Easter has recently come and gone, so it’s opportune to critique “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection,” ten brief videos by Dr. Mike Licona covering what he claims are false beliefs about the Resurrection. Let’s take a look and see where the facts point us. (I’ve written about Licona before, and I analyze where he got on the wrong side of fundamentalist scholars here.)

Myth 1: Contradictions in the Gospels

“The gospels contradict themselves and so therefore we can’t believe them on the Resurrection of Jesus.”

Licona rejects this: “No credible historian believes that contradictions within an account discredit the account itself.” (I’ll use blue for the myth, green for Licona’s rejection of the myth, and black for my response to Licona.)

Contradictions don’t discredit a historical account? Surely you admit that contradictions within a source must discredit it somewhat and that a contradiction-free account is more credible than the equivalent story full of contradictions. (I have a long list of Bible contradictions beginning here.)

Licona gives the sinking of the Titanic as an example. Some witnesses say that the ship broke in two before sinking (which is correct) while others say that it sank intact, but historians didn’t conclude from this contradiction that the Titanic didn’t sink.

Since the witnesses were unanimous that it did sink, that a sinking ship is a well-understood event, and that the event is well documented, “the Titanic sank” sounds like a reasonable conclusion for historians. Disagreements over details didn’t change the fact that the genre of the Titanic account is history, but disagreements between the gospels make one wonder if historical or journalistic accuracy was even the goal.

While a ship sinking isn’t especially incredible, the story of a man rising from the dead must default to the “mythology” or “legend” categories. We’ll move it to the history category only after being convinced by very good evidence. The 100% natural Titanic story is a poor analogy to a supernatural tale.

Licona says that he won’t admit to any contradictions in the Bible and that any there could be explained away.

Harmonizing the facts to support something you know for certain happened is fine, but first you must show that it happened. Licona has it backwards—he wants to assume the accuracy of the Bible first and then select the facts of the world to support that presumption.

And, of course, if there are contradictions in an account, you must first ask yourself if that account is so unreliable that it should be discarded. Richard Carrier addresses this with his summary of Stephen Law’s Argument from Contamination:

Law’s argument is that in documents with a disturbingly high quantity of unbelievable claims, we have no reason to trust the mundane claims in those documents either, without some reliable external corroboration (the bogus material thus “contaminates” the rest with heightened suspicion). . . .

Law is not saying any history or biography that blends legendary with mundane claims warrants skepticism. He is saying any history or biography that is loaded with legendary claims, as in has an unusual amount of them central to the story, warrants sweeping skepticism. . . .

Law’s actual principle is obviously correct and obviously one real historians routinely employ.

I can accept that a single contradiction can’t justify the dismissal of a source, but contradictions must affect the reliably to some extent. Stephen Law’s Argument from Contamination is a nice encapsulation of how unbelievable claims, like the supernatural, must color our view of the remainder.

Licona argues that any contradictions are in peripheral details. The gospels agree on the important claims: that Jesus died, was buried by Joseph of Arimathea, was raised on the third day, and appeared to others.

We have several copies of the Gilgamesh epic, which must also disagree on some details. Are we entitled to consider as history the supernatural claims agreed to in all copies as Licona does for the claims common among the gospels?

Or suppose that a future historian is trying to make sense of our contradictory stories about Superman from radio shows, TV, movies, and other media. Suppose he selects just the common features—Superman came as a baby in a rocket from Krypton, he grew up in Smallville, he could lift cars, he disguised himself as Clark Kent, and so on. Must that amalgam be historical?

Licona gives no rule that allows him to capture Christianity but reject Gilgamesh, Superman, and other fanciful tales.

Myth 2: Pagan Parallels in Mystery Religions

“How can it be that you have so many accounts of dying and rising gods and heroes within pagan accounts—isn’t Christianity just another example of this?”

Licona says that there is almost unanimous consensus by scholars that virtually all of these accounts postdate the gospels. That means that it’s the pagans who are copying the Christians!

