Freshly Updated Jesus Resurrection Debate

Today I am going to tell you why I don’t buy the resurrection tales in the Gospels, of Jesus physically rising again from the grave.

I begin with a different tale. In 520 AD an anonymous monk recorded the life of St. Genevieve, who had died only 10 years before that. In his account, he describes how, when she ordered a cursed tree cut down, monsters sprang from it and breathed a fatal stench on many men for hours, while she was sailing, eleven ships capsized, but at her prayers they were righted again spontaneously. She cast out demons, calmed storms, created water and oil from nothing before astonished crowds, healed the blind and the lame, and several who stole from her actually went blind instead.[i]

No one wrote anything to contradict or challenge these claims, and they were written very near the time the events supposedly happened– by a religious man whom we suppose regarded lying to be a sin. Yet, do we believe any of it? Not really, and we shouldn’t.

But, we should try to be more specific in our reasons, and not rely solely on our common sense impressions. There are specific reasons to disbelieve the story of Genevieve, and they are the same reasons we have to doubt the gospel accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus. The parallel is clear: the Gospels were written no sooner to the death of Jesus than the Genevieve account to her death. Like that account, the Gospels were also originally anonymous – the names now attached to them were added by speculation and oral tradition half a century after they were written. Both contain fabulous miracles supposedly witnessed by numerous people. Both are a sacred account of a holy person regarded as representing a moral and divine ideal.

Christian apologist Douglas Geivett in his book, The Evidential Value of Miracles declared that the evidence for the physical resurrection of Jesus meets, and I quote, “the highest standards of historical inquiry” and “if one takes the historian’s own criteria for assessing the historicity of ancient events, the resurrection passes muster as a historically well-attested event of the ancient world.” As well attested, he says, as Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 B.C.

Let’s take a look at Caesar’s crossing.

First of all, we have Caesar’s own word on the subject. The Civil War was written by Caesar himself and one of his generals who was definitely an eye-witness. In contrast we do not have anything written by Jesus and we do not know for certain the name of any authors of any of the accounts of his physical resurrection.

Second, we have many of Caesar’s enemies, including Cicero, a contemporary of the event, reporting the crossing; whereas we have no hostile or even neutral records of the resurrection until over a hundred years after the event.

Third, we have a number of inscriptions and coins produced soon after the Republican Civil War related to the Rubicon crossing; including mentions of battles and conscriptions, which form an almost continuous chain of evidence for Caesar’s entire march. On the other hand we have absolutely no physical evidence of any kind in the case of the resurrection.

Fourth, we have the story of the “Rubicon Crossing” in almost every historian of the period, including the most prominent scholars of the age.[ii] Moreover, these scholars have a measure of proven reliability since a great many of their reports on other matters have been confirmed in material evidence and in other sources. In addition, they all quote and name many different sources, showing a wide reading of the witnesses and documents, and they show a regular desire to critically examine claims for which there is any dispute. Compare this with the resurrection: we have not even a single historian mentioning the event until the 3rd and 4th centuries, and then only by Christian historians. And those few people who do mention it within a century of the event, none of them show any wide reading, never cite any other sources, show no sign of a skilled or critical examination of conflicting claims, have no other literature or scholarship to their credit that we can test for their skill and accuracy, and are completely unknown, and have an overtly declared bias toward persuasion and conversion.

Fifth, and most importantly: the history of Rome could not have proceeded as it did had Caesar not physically moved an army into Italy. On the other hand, all that is needed to explain the rise of Christianity is a belief a belief that the resurrection happened.&n

bsp; There is nothing that an actual resurrection would have caused that could not have been caused by a mere belief in that resurrection. Thus, an actual resurrection is not necessary to explain all subsequent history, unlike Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon.

It should be clear that we have many reasons to believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, all of which are lacking in the case of the resurrection. In fact, when we compare all 5 points, we see that in 4 of the 5 proofs of an event’s historicity, the resurrection has NO evidence at all, and in the one proof that it does have, it has not the best, but the very worst kind of evidence — a handful of biased, uncritical, unscholarly, unknown, second-hand witnesses. This is not a historically well-attested event, and it does NOT meet the highest standards of evidence.

But, reasons to be skeptical do not stop there. We must consider the setting in which these stores spread.

This was an age where magic, ghosts, demons and gods were everywhere and almost never doubted. By the estimates of William Harris, author of Ancient Literacy, only 20% of the population could read anything at all, and fewer than 10% could read well, and far fewer still had any access to books. The result was that the masses had no understanding of science or critical thought. They were neither equipped nor skilled nor even interested in challenging an inspiring story, especially a story like that of the Gospels: Utopian, wonderful, critical of upper class society — even more a story that, if believed, secured eternal life. People back then based their trust on the display of sincerity by the storyteller, by his ability to impress them with a show, and by the potential rewards his story had to offer.[iii] At the same time, doubters didn’t care to waste the time or money debunking yet another crazy cult, of which there were hundreds then. And so it should not surprise us that we have no writings by anyone hostile to Christianity until a century after it began – not even slanders or lies. Clearly, no doubter cared to check or even challenge the story in print until it was too late to investigate the facts.[iv]

In today’s society, the claim or belief that another person is resurrected from the dead (and not in the near-death sense), is absolutely absurd. The claim that a person is resurrected was not absurd for this society.

To use some examples within the New Testament itself: An example in Mark 6:14-17 that is echoed in Matthew and Luke says, “King Herod heard about this, for Jesus’ name had become well known.

Some were saying, “John the Baptist has been raised from the dead, and that is why miraculous powers are at work in him.” Others said, “He is Elijah.” And still others claimed, “He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of long ago.” But when Herod heard this, he said, “John, the man I beheaded, has been raised from the dead!” For Herod himself had given orders to have John arrested, and he had him bound and put in prison.”

