He is risen!
Happy Easter! And to sweeten your celebration, here is a six-minute clip from Gary Habermas on the historicity of the Resurrection.
For more on Dr. Habermas’s “minimal facts” approach, see my blogpost here. That blogpost reviews a book coauthored by him, which I summarize this way (thus, this is also a fair summary of the YouTube clip above):
The authors recognize that an effective pitch must often be relatively brief and geared to evidence that nonbelievers will accept. Thus, they propose a bare-bones “4+1” “minimal facts approach”: (1) “Jesus’ Death by Crucifixion” (using Christian and non-Christian sources); (2) “Jesus’ Disciples Sincerely Believed He Rose from the Dead and Appeared to Them” (using New Testament and other early Christian sources); (3) “Conversion of the Church Persecutor Paul” (both his conversion and his suffering and martyrdom, again with New Testament and other early Christian sources); (4) “Conversion of the Skeptic James” (conversion and martyrdom, with New Testament and other early Christian sources, and Josephus); plus “Empty Tomb” (direct New Testament evidence and other indirect evidence and logical argument). The “minimal facts approach,” in turn, “considers only those data that are so strongly attested historically that they are granted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject, even the rather skeptical ones” (44, emphasis in original).
He is risen indeed!