Ankerberg Show

Guest (Male): Welcome to the John Ankerberg Show Classics Edition. For decades, we've been privileged to host esteemed scholars discussing a wide range of topics, from apologetics and science to biblical prophecy and beyond. Join us as we revisit these timeless conversations and make them accessible to you wherever you are.

Today, we invite you to hear a debate between one of the world's foremost philosophical atheists, Dr. Anthony Flew, former professor of Oxford University, and Christian philosopher and historian Dr. Gary Habermas, current chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Liberty University, on the topic: Did Jesus rise from the dead?

Dr. Gary Habermas: If we've got good arguments for God's existence, if we have evidence for God writing Scripture, if we have evidence for Him acting in time, if Jesus does miracles, then He rises from the dead. And if today we see cases of double-blind experiments where we can't answer a medical journal publishes answers to prayer, where 21 out of 26 categories the person is statistically better, we see some healing examples which we had time to go into, near-death experiences, and then we talk about the evidence for the resurrection, I think the Christian's point is the resurrection is not isolated. It's part of a bigger picture, what we would want to call a theistic worldview.

Guest (Male): Christianity stands or falls on Christ's resurrection. If Christ has risen from the dead, then Christianity is true. If He did not, then Christianity is false. Even the apostle Paul wrote, "If Christ has not been raised, then your faith is groundless, your preaching is useless, and you are still in your sins." We invite you to join us for this important debate on the John Ankerberg Show.

Welcome. We're discussing the topic: Did Jesus rise from the dead? We're talking with two wonderful guests: Dr. Anthony Flew, considered by many to be the world's foremost contemporary philosophical atheist, and Dr. Gary Habermas, a renowned Christian philosopher and historian considered by many to be the foremost expert on the evidence for Jesus' resurrection.

I just appreciate you being here. We want to jump right to the crux of the matter. Do we have historical evidence to prove that Jesus actually lived? Did He die on a cross? What about the disciples? Did they have experiences which they believed were literal appearances of the risen Jesus? Dr. Habermas, you mentioned 12 facts in our last segment. You have said out of those 12, all critical scholars would basically agree with four specific facts. We need some of that evidence. First of all, what are the facts?

Dr. Gary Habermas: What I did from this list of 12 facts surrounding Friday to Sunday in the life of Jesus traditionally, I've taken four. It's an arbitrary number because, to my knowledge, nobody would give you as few as four. Rudolph Bultmann probably gives you 20 from this last week, half a week in Jesus' life.

What I've done is think there are four facts out of the 12 that do three things. First of all, I think that these, plus a couple of others of the 12 facts, can refute the major naturalistic theories using nothing but the data surrounding these facts. Secondly, you've got the best evidences for the resurrection here. Third, you're doing all of it with a very small kernel of historical data. You're not requiring the Gospels or this or that. This all comes from Paul.

Guest (Male): What are the facts?

Dr. Gary Habermas: The first one is that Jesus died due to the rigors of crucifixion. Secondly, the disciples had experiences that they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus. Thirdly, their lives were changed. They were transformed. They undeniably believed that Jesus saw them, and they turned the world upside down. Fourthly, a man named Paul, a skeptic and a critic who killed Christians and imprisoned them, came to Christ by an experience that he believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus.

Guest (Male): Now, Tony, sitting next to you, would be saying that if you're not a Christian, some of those facts... Tony, you tell him. Would you agree with all those facts?

Dr. Anthony Flew: Yes, I think I would. But these literal appearances... I'm very much a sympathizer of the Thomas who appears very late in the gospel story, one with doubts as to whether there is an actual physical body there. As far as I can see, there's nothing said to say that he actually did put his hands in. He's told he ought to do, and then it's reported that Jesus is reported to say that he had seen rather than that he had actually felt the body.

