Category Archives: Deep Dive>Religion

A haunted house at Halloween? Let’s visit a Hell House!

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A guide takes the audience from scene to scene. The tour starts with a teenage girl in a doctor’s office being told she has gonorrhea. How will she tell her parents? The guide makes clear the irony: this girl was a Christian, and she knew that premarital sex is a sin.

Next up is a gaunt young man being told that he has AIDS. He also knew that his homosexual lifestyle was sinful.

Then there’s a girl on a filthy gurney in a back-alley abortion clinic. There’s blood everywhere, and she’s screaming in pain. A drugged drink leads to rape. A drunk driver crashes, killing himself and everyone in the car. A drug overdose. A demon greets someone dabbling with Satanic spells. A suicide. Worse of all would be dying without getting right with Jesus, which would commit you to eternity in hell. Sin has consequences, people!

Welcome to Hell House, a haunted house attraction recast with an Evangelical moralistic viewpoint. It’s designed to scare the Jesus into you.

Hell House with a twist

Hell Houses are out of fashion, at least where I live. If you’re in the same situation, left out of the hellish fun, I have good news. I came across an interesting variation on a Hell House. It’s a video about getting a letter from a place you’d never expect. It’s called “A letter from hell!”

In the story, Josh and Zach were in high school. They had classes together, they played sports together, they partied together. They were best friends. One thing Zach never got around to doing—it was a small omission, really—was sharing with Josh his personal relationship with Jesus.

Then one night, Josh drove home from a party. He was drunk, and he crashed and died. Zach’s small omission meant that his best friend hadn’t accepted Jesus before he died.

After the funeral, Zach got a letter in the mail. It was from Josh, describing the afterlife. He says he’s in line at heaven’s gate. But his name isn’t in the Book of Life, and he’s dragged away to a holding cell. Josh is terrified and blames Zach. “You say you’re my friend, but if you really were, you would’ve told me about this Jesus.”

Angels come into the cell and drag Josh off. He can smell the sulfur, and then he feels the fire. “Zach, why didn’t you tell me?!”

Josh ends his letter, “P.S. Wish you were here.”

Zach’s reply

Zach defends himself with his own letter, saying, “Don’t bother me.” He has school to do, sports to play, and life to live. He rationalizes that his friends will make up their own minds.

Presumably the mixture of Josh’s anguish, his revenge wish that Zach would also be sentenced to hell, and Zach’s callous reply is supposed to push the right buttons to scare teens into evangelizing their friends.

That motivation for a congregation is understandable. Christianity must be continually replenished with new blood, and with adults, it’s too late since they rarely switch into a religion. Christianity’s primary feedstock is the children of Christians, but another important source is Christian teens bringing in their friends. (I explore the embarrassing fact that Christianity survives only with children indoctrinated before they’re old enough to understand here.)

Critique

While this video letter might make an effective emotional argument for some, look more closely and we’ll see it has problems.

– The story Josh wanted from Zach is the story of a god who’s infinitely good and yet created hell. It’s the story of a loving deity who slipped infinite torment into his “perfect” plan, hoping no one notices. It’s incoherent.

– It makes no sense to dump the blame on Zach. Who in America hasn’t heard about Jesus and the Christian concept of hell? Josh even admitted that he had. Sharing the Jesus story is like giving someone a stock tip—maybe it’s a good investment, and maybe not. It’d be awkward to pressure a friend to buy the stock and then have its price fall. Christianity is like a thousand other religions—Shintoism, Jainism, Mormonism, Scientology—that we agree are invented. Why think Christianity isn’t more of the same?

– Many Christians are embarrassed by the doctrine of God creating hell. I occasionally see C.S. Lewis used to salvage God’s honor with the claim, “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.”

But Christians must pick. (1) They can have God as a heartless monster and accept Zach’s story that hell means exquisite torment. He’s in a frenzy to get out, but he can’t. Or, (2) they can have Lewis’s hell, in which the inmates of hell are in a prison of their own making, but then Zach would be gone, and this “Letter from hell” makes no sense.

– Does God want the threat of hell to scare us straight? Then he can come down and tell us about it. As always, God avoids the opportunity to do something significant on earth—end covid, stop natural disasters, or make an unambiguous statement about how to go to the “Good Place” after death. Instead, we’re assured by his self-appointed human messengers that they can speak for him—which is what we’d see if there were no God.

– How lasting will a commitment to Jesus be if someone is frightened into it?

