Ratio Christi

● Roadmap ● Background/Assumptions ● Math preliminary ● Claim 1: Women’s testimony(W) ● Claim 2: Disciples’ testimony(D) ● Claim 3: Paul’s conversion(C) ● Cumulative case

● “The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like [Jesus’s] teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.” -Timothy Keller ● If true, then Jesus has some insight into an unknown realm of the universe: life after death

● Reliability of Synoptic Gospels + Acts o Early sources, eyewitness accounts, archeological support o Supported by majority of New Testament scholars (+non-Chrisitian) ● Death of Jesus of Nazareth via Roman Cruxifiction ca. 30CE ● Bayes theorem is useful for historical analysis

Bayes Factor < 1 LikelihoodReversedBarely Mentionable SubstantialStrongVery StrongDecisive

Hume Of Miracles (1787)- “I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of the testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which [the witness] relates” [sic] (I.13)

● T = R = “Jesus of Nazareth was resurrected from the dead” ● E: o W = Women’s Testimony o D = Disciples’ Testimony o C = Paul’s Conversion ● Cumulative case: multiply Bayes factors (maybe…)

● Evidence: W = “5 women claim to have discovered Jesus’s empty tomb” ● Luke 24: 1-3, 8-9

● Evidence: D = “13 disciples were willing to die for their (empirical) claims of R” o 13 = 12 original - Judas + Matthias + James (Justus) ● Acts 4:18-20

● Considerations ● Persevered in attesting to empirical claims ● Alternatives fail to incorporate all members ● Bayes Factor o Independence (multiply carefully)  Does R unify testimonies more than ~R?  Other disciples’ deaths  Encouragement in (known) deception?

● Evidence: C = “Conversion of Saul of Tarsus” ● Galatians 1:13-16a, Philipians 3:5-6

● Initial bias ● Consider other evidential claims ● Cosmological, Fine-tuning, etc. ● Potentially philosophical or ‘off the cuff’ ● Dynamic premises

Bayes Factor < 1 LikelihoodReversedBarely Mentionable SubstantialStrongVery StrongDecisive

● Rapid spread of new worldview and religion (against authorities, c.f. Jewish and Greco-Roman beliefs) ● Making wild claims (negative evidence) (actually helps the factor; if substantiated) ● Other well-attested historical facts

● Alternative explanations for W,D,P? ● Negative Evidence? ● Valid assumptions? What effect if they don’t hold? ● Dwindling probabilities?

Hume’s paper: [ Bayes factors table [H. Jeffreys (1961). The Theory of Probability]

W: Accepted by 75% of NT scholars [Habermas 2006a] D: Accepted by majority of scholars [Habermas 2005; 2006a; 2006b] P: Integral to the early church