The world's leading resurrection specialist
Habermas has spent his entire career on a single question, and it shows. He catalogued and analysed several thousand scholarly publications on the resurrection written between 1975 and the present — in English, German and French, by believers, sceptics and everyone in between — in order to establish which facts the whole field actually grants.
That produced the "minimal facts" method: argue only from data that are (a) multiply and strongly evidenced, and (b) accepted by the overwhelming majority of scholars who study the period, including non-Christian ones. Typically that is Jesus' death by crucifixion, the disciples' sincere belief that they saw him risen, the conversion of the persecutor Paul, the conversion of the sceptic James, and the empty tomb.
The power of the method is that it concedes almost everything before it starts. You do not need biblical inerrancy, or even the reliability of the Gospels, for the argument to run.
The historical case for the resurrection using only facts sceptical scholars concede — the minimal facts method, the alternative explanations, and why each of them fails.
The hymns, confessions and prayers Paul quotes in the 50s were already older. They worship Jesus as Lord within Jewish monotheism — evidence that has overturned the old theory of a slow deification.