The Great Commission makes no sense

This is the big one.

The foundational claim supporting this entire Jesus-died-so-you-could-avoid-hell project is that Jesus himself demanded that his flock spread the word. That’s the Great Commission, where Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

That sounds like the last word on the subject. Jesus has spoken, so why are you still hanging around? Get out and evangelize!

But here, as with the letter from hell, a little thought uncovers many problems.

– Jesus wasn’t talking to you. Read that chapter, and you’ll see that Jesus’s audience was his disciples.

But what about passing on the message long-term? The original disciples would eventually die, so surely the Great Commission was binding on future generations?

Nope. There was no “long term” in the Jesus story. He was an Apocalyptic prophet, and he thought that the end would come in just a few years. He said, “This generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matt. 24:34). “All these things” included stars falling from heaven, so the typical Christian excuses fail. (For example, apologists often tap dance that Jesus actually meant the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. That was a disaster, to be sure, but it’s very different from the end of the universe).

We find the same “the end is nigh” thinking from Paul. He likened the resurrection of Jesus to the first fruits of a harvest. With Jesus risen, Paul expected him to soon harvest those who belong to him (1 Corinthians 15:20–23).

Paul also reassured one of his congregations when they grumbled that Jesus was late, and Christians were starting to die. Paul said that when Jesus came, the dead would be swept up, followed by “we who are still alive and are left” (1 Thessalonians 4:17).

– Jesus’s message was not a universal message. In what has been called the lesser commission, Jesus said,

Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel [that is, Jews who have been abandoned by their Jewish leaders]. As you go, proclaim this message: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matt. 10:5–7)

No modern Christian interprets Jesus’s instructions as a command to preach solely to Jews.

– When Jesus sent apostles out to spread the word, he gave them superpowers: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons” (Matt. 10:8). Incredibly, Jesus also granted the power to judge sins, a power you’d think would be reserved for God himself (Matt. 18:18, John 20:23).

Christians today who don’t have these superpowers probably shouldn’t flatter themselves that they have been chosen to walk with the apostles.

– It’s arrogant for one person to imagine that their interpretation of the message of Jesus is the correct one. There are 45,000 denominations in Christianity. That’s a lot of different interpretations. It’s not realistic for any Christian to feel certain that they had it figured out.

– Evangelizing isn’t necessary to get people saved because we’re already saved. Paul in Romans 5:18–19 draws a parallel between Adam and Jesus. Just as we didn’t need to opt in to inherit Adam’s sin, Paul assures us that we don’t need to do anything to get Jesus’s grace.

See you in heaven.

(Read more on the irrelevance of the Great Commission to modern Christians).

If God has a really important message for us, I suggest he come down and give it to us and stop looking indistinguishable from a god who doesn’t exist.

“Why is God hidden?”
I’d say for the same reason that
unicorns and dragons and leprechauns are hidden.
— commenter C Peterson

Do atheists have a nihilistic worldview?

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We looked at the odd views of “John the atheist” in a recent article.

  • John denies that morality exists (apparently he means that objective morality doesn’t exist).
  • John dismisses aspirations and love as imaginary by equating them with the chemistry that makes them (just because we can understand how love works doesn’t mean it no longer exists).
  • John says that “there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife” (no, you’re thinking of a sociopath).

You’ve pressed the Christian’s magic button!

Let’s move on to what is the more interesting aspect of this story, Christian bloggers’ eager and gullible embrace of John’s views.

John’s essay first appeared in “The Inevitable Consequence of An Atheistic Worldview” at Jim Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity blog. Wallace says, “John bluntly captured the true nature of morality when it is untethered to a transcendent source.”

I wonder why he accepts John’s nutty view of morality rather than those of many other atheists whose views contradict that—I reject that view, for example.

Wallace makes clear the atheist’s problem: “[As an atheist,] I embraced a particular set of moral laws even though I couldn’t account for these laws in a world without a transcendent moral law giver.”

If you’re looking for a sensible worldview, you’ve backed the wrong horse. Naturalism explains morality with evolution, while Christianity posits God as a law giver without evidence. That’s how you tell the difference between science and religion—science is the one backing up its claims with evidence.

And Wallace is confused about how society works. “Without a true transcendent source for morality (and purpose), skeptics are left trying to invent their own, justifying their subjective moral rules as best they may.”

