Christian apologist Jim Wallace thinks that explaining the Resurrection is easy—God was behind it all. Drop the God explanation, and atheists come up short explaining the facts: Jesus was a historical person, the gospels report that the tomb was empty and that Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples were willing to die to defend the Jesus claims, and there was little chance for legend to creep in to the story. I dismantle these “facts” in part 1.

Let’s move on to the atheist response. Wallace imagines theories such as that the disciples stole the body, the women went to the wrong tomb, Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, or that the risen Jesus was simply hallucinated.

Considering this, Wallace wonders “why there are 6 or 7 non-Christian theories and then the one Christian theory.”

Let’s start with a joke

I personally have little interest in these particular theories. But before I get to the one that I prefer, did you hear the one about the man walking along a street at night? He came across another guy bent over, slowly walking around at the edge of a parking lot, obviously looking for something.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for my keys. I lost them over there.” He points to a distant part of the parking lot.

“Then why are you looking for them here??”

“The light’s better here.”

Similarly, why do apologists spend so much time lovingly attacking arguments like “wrong tomb” or “swoon theory”? Because the light’s better here. These they think they can knock over.

And let’s sidestep their insistence that we pick up the story at a certain point and explain things naturally. I have no obligation to explain the resurrection given the empty tomb just like I have no obligation to explain the yellow brick road given Oz. The ball’s in the apologist’s court to show that it’s history.

As for Wallace’s puzzlement about why there are a bunch of non-Christian theories, there aren’t. There is no miscellany of arguments that must all harmonize somehow. You bring out your “God did it,” and I’d prefer any one of these naturalistic theories instead.

How the heck do you explain the Resurrection? The Jesus story was legend.

My preferred explanation (which gets insufficient consideration from the apologists) is that the gospel story is legend. There was something in the beginning—during a period of turmoil within Judaism, a charismatic teacher created a small movement—and legendary accretion over the decades did the rest. Ideas like gods impregnating humans and gods resurrecting worthy people were familiar elements of other religions, and these got attached to the Jesus story with the retelling.

“Wait—you say this Jesus guy was executed by the authorities, and that’s it? Not very impressive. I worship Dionysus, and he was raised from the dead by Zeus.” How many times would this happen before the Jesus story added the Resurrection? (I give this as simply a possible legendary addition. The Resurrection could’ve become part of the gospel story in other ways.)

A related theory, championed at this blog in particular by Greg G. (one of our most eloquent commenters), discards even that small historical core. The stories and ideas in Mark, the first gospel, can all be traced back to precedents in earlier literature—Jewish scripture and Hellenistic books of history or fiction available at the time. In other words, the first gospel was deliberate fiction from the start. This parsimonious theory, then, doesn’t assume any historical origin.

(This is my paraphrasing, so I invite those who’ve thought about it more to correct me as necessary. This is the Christ Myth theory, but I didn’t introduce it as such because it emphasizes the “Jesus didn’t exist” part, when the “Mark was fiction” part is more interesting and relevant for this post. Perhaps this alternative angle into the same theory could be called the Pious Fraud theory.)

Christian unity

As for Wallace’s “one Christian theory,” let’s not overemphasize Christian unity. Christians disagree on many important issues, such as Arminian vs. Calvinist thinking, Trinitarian vs. Arian (and Unitarian, Binitarian, and other beliefs) thinking, plus lots of other conflicts over the centuries where the losing philosophy was declared heretical. Christian big-tent thinking is roughly, “Ignoring the areas where Christians don’t speak with one voice . . . Christians speak with one voice.” And now Christians look like just another manmade religion, with factions bickering over who’s right.

The ineffectiveness of “God did it”

Finally, consider the conclusion Christians are so eager for us to reach, “God did it.” It’s a powerful explanation, though a little too powerful. It can explain anything and, in so doing, it explains nothing. It can’t be falsified, and if I say, “God did X,” you can’t prove me wrong because God could do anything. If you say that X isn’t something God would do, I could either say that God moves in mysterious ways (too grand for your mortal thinking) or dismiss your poor understanding of how God thinks.

