The conversations happening today in the field of artificial intelligence, known as AI, are completely mind-blowing. Aside from AI robots using 3D printing to build bridges in the Netherlands or cars in Los Angeles with digital nervous systems, the crucial topic of discussion is the unknown potentialities which AI technology could precipitate. The central question which belabors not only scientists and engineers but also economists, politicians, and Christians is ultimately: “What will happen once AI is let out of the box?” Despite the wide variety of speculation within AI scholarship and social media, everyone agrees that the future of AI is a frightening yet seductive mystery from which no one can look away. “AI could be terrible, and it could be great,” remarked Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors. “Only one thing is for sure,” he says. “We will not control it.”

The big idea within AI circles is the creation of a superhuman, God-like intelligence that will amplify human cognitive abilities to solve all the problems of the world. At its base, AI is software that writes itself. In theory then, superintelligence can be achieved if the right algorithms are developed which give AI the ability to self-improve. As the algorithms develop themselves and improve their coding throughout a vast network of global intelligence systems, eventually exponential leaps in intelligence will leap off those leaps and reach unbounded levels of computing power. Some thinkers foresee the ability to achieve twenty thousand years of human progress in a single week. The hopes and dreams of those from Silicon Valley to China converge upon harnessing the power of this intelligence, and the practical aspects of building things or implementing innovative solutions is a secondary problem which the superintelligence itself will solve. Whatever company or nation reaches this level of intelligence first will win the world, and either save or destroy humanity in a winner-takes-all scenario.

To be clear, the AI debates do not predict a Hollywood doomsday scenario in which robots become spontaneously malicious and start attacking humans. The more subtle danger is aligning AI’s values and goals with those of humans, what thinkers call the “alignment problem.” The difficulty of alignment is that as AI self-improves, it can behave in ways beyond the foresight of computer programmers. A programmer cannot write a safety patch for every unknown scenario in which an AI might act. For example, if an AI is told to drive someone to the airport, it could be programmed with the common sense needed to drive according to traffic laws. But if an AI developed the ability to fly all by itself, this could be a problem if a human is taken up into the stratosphere with insufficient oxygen. The safety patch of “don’t take humans into the stratosphere without an oxygen mask” is nowhere close to the mind of a computer programmer until it happens. More serious concerns arise if the AI were to design new goals for itself. “What if humans are judged as obstacles to those goals or are objectified to reach them?” Sam Harris asks. Theoretically, the cognitive power of AI technology could be hard to contain and may inevitably lead to weaponization.

If humanity loses control of AI, an obvious solution is to simply unplug or shoot it. (Note to the reader: robots are like zombies; aim for the head or face.) Thinkers have toyed with this solution in what’s called the “AI in a Box” scenario. The idea is simple: anyone building an AI should do so in a secure laboratory to prevent it from escaping into the wild. The laboratory would include an emergence failsafe switch to override a robot with a hard shutdown. This line of thinking, however, overlooks the fact that the AI in the box is superintelligent, and convincing a human to let it out could be like taking candy from a baby. The AI could easily concoct a clever douceur and, with a carrot on a stick, win its freedom through manipulation or bribery. Eventually, the projected intelligence of the AI assumes a development beyond the reliance on electrical power.

While make-believe scenarios of autonomous robots with personality disorders are amusing, the self-improving ability of AI is not something completely untenable. In fact, it is already here. Google, YouTube, and Amazon already have algorithms which can learn and adapt to user search preferences. Right now, the advanced robotic system at the Deep Mind Company is playing video games super-humanly well, which it learned by merely watching a screen. Researchers at New York’s Columbia University recently created a robot that became self-aware and learned things entirely from scratch, with no prior computer programing. Just thirty-five hours after its launch, the robot was able to build its own biomechanics, allowing it to pick up and drop objects, write with a marker, and repair damages to its own body.

