Two explanations for Easter come up wherever the subject does. One says the disciples were grieving and hallucinated. The other says the story was borrowed from older myths about dying and rising gods like Horus. Both can be checked against the record. Dr. Michael Licona’s answer is that the resurrection is a historical claim with real evidence behind it, judged the way historians judge any ancient event. When the popular rivals are tested against facts even skeptical scholars grant, he argues, neither one fits.
That is a strong conclusion, so it should get the same scrutiny as the claims it answers. Licona, a professor at Houston Baptist University (now Houston Christian University) and founder of the Risen Jesus ministry, wrote his doctoral work on the resurrection and has debated leading atheists and skeptics on it. This article takes each popular explanation as an assertion. It asks what would have to be true for the explanation to work, then checks that against the evidence Licona sets out. It also marks the places where his case rests on his own reading of the evidence rather than on settled fact.
What would count as evidence for an ancient event?
Licona begins by admitting that “no historian can get into a time machine” to confirm what happened. Historians, he says, “talk in degrees of probability.” Nobody gets laboratory proof for any event in antiquity. The question is which account of the past is most likely, given what survives.
He adds a second limit: “everyone, no matter who you are, everyone is biased.” His way around that problem is to begin only with facts that historians across the spectrum already accept, including atheist, agnostic and Jewish historians. He offers four:
- Jesus died by crucifixion.
- Shortly afterward, his disciples had experiences they perceived as the risen Jesus appearing to them.
- These experiences happened to individuals and also to groups.
- Paul, a persecutor of the church, had an experience he took to be the risen Jesus appearing to him, and it turned him into one of the movement’s most aggressive advocates.
Licona says “virtually 100% of scholars agree on those things,” and then qualifies his own claim. He does not put the group appearances at full agreement. He estimates that “probably 75 to 85% would agree that these experiences occurred to groups as well.” These percentages are his estimates. The conversation does not cite a survey for them, and the qualification will matter below.
The four facts describe a death and a set of experiences. They do not assume the Bible is inspired, and they do not assume a miracle happened. A bodily resurrection enters only as one candidate explanation, the claim under test. Licona argues it accounts for all four facts better than its rivals. That sets the standard for every alternative: it has to explain the whole list, not just one convenient item.
Could grief have produced the appearances?
Licona calls the hallucination theory the most common objection among serious critics, the kind of scholars he debates. He grants that on the surface it sounds plausible. Grieving people do sometimes see or sense the dead. If the theory is right, the record should look like a cluster of private experiences among some mourners. He tests it at three points.
How often grief produces a vision
Licona refers to studies on bereavement done over the past century and longer, though he does not name a specific study in the conversation. Readers should treat the figures as his summary, to be checked against the research itself. As he gives them, senior adults grieving a loved one are the group most prone to hallucinations. About half of them experience one of some kind, most often a felt sense of the person’s presence. Only about 7 percent of the whole group have a visual hallucination of the person.
The reports about the disciples say that all of them saw Jesus. Licona puts the choice plainly: either the reports are lying, or this was not hallucination. That leaves a real exit open. A skeptic can say the reports are false. Then the hallucination theory is no longer doing the explaining. The work has moved to a different claim, that the sources cannot be trusted, and that claim needs its own evidence.
Whether a group can share one
The second test is the strongest. “Hallucinations are false sensory perceptions,” Licona says, and he argues that “hallucinations occur in the mind of an individual.” He compares them to dreams. He cannot wake his wife and invite her into his dream of a Hawaii vacation so that they share the same conversation in it. A perception of something that is not there belongs to one mind.
He points to a book published by the American Psychological Association, Hallucinations: The Science of Idiosyncratic Perception, which surveys a century of research and does not treat group hallucinations. Licona says he contacted the authors and asked why. He reports their answer this way: “we could not find a single documented case of a group hallucination and what we understand about the mind that can’t occur.”
Two limits belong here. That sentence is Licona’s account of a private exchange. The transcript shows that he said it, and readers can examine the published book, but the reply itself comes to us through him. Also, this test only bites if the group appearances happened, and Licona’s own estimate puts agreement on that fact well short of unanimous. A critic in the remaining minority will not be moved. For everyone else, the group reports are exactly what the hallucination theory cannot absorb.
Why Paul does not fit
The third test is Paul. A grief hallucination needs grief. Paul, Licona notes, was persecuting the church. He thought Jesus was a false and failed Messiah, and he believed it was God’s will to destroy the movement. “So Jesus would’ve been the very last person in the universe” Paul expected or wanted to see. Whatever happened to Paul, mourning cannot explain it.
Put together, the theory explains one fact well, that people had experiences. It struggles with how many of them saw Jesus. It has no clear account of the group experiences and no account at all of Paul. That is why Licona concludes that the most popular naturalistic alternative is probably the weakest.
Is Jesus a remix of Horus and other dying-and-rising gods?
The copycat claim travels in a different way. Lisa Fields described the split-screen videos she has seen online, with mythical figures on one side and Scripture on the other, edited to look like the same story. The format persuades through juxtaposition. It rarely shows where its descriptions of the ancient gods come from.
Licona’s first move is a question for the person making the claim: “who do you have in mind?” Then he asks what evidence supports it. He says “most of the examples that are typically cited are spurious.” In his account, they come from popular books by people who are not scholars. When he traces their documentation, there is none, or it points to another source that also gives none. Licona does not discuss Horus by name here. His test still applies directly: ask for the primary source behind each claimed parallel, not the meme that summarizes it.