More practically, “God did it” is just a repackaging of the unknowns and so explains nothing. We’ve answered, “How did Jesus get resurrected?” by replacing it with, “Who is God, and why is there suffering, and why is God hidden?” (and so on). Introduce the Bible into the conversation, and that just introduces more problems—“Why are there so many unanswered questions, and why did Jesus leave so much dogma undecided, and why is it contradictory?” (and so on).

Declare victory and go home

You can always just say that the atheist is cheating. If those atheists were honest in their evaluation of your argument, they’d be on their knees, sobbing out the Sinner’s Prayer. Here, Wallace thinks he’s found the problem.

The better , and the only reason why you don’t like the Christian theory, is because you don’t think a miracle is reasonable. You have a presuppositional bias against the miraculous.

And you don’t?? I suspect we’re equally skeptical about supernatural claims . . . except when it comes to Christian claims. You give them a pass, while I do my best to insist on evidence in proportion to the extraordinary character of the claim, regardless of whether they support my worldview or not.

Looks like that makes me the one who treats things without unfair bias. More here.

No, Mssr. Atheist, you can’t use science

Wallace concludes with a Molotov cocktail from a new quarter.

So you think that everything in your world can be explained by natural causes and natural forces; you think that everything in your environment, [the entire history of] the universe can be explained by nothing more than space, time, matter, physics, and chemistry? How do you explain the beginning of the universe (which you cannot explain using space, time, matter, physics, or chemistry, because none of those things are available to you)? We know from the science that everything comes into existence, not from some other form of space, but from nothing.

There’s lots I could say here, but I’ll cut it short and simply note (1) I have no obligation to answer any scientific question to make an atheist argument, and (2) this challenge is about cosmology, while our topic is Christianity’s unbelievable explanation for the Resurrection. If you think you’ve got a showstopper of an argument (or simply want the best answer from a scientific field that you’re a novice in), go talk to a relevant scientist.

I’m sure that no scientific question you could pose would surprise scientists or shake their confidence in the science. More to the point, none would convert to Christianity as a result. What does that tell you about the power of this question about the origin of the universe?

As usual, the supernatural is unnecessary in explaining the objective facts surrounding the Resurrection. As the French mathematician Laplace is reported to have said two centuries ago about the absence of God in his book on celestial mechanics, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

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Image from Francisco Delgado, CC license
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Christian apologist Jim Wallace has an explanation for the Resurrection story. He gives his winning argument in a recent video, “Why Naturalistic Explanations for the Resurrection Are… Lame.” Here is his challenge to the skeptic:

What is it that’s keeping you from thinking that [the Christian explanation for the Resurrection] is a reasonable inference?

His argument gives a bunch of facts and demands an explanation. He has his explanation—God did it. Well, Mssr./Mme Atheist? Find a better explanation than that.

4 facts about the Resurrection

Let’s examine the facts that he offers.

1. Jesus was a real person. “It’s ludicrous to think that Jesus never lived.”

Nope—hardly ludicrous. Some religions were started by a real, historical person, such as Joseph Smith (LDS),  Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science), and L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology). And others have a named figure at their beginning who might not have been historical.

Was there a real Mohammed (Islam)? Buddha (Buddhism)? Zarathushtra (Zoroastrianism)? Probably.

Was there a real Moses (Judaism)? Laotzi (Taoism)? John Frum (Vanuatu cargo cult)? Probably not.

I reject option 1, the gospel account of the supernatural Jesus, but that still leaves two more options: (2) Christianity was created with a real man at the beginning and morphed into the gospel story, or (3) it started without a real man. The scholarly consensus rejects 3, but it’s not a ludicrous option. It’s possible.

2. “The tomb [was] empty . . . [and they] claimed that he rose from the dead, . . . [and] there was apparently no body that was ever recovered.”

