I contributed a chapter to a great new book that was just released, a book I dare say is required reading for anyone who wants to be up-to-date on the “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” debate. It pits atheist professor Carl Stecher against Christian professor Craig Blomberg. And in response are two chapters analyzing who won, one by Christian apologist Peter S. Williams, and one by atheist Richard Carrier. Followed by replies to us by Blomberg and Stecher. Here I’ll add further comments on the result.

The Book

I highly recommend getting this book, for anyone interested in the subject, because it represents the latest in methods and arguments from both sides. This is the best they have. As infamous Christian apologist Gary Habermas himself says (and this from the “Distinguished Research Professor & Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Liberty University”):

In this debate on the central Christian doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus, the two chief scholars represented here, Craig Blomberg and Carl Stecher, speak capably and knowledgeably in favor of the major opposing positions. Additional respondents enhance the discussion. The opponents are nonetheless amicable and attempt to understand and make allowances for positions that are not their own, which always contributes to greater understanding. For those who appreciate dialogue as a means of clearing away poorly articulated views, this dialogue is a good place to either begin or for further study. Though I have always favored the resurrection position, the communication must continue for greater clarification and decision-making.

It’s available in print now:

• Resurrection: Faith or Fact? A Scholars’ Debate Between a Skeptic and a Christian (Pitchstone 2019)

There is also a kindle version. And possibly other digital formats.

I think this is so far the best attempt at defending the resurrection from any Christian you’ll encounter. So if you want to prep yourself for the best, this is the book to consult. Not only to see the best and latest Christian arguments. But to see the atheists’ best and fullest response to them—yet succinctly: each chapter is a very manageable read.

Resurrection: Faith or Fact? starts with an Introduction by Stecher explaining the project, followed by one chapter from each contributor on how we got here—including myself. So you also get a bonus chapter from me, an extension of my autobiography and account of my motivations beyond what you get in Sense and Goodness without God (as that is now almost fifteen years old). But it’s brief (“A Path to Secular Reason,” pp. 40-47). The principal chapter I contributed is of post-debate analysis (“A Skeptic’s Analysis,” pp. 195-219), which can even serve as an analysis of the whole history and field of resurrection apologetics to date, and why it doesn’t rationally succeed. The rest of the book contains two openings, rebuttals, and rejoinders each from Stecher and Blomberg, analysis chapters by Williams and myself, and Stecher and Blomberg’s closing statements in response. Plus a one-page recommended reading list from each of us. The whole thing clocks in at under 300 pages.

My Chapter

Of course still to this day my most definitive refutation of all attempts to claim the evidence proves Jesus rose from the dead remains my chapter on it in The Christian Delusion from 2010 (complete with Bayesian modeling in the endnotes). And my most thorough scholarly analysis of the three most likely competing explanations of the evidence is still the three corresponding chapters I contributed to The Empty Tomb all the way back in 2005 (expanded by an online FAQ).

But this book supplements those by showing how even now Christian apologists don’t really have any valid response to our case against them. Stecher himself advances a number of alternative theories that I don’t think are likely, yet are still more likely than the miraculous interventions of cosmic superhuman entities. And Blomberg and Williams don’t really have any valid reply to that. So what you get to see here, is how they construct and rationalize themselves out of this desperate conundrum.

As I summarize the situation (pp. 195-96):

Carl’s case against Jesus’ resurrection as a fact of history can be summarized succinctly as follows:

1. Paul, our only contemporary source and the only contemporary witness to the risen Jesus we have any record from, does not report any facts about the nature or circumstances of the risen Jesus’s appearances, and certainly none that establish he was encountered in any way outside of momentary private visions, dreams, or hopeful confusions.
2. The Gospels appear decades later, their authors anonymous, and manifestly fictionalize and invent details and whole episodes; and no one to our knowledge verified or fact-checked anything in them, so we cannot know that any of their content dates to the time of Paul.

When we add the first fact to the second, there is no way to know that Jesus rose from the dead, only that he was believed to have.

