This guide is built for a 45-60 minute small-group conversation about "The Minimal Facts Method." Open with prayer, read the framing aloud, and use the questions below to surface what people actually think before you walk through the case. Aim for honest engagement over consensus.

• Read the lesson before the meeting; you do not need to be an expert, just a guide.
• Resist the urge to fill silence. The best discussions follow long pauses.
• When someone raises an objection you cannot answer, write it down and follow up next week.
• Close with a single takeaway from each member, not a doctrinal summary.

Most debates about the resurrection collapse into arguments about Gospel reliability. The Minimal Facts method, pioneered by Gary Habermas and developed with Michael Licona, deliberately sidesteps that debate. It argues only from the small set of historical facts that the overwhelming majority of critical scholars — Christian, agnostic, and atheist — already accept. If the resurrection is the best explanation even of this concessive minimum, the case cannot be dismissed as "believers arguing from their own texts."

Habermas's bibliographic survey catalogues more than 3,400 academic works on the resurrection published since 1975. From that database he identifies five (sometimes six) "minimal facts" that clear two thresholds: (a) strong supporting evidence and (b) near-universal agreement among critical scholars — including skeptics. These are: Jesus's death by crucifixion; the disciples' sincere belief that he appeared to them risen; the transformation of Paul from persecutor to apostle; the transformation of skeptic James; and the empty tomb (slightly softer at ~75% acceptance). Licona then applies five standard criteria for inference to the best explanation (from C.B. McCullagh's historiography) — explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, non-ad-hoc-ness, illumination — and shows that the bodily resurrection hypothesis outperforms every major naturalistic competitor across the combined criteria.

Conclusion: Even on the minimum that skeptics grant, the bodily resurrection is the best historical explanation.

1. Which of the five facts do you find yourself most tempted to contest?
2. Could you, in principle, accept all five and still reject the resurrection? What would that require?
3. How should we weigh scholarly consensus against worldview commitments in historical reasoning?
4. [Small group] Where in your own life does this question feel most pressing?
5. [Small group] Who do you know that wrestles with this — and how could you talk with them about it this week?

• The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus
  Gary Habermas & Michael Licona · 2004 · Resurrection
• The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach
  Michael Licona · 2010 · Resurrection
• The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology
  Gerd Lüdemann · 1994 · Resurrection
• Did Jesus Exist? / Jesus, Interrupted
  Bart Ehrman · 2012 · Historical Jesus
• The Resurrection of the Son of God
  N.T. Wright · 2003 · Resurrection