This is a red herring. If there are accounts that postdate the gospels, we should obviously discard them. But that leaves us with plenty of precedents for the Jesus resurrection: Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Baal. My favorite is Dionysus, the love child of one of Zeus’s many affairs. His jealous wife Hera had the infant Dionysus eaten by Titans, but Zeus brought him back to life through the mortal woman Semele.

Dead, and then born by a mortal. Brought back to life by the ruler of the gods. Sounds like there’s overlap with the gospel story.

Unlike Licona, second-century Christian Justin Martyr was happy to acknowledge commonalities between Jesus and Greek gods such as a virgin birth and resurrecting from the dead. He simply says that Satan placed the precedent back in time to trick us.

The Jesus story arose in a culture suffused with the idea of dying and rising gods, and Resurrection envy nicely explains the Resurrection.

Licona warns us that many popular internet examples are nonsense, such as the claim that Krishna was crucified and rose from the dead. “There are no accounts period of Krishna being crucified or rising from the dead three days later.”

I suppose he’s thinking of sources like The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves (1875) or Zeitgeist: the Movie (2007), which have been attacked for poor scholarship. But, like his complaints about the existence of dying-and-rising gods that postdated the gospels, historical examples that don’t fit can simply be ignored. His warning us away from examples that aren’t relevant doesn’t dismiss the ones that are.

As for Krishna, it’s true that there is no crucifixion or three-day delay, but those are insignificant details. What’s common is the important thing: that, like Jesus, Krishna arose from the dead and returned to his place in heaven!

Continue with part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/21/16.)

Image from Camilo Rueda López, CC license
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Isn’t it weird that faith healers aren’t curing COVID-19? Isn’t it weirder that their flock isn’t calling them on it?

From Oral Roberts’ sweaty tent revivals in the 1950s to Benny Hinn’s slick five-hour productions today, faith healers have been busy. Kenneth Copeland, Pat Robertson, Peter Popoff, and other big names are faith healers or started that way. A healing revival has lots of practiced emotional manipulation, but there is clear biblical support for healings of this sort. Jesus did public healings, and we see a first-century promise to the sick in James 5:14–16:

Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

If faith healing worked, and healing revivals were the place to see them, what would that look like? How could we tell that it was for real? Here’s a list of some of the things we should expect to see (contrasted with what we actually see).

Use of money

Donations given by sick people to the ministry that provided real faith healing would either be refused or used for conventional good works (food, clothes, and housing for the needy, for example). Instead, God would provide money, equipment, or whatever was necessary to run the ministry. After all, God “will repay each person according to what they have done” (Romans 2:6), and Jesus said, “Give, and it will be given to you” (Luke 6:38).

What we see instead: the big faith-healing ministries take in roughly $100 million per year, and sick people in the audience, who probably have better things like medical expenses to spend their money on, are encouraged to give money repeatedly. Desperate people giving money they shouldn’t part with to rich people who make big claims with paltry evidence? Though it may be done for the best of reasons, that certainly looks from the outside like a scam, a modern-day version of the patent medicine salesman.

Relationship to evidence

If faith healing worked, the focus would be on evidence and science. Scientists and doctors would be given easy access to evidence supporting claims of miraculous healings and would be encouraged to evaluate the claims and publish the results. They’d be encouraged to examine people before and after healings by prayer.

You would see statistics showing the efficacy of faith healing, just like with a conventional medical treatment. The ministry would show that it could reliably access the supernatural by winning a public, transparent test like the James Randi Education Foundation’s Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. (The JREF Challenge retired in 2015 after fifty years with no winners.) If faith healing worked, you’d see people going there first instead of conventional medicine.

What we see instead: instead of evidence and science, we see anecdotes, emotion, and faith. The focus is on quantity rather than quality, and if you debunk the claims of one anecdote, they point you to others. No one won the JREF million-dollar prize, and no big-name psychic or faith healer ever tried. The 2006 STEP experiment, often known as the Templeton Study because of the foundation that funded it, showed no value in third-party healing prayer.

