The End of Christianity (28 page)

As a result, this faux-historical believer and the historical nonbeliever are actually playing two very different games, although one or both of them may not realize it. There are no scenarios, even hypothetically, where the faux-historical believer would not affirm the historical resurrection. If she's arguing for the historical evidence, but in practice she wouldn't actually accept a good historical argument against Jesus, then, in effect, the only historical arguments that she will accept are the ones that support her conclusion. She believes, and she would believe no matter what the state of the historical facts. So the time and energy spent on the discussion could have been better spent by both parties.

We can be more specific about how the deck gets stacked in favor of one's favored conclusion. We now have a mountain of empirical evidence that con-firms what everyone who has had one of these conversations already knows: humans have a very strong tendency to find evidence for the conclusions they favor. That is, our beliefs, and the evidence we find to justify them, are distorted in the direction of our desires. While the bias is not confined to Christians, it often emerges when they come to the historical Jesus debate with a strong prior conviction that Jesus was real and that he really was resurrected. If that prior enthusiasm is present, then it is more likely that one will find, filter, or tilt the evidence, consciously or unconsciously, in favor of the prior conviction. Furthermore, the distortions often happen completely without our awareness.

Here are two telling questions: how frequently does someone become a Christian as a result of his considering the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection? I'm not asking about how often are people led to Christianity by reading the Bible, but rather from consulting the historical arguments that would establish that the assertions in the Bible about the resurrection are true. The strangeness of that question should, by itself, suggest an answer. People do not, by and large, become Christians on the basis of a strict reflection on the historical evidence. By contrast, how often does someone adopt the Christian views held by his parents from his childhood and
then
conclude that there is a compelling historical case for the existence and resurrection of Jesus? I submit that it is much more common for belief to come first and confirming historical evidence is sought out second. That suggests that something else is going on besides an objective, dispassionate, and open-minded consideration of the historical facts.

So the question for all of us that is more fundamental than “What is the historical evidence for the resurrection?” is “Did I come to the historical debate to confirm what I already believe, or am I coming to the historical debate prepared to accept the results of applying fair, uniform, and appropriately skeptical standards of reasonableness, whatever results they may indicate?”

I will argue here that believing in the resurrection of Jesus on the evidence we have is inconsistent with other comparable cases we reject. That is, most of us already reject the resurrection, it's just a matter of seeing and accepting the implications of what we already know is true in other comparable cases. Many people who believe in the resurrection and who think that the evidence renders that belief reasonable already have a set of epistemic standards that would lead them to reject the resurrection. In fact, we typically reject many comparable supernatural claims that have far
more
evidence in their favor.

Historical Evidence for the Resurrection

What are some of the reasons that are frequently given for thinking that there is a sound historical argument in favor of the resurrection? A vast amount has been written about the historical evidence for Jesus. We cannot hope to survey those arguments or pursue much detail here. But let us consider a rough summary of the sorts of reasons that are often given for accepting the historical evidence that allegedly proves the resurrection of Jesus.
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Not surprisingly, these arguments focus most heavily on the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection given in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and to a lesser extent on the writings of Paul.

Defenders of the historical argument have emphasized both claims made in the Bible manuscripts and facts about the writings. It is reported that there were multiple eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus, not just a few isolated people. Thousands of people are purported in the Gospels to have witnessed his healing the sick, raising the dead, feeding the hungry. Furthermore, when Jesus was crucified, he wasn't buried in secret. The tomb was widely known and accessible. If his corpse had not disappeared, then a story about his resurrection would have been very difficult to fake. If he had not really died, news of his survival would have been impossible to suppress. A number of people found the tomb empty. On several different occasions, different groups of people are purported to have experienced Jesus resurrected from the dead.

The witnesses were not a homogenous group of religious zealots. They were from diverse backgrounds with different educations and social standings. They were not a strange fringe group. There was not enough time between the events and their recording for a legend or fable to develop. It has also been argued it's highly unlikely that the witnesses had any ulterior motives. The witnesses stood to gain nothing from retelling what they had seen. In fact, they stood to lose a great deal. Early Christians were socially ostracized for their beliefs, persecuted, and even killed. The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every reason not to. Such an event would have been outlandish to them, yet they still believed. They were so convinced that they gave up their jobs, their wealth, and their families to become Christians. Many of the people surrounding the eyewitnesses believed them and were impressed enough to convert. The passion and conviction of the original believers was so profound that it conquered the doubts of all those around them. A whole religious movement that has lasted for thousands of years and spread to millions of people has sprung from those eyewitness accounts.

Furthermore, many of the events of the New Testament have been historically corroborated. Archaeologists, historians, and other scholars have been able to find a great deal of independent evidence that confirms many of the historical claims such as the reign of Herod, the destruction of the temple, and the growth of the early church.

The Gospels focus on a real, historical person. They are not comparable in their age to a book of mythology or fairy tales like Paul Bunyan. They present their account as a factual record of the events in history, not as allegory or fiction. Furthermore, the Jewish tradition of transmitting history accurately and reliably was highly developed and successful.

Paul, who was an ardent persecutor of Christians before, claims to have seen the resurrected Jesus on several occasions. In fact, since he wrote many of the books of the Bible, his account is the only immediate one given by someone who claimed to have seen Jesus. He must have been utterly convinced to have changed his mind about Christianity so radically.