In short, “Carl’s argument requires us to distinguish and not confuse two different things: what Paul thought happened when he wrote 1 Corinthians 15:3-8; and the stories the Gospels tell.” Yet the Christian apologists in this book simply went on to continually do exactly that. Thus exposing a key cornerstone of the system of delusion they’ve constructed for themselves. They also, of course, resorted to a number of other fallacies and inaccuracies, particularly in misrepresenting and thus never really responding to many of Stecher’s arguments. Which is Apologetics 101. But to understand it, you have to see it in operation. This book’s perfect for that.

Peter Williams

Williams adds his thoughts in “Evidence, Explanation, and Expectation” (pp. 220-61). His attempts to rescue the resurrection from that failure of evidence is instructive. I won’t be redundant; my own chapter already refutes much of what Williams writes, and Stecher already responds in his own “Final Thoughts” (pp. 265-78). But here is what I’d add now (since my chapter wasn’t written with knowledge of this one):

Williams seems to think N.T. Wright was correct that the empty tomb and sightings of Jesus are as well attested as “the fall of Jerusalem’s Temple” (pp. 220-22). Christians often say false things like this. It’s illustrative of how their supernatural beliefs require believing false things even of the mundane. In fact for the Temple’s destruction we have not only detailed eyewitness testimony (from Josephus, who was there) and a contemporary’s account (from Tacitus, who was in government at the time and served soon after with the very men who prosecuted the war), but also a whole collection of direct and indirect archaeological, numismatic, and epigraphic evidence from the immediate aftermath years. None of which we have even for the sightings of Jesus; far less, an “empty tomb.” We actually have really terrible evidence for the latter; and for the former, no good evidence beyond the possibility of fleeting visions. This is what Christians keep refusing to admit.

Williams then asks how it is that Stecher can claim some things in the Gospels are known to be true (such as, one might suggest, the governance of Pontius Pilate over Judea) but for the rest we lack any way to tell (pp. 223-24). Williams uses this as a wedge to push in illogical or inapplicable methodologies for separating fact from fiction, all of which fail to work in the judgment of literally every peer reviewed study of them to date (which scholarship I cite in my own chapter; but you’ll find a thorough collection of scholarly quotations refuting the applicability of these “criteria” in Chapter 4 of Proving History).

Which is all to ignore the actual answer to the question: for that which we affirm true, we have reliable independent corroboration. For Pilate, for instance, we have eyewitness attestation by Philo of Alexandria, multiple early critical histories (e.g. Tacitus, Josephus), even an autograph inscription by Pilate himself. That’s why we conclude the Gospels have at least that one fact right. Do we have such reasons for the “empty tomb”? No. Not even remotely. Do we have such reasons for the “sightings of Jesus”? No. Only one witness who tells us they were fleeting visions. Which gets us nowhere near “resurrection” as explanation. This is why Christians keep resorting to inapplicable “criteria” to invent evidence out of unverifiable tales: to avoid admitting that actually there is no evidence. Only legends.

Even if we accepted Stecher’s method of plausibility that Williams calls attention to, whereby “it makes sense” that Jesus would be an itinerant apocalyptic preacher because we independently know from abundant evidence that that sort of thing was common then (it’s not even wholly unheard of still today), “therefore” we can assume that’s true (an argument that is formally invalid and not actually a legitimate method in any field of history), that still doesn’t get us a resurrection. Resurrections aren’t “the sort of thing we know from abundant evidence was common then” (or ever). If we were to accept this method, we should conclude the empty tomb story was made up—because, we know from abundant evidence, making stuff up like that was common then (and still is today).

Even if we were to stretch the method beyond such a reasonable conclusion, at best we’d have to conclude the tomb became empty (if such it did) by any of the many natural means that we know, on abundant evidence, graves become empty. And “reanimating corpses” is not one of those means. Likewise “sightings” of the dead. So Christians keep doing this, too: fabricating the claim that magic is “plausible,” as a rationalization to avoid admitting what actually is plausible (pro tip: it isn’t magic)—by avoiding admitting how we know it’s plausible: by being well documented as happening a lot—like stolen and lost corpses, and dreams and hallucinations and intuitions believed real. Conversely, that which is not well documented ever to occur is by definition not plausible. It is a logically necessary fact that when the evidence for either is the same, the ordinary is always more probable than the extraordinary. Christians accept this fact for every religion but their own. So why the special pleading? Because admitting it was true of their own faith would destroy it. And that’s just too scary to countenance.

