Allison, Dale C., Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Criticism, History. (Part IV)

PART IV. Analysis and Reflections

15. Some Tenuous Arguments: Apologetical 303 

16. Some Tenuous Arguments: Skeptical 323 

17. Inferences and Competing Stories 336 

18. Overreach and Modest Resul

Chapter 15. Some Tenuous Arguments: Apologetical

I know that most men—not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic problems— can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty—conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives. —Tolstoy 

Analogous to that undeliberate warping of evidence which arises from the desire to justify the adoption of a new faith and to aid in proselytising others, is that which arises from the desire to strengthen the grounds of a conviction which has already been fully formed. —Richard Hodgson 

I should like, in this chapter and the next, to introduce and briefly assess some arguments that, although they often appear in the literature, lack much, if any, force. Most of them should, unless they can be revised in ways I have missed, be retired. I begin with some of the common but inadequate reasons many apologists have unfurled to buttress their belief in Jesus’ resurrection. 

ARGUMENTUM AB ECCLESIA 

Griffith Roberts, in an apologetical treatise of 1914, asserted: 

The very presence of the Church in the world, as we know it to-day; its marvellous growth from a small and unpromising beginning; its elevating influence on human life and character, are incontrovertible facts. And apart from the truth of the Resurrection, they are facts for which it is impossible to account. This is an appeal to the intellect and reason.

Nearer our own time, Charles Cranfield embraced a similar line of thought: “That the church still produces today (as it has produced in all the past centuries of its existence) human beings, who, trusting in Jesus Christ crucified, risen and exalted, show in their lives, for all their frailty, a recognizable beginning of being freed from self for God and neighbour, is a not unimpressive pointer to the truth of the Resurrection.”2 Even the great E. A. Abbott, a liberal who was usually a friend of reason, could lose himself here: 

What shall we say of the mighty vision that originated these stupendous results? Shall we take the view of the modern scientific young man, and lecture the great Apostle on the folly of that indiscreet journey to Damascus at noon-tide, when his nerves were a little over-wrought after that unpleasant incident of poor Stephen? Shall we say it was ophthalmia and indigestion—that flash of blinding light, those unforgettable words, ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’—all a mere vision? Is a fact that changed the destinies of Europe to be put aside with the epithet ‘mere’?”3 

In other words, Christianity, that great world religion, could not be the product of hallucination.4 

This argument, which presupposes an idealistic, even romantic view of Christianity, is easily deflated. One obvious defect is that the line of reasoning will appeal only to people happily ensconced within the Christian tradition; that is, it will convince only those already convinced. What of the multitudes who have become, for one reason or another, alienated from that tradition, or who are acutely aware of the church’s “obvious and manifold failures and atrocities”5 throughout the centuries? How, a skeptic might counter, could a good God have vindicated the founder of a religion that has tolerated slavery, executed heretics, vilified Jews, terrified people with a postmortem torture-chamber, and failed, with a few recent exceptions, to regard women as equal to men? The churches, to state the obvious, are, like so much else, a befuddling mixture of good and bad. Privileging their boons over their sins in order to make a case for Jesus’ resurrection is no more persuasive than privileging their sins over their boons in order to make a case against it. 

Yet even were one unreservedly to concur with Roberts, Cranfield, and Abbott that Christianity has, on the whole, exerted a marvelous, elevating influence on humanity, liberating multitudes to love and serve others, why attribute all this to Jesus’ resurrection? Every historical phenomenon is the product of multiple factors and complex causation. What justifies attributing the charity-filled lives of saintly Christians to Jesus’ resurrection rather than, let us say, to the impact of the Golden Rule, 1 Corinthians 13, and/or the indwelling of the Holy Spirit? 

The argument of Roberts et al. also fallaciously conflates outcome and origin.6 You do not always know them by their fruits. I do not have a flattering view of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. I indeed believe, rightly or wrongly, that he was a sort of religious con artist. This does not, however, prevent me from admiring many religious Mormons and their good works, or from recognizing the beauty of Salt Lake City. The argumentum ab ecclesia is fallacious, a sort of argumentum ad consequentiam. 

I have, I should add, no desire to belittle or even to disagree with those who think that the lives of certain individuals point to something beyond themselves. Indeed, I have had this thought myself, because I have known people whose stories are sufficiently remarkable that explaining them with reference to something outside themselves makes sense to me. The problem is that such people do not belong exclusively to my Christian religion. Jesus’ resurrection does not account for them.7 

PSYCHOLOGICAL DEATH AND RESURRECTION 

A recurrent apologetical strategy is to insist that, after his crucifixion, Jesus’ apostles were so dejected, distraught, and demoralized that they could not, on their own, have concocted resurrection faith.8 “To the Apostolic age the death of Christ must by itself have crushed and refuted all expectations, and peremptorily have prohibited all possibility of believing in the glorified condition of One whom the stubborn facts of the criminal register presented to the world as condemned and executed.”9 Only the resurrection can explain the disciples’ recovery, subsequent transformation, and bold public behavior. Before that miracle, which gave life to the lifeless, the apostles were wholly bereft of hope, marooned in utter despair.10 They were, in addition, “in so depressed a state of mind that subjective visions were the last thing in the world likely to befall them.”11

 The presupposition of this argument is that “it is difficult to conceive a more despondent state of mind than that into which the apostles had been thrown by the condemnation and death of their Lord.”12 In the words of Murphy O’Connor, “The death of Jesus dashed all their hopes. They had nothing to look forward to; they expected nothing. It took an initiative of Jesus to lift them out of their pessimistic lethargy.”13

 Those who adopt the psychological argument from despondency—many of whom protest when skeptics try to psychologize the appearances to Peter and Paul—do not, to the best of my recall, ever support their case by referring to modern psychologists or sociologists. They rather proceed as though what they say is somehow obvious and so without need of support. But it is not so. What do we know about the state of mind of the disciples immediately after Good Friday? Paul reports nothing on the matter. Mark recounts that “all the disciples fled” (14:52), after which Peter denied Jesus and then “broke down and wept” (14:72). Matthew, in this connection, adds nothing to Mark. Luke has Cleopas and his companion confess to Jesus, while walking with him on the Emmaus road, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (24:21).14 These words consign their dreams to the past. And that is it for the synoptics. As for John’s Gospel, it records that, two evenings after the crucifixion, the disciples were behind locked doors “for fear of the Jews” (20:19). Even were we whole-heartedly to trust all this testimony, it amounts to little more than what we might, without the benefit of the sources cited, have surmised: that followers of a messianic aspirant crucified by order of Pontius Pilate would, in the immediate aftermath, have been disenchanted, confused, afraid. 

People can, however, be fearful, perplexed, and disheartened without being forever bogged down in the slough of despond. And they can be emotionally down but not theologically out. How do apologists know it must have been otherwise with Jesus’ disciples? The latter had for some time whole-heartedly devoted themselves to a mesmerizing miracle-worker for whom they had sacrificed much.15 As Peter says in Mk 10:28: “We have left everything and followed you.” Their personal investment was, then, more than high. Furthermore, 1 Cor. 15:5 (“he appeared… to the twelve”) as well as the gospels entail that they remained a social unit even before their collective sighting. One wonders, then, how easy or natural it would have been, whatever Jesus’ fate, for them to walk away from their commitments, to bury their hopes, to abandon their faith, to let Jesus become an unhappy memory.16 Had they no mental fortitude at all? How could they possibly have identified Pilate’s verdict with God’s verdict? Had they never heard Jesus speak about losing one’s life and of the last becoming first? Or did the crucifixion liquidate utterly their faith in Jesus and turn them into atheists? Would we rather not expect them, after a short stupor and a time of grief, to have tried to salvage something?17 Had they not heard Jesus praise the Baptist as “more than a prophet” after Herod had beheaded him?18 If, moreover, some of John’s disciples could continue to venerate the Baptist despite his execution,19 why could not some of Jesus’ disciples have continued to revere their rabbi despite his crucifixion?20 Indeed, why could they not have come to believe in God’s exaltation of their righteous master in some form even without appearances and an empty tomb?21 Jesus had given his disciples new identities, and people do not easily reinvent themselves. 

The Jesus of Lk. 22:31-32 prays that Peter’s faith will not fail (μὴ ἐκλίπῃ). Maybe his prayer was answered. Certainly the history of messianic movements proves that the religious psyche can be remarkably resilient in the face of apparent doctrinal catastrophe. Furthermore, the Jewish tradition, which was the disciples’ ideological home, knew all about surviving unmitigated catastrophes, such as the destruction of the first temple. Yahweh was a God in times of crisis.22 If Titus’ destruction of the temple did not terminate Jewish faith but rather led to revisions of it, why should Jesus’ death have annulled faith in him rather than led to a revised form of belief? 

The seventeenth-century Jewish Messiah, Sabbatai Sׂ evi, apostatized to Islam.23 It is hard to imagine anything more offensive to piety than that. Yet, in spite of the shock and horror of the wholly unforeseen disaster, Sabbatianism did not die. The movement, although it lost many,24 remained lively in several areas for 150 years (and a few Sabbatians remain yet today). The faithful, for whom inner beliefs defeated external events, variously explained the great mystery. Sabbatai had not, some claimed at first, apostatized; he had rather ascended to heaven. Others taught that the Messiah, in fulfilling Isa. 53:5 (“he was wounded because of our transgression”), had to enter the realm of evil powers and suffer a horrific descensus ad inferos. There was also the paradoxical and scandalous notion that the messianic redemption would come via sin, with good assuming the form of evil. These and other rationalizations—acts of intellectual desperation that gave the Messiah’s apostasy “a positive religious value”25—enabled believers, in spite of dismay, initial perplexity, and far-flung ridicule, to persevere. 

The Sabbatian case is only one illustration of the fact that religious movements can successfully cope with emotionally devastating events that, to the eyes of outsiders, should have forever dashed dreams. When Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of the Lubavitch branch of Hasidim, died in 1994, many of his followers did not abandon their faith that he was the Messiah. The so-called meshikhistn maintained their messianic beliefs by multiple means—by hoping for his resurrection, by affirming that he is not dead but in hiding, by emphasizing his spiritual presence in worship, by holding that, in his disembodied state, the Rebbe has more power than before, and so on.26 While the Rebbe’s death shocked and dazed most Lubavitchers and directly confuted their expectations, they were rapidly able to recover by modifying and so maintaining their faith. Today, twenty-five years after Schneerson’s departure, Chabad is a thriving religious movement.27 The Sabbatians and Lubavitchers exhibit a pattern that sometimes appears when religious expectations seem to lie in ruin: 

Hopes → Hopes dashed → Confusion and despair → Rationalization(s) → Recovery 

One sees the same sequence with some of the followers of Joanna Southcott and William Miller, following the eschatological debacles their forecasts created.28 The social-psychological fact is that people in situations not wholly dissimilar to that of the disciples immediately after Good Friday have been able to reconfigure their expectations and soldier on. Apologists should recognize this fact and either drop the defective argument from psychological death and resurrection or figure out how to render it new and improved.

MARTYRS FOR THE TRUTH 

Starting with Origen, the apologetical literature again and again avows that, since the twelve apostles and Paul gave their lives for their religious cause, or at least endured public scorn, persecution, and physical hardships, they must have been absolutely sincere in their beliefs. That is, they must have truly believed that God raised Jesus from the dead.29 In the words of Michael Licona: “The disciples’ willingness to suffer and die for their beliefs indicates that they certainly regarded those beliefs as true. The case is strong that they did not willfully lie about the appearances of the risen Jesus. Liars make poor martyrs.”30 

A recent book by Sean McDowell dedicates itself to filling out this argument.31 It focuses on the fates of Paul, the twelve, and James the brother of Jesus. (Whatever the explanation, McDowell makes no attempt to discuss the fate of Mary Magdalene.) Invoking Pascal—“I only believe historians whose witnesses are ready to be put to death”32—McDowell concludes, following a thorough review of early Christian literature, that 

all the apostles suffered and were “ready to be put to death,” and we have good reason to believe some of them actually faced execution. There is no evidence they ever waivered. Their convictions were not based on secondhand testimony, but personal experience with the risen Jesus… It is difficult to imagine what more a group of ancient witnesses could have done to show greater depth of sincerity and commitment to the truth.33 

McDowell’s book is a useful, convenient collection of traditions and legends about Jesus’ followers and their deaths. There are, however, problems with its apologetical slant, the chief being a tendency to generalize about “the apostles.” I concur, as would most, that at least four of the witnesses in 1 Cor. 15:3-8—Peter, Paul, James the brother of Jesus, and James of Zebedee (one of “the twelve”)—were martyred. I disagree, however, that we have much if any knowledge about the rest.34 Maybe Thomas made it to India and was killed there;35 but McDowell, who endeavors to pan historical nuggets from the vast river of legendary and apocryphal materials, can claim at best, regarding Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, James of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot, and Matthias, that it is “as plausible as not” that they were martyrs. This means, even with McDowell’s charitable estimate of the evidence, that it is equally as “plausible as not” that they were not martyrs. 

While some second- and third-century legends may not be utterly devoid of memory, we should tread cautiously here. Once Acts became scripture, legends of the apostles’ world-wide martyrdom were almost inevitable, whatever the historical facts. Acts 1:18, in the NRSV, includes these words: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The Greek behind the English “witnesses” is μάρτυρες, and Christians, from the second century on, used the word, μάρτυς, to mean “one who testifies at the cost of life,” that is, “martyr” (cf. Mart. Polyc. 14:2). As Origen put it: we “keep the name of ‘martyr’ more properly for those who have borne witness to the mystery of godliness by shedding their blood for it.”36 He immediately goes on to quote Acts 1:8. That verse, then, virtually guaranteed, especially as it was a word of Jesus, the fabrication of stories about the twelve going “to the ends of the earth” and becoming martyrs.37 

Another fact gives one pause. Even were we to suppose (as I do not) that Matthew authored the Gospel of Matthew, that John the son of Zebedee gave us the Fourth Gospel, and that Simon Peter uttered every word Acts attributes to him and furthermore wrote 1 and 2 Peter, we still have nothing first-hand from three-fourths of the twelve—Matthias, Thaddeus, Bartholomew, and the rest. If any of them ever penned anything, we do not have it. If any of them ever sat for an interview, it is lost to time. Where do these people speak for themselves? And how can anyone know that all of them would have whole-heartedly agreed, without qualification, with everything others wrote about them under the rubric, “the twelve”? We in truth know next to nothing about most of these characters, who are little more than names. Even were one recklessly to imagine that Acts gives us nothing save unembellished history, the twelve disappear after Acts 6, so we know no more about most of their post-Easter lives than we know about their deaths. 

Who would be so foolhardy as to outline precisely what Bartholomew must have believed and preached? Or so confident as to aver that James of Alphaeus would certainly have applauded every line in 1 Corinthians 15? Or so bold as to maintain that Jesus’ resurrection was Simon the Cananean’s polestar, and that his thoughts about it in 33 CE were exactly his thoughts about it twenty-five years later, if he lived that long? We do not even know beyond cavil that all the twelve remained Christian evangelists until the end of their days. If Thaddeus took early retirement from the business of religion and returned to Galilee, let us say, after Stephen’s martyrdom, would we expect the extant sources to take note? 

McDowell would no doubt respond to this last query by insisting that we have no record of an apostle ever wavering in his religious commitment.38 That is true, and it is possible that every single one of them fought the good fight and persevered to the end.39 Yet we have no record of any of them wavering because for most of them we have no record at all, only legends. And the claim that, if any of the apostles had apostatized or recanted, polemicists such as Celsus and Lucian would have loudly said so,40 flops because Christians and their texts, which were the primary sources for the would-be undertakers of the new religion, likely would not have said so.41 Beyond that, even if one declines to wonder whether Mt. 28:17 (“but some doubted”) reflects awareness that one or two of Jesus’ disciples did not cross the Christian finish line,42 the early silence about most of the twelve remains. If all of them became martyrs for their faith, is it not odd that Acts nowhere even hints at this, and that we get no stories until the second century and later? 

