Confronting Christianity with Rebecca McLaughlin Can a Historian Believe in the Resurrection? with Molly Worthen
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Nov 14, 2023 
Molly Worthen, an associate history professor who studies American religious life, tells how academic inquiry led her toward Christian faith. She discusses wrestling with anti-supernatural assumptions, conversations that shifted her thinking, using historical methods on the resurrection, and why certain evidence and scholarship made belief plausible.
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How A Journalist Slowly Opened To Faith
- Molly Worthen described her gradual move from secular agnosticism to curiosity about religion after college, sparked by ethnographic fieldwork and envy of religious community.
- Her journalistic habit of sympathetic observation led to long interviews and eventually a correspondence with J.D. Greear that began the conversion process.
Resurrection Is The Central Historical Question
- Molly realized Christianity hinges on one historical claim: the resurrection, which as a historian she could investigate with historical methods.
- She concluded the historical method can narrow the gap to a miracle close enough to make belief rational without 'proving' the supernatural.
Why The Resurrection Isn't Just Mythic Repetition
- N.T. Wright's work convinced Molly that first-century Jewish and pagan contexts do not map onto later mythic 'dying-and-rising-god' stories.
- The combination of an empty tomb plus appearance reports is, she says, the only reasonable historical explanation for early belief in Jesus as risen.