Williams then goes on for several pages confusing two different logical principles: that absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence; and that an absence of evidence remains a lack of evidence (pp. 224-28). Pointing out that, in certain cases, an absence of evidence does not disprove your speculations does not produce evidence for your speculations. Unevidenced speculations remain unevidenced speculations. Williams confusingly leaps from “we can explain why we have no evidence of our speculations” to “we therefore can affirm our speculations are true.” Which is simply not how evidence works (more on this point in my discussion of Blomberg below). This is indeed one of the most common illogical procedures among Christians. Because indeed, faith must rest on an avoidance of logic.

Williams then confuses “legends about eyewitness testimony” with “actual eyewitness testimony,” repeatedly listing Acts’ claim that Peter saw stuff as “eyewitness testimony” (he even goes on to claim we “have” the eyewitness testimony of all twelve disciples: pp. 228-32). Which is doubly irrational, given that, after the wildly implausible private scene in Acts 1, the stuff Peter (or indeed anyone) is said in Acts to have seen, ironically, is never the finding of an empty tomb, nor even any physical encounter with a risen Jesus. So when it comes to its public (and not private) history of the church (and indeed the very verses Williams cites), Acts does not even contain a claim of the testimony Williams is asserting. So it’s just all the worse that a claim of a testimony published a lifetime later by an unknown author using no stated sources is not “having an eyewitness testimony.” If we had a text written by Peter relaying his discovery of the empty tomb and detailing his subsequent encounters with Jesus, then we’d have an eyewitness testimony. But we don’t. Our only eyewitness source is Paul. Who mentions no empty tomb being found, nor any encounters with Jesus outside “revelation.” Fabricating claims of eyewitness testimony we don’t in fact have is another very common Christian rationalization tactic.

Williams similarly “invents” multiple corroboration for these claims by ignoring the always-crucial condition required of it: you only have multiple corroboration if you have independent corroboration. He thus invents “seven first-century sources” that are actually in fact only one: the Gospel of Mark. Everything else he lists are just embellishments, legendary extrapolations, and expansions thereon, not a single one of which can be shown to have any independent source for any pertinent detail. Except of course for Paul. Who actually counts for zero here, as Paul attests to neither an empty tomb nor physical encounters with Jesus. So that’s zero sources. Plus one continually growing, unsourced legend appearing a lifetime later, none of whose contents can be corroborated as ever having existed before Mark. This “trickery” of inventing “multiple sources” in defiance of the logic plainly stated everywhere this method is formally advocated is another common Christian rationalization tactic.

But I must say Williams is correct (as I also note in my chapter) that Stecher’s doubts about an organized burial for executed convicts are unfounded (pp. 232-34); Judea was under treaty with Rome that mandated such burials in accordance with Mishnah law (thus forbidding disorganized mass graves or leaving the dead unburied in Judea, regardless of what happened outside Judea). But that Jesus would have been buried does not entail the disappearance of the corpse. And there is no evidence that happened, outside Mark’s invention of the tale (which Mark even says no witnesses reported). Because all other versions of that tale are just redactions of Mark’s. Paul conspicuously never mentions such a thing.

Williams seems to want to avoid this fact by accusing Stecher of “ad hominem” for pointing out that fundamentalists are dogmatically forbidden to admit historical doubts about the empty tomb (pp. 235-36). That’s not an ad hominem. Correctly identifying dogmatic bias in a survey of opinions is a valid argument: it establishes a fallacy of Argument from Authority. Williams then goes on to say some scholars who aren’t even Christians affirm the empty tomb, which is not actually relevant to Stecher’s point, which was that most scholars doubt the empty tomb (as Habermas’s own data actually show; hence even Gary Habermas has dropped this from his list of minimal facts). Indeed, outside fundamentalists, nearly all doubt it. Therefore one cannot cite “consensus” in defense of an empty tomb. Nor can one cherry pick a few exceptions and claim that is therefore a consensus. It’s just worse that all these exceptions cite reasons for affirming the empty tomb that are false (e.g. that women’s testimony wasn’t trusted in antiquity: see Ch. 11 of Not the Impossible Faith).

