Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 6 days ago
I'm reading further quotations from the book of Jesus Seminar conclusions cited by Gary Habermas. According to Habermas, the Seminar acknowledges that a group appearance of Jesus to his disciples is attested by multiple, independent sources. This is not the case. We saw last time that Habermas misunderstands lists of sources by the Jesus Seminar, jumping to the conclusion that these are supposed to be independent sources, when in fact in those places the Seminar is just listing all sources that tell about some event or type of event.
Here we see that the Seminar has its own non-independence theory of the origin of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' appearance to the eleven--namely, that they were imaginative embellishments of an appearance to Peter alone and/or of Mark 16:7, in which an angel says that Jesus will meet a group of the disciples in Galilee.
Such imaginative embellishments are like the branches of a tree, with the single source (which is not reality itself, but some other account or claim--like the claim that the angel made such a statement), do not constitute independent attestation. So we can see in this additional way that the Jesus Seminar does not acknowledge multiple, independent attestation to a group appearance by Jesus to his core male disciples.
Here is the Jesus Seminar book in question:
archive.org/details/actsofjesuswhatd00robe/page/n3/mode/1up?view=theater
Tree thumbnail from Wikipedia. By Łukasz Smolarczyk - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3402545
I'm reading further quotations from the book of Jesus Seminar conclusions cited by Gary Habermas. According to Habermas, the Seminar acknowledges that a group appearance of Jesus to his disciples is attested by multiple, independent sources. This is not the case. We saw last time that Habermas misunderstands lists of sources by the Jesus Seminar, jumping to the conclusion that these are supposed to be independent sources, when in fact in those places the Seminar is just listing all sources that tell about some event or type of event.
Here we see that the Seminar has its own non-independence theory of the origin of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' appearance to the eleven--namely, that they were imaginative embellishments of an appearance to Peter alone and/or of Mark 16:7, in which an angel says that Jesus will meet a group of the disciples in Galilee.
Such imaginative embellishments are like the branches of a tree, with the single source (which is not reality itself, but some other account or claim--like the claim that the angel made such a statement), do not constitute independent attestation. So we can see in this additional way that the Jesus Seminar does not acknowledge multiple, independent attestation to a group appearance by Jesus to his core male disciples.
Here is the Jesus Seminar book in question:
archive.org/details/actsofjesuswhatd00robe/page/n3/mode/1up?view=theater
Tree thumbnail from Wikipedia. By Łukasz Smolarczyk - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3402545
