Geisler Meets the Ghosts of Christmas

Mercy, this story of Geisler – and others – roasting and toasting Mike Licona, who in a book defending at length the resurrection of Christ went on also to suggest that Matthew 27’s description of saints rising from the dead (and entering Jerusalem) might be apocalyptic and not straightforward history … well, it’s an old debate among evangelicals, and this YouTube piece gets after Geisler.

FYI: I once had a conversation with a well-known Christian specialists in all things rabbinic when the dead saints rising in Matthew 27 came up, and I was a PhD student wondering about such things because of Bob Gundry’s Matthew book, so I asked him what he thought and he said it didn’t look or feel like midrash to him. I’ve since paid attention to various debates on this text but can’t for the life of me come to terms with how anyone can know certainly if they did or did not rise; it reads like they did; I can see how others would see it as midrash. Like Jonah’s fish and Peter’s coin and Adam’s snake, I wonder how we get ourselves twisted into certainties here.