It is reasonable to believe that the resurrection of Jesus is a historical event.

I'm a little frustrated. My opponent's "rebuttal" (if it can even be called that; it wasn't much of a rebuttal) ignored a lot of points that I had previously addressed, which means that he either didn't read what I wrote or doesn't know how to respond to my points and thinks that just repeating the same assertions like a broken record will pass for a response. For example, he says that there is no evidence that mass hallucinations occur even though I provided some earlier in the debate. He also thinks that Paul provides evidence for the empty tomb because Paul preached a bodily resurrection (which would have logically entailed an empty grave). Although it is true that Paul's beliefs logically entailed an empty tomb, that does not mean that Paul knew of any evidence for any empty, as previously stated. How many times will I have to bring up these points before they are acknowledged? In light of what I said above, I'm not going to even bother responding to any of my opponent's comments that I have already refuted. My opponent is using different terminology than I am. He thinks that something is a "fact" when the reasons for believing it outweigh the reasons for disbelieving it. Fair enough, this is nothing more than a semantic point. He asks about the evidence that the women in the empty tomb story is a literary device. I'll tell you: in the gospels it is taught that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. In the gospels it is the marginalized, the weak, the downtrodden, who understand Jesus rather than the Jewish authorities or even Jesus' disciples. It only makes sense that the underlings (the women) are the ones who discover the tomb.[1] Further, there seems to be a theme of "reversal of expectation" in the gospel of Mark: Who carries Jesus' cross? Not Simon Peter, the one whom prompted Jesus to say "You must take up your cross and follow me" (Mark 8) but another Simon, Simon of Cyrene. Who buries Jesus? Not his father Joseph (which customary for Jews) but another Joseph, Joseph of Arimathea. Who discovers that Jesus has risen? Not the male disciples, but the lowly female followers. My opponent says that if any body were in Jesus' tomb, it would have dealt Christianity a death blow. As if Christians couldn't have simply claimed that the body was not Jesus'. As if the authorities would have even bothered citing such weak evidence. As if cults don't continue in spite of disconfirming evidence, as I already showed. Re: subjective methodology, to give a precise answer to your question, you'd have to determine the frequency of missing bodies (which I assume would be very low). Let's say the odds are 1 in 1000. Then you would have to find some fact which has an even lower probability of existing if there was no empty tomb. William Lane Craig has explained the principles for how can you can do this; indeed, he explained Bayes' Theorem in a debate with Bart Ehrman. The next objection that keeps cropping up is that I don't have any evidence. Apparently my opponent once again did not absorb the points I made in a previous post: all we are doing is taking the facts we have and explaining them. When a fact is "evidence for" some explanation, that means that the fact is predicted (or expected) by the explanation. A hallucination of jesus predicts someone believing that they saw jesus just as well as an actual resurrection appearance. Further, hallucinations occur very frequently in comparison to resurrections, which either never or almost never occur. I find it somewhat amusing that my opponent criticises me of psychoanalyzing historical figures, but nevertheless thinks that he can tell us that James and Paul weren't "in the right frame of mind" to hallucinate Jesus. Why can't we postulate mental illnesses for historical figures? No reason is given. And if we can't assess the mental status of a historical figure, what makes my opponent think that he can assume these individuals were sane, or that they "weren't in the right state of mind" to hallucinate? "In Judaism, the resurrection was to occur at the end of history, but not in the middle of history." Exactly. And that's why most scholars don't believe that the early Christians thought they were living in "the middle of history" but at the end of history. It's one reason among many that scholars think of Jesus as a failed apocalyptic preacher and his followers as failed apocalypticists. Jesus thought the end of the world was near[2]. He was wrong. Why do you think God would raise a false prophet? "It is begging the question whether such experiences could possibly be objective, or even supernatural. In other words, why must a naturalistic, subjective explanation be assumed?" No it isn't begging the question, and I'm not assuming a natural explanations. I postulated a natural explanation to account for certain facts, and it does account for those facts, and I also know that the kind of natural explanation (hallucinations) occur pretty frequently, more frequently than resurrections. So I'm simply concluding that the explanation for the facts which is objectively determined to be more likely is probably correct. In regards to James: "I have given historical reasons as to why I believe what I stated." No you didn't. You didn't give one shred of evidence to show that James' skepticism lasted for more than just a temporary period of time. You say that God did give everyone enough evidence to believe in him from nature. That is debatable. But even if he did, what is there in nature that shows that human beings need to turn specifically to Jesus? If there is something in nature that serves to teach man about Christianity, why did no other culture discover Christianity independently of (direct or indirect) middle-eastern influence? And this question is not off-topic, since the fact that Jesus never proved to the entire world what he was is a fact that pretty much every non-resurrection theory can explain, but which the resurrection theory cannot, as previously explained. To wrap up, I'd like to restate something I stated before: When my opponent says that the empty tomb is a "fact" he is simply wrong: it isn't a fact, it is a theory created to explain the facts (the "facts" being the text which attest to an empty tomb) [This is something I brought up in my opening statement]. He doesn't seem to want to acknowledge this or to count it as a hypothetical explanation. However, when I come up with a hypothetical explanation for the empty tomb stories, he wants to say that this counts as an additional assumption in my overall theory, and use that to make my theory seem ad-hoc (or contrived). Why hasn't my opponent acknowledged the above point at all? Why has he chosen to ignore the lesson I just taught him and continue in error?