Apparently, resurrection was a common explanation that was accepted at that time – even by Kings! Herod apparently thought that Jesus was John, even though John had just recently died and the people must have known what he looked like. That is huge! There isnt any concern over checking whether Elijahs tomb was empty, or if Johns head had vanished these were not things that crossed into these peoples minds. We would think of it, but they wouldnt. These are just some of the reasons why we cannot trust the extraordinary reports from that time without excellent evidence, which we do not have in the case of the physical resurrection of Jesus.

Even so, it is often said in objection that we can trust the Gospels more than we normally would because they were based on the reports of eye-witnesses of the event who were willing to die for their belief in the physical resurrection, for surely, no one would die for a lie.

There are two key reasons why this argument sounds great in sermons, but doesn’t hold water under rational scrutiny.

First, it is based on nothing in the New Testament itself, or on any reliable evidence of any kind. None of the gospels or Epistles mentions anyone dying for their belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus.

The only martyrdoms recorded in the New Testament are, first, the stoning of Stephen in Acts but the story has it that he was not killed for what he believed, but by a mob whom he could not have escaped even if he had recanted.

<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 200%”>The second and only other ‘martyr’ recorded in Acts is the execution of the Apostle James, but we are not told anything about why he was killed or whether recanting would have saved him, or what he thought he died for. Yet, that is the last record of any martyrdom we have until some unnamed Christians are burned for arson by Nero in 64 AD, but they were killed on the false charge of arson, not for refusing to deny belief in a physical resurrection.[v]

There is no indication of any witness who was killed, yet could have been saved by recanting their belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus.

The second point is that it is distinctly possible, if not definite, that the original Christians did not in fact believe in a physical resurrection, but that Jesus was taken up to heaven, and then the “risen Jesus” was seen in vision and dreams, just like the vision Stephen has before he dies, and which Paul has on the road to Damascus. Visions of gods were not at all unusual, a cultural commonplace in those days, well documented by Robin Fox in his book, Pagans and Christians. If this is how Christianity actually started, it means that the resurrection story told in the Gospels, of a Jesus risen in the flesh, does not represent what the original disciples believed, but was made up generations later. So even if the original disciples did die for their beliefs, they did not die for the belief that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead.

That the original Christians believed in a spiritual resurrection is hinted at in many strange features of the Gospel accounts of the appearances of Jesus after death, which may be survivals of an original mystical tradition; such as a Jesus that they do not recognize, or who vanishes into thin air.

Paul’s writings are the earliest record we have of Christianity, and it’s important to note that he never mentions Jesus having been resurrected in the flesh. He never mentions any empty tomb, physical appearances, or the ascension of Jesus into heaven afterward. In Galatians 1, he tells us that he first met Jesus in a “revelation”, not in the flesh, and Acts gives several embellished accounts of this event that all clearly reflect not any tradition of a physical encounter, but a startling vision (a light and a voice, nothing more).

Then, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul reports that all the original eye-witnesses, Peter, James, the 12, and hundreds of others saw Jesus in essentially the same way Paul did, the only difference, he says, was that they saw it before him. He then goes on to build an elaborate description of how the flesh cannot inherit the kingdom of God, and how the resurrected body is a spiritual body, and all this seems good evidence that Paul did not believe in a physical resurrection of Jesus, but something fundamentally different.[vi]

Finally, when we examine the Gospel record closely, it becomes apparent that the physical nature of the resurrection was a growing legend, becoming more and more fabulous over time, a good sign that it wasn’t the original story. Scholars hold that Mark was written first and then Matthew and Luke around the same time, and the latest written was John.

So we start with Mark: Many of you may know that the ending of Mark, everything after verse 16:8, does not actually exist in the earliest versions of that Gospel[vii]. That means that his Gospel ended only with an empty tomb and a pronouncement by a mysterious young man that Jesus would be seen in Galilee — but nothing is said of how he would be seen. When we consider the original story, it supports the notion that the original belief was of a spiritual rather than a physical event. The empty tomb for Mark was likely meant to be a symbol, not a historical reality, it was not unusual in the ancient world for the bodies of heroes who became gods to vanish from this world: being deified entailed being taken up into heaven, as happened to men as diverse as Hercules and Apollonius of Tyana[viii].

Next, the Gospel of Matthew appears. This Gospel says there was a vast earthquake, and instead of a boy standing around besides an already-opened tomb, an angel, blazing from the sky, paralyzed the two guards that happened t

o be there, rolled away the stone single handedly before several witnesses and then announced that Jesus will appear in Galilee. Obviously we are seeing a clear case of legendary embellishments of the otherwise simple story in Mark. Then in Matthew a report is given where, contrary to the angel’s announcement, Jesus immediately meets the women that attended to his grave and repeats what the angel said. Matthew is careful to add a hint that this was a physical Jesus, having the women grovel and grab his feet as he speaks.

Then, Luke appears and suddenly what was a vague and perhaps symbolic allusion to ascension in Mark has now become a bodily appearance, complete with a dramatic reenactment of Peter rushing to the tomb and seeing the empty death shroud for himself. As in Matthew, other details have grown. The one young man of Mark, which became a flying angel in Matthew, in this account has suddenly become 2 men, this time not merely in white, but in dazzling raiment. And to make the new story even more suspicious as a doctrinal invention, Jesus goes out of his way to say that he is not a vision, and proves it by asking the Disciples to touch him, and then by eating a fish. And though Mark and Matthew said the visions would happen in Galilee, Luke changes the story, and places this particular experience in the more populous and prestigious Jerusalem.

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(Con’td next entry)