As you can see, I’ve been away for a while, but I’ve finally been getting re-started on my resurrection research. I’ve started working my way slowly through the backlog of 300+ articles that I’ve collected on the resurrection, and I’ve been reading through them roughly in chronological order to try to get a better grasp of the way the contemporary historical case for the resurrection has developed. The catalyst, of course, seems to be the work of Pannenberg, which seems to have first started to get noticed in the English-speaking world in the early to mid-1960s. But the Pannenberg stream of thought seems to have merged somewhat with an older British tradition of historical defenses of the resurrection that dates to at least the mid-nineteenth century. That whole British tradition seems to have been somewhat neglected and deserves study; maybe someday someone will write a book or doctoral dissertation on it. I may dip into it some later. Brooke Foss Westcott’s The Gospel of the Resurrection, which went through seven editions between the 1860s and 1890s, includes many arguments that are basically similar to those of present-day apologists.

Another area that I’m intending to research is recent literature on Hume’s argument against miracles. In the 1980s there was, in effect, a Bayesian turn in the interpretation of Hume’s argument on miracles – a turn that in fact first appeared in the eighteenth century, in the work of Richard Price, but took a while to be re-discovered by philosophers examining Hume’s argument. Thomas Bayes had developed a theorem for assessing probabilities in consideration of prior knowledge, and in the 1980s and 1990s there was an effort among philosophers to translate Hume’s argument against miracles into a probability formula. John Earman and others, in work that has been promoted by resurrection apologists like William Lane Craig, have claimed that a Bayesian analysis has exposed fatal weaknesses in Hume’s argument. It’s all pretty complicated, and I’ve only just begun to dig into the literature, but it’s something to look at during the time ahead. If you’re interested in the issue, there’s an article by Earman posted here:
http://pitt.edu/~jearman/Earman2002a.pdf