With superintelligence on the horizon, mortality itself could theoretically be overcome through some kind of human-robot symbiosis. Superintelligence could presumably develop robotic prosthetics or some kind of elixir that prevents biological decay. Talk has begun of a digital self, created by a neural processor chip which acts as a tertiary cognition layer between the brain’s limbic system and cerebral cortex, enabling anyone to have superhuman cognition. If the biological self dies, a person could upload their “digital self” into a new computer. Overpopulation would be solved by turning something like Facebook into a permanent virtual homestead or employing the power of superintelligence to streamline space exploration and establish a multiplanet species.

The achievement of AI immortality would have profound impacts on central doctrines of the Christian faith. The doctrine of the Resurrection could one day appear like an awkwardly devised VCR or reel-to-reel cassette tape, outdated and completely laughable. Atheists like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins would have empirical verification that evolution has finally outgrown the primitive impulse of religion. According to their logic, natural selection built beavers and bees in such a way that they could adapt to their surroundings to survive. It would follow, therefore, that the inbuilt survival mechanism for humans is their intelligence and the production of robots is the ultimate zenith of adaptation. Dennett and Dawkins could very well conclude that the concept of “God” was merely a metaphorical projection of humanity’s highest potential, and the kingdom of God prophesied in the Bible was really a foreshadowment of the kingdom of Robots. Or perhaps the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection were interpreted incorrectly all these years, and the figure of Christ is really an image for the deification of human consciousness, technuminously exalted with the omniscience of “God.”

The harrowing prospects of AI immortality could make the doctrine of the Resurrection potentially unnecessary. To profess such a belief would entail the deliberate decision to forego synthetic life and endure biological death. The Christian of the future would be viewed as the epitome of unreason, illogically adhering to pro-life and pro-mortem beliefs. Once blamed as obstacles to “choice” and “dignity,” Christians will then be, ironically, charged as adversaries to life without end.

However, if the doctrine of the Resurrection is properly understood, the promise of cybernetic impersonation wane in comparison to its eschatological counterpart. The doctrine of the Resurrection has nothing to do with the prolongation of temporal-historical existence. Pope Benedict XVI would describe such thinking as the “secularization of salvation,” which reduces human nature to a permanent state of gadgetry and highly advanced tools, as opposed to an elevation of human nature to participation in the divine life. Ultimately, the essence of the Resurrection is a difference in the quality of life rather than its duration. The New Testament uses two Greek words for life: bios and zoe. The former is carbon-based life, life that is organic, mutable, and subject to decay. The latter is divine life, life that is immutable, unchangeable, and eternal. Zoe is life in the raw, life’s life, the very life of God. At the Resurrection, this divine life will not only fuel human bodies and souls but will transforms all of creation.

Perhaps the best description of the future life of the Resurrection comes from C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce, in which he distinguishes between the “shadow lands” and “ultimate reality.” The story begins when the narrator of the book, Lewis himself, is taken by a bus to the foothills of heaven. The passengers on the bus disembark into the most beautiful country they have ever seen. Yet curiously, every aspect of the landscape is different. “I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy,” Lewis says, but the “little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron but like diamonds.” The heavenly world is made of an entirely different substance, so remarkably solid that the grass hurts Lewis’ feet when he tries to walk. The life of heaven is so real that it makes the former world a mere shadow in comparison, a world where everyone and everything overflows with the superabundance of divine life. “The glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone,” says an inhabitant of the land, “like light and mirrors.”

The eternal life of God constitutes the very quality of the Resurrection, a life that has no terminus or limit on either side—that is, no beginning or end. Boethius’ classic definition of eternity is the “complete possession all at once of illimitable life.” Boethius abstracts eternity from the forward succession of time, measured by a before and after, and replaces it with the “now” of time. The now of eternity is unbounded by time’s fleetingness, which does not separate into past and future. Eleonore Stump describes eternity as a “durational now” that persists indefinitely, a stable moment of pure existence, without change or intervals.