Societies around the world and throughout history have developed moral rules. Christians have a special book, and yet they have the same moral programming as anyone else. It’s not just Christianity that has the Golden Rule.

What is the meaning of life?

Wallace wraps up his argument this way:

In my interaction with John, he told me he was weary of hearing fellow atheists mock their opponents for hypocrisy and ignorance, while pretending they had a definitive answer to the great questions of life. He simply wanted his fellow atheists to be consistent. As it turns out, theism provides the consistent moral foundation missing from John’s atheistic worldview.

Hold on—who is pretending to have definite answers to the great questions of life?

By “great questions,” I assume you mean questions like, (1) Why are we here? (2) Where did we come from? (3) What is my purpose? Or (4) What will happen to me after I die? Yes, Christianity has answers, but are those answers backed up with evidence? Other religions have different answers to life’s great questions. Why imagine that your answers are better? And if theirs are made up, why not yours?

Remember science, the discipline that backs things up with evidence? It answers your Great Questions. It’s just that you don’t like the answers: (1) We’re here for no more cosmically significant reason than a goat or oak tree is here, (2) the Big Bang and evolution are parts of the explanation of where we came from, (3) your life’s purpose is yours to define, and (4) what happens to you after you die is the same as what happens when the goat or oak tree dies. (I’ve written more about how science answers the big questions.) Might there actually be supernatural explanations behind these questions? Sure, maybe, but why think that in the absence of good evidence except to satisfy your predetermined supernatural conclusion?

That’s how you tell the difference between science and religion—science is the one backing up its claims with evidence.

A parting insult

John said, “You’re just a little bit less evolved, that’s all.  When you are ready to join me, let me know, I’ll be reproducing with your wife.” John demands that atheists be consistent and accept the consequences of their worldview.

I am an atheist, and I reject that worldview. I won’t accept his “consequences” when they’re ridiculous.

Wallace concludes, “As it turns out, theism provides the consistent moral foundation missing from John’s atheistic worldview.”

Consistent? First, you’ve given no evidence that Christianity is not just pretend, which is what it looks like. Second, Christian morality is wildly inconsistent when Christians in the West must juggle modern morality (racial equality, gender equality, and slavery and genocide as abominations) with God’s actions in the Old Testament (God supports slavery, God supports genocide, and God even supports human sacrifice). Christianity’s “moral foundation” sucks.

Concluded in part 3.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around
a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal
is obviously some indication
of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt


(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-8-17.)

The Bible defeats its own Resurrection story

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Step through the gospel’s crucifixion and resurrection story, and you’ll see that some of the popular arguments made by Christian apologists fall apart.

Many apologists insist that the resurrection was documented by eyewitnesses. Their motivation makes sense—the resurrection is the punch line of the Jesus story, and the authors can’t simply be passing along a popular yarn. Only eyewitness authors could be credible.

We must start by agreeing on what it means to witness a man’s resurrection from the dead. You must (1) see him alive, then (2) see him dead, then (3) see him alive again. This is obvious, I realize, but you’ll soon see where this is missing in the gospels.

Matthew’s passion narrative

We’ll start with the crucifixion story in Matthew. For this to be an eyewitness account, one of the disciples must author Matthew. This requires that the author personally experience the three elements of any resurrection above.

Let’s pick up the story when Jesus is arrested. Next we read, “Then all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matthew 26:56b). The next day Jesus was crucified, and “Many women were there, watching from a distance” (Matt. 27:55) including Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph. There were men present—Roman guards and passersby who insulted Jesus—but no disciples.

With no male disciples to observe the crucifixion, this eyewitness claim fails in point 2 above: you must see him dead if you want to later claim a resurrection. Matthew doesn’t even claim any disciples at the empty tomb. Note also that it’s modern Christians who claim that Matthew was an eyewitness; that gospel never makes that claim.

The women’s tale

But what about the women? They were there. The two Marys saw the crucifixion, they saw Jesus die, they saw the burial in the stone tomb, they saw the empty tomb, and they saw the risen Jesus. They were part of the inner circle, and surely their word was good enough.

The first problem is that the author of Matthew is still not an eyewitness. At best, he simply reported a story he’d been told.

And as for the women’s story being a reliable report, a popular Christian apologist argument won’t allow that. Here’s Greg Koukl’s version:

Women, disrespected in the ancient world, are the first to witness the risen Christ. Why include these unflattering details if the Gospels are works of fiction?