Williams then burns several pages gullibly believing Acts is a reliable source on Paul (pp. 236-38). We already know it’s not (see Ch. 9 of On the Historicity of Jesus). It doesn’t even present a coherent account of Paul’s vision, but three contradictory ones, none of them from any identifiable source (least of all anything actually said or written by Paul). And we know Acts routinely embellishes and rewrites historical facts, particularly of the supernatural. For instance, its account of glossolalia renders the truth, as we know it from Paul, far more spectacular than reality (cf. OHJ, pp. 124-25); we can expect it did the same of his visions. We therefore cannot get to any real history from fabulous details added in Acts.

Williams wants to defend the expectations that Jesus would rise from the dead, arguing Jesus likely told his followers to expect it and even hostile Jews would be concerned about a claim of it (pp. 239-40), evidently not realizing this increases the probability of hallucinating or dreaming a confirmation of it…or even indeed of stealing a body to inspire it; after all, Jesus repeatedly telling them the plan, sounds an awful lot like a plan; which is why William Lane Craig likes to deny Jesus predicted his resurrection (see my discussion of the plausibility of theft in Ch. 9 of The Empty Tomb). This does not help his case. But his argument suffers from a number of unjustifiable assumptions anyway, such as that Matthew’s addition to Mark of a wild tale of monster-paralyzed guards has anything to do with reality. In the original version, there is no knowledge or expectation Jesus’s followers would claim he rose from the dead; nor any plausibility to tales of Jesus telling them he would—which portray his Jewish followers as not even knowing what a resurrection was, nor ever understanding or believing him, which is odd behavior for fanatical cultists.

Williams likewise wants to defend Jesus against the charge of being a false prophet by insisting Jesus never said he would return within the lifetime of those then living (pp. 240-41), completely ignoring direct and explicit evidence to the contrary: that “this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened” includes “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven” with “his angels,” who “will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other” (Matthew 24:30-34). There is no “separation” of this event from any others Jesus lists. And this is exceedingly clear in other passages in the Gospels. Williams is just deluding himself here. As Christians have been doing for thousands of years. It’s the same stunt pulled by every cult that has ever predicted the end of the world: when it doesn’t come, they creatively “reinterpret” the prediction, ignoring how illogical and contrary to the prediction’s original wording and context their new reading is.

Williams then gets wrong how historical reasoning works (pp. 242-43). He thinks a resurrection is a “simple” explanation, when in fact it requires some of the most complex moving parts imaginable—not just the existence of gods and magic, but a weirdly specific God with a very weirdly specific motivation, and a whole strange architecture of atonement magic. That’s far from “simple.” Thefts, lies, visions are all far simpler and vastly more commonplace. And that’s even before we get to the enormous complexities that have to be added to the hypothesis to explain why none of the evidence it would normally produce was ever generated (see my chapter’s conclusion in the same volume). Otherwise the supernatural hypothesis is highly disconfirmed by this missing evidence. Indeed it also thereby fails to have adequate explanatory scope and power—because the actual outcome is far more likely on mundane explanations, and far more observations can be explained by them (see my demonstration of this in Ch. 2 of The End of Christianity). It just adds to that that gods and magic are also not plausible explanations in our world the way thefts, lies, and visions are. Indeed they are massively ad hoc. Williams is thus completely wrong on every single point here.

