The End of Christianity (30 page)

The short answer here is simply that a reasonable person should not lower their threshold of acceptance to the point that all of these demonstratively false cases flood in through the gates. The cost of allowing both Salem and Jesus in amounts to being gullible, contradictory, or just wrong about too many other events. True, if the believer accepts magic both at Salem and in Jerusalem, then at least that position has the virtue of some consistency. The embarrassing part is that this person has said something that the vast majority of thoughtful, educated adults find utterly ridiculous, namely that the women in Salem really were performing magic. The Salem Witch Trials, in the minds of the vast majority of thoughtful people, are the consummate example of just how far astray human enthusiasm and fear can take even large groups of people into irrationality. Most people now see them as a frightening example of how enthusiasm, hysteria, social pressure, anxiety, and religious fervor can be powerful enough to lead ordinary people to do such extraordinary and mistaken things. “Witch hunt” has come to be synonymous with an irrational and emotionally heated persecution. Indeed, the reasons historians are so interested in the case is that we're all sure that they weren't witches, but all of those otherwise normal, reasonable people got themselves convinced that they were. What's remarkable is that so many people could talk themselves into something that was so clearly false.

It is difficult not to conclude that someone who would bite this bullet is deep in the grips of an ideology. Accepting that Jesus and the women at Salem were magical beings forces you to accept a world that is teeming with spiritual and supernatural powers. The world you inhabit with cell phones, rapid genetic analyses, sophisticated biochemical cancer treatments, handheld computers with fifty-nanometer silicon etched chips, planes that can fly at seven thousand miles per hour, and spacecraft that can leave the solar system is also overrun with ghosts, demons, magical spells, fairies, elves, and psychic powers.
¹⁹
The dissonance between the two realms demands some substantial justification. How is it that both of these radical kinds of forces and entities cohabitate in our world, and why is it that despite their ubiquity, we cannot find any compelling evidence for these spooky occurrences? And ultimately, this response to the Salem case will be disproved by this spooky worldview's peculiar and false accounts of the most ordinary phenomena. If these things are real and are so common, then where are they and why can we not find any better evidence in their favor than the passionate testimonials of unscientific converts ? Do the demons and miracles only manifest themselves when there are no credible witnesses or skeptics present?

To be fair, there could be situations where believing in real witchcraft is reasonable. For at least some of the people in Salem, it may have been a fair conclusion to draw given the other things they knew, the context, the levels of education available, the culture, and the beliefs of those around them (although probably not for the accused). And it may have even been reasonable for some early Christians to believe that Jesus was resurrected depending on what sorts of information and background they had. But the question is not about what's reasonable for them to believe, it is about what is reasonable for the ordinary person to believe now, knowing what we now know.

Alternately, someone might try to salvage the resurrection by arguing that the Salem and Jerusalem cases are importantly different in some respects, and those differences justify denying witchcraft at Salem while accepting Jesus’ return from the dead. One might argue that there are important defeaters in the case of Salem that are not present in the Jesus case, or there are powerful points in favor of Jesus that are not shared by the Salem example. So accepting Jesus and rejecting Salem is not inconsistent, on this view, because there is a principled separation of the cases.

This approach appears to be doomed to fail, too, and amounts to ad hoc rationalizing. One problem is that any such approach will have to be reconciled with the fact that we have so much more information about Salem. If someone wishes to argue that we are justified in concluding that there were natural causes in Salem on the basis of the evidence, they face a challenge when it comes to defending Jesus. They will also need to argue that we have substantial reasons to believe that nothing like
that
explanation is likely to be true with Jesus, and that we can be sure that a similar naturalized account cannot be correct on the basis of a much smaller, more fragmented, older, and less corroborated body of information. That we have only a few stories (that conflict on many important details) recorded on the basis of unknown hearsay testimony decades after the fact, and lacking in any recorded attempt at a soundly principled inquiry by anyone, will be the undoing of many attempts to argue that we can definitively rule out some alternate natural explanation of what happened. We just don't have enough good information about Jesus to rule anything out definitively (see Robert Price's next chapter in this very book-and those aren't even the only likely explanations available, as Richard Carrier's chapter on this same subject in
The Christian Delusion
reveals).