I’m arguing that the gospels are legend, not fiction, but set that aside. Koukl is using the Criterion of Embarrassment: why say something embarrassing about yourself unless it’s true? If women witnessing the empty tomb is embarrassing (because they’re unreliable) but that story element is still in each gospel, doesn’t that point to it being true?

It turns out that women being the sole witnesses at the tomb is not at all embarrassing. In fact, it’s the only way discovering the empty tomb makes sense in a culture where caring for the dead was women’s work, but let’s ignore that as well and watch the apologists dig their hole deeper.

[The reasons supporting Jesus’s empty tomb] include the potentially embarrassing but unanimous agreement in all four Gospels that women were the earliest witnesses. (Gary Habermas)

The discovery of the tomb by women is highly probable. Given the low status of women in Jewish society and their lack of qualification to serve as legal witnesses, the most plausible explanation . . . why women and not the male disciples were made discoverers of the empty tomb is that the women were in fact the ones who made this discovery. (William Lane Craig)

Anyone trying to pass off a false resurrection story as the truth would never say the women were the first witnesses at the tomb. In the first century, a woman’s testimony was not considered on par with that of a man. An invented story would say that the men—the brave men—had discovered the empty tomb. Yet all four gospels say the women were the first witnesses—all this while the sissy-pants men had their doors locked for fear of the Jews. (Frank Turek)

These apologists insist that women were seen as unreliable witnesses. This means that they can’t argue that while the author of Matthew wasn’t technically an eyewitness, that’s unimportant because he trusted the women’s report. They’ve left Matthew with no authority from which to document the most important (and least believable) part of the gospel.

See also: Why the Gospel of Mark Is Likely NOT an Eyewitness Account

Gospel of Mark

Another reason to discount Matthew as an eyewitness is that that book liberally copies from Mark, the first gospel. More than half of Matthew comes from Mark. Why would an eyewitness account copy from someone else rather than give his own version . . . unless it wasn’t an eyewitness account?

Perhaps that makes Mark the more authoritative gospel. However, Mark’s story is almost identical. After the arrest, “everyone deserted [Jesus] and fled” (Mark 14:50). Again, women watched the crucifixion from a distance. The two Marys are mentioned along with Salome, but there are no male disciples. The women saw the burial and they brought spices on Sunday morning, where they saw the empty tomb.

Mark’s ending is the big difference when compared with Matthew. The women see a young man in a white robe who tells them that Jesus has risen and that they should tell the disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee. The gospel ends, “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.”

Mark also shares the problems of Matthew. The author wasn’t an eyewitness to the death or resurrection, and the apologists’ own “women are unreliable” argument prevents the author from using them as reliable sources. Mark adds a unique problem: with its abrupt ending, how did anyone learn of the story since the women kept it to themselves?

Mark is traditionally said to be authored by John Mark, who documented the eyewitness story of the apostle Peter, but the book itself makes clear that neither Peter nor any disciple was an eyewitness to the death, so no disciple could claim to be an eyewitness to the resurrection.

Gospels of Luke and John

Luke and John correct most of the problems. Luke doesn’t have the disciples run away at the arrest of Jesus. At the crucifixion, “All those who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching,” so the men were presumably there.

Men are also added to the empty tomb element: women saw the empty tomb and told the disciples, and Peter ran to the tomb to see for himself. Here again, though, Peter was only an eyewitness to an empty tomb. He only had the women’s authority that this was the one that had held Jesus’s body, since no disciple witnessed the burial.

The story in John is similar except that one disciple is mentioned as a witness along with a few women, and two disciples ran back to see the empty tomb.

With Luke and John, Christians have a better argument for disciples witnessing Jesus alive, then dead, then alive again, but they can only do so after admitting a worse problem, that the gospel stories are contradictory.

(This is an aside, but I can’t resist pointing out one more awkward element in the crucifixion story. According to John, when Jesus is on the cross, he sees his mother and “the disciple whom he loved.” Presumably concerned about who would care for Mary after his death, he said to her, “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother” (John 19:26–7). But Mary already had another son! Why would Jesus do this when James the Just was his brother? One simple explanation is that James’s assuming leadership of the church after the death of his brother Jesus was a later tradition, and the gospel of John documents the original tradition, that Jesus had no brothers.)

