Dave Kinsella just this week uploaded this video of Gary Habermas presenting “a convincing argument detailing the arguments in favour of the Shroud’s authenticity,” as he puts it. “I was skeptical til I watched this,” he adds. The video runs 44 minutes. It looks good. I disagree with several points, like the discussion of the coin images over the eyes.
It is a good talk. I’ve never seen it before and I don’t know when this was recorded.
How influential is Gary Habermas when it comes to the shroud?
I don’t know. But if you search YouTube for “GARY HABERMAS SHROUD OF TURIN” you encounter 2320 videos. There are, of course, duplicates. But it is also evident, just by the numbers, that Dr. Habermas is an influential speaker out on the circuit and on the Internet. By comparison here are two other YouTube search counts:
- BARRIE SCHWORTZ SHROUD OF TURIN: yields 4660 videos
- RUSS BREAULT SHROUD OF TURIN: yields 750 videos
If I search Google directly for videos thus:
- GARY HABERMAS SHROUD OF TURIN: I get 13,100 videos
- BARRIE SCHWORTZ SHROUD OF TURIN: I get 7,550 videos
- RUSS BREAULT SHROUD OF TURIN: I get 5,160 videos
Something seems counter intuitive here. Well, anyway, Habermas is influential. (We really should count views but I have other things to do with my life).
And who is Gary Habermas?
And here is something I posted ten months ago:
Swedish Parliament to Hear About the Shroud of Turin
October 17, 2013
The Christian Post is reporting that in another presentation before the 20th annual Christian Apologetics conference in Charlotte, Gary Habermas presented 10 reasons for the fall of atheism, “an argument which he is also set to deliver before the Swedish parliament, one of the most atheistic societies in the world.”
Next, he presented six reasons that people can use for believing specifically in the Christian faith, listing them as follows:
- Recent documentations of miracle claims: referring to thousands of cases around the world of documented miracles, including those where medical doctors witness prayer healing people with severe physical disabilities.
- Double-blind prayer experiments: where people pray for others with terminal illness. Habermas admitted that most such experiments have not worked, but the three that he knows of that have indeed worked were cases of orthodox-Christians praying for the sick.
- Jesus as a miracle healer: the research professor noted that when he went to graduate school, most people did not believe that Jesus was a miracle healer, but that has changed and many scholars now believe in the real miracles presented in the Bible.
- Jesus proclaimed the resurrection beforehand: meaning that Jesus did not simply rise from the dead, but revealed beforehand that he would be resurrected. "It’s one thing to rise from the dead, but you claim double the significance of it if you told everybody what was going to happen ahead of time, which shows that you’re in control and know what’s going on," the apologist argued.
- Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Habermas said that "we are on the strongest grounds up here on the resurrection argument. Today, there are more scholars who believe that something happened to Jesus than there are those who believe that nothing happened to Jesus."
- Shroud of Turin: the apologist referred to an hour-long session he led on Friday about recent discoveries surrounding the Shroud, but admitted, "It deserves to be put on the board, at least now. It could be proven wrong tomorrow."
Habermas concluded: "We have got to get the world out there, because the challenge is there, naturalism is losing, and we need to see Christianity ascend, because we have the data."
[ . . . ]
And here is a collection of postings in this blog about Habermas. His name appears 55 times in this blog.
Almost too realistic an explanation, I could almost feel it.
Does anyone have any details of the radiocarbon dating that came up with a AD 30 plus or minus 70 years from 1982 that Habermas mentions in his lecture ( at 30 minutes, 30 secs). I had never heard of it before. Provenance of sample, possibility of contamination, laboratory testing it, etc- all the issues that have come up with 1988. Was it an AMS dating -if not where did they get a big enough sample from ?
We had quick look at this on 28 April this year. An extremely controversial dating by a scientist who refuses to comment at a laboratory that has not only formally denied that any such testing took place, but also that it did not have the appropriate equipment anyway, of a thread apparently stolen from the Shroud and dated (if it actually was) in the face of the express refusal of the owner to permit it. A single thread, divided into two, giving different dates for the different parts. We don’t know how long this thread was, or whether there was enough for radiocarbon dating anyway. Joe Marino claims to have some more confirmatory evidence that the dating did actually happen, but what credence can be placed on its credibility has been seriously questioned.
Thanks, Hugh. I thought that the controversial thread you are talking about actually dated later – not as early as AD 30. Perhaps Habermas was speaking before all the controversy of it came out but ,as with the coins, some caution is needed before evaluating this video.
Yes, having accessed the acrimonious debate from April of this last year, there was never a claim that the thread was as early as AD 30, so I leave it to others to debate where Habermas got his date from. Surely it must have been an AMS lab to have got a rEsult from the end of a single thread and there seems to be no evidence of one here. Shows how easily stories grow in the telling!