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http://trinities.org/blog/archives/6214 Weekly podcast exploring views about the Trinity, and more generally about God and Jesus in Christian theology and philosophy. Debates, interviews, and historical and contemporary perspectives. Hosted by philosopher of religion / analytic theologian Dr. Dale Tuggy.

Show notes:

Dr. Craig Evans is a leading New Testament scholar. He is the Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College of Acadia University, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada. The author or editor of more than 60 books, his recent books include

From Jesus to the Church: The First Christian Generation - published just this year,
Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence (2012),
a commentary on the gospel of Matthew, in the New Cambridge Bible Commentary series (also published in 2012),
and Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (2006).

Dr. Evans is here with us today to talk about his chapter in the book How God Became Jesus. This book is a reply by five evangelical scholars to Bart Ehrman's recent book How Jesus Became God. Dr. Evans's chapter deals with historical issues, and is called "Getting the Burial Traditions and Evidences Right."

Dr. Evans, welcome to the trinities podcast.

In his book, Bart Ehrman declines to really interact in any way with Christian apologists. But he's well aware that some of the best evangelical apologists, like Gary Habermas, Michael Licona and William Lane Craig, employ a minimal facts approach to defending the historicity of Jesus's resurrection. They argue that the best explanation of facts about which nearly all scholars agree is that Jesus was actually raised from the dead. And one of the facts they appeal to is that on the Sunday after Jesus was crucified, some of his disciples found his tomb is empty. If Ehrman can show that we should doubt the empty tomb traditions, would that cut the legs out from under any minimal facts type defense of the historicity of resurrection?
On the face of it, it adds credibility to some of the reports that they mention the very name of the man who donated the tomb for Jesus's burial, that is, Joseph of Arimathea. But Ehrman argues that this very specificity should cause us to doubt those reports. He argues that this is an early instance of an unnamed character in the story getting named - just as, for instance, in the middle ages, they came up with names for the three wise men. Do you agree with him that the earliest reports don't mention Joseph, and that this should make us suspicious?
Do you agree with Bart Ehrman that the earliest written testimony concerning Jesus's burial is in 1st Corinthians 15?
Did the Romans have a general policy of denying burial to the victims of crucifixion?
Is the Jewish context of Jesus's crucifixion relevant to this question? (p. 78)
Is the peacetime context relevant?
From various incidents reported in the NT, it seems clear that Palestinian Jews in that day believed in ghosts. So if Jesus's followers literally saw Jesus alive after his crucifixion, why didn't they just think they were seeing a ghost, rather than a resurrected human being?