In chronological time, human beings do not have full possession of their lives all at once. A person at age fifty will not possess the life he once had at age three, nor the life he will have at age seventy. Life is experienced sequentially, little by little. Humans have only one moment of their life within the continuum of its totality, which is experienced as a now that is continually passing away. If time can be transcended, a person can have a now that endures always and does not change or separate into past and future. The future life of the Resurrection will be the complete possession of a person’s entire life all at once in an uninterrupted moment of divine sublimity. Augustine longed for this life in his Confessions, praying: “I have been divided amid times, and my thoughts, even the inmost bowels of my soul, are mangled with tumultuous varieties, until I flow together into You.”

The eternal now of resurrected life is entirely different from a static, lackluster world that eventually succumbs to the bland familiarity to which AI is predestined. Eternity is a moment that is continually fresh and new with the life of God, a savory moment blooming with illimitable vitality. Gregory of Nyssa likens the soul to a vessel that is continually expanding as the divine life flows into it. Rather than the vessel becoming full and overflowing, God enlarges the soul’s capacity to receive more and more divine life. Yet because God’s infinity always exceeds the soul’s capacity to be filled, the soul can never reach a satiety of the endless good. While the soul will be satisfied completely and rest in its final end, its desire will be enkindled always anew by the pleasures that lie beyond it. Gregory described eternal life as a paradoxical state of “insatiable satiety” wherein desire itself is the satisfaction. The soul lives in a felicitous tension between its ecstatic desires and their ever-more wondering fulfillment. Which means humans are continually in a state of young love with God, always at the beginning of their relationship, since the possibilities are infinite.

To whatever degree it is appropriate to use the word “danger” in describing AI technology in the world, it can certainly be applied to the spiritual effects it will have on the human person. The indefinite extension of temporal life by AI technology would impede the human person’s final end of union with God. The soul would be left suspended in an intermediary spiritual stasis of insatiable longing for the infinite, while artificially ordained to the finite, a space of interminable spiritual frustration, like a fish out of water, gasping for its ultimate life principle. John of the Cross wrote of this condition with particular antipathy in his spiritual lamentations, complaining that he was “dying that I do not die.” The litmus test for the viability of AI immortality is surely the desire for God and the spiritual needs of the human person, which are too big for this world.

While the entire AI conversation may be written off as wildly speculative and more than likely impossible, humanity awaits the event on the horizon. For people of faith, the superintelligence of God incarnate has already enacted a solution for the human condition, expanding human consciousness with the vision of eternity and inestimable spiritual delights. Without the hope of the Resurrection, the costs and benefits that result from AI curiosity will forever be too small.

Christians around the world are just a couple weeks away from celebrating what they consider the most important event in human history: the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

But for skeptics around the world, the celebration of Easter marks, at best, a mass confusion—delusion at worst.

So who is right? Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Does the Resurrection make the best sense of the available evidence, or do we have better alternatives?

Those are the questions that Carl E. Olson probes in his new book, Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? Questions and Answers about the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus (Ignatius Press/Augustine Institute, 2016).

Today I sit down with Carl to ask about the book, some common misunderstandings about the Resurrection, and whether he thinks his arguments will convince skeptics.
 

 
BRANDON: A short review of Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead? on Google Books describes your book as "Fundamentalist obscurantist dribble" and then states: "Don't waste your time unless you like slanted deluded nonsense." How does that make you feel?

CARL OLSON: Does it matter how I feel?

BRANDON: No. But feelings are big these days.

CARL OLSON: Well, I find it amusing.

BRANDON: Why?

CARL OLSON: In a former, younger life I was a pretty good basketball player. However, I was only an average dribbler. So I'm not sure the, uh, reviewer is accurate or informed on that count. More to the point, and a more seriously, I am actually a former Fundamentalist. I know a bit about Fundamentalism—I even wrote an entire book about premillennial dispensationalism, which has long been a key theological perspective among many American Fundamentalists.

BRANDON: But you're a Catholic now...

CARL OLSON: Yes. In fact, this Easter marks the twentieth anniversary of my wife and I entering the Catholic Church. I grew up in a Fundamentalist home and then attended an Evangelical Bible College; my wife has a similar background.