Since there is so much evidence available concerning Salem, there remains a
better
possibility that we may find grounds that
justify
some naturalistic explanation in the Jesus case as well. The lack of good evidence in that case, and the extent to which the accounts of Jesus have been cultivated, altered, and canonized will make it very difficult to rule out any comparable natural explanation with any confidence.

The other major challenge for the critic who wishes to reject the Salem-Jesus comparison is that we don't need to be deeply committed to the Salem case to make the point. There are many other examples where we can find a body of information that is as good or better than the Jesus evidence for the conclusion that some supernatural event occurred, but it is not reasonable to draw that conclusion. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus have claimed to have witnessed statues of the Lord Ganesh drinking milk. Millions of thoughtful, educated, fairly reasonable people have left the shrine at Lourdes, France, utterly convinced that they have witnessed a miraculous (and very distinctly Catholic) healing. Gurus, New Age spiritualists, and other quasi-religious leaders gather millions of devoted followers who become deeply convinced that their spiritual adviser possesses otherworldly powers. The original accounts of Islam, Mormonism, Buddhism, and Hinduism are filled with comparable supernatural claims, and the circumstances surrounding their advent resemble Christianity in many respects. Whatever particular virtues that may strike us about the case for the historical resurrection, there are numerous non-Jesus cases where the evidence is just as good or better by those same criteria, but where the reasonable view is to reject the magical conclusion.

A defender of the historical case for Jesus’ supernatural powers may opt to emphasize this feature of the information or that one. She may present us with a list of what she takes to be the virtues of the evidence about Jesus that make it reasonable to conclude that the best possible explanation is that Jesus really had supernatural powers. Whatever those general features of the evidence are, we must ask this question: In general, is it true that we should accept as reasonable some supernatural explanation
whenever
the evidence for the super-natural event has these features? If they approach that question objectively without any ad hoc qualifications in favor of the Christian conclusion, they will be disappointed. They will find numerous other cases where (1) we have a body of evidence that is as good or better than the one for Jesus; (2) it possesses the virtues that are being touted (e.g., numerous witnesses of high character, devotees with no apparent ulterior motive, utter conviction among the followers, and so on); and yet, (3) it is not reasonable to accept the supernatural conclusion in that other case. The Salem argument is just one example among many others that illustrates that, in general, it is not reasonable to accept the strong, magical conclusion when those features are present, or even when the body of evidence is far better along those vectors than the Jesus case.

Advocates of the historical resurrection have sometimes argued that unless some natural explanation can be successfully defended, then we must accept the supernatural conclusion. If the naturalistic explanations that we can come up with all fail, then the resurrection must be real. There's a mistake concealed in this innocuous-sounding approach. What the Salem example illustrates is that one need not believe or defend any particular alternative natural explanation, such as the rotten rye grain/hallucination theory, in order to conclude reasonably that they weren't witches. We believe that it is reasonable to think that there were no real witches at Salem even without knowing exactly what happened. In historical matters, there is always much that we do not know. The Salem case shows that we don't need to have a fully articulated naturalistic explanation in place, with all the requisite supporting evidence, in order to believe reasonably that there is one. Even if it turns out that a number of proposed naturalistic hypotheses do not readily fit with what we believe are the facts about the case, it would not follow from those failures alone that we should default to the supernatural explanation as the best or default hypothesis. At this point in history, we have seen countless examples of allegedly strange, or unexplained phenomena that resisted our efforts to explain them. Then later, when we continued to work on it or after we had learned more about ourselves and the world, the answers became clear to us. The real source of the bubonic plague (not demon possession or God's wrath for our sinfulness) wouldn't become clear to us for
several centuries
, when the plague bacillus was discovered.

