Square Pegs for Round Holes? Applying Historical Method to Jesus’ Resurrection

It has become the norm for evangelical scholars studying the resurrection of Jesus, notably William Lane Craig and Michael Licona, to argue that the alleged historicity of this event can be made clear via the application of tried and trusted historical methods such as the principles of analogy, antecedent probability, and inference to the best explanation. Bayes’ Theorem, although strictly a statistical tool, has also sometimes been deployed to bolster these arguments. In the present article, I argue that each of these methods, not least because the involvement of God as agent, is _ipso facto _beyond the possibility of historical enquiry. Despite the obvious evangelical objections, I suggest that, assuming there was a resurrection ‘event’ of sorts, the best of the natural explanations, such as the hallucination-cum-collective delusion hypothesis, is as likely to be true as the traditional explanation in historical terms.