BRANDON: How does that background inform or shape your understanding of the Resurrection?

CARL OLSON: While Catholics disagree with Fundamentalists about a number of important topics, the core belief in the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ is something we certainly agree on. It is a fundamental belief, after all, of all orthodox Christians, going right back to the beginning of Christianity. In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "The Resurrection of Jesus is the crowning truth of our faith in Christ, a faith believed and lived as the central truth by the first Christian community; handed on as fundamental by Tradition; established by the documents of the New Testament; and preached as an essential part of the Paschal mystery along with the cross..." (par 638). Of course, Fundamentalists have issues with the word "Tradition", but that's a conversation for another time.

Near the end of my time in high school and then during my college years, I began to develop an interest in apologetics, especially as I began to meet and spend time with people who either had no interest in Christianity or who were openly antagonistic toward it. For example, in my first year of college I had an art professor who went on a rant one day about the "secret gospels" and how they told us "the truth" about the "real Jesus". I knew just enough to know he was spouting silliness, but not enough to really respond with specifics.

In my two years at Briercrest Bible College, I took courses in apologetics and Scripture, and began to read fairly widely in both fields, something I've done ever since. And so I refer to and quote often from the works of scholars such as N.T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, Dale Allison, Craig Evans, Michael Licona, Martin Hengel, Craig Keener, and many others, none of whom are Catholic. The fact is, much of the best New Testament scholarship in recent decades has been done by various Evangelical scholars, and I am certainly thankful for their impressive and helpful work. The Resurrection, which is of course part of the greater mystery of the Incarnation, is something that Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox can stand together on, learning from one another in the process.

In sum, to come full circle: if what I say in my book about the Resurrection is "Fundamentalist," then Peter, Paul, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Pascal, Newman, Wesley, Barth, C.S. Lewis, Schmemann, and Pope Francis—to name just a very few—are all "Fundamentalists".

BRANDON: Are you implying that your book is not the work of an obscurantist party hack desperate to uphold a belief in deluded nonsense that rests on legends, myths, and cleverly devised tales?

CARL OLSON: I sense that is something of a loaded question, but I happy to answer in the negative.

BRANDON: Fair enough. Why, then, did you write the book?

CARL OLSON: The book was originally conceived as a possible study guide to a major motion picture about the Resurrection. That didn't work out, but we went ahead with it for a couple of reasons. The first is that there really hasn't been a work of popular Catholic apologetics focusing on the Resurrection to be published in quite some time. Certainly there have been works of Catholic apologetics that contain helpful chapters or sections on the topic—for example, Dr. Brant Pitre's excellent new book The Case for Jesus (which I mention in my book)—but none that focus exclusively on it.

Secondly, my sense has long been that quite a few Catholics (and other Christians as well) view the Resurrection as something we simply accept by faith; that is, we really don't have a way to argue for it using evidence, facts, and logic. That is, in my estimation, a very serious mistake.

Thirdly, anyone familiar with New Testament scholarship knows there is an incredible amount of recent and new literature about topics directly or indirectly relating to the Resurrection. Most people, for obvious reasons, simply cannot keep up with it all; more importantly, it can be so confusing and intimidating that many good and helpful things can be missed. And, conversely, many questionable or problematic popular books—by authors such as Bart Ehrman, Deepak Chopra, John Shelby Spong, Reza Aslan—receive a lot of time and attention from the secular media. My book seeks to be an introductory guide through some of the jungle.

BRANDON: Why did you choose to use a Q&A format in the book?

CARL OLSON: That was partially because we thought it might be a study guide. But I think it works well for a popular work on the topic because, again, there is so much to cover and using 75 or so questions helps make it more "bite-sized" for readers. Also, and equally important, I wanted the book to be conversational in nature, with the questions coming from a more skeptical, even antagonistic, perspective.

BRANDON: How did you arrive at the questions? What are some examples?