Relationship to faith

It may be faith healing, but it’s claimed to actually work. Faith may be the key to unlock the miracle, but the results should be testable. It should work as reliably as a car or light switch works—otherwise, “faith healing works” is a meaningless claim. If a sick person stays sick despite treatment, the medicine (the faith healing procedure) would be faulty.

What we see instead: We see sick people who don’t recover blamed for their lack of faith, adding guilt to their burden and making faith healing unfalsifiable. We see sick people told that using conventional medicine admits a lack of faith. We see people pushed because of the limitations of conventional medicine to a desperate, “Well, I can’t take it with me” attitude toward their life savings, preyed upon by faith healers eager to provide snake oil in return for all they can take.

I remember one televangelist who used the line, “The bigger the need, the bigger the seed”—that is, the bigger your problem (and a life-threatening disease is a pretty big problem), the more money you must send to God to the televangelist. It’s hard to imagine more reprehensible advice to give to a vulnerable person.

Lourdes, France became a destination for the sick shortly after a claimed visitation by Mary in 1858. Today it receives six million visitors per year, though the Catholic Church recognizes a total of just 67 miraculous cures. How many more people are killed or injured just traveling to Lourdes than are imagined to be healed?

Kinds of cures

A real faith healer would be able to cure anything, including healings that anyone could see, such as limbs restored, burns healed, and chromosomal diseases like Huntington’s or Down syndrome cured.

What we see instead: we see only claims for invisible “cures” like cancer or some other internal illness that we can’t check on the spot. We must take the results on faith.

Military uses

The battlefield would be the perfect place for faith healing. Imagine a wizard who could conjure injured soldiers back to health or even raise them from the dead. Such a military would be invincible.

What we see instead: chaplains in the military can be helpful with matters of conscience (“Is it wrong to kill people?”) or as a therapist in an extremely stressful environment. But they have no medical mojo to offer medics and doctors.

Public healings

Real faith healings wouldn’t need to be elaborate public events. Real faith healers would take their show on the road. They wouldn’t be in churches but rather in hospitals or on street corners. The goal wouldn’t be showmanship but simply healing people. There would be no interest in a big audience, and a private hospital room would be as good a venue as a stadium.

What we see instead: we see a performance. We see emotional manipulation. We see tricks like those performed by a stage magician—think of Peter Popoff’s use of wireless messages to magically “know” someone’s name or ailment. We see frauds like putting someone who normally needs only a cane into a wheelchair. The patient is then wheeled onstage so the faith healer can do his thing and then marvel when the patient gets up and walks.

With the public spectacle, we have the solitary person put on the spot and all the emotional issues that brings: the placebo effect that can simulate a cure, adrenaline that masks pain, peer pressure to encourage you to play the role you’re expected to play, and so on.

Negative results? Just blame them on demons.

Intermediaries

Faith healing wouldn’t need a special personality or great training. There would be no need for intermediaries like Benny Hinn. Jesus himself makes clear that it’s as simple as, “Ask and you will receive” (John 16:24).

What we see instead: faith healers are apparently anointed by God. They may or may not have great learning, but they have the gift. Communicating with God is so tenuous that only a very few can do it. Nevertheless, even their performance isn’t very reliable, so don’t expect a guarantee.

Here again, the presence of an intermediary with his hand out makes faith healing look like just another scam.

Conclusion

Televangelists always conclude their infomercials with two requests: to pray for them and to send lots of money. But why ask for money? If prayer works and God responds to it, then the prayer is far more potent than my twenty dollars. Televangelists asking for money means that they know what I know: that money has value but prayer is just a placebo. Prayer does nothing whether I’m at home praying for their ministry or they’re on television praying for my health.

Am I too hard on faith healing? Televangelists handwave about the comfort provided by a god that’s not there or a heaven that doesn’t exist, but this may provide hope for the hopeless.

I’m in no position to criticize what someone in a tough position must do to get through life, but we’re not talking about a sugar pill. We’re talking about taking poor people’s money in return for witchcraft or encouraging them to shun conventional medicine. In the West in the twenty-first century, when we know something about disease, neither is acceptable.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/22/16.)

Image credit: Jay Trinidad

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