The resurrection is a ridiculous claim that needs a mountain of evidence to support it. Where is this evidence? We could explore how implausible it would be for this dying-and-rising god story to be history, unlike all the others and unlike the supernatural stories of other religions, but we don’t need to go there. Staying within the Bible, the claim that Matthew and Mark are eyewitness accounts fails, and apologists’ own “women were unreliable” argument makes their situation even more desperate.

See also:

Blasphemy:
a law to protect an all-powerful, supernatural deity
from getting its feelings hurt.
— Ricky Gervais


(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-8-16.)

Image from Wikimedia (public domain)

Christians’ secret weapon against same-sex marriage

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Whining about same-sex marriage is always in season in some circles. Let’s critique one such article, “The importance of your gag reflex when discussing homosexuality and ‘gay marriage.’”

“Gag reflex”? I doubt we’ll find much respect and compassion in this article.

The secret weapon in undercutting same-sex marriage

The author (a pastor) begins by acknowledging that Christians will be branded as hateful, first simply for being Christian and second for their desire to “speak the truth in love.”

(Poor baby. It must be so difficult being a Christian busybody in America today).

He says that the secret weapon against same-sex marriage is first to strip away “euphemisms” like gay or homosexual:

We’ve actually stopped talking about the things that lie at the heart of the issue—sexual promiscuity of an abominable sort. I say “abominable” because that’s how God describes it in His word.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means

God labels eating shellfish as abominable. These are ritual abominations, not ones that actually cause any harm.

The Jewish ritual burdens (kosher food laws, circumcision, and other requirements demanded of Jews) were not put on the new gentile converts to Christianity. Prohibitions against homosexual activity in Leviticus 18 and 20 are mixed with other rules that Christians have abandoned. These rules come as a package, and Christians can’t now go back for a few old favorites that they’d like to revive.

The gag reflex is relative, and it makes no sense to say, “Well that grosses me out, so it must be objectively immoral.”

Next the author moves on to a somewhat explicit description of homosexual sex acts with the admitted goal of provoking a reaction of disgust. He concludes:

That sense of moral outrage you’re now likely feeling—either at the descriptions above or at me for writing them—that gut-wrenching, jaw-clenching, hand-over-your-mouth, “I feel dirty” moral outrage is the gag reflex. It’s what you quietly felt when you read “two men deep kissing” in the second paragraph. Your moral sensibilities have been provoked—and rightly so. That reflex triggered by an accurate description of homosexual behavior will be the beginning of the recovery of moral sense and sensibility when it comes to the so-called “gay marriage” debate.

If you’re disgusted at two men kissing, then don’t kiss another man. If you were gay, you’d have a different response.

So two men kissing is offensive but a man and a woman aren’t? How about a male and female coworker kissing in the corner during a business meeting—would that be offensive or at least extremely inappropriate? If you’re made queasy at the thought of your parents doing it, does that mean that it’s morally wrong?

And if, in the right situation, you’d enjoy watching a man and a woman kissing, let’s change it up. Now the woman is much heavier. Or much older. Or much uglier. How about now—is it just as enjoyable? (I’m seeing this from a straight male perspective because the author of this article was male).

The author thinks that dropping our pretense of politeness and describing behavior accurately “will be the beginning of the recovery of moral sense and sensibility when it comes to the so-called ‘gay marriage’ debate.”

3 points of rebuttal

I see several problems here. First, the author thinks that he’s found in the gag reflex a reliable shortcut to God’s morality. He says, “Deep down we all—Christian and non-Christian, heterosexual and homosexual—know it’s wrong.” But do we? Different people have different turn-ons. If a man finds his wife sexy but you find her unattractive, so what? Who cares about your critique of someone else’s sexual relationship? By extension, if a man loves another man, what concern is that of yours? The gag reflex is relative, and it makes no sense to say, “Well that grosses me out, so it must be objectively immoral.”

If he wants visceral gut reactions, pregnant women are often very sensitive to smells. Does he find objective moral wisdom in this? What about the reactions of a typical American to traditional cultural foods in other parts of the world—say, natto (fermented soybeans), Vegemite, or insects. These might provoke widespread disgust, but so what? If these are familiar foods to other people, who are you to complain?

Second, whatever sex act you don’t approve of, there are more straights doing it than homosexuals, simply because there are far more of them. If it’s consensual and the sex pleases them, where’s the problem?

Third, it’s not homosexual sex that’s disgusting but sex itself. Imagine teaching a seven-year-old about how homosexual sex works. They’d be disgusted. Now imagine teaching how heterosexual sex works. They’d be disgusted. Sex is the issue, not homosexual sex.