He does not deny that real parallels exist. He names the two he considers closest. Before Jesus, there is Asclepius, a mythical healer whom Licona places roughly 800 years earlier. After Jesus, there is Apollonius of Tyana, who died at the end of the first century. Licona says the earliest account of Apollonius comes from Philostratus, writing about 125 years after his death. Even that account reports disagreement over whether Apollonius died at all. It includes one post-death appearance: a follower fell asleep, then said Apollonius had come to him in a dream, and no one else saw him. Set that beside Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 of appearances to Cephas, to the twelve, to more than five hundred at once, to James and to all the apostles. The two reports do not even claim the same kind of event.
The copycat case only works, Licona argues, by stitching. One detail comes from one figure, a threatened birth from another, wine-making from a third. From Hercules, the copier keeps only the ascent to heaven and drops the suicide by fire and the ride on Pegasus. “So they pick out only those items that are similar to Jesus from all these different figures,” Licona says, drawn from more than a thousand years of history and legend.
His modern comparison shows the method at work. Take Abraham Lincoln, a tall, lanky Illinois politician elected president twice. Take John F. Kennedy, a president who graduated from Harvard. Take David Palmer, the fictional first Black president on the television series 24. Combine them and you get Barack Obama, and by the copycat logic, Obama never existed. Everyone recognizes that conclusion as absurd. The Jesus version uses the same method across a far larger span of time and many more figures.
A shared motif does not prove borrowing, and a composite built by discarding every difference cannot show that a template existed. The failure of the copy theory also proves less than some defenders claim. On its own, it establishes no resurrection. It simply leaves the four facts unexplained, since it never tries to account for grieving disciples and a hostile Paul reporting that they saw a crucified man alive.
Does “three days” show the story cannot add up?
Jesus died Friday afternoon and the tomb was empty Sunday morning, so where are the three days? Licona calls the phrase “a temporal figure of speech,” like saying you will be there in a minute. It names a short span.
Scripture itself uses it loosely. Esther asks the Jews to “neither eat nor drink three days, night or day” (Esther 4:16), yet “it came to pass on the third day” that she went in to the king (Esther 5:1). In Matthew, the leaders report Jesus saying, “After three days I will rise again,” and ask that the tomb “be made sure until the third day” (Matthew 27:63-64). If the phrase meant a full 72 hours, Licona observes, “they’re gonna pull the guard away from the tomb at the time they need it most.” That is why he calls it “wrongheaded to try to back the crucifixion up to Wednesday or Thursday.”
Lisa Fields pressed the obvious follow-up: “if the three days was figurative, why should we take the resurrection literal?” Licona answers from the sources. Paul, writing to Christians told to expect no resurrection, ties everything to a real event: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). If it did not happen, he says, “let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32).
Licona adds the critics’ counter-stories. Matthew reports the claim that the disciples stole the body. Justin Martyr, in the mid-second century, says Jewish leaders were still saying so. A writer around the year 200 reports skeptics claiming the gardener reburied the body, and another claim held that Jesus faked his death. An investigator should note the limits of this evidence. These reports come later than Paul, they reach us mostly through Christian writers, and some may be responding to the Gospel narratives themselves. They do not independently confirm an early empty-tomb claim. What they do show is how the dispute was understood: critics answered with theft and reburial stories, and Christians answered by denying the theft rather than retreating to talk of a living memory. Both sides treated the claim as history.
Why would anyone invent women as the first witnesses?
The invention theories face one more problem. Licona says women held low legal and social standing in that world, citing Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, as writing that a woman should not be allowed to testify because of her gender. Those are Licona’s summaries of ancient sources, and they can be checked. His argument follows: “If you’re gonna invent a story and you wanna persuade people, you’re not going to make your primary witnesses of that story, women.” All four Gospels have women find the empty tomb while the men are in hiding.
Historians call this the criterion of embarrassment. People rarely invent details that weaken their own case. Licona places the women alongside other awkward details, such as John’s note that “neither did his brethren believe in him” (John 7:5) and Jesus rebuking Peter with “Get thee behind me, Satan” (Mark 8:33).
There is a telling contrast inside the sources. The formal list of witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 leaves the women out. Licona reads that list as public proclamation, shaped to avoid needless controversy. The polished summary drops the women, but the narratives keep them, which is what you would expect if the narratives were preserving something awkward because it happened. The criterion yields a probability. It still counts against fabrication for persuasion, the very motive the myth and invention theories need.
What the evidence establishes, and what it leaves open
The investigation supports a limited but real conclusion. Licona’s four facts are, by his account, widely accepted, with the group appearances the least secure. The hallucination theory fails on group experiences and on Paul. The copycat theory depends on undocumented claims and selective editing. The “three days” objection misreads an idiom that Scripture itself uses loosely. Each rival survives only at a price, usually by declaring the reports false without evidence for doing so.
No historical method delivers certainty about an ancient event, and Licona claims only that the resurrection is the best explanation. He also draws the consequence for everything else: “If Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true, period. And it remains true.” That is why the question deserves careful testing rather than slogans in either direction. When the meme or the coworker comes back, the useful question is not who sounds more confident. It is which explanation accounts for all four facts without throwing out the evidence it cannot handle.