Williams then goes completely off the rails of logic at this point when he tries to claim that Jesus’s honesty entails his resurrection (pp. 242-43). Even apart from the fact that we have no evidence of his honesty (unsourced legends of it a lifetime later would not be believed on this point for any other person in history), a man’s honest belief he will rise from the dead does not increase the probability he will actually do so, not even one jot. This is simply not a logically valid way to argue. But it is a typical way Christians argue themselves into their false beliefs. Similarly when Williams insists that Jesus fulfilling prophecy counts as evidence: we have no evidence Jesus really fulfilled any prophecy—again, unsourced legends that he did, written a lifetime later, would not be believed on this point for any other person in history. Thus Christians always abandon logic when it’s their own religion and not someone else’s (hence as John Loftus demonstrates, Christians never pass The Outsider Test for Faith).

Williams then tries to respond to Stecher’s alternative hypotheses (pp. 243-54). But at no point does he correctly describe any of Stecher’s alternatives. This failure I already adequately address in my own analysis chapter; because Blomberg did the same thing. Williams also doesn’t realize that the background knowledge we already have of the world makes all the assumptions Stecher relies on inherently probable, in precisely the way magic and gods are not—even in general, much less the extremely bizarre magic and gods Christian theism requires. I won’t even bother elaborating further how Williams also relies on Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy here as well, trusting all the Gospel narratives as 100% true and as omitting nothing pertinent. That’s not at all how Williams would treat any other religion’s legends, demonstrating Stecher’s very point about dogmatic bias invalidating Williams’ reasoning.

Williams also exhibits some innumeracy here; for example listing the low percentages of bereavement hallucinations being visual and auditory as evidence against that happening, yet that cannot be an argument against bereavement hallucinations being visual and auditory, precisely because his own data show there are nonzero percentages of them. Does he have data showing nonzero percentages of miraculous corpse reanimations? Or indeed of any miraculous power whatever? Quite simply, no. Math does not go well for Williams here. But innumeracy, I find, is another common failing in Christians. And this holds even despite the fact that I personally doubt the visions Christians had were of the bereavement kind; that is simply a possibility that has a larger base rate expectancy than miracles do. It therefore has to be ruled out; and we don’t have access to what we’d need to do that. Wild unsourced legends a lifetime after the fact just don’t cut it.

Williams then closes by trying to defend his massive architecture of ad hoc assumptions (pp. 254-61), in the usual way of all Christian apologetics: by leaving out all the evidence that would reverse his conclusions (e.g. see Bayesian Counter-Apologetics). He similarly doesn’t numerically understand the reason the Argument from Evil works against him here: all the excuses he has to invent to explain away the internal contradiction between what the Christian God (and indeed the cosmic Jesus himself) is supposed to believe and want and value, and what we instead observe happening in the world, vastly reduce the plausibility of his resurrection hypothesis, rendering it extraordinarily ad hoc.

Williams then makes an appeal for our salvation (pp. 259-61). Thus revealing the real reason he believes all this stuff. It’s not evidence and reason. It’s hope and desire. Everything else is just rationalization.

Craig Blomberg

Of course my chapter in Resurrection already responds to nearly everything importantly said by Blomberg in this book. Except for his last chapter (pp. 279-89), which was written to respond to mine by way of closing (he notably spares hardly a word in response to Stecher here; nearly every page is about me). Here I’ll add my reactions to that.

First, I won’t respond to claims Blomberg gives no evidence of (such as when he claims I misrepresent him, but gives no evidence I did; readers can judge that for themselves).

Second, I won’t dwell on many of his complaints that are extraordinarily trivial—for instance, why he wastes word count insisting I am wrong to say Mormons believe Jesus flew to America, only that he “visited America” (p. 280), is beyond me (it makes no difference to any point any of us made); and it’s additionally weird, given that I’m not wrong: Mormons do not believe Jesus walked or sailed to America. He flew (Acts 1:9-10, as referenced in 3 Nephi 11:21; hence Jesus lands in America from the sky, in 3 Nephi 11:8…we call that flying). This is typical of Christian apologists: getting basic facts wrong; and then arrogantly claiming those who got them right are wrong. Similarly, Blomberg’s claim that the evidence is better for Jesus appearing than Moroni mistakes what counts as “better” (pp. 280-81). For instance, he portrays late unsourced legends extant only in distant copies, as equal to original hand-signed eyewitness accounts. He also again gets basic facts wrong, claiming only Joseph Smith saw Moroni; in fact three other witnesses signed statements swearing they had, too. And so on.

