The historical validity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ — the foundation for the Easter holiday — was debated before a packed house in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union Wednesday night.

Hector Avalos, Iowa State professor of religious studies and Rubel Shelly, noted Christian apologist and senior pastor of Woodmont Hills Church of Christ in Nashville, Tenn., participated in a debate titled “The Resurrection of Jesus: Fact or Fiction?”

Avalos argued that the resurrection did not occur, and is only a myth, while Shelly contended that historical evidence supports the view that the resurrection was an actual event in “space-time history.”

On Wednesday, the first night in a two-night academic debate, Shelly presented his argument, followed by responses from Avalos.

Shelly presented several possible explanations for the accounts of Jesus and his death.

He said his argument would be based on a “process of elimination,” quoting fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who said, “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

These explanations included the idea that Jesus didn’t really die, or that his disciples or the Roman guards stole his body.

Shelly said Roman soldiers were professionals and would have known whether Jesus was truly dead.

He also said if the Roman guards had had Jesus’ body, “they could have quashed the claims of a resurrection … simply by producing the body.”

As for the disciples having stolen the body, Shelly questioned why the disciples would have been motivated to travel around, being beaten and killed in order to spread a story they knew was a blatant fabrication.

“In the Bible, faith is neither blind nor credulous; it rests on fact,” Shelly said.

Avalos said the historical evidence on which Shelly’s standpoint was based is “not factually accurate.”

He discussed a passage in the Gospel of Luke that may contain a historical conflict with ancient sources.

Luke states that at the time of the census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem before Jesus’ birth, a man named Quirinius was governor of Syria.

However, other historical texts say Quirinius was not governor until later.

Avalos used this issue to question the fundamental credibility of the Book of Luke.

“If Luke is not reliable on some sources, why should we trust him on others?” Avalos said.

Shelly said the Quirinius issue is not relevant to a debate on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“Nothing in question in Luke affects any cardinal doctrine of the Christian religion,” he said.

Avalos said the lack of authentic New Testament manuscripts from the first century, and the fact that the bulk of the manuscripts come from about 1,000 years later, also brings into question their credibility.

Shelly said the earliest existing documents attesting to the lives of Julius Caesar, Plato and Aristotle date from at least 1,000 years after their deaths.

However, there are at least 5,000 copies of the New Testament dating 100 to 150 years after Jesus’ lifetime.

He quoted a Jewish professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who said, “If we had documents like these New Testament documents about Jesus about any other figure of antiquity, we would not begin to question their authenticity.”

Avalos asked why, if that Jewish professor had such good things to say, he had never become a Christian.

Shelly said when people study the scriptures with biases against the possibility of their truth, they let themselves “disallow claims before investigating them on their own merits.”