Person

Mike Licona

American New Testament scholar and analytic apologist (b. 1961). Professor of New Testament Studies at Houston Christian University. Co-developer with Gary Habermas of the minimal-facts case for the resurrection of Jesus, the most rigorously argued analytic-historical defense of the bodily resurrection in contemporary apologetics.

Biography

• PhD in New Testament, University of Pretoria (2008), under Jan G. van der Watt
• Former Director of Apologetics Evangelism at the North American Mission Board (Southern Baptist Convention)
• Currently Professor of New Testament Studies, Houston Christian University (formerly Houston Baptist)
• President, Risen Jesus, Inc.

Major works

The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (IVP Academic, 2010)

The 718-page expansion of his doctoral dissertation. Applies professional ancient-historiographical method to the resurrection question: lays out the criteria contemporary classicists and ancient historians use to evaluate causal hypotheses about events in antiquity, then runs the resurrection through that grid. Concludes that Jesus was raised bodily is the historical hypothesis that best explains the agreed-upon facts on the standard explanatory virtues (explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, less ad hoc, illumination).

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel, 2004), with Gary Habermas

Popular-level co-authored treatment of the minimal-facts case. The accessible companion to Habermas's decades of database work on critical-scholarship consensus.

Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Argues that the apparent discrepancies among the four Gospels resemble the literary conventions of Greco-Roman bioi (lives), the genre in which the Gospels were written. Compares Plutarch's Lives to show that ancient biography permitted compression, displacement, conflation, and paraphrase without falsifying the work. Controversial inside conservative evangelicalism: Norman Geisler publicly accused Licona of denying inerrancy, prompting a years-long inerrancy debate; mainstream evangelical scholarship (Craig Blomberg, Daniel B. Wallace, Darrell Bock) defended Licona's compatibility with a robust doctrine of inerrancy.

The minimal-facts case

The methodological signature of Licona's resurrection apologetics. The case proceeds in two steps:

1. Identify a small set of facts about Jesus's death and the disciples' subsequent experience that the great majority of critical New Testament scholars (Christian, skeptical, and neutral) accept as historically established.
2. Show that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation of that set on the standard explanatory virtues.

The minimal facts (Habermas-Licona, varying slightly in count):

• Jesus died by Roman crucifixion
• The disciples sincerely believed Jesus appeared to them risen
• The persecutor Paul was converted by what he took to be a resurrection appearance (Galatians 1.13-16; 1 Corinthians 15.8)
• The skeptic James (the brother of Jesus) was converted by what he took to be a resurrection appearance (1 Corinthians 15.7)
• The tomb was found empty (broader consensus than minimal-facts strict; Habermas treats as ~75% scholarly acceptance)

The case's textual anchor is 1 Corinthians 15.3-7, the pre-Pauline creed datable to within five years of the crucifixion.

Major debates

Licona has debated:

• Bart Ehrman (2008), on the resurrection at Southern Evangelical Seminary
• Dale Martin (Yale), on whether the resurrection happened
• Richard Carrier (mythicist), multiple exchanges
• Matt Dillahunty, on whether the resurrection is the best explanation of the facts
• James Crossley, on whether the disciples really believed Jesus appeared to them

Codex pages that cite Licona

• 1 Corinthians 15.3-7, the pre-Pauline creed anchoring the minimal-facts case
• Resurrection of Jesus - Minimal Facts Case, the structured apologetic Licona co-developed
• Gary Habermas, his primary co-author and the senior figure in the minimal-facts research program

See also

• Gary Habermas, minimal-facts co-author and senior researcher on resurrection scholarship
• N. T. Wright, the historical-Jesus scholar whose The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) is the parallel large-scale resurrection defense
• William Lane Craig, analytic-philosophical resurrection apologist; complementary methodology
• Daniel B. Wallace, NT textual critic who defended Licona in the inerrancy controversy
• 1 Corinthians 15.3-7, the creedal foundation
• Resurrection of Jesus - Minimal Facts Case, the structured argument