Or, imagine meeting someone at a cocktail party and having them describe their last straight sexual encounter or their favorite sexual fantasy. It’s not that one kind of sex is pure and beautiful while the other is hurtful and filthy, it’s that sex has its place, and a public setting isn’t it.

(In the interest of completeness, the author responded to feedback to his article).

This author’s book of Iron Age prudery is no guide in the 21st century. Sexual acts are a problem if all parties don’t give consent (or if they withdraw consent) or if precautions against disease or unwanted pregnancy aren’t taken. They’re not a problem simply because they’re homosexual.

I support Christians’ right to speak about their views on same-sex marriage, but they won’t stand up to scrutiny if they’re as weak as this.

If the Bible got the easiest moral question
that humanity has ever faced [that is, slavery] wrong,
what are the odds that the Bible got something
as complicated as human sexuality wrong?
— Dan Savage

How likely was the empty tomb, Part 3? Empty tomb or empty promise?

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This is the final column in response to a recent the article, “12 reasons to accept the empty tomb as a historical fact.” Before you read my reasons nine through twelve, I recommend that you check out Part 1 and Part 2. And, if you can find points that I’ve missed, share them in the comments.

9. The leaders of the day didn’t produce a body

If Christianity were a nuisance, why not shut it down by presenting the body? The Jewish and Roman leaders could’ve undercut Christianity’s central claim. That they didn’t produce a body suggests that they didn’t have one. An empty tomb would explain this.

Critiquing the gospel story by assuming the story is like taking the Goldilocks story up to where she was woken by the bears and demanding to know what she should’ve done besides run away.

The resurrection didn’t happen two days after the crucifixion of Jesus; it happened two decades later in Paul’s 1 Corinthians 15. Or two decades after that in Mark. The Jewish and Roman leaders in the story are in a story. If Christianity was troublesome in Paul’s or Mark’s time, the time to reveal the body was long passed.

If Jesus were a real person who was a real rabble-rouser (the “King of the Jews” title would’ve been a very clear poke in the eye to Rome) and really was executed by the Romans, then why produce the body? The leader was dead; case closed.

The book of Acts agrees. It has no “was he/wasn’t he resurrected?” arguments. There was no seditious behavior at that first Pentecost, fifty days after Easter (see Acts 2). Again, what would producing the body be a response to?

And why imagine the body of Jesus would have changed things? Remember the example of the Millerites—religion is largely above the facts. It took years for Christianity to evolve its interpretation of Jesus’s death. In the days after the first Easter, it would’ve made no sense for the Romans to say, “Y’know how the bodily resurrection of Jesus will be a big deal within Christianity years from now? Well, guess whose body we just found!”

Christianity with the corpse of Jesus could’ve seen Jesus as a martyr—it’s a much more powerful sacrifice if Jesus stayed dead. Or maybe Jesus would’ve risen as a spirit to rule in heaven, discarding his useless body. Or the early Christians could’ve just dismissed any body as a Roman deception.

10. The empty tomb hypothesis is widely accepted

A strong majority of scholars accept the empty tomb hypothesis. “[Gary] Habermas notes that over one-hundred contemporary scholars accept at least some of the arguments for the empty tomb.”

Do Muslim scholars accept the empty tomb? Nope. They are comfortable with the supernatural, they revere Jesus, they accept him as a prophet, but they reject the resurrection. Are they biased? Probably, but by the same logic, so is your “strong majority [of scholars].”

11. The story is simple

“The story of Jesus’s burial is simple without any form of theological development. Its simplicity argues for the empty tomb’s authenticity. Signs of legendary development are simply not found in the empty tomb hypothesis.”

Suppose our oldest tale of Merlin the magician has him buried without ceremony. Or maybe it says “And then Merlin died,” and that’s it. Would that make believable the tales of his magic? And if not, why imagine that this process would make believable the far more fanciful tales of Jesus?

You claim that complexity suggests legendary accretion. I’ll buy that, but why bring this up since Christianity is extremely complicated! Books on systematic theology are 1500 pages and more. The Bible has close to a million words, and the church needed more than twenty worldwide councils to fill in its gaps.

12. The resurrection and empty tomb were too early to be legend

“The resurrection story and the empty tomb are part of the pre-Markan passion story which is extremely early which precludes any time for legendary development. Legendary claims do not apply to the empty tomb hypothesis. This suggests that the tomb was not something that came later in the Christian story but was rather found at ground zero.”

