Gary Habermas and Bart Ehrman on the Resurrection - PART ONE

KEVIN HARRIS: OK, Bill, the next two podcasts are going to be a lot of fun. We are going to do a two-part series on Gary Habermas and Bart Ehrman. Gary was on Cameron Bertuzzi's podcast, Capturing Christianity, talking about evidence for the resurrection.^[1] He gives five lines of evidence. Paulogia, who describes himself as a former Christian, had Bart Ehrman on his podcast to respond to Gary^[2], especially since Gary quoted Bart Ehrman so frequently in this interview with Cameron. Bill, we are going to get you to do an overview of the whole thing. So let’s go to Paulogia who interviews Bart and also plays portions of the clips from Gary. Here’s the first clip.

PAULOGIA: Gary says he has five lines of resurrection evidence that he dates to 36 AD, or six years after the death of Jesus.

DR. HABERMAS: The first stage is they preached it. The homologia is what they preached is number one. And the message is always the same (deity, death, resurrection) because homologia means “earliest thing we shared or believed among us.” The earliest Christian preaching according to skeptics like Bart Ehrman and many others – the preaching of Christianity – started immediately.

DR. EHRMAN: I do think that that's true, but I probably mean it in a different way than Gary is using it. My hunch is that he thinks that that means that the third day on the Sunday after Jesus was killed people started proclaiming the Gospel of Christ's death and resurrection. I don't mean it like that. I don't know when the disciples of Jesus first came to believe he was raised from the dead. They certainly did come to believe in it, and I think they believed in it fairly soon. I doubt it was on the third day. It might have been a week later, two weeks later, a month later. At some point they came to think that Jesus had been raised from the dead. They believed that, I think, because one or more of them had some kind of visionary experience. They thought they saw Jesus alive. Once they thought Jesus was alive they told the others, and the others believed them. Some of the others (we don't know if all the disciples even believed it; we don't know) . . . we have all these stories in the New Testament of the disciples doubting. Why do you have all these stories about them doubting? Why don’t they just believe it? Well, probably because some of them doubted it! And so as soon as they thought Jesus was alive they immediately assumed that God had raised him from the dead. They immediately then thought he really is the one chosen by God, and they had to figure out how it could be that the Chosen One got crucified. I think very soon they started thinking Jesus must have been a sacrifice of some kind. And once they thought that, I think, yeah, I think they started preaching that probably right away wherever they were. My guess is they were up in Galilee at the time, and I don't think it was on the third day.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK, Bill. There's the first one. Let's start there.

DR. CRAIG: What Gary is trying to enunciate here are three stages in the progression of the Christian proclamation of the resurrection. It's not so much five lines of evidence as several stages. He thinks that the first stage would be the preaching of the resurrection. Here I don't think there's really any disagreement of substance between Ehrman and Habermas. As we'll see later in the interview, Ehrman says he agrees basically with the first point. Whether it was a week, two weeks, a month later is immaterial. It is that this was the early stage of the resurrection belief and proclamation. I think Gary would agree that it was based upon these resurrection appearances. I would add as well “and the discovery of the empty tomb.” One mustn't leave out the fact of the empty tomb as part of the reason for their belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead. One thing I would disagree with about Ehrman is when he says, “They wondered how the Chosen One could be killed. They thought he must have been a sacrifice.” This sounds like a sort of ex post-facto account of why Jesus, though the Messiah, was crucified and killed. This notion of Jesus’ death as a self-giving sacrifice for the sins of the people is a motif already present in Jesus’ own lifetime. He prefigured his death in the Last Supper that he ate with his disciples on the night of his arrest where he presented his impending death as a sacrifice modeled upon the righteous servant of Isaiah 53 who gives his life as a sacrifice for sin. So this wasn't some sort of rationalization invented later by the disciples. This was Jesus’ own interpretation of his impending death, and it was his resurrection from the dead that convinced the disciples that in fact he was God's Chosen One despite the humiliation of his crucifixion.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Here's the next clip.

DR. HABERMAS: Secondly, James is converted. James, the brother of Jesus, comes to know Jesus. From 1 Corinthians 15 we know he appeared to James. Right? He appeared to Peter, to James. We have two individuals and three groups in that creed of 1 Corinthians 15. But all we have is that comment – he appeared to James. That's all we have in the New Testament. Now some fragments have been discovered. They're not New Testament. They're not inspired. But it's a little book that may only be 25 years after the Gospel of John. It's really early. It's called the Gospel of the Hebrews. It only exists in a few fragments. Guess what one of the fragments is? Jesus appearing to his brother James. This is really cool.

