For all those wondering: my book on the resurrection of Jesus is coming out as soon as a few last-minute things like the indexing are finished. But as I do my regular rounds of blog reading, I’ve noticed that this puts me in an odd position: there are lots of standard talking point out there from fundamentalist apologists on the resurrection which look really impressive an interesting at first, but, once you’ve researched them and found out the truth about them, just look like really annoying clichés. And the rate at which these clichés get repeated spikes around the Easter season. For example:

“For in order for these stories to be in the main legendary, a very considerable length of time must be available for the evolution and development of the traditions until the historical elements have been supplanted by unhistorical. This factor is typically neglected in New Testament scholarship, as A. N. Sherwin-White points out in Roman Law and Roman Society tn the New Testament. Professor Sherwin-White is not a theologian; he is an eminent historian of Roman and Greek times, roughly contemporaneous with the NT. According to Professor Sherwin-White, the sources for Roman history are usually biased and removed at least one or two generations or even centuries from the events they record. Yet, he says, historians reconstruct with confidence what really happened. He chastises NT critics for not realizing what invaluable sources they have in the gospels. The writings of Herodotus furnish a test case for the rate of legendary accumulation, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states for these to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be ‘unbelievable’; more generations are needed. All NT scholars agree that the gospels were written down and circulated within the first generation, during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses.”

I remember first reading this claim in Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, and being floored by it. But it’s false for a half-dozen reasons. If I hadn’t (by a stroke of luck) gotten a publisher for the book, I’d be very tempted to put up what I’ve written on the subject as a blog post or downloadable file. As it is, I’m just waiting until the book can be gotten out, and don’t have much I can do when people like Hinman call me dishonest without having read the book.