You want legendary development? Before Mark was Paul, and here’s what Paul says about the divinity of Jesus:

[Jesus], who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom. 1:3–4).

That’s right—Jesus became divine at his resurrection.

Let’s move forward in time to the first gospel, Mark. Here, Jesus becomes divine at his baptism:

Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:10–11).

Then it gets earlier: Matthew and Luke are the two gospels with nativity stories. Angels announce the supernatural birth.

And in John,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning (John 1:1–2).

The later the New Testament book, the earlier and grander is the stature of Jesus. That’s legendary development!

But back to our Christian argument. Its focus is the historicity of the empty tomb. Did just that element stay simple?

Hardly. The gospels aren’t consistent on whose tomb it was and where it was. Matthew alone has the bit about Pilate ordering guards to keep the tomb secure and the guards being told to lie that the disciples took the body. The synoptic gospels say the death and burial were on the day after the Passover, while John says the day before. The events at the tomb on Easter morning vary: the number of angels, how the stone was moved from the entrance, who applied spices, which women went to the tomb, which male disciples went to the tomb, if Jesus was there and who he spoke to, what the women did afterwards, whether Jesus met with the disciples afterwards in Galilee or Jerusalem, and so on. Sounds like a textbook example of legend to me.

Conclusion

The author of this Christian article realizes that the empty tomb is just a part of a historical critique of the resurrection claim. But given the naïve scholarship in this one, I don’t hold out much hope for the rest of the series.

As human beings, we’re desperate to do
the minimum amount of research
that allows us to keep on believing
what already makes us feel good about ourselves.
— Dave Holmes, Esquire

How likely was the Empty Tomb, Part 2? Maybe Jesus just stepped out for a sandwich

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How likely is the empty tomb story in the Christian gospels? I’m continuing my critique of a recent article, “12 reasons to accept the empty tomb as a historical fact” with reasons five through eight (part 1 here). This batch of reasons don’t seem to be any better than the first, but they will give us a mental workout. See what you think.

5. Women found the tomb

Women were the first to see the empty tomb. This strengthens the case for an empty tomb since the testimony of women was not trusted as much as that of men. They wouldn’t have included this embarrassing detail if it weren’t true.

Oh, please. If women were first, why didn’t Paul say so in his 1 Corinthians 15 “creed” that you referenced so admiringly in point 3 above?! In it, he ticked off, in order, the people who saw the risen Jesus but never mentions women as the first to find the empty tomb. If you want to cite that creed as reliable history in point 3, you must be consistent here. Each gospel mentions women as the first to come upon the empty tomb. Matthew and John add that the women saw Jesus, and this is a glaring contradiction with Paul.

But back to the point: are women embarrassing to the gospel story, making it more reliable? Nope. Tending to the dead was women’s work in this culture. If someone in the story was to find the tomb empty, it had to be women. Yes, women were considered less reliable in a courtroom, but that’s irrelevant because there is no courtroom in the story. Women were trusted members of Jesus’s inner circle, and they found the empty tomb. If you want men, they saw it themselves after the women told them.

6. The Jewish authorities invented the story that the disciples stole the body

The Jewish authorities explained the empty tomb by invented the story that the disciples stole the body (Matt. 28:11–15). They knew they had something to hide.

Again, we must keep separate the story from 30 CE and the story being written down by the author of Matthew in 80 or 90 CE. How would the author of Matthew know of this secret meeting—with security cam footage? A hidden microphone? Of course not—to this author in 90 CE, these people were just characters in a story, not bound to history, and he can make them do anything necessary to advance the theological point. Nothing in Jerusalem in 90 CE prevented the author of Matthew from writing whatever he wanted about the chief priests sixty years earlier.

7. Early creeds in the New Testament argue for the resurrection

Look at the early creeds in Acts (13:29-31, 13:36-37). They make clear that Jesus was buried, raised, and appeared without experiencing decay. Other verses in Acts indicate that the body of Jesus was no longer found in the tomb.

Creeds are not evidence; they’re just statements of belief. My creed could be that fairies and leprechauns exist, but that doesn’t make it true.

Is it smart to move these passages into the Creed category? I assume you’re trying to argue that they’re older than the authorship of Acts (about 90 CE) to make them more reliable, but by doing so you’ve moved them out of the History category. I agree that they were only tenuously in History to start with, but now that they’re creeds, they’re useless.

