ARTICLE GUIDE
At a Glance
Christianity stakes its theological validity upon a single, verifiable occurrence in the space-time continuum: the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (1 Cor 15:14–17).
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What This Study Explores
Promise-Plan Theology • Resurrection • Historical Method
Direct Answer: Can critical realism support a historical case for Jesus’ resurrection?
Yes, though it yields a reasoned historical judgment rather than mathematical proof. Critical realism affirms that the past is knowable through incomplete and interpreted evidence, while requiring historians to expose assumptions, test sources, and compare explanations.
Applied to Jesus’ resurrection, the method establishes a historical bedrock from multiple lines of evidence and asks which hypothesis best explains it. The resurrection claim gains its fullest coherence inside Israel’s promise-plan, where bodily vindication, new creation, and the defeat of death belong together.
Key Claims
- Positivism overstates detached certainty, while radical postmodernism understates the possibility of genuine historical knowledge.
- Critical realism joins correspondence to reality with disciplined awareness of the interpreter’s horizon.
- Historical bedrock should rest on early, multiple, and independently assessed evidence rather than a single proof-text.
- Inference to the best explanation compares scope, power, plausibility, ad hocness, and fit with established knowledge.
- The resurrection’s theological meaning arises from the same Jewish narrative that gives the historical claim its conceptual shape.
Interpretive Context
Agreement on selected facts does not guarantee agreement on their best explanation, and the category “minimal facts” can conceal differences in how strongly particular data are established. Historical arguments should state those gradations openly. Nor can method by itself move from “an event occurred” to every Christian doctrinal conclusion; canonical interpretation explains why the earliest witnesses understood the event as God’s vindication of Messiah and the inauguration of the promised restoration.
The method also distinguishes data from interpretation. Early testimony, sincere appearance claims, Paul’s conversion, and other proposed bedrock facts can be graded independently, while the resurrection hypothesis is judged by comparative explanatory criteria; canonical theology then identifies why such an event would constitute Messiah’s vindication and new creation’s beginning.
Selected Scholarship
- C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions — formal criteria for historical inference.
- Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach — application of critical realism and explanatory comparison.
- N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God — historical reconstruction of Jewish resurrection belief and earliest Christianity.
- John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2 — a major critical discussion of miracles and the limits of historical method.
- Gary R. Habermas, On the Resurrection (2024).
Scripture Connections
Genesis 3; Genesis 1:1–2
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The complete article and its available video material remain on Rabbit Room Apologetics at Substack.
Originally published June 4, 2026. This WordPress page is a discovery guide; the complete article is hosted on Substack.