T. H. Huxley opined that “there is no falsity so gross that honest men…anxious to promote a good cause, will not lend themselves to it without any clear consciousness of the moral bearings of what they are doing.”43 Although I sometimes feel the force of this,44 and despite my caution in the previous paragraphs, it still seems that the argument from sincerity carries some force for at least Peter, James the son of Zebedee, Paul, and James the brother of Jesus. Here I can quote E. P. Sanders: “I do not regard deliberate fraud as a worthwhile explanation” of Easter faith, for some of those in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 and the canonical resurrection narratives “were to spend the rest of their lives proclaiming that they had seen the risen Lord, and several of them would die for their cause.”45 (One should not forget, however, that there is a difference between dying and dying bravely, and if we set aside as fiction the account of James’ martyrdom in Hegesippus,46 we know next to nothing about how these people died.) 

At the same time, this popular argument from character has scant payoff. Not only may “the pride of opinion…be greater at times than the love of life,”47 but Joan of Arc and Savonarola were sincere and were martyred, yet acknowledging those facts scarcely pinpoints the source of her voices or his visions. Again, it may be, as Mormon apologists insist, that the eight witnesses who signed sworn statements that they had “seen and hefted” Joseph Smith’s Golden Tablets demonstrated “lifelong commitments to the Book of Mormon”;48 even so, those of us who are not Mormons are left with questions. Likewise, and in connection with the resurrection of Jesus, the argument from sincere belief only negates the long-discarded theory of Reimarus, who envisaged Jesus’ inner circle clandestinely stealing his body and inventing a religion for their own gain. It takes us no further than that, which means it takes us no further than Strauss, which is not very far: “only this much must be acknowledged, that the disciples firmly believed that Jesus had arisen; this is perfectly sufficient to make their further progress and operations intelligible; what that belief rested upon, what there was real in the resurrection of Jesus, is an open question.”49 

FROM SABBATH TO SUNDAY 

According to the second-century author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Christians “celebrate the eighth day with gladness, for on it Jesus arose from the dead, and appeared, and ascended into heaven” (15:9).50 The correlation between Jesus’ resurrection and Sunday has become, in modern times, an apologetical argument. In the words of Craig Blomberg: 

Jew and Gentile Christian alike had chosen a different day for their most holy day than the one that was commanded in the Hebrew Scriptures… There must have been some overwhelmingly compelling reason for them not to accommodate themselves to the best day for Jewish believers to worship, the Sabbath (Saturday), and for Jewish believers to begin celebrating their Christian faith on a different day from the first day of worship prescribed in their Scripture! Only the objective bodily resurrection of Jesus datable to a specific Sunday morning, rather than a variety of subjective visionary experiences on a variety of days, can adequately account for this shift.51 

Charles Cranfield wrote to similar effect: 

The undisputed fact that, in spite of all that the sabbath meant to Jews and although Jesus himself had loyally observed it all his life (even if not always in such a way as to satisfy his critics), Jewish as well as Gentile Christians soon came to regard the first day of the week as the special day for Christian worship is highly significant. The replacement of sabbath by Lord’s day presupposes a sufficient cause—nothing less than, at the very least, an extraordinarily strong conviction of an event’s having taken place on the first day of the week which could be seen as transcending in importance even God’s “rest” after completing his work of creation.52 

This is, to my mind, is not a leaky argument but a sunken ship. Nothing justifies Cranfield’s assertion that, in the earliest church, the Lord’s day became “the replacement of sabbath.” This is the language of later theology.53 With regard to the earliest Jerusalem community, we have no more evidence that it annulled or replaced the Sabbath than that Jesus did those things.

In the relevant synoptic controversy stories, Jesus never responds with: Yes, of course you’re right, I am cancelling the sabbath, whose time has passed;54 or with: God never commanded sabbath observance in the first place;55 or with: God never intended anyone to keep that commandment literally.56 On the contrary, Jesus consistently defends himself against antinonianism, often with an argument about the greater of two goods in an exceptional situation.57 In line with this, the revision of Mk 13:18 (“Pray that it [your flight] not be in winter”) in Mt. 24:20 (“Pray that your flight be not in winter or on a sabbath”) most likely implies sabbath keeping by a Jewish Christian group; and the author of Acts had no problem remembering Paul as frequenting synagogue on the sabbath.58 Later sources are explicit that Christian Jews kept the sabbath and that many Christians observed both the sabbath and Sunday.59 Only as Christianity began to establish itself among Gentiles did some Christians begin to disregard the sabbath;60 and to judge from passages in Paul’s letters, some “zealous for the law” (Acts 21:20) did not welcome that development.61 

More importantly, it is not clear precisely when Sunday morning or evening became a time for Christians to gather.62 Did they begin to do this in the fall of 33 CE, the winter of 34 CE, the spring of 35 CE, or the summer of 36 CE, or some other time? And why exactly did they choose that day, and was there only one reason?63 And who chose it—the Hebrews, the Hellenists, or Gentile Christians? And what precisely did their get-togethers involve? Although Acts 20:7-11 (“On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”); 1 Cor. 16:2 (“On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that contributions need not be made when I come”); and Rev. 1:10 (“I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day”) make it likely that some Christians, before the middle of the first century, customarily gathered for religious reasons on the first day of the week, a day which became known as “the Lord’s day,” the nativity of their habit remains hidden.64 Observance of the Lord’s day becomes an indisputable fact with clear-cut features only in Ignatius, Barnabas, the Didache, and Justin Martyr.65 Earlier sources, by contrast, offer next to nothing on the subject. They certainly nowhere claim that Christians meet on Sunday because Jesus then rose from the dead. The evidence is sufficiently slim that one can urge, as do Seventh Day Adventists, that the New Testament fails not only to cancel Saturday as the day of rest and worship but also fails to brand Sunday as a generally recognized day of assembly.66 

Despite our sizable ignorance and all the doubts just introduced, it remains plausible that, within a decade or so after Jesus’ departure, many Christians gathered weekly on Sunday, and that they associated this day with his resurrection.67 Yet this is a judgment call, not an unassailable fact. The explicit basing of “Sunday celebration on Christ’s resurrection emerges first in the second century, and then only timidly.”68 We cannot, furthermore, determine whether the Lord’s day, if designed to commemorate the resurrection, was originally intended to recall the discovery of an empty tomb (cf. Mk 16:1-8) and/or the appearance to Mary Magdalene (cf. Mt. 28:8-10; Jn 20:11-18) and/or the appearance to Peter (cf. Lk. 24:34) and/or the appearance to the twelve (cf. Lk. 24:36-49; Jn 20:19-23) and/or something else. 

The phenomenon of Sunday assembly is one more reminder of how little we know about Christian origins. We can affirm that commemoration of Jesus’ resurrection on the first day of the week, whenever it arose, aligns with the canonical stories that place dramatic events on the Sunday after the crucifixion.69 But to infer from this correlation that the appearances of the risen Jesus were not wholly contained within the subjectivity of the percipients is to take a very large leap of faith. A skeptic need observe only that belief in Jesus’ resurrection on a Sunday as opposed to the fact of Jesus’ resurrection on a Sunday suffices to explain why Christians gathered on that day of the week.

THE LACK OF COLLUSION 

According to Hans Erich Stier, “the Sources for the resurrection of Jesus, with their relatively large contradictions in detail, present to the historian for this reason a criterion of extraordinary credibility. For if the tale were the fabrication of a congregation or some other group of people, then it would be consistently united and clear.”70 This argument, oft-repeated,71 is very old. John Chrysostom already urged, with regard to the canonical gospels in general, that the discordance between them 

is a great proof of their truth. For if they accurately agreed in all things, including time, place, and wording, no enemies would believe them but would rather suppose that they [their authors] came together by some human agreement to write what they did. For such agreement could not stem from sincerity. But as it is now, even the discord in minor matters removes them from all suspicion and clearly defends the character of the writers.72 

This tries to convert a defect into a virtue. If the blatant contradictions between the gospels are, according to Christian opponents, reason to doubt, such disagreements are, according to the Christian preacher, reason to believe. 

The logic of Chrysostom and Stier is spurious. Although a large lack of agreement does imply a lack of collaboration, it guarantees nothing beyond that. People can lie without collusion, and contradictory accounts of this or that may disagree because nobody has the truth. Although there are multiple, discordant versions, set in various cities, states, and countries, of the urban legend about the Kentucky Fried Rat, nobody ever bit into a deep-fried rodent served by the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.73 Discordance, in and of itself, is hardly, in Stier’s words, “a criterion of extraordinary credibility.” 

Long ago, in a skeptical treatment of the resurrection, Reginald Macan offered these sensible generalizations: 

One of the grounds of belief or disbelief is the agreement or disagreement of various witnesses with each other and with themselves; a certain amount of disagreement and inconsistency may not invalidate their testimony, may even allay the suspicion of possible fraud or collusion; but there is some limit to be observed in this matter; there is a point where divergence becomes as suspicious as complete harmony, and where inconsistency becomes inconsistent with truth. It may be difficult to locate this point exactly in particular cases; but even records of supernatural events, however fragmentary, dare not, to speak freely, try our historical conscience too far.74 

Some think that the canonical accounts of the resurrection try the historical conscience too far. Strauss was one. For him, the “detailed narratives of the gospels, in which the resurrection of Jesus appears as an objective fact, are, from the contradictions of which they are convicted, incapable of being used as evidence.”75 I am, for reasons apparent throughout this book, of another mind. None theless, the contradictions of which Strauss spoke, and which he highlighted so carefully, comprise no happy intimation of authenticity. They rather constitute, for historians, a challenging obstacle to surmount. 

THE SHROUD OF TURIN 

Some Christian apologists—not all Roman Catholic—have found in the Shroud of Turin ancillary support for belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.76 One of them believes that the relic is “tangible evidence that Jesus rose from the dead,”77 another that the “inexplicable phenomena of the Turin Shroud” are best explained by Jesus’ resurrection, because those phenomena attest to something “beyond all natural laws.”78 Yet another insists that “the images on the Shroud literally defy the laws of chemistry and physics as we understand them,” and that the preponderance of the medical, scientific, archaeological, and historical evidence pushes us to conclude that the cloth once held a body that gave off particle radiation when it dematerialized in an instant.79 

What lies behind such confident, dramatic, and far-reaching assertions? Among the long series of claims regularly made on behalf of the Shroud’s genuineness are the following: 

• When, in 1898, King Umberto I of Italy gave permission for the Shroud to be photographed, the image turned out to be, in effect, a photographic negative; and, remarkably, negatives of modern photographs of the Shroud reveal more than unaided, direct examination of the relic itself.80 

• Contrary to dominant artistic tradition, the Shroud depicts a man with bleeding wounds in his wrists, not in his palms.81 This is particularly intriguing as experiments have shown that nails driven through hands will not support the weight of a hanging human body.82

• Examination of a photograph taken in 1976 with a VP-8 Image Analyzer demonstrated that the Shroud, unlike two-dimensional paintings and photographs, encodes undistorted threedimensional information.83 

• The Shroud’s image is apparently superficial; that is, the yellow color comprising it does not penetrate the linen fibrils but is confined to the surface, extending only two or three fibers into the thread structure.84 There are, furthermore, no signs of brush strokes. How then can it be a painting? 

• The Shroud contains traces of pollen from plants that grow solely in the Middle East, and their proportion is high vis-à-vis pollen evidenced from other locales.85 

• The figure on the Shroud has four fingers on each hand. No thumbs appear.86 This is intriguing because driving a nail through the right spot in a wrist will cause the thumb to contract on the palm.87 

• The bloodstains reportedly exhibit the clotting and serum separation that would result from real wounds.88 

• The Shroud is one-of-a-kind. There are no similar shrouds, no comparable forgeries. 

What should one make of all this? New Testament scholars have generally failed to broach the topic.89 One exception was John A. T. Robinson, who was so famed for his unorthodox, “honestto-God” theology. He wrote that, “if the Shroud is authentic, it obviously greatly strengthens the historicity of the stories that the grave was found empty with nothing but the linen clothes remaining.”90 He confessed, moreover, that he had finally come to think it likely Jesus’ burial cloth: 

For me the burden has shifted. I began by assuming its [the Shroud’s] inauthenticity until proved otherwise and then asking how one explained it. On the hypothesis of a medieval forgery, or any other I could think of, this was very difficult. I now find myself assuming its authenticity until proved otherwise…and then asking how one explains it. This is equally difficult. There is as yet no plausible scientific answer.91 

One hurdle to responding intelligently to these words is that sindology has become a vast and complex field in its own right. Robinson, writing in 1977, observed that “there is a daunting literature on the subject.”92 That literature has become far more daunting in the decades since he wrote. No less importantly, much of it consists of scientific papers appearing in journals such as Optical Engineering and the Journal of Biological Photography. How is a historian of early Christianity supposed to evaluate such publications? Most of us know nothing—absolutely nothing—about maillard reactions, colorimetric measurements, low-energy radiography, thermal neutron flux, or pyrolysis mass spectrometry.93 

It is not my nature to acquiesce, without further ado, to authority, scientific or not. I do not usually believe A because scientists B, C, and D—who are just as full of observer bias and the willto-believe as the rest of us, and maybe just as religious as many of us94—say it is so. Still, if all the experts were at one in the matter of the Shroud, one might feel obliged to go along. This, however, is not the case. There is a competing narrative.95 Its advocates make these points, among others: 

• In 1988, three different laboratories carbon dated samples from the Shroud and placed the manufacture of the linen between 1260 and 1390 CE.96 

• The first undisputed literary reference to the Shroud, in a letter of 1389 from Bishop Pierre d᾽Arcis of Troyes to the Avignon Pope (Clement VII), claims that a painter had confessed his fraud to a former Bishop a few decades earlier.97 The Pope, in response, decreed that, whenever the cloth was on display, the priest exhibiting it should declare that the “figure or representation is not the real shroud of our Lord Jesus Christ, but only a drawing or picture made to represent or imitate the shroud of our Lord Jesus Christ as it is alleged to have been.”98 

Those who defend the Shroud’s antiquity must regard as coincidence the fact that the carbon dating aligns perfectly with the Bishop of Troyes’ statement about the genesis of the Shroud.99 • The Middle Ages teemed with forged relics. This is why the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) warned of people being “deceived by lying stories or false documents [associated with alleged relics], as has commonly happened in many places on account of the desire for profit” (art. 62). Critical historians deem all the other alleged relics associated with Jesus to be counterfeits. 