Once we consider all these (alleged) factors, according to the historical argument, it would seem as if no other hypothesis can explain all the elements of the story of Jesus as well. Gary Habermas has presented a popular recent version of this argument. In addition to making many of the points above, he points out that many people who were enemies of the early Christian movement, such as the Jewish leaders, failed to contest the empty tomb in the stories about the resurrection that we have. Their omission in the historical sources is relevant. Furthermore, when his followers are alleged to have seen Jesus after his death, the sources indicate that it created a radical transformation in their lives. They were utterly convinced, and many critical scholars concur that they were convinced.
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To bolster the case for the resurrection, Habermas offers this common list of objections to the most common naturalistic alternatives, none of which explain all the “facts” as well as the resurrection does:

For example, (1) hallucinations are private experiences, while clearly we have strong reasons to assert that groups of people claimed to have seen Jesus. (2) The disciples’ despair indicates that they were not in the proper frame of mind to see hallucinations. (3) Perhaps the most serious problem is that there were far too many different times, places, and personalities involved in the appearances. To believe that with each of these varying persons and circumstances a separate hallucination occurred borders on credulity. (4) Further, on this view, Jesus’ body should still have been located safely in the tomb! (5) Hallucinations very rarely transform lives, but we have no records of any of the eyewitnesses recanting their faith. Two huge problems are the conversions of both (6) Paul and (7) James, neither of whom had a desire to see Jesus. These are just a very few of the serious questions for this alternative view. All other proposed natural hypotheses have similarly been disproven.
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As a result, Habermas, like many other people, concludes that the naturalistic hypotheses fail, which means that the events must have been supernatural. In fact, the more thoroughly the natural hypotheses fail, the more likely are the historical resurrection appearances. To state this principle more briefly as a mock mathematical equation: given a reasonable explanation, the disciples’ experiences plus the failure of alternatives equals the historical resurrection appearances of Jesus.
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Habermas acknowledges that people are often willing to sacrifice themselves or die for false or mistaken causes, but he thinks that explanation can't work with Jesus. They were willing to die for their strong conviction that they had seen Jesus resurrected. That makes their case distinct from so many others where people will die for a false cause.

The summary above and some of the details from Habermas give us an abbreviated picture of the historical arguments for Jesus’ resurrection that are often given. Defenders focus on some of the inclusions and the omissions in the texts, they triangulate with common sense about human nature. They reason that when the full list of the considerations that they are emphasizing is taken into account, the competing naturalistic hypotheses fail, and the miraculous resurrection of Jesus is left as the last, best explanation.

It should be immediately evident why a number of these reasons aren't plausible. There's no reason to think that people only have those hallucinations that they desire to have, as Habermas suggests about Paul and James. Despair over lost loved ones is known to
induce
hallucinations rather than deter them, as Habermas suggests.
¹⁰
And we have ample empirical evidence to show that people's memories are readily altered by context, expectations, and interactions with others.
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People frequently put themselves at great risk and even sacrifice themselves for extreme and unworthy causes-after Michael Jackson's death, more than a dozen of his ardent fans committed suicide (and enthusiastic disciples frequently post pictures and stories of seeing Jackson returned from the dead
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). And so on.

N. T. Wright's views about the historical resurrection have also been influential. One of his contributions is an argument that the particular notion of a complete physical resurrection like Jesus’ would have been so foreign, so unfamiliar, and so unconnected with any of the predominant ideologies that the followers of Jesus could not, or would not, have come up with it on their own. The only place they could have gotten such a novel idea, Wright argues, is if Jesus was actually resurrected:

It is out of the question, for a start, that the disciples were simply extrapolating from the teaching of Jesus himself. One of the many curious things about Jesus’ teaching is that though resurrection was a well-known topic of debate at the time, we only have one short comment of his on the subject.
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What's puzzling about Wright's argument here is the conflation of the attributions to Jesus we have in the Gospels with everything that Jesus would have ever said to the disciples (assuming that Jesus existed at all). Are we to think that everything that Jesus ever said is recorded in the Gospels? Were there no other unreported conversations between Jesus and his followers during all the years of his work? The principle that Wright is assuming and that we must reject appears to be: “If the Gospels do not record a claim, then Jesus did not make it.” Furthermore, the Gospels report Jesus discussing resurrection no less than eleven times, sometimes elaborately, and many of those occasions specifically and explicitly predicting his own resurrection:

• Matthew 22:23-33/Mark 12:18-27/Luke 20:27-39

• Matthew 12:38-42,16:4/Luke 11:29-32

• Matthew 16:21/Mark 8:31/Luke 9:22/John 2:18-22 (cf. Matthew 27:62-65)

• Matthew 17:9-13/Mark 9:9-13

• Matthew 17:22-23/Mark 9:31

• Matthew 19:27-30

• Matthew 20:18-19/Mark 10:34/Luke 18:30-33

• Matthew 26:32/Mark 14:28

• Luke 16:19-31

• John 5:24-29

• John 11:21-27

So Wright is in the difficult position of arguing that while a resurrection was an active topic of interest and discussion for the early Christians, the particular sort of resurrection that Jesus underwent was too novel to have been invented, imagined, deceived, or mistaken about.

Wright goes on to argue that they could not have gotten the particular idea of a physical resurrection like the one that Jesus supposedly underwent from any of the Jewish traditions, which include nothing about it:

Almost all early Christians known to us believed that their ultimate hope was the resurrection of the body. There is no spectrum such as in Judaism the early Christian belief in resurrection had a much more precise shape and con-tent than anything we find in Judaism…. Where did this idea come from? Not from any ancient paganism known to us; and not, or not straightforwardly, from any ancient Judaism.
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