CARL OLSON: Mark Brumley, president of Ignatius Press and a very fine apologist, and I came up with the questions, drawing on our studies and experiences, which I then organized into chapters.

For example, in the opening chapter ("What's the Point?"), there is this question: "But why this fixation on the Resurrection? Why is it important whether Jesus rose from the dead—especially when it seems to be entirely a matter of faith?"

In the chapter on the historical reliability of the Gospels, there is this question: "You mentioned that the Gospels are some form of biography. But wouldn’t you agree that trustworthy biographies are built on facts and eye witness accounts, not on stories told by illiterate fishermen decades after the events? Why shouldn’t the Gospels, and their accounts of Jesus’s life—especially miraculous elements—be viewed with suspicion?"

And in chapter titled "Physical and Spiritual", there is a series of questions about the nature of Christ's body, including this question: "Paul also says that the 'first Adam became a living being,' quoting Genesis 2:7, while the last Adam, Jesus, became 'a life-giving spirit' (1 Cor 15:45). Doesn’t this suggest that the risen Jesus was a spirit?" And so forth.

BRANDON: Does the book assume the historical reliability of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament?

CARL OLSON: On the contrary, rather than start with such an assumption, the book argues that it is reasonable to take the Gospels seriously as historical documents. Although I believe in that Scripture, as Dei Verbum states, was "written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit" (par 11), the book does not argue for that belief. One reason is because such an argument would require an entire book in itself; another is that I wanted to emphasize, throughout the book, that the testimony and accounts presented in the Gospel and other New Testament books, can and should be taken seriously as works conveying history and facts about real events and people in first century Palestine. As I argue in the book, there are a number of essential events in the Gospels that historians across the spectrums of faith and personal philosophy accept as real events, based on the criteria used by scholars in studying ancient texts.

BRANDON: But weren't the writers of the New Testament books biased?

CARL OLSON: Yes, of course, if by "bias" we meaning holding to certain convictions and beliefs about what they had witnessed, seen, and heard. As Craig Keener points out, contrary to what some modern writers assume, the “bias” of the gospel writers doesn’t mean their biographies of Christ are novelistic or fictional. All ancient historians had a certain “bias”; in fact, all historians have a “bias,” if by that we mean coming from a certain perspective and holding specific beliefs about the subject at hand.

The key is recognizing and acknowledging one’s perspectives—or what Michael R. Licona calls “horizons”—in assessing information, analyzing texts, and reaching conclusions. And so it is no surprise that historians and other scholars end up with such a wide array of understandings of who Jesus was and what he did, but often revealing more, arguably, about themselves than about Jesus.

BRANDON: What are, in your opinion, some of the common mistakes or misunderstandings made about the Resurrection?

CARL OLSON: There are quite a few! Here are a couple that stand out to me: First, many people seem to miss how compressed of time period is involved when discussing the events described in the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul's writings. Put another way, there is often this sense that belief in the Resurrection developed over many, many decades (if not centuries), as in some sort of fog. But the evidence consistently points to a very compressed period of time. The German New Testament scholar Martin Hengel, for instance, notes that it is widely agreed that Jesus probably died in April of A.D. 30, and that Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus took place between A.D. 32 and 34—and then Paul’s letters were written between A.D. 50 and A.D. 57. This means that Paul—who had been persecuting the first Christians—was spending time with Peter, the head apostle, within just a few years of the Resurrection (cf. Gal 1:18).

As Hengel notes, this means that within the space of less than two decades, Paul emerged with a fully formed Christology that contains many clear references to pre‐Pauline language, titles, and theological assertions (such as, for instance, the great Christological hymn in Philippians 2:5–11). “In essentials,” Hengel writes, “more happened in Christology within these few years”—that is, from A.D. 32 to A.D. 50—“than in the whole subsequent seven hundred years of church history." But, as Hengel observes, rather dryly, “If we look through some works on the history of earliest Christianity we might get the impression that people in them had declared war on chronology.” And I think that is most assuredly the case in many instances.

