In making his case, Licona demonstrates his knowledge of modern historiography, the philosophy of history, and the work of work of modern historians. He confronts head-on the arguments against the historicity of the resurrection put forth by scholars ranging from Bart Ehrman and Gerd Ludemann to John Dominic Crossan.

.... Crossan, a veteran of the infamous “Jesus Seminar” that sought to remove all supernatural elements from the New Testament, asserts that the body of Jesus remained in the tomb, where it decomposed and was eventually consumed by scavengers.

Licona offers a powerful rebuttal to Crossan, demonstrating, first of all, that Crossan operates out of a worldview that simply denies that a resurrection can happen. Licona takes Crossan’s arguments and, one by one, he answers them convincingly. Along the way, he documents Crossan’s own anti-supernatural ideological commitments and his use of psychohistory to explain the experience of the disciples.

But, even as Licona dissects arguments against the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact, he then makes a shocking and disastrous argument of his own. Writing about Matthew 27:51-54, Licona suggests that he finds material that is not to be understood as historical fact.

He even seems to catch himself at this point, conceding that, if the raising of these saints, along with Matthew’s other reported phenomena, are poetic devices, “we may rightly ask whether Jesus’ resurrection is not more of the same.”

This is exactly the right question, and Licona’s proposed answers to his own question are disappointing in the extreme. In his treatment of this passage, Licona has handed the enemies of the resurrection of Jesus Christ a powerful weapon - the concession that some of the material reported by Matthew in the very chapter in which he reports the resurrection of Christ simply did not happen, and should be understood as merely “poetic device” and “special effects.”

So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must also be observed: Since, for instance, nonchronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days, we must not regard these things as faults when we find them in Bible writers. When total precision of a particular kind was not expected nor aimed at, it is no error not to have achieved it.