Michael R.

Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historigraphical Approach (IVP

Academic, 2010). Reviewed by Jim West.

Licona has produced a massive volume meticulously argued and amply illustrated. It
consists of five parts, so in what follows, I’ll review part one. In subsequent segments, I’ll
review the other four.

In Part 1 Licona addresses ‘Important Considerations on Historical Inquiry Pertaining to

the Truth of Ancient Texts’ and he takes 132 pages to do it. That is, he describes here
methodological questions and sets forth his own.

Those familiar with the work of William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas will hear echoes
of their spirits throughout. And he offers six tools which, he asserts, can be ‘effective
guides that bring us closer to objectivity’ (p. 52). These are method, horizon, peer
pressure, the submission of ideas to unsympathetic experts, the necessity of accounting
for relevant historical bedrock, and detachment from bias.

With these tools in hand, Licona engages postmodernism, weighs it in the balances, and
finds it wanting. Then he attempts to move forward describing three basic approaches to
understanding history: naïve realism, postmodernism (which he has already abandoned),
and realism (which is not the same as naïve realism because it ‘maintains that the
accuracy of historical descriptions may be held with varying degrees of certainty’ (p. 89).

Licona’s position is simple to express- ‘Historians do not seek absolute confidence;

instead, they seek adequate descriptions of the past for which they may have reasonable
certainty’ (p. 90).

Licona fully exposes his own biases and pre-judgments at the conclusion of the first
section in what he calls ‘confessions’. He is a believing Christian who confesses that Jesus
has indeed been resurrected. But he doesn’t believe that this faith perspective makes it
impossible for him to be objective about the evidence at hand. However, if it were
determined that Jesus had not been raised from the dead, his Christian faith would have
to be abandoned.

Methodologically, Licona has all his ‘ducks in a row’. He clearly knows the issues. He
also clearly knows the perils of historical research. Absolute certainty is not something
historians can assert. Probability is what they strive for and the best they can hope for.

But Licona is clearly far more dependent on the methodological approach of N.T. Wright
than he is on the methodological approach of R.K. Bultmann. And that may be the
Achilles heel of his presentation.

In Part Two, Licona discusses the ‘problem’ of the miraculous. To that we next turn.