• According to the synoptics, Joseph of Arimathea wrapped Jesus in a linen garment (Mk 15:46; Mt. 27:59; Lk. 23:53). John 20:5-7 adds that the empty linen wrappings were left in the tomb.100 Our earliest sources make no additional claims about Jesus’ burial garment. John Calvin asked, “How is it possible that those sacred historians, who carefully related all the miracles that took place at Christ’s death, should have omitted to mention one so remarkable as the likeness of the body of our Lord remaining on its wrapping sheet? This fact undoubtedly deserved to be recorded.”101 

• The Shroud has no clear past before the fourteenth century. Attempts to find its earlier history in notices about the image of Edessa102 are full of gaping holes and remain exceedingly speculative.103 

• “The marks on the body of the man wrapped in the Shroud…coincide with the forms of the scourges that men of the Middle Ages were familiar with and artists were accustomed to representing. Everything is fully compatible with the…first half of the fourteenth century.”104 There is, by contrast, no evidence that the Romans used the sort of scourge seemingly imprinted on the Shroud.105 

• People have, through multiple means and with partial success, produced what they claim are Shroud-like images.106

• Although some of the extant witnesses from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries remark on the vividness of the blood, as though it were fresh, this long ago ceased to be true. It is hard to understand why, if the Shroud is authentic, the blood spots were bright for fifteen or sixteen hundred years and faded only thereafter. It is also puzzling that they are not smeared but well defined.107 If, however, someone produced the relic in the fourteenth century, all this is what we would expect.108 

• The welts and bloodstains on the Shroud cover the whole body, and it was only ca. 1300 that iconography began to depict the crucified Christ with wounds from head to foot.109 

• The one indubitably extant burial wrapping from first-century Jerusalem consists of at least four different pieces made of different materials.110 The Shroud, by contrast, is a single piece of linen with a 3/1 herringbone twill weave, a type of weave otherwise unattested in Israel until medieval times.111 If, moreover, the Shroud required a treadle loom, as its length suggests, such a loom was unknown in Europe prior to 1000 CE.112 

• The Shroud contains mineral pigments, such as red ochre and vermillion, which are consistent with the use of paint.113

 Which side has the truth? Given that my worldview does not preclude the possibility of metanormal or even miraculous phenomena, there is no obligatory answer. It is simply a matter of the evidence. Yet every single one of the bullet points listed above, pro and con, is disputed, or at least its implications are disputed; and the same is true of the many additional claims both sides make, many of which are next-to-impossible for non-scientists to adjudicate. There is always more to the story. Thus defenders of the Shroud’s authenticity impugn the Carbon-14 tests by arguing that the samples were not from the original linen but from newer fibers added by later mending; or by urging that the centuries of handling and/or the fire the Shroud survived in 1532 contaminated the pieces tested; or by contending that the raw data show variations that call the dating into question;114 or by claiming that bio-plastic coatings produced by fungi and bacteria skewed the results.115 Again, in response to the clear accusation of fraud in the 1389 memorandum to the Pope, one can observe that the Bishop failed to supply any documentation or to quote his predecessor, Henri of Poitiers, who allegedly conducted an investigation.116 But then one can retort that the “Bishop d᾽Arcis did not waste time in arguing the point further for the sufficient reason that nobody contested it. Whatever the people believed, it is quite certain now that from the very first neither Geoffrey [de Charny, owner of the Shroud], nor the canons, nor the Pope supposed that the so-called shroud was anything else but an ordinary painting.”117 Again, if one objects that Christ’s hands too conveniently cover his genitals, one can retort that the graveyard at Qumran offers examples of ancient Jewish skeletons with hands extended and crossed. And so it goes, back and forth, like a tennis match, leaving an observer wondering if the arguments—which incessantly exemplify what psychologists call “confirmation bias,” the all-too-human tendency to interpret evidence so that it confirms what one already believes—will recede indefinitely. 

At the end of the day, maybe no verdict fully satisfies. If one opts for authenticity, the testimony of the Bishop d᾽Arcis remains embarrassing, as does the carbon-14 dating, which matches that testimony. Yet those defending a medieval origin should perhaps be uneasy with the fact that, so far, modern attempts to reproduce the Shroud are less than compelling,118 and also stumped because nothing else quite like it may survive from the Middle Ages.119 Prudence, then, might declare a draw and incline us to bide our time, until additional investigation tips the scales for an early dating or a late dating. Nonetheless, I wager against authenticity. The default setting for medieval relics is, without question, fake; and unless the evidence for the authenticity of an alleged relic is uniformly beyond cavil—which it definitely is not in this case—skepticism is sensible.120

 Even if one contests this conclusion and doubts that the Shroud is a medieval creation, what would follow? In theory, the Shroud could remain an enigma, an unsolved whodunit, an artefact of unknown origin, perhaps not wholly unlike the Antikythera mechanism, which is a one-of-akind, deeply puzzling piece of the past that, given what we otherwise know about ancient Greek technology, should not exist.121 One unmotivated by religious sentiments could sensibly leave it at that, in the knowledge that much perplexes us.122 

If, however, one moves from the image on the Shroud in Torino to Jesus’ resurrection in Jerusalem, what precisely is the relationship between a man rising from the dead—whatever that might involve scientifically—and the physical properties of a linen shroud? Is the latter a true singularity? Or, at the last trump, will all enduring burial garments be imprinted with an image of the remains they enveloped, so that holy shrouds will be everywhere? We have no answer. We cannot compel God to raise people from the dead and record what happens. There is, then, no testable theory here.

On the hypothesis of a literal bodily resurrection, maybe Jesus vanished in the blink of an eye, without noticeable effect, like a three-dimensional object leaving a two-dimensional space.123 Or maybe he sat up, manually removed and rolled up his linen wrappings, and then walked right through the cave wall.124 How could anyone possibly know? Theories about photolytic burn, corona discharge, or neutron irradiation125 are, despite the technical terms, no more than wild shots in the dark.126 And how did such a burn, discharge, or irradiation manage to move exclusively at a right angle to the Shroud, rather than in all directions or directly away from Jesus’ body?127 And what justifies the assumption that such a process was the effect of a corpse being resurrected rather than utterly destroyed? Do any of these hypotheses really have any more scientific value than Frank Tipler’s fantastic claim that Jesus walked on the water by directing a neutrino beam from his feet, or his bizarre explanation of the resurrection, according to which Jesus’ body was “enveloped in a sphaleron field” and, through a “baryon-annihilation process,” dematerialized “into neutrinos and antineutrinos in a fraction of a second”?128 

I remain confused as to how appeal to Jesus’ mysterious, supernatural resurrection explains the features of the Shroud.129 Does not positing a direct, mechanical link between an event wholly beyond scientific analysis—Jesus’ resurrection—and the Shroud of Turin still leaves us, in terms of chemistry and so on, with an enormous explanatory blank? Even if one is comfortable invoking the Almighty, this says nothing definite about the production of the image. Indeed, one could, in theory, affirm that God raised Jesus from the dead and then, later on, as an additional miracle physically unlinked to the resurrection, imprinted or created the Shroud. For Omnipotence, working two miracles can be no harder than working one. On the presumption of divine production, God could have decorated or produced the Shroud any time after the resurrection—thirteen seconds, thirteen minutes, thirteen decades, or thirteen centuries later. Those who regard the cloak that  depicts Mary in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe as an authentic miracle do not explain it as an ancient artefact created at Mary’s ascension but as a divine work of the sixteenth century. In like fashion, one could explain why no one before Eusebius refers to the Shroud—if one equates it with the Image of Edessa—or, in accord with the Carbon-14 tests, before the fourteenth century, when we have undeniable documentation of the Shroud: God did not make it until then. My point is not to suggest that anyone should entertain either scenario. It is rather to emphasize that, even if we appeal to God to explain the Shroud, questions abound.

 Just how little the Shroud, in and of itself, contributes to the larger debate on Jesus’ resurrection appears from an article by Tristan Casabianca. He contends that, in terms of plausibility, explanatory scope, explanatory power, and other considerations, “the resurrection hypothesis” best accounts for the Shroud.130 En route to his destination, Casabianca writes: “One can admit that without divine intervention the plausibility of the revivification of a human being…is not adequately grounded. However the resurrection of a human being is plausible once God is defined as omnipotent.”131 Casabianca goes on to appeal to Richard Swinburne’s case that the resurrection is 97% probable,132 next to insist that one can do history without adopting dogmatic naturalism, and then to claim that “from an historical point of view, the resurrection…has strong defenders in current scholarship.”133 Yet all this is to argue not from the Shroud to Christian belief but from Christian belief to the Shroud. In other words, Casabianca’s argument for the Shroud will work only if one already believes, or is inclined to believe, in an omnipotent deity with distinctively Christian proclivities. Casabianca will not, then, persuade any who are not already cheering him on to his Christian conclusion. It is no mystery that, with very few exceptions, those who believe in the Shroud’s authenticity are a subset of those who believe in Jesus’ resurrection.

Chapter 16. Some Tenuous Arguments: Skeptical

Inveterate unbelief is but tantamount to the weakness of overstrained credulity. —John Timbs 

Where the Will, or Passion, hath the casting vote, the case of Truth is desperate. —Joseph Glanvill 

I turn now from some of the anemic arguments of apologists to some of the low-wattage arguments of polemicists, the first being the declaration, recurrently met with, that since miracles are impossible, Jesus’ resurrection is impossible. 

MIRACLES DO NOT HAPPEN 

Miracles were, in the past, a customary component of Christian apologetics, a bulwark of the faith. If Jesus worked miracles and rose from the dead, then, so the argument ran, he must have had God’s approval or even been divine, for “miracles are as it were certayne diuine seales and Testifmonyes, whereby Religion is confirmed.”1 In our day, however, miracles have become for many not a reason to believe but a reason to disbelieve;2 and if Jesus’ disciples claimed that he rose from the dead, then the post-Enlightenment, up-to-date, scientific view demands, we are told, that they were either deceived or deceiving.3 The literal resurrection of a dead man is no more possible than the character of a novel leaving its pages and entering our world.

This judgment has its roots in Spinoza, who argued that everything in scripture must have happened in accord with the fixed and immutable order of nature,4 and its most famous proponent in David Hume, who asserted that we should not credit miracles because they oppose the laws of nature, which rest on firm and unalterable experience.5 As is well known, many modern, more liberal Christian thinkers have gone along with this brand of uniformitarianism.6 

Disbelief in miracles is the outcome of a long historical process that commenced with the Protestant critique of Roman Catholic marvels, continued with the deistic assault on orthodoxy, and seemingly triumphed in the modern academic criticism of the Bible.7 That history of disenchantment has been informed by historical investigation of the lives of saints (some of whom never lived at all), the scholarly analysis of folklore, and critical study of traditions about religious figures such as Buddha and Muhammed. We have learned, time and again, that the earlier and better attested the history, the less prodigious the miracles, and the more prodigious the miracles, the later and more poorly attested the history. We also now know that much people formerly ascribed to supernatural forces—epileptic fits, natural catastrophes, astonishing coincidences, and bodily stigmata, for instance—can be adequately fathomed without reference to divine intervention.8 When one adds that miracles have, historically, served to authenticate competing and contradictory religious claims and so seemingly cancel each other out,9 the psychological climate of skepticism in our day is easy to understand. 

There are, nonetheless, numerous critical problems here. One is that the philosophical issues surrounding Hume’s argument—an argument that can and has been deciphered in various ways10— are complex, so much so that an unqualified appeal to Hume serves no constructive end.11 Further, maintaining, within the context of debate on Jesus’ resurrection, that miracles are impossible begs the question for anyone not of like mind, so it is hard to see the point.12 If what one concludes at the end inexorably follows from what one excludes at the beginning, then one is not arguing but simply taking sides. 

What disbelievers in Jesus’ resurrection rather need to do, or so it seems to me, is attempt to show that one can, on the assumption of methodological naturalism, plausibly account for the facts to hand. That goal will not be achieved by reciting a mantra about what is impossible. The means should rather include examination and evaluation of the sources, the construction or discovery of persuasive reductionistic analogies, and so on. This is in line with the generalization of atheist philosopher Michael Martin: we should not “decide on naturalism or supernaturalism beforehand. Rather, one must attempt to reject the a priori arguments and instead base one’s position on inductive considerations.”13 

Before, however, leaving this issue behind, I should like to append four brief observations. First, the dictum that we should reject testimony to a miracle can interfere with reconstructing the past. This is apparent in Hume’s dismissal of Tacitus’ report that Vespasian healed the blind and lame, as well as in his ridicule of the miracles associated with the tomb of François de Pâris.14 Hume selected these examples because of the sturdy testimony to them, which he felt obligated to reject: “What have we to oppose to such a cloud of witnesses, but the absolute impossibility or miraculous nature of the events, which they relate? And this surely, in the eyes of all reasonable people, will alone be regarded as a sufficient refutation.”15 

That Hume made no effort to account for the ostensible evidence is a deficiency. Given what we now know about psychosomatic illnesses, the power of suggestion, hysterical blindness, trance states, placebos, and nocebos, there is little to balk at in Tacitus’ depiction of Vespasian healing a few people, or even in many of the wild stories about the Convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard.16 Hume’s bias moved him, in these instances, to dismiss too much. What he took to be unbelievable is not, to those informed, incredible. 

This leads to my second point, which has to do with the meaning of “miracle.” Here is the definition of a contemporary Christian philosopher, Francis Beckworth: “a divine intervention that occurs contrary to the regular course of nature within a significant historical-religious context.”17 Although this may be perfectly sound theologically, I wish to emphasize that one can acknowledge the existence of events that are “contrary to the regular course of nature” and that occur “within a significant historical-religious context” without attributing them to divine agency. 

The well-known medical historian, Jacalyn Duffin, after studying Roman Catholic canonization records at the Vatican, concluded that they do indeed document some truly enigmatic events, healings that defy natural explanation.18 She, however, is an atheist. Her work has led her to acknowledge the reality of certain events that many dub “miracles”—inexplicable events within a religious context—without abandoning her non-theological worldview. There is nothing irrational in this. One need not assume that, if something inexplicable has transpired in a religious context, the agent must either be the Christian God or the Christian devil. That would be a God-of-the-gaps or a Satan-of-the-gaps argument. The move from event to interpretation is not so easy.19 

Third, as Gregory of Nyssa observed long ago, most of us judge what is credible by our own experiences.20 Hume, one guesses, never saw anything much out of the ordinary. What if, however, one’s experience is different? Mine has been. Rightly or wrongly, I believe that I have vividly seen the future on two occasions, once in a dream, once while awake. I further believe that I once witnessed a solid object disappear from one part of a room and reappear at another;21 and, as narrated earlier in Chapter 7, on a couple of occasions I took myself to be in touch with a dead friend. 

Some readers, steadfastly skeptical of all phenomena alien to mainstream science, may confidently believe that I must be deluded in all this, that my assertions are unworthy of a moment’s attention. I understand their mindset and do not object. I know full well that bogus reports abound, and further that human beings are fallible interpreters and recallers of their own experiences. Yet the point is that, notwithstanding my critical bent, I believe—not because the Bible tells me so but because my first-hand experience tells me so—that events beyond our current understanding sometimes occur. I am emboldened in this by immediate family members and several close friends— people I trust and have cross-examined at length—who have shared with me experiences that, like mine, shatter modern common sense (and customarily come to speech only in very select company). Yet even if we are open-minded about the metanormal, and even if we regard the Humean dismissal of so-called miracles as an insular prejudice inconsistent with human experience, this may not get us very far. The difficulty lies in building a bridge between one’s own experiences and the experiences of those who see things differently. To recall Gregory, we do tend to judge what is credible by what we have ourselves seen and heard; and if we have seen and heard things others have not, there will be differing judgments about what is credible. Those whose private experience, immediate social world, and education bear no witness to the metanormal are likely to approach the matters in this book much differently than does its author. 

Fourth and finally, deciding what one believes about miracles in general does not determine what one believes about any particular miracle. In our case, and as the Jewish writer, Michael Alter, has remarked: “It is possible to believe in the supernatural and that miracles are possible but that Jesus’s resurrection was not one of them.”22 One can, in other words, believe in miracle A but not miracle B. In fact, that is the rule for religious individuals. Christian apologists who believe that Jesus ascended into heaven from the Mount of Olives do not believe that Muhammed made the same journey on a Buraq.

TOO MANY INCONSISTENCIES

 A perennial tactic of critics of Christianity has been to catalogue contradictions between the gospels, and a long-time strategy of skeptics of the resurrection has been to list disagreements between Matthew 28 and its canonical parallels.23 I have already, in the preceding chapter, quoted Strauss as to the alleged upshot: the discrepancies in the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection render them “incapable of being used as evidence.”24 

Strauss has, to my mind, overstepped here. The manifest disagreements, which Eusebius of Caesarea futilely tried ages ago to explain away,25 do undermine certain ideas of biblical inspiration (which is why Eusebius is far from alone in his harmonizing acrobatics). And—the relevant point for us—they stand in the way of easy, straightforward reconstructions of the past. They entail, at the very least, that “many of the descriptive details are not to be trusted.”26 

In this respect, however, there is nothing singular about the resurrection narratives. Indeed, the modern quest for the historical Jesus got underway in part precisely because of the collapse of harmonizing exegesis. Recognition of contradictions did not, that is, lead to a cul-de-sac but to a new research program, and its practitioners have ever since gone about their business fully cognizant that the sort of harmonizing Strauss effectively dismantled belongs to the past. Despite, moreover, all its limitations and missteps, that quest has not wholly failed. It has taught us that we can indeed say much about Jesus even though our sources contain conflicting traditions and exhibit diverse redactional tendencies.