Secondly, many people apparently assume that there are all sorts of things that could have happened: "We really can't know what happened!" But, in fact, there are only a certain number of limited options. To begin with, Jesus either rose from the dead or he didn't. If he didn't, then there are just a few possibilities: he was actually resuscitated and later died, the disciples made it all up, they suffered a group hallucination, or some variation thereof. There is also the "spiritual Resurrection" theory, which has been quite popular since the Enlightenment era. The book examines each of these and argues that each is seriously lacking.

Finally, there is the common (and understandable) argument that since there are apparently differing details in the post-Resurrection accounts, those accounts are either questionable or cannot be trusted at all. This is a pretty involved issue, but one thing I point out is that skeptics usually fixate on this or that detail and completely ignore the many agreements and cohesive nature, overall, of what is a most stunning and confusing event.

BRANDON: So you think skeptics are wrong to raise those questions?

CARL OLSON: Not at all! Those are good questions. And that's why they are in the book. But my conviction is that in a secular world, which is what we live in here in the West, skepticism cuts both ways. And that, as odd as it might sound, is good news. In other words, while skeptics and secular fundamentalists often act as if their constant appeals to science and reason have adequately explained every aspect of reality, that is only so much “secularist spin,” which actually refuses to think outside its own rather limited, materialist box. In other words, such secularists have simply created a narrative based on their materialist, scientistic assumptions but without actually offering either real proof or satisfying explanations for a whole host of things. So, yes, Christians have questions to answer—and they've been answering them since that Pentecost following the Resurrection. But so do the skeptics.

BRANDON: Do you think, then, that your book will convince skeptics?

CARL OLSON: I think the book presents evidence and arguments demonstrating that belief in the Resurrection is not irrational, or anti-historical, or "fundamentalist". Faith is different from reason, but it is never unreasonable or illogical; it is supra-rational. I like to think of the Resurrection as the "Big Bang" within history, changing everything that follows it while also raising startling questions that every one should contemplate and ponder. In the words of J.R.R. Tolkien: "The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the 'inner consistency of reality.' There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath."

When confronted with the early Christians’ testimony about the Resurrection of Jesus, it is natural to question whether it’s credible. A healthy skepticism demands we test the claims of such an event.

One way to do so is by offering alternative explanations, and one such explanation is the conspiracy theory. This theory purports to explain Christ’s empty tomb and postmortem appearances by claiming the early Christians stole the body and made up the Resurrection story.

I don’t fault anyone for raising the question, because it's natural to ask, “Did the early Christians make this stuff up?”

I contend they did not, and there are two good reasons to think so.

The Apostolic Dilemma

First, the early Christians had nothing to gain and everything to lose in lying about Jesus’ Resurrection. As I learned from my mentor and friend Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, this kind of jeopardy makes for the most credible witness, and St. Paul understood this. Paul uses this fact to argue for the credibility of the early Christian testimony and presents his argument in the form of a two-horned dilemma in 1 Corinthians 15:

[I]f Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised (1 Cor. 15:14-15).

St. Paul presents the second horn in verse 19 and then expounds on it in verses 30-32:

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied . . . Why am I in peril every hour? I protest, brethren, by my pride in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

Notice in the first horn St. Paul argues that if he and the witnesses believed in God, then they would be bearing false witness in their proclamation of Jesus’ Resurrection—“we are even found to be misrepresenting God.” What would the early Christians have to gain from a lie while still believing in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Damnation! Is it reasonable to think the early Christians believed their eternal salvation was worth risking for such a lie?

In the second horn St. Paul seems to consider what they might gain from the lie if they were unbelievers and didn’t believe in God or the Resurrection. Notice in verse 19 he writes, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ” and then in verse 32 “What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus.” Paul’s argument is thatnothing except persecution and death is to be gained from such a lie. For Paul, if this is the reward, then we might as well “eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

There may be alternative explanations for the falsity of the Resurrection testimonies that are worthy of consideration, but for St. Paul the conspiracy theory is not one of them.

