Let’s continue with part 3 of our critique of Mike Licona’s “Top 10 Myths About Jesus’ Resurrection” (part 1 of the critique here).

(Blue text is the myth, green is Licona’s rejection of the myth, and black is my response to Licona.)

Myth 5: It’s a Matter of Faith.

You can’t prove the resurrection because it’s a matter of faith.

Imagine this conversation between an atheist and a believer.

Atheist: I don’t believe in God but instead think that we’re all here because of blind naturalistic forces.

Christian: Can you prove that? Perhaps there’s no point in even trying because that’s just a statement of faith.

Response: We have scientific evidence!

Christian: And we have historical evidence for the resurrection.

Historians have already evaluated your evidence and rejected it. The resurrection is a religious belief, not a historical one. The historical consensus rejects the supernatural.

And science never proves anything. It’s always provisional. Acceptance of science as a reliable (though imperfect) source of information isn’t a matter of faith. We trust in science because it has earned that trust—contrast that with religion.

Licona: “When you subject that historical evidence to strictly controlled historical methods, the resurrection of Jesus is not only the best explanation, it is by far the best historical explanation for the known historical data.”

Now that’s a faith statement! You’ve already tried and failed to convince historians. You’ve not even convinced Muslims of the resurrection, and they’re fellow believers in the supernatural and Jesus. Why should I accept your version of the crucifixion story over the Muslims’ version?

You’ll likely say that Muslims are biased by their beliefs to not follow the evidence, but first show me that this criticism doesn’t apply to you as well.

Myth 6: Apparent Death Theory.

Jesus really didn’t die; he just seemed to die, and then he revived in the tomb. This is also known as the swoon theory.

The chance of surviving a crucifixion is very small. Even if taken down from the cross alive (Josephus gives examples of this), the trauma would probably be too much to survive.

Uh, okay. For your next trick, I suggest you analyze the likelihood of the Wicked Witch of the East surviving the fall of Dorothy’s house.

Labeling part of the gospel narrative as history and then demanding that the skeptic give a naturalistic explanation for what comes next is a waste of time. The resurrection is an accretion of legend and history and we’re not sure which is which, but the supernatural explanation isn’t necessary. The God hypothesis adds nothing.

“The problem with the apparent death theory is: there’s not a shred of evidence for it.”

And the problem with the claim that George Washington didn’t fly around with a jet pack is that there’s not a shred of evidence for it, either. There are no testimonies from friends who say he didn’t, and there is no comprehensive inventory of his possessions that convinces us that a jet pack couldn’t have been hidden somewhere or given to a friend when he died.

So must we be agnostic on the jet pack question? Of course not. Common sense is a reliable tool, and we can reject the claim. Similarly, the resurrection would be an incredible, unprecedented event, and all evidence is against it.

Licona apparently wants contemporary evidence to overturn a claim from history. I wonder then what he makes of the claim of the “Eight Witnesses,” eight men who publicly stated that in 1829 they saw and handled the golden plates from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. Even after some of them fell out with Joseph Smith and were excommunicated, there is little evidence that they retracted their position. This statement is in every copy of the Book of Mormon.

The statement of the Eight Witnesses does nothing to increase my belief in the reliability of Joseph Smith’s story, and I don’t need to see any contemporary evidence to undercut it. Is it any different for Licona? If he sees things the same way, what does that say about his demand for evidence supporting the swoon theory? In fact, only his Christian bias prevents him from seeing pretty much any natural alternative as more plausible than a divine resurrection.

“These reasons and some others are why no widely respected scholar in the world today holds or posits that Jesus survived his crucifixion.”

Every Muslim scholar thinks that he wasn’t crucified at all. This suggests that to Licona, “scholar” just means “Christian scholar.” Muslims and atheists need not apply. His brand of scholarship requires an echo chamber with only supportive voices.

Why bother with the apparent death theory? Licona wants to focus here rather than respond to the best challenges to the resurrection, that it’s a combination of myth and legend. It’s easier to wrestle with a strawman than with a real argument.

To be continued.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/25/16.)

Image from Wikimedia, public domain

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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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My recent posts have focused on Gary Habermas’s claim for a scholarly consensus in favor of the resurrection of Jesus (discussed here) and his minimal facts argument supporting the resurrection (here, with lessons learned here).

His arguments might be great when preaching to the choir, but they don’t hold up to a skeptical critique. But if the Christian explanation is wrong, what does explain the facts?

Let’s begin by making clear where we’re going and how we’ll get there.

The claim: The gospels each claim that Jesus rose from the dead, but a natural explanation is plausible. To be clear, I have no interest in finding a natural explanation for the resurrection; I’m looking for a natural explanation for the story of the resurrection.

