75 Percent Consensus on the Empty Tomb? It's complicated!

If you're into minimalist or minimal-ish arguments for Jesus' resurrection you may be tempted to include the empty tomb as one of your "core facts" because you've heard that it's granted by 75% of New Testament scholars. That isn't a high enough percentage for the minimal facts method as practiced by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, but you might think, "Hey, that's still pretty good, and it will make the argument stronger, so I'll include it."  If you follow my work you know that I don't allow scholarly consensus to influence me in this way, either positively or negatively. But looking at the claim on its own terms, what does that 75% you might hear really amount to?  I don't think anybody is trying to hide the statistical facts here. In fact, I sincerely commend Dr. Licona for making some further information on this available in his 2010 book The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. But I think it needs to be made more widely known. It turns out that gauging scholarly consensus by a literature survey whose results are interpreted and reported by one person alone is a pretty messy business. If you're inclined to "beef up" your minimal-ish approach by including the empty tomb on the basis of that alleged 75% consensus, maybe you should think again. 

Originally published Jun 26, 2022