The Testimony of Women

The second reason to think the early Christians were not making up the Resurrection story: they included women as the first witnesses.

One of the many criteria historians use to test historicity is the criterion of embarrassment. This refers to any action or saying the early Christians would have found embarrassing and apologetically unappealing. No Gospel writer would want to include such information, because it would undermine the Gospel’s purpose. Having women as the first witnesses of the Resurrection fits the bill for such a criterion.

In first-century Judaism, the testimony of women was inadmissible in a court of law: “But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex” (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 4.8.15).

If a woman’s testimony was not considered credible in a court of law, it would seem that the apostles would not use the testimony of women to convince their hearers about the truth of the empty tomb and the appearances of the resurrected Christ. It is more reasonable to conclude, if the Gospel writers were fabricating this story, that they would have chosen men to be the first witnesses—perhaps Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.

The atheist activist and historian Richard Carrier, in chapter 11 of his book Not the Impossible Faith, objects to this appeal to women. He argues that because the Gospels are history and not court documents, it is improper for the Christian apologist to go from “courtroom decorum to everyday credibility.”

Furthermore, he contends, while the testimony of women was not accepted in a court of law, it was admissible as a source for historical claims. Carrier appeals to Josephus’s account of the massacres at Gamala and Masada, both of which have two women as their sources.

In response to Carrier’s first objection, I think it is legitimate for the Christian apologist to use the inadmissibility of women’s testimony in the court of law, because the Gospel writers were making an apologetic case to convince their hearers of the truth of the Resurrection. They were not merely recounting a historical event but presenting a convergence of evidence for the truth of Jesus’ rising—empty tomb, multiple post-mortem appearances, conversions, etc.

Moreover, notice the reason Josephus gives for not admitting the testimony of women: “on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.” The word levity means to treat a serious matter with humor or in a manner lacking due respect. While this view of women might not lead to an utter dismissal of a woman’s testimony, it would surely make such a testimony less desirable if one is fabricating a story, especially when it is just as easy to use men as the first witnesses.

Neither does Carrier’s appeal to Josephus using women as sources for his account of the massacres at Masada and Gamala undermine the Christian apologist’s argument.

In reference to the slaughter at Gamala, Josephus states that the two women who served as his sources were the only ones who escaped (The Wars of the Jews, 4.82). While not explicit when recounting the massacre at Masada, Josephus seems to imply the two women who were his sources for that event were sole survivors as well (The Wars of the Jews 7.399).

So it’s obvious Josephus is going to use the testimony of women for these events, since no one else survived.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why Carrier’s appeal to Josephus’s reliance on these women does not undermine the Christian argument. The Gospel writers had options when deciding whom to place as witnesses of Christ’s Resurrection, but Josephus did not have options when considering on whose testimony to base his account of the massacres.

The unreliability of the testimony of women in first-century Judaism still stands as a legitimate case of the criterion of embarrassment and thus can be used when making the case for the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection.

There are many more reasons one can give to show the conspiracy theory is unreasonable. But I think the two presented above are sufficient—namely, people don’t die for what they know to be a lie; and liars don’t use unreliable testimonies to convince audiences of their fabricated stories.

In this Easter season, we can rest assured that faith in the resurrected Jesus is at least not based on a lie.

When I saw the coming attractions for the new film Risen—which deals with a Roman tribune searching for the body of Jesus after reports of the resurrection—I thought that it would leave the audience in suspense, intrigued but unsure whether these reports were justified or not. I was surprised and delighted to discover that the movie is, in fact, robustly Christian and substantially faithful to the Biblical account of what transpired after the death of Jesus.

