Person

Gary Habermas

American evangelical philosopher and apologist (b. 1950), Distinguished Research Professor at Liberty University. He is the leading living scholar on the historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection. He also created the minimal facts method, which is now the standard evangelical apologetic for the resurrection.

Habermas matters most for Resurrection of Jesus and the Minimal Facts Argument. He has tracked over 3,400 scholarly publications on the resurrection from 1975 to today (the Habermas Resurrection Bibliography). He sorts out which historical facts almost all New Testament scholars accept, including skeptics and non-Christians. The minimal-facts case works from this base: start with only the facts skeptics accept, then show the resurrection is the best explanation. Michael Licona is his closest collaborator.

His second area of research is near-death experiences. He has studied and defended NDEs for decades as evidence that the mind keeps going after the body dies. People often mistake this for a Christian endorsement of New Age ideas. Habermas says no: some NDEs include real, verifiable details, but that does not confirm the religious content people read into them.

Biographical sketch

Education: B.R.E. William Tyndale College (1972); M.A. University of Detroit (1973); Ph.D. Michigan State University (1976, philosophy of religion); D.D. Emmanuel College, Oxford (1989).
Academic appointment: Liberty University since 1981; Distinguished Research Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Theology in the School of Divinity.
Personal: Lost his first wife Debbie to cancer in 1995; his subsequent work on suffering and the resurrection reflects the personal experience.

Major works

Ancient Evidence for the Life of Jesus (Thomas Nelson, 1984; revised as The Historical Jesus, College Press, 1996), his early-career masterwork on biblical and non-biblical evidence that Jesus really lived.
The Resurrection of Jesus: An Apologetic (Baker, 1980), his first book-length defense.
Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? The Resurrection Debate (with Antony Flew, ed. Terry Miethe; Harper & Row, 1987), the transcript of the famous Habermas-Flew debate; it helped move Flew toward later becoming a deist.
The Risen Jesus and Future Hope (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), his scholarly book-length presentation of the minimal-facts case.
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (with Michael Licona, Kregel, 2004), the standard popular-level minimal-facts book.
"The Minimal Facts Approach to the Resurrection of Jesus" (Southeastern Theological Review 3.1, 2012), Habermas's short summary; the article apologists cite most often.
Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (with J.P. Moreland, Crossway, 1998), NDE research used apologetically.

The minimal facts method

This is Habermas's signature contribution. The full argument is in Minimal Facts Argument; in short:

Use only the historical facts about Jesus' death and the post-death appearances that more than 90 percent of New Testament scholars accept, including skeptics and non-Christians.
Show that the resurrection explains all those facts together and without strain.
Show that no natural explanation (hallucination, stolen body, swoon, legend, or a mix of these) explains all the facts as well.
Conclude: the resurrection is the best explanation of the minimal facts.

Why this is strong: the atheist cannot reject the starting facts, because the scholars who agree on them include skeptics. And you can show the natural explanations fall short. This is the most influential evangelical apologetic argument of the modern era.

The five-fact set (the most common version): (1) Jesus died by crucifixion; (2) the tomb was found empty; (3) the disciples truly believed they had seen the risen Jesus; (4) Paul the persecutor was converted by what he took to be an appearance; (5) James, Jesus' skeptical brother, was converted in the same way.

Near-death experiences research

Habermas is unusual among evangelical apologists in taking NDE research seriously. His position:

Veridical NDE cases are evidence that the mind keeps going apart from the body. (A veridical case is one where the person reports details they could not have known any normal way, like events in another room while they were clinically dead.)
This is not a salvation claim. NDEs do not back up the specific religious content people read into them. Many NDE-experiencers come back with universalist or mixed-religion theologies. Habermas does not endorse those.
The apologetic value is about human nature: people are not just bodies and brain function. This grounds the substance dualism case (see Mind, Soul, Consciousness) and indirectly supports the resurrection, which assumes personal identity survives bodily death.

Apologetic style

Habermas's style is the opposite of David Bentley Hart's. He is clear, conversational, and willing to repeat himself for the sake of teaching. He leans on evidence and history rather than philosophy and rhetoric. He has given the minimal-facts lecture thousands of times across colleges, churches, and debate stages over four decades.

His influence on popular evangelical apologetics is enormous. Most current popular books on the resurrection draw heavily on his catalog of what scholars accept. Examples include Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, J. Warner Wallace's Cold-Case Christianity, and Frank Turek's I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. The minimal-facts framing is now so common that many people who use it do not know it is Habermas's.