This is the conclusion of a response to the intriguingly titled article from Christian apologist Greg Koukl, “This One Thing Could Destroy Christianity Completely….” Part 1 of my critique is here.

The argument comes from a verse in 1 Corinthians, which bases the entirety of the Christian message on the historical truth of the Resurrection. No Resurrection means no saving message of Jesus.

Koukl helpfully lays out Christianity’s vulnerability with three facts. He says that they’re strong enough to support the hard-to-believe claim of Resurrection. I say that each one is unreliable and so are not actually facts. In addition, no set of natural claims can support a supernatural conclusion.

“Fact” 1 was that Jesus was dead and buried. (Yes, he was, but only in the story.) Let’s wrap up with the remaining two.

2. The tomb was empty on Sunday morning

Here’s Koukl’s summary.

Nearly three-quarters of all scholars agree here, since the empty tomb was never disputed by anyone at the time, even the Jews and Romans. Why was Jesus’ body never produced to quell the rumor of resurrection? Present the corpse, end the controversy. Pretty simple.

Wow—so few words with so much wrong.

The “three-quarters of all scholars” (I think he meant New Testament scholars) comes from Gary Habermas. It’s a statistic from his personal database of articles, which he hasn’t made it public, so we’re stuck taking his word for it. And who’s in the database—historians? Christian professors? Pastors and street preachers? I’d find historians whose expertise was in non-religious areas of history to be far less biased than New Testament scholars, for example.

My guess is that those motivated to write articles about the empty tomb are Christians, and almost all historians of pre-Columbian America, medieval France, or any other non-New Testament area couldn’t be bothered. (More on this statistic here and here.)

How do we know whether the empty tomb was disputed by anyone at the time? We have poor records of anything from 2000 years ago. Who would’ve gone to the expense of denying an odd claim in writing if it didn’t affect them or challenge anything dear to them? Even more so, who would bother copying that rebuttal through the generations to preserve it for us to read today?

More important, there was no “anyone at the time” to dispute the story! When Jesus was supposed to have died, the empty tomb was in a book that wouldn’t be written for decades. Seeing it from the other end of the timeline, in the 70s or 80s when the gospels were written, those authors weren’t constrained by history. They could write whatever they wanted to.

Said another way, the empty tomb didn’t exist until the author of Mark wrote “He is not here; see the place where they laid him” roughly forty years after Jesus supposedly died. Was Mark documenting history? That must be demonstrated. Until then, it’s just a story.

Koukl’s “Present the corpse, end the controversy” isn’t realistic. Who’d be motivated to head off any rumor that Jesus was risen? Even if Christians caused trouble in later decades or centuries, in the two or three days after the crucifixion, any Jewish or Roman authority would assume that this fringe Jewish sect was finished. Its troublesome leader was now dead; problem solved. As for the worry about the rumor of resurrection, that, too, was in a gospel that wouldn’t exist for decades.

Skeptics give a dozen reasons why Christianity’s claims are nonsense, and that doesn’t destroy Christianity today. Why imagine it any different 2000 years ago? Even if you imagine naysayers poised to contradict the gospels (and why would you?), contrary facts have little impact on a religion.

3. The disciples were transformed

Koukl now argues that the disciples took the difficult route, proving the depth of their motivation.

Even the most critical scholars acknowledge that the disciples proclaimed the resurrection at their peril because they thought they’d encountered the risen Christ. Many paid the ultimate price—including the skeptic James and the former executioner of Christians, Paul—choosing death rather than retraction.

Let me make a quick aside about Christian scholarship. Many Christian professors must sign a doctrinal statement (statement of faith) before they can work at a Christian college. Their job then depends on their abiding by each point in the doctrinal statement. If the statement says that Jesus’s disciples chose death over denying the divinity of Jesus (say), what does it mean when they write a paper or give a lecture with that conclusion? They were obliged to reach that conclusion, so their objectivity is suspect.

A doctrinal statement is a commitment to a conclusion before any research is done, and researchers can’t honestly follow the facts when some conclusions are off limits. In other fields, practitioners recuse themselves when they can’t be objective, and Christian scholars should do the same. I talk about the problem in depth here and here.

Let’s move on to “paying the ultimate price” as a martyr. This is the “Who would die for a lie?” argument, which asks why a disciple would go to his death knowing that Jesus didn’t resurrect as the story says.

Our first question: why do we think any disciples died as martyrs? Only the martyrdom of James the son of Zebedee is given in the Bible. The oldest source with claims about all twelve disciples, “On the Twelve Apostles,” was written roughly 150 years after the last supposed martyrdom. This is too old to be reliable, but the story gets muddier still when you toss in contradicting accounts written even later. These give us tradition, not history.

Second, on what charges were these disciples convicted? To support the argument, the crime must merit a death penalty (something like treason or sedition) and be such that denying Jesus’s resurrection would get you released. “On the Twelve Apostles” doesn’t tell us what any disciple was charged with, if anything. It only claims to document how they died. That means we have no evidence, not even poor evidence, that they would’ve been released by saying the magic words, “Okay, I’ll admit it—Jesus didn’t rise from the dead!”

And with that, the “Who would die for a lie?” argument fails. (More here.)

Punch line

Every fact is false and even the grounds for his argument are gone, but Koukl still springs his nonexistent trap.

Which brings us to our final, most important question: What single explanation makes sense of all of the historical details that virtually every academic in the field agrees on—the death of Jesus, the empty tomb, and the transformation of the disciples and the skeptics? What single interpretation accounts for all the facts?

That it’s a story.

Jesus was buried in the story. The tomb was empty in the story. The disciples became bold proclaimers of the divinity of Jesus in the story. Don’t take us to a certain point in the story and then demand to know, given the constraints of the story to that point, what alternative we could have to a supernatural explanation.

This is Robert M. Price’s yellow brick road problem: “Of course there’s an Emerald City. Where else would the yellow brick road go to?” Or, in this case, “Of course Jesus rose from the dead. What else explains the empty tomb?” Step outside of it and see the story, and you’ll discover that nothing about it constrains you to accept a supernatural conclusion.

In the beginning of part 1, I pointed to C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument and noted that a fourth possibility, Legend, was the obvious explanation. How could Lewis or any apologist today make the argument without that omission being apparent? And with Koukl’s “The one thing that could destroy Christianity” argument, we have a similar mystery. How can anyone make this argument without “It’s just a story!” springing to mind?

Koukl wraps up:

Here it is, the answer Peter gives—the only answer that fits all the evidence: “This Jesus God raised up again, to which we are all witnesses” (Acts 2:32). Those who disagree must solve this problem: “What is a better explanation of the facts?”

 That it’s a story.

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For further reading: 8 Lessons Learned from the Minimal Facts Argument

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Image from Tom Edgington, CC license
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