Dr. Gary Habermas: He tells Thomas to touch him. John does not tell us that Thomas touched him. I would add the following, though: Ignatius, just perhaps 10 years after the Gospel of John in 107 AD, says at that point that Thomas did touch him. Be that as it may, we've got two earlier accounts of women touching Jesus from the Gospels. One is the women as a whole who take Jesus by the ankles in Matthew 28:9. We've got the case of Mary Magdalene who comes back alone, and she thinks he's the gardener, and she turns around and sees him and she knows it's him. He says, "Stop clinging to me." So I get this picture of Mary holding him for all she's worth. So we have the women touching him, Mary touching him, and at least Ignatius says Thomas touched him.

Guest (Male): Not only that, but the fact is, if you're going to use the account about Thomas where "I won't believe until I can put my hands right into the nail prints and see the side," whatever happened, you have his testimony after he said that: "My Lord, my God." So something happened. What do you think?

Dr. Anthony Flew: It is curious that Jesus is reported as saying, "So now you've touched, you believe." But it is reported as saying that he'd seen. It's a very peculiar thing to my mind. It's not the way that I would have written the report if I'd been there and seen someone actually touching.

Guest (Male): What about the women in the two accounts? Mary Magdalene alone. Do you think they touched him?

Dr. Anthony Flew: These are accounts that they did, yes indeed. But that we have an account that they touched him is not a decisive reason to believe that he was touched. This is what they were reported as having done.

Guest (Male): But you'd have more to complain about if no one touched him in the Gospels. At least we have these three cases because Ignatius says Thomas touched him.

Dr. Anthony Flew: It's to my mind remarkably little, actually. After all, you will all presumably remember: "Art thou not fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight?" This is surely the first thing anyone would do if they were wondering whether the vision was a seeing of something that was there that other people could see and touch, or not.

Guest (Male): By the way, if you're going to admit the data from the Gospels there, the same author of the fourth Gospel, First John, starts out the first three verses and says we've seen him with our eyes, our hands have touched him, we've beheld the word that was made flesh. John comes back in the first epistle with that material. Let me read it to you here. Six times he says we have seen something, six times we have heard something, and he says that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at—the Greek is scrutinized—and our hands have touched. Now Jesus in Luke, wasn't it, where Jesus said, "Touch me and see that I'm not a ghost"?

Dr. Gary Habermas: Right, and eats.

Guest (Male): So the evidence seems to show that we have a literal physical body going on here that the boys were a little bit surprised to see in the first place, but it took them quite a few experiences and they did touch, they did see, and that's what they're claiming.

Dr. Anthony Flew: They didn't touch, surely. They saw some vision of someone eating, didn't they?

Guest (Male): Well, he says there, "that which we touched."

Dr. Gary Habermas: If you like the straightforward account in Luke 24, Jesus said, "A spirit hath not flesh and bones as you see me have." So he's saying, "I'm not a spirit," if we take the Gospels straightforwardly.

Dr. Anthony Flew: Well, the spirit is claiming not to be a spirit.

Guest (Male): Since he's saying he's not a spirit, I assume that means he's not a spirit. Why is it there are some people, Gary, that would say the resurrection, as you go into a lot of churches across the country, the minister in that church would say this is not a physical, literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead? This is what they call a "spiritual resurrection" from the dead. Why not just a spiritual resurrection?

Dr. Gary Habermas: This is the earlier point that I was at odds with Tony. I would say today, this is a statement whenever you try to tell us where scholars are today, but I am currently studying 100 sources on the resurrection from 1975 to 2000 to see if I can get a feel for where critical scholars are. By far, most scholars today think something really happened. The disciples had real experiences. They believed they saw the risen Jesus.

Most of these scholars think the disciples really saw something; they had real experiences. But the majority of scholars who will admit even some of them think even Jesus appeared there, they shy away from the physical body. They think, maybe some kind of shimmering hologram or something. So that's probably the typical approach today from skeptics that are somewhere in between the two of us.

Guest (Male): Another word that people would usually say is Paul uses the word "spiritual" in First Corinthians 15. Does he mean spiritual in the sense of some ethereal, wispy, see-through thing, or is this a literal physical body? What do the words mean there?