 What is true of the whole is also true of the parts, including the resurrection narratives. Although Hans von Campenhausen, R. H. Fuller, Ulrich Wilckens, Gerd Lüdemann, and A. J. M. Wedderburn, in their critical histories of the resurrection, all presuppose that our sources cannot be harmonized, they do not for that reason concede defeat.27 They go on to weigh arguments for and against the empty tomb, debate whether the first appearances were in Jerusalem or Galilee, and discuss at length other disputed matters. Despite all the obstacles, their hands are not tied. 

Consider, as a parallel, the different versions of Jesus’ crucifixion. One could, if so inclined, compile a long list of their disagreements. The synoptics have Simon of Cyrene bearing Jesus’ cross although John says, in direct contradiction, that Jesus carried his cross “by himself” (Jn 19:17). Mark reports that Jesus was crucified at nine o’clock in the morning (Mk 15:25) whereas in John he is still standing before Pilate at noon (Jn 19:14). Only Luke has one of the two thieves repent and Jesus address him with a promise of paradise (Lk. 23:39-43). In John alone does a soldier stab Jesus with a spear (Jn 19:34). If, in Matthew and Mark, Jesus dies with what appears to be a cry of despair (Mt. 27:46; Mk 15:34), in Luke he declares, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk. 23:46). None but Matthew narrates the resurrection of the holy ones (Mt. 27:51-53). And so it goes. 

Yet the discord—one could go on for pages—does not, in and of itself, prohibit scholars from intelligently discussing how much history might lie behind the diverging texts. We know, despite the clashing sources, that Jesus was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate as “king of the Jews.” Beyond that, it may well be that scholars can devise decent arguments for thinking that someone named Simon of Cyrene really did carry Jesus’ cross, or that Jesus’ last words may have been, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, or that a member of the Sanhedrin probably interred Jesus. Memory traces can survive in dissimilar and even contradictory forms, and legend can be parasitic on memory. If this is the case in the passion narratives, it can be true in the resurrection narratives, which to some extent, we should not forget, agree on “the basic facts.”28 Lessing, in connection with our subject, asked, “If Livy and Polybius and Dionysius and Tacitus each report the same event—for example the same battle or the same siege—with circumstances so different that those described by one completely give the lie to those described by the others, has anyone ever denied the event itself on which they all agree?”29 The answer is, No.

 NO APPEARANCE TO OUTSIDERS OR OPPONENTS 

After Paul is beheaded in the Acts of Paul, he appears before Nero Caesar and gives him a message (11:6). Things are different in the New Testament. God, according to Acts 10:40-41, raised Jesus “on the third day and made him manifest; not to all the people” but only “to us who were chosen by God as witnesses.” Celsus, just like the pagan critic of Christianity in Macarius Magnes’ Apocriticus, thought this an embarrassment for faith. Why did the risen Jesus show himself to insiders alone, to friends and family, not to his enemies or to people in general or to the Roman senate?30 Thomas Chubb put the point this way: as Christ’s resurrection “was of universal concern, so, surely, it would have appeared with a much better grace, had Christ shewed himself publickly, and to enemies or unbelievers as well as friends, because by this all ground of suspicion would have been taken away.”31 Strauss was of the same mind and cited Celsus in order to endorse him.32 Ingersoll asked, “Why did he not make another triumphal entry into Jerusalem?”33 Coneybeare wrote: “the admission made by Luke in Acts, that Jesus appeared to none but the faithful, establishes the subjective character of the apparitions.”34

Christian responses to the common criticism that the resurrection was done in a corner are usually ad hoc and labored. Tertullian offered that Jesus did not appear before the multitudes “so that the wicked would not be delivered from their error,”35 and that faith might win reward by persevering through “difficulty.”36 Griffith Roberts construed Jesus’ failure to appear in public to unbelievers as a token of divine goodness: “It was an act of mercy on our Lord’s part not to shew Himself to all the people. It would have increased their guilt.”37 Zachary Pearce urged that, had Jesus appeared to the Sanhedrin and converted them, after which they produced a broadsheet to announce the fact to the world, everybody would have suspected “a State Trick, a Political Craft, a National Contrivance of the Jews.”38 Then there is the flabbergasting rationalization of James Baldwin Brown: 

Imagine the thronging and crushing in the streets of Jerusalem, the mad excitement, the prompt rebellion, the blood-stained fields of battle, and the murderous work of the ruthless Roman sword, which would have followed any public exhibition of the risen Christ in the world, and you will understand how entirely necessary it was that the fact of the resurrection should be established after the method which is set forth in the sacred history.39 

I leave it to readers to ponder the efficacy of this alleged argument.40

 Sparrow Simpson, who dedicated a whole chapter to the old stumbling block in his book on the resurrection,41 more cogently observed that to ask why Christ did not appear to Pilate or the Sanhedrin “is to single out one instance of a larger principle. We may just as reasonably ask Why did not Christ appear in the streets of Rome?… Moreover, why limit the objection to one generation or one age? Why does not the risen Christ appear in modern London?… It is the old objection over again: Why does not God write His revelation across the skies in such a way that the world must be convinced?” For Sparrow Simpson, the restricted actions of the risen Christ parallel the restricted actions of God, so to complain that Jesus appeared only to friends is to object “against the principle of the divine government of the world.”42

This riposte, while more interesting, works only for those who share the apologist’s view of Providence. Skeptics of the resurrection keep different company. Some or many of them would no doubt side with those philosophers who hold that God’s ostensible hiddenness is evidence that there is no deity.43 Sparrow Simpson would have been better off parading the case of Paul. The apostle was, before encountering Jesus, a hostile outsider. 

There is, however, another reason why the protest that Jesus appeared only to friends and family may be less formidable than it initially seems. That reason, which comes from social psychology, is this: people typically do not speak about metanormal experiences that conflict with the social beliefs of those around them. 

After the Reformation, when a number of Protestant divines started preaching that ghosts were not visitors from purgatory but either hallucinations or demonic tricks, Christians in Protestant lands reported far fewer ghosts than they had before;44 and modern Americans and Europeans who have had a so-called near death experience often, when they finally go public, confess to having said nothing to anyone for years, or to having shared what happened with only one or two others, especially if an experience was hellish.45 Again, after Barbara Ehrenreich, a prominent atheist, had an overwhelming mystical encounter with something seemingly transcendent, she told no one for decades;46 and if I may be permitted to be autobiographical, I kept an absurd, mind-boggling experience of my own confined to my narrow circle of affectivity until recently, and when I gave permission for my account to be written up for a book, I requested anonymity.47 Implicit social censorship envelops us. There is a site on the internet known as “TASTE” (The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences). It is an on-line safe space where scientists can anonymously post their mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences without fear of personal ridicule or professional reprisal.48

 Not only are all experiences filtered through perception and expectation, but they are valued or marginalized, promoted or stigmatized, recounted or unrecounted, and even remembered or forgotten49 in accord with a social context.50 So if—I speak purely hypothetically—Jesus had appeared to, let us say, Pilate or Caiaphas, would we really expect to have a record of it? 

Beyond that, if—again to speak theoretically—a postmortem Jesus had shown himself to Herod Antipas or Annas and, as in the story in John, invited them to feel the marks of the nails, would they not likely have doubted their senses, discounting their vision as being a mirage, just as Scrooge initially dismissed Marley’s ghost?51 Maybe one of them would have reasoned that Jesus had not really died. Whatever the rationalization, it is wildly unlikely that either would have declared, “Jesus is Lord!” Annas and Herod would have been like the fictional guards in Matthew 28, who see everything yet fail to lay down their weapons and take up the new faith.52 

If, as the gospels not implausibly report, some insiders had doubts about their encounters with the risen Jesus, how much more would it have been with outsiders, if there were any? Our neverabsent psychological defenses help us to classify and interpret our experiences, and it is hard to overestimate the power of denial.53 I am put in mind of remarkable words from a Protestant journalist, James Parton, writing in 1868. In evaluating a then-famous, well-attested Catholic miracle that involved the rapid disappearance of an inoperable tumor, this dogmatist declared: 

No amount or quality of testimony could convince a Protestant mind that Mrs. Mattingly’s tumor was cured miraculously… For my part, if the President and Vice President [of the US], if the whole cabinet, both houses of Congress, and the Judges of the Supreme Court, had all sworn that they saw this thing done, and I myself had seen it,—nay if the tumor had been on my own body, and had seemed to myself to be suddenly healed,—still, I should think it more probable that all those witnesses, including myself, were mistaken, than that such a miracle had been performed.54 

Others have said similar things. Hermann von Helmholtz avowed, regarding telepathy: “Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses, could lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another independently of the recognized channels of sensation. It is clearly impossible.”55 

Although the asseverations of von Helmholtz and Parton may sound more than immoderate, they betray how most of us operate. Ideology regularly obliterates facts, and reason usually falls victim to heartfelt conviction. The words of Lk. 16:31, “neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead,” are true to life. “Experience,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.”56 A resurrection appearance to Caiaphas or Pilate would almost certainly have failed to persuade; and if it had failed to persuade, it would not have come to speech; and if it failed to come to speech, no one would know about it. In like manner, if Paul had, for whatever reason, convinced himself that he had been merely hallucinating on his way to Damascus, the event would have been lost to history. (That Paul did not dismiss his encounter with Jesus suggests that some part of him welcomed it. Otherwise he would have rationalized it away.) 

It seems, then, that the complaint about Jesus not appearing to outsiders or opponents operates with a hidden premise—had he appeared to such we would know about it—that is not self-evident given human psychology. There admittedly remains, as Sparrow Simpson perceived, the closely related and pressing question as to why, if God exists and Christ is risen, their activities, past and present, seem to most of us so covert. That, however, is a theological or philosophical puzzle of universal scope beyond these pages.57

 THE TALPIOT TOMB 

In 1980, construction workers in the Talpiot area of Jerusalem accidentally exposed a burial cave from the turn of the era. It held human bones and ten ossuaries, some inscribed. The Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, on being notified, took charge of the site and moved the ossuaries to the Rockefeller Museum. An official report on the find appeared over a decade later, in 1996.58 Few paid attention until 2007. In that year, the Discovery channel aired a documentary (produced by the well-known James Cameron) revealing that Jesus’ tomb had, in all likelihood, been found. Soon after that, a book, The Jesus Family Tomb, was published, offering detailed arguments for the identification.59 It became a New York Times bestseller. A few years later, a second book, authored by James D. Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici, endeavored to buttress the case, in part by calling attention to a second tomb in the same vicinity, a tomb which, they urged, contains Christian symbols.60 

Evangelical scholars, as expected, responded adversely to the extraordinary claims in more than one publication.61 More significantly, James Charlesworth convened a major conference in Jerusalem in 2008 in order to address the controversial matter. Prominent Jewish and Christian scholars came from all over the world. Their papers have since appeared in print.62 

Those contending that the tomb unearthed in 1980 once contained the bones of Jesus of Nazareth stake their claim chiefly on the names inscribed on the ossuaries. The following appear in Aramaic: “Yeshua‘ (?) bar Yehoseph,” “Marya” (= “Mary”), “Matya” and “Mata” (forms of “Matthias” or “Matthew”), “Yose,”63 and “Yehuda bar Yeshua‘.” Two names are in Greek: “Mariam(n)e and Mara.”64 We have here a concatenation of names known from the New Testament. Jesus was the son of Joseph. His mother and some of his followers bore the name “Mary.” A certain “Matthew” was among his disciples (Mk 3:18). And he had a brother named “Joses” (Mk 6:3). Tabor and Jacobovici, emboldened by these facts, argue that “Judah” was the son of Jesus of Nazareth, and that Judah’s mother was named Mary, most likely Mary Magdalene.65 

It is obvious why the public has taken an interest in all this.66 It is equally obvious, however, why most New Testament scholars have paid less attention, and why they go about their work without fretting much over the Talpiot ossuaries.

 If we leave the Talpiot materials to the side, it is unlikely that Jesus was married,67 much less that he had a son. Nothing, moreover, favors the notion that he was buried either with Matthew, one of the twelve, or with Matthias, the replacement for Judas in Acts 1:23-26. One could, of course, theorize that Matthew or Matthias was his relative, but that would be a thesis made for the occasion, without anything else in its favor. Beyond that, we have no evidence for anyone named “Mara” among Jesus’ family or followers;68 and while there are multiple Marys in the New Testament, the name is always “Mary” or “Mariam.” The form, “Mariam(e)ne,” if it is indeed on one of the Talpiot ossuaries,69 is not in the New Testament.70 

These are not small obstacles to overcome, nor is the fact that the letters forming “Jesus, son of Joseph” are crude and clumsy, and the ossuary on which it appears plain and unornamented, unlike five of the other ossuaries from Talpiot.71 Given that early Christians held Jesus in high honor, is it not peculiar to envisage him being interred in such modest fashion and receiving less decorative display than others in the same tomb?72 And why is there no honorific, such as mārê’ (= Lord”)? When one adds that Jesus’ first followers believed him to be risen from the dead, so that those who identify the Talpiot tomb with his grave must either urge that his disciples conceptualized his resurrection as a purely spiritual affair not involving his corpse73 or entertain the possibility that his family kept the location of his remains a secret,74 the obstacles appear insurmountable. 

There is, nonetheless, a statistical argument. Some have supposed that, when we analyze the cluster of names in the Talpiot tomb against the known rates of occurrences of those names in first-century Palestine, we should be able to calculate the odds that the Talpiot tomb held the bones of Jesus of Nazareth. For the authors of The Jesus Family Tomb, the chances are 599 out of 600.75 Others, however, demur. According to Mark Elliott and Kevin Kilty, if “Jose” is not simply a variant of “Joseph,” then “the probability that this tomb is that of the Jesus family is 47%. However, if Yoesh is to be regarded as simply ‘Joseph’ in all circumstances, then the probability that this tomb is ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus’ is 3%.”76 Camil Fuchs, after running equations with several variables, ends up with an average likelihood of 20%.77 William Dembski and Robert J. Marks II are far more negative: their results do not rise to statistical significance.78 

It would be unwise for a non-statistician to say much about all this. My amateurish guess, however, is that, while there may be nothing wrong with the equations, there may be something wrong with the numbers inserted into them: bad numbers in, bad numbers out. We do not know, for example, how many first-century Jews named Jesus had a father named Joseph. “Jesus son of Joseph” appears not only in the New Testament and on a Talpiot ossuary but also on a second ossuary dug up long ago;79 and given the popularity of the names “Joseph” and “Jesus,”80 there may have been dozens of people with that name in first-century Palestine.81 We can only guess. The same is true of how many men named “Jesus” had a wife named “Mary” or a relative named “Jose.”82 Since the publication of Ilan’s Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity, we are no longer wholly in the dark, but we are not in the midday sun either. The names in her catalogue are from ossuaries, inscriptions, and written texts and so likely reflect the situation of those with higher status. This matters because different social strata may differ in their fondness for this or that name.83 Resting a lot on the statistical analyses of the Talpiot names might, then, be unwise, especially given the different estimates of the experts as well as how common the names “Jesus,” “Joseph,” “Mary,” and “Matthew” were.84 

It is instructive to compare the Talpiot finds with a much earlier discovery. In 1873, Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau reported on ossuaries exposed in a cave in the Mount of Offense (Jabel Batn el-Hawa) on the Mount of Olives.85 A number were inscribed. The Hebrew/Aramaic names were these: Salome, wife of Judah; Judah, son of Eleazar, the scribe; Simon, son of Jesus; Martha, daughter of Pasach; Eleazar, son of Nathan; Leah (?); Ishmael; Judah, son of Hananiah; Shelamzin, daughter of Simon the priest; Crocus; Hananiya. The Greek names were: Jesus, Natanilos (a form of Nathaniel), Hedea, Cyrthas, Moschas, Mariados. 

