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The Resurrection of Christ: a Bayesian Analysis of Explanatory LIBERTY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF DIVINITY The Resurrection of Christ: A Bayesian Analysis of Explanatory Hypotheses Submitted to Dr. Ronnie Campbell in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the completion of THES 689 – D01 Master Thesis by Nicola Jérôme Liebi December 20, 2019 THESIS APPROVAL SHEET RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY ___________________________________ GRADE ___________________________________ THESIS MENTOR ___________________________________ READER ___________________________________ ii Deo Optimo Maximo Copyright © 2019 by Nicola J. Liebi All Rights Reserved iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my thesis committee, Dr. Ronnie Campbell and Dr. Leo Percer, for their support on this project. They have provided crucial comments and insights that helped strengthen the arguments in this thesis. Furthermore, I wish to express my thanks to Johannes Nussbaum, Dr. Peter Trüb, Philip Zurbuchen and Luca Liebi for their valuable and encouraging remarks, especially related to mathematical aspects of the methodology and the historical implementation thereof. Moreover, I would like to extend my gratitude to Sarah Zurbuchen for proofreading earlier versions of this manuscript. Over the years and even more so during the past few months, Sarah and her husband Andreas have become examples to me in the way they live for Christ. I am grateful for their friendship and prayers. Lastly, I could not accomplish this task without the encouragement and support of my loving wife and true help meet, Lydia Joy. iv Abstract The goal of this thesis is to determine under which circumstances a supernatural hypothesis should be preferred over the most probable natural hypothesis to explain a set of historical facts. The supernatural hypotheses include the objective vision hypothesis and the resurrection hypothesis, while the subjective vision hypothesis is taken to be the most probable natural hypothesis. Each of them can be found in the recent literature on the Resurrection and is still advocated by major proponents. The facts by which these three hypotheses are judged are agreed upon by most scholars. They include (1) Jesus’ death by crucifixion, (2) the disciples’ claim that Jesus was raised and appeared to them alive after his death, and (3) the transformative experience of Paul. This thesis argues that, unless it is extremely improbable that God exists and that He would raise Jesus from the dead, the best historical explanation for the set of historical facts herein considered is that Jesus appeared alive in bodily form after being crucified. v Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 –Bayes’ Theorem and Historical Research ...............................................................3 Theism, Jesus’ Resurrection, and Bayes’ Theorem .............................................................3 Objections and Caveats ......................................................................................................10 Refined Methodology ........................................................................................................18 Chapter 2 - Historical Evidence Pertaining to the Easter Events ...........................................23 Defining Historical Facts ...................................................................................................23 Sifting Through the Evidence ............................................................................................27 The Facts ............................................................................................................................32 Chapter 3 - Evaluation of the Hypotheses .................................................................................62 Subjective Vision Hypothesis ............................................................................................64 Objective Visions Hypothesis ............................................................................................82 Resurrection Hypothesis ....................................................................................................92 Chapter 4 – Discussion of Results.............................................................................................102 Overview ..........................................................................................................................102 Independence Assumption ...............................................................................................104 Implications......................................................................................................................107 Further Reflections...........................................................................................................111 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................114 Appendix .....................................................................................................................................115 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................116 vi Introduction This thesis explores under which circumstances a supernatural hypothesis that seeks to explain three major historical facts concerning the Easter events should be preferred over the most probable natural hypothesis, the subjective vision hypothesis. The argument of this thesis is that, if it is a priori sufficiently likely that God exists and that He would raise Jesus from the dead, then the bodily Resurrection of Christ is superior to the most likely alternative natural explanation that these experiences resulted from subjective visions of some sorts. Or, expressed in more probabilistic terms, if the prior probability of the Resurrection is more than “extremely improbable”,1 then the resurrection hypothesis is the most probable hypothesis and should, therefore, be preferred over the most likely natural hypothesis. The thesis unfolds in the following way. In chapter 1, different approaches for examining explanatory hypotheses for the Easter events are described and compared. More specifically, reasons are given for why a Bayesian approach should be preferred over an inference to the best explanation approach. In addition, objections against the Bayesian approach are considered and the methodology is laid out in more detail. Perhaps the central advantage of the approach lies in its ability to adequately capture worldview issues and how they affect the probability judgement of the hypotheses. For those hypotheses that involve supernatural elements such as God’s existence and the likelihood of raising Jesus from the dead, the probability is expressed as a variable. This will later allow us to say under which circumstances such a hypothesis becomes more likely than the most probable alternative natural hypothesis. 1 For the numerical values, see table 2. canon of probabilities in the appendix. 1 Chapter 2 focuses on the historical facts pertaining to the Easter events. It starts with a definition of the term historical “fact.” The chapter proceeds with a description of how such historical facts can be identified. Even though more facts concerning Jesus’ death and Resurrection could be identified, they include for the purposes of the present investigation: (1) Jesus’ death by crucifixion, (2) the appearances of the risen Christ to various individuals after his death, and (3) the change brought about in Saul of Tarsus, a former persecutor of the Christian church, such that he started to proclaim the gospel as a result of what he believed to be a personal encounter with Jesus. These three facts are accepted by a large majority of scholars in this field.2 Then, in chapter 3, three explanatory hypotheses for the aforementioned historical facts are discussed. They include: (1) subjective vision hypothesis (SVH), (2) objective vision hypothesis (OVH), and (3) resurrection hypothesis (RH). For each of them, a probability estimate is formed for how likely these facts are to be expected. Moreover, for the natural hypothesis the prior probability is estimated, whereas in the case of those hypotheses that involve a supernatural element, the prior probability is expressed as a variable and thus not estimated, as the goal of the approach is to find out how high that probability needs to be such that any of the supernatural hypotheses is rendered more probable than the most probable natural one. Finally, the results of the probability estimates are displayed and summarized in chapter 4. In this chapter the minimal value for the prior probability of the supernatural hypotheses is computed and the relationship of the factors that affect this prior probability is displayed graphically. This allows us to show under which circumstances a supernatural hypothesis should be preferred over the SVH. 2 Gary R. Habermas, The Risen Jesus & Future Hope (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 9–10. 2 Chapter 1 – Bayes’ Theorem in Historical Research Theism, Jesus’ Resurrection, and Bayes’ Theorem When evaluating various hypotheses that account for a set of historical data, historians commonly examine and compare these hypotheses based on their explanatory character. This is referred to as explanationism. A classical explanationist approach is the inference to the best explanation (IBE). Bird defines IBE as a view according to which a hypothesis
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