DR. EHRMAN: We know about the Gospel of the Hebrews. It shows up in the second century sources. We don't actually have the Gospel of the Hebrews. We have quotations of it by church fathers. If anybody's interested in it, I did a translation of it. I've got a book of Gospels that aren't in the New Testament. We just have these fragments of the Gospel of the Hebrews like we have the Gospel the Ebionites. And so we have these various Gospels. We don't know much about the Gospel of the Hebrews. I don't think Gary wants to put too much weight on the Gospel of the Hebrews. If he's really talking about what I think he's talking about, the Gospel of the Hebrews has a very Gnostic orientation to it. So if you credit it for some of its information that is satisfying to you, doesn't it mean you have to credit it with the other things it says about Jesus? You just can't pick and choose these things. It's like when people use Papias to show that Mark who was writing down Peter's version of the story. Yeah, they accept that little fragment from Papias. Why don't they accept the other fragments where he says things that even they say “Oh, boy. That's a little bit . . . that's off the charts. That can’t be right.”

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Here I come down somewhere between Habermas and Ehrman. I don't see any reason to try to date the conversion of James as a sort of second stage of resurrection belief. We do know that it was prior to Paul's own conversion and probably prior to Pentecost fifty days after the Passover during which Jesus was crucified. So it is very early – this appearance to James. But I was really surprised to hear Gary appeal to the Gospel of the Hebrews as vindication of this appearance claim. As he says, it is a very early apocryphal Gospel. It's quoted by Jerome and has a fairly lengthy paragraph in which the resurrection appearance of the Lord to James is described. This is dated in the early second century. But I don't think anybody thinks that this is a historically accurate account of the appearance to James. Quite the contrary, by then people were well aware of the name in Paul's list of eyewitnesses in 1 Corinthians 15 (“then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles”). So this apocryphal story is probably a fanciful legend of the appearance to James built upon this single reference that Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 15. Maybe Gary knows something about this that I don't, but I'm not aware of anybody who would think that this is a historically credible account of the appearance to James. That being said, however, Ehrman is quite mistaken if he thinks that you cannot discover kernels of historical fact in documents that may in other respects be unreliable. Even if, for example, this Gospel of the Hebrews is imbued with the philosophy of Gnosticism, that doesn't prove in any way that it doesn't preserve some historical memory of Jesus or of James. You can't say it's a kind of all or nothing thing – that either you've got to believe it all or you believe none of it. If you took that attitude toward the documents of the New Testament then Ehrman wouldn't even believe in the historicity of Jesus which he strongly defends. He recognizes that even though he thinks the Gospels are in many respects unreliable that nevertheless there are historical kernels there to be had which tell us about the historical Jesus. So you can't just blow off the Gospel of the Hebrews because it shows Gnostic influence. You've got to look at it more seriously and see if there could be a historical nugget contained in it.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip they get into the creeds. Let's go to that now.

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

DR. HABERMAS: OK. Number three: the preaching becomes crystallized. The crystallization is called creeds. But the question is: How do we know they preach this heavy, heavy Christology from the beginning? Because the early creeds say so. And we know they're early. Critics date these things to the 30s. Critics do. Bart Ehrman, atheist New Testament scholar. Bart Ehrman says over and over and over that they're in the 30s.

DR. EHRMAN: No! Why do people say that? I'll tell you why I think people say that. They say that because scholars have called those pre-Pauline creeds. People reading that who aren't New Testament scholars don't seem to understand what that means. It doesn't mean that they were creeds that were devised before Paul became a believer. Pre-Pauline creed means that they were creeds in circulation before Paul wrote them down in his letters. So if the letter to the Romans was written in whatever it was (62, 63, 64, whatever it was), if you say that, say, Romans chapter 1:3-4 was pre-Pauline, what you mean is that it was circulated before Paul wrote it in that letter. And so that could have been in the 50s. On what basis would people say that it was circulating in the 30s?

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Now here is the key disagreement between Habermas and Ehrman. Erhman will later say he agrees with the first two stages – the primitive Christian preaching and the appearance to James. But what he denies is the crystallization into creeds that exhibit a strong Christology in which Jesus is presented as fully divine, as divine as the Father. Now, I don't know what Bart Ehrman says or believes about when these confessions first began to crystallize, but I do know that in recent New Testament scholarship as a result of the work of people like Richard Bauckham and Larry Hurtado there has been a groundswell of scholarly judgment concerning the worship of Jesus as God in the earliest Jewish Christian fellowships in Roman Judea (that is to say, in Palestine). So this is, in fact, an extraordinarily early development. Here the weight of scholarship is solidly on Habermas's side. Let me quote to you from Hurtado's book One God, One Lord. He writes this,

Jesus devotion erupted initially among Jewish circles of Jesus’ followers in Roman Judea and astonishingly early and quickly.

. . .

Jewish Christians gathered in Jesus’ name for worship, prayed to him and sang hymns to him, regarded him as exalted to a position of heavenly rule above all angelic orders, appropriated to him titles and Old Testament passages originally referring to God, sought to bring fellow Jews as well as Gentiles to embrace him as the divinely appointed redeemer, and in general redefined their devotion to the God of their fathers so as to include the veneration of Jesus.