Clermon-Ganneau wrote: “by a singular coincidence, which from the first struck me forcibly, these inscriptions, found close to the Bethany road, and very near the site of the village, contain nearly all the names of the personages in the Gospel scene which belonged to the place”; and “a host of other coincidences occur at the sight of all these evangelical names.”86 If the four main characters in Jn 11:1-44 are Jesus, Lazarus, Mary, and Martha, the Batn el-Hawa ossuaries, near Bethany, have a Jesus, a Lazarus (= Eleazar), a Martha, and a Mary (Mariados is a form of Mary). Jesus, moreover, reportedly had a brother named Judah (Jude), a brother named Simon, and disciples named Nathaniel and Simon; and there was a Salome among the women who travelled with him from Galilee to Jerusalem (Mk 15:40; 16:1). What are the odds of all this? I do not know. If, however, the Talpiot tomb held Jesus’ remains, then the correlation between the names from Jabel Batn el-Hawa and the gospels must be coincidence; but if the overlap in the latter case can be due to chance, does this not make it easier to think the same of the former case?87 There is such a thing as coincidence. 

Mark’s Gospel itself contains a notable coincidence that further helps put the Talpiot data in perspective. According to Mk 6:3, Jesus’ mother was named Mary, and her sons were James, Joses, Judas, and Simon. According to Mk 15:40, one of the women who watched the crucifixion was named Mary, and she was the mother of James the younger and of Joses. If, as it appears, we should not identify these two Marys,88 then Mark speaks of two women close to Jesus who were named Mary and had sons named James and Joses. One of them, moreover, had two additional sons named Judas and Simon, the names of Jesus’ most famous disciple and his most infamous disciple. The explanation of all this is nothing but chance. The several names were sufficiently common as to recur beside each other in multiple contexts.

Chapter 17. Inferences and Competing Stories

My main historical conclusions in Part II are, within the broader context of critical study of the New Testament, quite conservative. They indeed border on the embarrassingly antediluvian. Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin, buried Jesus, perhaps in a family tomb. Shortly thereafter, some of Jesus’ female followers found the entrance to that tomb open, his body gone. After that, likely quite soon after that, at least one of them, Mary Magdalene, had a vision of Jesus. Sometime later, in Galilee, Peter, probably aware of the story of the empty tomb1 as well as of Mary’s encounter and presumably her interpretation of it, also believed that he had met Jesus. Not long after that, the apostle and his companions returned to Jerusalem, where they began to proclaim that God had raised Jesus from the dead. By that time, additional members of the twelve had become convinced that they, too, had seen their lord, whether in Galilee and/or Jerusalem. Months or even years after that, something happened to convince members of a large crowd—“more than five hundred,” according to Paul—that they too had beheld Jesus. Subsequently, Jesus’ brother James made the same claim, and eventually also Paul of Tarsus. 

CLARIFICATIONS 

Having argued at length for the likelihood of this reconstruction of events, my next step will be to contemplate two rival interpretations. Before essaying that task, however, I wish to reiterate and so stress four points. First, we have direct testimony only for Paul’s visionary encounter. The primitive creed in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 is our only early witness to the appearances to the five hundred and to James; and this testimony, which is altogether bereft of detail, is at best second-hand. Sadly, we know little more about the appearance to Peter. Half-sentences in Lk. 24:34 and 1 Cor. 15:5 attest to it; Lk. 22:34 implies its occurrence, as also perhaps Mk 16:7; and John 21 and Lk. 5:1-11 may contain traces of it. There is nothing more. As for Jesus’ burial, the empty tomb, and an appearance to Mary, we know neither the identity nor number of individuals in the chain of tradents between the originating witnesses and the surviving texts. All this, taken together, commends historical modesty. Robust assurance has no place here. 

Second, belief in Jesus’ empty tomb was probably crucial for the birth of belief in his resurrection. Many have deemed the claim about the tomb to be either late or, for other reasons, as of next-to-no importance for the emergence of distinctively Christian convictions. In Michael Wolter’s words, “All reports regarding the events of Easter Sunday are united on one point: the impulse for the spreading of the Christian Easter message was not the result of the discovery of the empty grave.”2 Given my conclusions in Chapter 5 and 6, this misleads. In Matthew, Luke, and John, the men see Jesus only after learning about the empty tomb, and I have urged that this is also plausibly the scenario implicit in Mark 16.3 This is likely the way it was historically.4 Maybe the penchant of many to imagine otherwise is to some measure due to the Protestant habit of privileging Paul over all else, which in this case means privileging 1 Cor. 15:3-8 over all else. One might also speculate, as have some, that an (unconscious) androcentrism has helped move the women to the sidelines.5

 Third, and as urged in Chapter 4, I am inclined to suppose that, before Peter and the twelve encountered the postmortem Jesus, the idea of his resurrection had already begun to suggest itself, probably not with full conviction but as a possibility.6 The cause was Mary Magdalene’s report about the tomb and her meeting with Jesus.7 If she shared her teacher’s eschatological hopes, which included resurrection,8 and if she, like the twelve, went up to Jerusalem hoping that “the kingdom of God was to appear immediately” (Lk. 19:11), then already a few days after Jesus’ death she likely entertained the idea that God had raised him from the dead. On this reconstruction of events, the men who soon enough eclipsed Mary in prominence were following her interpretive lead. 

It accords with this that, in Mark, Peter is not the first to learn that Jesus has risen. This honor goes to Mary Magdalene and two other women (16:6). It is the same (with one fewer woman) in Matthew (28:1, 7), which also has Jesus appear first to two Marys, not to Peter or the twelve (28:1, 8-10). In Luke, Peter inspects the tomb only because he has heard women report that it is empty (24:9-12), and it is not he but they who first recall that Jesus prophesied resurrection (24:5-8). In John, Jesus appears first to Mary Magdalene (20:11-18), and she believes before Peter (although not the Beloved Disciple) (20:8-9). The pattern across the narratives is uniform. Despite all the differences, women are always the first to learn of Jesus’ resurrection. This literary circumstance signals a historical circumstance.

 Fourth, while the stories in the gospels grew in the telling and contain late and legendary elements, their correlations with countless reports of visionary experiences from other times and places, as unfolded in Part III, establish, with decent probability, that they reflect or echo some genuine experiences. Again, however, we should not lose sight of how little we know.

As illustration, consider Matthew’s final paragraph. One could, if so inclined, raise a dozen questions regarding this exceedingly brief narrative. On what occasion did Jesus direct his followers to a mountain in Galilee?9 Did all doubt or only some?10 If some, how many doubted, and what were their names?11 What precisely did they doubt, and why did they do so?12 Did their doubt ever resolve into faith? If so, why, and was it sooner or later? On what particular mountain did this episode transpire? Did Jesus look as he had before, or did he appear, to recall Ps.-Mk 16:12, “in another form”?13 Do we have here all that Jesus said on the occasion, or did he impart more? Did the disciples say anything in reply, and what did they say to themselves afterwards? Did Jesus, at some point, just blink out and disappear, or did he, as in Acts 1, ascend toward the heavens? 

I personally reckon most of these questions to be exegetically barren. Trying to answer them would issue in little save futile speculation. Yet such are the sorts of questions historians often ask of texts, and many commentators have in fact asked them. That we cannot return informed answers shows how emaciated historically Mt. 28:16-20 really is.14 It is the same with the rest of the canonical resurrection narratives. Even were we naively to suppose them to be historically accurate down to the minutest detail, a myriad of questions would forever remain. The accounts of the resurrection are, from the historian’s point of view, very dim candles. They allow us to see only a little. 

A SKEPTICAL SCENARIO 

With all this in mind, what might skeptics of Jesus’ resurrection make of my chief historical claims? They could attempt to deny one or more of them. There is, however, a better way. I do not take it for I am not a skeptic. It is, however, incumbent to look at all sides fairly.15

To begin with the empty tomb: our sources claim, explicitly and implicitly, that no one removed or stole Jesus’ body. One could surmise that they protest too much. Of those who have thought this, few (at least in recent times) have fingered Jesus’ devotees as the responsible party. Nominations have tended rather to be Joseph of Arimathea or unknown thieves. 

The former option fails to fit what is otherwise plausible. Had Joseph moved the body, perhaps because the hurried interment on Friday was only temporary, why did he not later speak up, after Christians began to proclaim the resurrection? He would surely have protested had he been a member of the Sanhedrin, in good standing and acting on its behalf. Yet the sources preserve no hint of this.16 If he was a sympathizer, why did he not inform Jesus’ followers of what he had done? It is in either case doubtful that moving Jesus’ corpse would have been a secret. Joseph could not have dragged or carried a body by himself but would have required helpers, and they could have talked if he did not.17 

The apparent timing is another glitch. If the corpse was gone by dawn, as Mark purports, Joseph—assuming he rested on the sabbath—must have worked under the cover of darkness. But why? There was no law against moving a corpse to its final resting spot, and working blind would have been nothing but an inconvenience.18 

The key consideration, however, is this. All the accounts report that the stone was to the side when the women arrived. This must be a fact if the story in Mark 16 descends from a real event, for were the stone in place, there would be nothing to recount. The tomb’s vacancy is the whole point. Yet the historical Joseph, had he removed Jesus’ body, would have rolled the stone back, either because other bodies were there or because (in accord with Mt. 27:60; Lk. 23:53; and Jn 19:41) the tomb was empty and he would not have wanted animals setting up house. 

These problems do not beset the rival hypothesis, that thieves stole the body. No one ever came forward because the activity was illegal. For the same reason, they worked in the middle of the night so as to elude detection.19 And the stone was not rolled back into place because the uncaring robbers were in a hurry. 

What transpired thereafter? A skeptic can posit that Mary Magdalene hallucinated Jesus, as have others suffering grief. Likely triggered by Mary’s claim, something similar then happened to Peter in Galilee a bit later. As for the interpretation—God raised Jesus from the dead—Jesus proleptically supplied that. He had prophesied death in the eschatological tribulation and vindication at the general resurrection, so it would not have been difficult for his followers to imagine that the latter days had arrived, and that the resurrection of the dead had commenced, and all the more if Jesus seemed to Mary and/or Peter to be not a ghost but instead solidly real.20 

Concerning the appearance to James, a skeptic will rightly assert that we have nothing but a unelaborated assertion—“he appeared to James” (1 Cor. 15:7). This is, in Greek, a bare two words (ὤφθη Ἰακώβῳ), and the form has been dictated by the preceding clauses (which also have ὤφθη + dative). Whether, moreover, James saw Jesus before or after he joined the early Christian movement  is unknown.21 We do not, then, have enough information to insist that his experience could not have been subjective, however real it may have seemed to him. How then can his encounter be “one of the surest proofs of the resurrection of Jesus Christ”?22 It is the same with Paul. Skeptics will explain his vision as a hallucination, not dissimilar from Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne’s vision of Mary, which converted him from atheistic Jew full of anti-religious animus to pious promulgator of the Roman Catholic faith.23 

Regarding the collective appearances, we can infer a few things about the appearance to the twelve as several texts likely descend from an early report of it.24 Yet who saw exactly what lies beyond us, as does the reason for the note of doubt consistently associated with accounts of the meeting. As for the five hundred, our lack of knowledge similarly allows a skeptic to wave it away. Maybe mass pareidolia is the explanation. Or perhaps it was a case of mass hysteria.25 

Groups can, in any case, according to their own testimony, share visionary experiences.26 Near Lanarck, Scotland, in 1686, numerous people, over the course of several days, saw spectral armies marching beside the Clyde.27 In 1981, six teenagers reportedly saw Mary on the first day of her appearances at Medjugorje. The next day, four of those same teenagers saw her again, as did two additional individuals.28 A year later, on 19 November, five hundred children from an elementary school on the island of Luzon in the Philippines looked up and saw what they took to be angels and Mother Mary, figures they subsequently described in detail. One of their teachers also saw the sight (while another present did not).29 On March 25, 1984, approximately one hundred and fifty people—not just children, as in so many Marian visions—saw the BVM in Betania, Venezuela. She appeared seven times that day, each appearance lasting from five to ten minutes, except for the final appearance, which lasted half an hour. The bishop of Los Teques, in 1987, compiled a written report of the affair that included statements from eye-witnesses.30 More recently, Raymond Moody has told the story of five members of a family in a suburb of Atlanta. While standing around their mother’s death bed, mysterious, “vivid bright lights” gathered and formed into some sort of “entranceway.” After this, the woman died, and the brothers and sisters saw “mother lift out of her body and go through that entranceway.”31 A skeptic who is—justifiably or not—comfortable dismissively offering reductionistic accounts of events such as these will not balk at doing the same with the early Christian stories. 

RETORTS AND REJOINDERS 

How might apologists counter all this? 

(1) They could urge that the scenario just introduced is defective since it cannot account for all the textual details. It entails, for instance, that the guard at the tomb is a fiction; so too the notices about the grave cloths in Lk. 24:12 (Peter “saw the linen cloths by themselves”) and Jn 20:6-7 (Peter “saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself”). Thieves would have had no reason to undress a corpse, much less to roll up a cloth, carefully set it to the side, and “tidy up the sepulcher.”32 

Skeptics will be unmoved. They will dismiss the guard and the cloths as apologetical add-ons aimed precisely at refuting the possibility of theft. Mark, written before Matthew and John, refers to neither. To protest, moreover, that our sources directly contradict a naturalistic hypothesis begs the question when the credibility of those sources is precisely the issue at hand.33 Doubters will necessarily depart from the canonical texts at certain points. They must do so, or they will need to convert, because the texts themselves believe. To concur on all counts with the gospels and Paul would be to concur with them that Jesus rose from the dead. Any alternative explanation must, then, scrap certain details. 

This is not an intellectual sin. As Feyerabend observed, “a theory may clash with the evidence not because it is not correct, but because the evidence is contaminated.”34 Christian apologists themselves ride roughshod over the relevant sources when they explain away the angel Moroni and the Book of Mormon. To reject Mormonism requires rejecting multiple claims in the official Mormon narratives. 

(2) According to Jake O’Connell, “although sorcerers did occasionally rob graves, this was a quite uncommon occurrence, and is thus improbable.”35 We do not, however, have the statistics on this. What we do know is that theft occurred, and more than once in a blue moon. N. T. Wright’s verdict is that tombs were robbed “often”: the practice was “fairly common.”36 Markus Bockmuehl agrees: “ancient tomb robbery was a thriving industry.”37 The reason is not far to seek. Even when wealth was not involved, the remains of the dead were useful, because body parts were ingredients in magical recipes.38 So just as some, in the nineteenth century, robbed graves in order to supply bodies for dissection tables, so others, in the first century, robbed graves in order to procure ingredients for magical concoctions. 

Beyond this generality, the so-called Nazareth inscription, whatever its immediate occasion, confirms that the theft of graves was a problem in Jesus’ time and place.39 So too Jewish epitaphs that curse those who disturb tombs.40 Furthermore, magicians and necromancers—“who were, almost by necessity, body snatchers”41—had a special interest in those who died violent deaths,42 and they might have found the remains of a reputed holy man particularly tempting. One recalls the power of Elisha’s bones in 2 Kgs 13:2143 and of Thomas’ remains in Acts Thom. 170.44 

Even were one to hold, against the evidence, that tomb robbery was “a quite uncommon occurrence” (O’Connell), real life often beats the odds, even staggering odds.45 As Agathon put it, “One might perhaps say that this very thing is probable, that many things happen to mortals that are not probable.”46 In the 1950s, a roulette wheel at Monte Carlo came up even twenty eight times in a row;47 and, between 1942 and 1977, a certain Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning on seven separate occasions, which is why he is in the Guinness Book of World Records.48 Skeptics, emboldened by such statistically anomalous but genuine coincidences, will inevitably add—this is a refrain in their writings—that anything is more probable than a dead man coming back to life. History, full of wildly improbable events and wholly unlikely circumstances, has, to recall Nassim Nicholas Taleb, its black swans.49 Maybe the events leading to the proclamation of Jesus’ body were among them. 