This is not to rule out the magical explanation a priori-it remains a possibility, I suppose. But clearly the threshold of proof for reasonable people is and should be very high before magic becomes the
best
of all imaginable hypotheses. History has taught us that there is a very strong presumption in favor of naturalistic causes.
²⁰
And not even the copious body of evidence for real witchcraft at Salem is enough to meet or exceed that threshold. A fortiori, the paltry body of evidence we have in favor of Jesus’ resurrection certainly does not achieve that level. Among other things, the Salem Witch Trials show that it is possible to meet an even heavier burden of proof than what we have for the resurrection of Jesus, and yet it remains unreasonable to believe that anything magical happened. No clearheaded person should accept the claim that the historical evidence makes it reasonable to believe that Jesus came back from the dead, even if they don't have an alternative natural explanation that they believe fits with the available evidence. This is not to say that we can know a priori that only natural events occurred in 33 CE. Surely there must be some threshold of evidence that could, in principle, make it reasonable to believe that Jesus was resurrected. But the evidence we have falls far short of that threshold.

The sheer lack of information about the Jesus case will haunt the believer who wishes to argue that it is disanalogous with Salem. Any attempt to separate the two cases will be up against this question: Whatever the (alleged) differences between the two are, what are the unique features of the Jesus case that permit us to
lower
the threshold enough so that the small, fragmented, disconnected, and hearsay evidence is historically sufficient to prove a
resurrection
? Even if they
are
disanalogous, the information we have is still too poor to achieve the task that has been put to it.

CONCLUSION

The Salem case shows that by the ordinary standards of skepticism and evidence that most of us employ in other cases, we would not accept the claim that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. We are being inconsistent in accepting one while rejecting so many others, particularly other cases that have resoundingly better evidence in their favor. The considerations raised here cast enough doubt on the resurrection for a reasonable person to refuse the historical argument. The Salem case shows that even when a much higher burden of proof has been met with rigorous court trials, active investigations, witness interviews, and critical analysis, the supernatural explanation is still not warranted. So, a fortiori, believing in the return of Jesus on the underwhelming evidence that is available to us in
that
case is even more unreasonable. At the very least, a consistent and objective application of sound principles of evidence to all cases should have the effect of diminishing a person's estimate of the possibility of a real resurrection and elevating their estimate of the probability of some other nonsupernatural explanation enough to tip the scales against Jesus. All things considered, and by the standards of evidence that we already employ in other comparable cases, one should believe that the overall likelihood of some natural explanation is greater than a real resurrection. That is, you already don't believe in Jesus.

by Dr. Robert M. Price

I
t is one thing to decide that one must seek a naturalistic alternative to a miraculous resurrection. This is what Christian apologists imagine skeptics are doing, cornered game, all paths of escape denied them. While one may imagine the religious believer, back against the wall, praying for a miracle of deliverance, apologists picture skeptics hemmed in by the Hound of Heaven in an evangelistic fox-hunt and, oddly enough, “praying” (desperately seeking) for the
lack
of a miracle: some naturalistic alternative to the resurrection of Jesus.
¹
It is quite another thing for the skeptic to affirm that recourse to miracle is completely superfluous, a fifth-wheel of a hypothesis. And the latter will be my case here. I am not even raising the question whether miracles are possible. It just doesn't come up, as far as I can see. Let me explain why.

For the sake of argument I will assume that the narrative “setup” for the resurrection in the Gospels is historically correct. There really was a Joseph of Arimathea. There really was a group of female disciples who witnessed his burial. The tomb really was subsequently discovered to be empty. Disciples really did claim to see him. Sure-why not? Keep in mind, though, that this is purely an exercise in analyzing the particular approach taken by William Lane Craig and his colleagues,
²
not the approach taken by New Testament critics,
³
who do not take for granted the accuracy of the Gospel stories. Craig and the others prey on the naivete of their audiences, who open the Gospels ready and eager to believe whatever they say.
⁴
They are arguing as against the Rationalists of the eighteenth century who affirmed the virtual inerrancy of New Testament narrative, disputing (as odd as it seems) only the factor of alleged miraculous causation.
⁵
If the Gospel tells us Jesus was crucified and that he appeared to his loved ones three days later, then we ought to believe both. Some details may be legendary embellishments, but the core of the story should be granted. The question is:

How do we get from one to the other? How do we connect the dots? Rationalists ruled out the supernatural as a matter of course; they assumed God didn't and doesn't work that way. He works through a sublime system of natural laws that, for instance, preclude a genuinely dead body spontaneously returning to life. So, Rationalists concluded, though Jesus was crucified and appeared alive again afterward, it is because he did not succumb to crucifixion. He must have been taken down alive, licked his wounds for a short while, and rejoined the disciples at least temporarily. It is against this argument and others like it (the Wrong Tomb Theory, etc.) that contemporary apologists replied.

But modern New Testament scholars no longer take for granted that the Easter narratives are history at all. Why should they be? They are so much like similar apotheosis narratives of Hercules, Romulus, Apollonius, Empedocles, and others
⁶
that the burden of proof is on anyone who would insist that, in the single case of Jesus, “myth became fact.”
⁷
And such is manifestly a theological judgment, not a historical verdict.
⁸
But the important thing to see is that the chain of “events” leading up to the epiphany of the Risen One is equally legendary: mere stage-setting for the “Big Event.” Scholars do not suppose that, say, the Joseph of Arimathea story, or that of the women visiting the tomb, is history, and that the only thing that requires special explanation is why the tomb was empty. As my old pastor Donald Morris once quipped in a sermon, “Let me quote myself so as not to misrepresent my own views”:

What evangelical apologists are still trying to show…is that their version of the resurrection was the most compatible with
accepting all the details of the Gospel Easter narratives as true and nonnegotiable.
It is a very strange argument when you realize just what is actually going on: it is implicitly
an argument among biblical inerrantists
in which defenders of the resurrection assume that their opponents agree with them that all the details are true, that only the punch line is in question…. This is why, if apologists like William Lane Craig can get an opponent as far as admitting that Joseph of Arimathea probably did have Jesus interred in his own tomb, and if the women did probably visit the tomb, and that the tomb was probably found to be empty, he can then press on to the conclusion that,
Bingo!
Jesus must have risen from the dead!
What they somehow do not see is that to argue thus is like arguing that the Emerald City of Oz must actually exist since, otherwise, where would the Yellow Brick Road lead?
…We simply have no reason to assume that anything an ancient narrative tells us is true.
⁹

Why should they/we? As I've said before, these Christian apologists might not like it, but as historian R. G. Collingwood explains quite nicely, “the critical historian (whether dealing with the Bible or the newspaper) demands that assertions in ancient or modern sources be corroborated. The historian does not simply take the ancient or modern writer at his word until he happens to find out different.”
¹⁰

And yet, that is what I will be doing here. It is simply a thought experiment. As far as I am concerned, apologists long ago lost the game by misidentifying the kind of narrative we are dealing with in Mark 15–16, Matthew 27–28, Luke 23–24, and John 19–21. But I am perhaps perversely interested in seeing how weak the other links in their chain of supposed proof may be. I want to play their game of Rationalism versus anti-Rationalism. I will take for granted the basically historical character of the “events” prefacing the resurrection. The only difference is: I do not think one has to reach very far to see an altogether natural explanation for the supposed resurrection. There is no need for a fallback strategy, an expedient, an emergency plan. It never comes to that. Bear with me as I make bold to defend the Swoon Theory, the Reburial Theory, the Mistaken Identity Theory, and the Cognitive Dissonance (“Transformation of the Disciples”) Theory. I predict we will find that there is not the least improbability, even implausibility, attaching to any of these options.

“BUT I'M NOT DEAD!”
“YOU'RE NOT FOOLIN’ ANYONE!”

