Resurrection Is Only Implausible If You Presuppose that Miracles Are Historically Impossible
A consideration of Bart Ehrman’s claim that miracles can never be declared historically probable
I recently finished a book manuscript on the resurrection of Jesus. The Gospel Coalition and Crossway Books will release the book next year, Deo volente. As with most projects, there are paragraphs that must be cut to fit within the required word count, and this project was no exception. One segment that I needed to cut engaged with Bart Ehrman’s claim that miracles such as the resurrection can never be considered historically probable.
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The resurrection of Jesus is only implausible if we presuppose a world where miracles are impossible. And some form of that presupposition is precisely what some scholars and students of history have chosen.
In a debate with William Lane Craig, Bart Ehrman declared that the resurrection of Jesus can never be considered historically probable, no matter how much evidence supports the reality of this event. According to Ehrman,
What about the resurrection of Jesus? I’m not saying it didn’t happen; but if it did happen, it would be a miracle. The resurrection claims are claims that not only that Jesus’ body came back alive; it came back alive never to die again. That’s a violation of what naturally happens, every day, time after time, millions of times a year. What are the chances of that happening? Well, it’d be a miracle. In other words, it’d be so highly improbable that we can’t account for it by natural means. A theologian may claim that it’s true, and to argue with the theologian we’d have to argue on theological grounds because there are no historical grounds to argue on. Historians can only establish what probably happened in the past, and by definition a miracle is the least probable occurrence. And so, by the very nature of the canons of historical research, we can’t claim historically that a miracle probably happened. By definition, it probably didn’t. And history can only establish what probably did.
Although Ehrman does not rule out resurrection at a theoretical level (“I’m not saying it didn’t happen”), his line of thinking is grounded in methodological presuppositions that make it impossible to regard any miraculous event as historical. To be considered historical, a miraculous event must be historically probable, and historical probability only includes events which don’t violate “what naturally happens, every day, time after time,” according to Ehrman.
The resurrection is unavoidably implausible for Ehrman because he has methodologically declared it to be impossible for any miracle to be historically probable. Ehrman seems to be drawing from the “principle of analogy” described by Ernst Troeltsch in his classic article “Über historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie,” but there also seem to be some traces of the tenth section of David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Canons of Historical Research Don’t Exclude the Historical Probability of Supernatural Events
Regardless of what sources are driving Ehrman’s thinking here, the first problem with this line of thinking is that there are no irrevocable “canons of historical research” that declare a miracle to be the least probable occurrence. As Michael Licona rightly points out,
There are no specific canons of history that are accepted by nearly all historians…. McCullagh’s canons of historical research prohibit historians from adjudicating on miracle-claims while those of Tucker allow it. Within the community of biblical scholars, the canons of Meier, Dunn, Wedderburn, Theissen, Winter and Carnley prohibit historians from adjudicating on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, while the canons of N. T. Wright, Gerd Lüdemann, Raymond E. Brown, Gerald O’Collins, Gary Habermas and William Lane Craig allow it. Historians need not be theists to reject Ehrman’s canons. Lüdemann is an atheist.
One of the difficulties of Ehrman’s supposed “canon” governing historical probability is that, if history rules out the supernatural by implicitly declaring that only what is natural is probable, that’s circular reasoning. The same difficulty also afflicts David Hume’s argument against miracles, although in a somewhat different way.
Frequency Doesn’t Decide Historical Probability; Evidence Does
A second—and far more problematic—issue with Ehrman’s claim has to do with how he defines historical probability. For Ehrman, historical probability is based on natural regularity and frequency (“what naturally happens, every day, time after time” and “by natural means”). And yet, if the standard for gauging historical probability is what happens “time after time, millions of times a year,” no event that hasn’t already happened can be regarded as historically probable. That means Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps on elephants can’t be regarded as historically probable, and neither can the Kentucky Meat Shower. For that matter, neither should myriads of other rare and unexpected events that have no analogies in day-by-day human experience.
Here’s the critical error that Ehrman makes: What makes an event historically probable is not the frequency of the occurrence but the quality and consistency of the evidence. Whether an event is rare or commonplace, the probability that it happened is determined on the basis of ordinary evidences like memories, texts, physical artifacts, and eyewitness accounts. If someone makes a claim that has no natural explanation, it makes sense to look for more evidence or to examine the evidence more carefully. And yet, there is a vast difference between practicing a healthy skepticism about supernatural claims and presupposing that the resurrection of Jesus can’t be historically probable because miracles aren’t what happens “every day, time after time, millions of times a year.”
Christians have never claimed the resurrection was a natural or a frequent phenomenon. If it were natural or frequent, it wouldn’t be the event that early Christians described. If the resurrection of Jesus happened, it was supernatural and momentous. The historical case for or against the resurrection has to do with the quality of the evidence, not with the cause or the frequency of the occurrence.