Dr. Gary Habermas: This is crucial for us because we've been playing around with the Gospels a little bit, but we would both say Paul is by far the best evidence. He's the only eyewitness, and that's what everybody says today. So what Paul thinks about the resurrection body is crucial.

In First Corinthians 15, there is obviously a Greek word for spirit, *pneuma*. Paul doesn't choose that word. He says spiritual *soma*, body. Philippians chapter 3 is a short chapter, 21 verses, but Paul says three things in one chapter that indicate he's talking about a physical resurrection. In the opening verses, he says, "I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and as touching the law, I was a Pharisee." It's very well known that the Pharisees believed in a bodily resurrection.

In fact, according to Acts chapter 23, as Paul was being taken captive by the Romans to prevent him getting killed, he shouted out to the group of people and said, "Why are you taking me? Because I believe in the resurrection of the dead." He means a literal resurrection. The Pharisees there said, "There's nothing wrong with this guy," but the Sadducees don't like it. So as a Pharisee, he's agreeing with the Pharisees.

First evidence from Philippians 3, as a Pharisee, he believes in a physical resurrection. Secondly, in verse 11, he says, "that I may attain the resurrection of the dead." Now the normal Greek word for resurrection is *anastasis*. But in this passage, Philippians 3:11, he puts a prefix on there, *ek anastasis*. *Ek anastasis*, according to all Greek scholars that I know of, they translate this passage as "the out-resurrection from among the dead." Paul says that "I want to attain the out-resurrection." Now to a Jew, "out-resurrection" means what goes down is what comes up. You come out from the death.

Just a few verses later, Philippians 3:20 and 21, he says we look from heaven for Jesus, who will change our vile *soma* body to be like unto his glorious *soma* or body, when he should have said *pneuma* according to this other view. So he's a Pharisee: physical resurrection. *Ek anastasis*: resurrection from out among the dead ones. Three: he says he will change my body to be like his body. Right there in Philippians 3 alone, I think this picture of Paul of Jesus being some wispy spirit that appeared to him Damascus doesn't fit Paul's own data.

Guest (Male): Tony, you are just the most lovable person and you're an empiricist. You've got to follow the evidence. What do you do with this evidence?

Dr. Anthony Flew: I find the idea of a spiritual body very peculiar in that when you say something is spiritual, it's rather like saying it's immaterial. You're not telling us of any characteristic at all that you know of that it has. It seems to me that an immaterial substance is really nothing at all, and a spiritual body seems to me not to be a body at all.

Guest (Male): Let me ask you a question. If I say the Bible is a spiritual book, does it mean that it's not a material thing?

Dr. Anthony Flew: No.

Guest (Male): Could it be a spiritual body and still be a physical body?

Dr. Anthony Flew: It might be the body of someone you would say was a spiritual person.

Dr. Gary Habermas: He's exactly right. It's an ontological comment, not a behavioral comment. However, I think the issue here is Tony is looking at the phrase "spiritual body" with 20th-century empiricist or analytic eyes, and I think Paul has to describe what he means by spiritual body.

He's already said from Philippians 3, "I'm a Pharisee, so I believe the resurrection of the body." Two: *ek anastasis*, out from among the dead ones. Three: he calls it "he will change my vile body to be like his." Now there it's glorious body. It's not spiritual body in Philippians 3:20-21. It's glorious body. So now you've got body plus something else, I suppose some kind of glory, but not less than a body. So maybe the problem is we're looking at this word "spiritual" with our 20th-century eyes. But here's the issue: if Paul is clear in Philippians 3 that this is not some wispy spirit, then we can't have the problem of saying this is non-physical because he's telling us what he means by it. I take Philippians 3 to be a bit of a commentary on First Corinthians 15.

Guest (Male): Gary, apply this. So far we've had an intellectual discussion here on the evidence. I'm going to throw in the personal note, Tony, if you don't mind. Let's hear what Gary has to say. 1995, your wife Debbie—that every one of your students that I've seen letters and heard about said that you guys had a love affair that was made in heaven—she came down, 40-some years of age, with what?

