The Resurrection of Jesus: An Engagement with Dale Allison: A Review Essay

Abstract

In his latest book, The Resurrection of Jesus, Dale Allison states that, while he personally believes that Jesus resurrected, “the purely historical evidence is not, on my view, so good as to make disbelief unreasonable, and it is not so bad as to make faith untenable.” This review focuses on Allison’s discussion concerning apparitions, hallucination theory, mass hysteria, and pareidolia. While appreciative of various aspects of Allison’s work, this article points out various problems with Allison’s use of materials in other disciplines, a number of fallacies of reasoning in Allison’s analyses, and demonstrates that the best skeptical hypothesis against Jesus’s resurrection suggested by Allison is untenable.