Hurtado refers to this as binatarian worship of both God the Father and God the Son as equally divine. He says in his book,

we are dealing with explosively rapid and utterly remarkable developments. . . . The most crucial ones likely taking us back to the earliest years of the “post-Easter” Jesus movement.

He says,

Paul's own letters, the earliest literary access to Christianity afforded to us, provide strong evidence that the period in which to seek the decisive beginnings of the veneration of Jesus is not at all late but extremely early, easily within the first decade of the Christian movement.

So, in fact, it is easily within the AD 30s contrary to what Ehrman would have us believe. This raises a very profound question. Christopher Kaiser puts it this way. He says, “How could deity Christology arise among pious Jews whose tradition consistently opposed the exaltation of any living human being to equality with God?” A Jew would have regarded it as blasphemous and absurd that any human being could be exalted to equality with God, and yet these early Jewish Christians following Jesus’ resurrection believed that in Jesus we encounter God himself.

KEVIN HARRIS: By the way, I've got to give Paulogia credit for creativity. This cartoon of Bart Ehrman looks just like Bart Ehrman! Really creative way to present this material.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. It's just sad that this Paulogia is so taken in by Professor Ehrman on these things when the wide consensus of scholarship is quite in the other direction. Habermas is giving us a more accurate representation here.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next clip.

PAULOGIA: So Gary ultimately fails to affirm his early dating. But he moves on to perhaps his most novel contention that whatever the dating the pre-Pauline creeds contain high Christology.

DR. HABERMAS: And the critics agree where these creeds are. Here's one. Romans 10:9: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved.” If you confess through the mouth that Jesus is Lord, it's like Paul is saying “and by the way, by Lord I mean Jehovah.”

DR. EHRMAN: No, no, no, no. Paul did not think that Jesus was Yahweh. This idea is being, I don’t know, it’s being passed around in evangelical circles and I think, oh my God, this is so wrong. Paul did not think Jesus was Yahweh. Look. You can't use this Joel thing. Paul didn't read it in Hebrew! He's reading Greek! It's kurios! Jesus is kurios, and kurios said so and so. . . You can’t do that. The Philippians hymn in chapter 2 is quite clear. There is a God who is above Jesus. “Jesus did not regard equality with God something to be grasped after, but he emptied himself and became human.” And after that, God highly exalted him and gave him the name. So God made Jesus his equal. So he was equal with God after God exalted him at the resurrection. But they are not identical. He's not Yahweh. Oh, man. I just think that whole idea . . . I never even heard of that until I was in a debate with a guy named Justin Bass. And he was surprised I didn't think Jesus was Yahweh. I mean, what? Jesus is never understood to be Yahweh. I mean take the Old Testament. Psalm 110. “Yahweh said to my Lord [to adonai] sit at my right hand.” And Christians took this as God speaking to Jesus. “Yahweh spoke to my Lord.” Well, then how is Jesus Yahweh? So he can’t be Yahweh – he was never Yahweh in the early Christian thinking. No.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Here Bart really misrepresents the point that Habermas as well as Hurtado, Bauckham and many others are making. No one is claiming that Paul thought Jesus was numerically identical with Yahweh. Yahweh is the Hebrew name for God in the Old Testament. The Greek translation of the term for Yahweh in the New Testament is kurios which means Lord. And what these New Testament authors did was they would use Old Testament prooftexts referring to Yahweh (kurios) and they would apply them to Jesus. This is demonstrated, for example, by David Capes in his book Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul's Christology. The point is not that Jesus is Yahweh, that they're numerically identical. Rather, the point is that Jesus is equally God with Yahweh, that they are both God (theos). But they are two persons. In other words this is this binatarian worship that I spoke of a moment ago. There are two persons who have equal claim to being God. In the New Testament, in order to avoid the confusion between the Father and Christ the Son, usually the Father is referred to as theos (the Greek word for God). Theos usually denotes the Father. But the New Testament Christians picked up the word kurios (Lord), which is the name of God in the Old Testament, and they applied that to Jesus. So their doctrine was there is one God the Father and one Lord Jesus Christ, and they would use Old Testament prooftexts about Yahweh and apply them to Jesus. This is one of the strongest indications of the worship of Jesus as God in the early church. As Gary says, in Romans 10:9 one of the preconditions for salvation is that “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is kurios (Lord) and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead then you will be saved.” I’ll say something more about Philippians 2 later on, but I think it is clear that Bart is just confused if he thinks that those who defend a high Christology are saying that God the Father and God the Son are the same person. That is incorrect. They are the same God, but they are two persons.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Let’s stop right there. We are going to pick it up next time right here on Reasonable Faith for part two. It’s Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig.^[3]