was a tremendous debate in which both men do a fine job of making honest arguments from the best evidence available.

Ehrman vs. Licona in Matthews, NC

Bart Ehrman and Mike Licona, both prominent Biblical scholars and historians, debated the resurrection of Jesus at Southern Evangelical Seminary in North Carolina (video, audio). As in their first debate, evangelical scholar Mike Licona has home field advantage and a very friendly crowd.

After a surprising amount of autobiography, Licona leads with three allegedly well-established facts from Biblical scholarship:

1. Jesus was crucified and died


2. Some disciples claimed to have seen Jesus afterward


3. Paul also claimed to have seen Jesus afterward

He goes on to claim that the best way to explain these facts is to conclude that the gospels are reliable in their claims of a literal bodily resurrection. His argument is that if you accept the New Testament accounts on these key details, you should go on to accept the gospels at face value, no matter how mythical the accounts might seem, because there is no point in ruling anything out as inherently unlikely, however miraculous it might be. Essentially, it is as if he lifted a resurrection-shaped hole out of the gospel accounts, and went on to note how perfectly he could plug that hole by reinserting the resurrection into the accounts from whence it was lifted. Of course, he manages to make it sound a good deal more reasonable than that, by going on at some length about historical methodology.

Ehrman's opening is a fairly strong condensation of his general case against the reliability of the gospels as historical sources, in which He uses the phrase "it depends on which gospel you read" at least two dozen times in reply to various historical questions he poses. He also provides a different account of historical methodology than that given by Licona. Ehrman seems to think that ancient written accounts are never going to be strong enough evidence to demonstrate the truth of a miraculous claim, given the very low apriori probability of such claims relative to other possibilities, e.g. mythmaking, hallucinations, dreams, visions, false memories.

On rebuttal, both speakers do a fine job of addressing their opponent's case head-on, which is surprisingly rare in these kinds of debates. I found Ehrman's rebuttal more effective, but then it seems to me that he had most of the relevant facts on his side. No doubt the audience saw it in a different light.

It should be noted that a major point of difference between the speakers lies in their treatment of probability, and neither one provides a full enough account of what probability theory really does in order to dispel his opponent's intuitions about how probability works. They would do well to go back to fundamentals on this issue. Mike even seems to posit that the relevant probability is the likelihood that an event takes place given that the most powerful being in the universe wants it to happen, which I'm pretty sure is a theological premise neither covered in his original three points nor established by independent argument.

Overall, though, this debate featured strong openings and vigorous give and take between two of the top scholars in the relevant field. Definitely worth seeing.

Ehrman vs. Licona in Kansas City, MO

Interestingly, this debate took place at my own non-alma-mater, the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.  I still get their newsletter from time to time.

Licona is seriously losing his voice (alas!) and this becomes downright hilarious around 14 minutes into the film when he attempts an homage to commercial audio fine print.  He tries to make the case that an historical analysis may demonstrate the truth of the resurrection to a reasonable certainty, by applying his own set of criteria to a set of “generally accepted facts” which fairly resemble the minimal facts of Dr. Gary Habermas.  He also includes a few cute pictures of children’s cartoon animals, and at least one animated express train.

Ehrman, for his part, walks back the congregation on their assumptions about the nature and origin of scripture, giving an account of how the gospels came about several decades after the life of Christ as the result of a multinational and multilingual process of passing around the basic Christian kerygma and myth until it finally ripened into a more-or-less biographical form, penned down by anonymous authors several steps removed from the historical Jesus of Nazareth.  I got the sense that the pastor sitting behind Professor Ehrman was distinctly nervous for his flock by this point in the presentation, and this made it all the more entertaining to watch.

Except for Licona’s fading voice and ridiculous visual aids, this was overall one of the best head-to-heads on the issues surrounding the resurrection of Jesus.  Both sides gave just about the best case that you can hope to get, and both presenters were evidently quite comfortable with the material and with their presentation thereof.  Definitely worth watching.