Blomberg also misunderstands our arguments. He mistakes Stecher’s statement that he is not presuming naturalism, as saying Stecher regards supernatural explanations to be as plausible as natural ones (pp. 280-81). No. Stecher says we can regard supernatural explanations as extremely improbable even if the supernatural exists. Exactly what I also explain in my chapter. Thus Blomberg gets wrong what we both argue, claims in result that I misrepresented or added to Stecher (when in fact I said exactly the same thing Stecher did: see Stecher’s own words, pp. 172-75), and then bemoans how unfair that is. This is weird behavior. But another typical of Christian apologetics. These any reader can catch for themselves. I hardly need reply to every instance of Blomberg doing such a thing.

Nor will I bother much with straw men. For example, Blomberg mistakenly “assumes” I am just repeating Hume in my argument about the relative base rates for the mundane and the miraculous, and proceeds to rebut Hume (pp. 281-82); which has no relevance to what I said, which differs importantly from Hume. Thus Blomberg avoids having to address what I actually said, by instead pretending I said what Hume did. Any reader can catch this out by simply not trusting Blomberg: don’t fall for his rebuttal of Hume as a rebuttal of me; read what I actually wrote instead, and look for whether Blomberg says anything actually applicable to that. Please do the same in every other instance where he tries straw manning what I wrote.

Once we sweep past all that, we get finally to a relevant attempt to answer something I said: Blomberg tries to argue that “just because” the evidence indicates the original Gospel of Mark contained no appearance narratives, we should not therefore “assume” there were none known to Mark (pp. 282-83). But this has the logic of evidence exactly backwards. One can speculate all one wants, but we still don’t have any evidence Mark knew of any appearance narratives. Much less of what was in them. “Maybe he did” is not evidence he did. It’s not in fact evidence of anything. Which is precisely the problem I pointed out: Blomberg cannot show any of the Gospel narratives predate Mark. “But they might have” is not a rebuttal to that inescapable point. Yet Blomberg does this over and over again for several pages (pp. 283-85). Christians often do this: they try to shoehorn speculations into the status of evidence, and then, trick accomplished, claim we were wrong to say there is no evidence. That might convince someone keen on deluding themselves; it won’t convince anyone genuinely committed to being logical.

The lack of evidence is a lack of evidence. Anyone who tries to escape that conclusion is servicing a delusion. And what we lack is any evidence any of the narratives in the Gospels existed prior to them. Paul only mentions visions. He mentions no details of them. Nor any missing body. And that’s all we get to hear about for decades and decades. There is simply no way to insist that later legendary stories were “known” to Paul, or anyone in his day. We have no evidence that’s the case. Even if it was the case. Because we can only operate today from the evidence available today; not evidence we wish were available today.

Already the conclusion follows—we cannot know what we do not know. It’s only the worse that it is peculiar none of those remarkable things were ever heard of before—as amazing and relevant as an empty tomb and reanimated corpse would be to Paul’s entire argument of 1 Corinthians 15, somehow he appears never to have heard of them (see The Empty Tomb, pp. 122-42). As extraordinary as it would have been that a reanimate Jesus hung out and dined with 120 followers for 40 days (Acts 1:1-4), Paul says there was only one occasion on which “hundreds” saw Jesus, not an extended period of such appearances (and of all other appearances, none apparently occurred “all at once” to any group). And none appear to have been different from his own vision, which he says was an inner revelation, not meeting a reanimated corpse (and no, Paul never says anything about his vision being “post-ascension” or in any way different from anyone else’s). And so on. (Just read my chapter Blomberg is responding to.) So the evidence is worse than missing here. The Gospel narratives appear to be contradicted by earlier eyewitness accounts; not endorsed by them.