Dr. Gary Habermas: Stomach cancer. Tony was in my house in 1985, and just yesterday we were talking about this because he didn't know it had happened. But my wife passed away in the summer of 1995, 10 years after we met, 10 years after he was in the house, with stomach cancer. I literally thought to myself, "Oh no, and here come the doubts again." They never came.

I had a graduate student who's now on our faculty who called me at the time and he said, "Where would you be right now if it weren't for the resurrection?" For me, Paul's point there about mourning—Christians mourn, but not as those without hope. It makes all the difference in the world whether you mourn with hope or without hope. We all despair when we lose a loved one as this point about the disciples, but to me, mourning my wife without the resurrection and mourning my wife with the resurrection makes all the difference in the world.

So to me, the answer to my questions in 1995 when something like this happens: if this is a world in which God has raised Jesus from the dead, then if that's true in 30 AD, it's still true in 1995. I could rest assured I didn't know the answer. I don't know the answer to pain and suffering. I don't know anybody does, theist or atheist. We don't know the answers of pain and suffering. But with something like the resurrection, it made existential sense to me because it said something about her, where she was going, and where I was going.

Guest (Male): Spiritual, physical, what kind of way do you expect to see your wife then?

Dr. Gary Habermas: Right now, I think she's existing without a body, but I think we will be together and she will have a body as I will. At the moment of death, before the Lord returns, believers are in the presence of the Lord without a physical body. I've got a friend, a philosopher buddy, Peter Kreeft at Boston College, who says Plato was right as far as he went; he just didn't go far enough. Plato believed in a disembodied state. What Plato did not believe in was a re-embodied state. I think Orthodox Jews and Christians share that same hope.

Guest (Male): Tony, come back. In terms of the information, we're still debating the question: Did Jesus rise from the dead? If the disciples saw something, what do you think with the evidence that they gave? Were they lying?

Dr. Anthony Flew: Good heavens no, because lying involves intention. To lie, you intend to say something which is false.

Guest (Male): Do you think the guys didn't intend to, but gave different information than what they really meant?

Dr. Gary Habermas: Tony's mentioned a very key point here. What I indicated earlier was the key list for me on that list of 12 is that the disciples had experiences which they believed—not lied, but they believed—they'd seen the risen Jesus. The crux of this discussion, I think the closest we will get to an answer, is the question: What did they see?

The disciples claimed it was something visual. Tony's view—hallucinations in two different kinds—also claims something visual, but something visual for which there is no external referent. I think you have a problem here because if Paul is not a victim of conversion disorder, and if the disciples are not good candidates for hallucination, and yet we admit the disciples thought they saw something, you're running out of possibilities.

Dr. Anthony Flew: It may be that we are here confronted with something of which we have no other experience. In considering any alleged miracle, what it is rational for you to do depends on what your prior beliefs were. For a person like myself confronted with an apparently miracle, the rational thing is to think that there must be some mistake here, though I could be persuaded that a miracle occurred. It would need something really very spectacular.

But of course, for people in Jerusalem who were virtually all believing Jews of some sort, either Sadducee or Pharisee or not, the question of what it is rational to believe is entirely different because they all were committed to the idea that a Messiah was going to come and that the Messiah would work miracles and so on. So I think you could argue that it was entirely rational for all these people to believe this is so, and of course, for Christian believers now to take this as a miraculous thing, whereas it isn't for me.

Dr. Gary Habermas: So if I heard you right, Christians at least are rational in believing the resurrection.

Dr. Anthony Flew: I think that could be said, yes. You've got to have reasons for your belief in God, of course.

Dr. Gary Habermas: Yes, well, and reasons for belief in God, too. I'd like to find out why you doesn't think those reasons are good ones.

Guest (Male): Stick with us. We're going to talk about this more in our next segment that's coming up. We're going to talk about the empty tomb and what that has to do with this whole thing. We'll talk about it then. Stick with us. Stay tuned as we revisit these timeless discussions and join us in celebrating the wealth of knowledge that continues to encourage and educate. To learn more, please visit jashow.org. That's jashow.org, or subscribe to us on YouTube.