(3) Craig Evans, responding to the hypothesis of theft, observes that “there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone claimed to possess any part of the corpse of Jesus,” and he adds that “the presence of a person with no respect for Jewish law and custom and willing to risk a tomb violation” is “most unlikely.”50 Against the first point, thieves do not publicize their proscribed deeds. If someone stole the body, we would not expect to learn anything further. Against the second point, one could imagine Roman soldiers as the perpetrators, or even impious Jews. Not every descendant of Abraham obeyed the Decalogue and its interdiction against theft. Israel had its bandits (cf. Ecclus 26:36; Lk. 10:30), and the rabbis spoke of “the wicked.”51 Jewish graves in the land would not feature curses if no one ever entered for unsolicited ends. 

(4) According to Joseph Bergeron and Gary Habermas, “if Jesus’ tomb had been found empty… this would be an additional factor counting against a purely psychiatric hypothesis for the biblical account of Easter.”52 They mean, I take it, that hallucinations cannot account for the empty tomb. But why not, as have some skeptics, turn things around? Maybe the empty tomb helped kindle visions and suggested interpreting them in terms of resurrection. Jesus and his followers, as argued in Chapter 8, believed that the end was at hand, that indeed eschatology was in the process of realization.53 Within the context of such expectation, which included the prospect of suffering and death followed by vindication at the resurrection of the dead, an empty tomb, whatever the cause, could have predisposed some to believe that Jesus had risen and thereby have suggested the possibility #of reunion with him. 

(5) According to Craig Keener, “our evidence for the theft of corpses appears in Gentile regions, never around Jerusalem.”54 There are three problems here. First, while the precise provenance of the Nazareth inscription (SEG 8.13) is elusive, the artifact is epigraphically related to both the Theodotus inscription (SEG 54.1666, from first-century Jerusalem) and the Temple Warning inscription (CII/P 2, from Jerusalem of the late second temple period). This is one reason scholarship has strongly tended to favor both an origin in Palestine and a date before 70. Even if the inscription is not from Jerusalem, it is close enough to be relevant testimony regarding theft in the area. Second, on a literary level at least, Mt. 28:13 assumes that the theft of a corpse was thinkable for Jews in first-century Jerusalem. Third, some tomb inscriptions in pre-70 Jerusalem warn against moving or disturbing corpses, which is consistent with anxiety about theft.55 

(6) A repeated objection against alternative scenarios is that they are ad hoc or composite. The skeptical scenario under review, for instance, invokes three chief causes: pre-Easter expectations, a tomb emptied by mundane hands, and hallucinations. By contrast, the orthodox proposition, “God raised Jesus from the dead,” explains all the data at a single stroke and so has greater explanatory power.56 

One might respond by urging that, although “God raised Jesus from the dead” may be logically simple—the assertion has one subject, one verb, and one object—the matter is more complex. The sources purport that God not only raised Jesus—something that, hypothetically, the deity could have done without letting anyone know57—but also moved the stone and sent an angel, after which Jesus appeared to different persons on various occasions. All this involves three actors—God, an angel, Jesus—and multiple actions. Even the orthodox story, then, is perhaps not really “simple.” 

More to the point, however, is this circumstance. Important historical events—the fall of the Roman empire, the Reformation, and World War I, for instance—regularly have multiple and often disparate causes. Why should belief in Jesus’ resurrection be different? One could attribute Roy Sullivan’s repeated encounters with lightning to a single cause, an angry Providence. The explanation would be parsimonious. Most of us, however, will instead speak of “bad luck” and think in terms of a series of unconnected events coincidentally instantiated in one unfortunate fellow. Real life does not always follow the odds.

Mormons insist that acceptance of the one foundational fact, that God gifted Joseph Smith with an extraordinary task, has unrivaled explanatory power. It explains how an unlettered Smith could hand us the Book of Mormon, how three men could swear to having together seen an angel with golden plates, how eight others could avow they had seen and handled those plates, how a persecuted religious minority could thrive despite the odds, and so on. The only counter to this is to summon several independent and controverted assertions: Joseph Smith copied much of the Book of Mormon from an unpublished novel written by the Reverend Solomon Spalding and stolen by Sidney Rigdon from a Pittsburgh printing shop; the witnesses to the golden plates were of naive or dubious character; Smith lied about much; sociological parallels show well enough how opposition and indeed persecution can grow a sectarian religious movement; etc. Although this retort is not Occam’s razor, those who do not live in the Mormon mental universe will find such a scatter-shot approach perfectly adequate and rational, and they will remain comfortably secure in their nonMormon world-view. It will be no different with skeptics of the resurrection.58 One should add that, whereas we have competing sources for Mormon beginnings, we lack such for Jesus’ resurrection. This means that any skeptical scenario will, in the nature of the case, lack positive, cast-iron evidence. Every alternative history will, in other words, necessarily be speculative and indeed oppose the texts at important points. Given how little we know, this is not the fatal flaw some imagine it to be. 

THE TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN VIEW 

If it is not so easy to banish the skeptical scenario, what of the more traditional view? 

(1) Nothing in the reconstruction in the first paragraph of this chapter contradicts anything in the conventional religious view. This is because the upshot of my investigations has largely turned out to be not replacement but reduction. After subtracting from the narrative accounts what we remain unconfident about and what we should disbelieve—such as the resurrection of holy ones and the guards at the tomb in Matthew—significant elements of what remains, with appropriate qualification, and for reasons set forth in Part II, descend from historical events. 

(2) The orthodox view can confidently affirm that its counterpart, as introduced above, requires positing an event—the theft of Jesus’ body—which must forever remain, in the nature of the case, hypothetical.

(3) The principal reason for urging the theft of Jesus’ body is, in the end, either disbelief in all miracles or in all distinctively Christian miracles. That reason will be inoperative for those happily ensconced within an orthodox or conservative Christian worldview. 

(4) The experiential parallels assembled and analyzed in Part II are strong evidence that the extant accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are more than literary products. Those accounts rather derive ultimately from people’s real experiences, however curious. This of course raises theological questions, because the more parallels one compiles to what we find in early Christian literature, the less unique that literature becomes. For the purposes of history, however, the principle of analogy supports a historical basis for elements in some of the stories. 

(5) I have, throughout these pages, emphasized how little we know about the appearances to Mary Magdalene, Peter, the twelve, and the rest. We have for them at best what Gilbert Ryle termed “thin descriptions.” Our ignorance diminishes the force of the well-worn apologetical claim that the objectivity of the appearances irrevocably follows from the number of people involved, and especially from the circumstance that some experiences were collective. But our want of knowledge should equally haunt skeptics, who are so sure that they can, with little trouble, explain away all the appearances as endogenous hallucinations. We know too little to do that—too little about what happened in the first century and too little about non-pathological visionary experiences throughout history and today. A skeptics’ belief to the contrary derives from a worldview which, as a matter of course, regards all visions as subjective projections. But that is not the only worldview on offer. 

(6) The chapters in Part II have compiled parallels to much that appears in early Christian stories and traditions. Nonetheless, I know of no close phenomenological parallel to the series of likely events as a whole. Early Christianity offers us a missing body plus visions to several individuals plus collective apparitions plus the sense of a dead man’s presence plus the conversion vision of at least one hostile outsider. Taken as a whole, this is, on any account, a remarkable, even extraordinary confluence of events and claims.59 If there is a good, substantial parallel to the entire series, I have yet to run across it. 

In view of the preceding considerations, one understands why the late Maurice Casey, a nonChristian who did not believe that Jesus rose from the dead, could write: “the historical evidence is in no way inconsistent with the belief of the first disciples, and of many modern Christians, that God raised Jesus from the dead, and granted visions of the risen Jesus to some of the first disciples, and to St Paul on the Damascus Road.”60 Casey was right. 

ROADS SELDOM TAKEN 

So far in this chapter I have contemplated two rival ways of approaching the data, or rather the history they allow us to reconstruct. This scarcely exhausts the options. 

Many discussions of Jesus’ resurrection suffer from a sort of Christian solipsism. By this I mean that Christian orthodoxy dictates the terms of the debate, and one is either pro or con, for or against. The arguments of apologist and scoffer typically mirror one another. The apologist argues A. The skeptic then argues not A. It is as though, for every question, the only answers are traditional Christian belief or cynical unbelief. Yet if one stands back and looks at the debate from a distance, it becomes obvious how much so many take for granted. Let me offer three illustrations of what I have in mind. 

ALL OR NOTHING 

Apologists and skeptics typically write as though the appearances are a single phenomenon requiring a single explanation. Either Jesus appeared to everybody in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 or he appeared to nobody. In other words, it is all God or all hallucination. This reductionism, however, is hardly compulsory. Between the two extremes is an excluded middle. 

Maybe, an open-minded investigator could muse, as I did at the end of Chapter 14, that Jesus truly appeared to Peter but not to Mary Magdalene, who rather hallucinated, or vice versa. Or to Paul but not to James. Again, perhaps Jesus really did show himself to the twelve but not to the five hundred, who in their religious enthusiasm took some peculiar formation in the clouds to be a manifestation of the risen Christ. What is the purely historical justification for assuming it must instead have been, in effect, all or nothing? Is it self-evident that the traditions about Jesus’ resurrection are dominoes that all fall down with one explanatory push? Are we in a binary reality with no choice but 1 or 0, Yes or No, True or False? That Jesus showed himself after death to several people hardly entails that he truly appeared to everyone who claimed to have seen him. We certainly have no cause to imagine that all early Christians were immune to the power of suggestion or from seeing things that were not there. History is strewn with people promoting their visions of Jesus, and even the open-minded must deem many of them not to have been born from above. 

Such possibilities are of no relevance to the thoroughgoing skeptic, who believes in nothing beyond this life. What, however, of those who disbelieve Christian doctrine yet believe in life after death and the possibility of communication from the other side? Our world is full of such people. Some of them could suppose that Jesus truly appeared to one, two, or more of his followers but that his tomb was empty because someone clandestinely removed the body. In other words, they could believe in some veridical visions without becoming Christians. 

I am not here promoting any of these hypotheticals. My point is only that the widespread failure to notice certain options, or to ignore them once noticed, to paint with black or white while failing to notice other colors, reveals that doctrinal interests continue to steer debates that often purport to be essentially historical. 

THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY 

Apologists sometimes move quickly from the empty tomb and veridical appearances to the truth of Christianity as they understand it. Along the way they typically insist that it is intellectually rash to dismiss miracles a priori. It is, however, possible—as I know from conversation with others—to believe that Jesus’ body disappeared and that he appeared to some of his followers and yet not to end up in a church. Such people are in the same position as someone who, although not a Tibetan Buddhist, judges from the evidence that Khenpo A Chö’s body vanished, after which he appeared to some of his disciples.61 

It is one thing to decide that something happened, another to offer an explanation. Discussions of “miracles” should not elide this distinction. The prior and logically independent question is always, Did something genuinely inexplicable occur? The second question, Was God responsible?, is necessarily parasitic. It presupposes a positive answer to the first question. The two questions remain different and so can have different answers, unless one somehow imagines, I know not how, that God alone directly authors every mystifying event. 

How then do we move from the mystifying to divine agency? I deem this conundrum far more challenging than any other issue this book has broached. My single goal here, however, is simply to observe that it is not so easy to get large theological conclusions from a few historical judgments.62 Consider Mike Licona’s attempt, in his book on Jesus’ resurrection, to identify criteria for deeming something a miracle and so attributing it to God: 

Since most philosophers and theologians agree that a miracle has occurred when the event has a divine cause, recognizing that an event is a miracle is much like recognizing that something is the product of an intelligent designer… We may recognize that an event is a miracle when the event (1) is extremely unlikely to have occurred given the circumstances and/or natural law and (2) occurs in an environment or context charged with religious significance. In other words, the event occurs in a context where we might expect a god to act. The stronger the context is charged in this direction, the stronger the evidence becomes that we have a miracle on our hands.63 

The problem here is not the first criterion but the second: a miracle occurs “in an environment or context charged with religious significance,” a context “where we might expect a god to act.” Who is this “we,” and from whence have they derived their religious expectations?64 

Consider the Franciscan ascetic, Joseph of Copertino (1603–1663). As outlandish as it may appear—although not as outlandish as the resurrection of a dead man—over one hundred and fifty people, during his canonization process, deposed that they had seen him levitate, sometimes a little bit off the ground, other times several feet into the air.65 The occasions were spaced over a thirtyfive-year period, took place in different cities, and occurred both inside of churches and outside of churches, sometimes in broad daylight. Witnesses included Popes, Cardinals, politicians, military leaders, physicians, and Joseph’s immediate superiors. One of the latter said he had seen Joseph levitate a thousand times. 

Hume, despite all the testimony, would have been serenely unmoved. What, however, if people who are not conservative Roman Catholics find the evidence, which is indeed more than considerable and far more copious than that for Jesus’ resurrection, persuasive? Judging by Licona’s criteria, they would face a series of miracles. Levitation is “extremely unlikely” and seemingly opposed to what we know of “natural law,” and all the alleged events took place in contexts “charged with religious significance.” Yet many of us will more than hesitate to imagine that the Ancient of Days again and again enjoyed lifting Joseph off the ground. My verdict is that, if the saint levitated, the explanation is some ill-understood, rarely-exhibited human ability.66 Those likeminded will find in Joseph proof that one need not attribute to God all inexplicable events occurring within a charged religious context.67 

What then of the resurrection of Jesus? If it would not be irrational to think that Joseph of Copertino levitated although we do not know the cause, or that Khenpo A Chö’s achieved rainbow body although we do not know the cause, why would it be irrational to hold that Jesus left his tomb and appeared to many although we do not know the cause?68 Christians may find the question exceedingly counterintuitive, but that is because they see everything from within their tradition. Matters look different from without.69 

INTERPRETIVE DIVERSITY 

We should not forget, in our ecumenical age, that many do not many belong to a Christian religious tradition. This further complicates matters, because some in other religious camps can accept the empty tomb and veridical appearances and not enter the world of the apologists. I know of some Buddhists, for instance, who teach that Jesus was an emanation of the Buddha Amitabha, who as an act of “skillful means” appeared in a manner appropriate to his first-century Jewish world.70 They underline the continuity between the New Testament’s stress on faith and the Buddhist tradition that one can enter Amitabha’s heaven (Sukhavati or Dewachen) by faith alone. They have no problem with the idea that Jesus achieved, in their language, rainbow body. 

Then there is the fascinating case of the Jewish rabbi, Pinchas Lapide.71 Although he believed that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead, Lapide was not a Christian but an orthodox Jew. He taught that Jesus is the savior of the Gentile churches but not the Messiah of Israel. Lapide was, then, able to accept the empty tomb, veridical appearances, and a supernatural explanation for them and yet deny most of the large Christological claims Christians have traditionally made.72 

Some religious traditions, of course, are dead set against Jesus’ resurrection. Muslims traditionally deny it because they deny that he died. My contention here, however, is only this: When we argue from historical effects to transcendent cause, we need not end up in the same place. We can, in other words, concur that something has broken the boundaries of everyday experience without agreeing on the transcendent cause or the religious meaning of that something.73 

Consider an analogy. Many people have seen mysterious lights and objects in the sky. The vast majority of sightings surely have prosaic explanations. But those who hold that a small percentage do not, that some are truly baffling and lie beyond current scientific knowledge, offer various explanations: galactic explorers à la Star Trek, time travelers from our future, visitors from other dimensions, psychic projections akin to Tibetan Tulpas, and more. The proponents of these competing theories may be at one in the data they accept and at one in rejecting mundane, reductionistic accounts; yet they are not, on that account, at one when it comes to interpretation.