Apologists think they can refute the
Scheintod
(seeming death) Theory by prooftexting D. F. Strauss, who derided the notion that a crucified but living Jesus, broken and bleeding, might have staggered into the midst of his disciples posing as the mighty victor over death:

It is impossible that a being who had stolen half-dead out of the sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treatment, who required bandaging, strengthening, and indulgence, and who still at last yielded to his sufferings, could have given to the disciples the impression that he was a conqueror over death and the grave, the prince of life, an impression which lay at the bottom of their future ministry. Such a resuscitation could only have weakened the impression which he had made upon them in life and in death—at the most could only have given it an elegiac voice, but could by no possibility have changed their sorrow into enthusiasm, have elevated their reverence into worship.
¹¹

I am not sure I see the point of this as an argument. It is a slightly comicalscene, but it is not a scene required or implied by the
Scheintod
Theory. All the theory (or the Swoon Theory, as it is also called) entails is a Jesus who, in the providence of his Father, cheated death, and whose beloved Sonship was thereby confirmed the more securely. The ensuing doting of his relieved disciples upon the recuperating savior would only have fed the instinct to worship him. All one has to surmise is that he waited a while, till he was better and stronger, to make grandiose pronouncements. That's not asking much. As for having been given all authority on heaven and earth, hell—the pope claims that pretty much every time he opens his mouth.

But let's back up. What suggests the Swoon Theory? Just above I portrayed it as a function of Rationalist assumptions: as an explanation, it's all they've got left. But now I will aver that there is much more to it. I think the texts themselves suggest it, so strongly in fact, that it does seem to me that the
Scheintod
model was the actual teaching of the Gospels at some earlier stage. It has since been redacted out in the course of the evolution of early Christian belief.
¹²

Here's why I think so. First, there is Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane in Mark 14:35–36: “And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.’” It reads most naturally to me as if Mark intended this supplication to receive an answer, despite initial appearances: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear” (Heb. 5:7).
¹³
And if that is not a reading of the Gethsemane prayer that envisions God delivering Jesus as he asked, I don't know what the words mean.
¹⁴
In short, the text seems to anticipate that it is Jesus’ willingness to go the way of sacrifice that atoned for Israel, just as, in much rabbinic thinking, it was the
willingness
of Isaac to die, and not any eventuality of his actual death, that expiated future Israel's sins.
¹⁵

Second, there is the surprise of Pontius Pilate that Jesus had expired so quickly, implying that maybe he hadn't. “Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, took courage and went to Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus. And Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead. And when he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph” (Mark 15:43–45). Surely this odd fact, Jesus’ as-yet unexplained premature death, is the first shoe dropping. We are left expecting the second: he is not dead but only drugged. Indeed, the attention and buildup devoted to giving Jesus a drink is surprising if there will not prove to have been some payoff. After all, a sponge soaked in something odorous being applied to his mouth most suspiciously the very moment before he passes out is otherwise a strange thing to occur, much less mention (Mark 15:36–37), yet this oddity is independently confirmed by an eyewitness (or so we're to believe: John 19:29–35). Islamic exegetes have been quick to recognize this point: “the words of Pilate…would show that at the time of the crucifixion itself a doubt had been raised whether Jesus had in fact died and the doubt emanated from no less a person than one who knew from experience how long it took a person to die on the Cross.”
¹⁶

Likewise, the mockery of the Sanhedrinists (Mark 15:32: “Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe!”) is delightful irony indeed if Jesus
is
in fact going to demonstrate his divine Sonship by coming down from the cross alive. Is this all coincidence? Only a flat, blindfolded reading of Mark says so.

I am not the first to note the surprising parallel between Mark 15:43–46 and the account of Josephus bar Matthias, the historian, of how he recognized a former ally on the cross and prevailed upon Titus to have him taken down, saving his life…

I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintances. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them;so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician's hands, while the third recovered.
¹⁷

One might plausibly argue that Mark's story is actually borrowed from Josephus (“Joseph of Arimathea” = “Josephus
bar-Matthias,”
which is in fact Josephus's actual name).
¹⁸
But if not, the Josephus story at least parallels the Markan version as I am suggesting we understand it.