UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus

I'm going to comment on a book by Chris Hallquist: UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus.

I believe Hallquist has a philosophy degree from Notre Dame.  Notre Dame has a top-rated philosophy dept., so this book ought to be the best that an atheist can mount against the miracles of Jesus. 

One way to judge a book like this is to start at the end: consult the bibliography. Who does Hallquist rely on? Who does Hallquist target?

On the one hand, Hallquist trains much of his fire on popularizers like Norman Geisler, Peter Kreeft, Tim LaHaye, Josh McDowell, Ravi Zecharias, and Lee Strobel. However, these hardly represent the most scholarly or sophisticated representatives of the position he is opposing. He's picking easy targets.

On the other hand, he relies on sources like James Randi, John Loftus, Robert Price, Richard Carrier, Paul Kurtz, Michael Shermer, Bart Ehrman, Susan Blackmore, Carl Sagan, Joe Nickell, Orson Welles, and Snopes.com. There's a heavy reliance on material by CSICOP. Ironically, Hallquist is very gullible when it comes to trusting his secular sources. He's just as credulous as pilgrims to Lourdes. 

If you want an idea of what-all is missing from his research, just compare his bibliography with my bibliography on the same basic subject:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2009/02/bell-book-candle.html

Some other things caught my eye. There's the use of dated sources, such as the first (1965) edition of Metzger's The New Testament: It’s Background, Growth, and Content–even though Metzger produced a third revised and expanded edition in 2003.

In chapter 3 he tries to impugn the reliability of the NT as a witness to the historical Jesus, but he hasn't begun to engage the range of evangelical scholarship. 

There are some howlers along the way. For instance, he says: "Scholars who reject dating Acts c. 62 AD generally opt for a date in the 70’s or 80’s. This puts us at the edge of modern life expectancy, and life expectancies weren’t what they are today back then." 

But, of course, that's an average based on things like high infant mortality. It doesn't mean many individuals didn't live a long time back then, if they survived childhood. 

He also has a section on D. D. Home, where he says "The fact that we have much better sources for Home’s (almost certainly fraudulent) feat than for Jesus’ feat is an excellent reason to reject the latter."

But researchers like Stephen Braude don't consider Home to be a fraud. So the comparison backfires.

In chapter 5, he tries to evaluate Christ's miracles by comparing them to faith healers like Peter Popoff and Kathryn Kuhlman, as well as Lourdes. But there are glaring problems with this comparison:

 i)As a matter of principle, many Christians don't believe in contemporary faith-healers. They are cessationists. So even if Kuhlman was a failed faith-healer, that doesn't furnish any counterevidence to dominical miracles.

ii) Conversely, even charismatics admit that some faith-healers are charlatans, just as some doctors are quacks. 

iii) Kathryn Kuhlman wasn't Jesus Christ. We don't expect her to be able to do what God Incarnate can do. Hallquist is comparing the incomparable. 

In chapter 6 he spends time on alleged alien abductees, to undermine eyewitness testimony. However, in my own study, there's a correlation between "alien abductions" and Old Hag syndrome. So I incline to an occultic interpretation.