NATURAL THEOLOGY TO THE RESCUE? 

The lesson of the previous section is that history has its limits, even history that is open to the miraculous or supernatural. That, however, is scarcely the end of the matter, because history is not all there is. One can gather the historical data or likely facts and drop them into the more expansive arenas of philosophy and theology, in the hope that additional knowledge will enable us to sort through the competing alternatives, including competing religious traditions. 

The boldest attempt to do this comes from Richard Swinburne.74 Before introducing the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, he sets the stage by establishing “general background evidence.” This involves, among other things, arguing for the existence of a personal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God, a deity we might expect to incarnate as a human being in order to accomplish reconciliation, identify with human suffering, and teach people, through word and deed, how to live. Swinburne acknowledges that he needs the Christian tradition in order to come up with all this, but he insists that, while that tradition has given him his theory in hindsight, the evidence supports it: it is vastly more probable than all competing theses. 

This is not the place to engage Swinburne’s project at length. I can only record my dissent. I demur not because I am a lame relativist or a fideist who despises natural theology. My problem rather is that I do not think that rational reflection can take us so far down the road to doctrinal truth. In other words, he has not persuaded me. Although I would like to think, and often do, that certain cosmological and teleological lines of reasoning, as well as certain religious experiences, make some sort of divinity intellectually credible, I fail to see how purely rational thought can arrive at the overwhelming probability of the specifically Christian God to the exclusion of all else. In addition, while I am more than inclined to think that we have decent empirical reasons for believing in the reality of some metanormal events and even some sort of an afterlife, this does not establish that the likely historical facts catalogued at the beginning of this chapter leave every informed nonChristian without rational alternative. 

To be sure, belief in a life beyond this one as well as assent to some metanormal events and a divinity of some sort will make one far more open-minded about Jesus’ resurrection than the tenets of an all-out atheist or hard-boiled materialist. Such beliefs constitute what Swinburne calls “background evidence” and effectively up the odds.75 Still, my judgment is that the historical evidence, even when combined with these additional considerations, does not demand the orthodox Christian verdict. 

Others who approach our subject with different “background evidence” than mine will judge even this undogmatic conclusion to be too friendly to Christianity. Many intransigent atheists view the odds against Jesus’ resurrection as sufficiently massive as to be insurmountable. If one is robustly confident that the Christian God does not exist, or that the antecedent likelihood of any miracle is less than miniscule, one will interpret the data accordingly.76 

BAYES’ THEOREM TO THE RESCUE?77 

Some may think the previous paragraphs rather vague. They contain expressions—“inclined to think,” “more open,” “up the odds”—that are less than precise. Can we not do better than this? 

Swinburne believes so. He turns the propositional evidence for Jesus’ resurrection into numbers and then runs them through Bayes’ theorem.78 The result is that the probability of Jesus’ resurrection turns out to be roughly 97/100. 

Swinburne is not the only one to employ Bayes’ theorem when handling our topic. Timothy and Lydia McGrew have run the numbers and come up with even better odds: .9999.79 Jake O’Connell, eschewing the issue of the initial probability of Jesus’ resurrection, confines himself to odds of the specific evidence (the “factors”).80 His resulting ratio is 1 quadrillion to one, granted that the gospels are “generally reliable.” 

Prudence advises that I say little about all this, for I am not trained in the mathematics of probability. My instinct, however, is to suppose that something must be amiss. History is too complex, too messy, too unpredictable, too full of highly improbable events for numerical estimates to capture its episodes.81 Maybe attending to the flux that is history with Bayes’ theorem is like measuring beauty with a thermometer, or like evaluating education with quantified outcomes assessment: it is a futile attempt to calculate what cannot be calculated. One doubts that historical judgments are numbers made manifest. That many “philosophers have…despaired of translating everything into observational and logico-mathematical terms”82 should give us pause. So too the circumstance that, even with a million statistics to hand, the next football game has to be played for the winner to be known. 

While writing this book, moreover, my mind has been inconstant. I have felt more assured about some matters one day, less assured the next. Translating my tentative conclusions into numbers would hide the hesitation and recurrent vacillations behind them and introduce an objectivity foreign to my sentences. 

I may, to be sure, be wrong about all this. Perhaps my doubt about the utility of Bayes’ theorem is self-serving, a mask for stubborn habit. I have done historical work for decades without ever attempting to convert my judgments into quantities. Perhaps I am reluctant to learn new tricks. 

I nonetheless wish, before heading for the final chapter, to hazard a few critical comments. The first is this. Output is a function of input, and Bayes’ theorem does nothing to help us with what numbers we should plug into its equation. This is why, in the hands of Stephen Unwin, the theorem shows us that theism is true whereas, in the hands of Sean Carroll, it shows us that theism is false.83 The same circumstance explains why Richard Carrier can utilize Bayes’ theorem to establish, with a high degree of probability, that Jesus never existed whereas the McGrews can utilize it to show, with a high degree of probability, that he rose from the dead.84

Beyond this major snag—that the disagreements between us when we work without Bayes’ theorem accompany us when we work with it—the McGrews and O’Connell, in their attempts to uphold Jesus’ resurrection, assume or defend views that impair their arguments. O’Connell, in order to arrive at odds of a quadrillion to one in favor of Jesus’ resurrection, needs to establish that the gospels are “generally reliable.” This task involves defending the historicity of the resurrection of saints in Mt. 27:51b-53 and ironing out even minor discrepancies among the gospels. Not only will his argument sway none save those already swayed, but one is puzzled as to why anyone who swallows the camel of Mt. 27:51b-53, with its resurrection of many, should strain at the gnat of Mk 16:1-8, with its resurrection of one. Indeed, the gospels are so steadfastly factual for O’Connell that one wonders why he needs anything more. If all the relevant texts are literally true down to their details, the orthodox conclusion would seem to be inevitable.85 

As for the McGrews, they presume the detailed facticity of Lk. 24:36-43 (where the risen Jesus eats fish) and Jn 20:24-29 (where Jesus shows himself to doubting Thomas), narratives whose historicity many—including everyone who disbeliefs in the resurrection of Jesus—query. Their discussion of the empty tomb overlooks the best skeptical alternative, namely, theft. And their judgment, after a page and a half of discussion, that “the Bayes factor for the conversion of Paul in favor of the resurrection” is “at least 103 ” leaves this reader utterly nonplussed.86 

Perhaps it would be instructive were someone to apply Bayes’ theorem to other astounding religious claims. What would happen were a Tibetan Buddhist to run the numbers for this or that master achieving rainbow body? Or what would a Bayesian analysis in the hands of a traditional Catholic tell us about the lights at Zeitoun, or the miracle of the sun at Fatima? I cannot begin to guess what such exercises might yield, or even how they might be conducted. But the lack of a comparative yardstick augments my hesitation regarding the efficacy of Bayesian analyses of Jesus’ resurrection.87

Chapter 18. Overreach and Modest Results

Although Henry Ford was reckless to assert that history is bunk, sober experience teaches us that it often fails to give us what we want or think we need. We ask and do not receive. We knock and the door is not opened. Time and again, the past keeps its secrets. Most of what happened long ago is beyond recovery, irretrievably lost. 

How then does it stand with Jesus’ resurrection? The purely historical evidence is not, on my view, so good as to make disbelief unreasonable, and it is not so bad as to make faith untenable. I like the formulation of James Anthony Froude, the nineteenth-century essayist and historian: “Of evidence for the resurrection in the common sense of the word there may be enough to show that something extraordinary occurred; but not enough…to produce any absolute and unhesitating conviction; and inasmuch as the resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be something far different from that suspended judgment in which history alone would leave us.”1 To claim more than this is to claim too much. 

Lawrence Shapiro imagines otherwise. He is confident that the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is “not even a teensy bit better than the evidence that Jesus walked the Americas.”2 These are silly words, nothing more than jejune rhetoric. Since, however, the vast majority of my readers are likely to be Christians of some stripe, let me focus, as I approach the end of this book, not on the intemperance of some skeptics but on the immoderation of some apologists. 

“BEYOND THE POSSIBILITY OF A REASONABLE DOUBT” 

The following quotations come from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries: 

• Isaac Barrow: “No matter of fact ever had, or well could have in any considerable respect, a more valid and certain proof…to refuse it is in effect to decline all proof by testimony, to renounce all certainty in human affairs, to remove the grounds of proceeding securely in any business, or administration of justice; to impeach all history of fabulousness, to charge all mankind with insufficiency, or extreme infidelity.”3 

• Humphry Ditton: “There is such an Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as actually induces an Obligation on all Men, to whom that Evidence is fairly proposed, and who are capable of arguing upon it after a due and regular Manner, to give their Assent to it as a certain Truth”; the facts lay “an indispensable Obligation on rational Creatures to give their Assent to it [the resurrection] as real Truth.”4 

• Gilbert West: “never was there a Fact more fully proved than the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”5 

• Samuel Horsley: “in this singular instance, if in any, the evidence of testimony emulates the certainty of mathematical demonstration.”6 

• William M. Hetherington: Jesus’ resurrection “is established beyond the possibility of a reasonable doubt. No man who believes that human testimony can establish any fact at all, is at liberty to cast doubt or discredit on that fact, without at the same time, and far more reasonably, doubting every fact that history has ever recorded,—nay, every fact that he himself has not witnessed,—and limiting his belief within the very narrow boundaries of his own sentient perceptions.7 

• B. F. Westcott: “Taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historical incident better or more variously supported than the resurrection of Christ.”8 

• Doremus Hays: “Judged by its results, the resurrection may be said to be the most certain fact in history.”9 

This list is long enough to establish that we have here a tradition. It is the rhetorical convention of avowing that the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is as good as it could be, indeed better than the evidence for any other event in history. 

Something has gone wrong here. The hyperbolic lines just quoted are no more credible than the over-the-top and out-of-date avowal that “there is no book in the world whose author can be more plainly demonstrated than that of the Pentateuch.”10 No one can truly believe that Jesus’ resurrection is better attested than Marco Polo’s journey to Asia or Cortés’ conquest of Mexico. The longing to combat unbelief on its own rational turf has, obviously and regrettably, moved some Christian warriors to lose good sense and to claim far more than the evidence warrants. Were Barrow and the rest right, unbelievers in Jesus’ resurrection would have to be, if not morons, then either victims of ignorance or obdurate beyond all reason, which is absurd. Denying that God raised Jesus from the dead is not like denying that the daytime sky, when unobscured, is blue. 

“VIRTUALLY CERTAIN” 

The old tradition lives on, although today’s iterations are usually less exorbitant. Here is Michael Green: “the evidence in favor of this astonishing fact [Jesus’ resurrection] is overwhelming.”11 Henry F. Schaefer III is of the same mind: “that Jesus rose from the dead…is one of the best attested facts of ancient history.”12 For Stephen Davis, “the alternative theories that have been proposed are not only weaker but far weaker at explaining the available historical evidence than the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead. That is, there is a patch of first-century history that makes sense from a Christian perspective but not from a naturalist’s perspective.”13 Grant Osborne concurs: “A genuine resurrection event supplies the best explanation for why we have the creed of a resurrection hope early on, as well as the accounts of the empty tomb and the appearances.”14 

N. T. Wright is another advocate of the view that all unorthodox interpretations are untethered to the data. He has written that, “though mathematical-style proof is impossible,” the literal resurrection of Jesus “provides far and away the best explanation” for the preponderance of the data.15 While rightly recognizing that there is no neutral standpoint, that how we interpret the data depends on our worldview,16 Wright nevertheless urges that the evidence for the literal resurrection of Jesus by Israel’s God is so strong that it suffices to “lure skeptics forward”17 and indeed constitutes “a historical challenge for other explanations, other worldviews.”18 That Jesus’ corpse was gone and that people saw him thereafter are “virtually certain,” being as probable “as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.”19 Does Wright mean to imply that Christians of conventional conviction are, once all the arguments sorted out, of greater cerebral endowment than everyone else, or at least better at using what brains they have? Jesus’ tomb was empty, and the disciples saw him alive after the crucifixion. These are the facts. They are sufficient to explain Easter faith. They are also necessary: the data belie all competing theories.20

The previous chapter and indeed this book in its entirety explain my inability to concur. I would be delighted were my more conservative friends to persuade me that they have made their case, that logical scrupulosity yields their belief, that to disagree means committing a rationcinative blunder. I remain, however, unconverted. They have more optimism, more faith in historical reason and in our sources than I can muster. The evidence, which is not all on one side, does not demand their verdict.21 There is no coercive necessity here, and nothing absurd or self-contradictory in denying that Jesus rose from the dead. The situation is such that those who disbelieve in all purported miracles can, and typically do, disbelieve the resurrection of Jesus after examining the evidence,22 just as traditional Christians can, and typically do, retain their beliefs after scrutinizing every relevant argument.23 

Welcome or not, ostensible encounters with the newly departed are not uncommon, and people often perceive apparitions not as ghostly shades but as solid, as wholly real. Furthermore, group visions appear in the religious and parapsychological records. What then restrains skeptics, who have less confidence in the historicity of the biblical reports than do the orthodox, from regarding the resurrection appearances, “transphysicality” and all, as not being beyond compare? Mix in the pre-Easter eschatological expectations of the disciples, the theft of Jesus’ body, and a knowledge of how messianic movements, such as Chabad in our own day, can become theologically innovative in the light of unexpected events and, one might claim, there it is. 

Apologists will reflexively protest, with justice, that such an explanation demands an extraordinary confluence of remarkable circumstances. As observed in the previous chapter, however, history is not untainted by the highly improbable. On the contrary, the world, being chaotic, is full of surprises. More than that, the supernatural hypothesis is, a skeptic will retort, no better off, for it too is hardly less than extraordinary. 

HISTORICAL OBSTACLES

 The scanty, truncated nature of the evidence as well as the limitations of our historical-critical tools plague all our endeavors. That something happened does not entail our ability to show it happened,24 and that something did not happen hardly entails our ability to show it did not happen. I emphasize this assertion, obvious and trite, because too many expect too much from historians. 

Some detractors of the faith bend the flexible indicia and then confidently affirm that there was no empty tomb and that the visions were subjective or legendary, so Jesus’ resurrection is a fantasy. Their opponents, to the contrary, strive vigorously to verify their faith, and they can convince themselves that robust probability is on their side. Both those actuated by doubt and those commending faith go through the argumentative motions and then announce that all the evidence is on their side. These consanguineous parties ironically validate each other with their common conviction that lucid proof, or something in its vicinity, should be in the offing, or at least that one and only one inference best accounts for the data. 

Yet it is possible, in theory, that Jesus vacated his tomb and showed himself to his followers and that the historical evidence for this is Janus-faced. It is equally possible that, when Jesus died, he died for good, that the appearances were altogether illusory, that his grave remained forever full, and that the historical evidence for this is nowhere near perfect. The pigs either ran over the cliff or they not (Mk 5:1-20), yet one fails to see how one could make much of a strong historical case for either possibility. 

We are, to be sure, in a better position with regard to Jesus’ resurrection than with the pigs, because we have more data. This allows us to narrow our choices and deem some scenarios more likely than others. Nonetheless, there are, as I have emphasized throughout these pages, no incontrovertible, tsunamical arguments that sweep all before their path. It is not manifest that “God raised Jesus from the dead” is, if one is trying to call a fair race, the clear winner going away, with the best skeptical competition a furlong behind. The data constrain us by limiting possibilities, not by excluding all possibilities save one. 