You’re building a foundation out of marshmallows. To support the most remarkable claim ever, you need overwhelming evidence.

8. The gospel story is built on many sources

“Historian Paul Meier indicates that two or three sources render a historical fact ‘unimpeachable.’The empty tomb is verified in four sources Mark, M (Matthew), John, and L (Luke), with 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 and Acts 13’s sermon summary adding two more. Historically, the more sources one holds, the greater probability that the event in question occurred. In this case, at least 6 sources suggest that the tomb was empty, doubling what historians would call ‘unimpeachable.’ ”

This can only mean two or three independent sources—that is, sources that didn’t know about the others. That’s quite rare, and you certainly don’t have it in the New Testament. Matthew and Luke not only knew of Mark, they copied large portions of it, sometimes verbatim.

Paul’s 1 Corinthians passage is chronologically the first in this list, but it shouldn’t be here at all since it doesn’t mention an empty tomb. It also contradicts Matthew and John, which state that Jesus appeared to women first. The burden of proof is yours to show that any independent source hadn’t read any of the others’ descriptions of the empty tomb.

What about claims beyond the empty tomb? You could admit that Matthew does overlap with Mark quite a bit but that it also brings new material to the party. And that’s true for Luke, John, and Acts.

I’ll agree, but what does this get you? The fundamental supernatural claims are all in 1 Cor. 15:3–7, and we’re back to a single source with the others not being independent sources.

Keep in mind that an axiom of history is to reject the supernatural. That supernatural stories were told is a fact of history. But the consensus of ordinary, not-bound-by-a-doctrinal-statement historians is that every supernatural claim is false.

Let’s turn to the referenced historian, Paul Meier. As stated, he said, “Many facts from antiquity rest on just one ancient source, while two or three sources in agreement generally render the fact unimpeachable.” That’s good advice for ordinary facts that we agree have precedents—someone died, someone traveled somewhere by boat/horse/airplane, someone and their army conquered a country, and so on. The claimed fact may be wrong, but at least we’ve seen this kind of thing before. Supernatural claims are unprecedented and need much greater historical evidence.

Meier agrees:

[The claims in these verses have not] led to universal acceptance of the resurrection as a datum of history. Why not? Because the more unlikely the episode, the stronger the evidence demanded for it. So if something supernatural were claimed, the evidence required to support it would have to be of an unimpeachable, absolute, and, indeed, direct eyewitness nature. Quite obviously, however, such categorical evidence disappeared with the death of the last eyewitnesses nineteen centuries ago.

Let’s imagine we had three independent sources documenting Merlin (from the King Arthur story) as a magician. Christians will respond that stories of Merlin were written centuries after he supposedly lived. All right—let’s suppose that our three sources were no more than 40 years after the life of Merlin (that’s the same timespan from the crucifixion to the first gospel). Would that convince Christians that Merlin could do magic?

Of course not. They’d suddenly become as skeptical as an atheist, saying that 40 years is far too long, that our surviving copies of the stories weren’t reliable, and that supernatural stories need a lot more than that to be convincing.

One example is Joseph Smith. In 1823, an angel told him where to find the golden plates whose writings became the basis of the Mormon church. We don’t have independent sources for that story, but we do have the testimony of the Three Witnesses, who say that they heard God’s voice and were shown the golden plates by an angel. A later group, the Eight Witnesses, testified that they touched the plates.

Or another: beginning in 1849, the Fox sisters claimed to be able to communicate with spirits through “rappings” and were important players in the religion of Spiritualism. Surely hundreds or even thousands of people who witnessed their public performances were convinced that they had seen evidence of the supernatural.

No conventional Christian would believe Smith’s tale or that the Fox sisters’ act was genuine, and yet they have two or more independent sources. Why then think that the far older books of the New Testament should be any more convincing?

For another historian who’s claimed to support the Bible, see: Oral Tradition and the Game of Telephone: A. N. Sherwin-White’s Famous Quote

For more on how historians deal with supernatural claims, see: Historians Reject the Bible Story

Concluded in part 3.

You toss a coin 100 times
and pray for heads before every toss.
If it lands on heads 50 times,
this doesn’t mean prayer works 50% of the time,
it means prayer doesn’t work.
— Geronimo Jones

Read my other critiques of this article on my column. Here’s Part 1, and here’s Part 3.