The minimal facts argument and epistemic entanglement

Today's session discusses how the minimal facts approach to the resurrection involves trying to help oneself to a "consensus of scholarship" by describing what scholars grant in a "fuzzy focus" (that there were "appearances" to the disciples) while not recognizing from the beginning that many of the scholars in question actually believe that the appearance experiences were such as to indicate that Jesus was probably *not* risen from the dead. This involves treating something as evidence for the resurrection which (if the scholars' opinions are to be taken as authoritative) would actually be evidence against. A better approach is not to use scholarly opinion all by itself as evidence but rather to look at the underlying evidence on which scholars are relying and then to describe it clearly and evaluate what it really supports or does not support. Here was my earlier webinar on the minimal facts approach to the resurrection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUt3r3dXBr4

Originally uploaded May 1 2021