Recall once more the weeks, months, and years following the crucifixion. We have only fleeting glimpses of what transpired. What, for instance, do we really know, let us say, about the experience of James? First Corinthians 15:7 says that he saw the risen Jesus. And that is it. What Jesus said, if anything, or where the encounter occurred, or what time of day or night it happened, or how James responded, or what state his mind was in, or what he might have been expecting,25 or how the encounter began, or how it ended, or how long it lasted, or what he soon thereafter shared with others of his experience, or whether his recall was accurate or embellished—of all this we are wholly, utterly, totally ignorant. We have no clue, which is why every question we raise goes unanswered. Again, what did Jesus look like? Was he the glorious Son of man at God’s right hand (cf. Acts 7:56; Rev. 1:13-16), or an ordinary person who could be mistaken for someone else (Jn 20:14-15)? 

When apologists avow that Jesus appeared to James, what precisely, given all the unknowns, is the content of their assertion? “He appeared to James” is like a thesis statement without the rest of the essay: elucidation and support are lacking. We are, regrettably, scarcely better off when it comes to the appearance to the five hundred or the appearance to Peter. How can such meager data obliterate a worldview or even dent it? 

THE MINIMAL FACTS 

The “minimal facts approach,” associated with Habermas and Licona, attempts to circumvent this problem by focusing on what we can reasonably know. While the strategy makes sense in principle, and while I do not dispute any of their “minimal facts” or “historical bedrock,”26 I remain far less sanguine than they about what follows. This is primarily because, as the previous chapter details, I doubt the power of the relevant facts to command a single inference that best explains everything.27 The data are not infinitely malleable, but they are malleable; and the skeptical scenario that I unfurl there, as advocatus diaboli, accepts that Jesus was crucified, that some of his followers believed he had later appeared to them, that Paul had a vision of Jesus that converted him to the cause, that James the brother of Jesus also reported seeing him, and even that Jesus’ tomb was empty. Yet it is a skeptical scenario for all that.28 

Beyond this disagreement over the implications of the extant evidence, I recall Donald Rumsfeld’s oft-discussed remark, that there are not only known knowns and known unknowns but also unknown unknowns. Our patchy, threadbare sources represent only one point of view. How do we know that, if we had a first-hand account from Joseph of Arimathea or some other member of the Sanhedrin, or entries from the diary of Peter or of James, there would be no jaw-dropping surprises? 

This is not a vacuous “what if” question. If one looks inside the front cover of the Book of Mormon, at the signed testimony of the three witnesses, and at the signed testimony of the eight witnesses, it all seems, on its face, highly evidential—until one reads some non-Mormon sources. We have nothing comparable for Christian origins. First Corinthians 15:3-8 and the rest are the verbal vestiges of a series of complex historical episodes to which we have no direct access. We can only wonder what the faithful omitted by oversight and forgot by choice.29 Ninety-nine percent of what happened in the first few weeks after Easter has fallen into the black hole of history, vanishing forever from the known universe. 

When there are too many unknowns, one cannot solve an equation; and if, from a jigsaw puzzle of five hundred pieces, only thirty survive, we may be unable to ascertain the original picture. It is the same with Jesus’ resurrection. No single hypothesis best explains the likely facts because those facts are too few and too thin, so that too much of crucial importance remains unknown. History supplies us with limited building materials, and we cannot finish the building. This is why the apologists have failed to dispatch every skeptical scenario without hope of recovery. Too often, as with the appearance to James, we are in uncharted territory. Maps require data. 

Einstein wrote: 

In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism…30 

What Einstein says about subatomic physics holds equally for much of history, including the birth of belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Over the gulf of years, we see in a mirror dimly. The data are mercurial, there remain multiple imponderables, and our theories are underdetermined. We cannot open the case and check the facts. 

WORLDVIEWS 

We confront not only the arduous problem of establishing the likely facts but also the problem of interpretation. According to Oliver Laas, “given two competing explanatory hypotheses of evidence, the one that is more in line with our understanding of how things typically are in the world is more plausible.”31 This seems sensible. But who decides “how things typically are”? Those of us who are have witnessed what we deem to be miracles or the metanormal may believe that our secular consensual reality—canonical materialism—is a flawed construct that perdures only because its promulgators ignore the data that contradict it. So even when our goal is to appeal to “canons of facticity that transcend the personal and subjective,”32 it is inescapable that plausibility is in the eye of the beholder. What is maximally coherent for one may be less coherent for others. 

Our historical data are perhaps a bit like an undetermined quantum state. It takes an observer to collapse the wave function. Similarly, with regard to Jesus’ resurrection, the observer—who is never disinterested—resolves the data, that is, establishes them and interprets them in accord with his or her presuppositions, which means in accord with a worldview.33 Our ideologies are integrating patterns that arrange the data so that they look one way rather than another. This is one reason that arguments for and against Jesus’ resurrection rarely disturb the inertia of prejudice. The data may constrain us, but we construe the data. 

“Modern logic,” in the words of F. C. S. Schiller, “has made it plain that single facts can never be ‘proved’ except by their coherence in a system.”34 It accords with this that evaluation of the resurrection cannot be isolated from one’s other beliefs. Such evaluation is rather a configural judgment, where the interpretation of one item depends on the interpretation of others. That is, the resurrection is not a topic unto itself but a part that cannot be evaluated apart from some larger whole. Indeed, we cannot evaluate it independently of our evaluation of the nature of the world as a whole. Easter sits in the middle of “a controversy concerning the nature of reality at large.”35 As G. F. Woods wrote, “the weighing of historical evidence is affected by the metaphysical presuppositions of those who weigh the evidence. There are no metaphysically neutral scales.”36 Just as a coherent moral judgment cannot be rendered without reference to a larger moral system or vision, so a verdict about Jesus’ resurrection cannot be made apart from one’s worldview.37 There is no “Archimedean objectivism,”38 and “rationality is always situated rationality.”39 When we look, our eyes are somewhere. 

My verdict is that trying to obtain a theological proposition from history as such, including the history immediately following Jesus’ death, is like trying to get mind from matter. Both endeavors are alchemical dreams. They involve category errors deriving, respectively, from Enlightenment rationalism and modern materialism. “God raised Jesus from the dead” is a frame-specific Christian doctrine, not a free-floating, historical-critical conclusion. Even if we can, as I believe, muster stout arguments for and against this or that worldview, the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection does not in itself constitute such an argument. 

THE VINDICATION OF JESUS AND THE VINDICATION OF CHRISTIANITY 

I wrap up this final chapter with a question. What follows if, despite my argument to the contrary, one becomes convinced that the apologists have established, on historical grounds, and with a high degree of probability, that Jesus came to life again and showed himself to his disciples? 

This was Barrow’s answer: 

Jesus’ resurrection corroborates faith in us concerning all the doctrines of our religion; for that by it the truth of all our Lord’s declarations concerning his own person, his offices, his power, his precepts and his promises, (to the highest pitch of conviction and satisfaction,) was assured; it being hardly possible that any miracle could be greater in itself for confirmation of the whole, or more proper for ascertaining the parts of our religion.”40 

William Milligan was more succinct: Jesus’ resurrection helps “to convince us that Christianity is from God.”41 Apologists for the resurrection regularly make or imply some such a claim. They gaze down the well of history and construe the vindication of Jesus in the first century as the vindication of their own religion in the here and now. 

Barrow does not itemize “all the doctrines of our religion,” nor does Milligan define “Christianity.” As soon as one attempts those things, however, the difficulty appears. Milligan and Barrow were both Anglicans, and they could hardly have intended to imply that Jesus’ resurrection underwrites “all the doctrines” of Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. Yet the resurrection, considered by itself, does nothing to establish the legitimacy of one branch of Christendom over against the others. 

Once aware of this difficulty, one might fall back on the notion of a doctrinal essence, perhaps along the lines of C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. 42 That is, Jesus’ resurrection vindicates the principal Christian ideas, or what some call “the Great Tradition.” Yet even were it possible to distill a religion’s quintessence—many will be dubious—belief in Jesus’ resurrection does far less work than one might anticipate. In addition to failing to help us decide whether to be Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, or whatnot, it does not, in and of itself, tell us what books belong in the canon, or what doctrine of atonement we should back, or whether Athanasius was closer to the truth than Arius, or whether we should hope for the salvation of all, or whether iconoclasts or their opponents had God’s approval, or whether we should recite the Filioque, or whether Martin Luther was right about faith and works, or whether one should baptize infants, or whether divine revelation is in the sacred text or in the history behind it. And so it goes. The vindication of Jesus is the vindication of Jesus, not a proleptic stamp of approval of theologians and doctrines that showed up later. 

Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and traditional Protestants need Jesus to have risen from the dead because, if he did not, their theology falls to the ground. It does not, however, work the other way around. If God vindicated Jesus, that does not tell us which (if any) of his followers God authorizes, or which of their beliefs (if any) God sanctions. Both Peter and Paul believed in Jesus’ resurrection, and Jesus appeared to both men. Yet, as Galatians 2 embarrassingly reveals, the two disagreed on an important matter.43 The history of Jesus and the history of his followers are not the same thing, so we cannot move, without further ado, from divine approval of the former to divine approval of the latter. 

Maybe, then, we should be content to hold that Jesus’ resurrection vindicates him, or that it at least shows, in the words of Gary Habermas, that “Jesus’ teachings were true.”44 In other words, the resurrection is God’s imprimatur, the divine nihil obstat for Jesus’ speech. Here too, regrettably, matters are not so simple. 

Habermas’ claim involves hidden assumptions, including his admiration for and personal commitment to Jesus.45 He would not draw the same inference regarding other figures. Has anyone ever urged that the resurrections in John 11 and Mt. 27:51-53 imply that whatever Lazarus and “the holy ones” taught was true? William Alger observed: “If a man should say, God is falsehood and hatred, and in evidence of his declaration should make a whole cemetery disembogue its dead alive…would his wonderful performance prove his horrible doctrine? Why, or how, then, would a similar feat prove the opposition doctrine?”46 In Revelation 13, one of the heads of the beast from the sea receives a mortal blow but then comes back to life, and in Jn 5:29 the wicked rise from the dead. Returning from the dead cannot, in and of itself, and without qualification, mean divine vindication. Additional factors must be relevant.

THE IDENTITY OF “JESUS” AND THE IDENTITY OF “GOD” 

There is another issue. Since the Enlightenment, the idea of “Jesus’ teachings” has not been a straightforward affair, a matter on which all agree. Does Habermas refer to everything that the New Testament attributes to Jesus—this would include Mt. 3:15 and 28:18-20 and much else that he almost certainly never said—or rather to a critical reconstruction of what Jesus of Nazareth likely taught, which might include some lines from extra-canonical sources? In the latter case, whose reconstruction should we adopt? Does “Jesus’ teaching” include the discourses in John’s Gospel? Or does Habermas have in mind only the main themes of Jesus’ proclamation as the synoptics report them? Does Habermas include Mk 12:36-37, which wrongly ascribes Psalm 110 to King David, or Mk 2:26, which confuses the priest Ahimelech with the high priest Abiathar, or Mt. 10:23 and Mk 9:1, which declare, erroneously in retrospect, that the eschatological consummation is not far off?47 

Even if one has answers to all these questions, the task of interpreting “Jesus’ teaching” remains, and anyone acquainted with exegetical history will know that this is the hardest work of all. In short, “Jesus’ teaching” is not a self-evident given. It is instead something one must construct, defend, and interpret. 

And there are additional problems. If one decides that “God raised Jesus from the dead,” who exactly is the subject of this sentence? Is it the anthropomorphic deity of Gen. 1:27 (“God created adam in his image”) or the ineffable, supra-essential divinity of Pseudo-Dionysius? Is it the God of exclusivist fundamentalists or the God of modern liberal pluralists? Is it the God of Ezekiel 18 and Matthew 5, who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and sends rain on the just and the unjust, or is it the God of Joshua and 2 Kings 2, who commands the slaughter of non-combatants and allows bears to maul children for teasing a bald man?48 

The answers to these questions are here unimportant. What matters is that we must ask them. While “God raised Jesus from the dead” may cancel some options—atheism, for instance—it leaves many others open. Indeed, the inexplicable disappearance of Jesus’ body and his postmortem appearances do not, in and of themselves, even tell us what religion we should adopt. As observed in the previous chapter, some Buddhists explain what happened to Jesus in terms of their tradition. The same holds for some Hindus. 

I am not here engaging in sophistry or picayune debate but instead seeking to make a serious theological point, which is this. Neither “Jesus rose from the dead” nor even “God raised Jesus from the dead” is, in naked isolation, a foundationalist premise from which one can deduce a series of doctrinal propositions.49 The sentence has meaning only within this or that wider religious or philosophical framework, and one cannot unfold its implications except, to recall Quine, within some web of belief.50 Just as “God raised Jesus from the dead” is not a historically determined, epistemically independent fact, it is also not a stand-alone theological foundation. It does little work in isolation. It is not a deus ex machina that resolves historical, exegetical, theological, and philosophical puzzles. It lives or dies only with the support of other beliefs, and its sense and significance derive from the interpreter’s universe of meaning.

Coda

Methinks it may consist with all due deference to the greatest of human understandings, to suppose them ignorant of many things, which are not suited in their faculties, or lie out of their reach. —George Berkeley 

There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, and discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger… The inexplicable, the mystery…remains. —William James 

Once upon a time, I naively thought of critical history as almost unbounded in scope. Surely its never-ending success story would take in everything. Surely The Truth would come to me served on a historical-critical platter. 

I have since grown up, put aside my narcissistic conceit, and learned that historians are not the mediators of all truth. The history department does not a university make, and historical study of the Bible does not a theology make. 

If historians could, on their own, cross the last frontiers of understanding with regard to Jesus’ resurrection, we would not need the assistance of laborers in other disciplines. But it is not so. When the mundane historical work is done, the results are less than prodigious. Crucial questions elude us. The implications of our work are equivocal. 

Perhaps, however, I may be permitted to observe, here at the end, that the frustrating failure of historical investigation to hand us theological conclusions has its analogue in the canonical accounts of the resurrection. Those who behold Jesus with their own eyes do not always know him for who he is. There are doubters among the eleven in Mt. 28:17. The pilgrims on the Emmaus road do not, in Lk. 24:30-31, recognize the Messiah as they stroll and converse with him. In Jn 20:11-18, only after a while does Mary realize that the man standing before her is not a gardener but her rabbi. And in Acts 9:7, Paul alone sees Jesus while his companions do not. (And presumably they do not convert or we would hear about it). These stories, in which people see but do not see, distinguish ordinary observation from religious insight. Such insight, it seems to be implied, involves more than everyday perception and logical analysis. Although Paul, as a persecutor of Christians, knew their claims about Jesus and probably even some of their apologetical arguments, he did not believe for himself until something overwhelming flipped him. God is no more in the argument than in the earthquake. God is in the experience. 

Sight is not insight; knowledge is a function of being; and religious knowledge must be a function of religious being. Or as the beatitude has it: the pure in heart see God.1  That is an epistemological statement, and it implies that we require more than critical study if we are to find what may lie beyond historical finitude.2 

It is, then, not so surprising that most who believe in Jesus’ resurrection, however exactly they understand it, have as little need for modern historical criticism as birds have for ornithology. When Christians, on Easter Sunday, greet each other with the acclamation, “Christ is risen,” the expected answer, “Christ is risen, indeed!,” is not a statement about investigative results. People do not go to church because they have been thinking like Hercule Poirot. 

Harvey Cox once rightly protested against a “detective-novel approach” to and understanding of the resurrection.3 Although ignorance should not be the mother of devotion, religious life and experience are not the products of a rational solution to a whodunit. They rather involve realms of human experience and conviction that cannot depend on or be undone by the sorts of historical doubts, probabilities, and conjectures with which the previous pages have concerned themselves. There is no religion within the limits of history alone, just as there is no religion within the limits of reason alone. For myself, all I have to do is look up at the night sky or look into the face of my neighbor, and then I know that there is more to life and faith than this.