The facts: I’m taking as evidence for this claim the books of the Bible, documents from the early church fathers, and writings of early historians. (Noncanonical books also exist—the Gospel of Thomas, for example—but these aren’t part of apologists’ arguments, so I’ll ignore them.) I like Habermas’s starting point: “I am not basing my argument for Jesus’ resurrection on the inerrancy of the Bible or even on its general trustworthiness” (The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, p. 212).

Note the distinction between “These documents say that Paul was converted,” which is a valid initial fact, and “Paul was converted,” which is not.

Given these facts, we will try to explain the resurrection with a natural explanation—that is, without taking the gospel story as history.

Gary Habermas is pessimistic about our project:

No plausible natural explanations can account for all of the known facts regarding the resurrection of Jesus. Never in history has there been such a unique combination of events. . . . A huge problem is that no single natural option, however unusual, can explain all of the evidence for the Resurrection (Case, p. 142).

Despite his certainty of our failure, let’s push on and consider the various elements of the Bible story.

Why did church fathers write what they did?

The Christian leaders from the first and second centuries believed (and wrote about that belief) just like people do today. Nothing supernatural here. We can explain them in the same way that Habermas explained the Muslims who attacked on 9/11: “Deceived? Yes. Liars? No” (Case, p. 93).

Why does the Old Testament say what it says?

The Old Testament looks just like it was written by primitive people from that region of the world. We see polytheism and support for slavery and genocide. We see in early Judaism the Combat Myth, which came from earlier Babylonian and Akkadian stories. We see Sumerian cosmology in the Genesis creation story. Early Judaism was simply another Canaanite religion, and we even read about Elohim and Yahweh in Canaanite holy books that preceded the Old Testament.

Here again, the natural explanation is plausible (I would say “overwhelming,” but our goal is simply to offer a plausible natural alternative to Habermas’s supernatural one).

Why did historians like Josephus write what they did?

Historians who followed Jesus said at most, “there are people called Christians who worship a man named Jesus,” hardly compelling evidence for the supernatural stories about Jesus. (I’ve written more on Josephus here.)

And now for the main event:

What explains the New Testament resurrection story?

If Jesus died around 30 CE and the first gospel was written forty years later, that’s a long time (in an unsophisticated prescientific culture) for the story to evolve. The gospels were written in Greek, which means that the Jesus story was filtered through Greek culture, full of their own stories of miracles and gods (one example: the story of Dionysus dying and rising from the dead). Some early Greek Christians might well have been former worshippers of Dionysus. If the Jesus story didn’t have him rising from the dead before they heard it, there’s a good chance that it did after they got through with it.

I’m not proposing malicious tampering with the story or claiming that any part is a hoax. I’m simply saying that human memory is notoriously inaccurate, and oral history is an error-prone process. Even in our own time, you can find errors in newspaper stories from the previous day. Stories change with the retelling.

As to the elements that are unique to Christianity, how does any new religion branch away from its earlier beliefs? Christianity isn’t the only religion that made innovations.

That’s it. It was oral history for decades in a culture full of supernatural tales, and it picked up changes and “improvements” along the way before being written.

And there are other possible variations along Christianity’s path. Maybe someone was lying along the way. That’s hardly surprising—we know that people lie. You might ask for their motivation. I dunno, and I don’t much care—we understand those times so poorly that there could be lots of surprising reasons. Are you going to trot out the literal, supernatural interpretation of the Jesus story and claim that that’s more likely?

Or maybe our understanding of the early church is significantly wrong because of deliberate changes to the gospels in the centuries-long period after initial authorship but before we get our first complete New Testament copies in the fourth century. Gospels could have been amended or added to, and competing gospels could have been discarded or destroyed. To give one uncontroversial example, half of the “Pauline” epistles—those that claim to have been written by Paul—were not.

Or maybe Jesus never existed. Paul was writing about a mythical Jesus in the unspecified past (his understanding of the gospel story is basically nonexistent), and later authors could have historicized the story.

QED

I only claim to have sketched out plausible natural paths through the facts. You might find better ones. My goal is to show that some natural path is possible. With the facts plausibly explained, that defeats the supernatural claim.

Habermas claims that (1) Jesus died by crucifixion, (2) the disciples believed, (3) Paul believed, (4) James believed, and (5) the tomb was empty. He says, “Two thousand years of attempts by critics to account for these facts by natural causes have failed” (Case, p. 128).

What’s to explain? You’ve got a marvelous story full of miracles from a distant culture 2000 years ago, and you’re wondering which bin to put it in? Stamp it with “Myth/Legend” and let’s move on. The gospel’s miracles, the doubts turned into beliefs, and the enthusiastic eyewitnesses are just a story.

If somewhere within the Bible,
I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5,
I wouldn’t question what I’m reading in the Bible.
I would believe it, accept it as true,
and then do my best to work it out and understand it.
— Pastor Peter LaRuffa in
2014 HBO documentary “Questioning Darwin”

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/5/14.)

