The Resurrection

I'm having a discussion over at a non-blog discussion board; I thought I'd mirror some of my comments and arguments over here. The NT doesn't contain an account of the resurrection itself. It contains an account of an empty tomb, and eyewitness accounts of encounters with a risen Jesus. The rules of textual scholarship say that you give the text the benefit of the doubt - you don't call the contents a fabrication unless you have clear extra-textual evidence that it was fabricated. That the contents describe miracles is not itself a reason to discredit the texts, since 1. IF they are correct about who Jesus was, then it is possible that miracles actually took place as described, and 2., it is possible to find natural explanations for some events described as miracles (see the 1950's novel "The Robe").