Blomberg then goes on to the Dying-and-Rising God mytheme, which clearly makes him uncomfortable, as it does most Christians (pp. 285-86). Oddly, I called him out for making factually incorrect claims about these gods, and Blomberg replies by claiming that’s impossible because he “gave no account” of them; in fact he did (see for yourself: p. 130; among the falsehoods there: that Isis killed Osiris (!), that Mithras was fathered by Isis and Osiris (!), and that in myth Osiris “never left the underworld” after his resurrection). He then goes on to make even more false claims about them here, despite my having directed him to the very survey of evidence he strangely asks me to have provided (his claim I didn’t, on page 285, is directly contradicted by my having done so, on page 215, note 21; I couldn’t list the material for limited word count, but he is here directed to it).

His new false claims include: that in myth Inanna was not “bodily resurrected” (she very clearly in fact was: OHJ, p. 47), that no ordinary humans rose from the dead in any extant myth (in fact we have several examples), that Romulus didn’t have a resurrection body when he ascended to heaven (contrary to the standard theological physics of the era), that restoring Bacchus to life again by physically reassembling his mutilated corpse is not a “bodily resurrection” (!), and that Zalmoxis worshipers taught Zalmoxis didn’t really die and rise. The latter is particularly hypocritical: Blomberg dishonestly resorts to the Christian apologetic tactic of representing an anti-Zalmoxian polemic as actual Zalmoxian beliefs (a trick played by apologists before him: Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 100-05). If that were fair play, then I’d get to claim Jesus “didn’t really die and rise, either,” because anti-Christian polemics portray his death and resurrection as faked. That’s not exactly honest.

Blomberg also leans on the fallacy of arbitrarily deciding which parallels count when they actually don’t. For example, that the dying be “human” rather than a god. That distinction is as irrelevant to the mytheme as what color hair the dying has. The resurrection mytheme requires only that the subject be killable, that they actually die, and that they actually return to a new embodied life. That’s what dying and rising means. All other distinctions are trivia, the mark of the creativity or religious adaptation of each mythographer. This argument is also disingenuous. Jesus is uniformly recognized as divine, a supernaturally empowered “Son of God” in the Gospel myths (so Blomberg’s claim that he is distinctively “human” in his myth is again not quite honest); and many dying-and-rising gods were as human as Jesus was, being, just like him, born of mortal women by divine agency. Blomberg is thus coming dangerously close to lying here. That is very typical of Christian apologetics: to not honestly represent uncomfortable evidence.

And that’s it. Blomberg closes with some moot thoughts about differing presuppositions that don’t even purport to resolve anything (pp. 287-88), and finishes with that most embarrassing of all Christian arguments: that the reason the evidence for the resurrection is so surprisingly poor, is that God deliberately hid all the good evidence so as not to violate our free will (p. 289). Which is an argument that doesn’t make sense even if free will actually worked that way (and it doesn’t), because evidence does not violate free will, as if my convincing you of something with exceptionally good evidence were a crime against your consent (it’s not and never can be); but worse, freely choosing to follow someone is not the same thing as knowing they exist and their offer is legit. Blomberg’s argument confuses these. It is morally irresponsible to follow anyone on insufficient evidence they’re legit. Exactly the opposite of Blomberg’s assumed premise. And Blomberg would admit this for literally every other cult and ideology on earth. Yet somehow, common sense flees him the moment it’s his cult and ideology we are talking about. Which makes this a big fallacy of Special Pleading. Which is precisely how delusion works. It constructs an artifice that superficially lets you forget a problem…as long as you don’t think about it too much.

Conclusion

The attempts in this book to rescue Christian belief in the resurrection from its obvious disconfirmation and implausibility are pretty much the best you are going to find. That they are still so illogical and inaccurate is thus what tells you their belief is false. I highly recommend you buy and read the whole thing. And if you are still uncertain of the merits of the Christian case, you can revisit my points here. But if some argument or claim in that book is made (by either side) that you don’t see me having addressed in my chapter there or in my analysis here, please post it in comments below, and I’ll give you my assessment. I would find that quite valuable.