Image credit: Ted, flicker, CC

How many days did Jesus teach after his resurrection? Most Christians know that “He appeared to them over a period of forty days” (Acts 1:3). But the supposed author of that book wrote elsewhere that he ascended into heaven the same day as the resurrection (Luke 24:51).

When Jesus died, did an earthquake open the graves of many people, who walked around Jerusalem and were seen by many? Only Matthew reports this remarkable event. It’s hard to imagine any reliable version of the story omitting this zombie apocalypse.

The different accounts of the resurrection are full of contradictions like this. They can’t even agree on whether Jesus was crucified on the day before Passover (John) or the day after (the other gospels).

• What were the last words of Jesus? Three gospels give three different versions.
• Who buried Jesus? Matthew says that it was Joseph of Arimathea. No, apparently it was the Jews and their rulers, all strangers to Jesus (Acts).
• How many women came to the tomb Easter morning? Was it one, as told in John? Two (Matthew)? Three (Mark)? Or more (Luke)?
• Did an angel cause a great earthquake that rolled back the stone in front of the tomb? Yes, according to Matthew. The other gospels are silent on this extraordinary detail.
• Who did the women see at the tomb? One person (Matthew and Mark) or two (Luke and John)?
• Was the tomb already open when they got there? Matthew says no; the other three say yes.
• Did the women tell the disciples? Matthew and Luke make clear that they did so immediately. But Mark says, “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” And that’s where the book ends, which makes it a mystery how Mark thinks that the resurrection story ever got out.
• Did Mary Magdalene cry at the tomb? That makes sense—the tomb was empty and Jesus’s body was gone. At least, that’s the story according to John. But wait a minute—in Matthew’s account, the women were “filled with joy.”
• Did Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus? Of course! She’d known him for years. At least, Matthew says that she did. But John makes clear that she didn’t.
• Could Jesus’s followers touch him? John says no; the other gospels say yes.
• Where did Jesus tell the disciples to meet him? In Galilee (Matthew and Mark) or Jerusalem (Luke and Acts)?
• Who saw Jesus resurrected? Paul says that a group of over 500 people saw him (1 Cor. 15:6). Sounds like crucial evidence, but why don’t any of the gospels record it?
• Should the gospel be preached to everyone? In Matthew 28:19, Jesus says to “teach all nations.” But hold on—in the same book he says, “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans” (Matt. 10:5). Which is it?

And there are lots more (thanks, Richard Russell).

Many Christians cite the resurrection as the most important historical claim that the Bible makes. If the resurrection is true, they argue, the gospel message must be taken seriously. I’ll agree with that. But how reliable is an account riddled with these contradictions?

Christian responses

I’ve seen Christians respond in three ways.

(1) They’ll nitpick the definition of “contradiction.” Contradictions, they’ll say, are two sentences of the form “A” and “not-A.” For example: “Jesus was born in Bethlehem” and “Jesus was not born in Bethlehem.” Being precise helps make sure we communicate clearly, but this can also be a caltrop argument, a way of dodging the issue. The issues listed above sure sound like contradictions to me, but if you’d prefer to imagine that we’re talking about “incongruities” or “inconsistencies,” feel free.

(2) They’ll respond to these “inconsistencies” by harmonizing the gospels. That is, instead of following the facts where they lead and considering that the gospels might be legend instead of history, they insist on their Christian presupposition, reject any alternatives, and bludgeon all the gospels together like a misshapen Swiss Army knife.

• How many women were at the tomb? Obviously, five or more, our apologist will say. When John only says that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, he’s not saying that others didn’t come, right? Checkmate, atheists!
• Why didn’t all the gospels note that a group of 500 people saw Jesus (instead of only Paul)? Why didn’t they all record the earthquakes and the zombie apocalypse (instead of only Matthew)? Our apologist will argue that each author is entitled to make editorial adjustments as he sees fit.
• Was the tomb already open or not? Did Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus or not? Did Jesus remain for 40 days or not? Should the gospel be preached to everyone or not? Did the women tell the disciples or not? Was Jesus crucified the day after Passover or not? Who knows what he’ll come up with, but our apologist will have some sort of harmonization for these, too.

Yep, the ol’ kindergarten try.

(3) They’ll try to turn this weakness into a strength by arguing that four independent stories (the gospels aren’t, but never mind) shouldn’t agree on every detail. If they did, one would imagine collusion rather than accurate biography written using eyewitness testimony. Yes, biography and collusion are two possibilities, but a third is that this could be legend.

Let’s drop any preconceptions and find the best explanation.

Wandering in a vast forest at night, 
I have only a faint light to guide me. 
A stranger appears and says to me: 
“My friend, you should blow out your candle 
in order to find your way more clearly.”
This stranger is a theologian.
—Denis Diderot

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 10/17/11.)

Photo credit: ThinkGeek