Overall rating: 4.5 stars

[2008-02-28]

 

 

 

Finley, Carrier, Licona, Habermas on the IG show

This radio segment isn’t nearly quite so insightful as one might expect from the names involved.  Alas, the conversation was lightly moderated and rarely focused, and Richard Carrier did not manage to ask all of the pointed questions which he had prepared for the broadcast.  As a result, the two apologists covered more-or-less the same ground that they always do, and rarely took the opportunity to dig deeper.   Worse yet, they derailed the conversation a few times to discuss such sideline issues, such as what precisely Herodotus wrote about Zalmoxis.  Alas!

All things considered, you may safely skip this broadcast, unless you are completely new to Christian apologetics and hope to hear an overview of the minimal facts model advocated by Habermas and his young apprentice. 

[2006-10-27]

Carrier vs. Licona in Los Angeles, CA

Debate: the Resurrection of Jesus Christ

This debate started off as a bit of a joke, actually, with an hypothetical posed by historian John P. Meier which reads like one, “Suppose that a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, and an agnostic were locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School library…and not allowed to emerge until they had hammered out a consensus document on who Jesus of Nazareth was...” With this, Mike Licona proposes three major points which he believes would inevitably emerge in such a document:

1. Death by crucifixion
   
2. An empty tomb
   
3. Disciples’ epiphanies

Licona makes the usual arguments in supporting each of these three points, arguments which will be quite familiar to readers of Bill Craig, Gary Habermas, and Ronald Nash. However, he also makes a few unduly extravagant claims in the course of proving up these three points, such as the claim that Jewish authorities in Jerusalem could have easily disproved early Christian kerygma by simply producing an identifiable corpse. This might work well for 21^st century forensic crime scene investigators, but if one assumes that Jesus was severely beaten as depicted in, say, The Gospel According to Mel Gibson, then his body would have been fairly unrecognizable even before his death and inevitable decomposition. In any event, for this argument to work, one has to securely date the earliest preaching of the Christian kerygma to within a few weeks or months after Jesus death, at the outset. Licona does not even attempt to do this, though he implies it can be done.

Carrier paints a picture of rival mythmaking between Christian Gnostics and Sarcissists, each community seeking a way to preserve the message of Jesus which they had received, and each one creating new prophecies and myths to bolster their evolving theological frameworks.

1. Paul contradicts the Gospels as to the nature of resurrection, whether in a body of spirit or a body of flesh
   
2. Paul omits the post-mortem bodily appearances of Luke and John when describing the resurrection body
   
3. Paul resurrection doctrine was an exchange of the old earthly body for a new heavenly one
   
4. Amazing but true stories are rare, while amazing but false mythic tales are quite common
   
5. Insufficient historical evidence to class Jesus’ resurrection in the “amazing but true” category
   
6. The gospels bear the marks of legendary development and confabulation over time
   
7. Objective supernatural encounters are far less common than subjective religious visions
   
8. Paul’s personal epiphanies seem to fall squarely in the latter category rather than the former
   
9. Jesus’ post-mortem appearances are corporeal only in Luke and John, indicating mythical development
   

Probably the most learned and interested argument made by Carrier was in support of point #5, in which he outlines five kinds of historical evidence and then uses them to compare two putative historical events: Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and Jesus’ empty tomb. Carrier argues that the Rubicon crossing has strong evidence from each category, and concludes that whereas the evidence for Jesus’ empty tomb as “the very worst kind of evidence, a handful of late, biased, uncritical, unscholarly, unknown, secondhand witnesses – that is not good evidence. Even seen in the best possible light, the evidence available is simply not sufficient to establish that there was an empty tomb.”

Neither debater does quite a thorough job in pointing out the weaknesses in his opponent’s case, although that is fairly normal when the time constraints are setup so as to allow for far more time for opening arguments than either rebuttal or cross. All things considered, this debate is among the most substantive on this particular topic.

• Unbeliever rating: 4.75 stars
  
  
• Believer rating: 4.25 stars
  
  
• Overall rating: 4.5 stars
  

Enjoy!