These aren’t objective, historical facts. They’re just claims made in a story, so let’s not give them more credibility than they deserve. More here.

3. “People were willing to die for their [claims about Jesus]”

You don’t even have a story about disciples being willing to die to defend the Christian claims about Jesus, let alone history.

Start with the story of Jesus himself. He was said to be the Jewish king, and he was killed. That makes sense—set yourself up as a rival to the king installed by the Romans, and they get cranky. That’s sedition, a capital offense. They will kill you for that. That doesn’t mean that the Jesus crucifixion story is history, of course, just that this part of the story hangs together.

Where’s the equivalent for the disciples? Were they executed by the authorities or murdered by a mob? What were their crimes? The earliest record dates from close to two centuries after the death of Jesus and it only gives method and place of death. And if, like Jesus, they were killed by authorities for sedition or some similar crime, then they didn’t die defending claims about Jesus. More here.

4. Scripture was written very early. There was little chance for legend to creep in.

The gospels were written decades after the death of Jesus, which isn’t “very early.” Apologists usually make relative claims here, comparing the statistics of the New Testament to those of other writings of the time, but these comparisons are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether this or that New Testament book has more manuscript copies, was written closer to the events it claims to record, or has a shorter gap from originals to our best copies compared to other ancient writings. We don’t care whether it’s the best on any of these metrics; we care that it’s reliable enough to support Christianity’s remarkable supernatural claims. It’s not.

Would you accept a miracle claim from a religious tradition not yours if you read it in today’s newspaper? If not then you see the problem.

These “facts” don’t amount to much, leaving nothing that’s puzzling to explain. This is what’s left:

1. The entirety of the Jesus story might be legend, in which case there was no historical Jesus at the beginning.
2. The gospels make lots of claims, but they’re just stories.
3. “No one would die for a lie” is no argument since we have no reliable documentation saying that any disciple died to support the gospel claims.
4. The New Testament documentation isn’t reliable enough to support its supernatural claims. (Could any document be?)

Comparing the Christian and skeptical positions

Those are the unimpressive facts that Wallace wants to start with. He sees God’s hand behind all this.

How do skeptics respond? How do they explain the Resurrection naturalistically? Though Wallace doesn’t explicitly enumerate them, he is apparently thinking of explanations like these.

1. The disciples stole the body to make it look like a miraculous resurrection.
2. The women went to an empty tomb, but it was the wrong tomb.
3. Jesus wasn’t quite dead when he was removed from the cross. In the tomb, he revived (swoon theory).
4. The distraught disciples imagined or hallucinated the risen Jesus.

And there are more.

Wallace wonders “why there are 6 or 7 non-Christian theories and then the one Christian theory” to explain the Resurrection. He says:

Why do you have [6 or 7]? Why not just 1? Because those don’t work, and you know they don’t work. The guy who invented #6 doesn’t think excuse #5 works, and the guy who invented #4 does not think 5 or 6 work. All these guys don’t agree with each other, they’ve got their own theory and think the other guy’s theories are lame. I agree with you there—they’re all lame.

Let me approvingly quote from a source Wallace should find credible, Gary Habermas and Mike Licona in The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus: “When it comes to reports of miracles, the historian must seek a natural explanation before considering a supernatural one.” The supernatural alternative is so incredible and without precedent that any of these naturalistic explanations is more plausible than “God did it.” And for every instance where you’re tempted to point to a Bible verse that weakens one of these theories, remember another naturalistic argument, that the Bible is an unreliable source for potentially many reasons (deliberate change by a copyist, that verse is contradicted by another elsewhere in the Bible, it’s a story, this thought experiment, and so on).

You want one theory? Okay, here it is: simple, natural explanations are sufficient to explain the facts surrounding the claims for the Resurrection. The supernatural is an unnecessary addition.

Concluded in part 2 with my preferred explanation, plus a critique of the Christian explanation.

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Image from Raychan, CC license

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