What The Early Christians Suffered For

I recently watched Gary Habermas' 2008 debate on the resurrection with Arif Ahmed. Ahmed is an atheist, and he's a philosopher at the University of Cambridge.

Habermas isn't as good of a communicator as somebody like William Craig, and this debate might be the worst of Habermas' performances I've seen. Much of what he said was disorganized and probably would be difficult to understand for somebody who doesn't know much about the evidence surrounding Jesus' resurrection and Habermas' research on the subject. And he didn't make some of the points he could have made.

I think he won the debate anyway. Ahmed comes across as somebody who doesn't know much about the history of Christianity (he seems to expect Habermas to accept the authenticity of Mark 16:18, he confuses the Mormons with the Jehovah's Witnesses, he responds to an audience member's criticism of his understanding of 1 Corinthians 15 as if he hasn't studied the passage much, etc.). His arguments are of a more philosophical nature, as we might expect from a philosopher. But he doesn't seem to have done much research on the historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection, even though he was going up against one of the leading scholars in that field. Even his philosophical arguments are weak.

But he repeated a popular argument that I want to address again, since it comes up so frequently, and I think Christians often don't respond well to it. He asked why we should believe that men like Peter and Paul died for a belief in the resurrection of Christ. I addressed that issue in an article a few years ago. Habermas made some of the points that I make on this issue, but not all of them. Ahmed's appeal to a possibility that somebody like Paul or James died without faith in the resurrection doesn't establish probability, and he left some of Habermas' points on the subject untouched.