Of course â thatâs exactly what Iâve been saying. The third quest gives (even if certainly wasnât its intention, itâs been an unintended consequence) strength to the most essential tenet of the Christian faith. Thatâs not to say it proves it beyond all doubt, but it certainly makes the leap of faith far less irrational or absurd than it was once thought to be.
And thatâs the crucial point: when we examine what happened after the crucifixion, the reality of the resurrection emerges as by far the most reliable explanation â unless, of course, one starts from an anti-theistic bias. Because if you begin with the axiomatic assumption that God doesnât exist, then miracles become impossible by definition. And even when something appears to point in that direction, the response is to dismiss it as ignorance, delusion, or some other natural explanation â no matter how strained.
As Iâve said before, everything else follows from that one central event. I could never believe that the same God who conquered death would somehow be unable to ensure that His message â the true teaching of Christ â was faithfully transmitted through the Gospels.
But let me stress one important point: history, by its very nature, cannot prove the resurrection. Historical inquiry operates under the principle of methodological naturalism â meaning it does not consider supernatural explanations, not because theyâre necessarily false, but because they lie outside the scope of its tools and methods.
That doesnât mean the resurrection isnât the best explanation for the historical data we have â it very often is and even Dale Allison said as much*. But it does mean that the tools of historical analysis can neither prove nor disprove it. Even John P. Meier â whose work I know intimately â openly states that the resurrection lies beyond the reach of historical investigation, precisely because of the limits imposed by methodological naturalism.
*âIf there was no reason to believe that his [Jesusâs] solid body had returned to life, no one would have thought him, against expectation, resurrected from the dead. Certainly visions of or perceived encounters with a postmortem Jesus would not by themselves have supplied such reason.â
â Dale C. Allison Jr., Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters, p. 324â325 (T & T Clark, 2005).
âHistorical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which scepticisms of various sorts have been hiding. The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivalled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity.â (N.T Wright Resurrection of the Son of God, p.718).
