Square Pegs for Round Holes? Applying Michael Licona’s Historical Method to Jesus’ Resurrection

In some of his writings, the biblical historian Michael Licona claims that the history of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ bodily resurrection can best be demonstrated by the application of tried and trusted historical methods such as the principles of analogy and antecedent probability. In his _magnum opus_, _The Resurrection of Jesus _[1], he adds the principle of inference to the best explanation as an extra tool and avers that Bayes’ Theorem may also be of use. In response, I argue that each of the methods applied by Licona to the resurrection has its shortcomings, not least because the involvement of God as agent is _ipso facto _beyond the possibility of historical enquiry. Despite the obvious evangelical objections, I suggest that, assuming there was a resurrection ‘event’ of sorts, the best of the natural explanations, such as the hallucination-cum-collective delusion hypothesis, is as likely to be true as the traditional explanation in historical terms.