My favorite scene shows tribune Clavius (played by the always convincing Joseph Fiennes) bursting into the Upper Room, intent upon arresting Jesus’ most intimate followers. As he takes in the people in the room, he spies Jesus, at whose crucifixion he had presided and whose face in death he had closely examined. But was he seeing straight? Was this even possible? He slinks down to the ground, fascinated, incredulous, wondering, anguished. As I watched the scene unfold, the camera sweeping across the various faces, I was as puzzled as Clavius: was that really Jesus? It must indeed have been like that for the first witnesses of the Risen One, their confusion and disorientation hinted at in the Scriptures themselves: “They worshipped, but some doubted.” Once Thomas enters the room, embraces his Lord and probes Jesus’ wounds, all doubt, both for Clavius and for the viewer, appropriately enough, is removed.

I specially appreciated this scene, not only because of its clever composition, but because it reminded me of debates that were fashionable in theological circles when I was doing my studies in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Scholars who were skeptical of the bodily facticity of Jesus’ resurrection would pose the question, “What would someone outside of the circle of Jesus’ disciples have seen had he been present at the tomb on Easter morning or in the Upper Room on Easter evening?” The implied answer to the query was “well, nothing.” The academics posing the question were suggesting that what the Bible calls resurrection designated nothing that took place in the real world, nothing that an objective observer would notice or dispassionate historian recount, but rather an event within the subjectivity of those who remembered the Lord and loved him.

For example, the extremely influential and widely-read Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx opined that, after the death of Jesus, his disciples, reeling in guilt from their cowardice and betrayal of their master, nevertheless felt forgiven by the Lord. This convinced them that, in some sense, he was still alive, and to express this intuition they told evocative stories about the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Roger Haight, a Jesuit theologian of considerable influence, speculated in a similar vein that the resurrection is but a symbolic expression of the disciples’ conviction that Jesus continues to live in the sphere of God. Therefore, Haight taught, belief in the empty tomb or the appearances of the risen Lord is inessential to true resurrection faith. At a more popular level, James Carroll explained the resurrection as follows: after their master’s death, the disciples sat in a kind of “memory circle” and realized how much Jesus meant to them and how powerful his teaching was and decided that his spirit lives on in them.

The great English Biblical scholar N.T. Wright is particularly good at exposing and de-bunking such nonsense. His principal objection to this sort of speculation is that it is profoundly non-Jewish. When a first century Jew spoke of resurrection, he could not have meant some non-bodily state of affairs. Jews simply didn’t think in the dualist categories dear to Greeks and later to Gnostics. The second problem is that this post-conciliar theologizing is dramatically unhistorical. Wright argues that, simply on historical grounds, it is practically impossible to explain the rise of the early Christian movement apart from a very objective construal of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. For a first-century Jew, the clearest possible indication that someone was not the promised Messiah would be his death at the hands of Israel’s enemies, for the unambiguously clear expectation was that the Messiah would conquer and finally deal with the enemies of the nation. Peter, Paul, James, Andrew, and the rest could have coherently proclaimed—and gone to their deaths defending—a crucified Messiah if and only if he had risen from the dead. Can we really imagine Paul tearing into Athens or Corinth or Ephesus with the breathless message that he found a dead man deeply inspiring or that he and the other Apostles had felt forgiven by a crucified criminal? In the context of that time and place, no one would have taken him seriously.

Risen’s far more reasonable and theologically compelling answer is that, yes indeed, if an outsider and unbeliever burst into the Upper Room when the disciples were experiencing the resurrected Jesus, he would have seen something along with them. Would he have fully grasped what he was seeing? Obviously not. But would the experience have had no objective referent?  Just as obviously not. There is just something tidy, bland, and unthreatening about the subjectivizing interpretations I rehearsed above. What you sense on every page of the New Testament is that something happened to the first Christians, something so strange and unexpected and compelling that they wanted to tell the whole world about it. Frankly, Risen conveys the edgy novelty, the unnerving reality of the resurrection, better than much contemporary theologizing.

Over the years I’ve come to believe that it is unproductive to debate about the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. There are simply too many details for those outside of the small circles of experts to responsibly juggle in a debate format. This opinion led me to look for non-evidential arguments for or against the resurrection.

My initial findings were that the Christian faces insurmountable odds in having to explain why God would (of all things) resurrect Jesus (of all people). After all, supposing that we have in our possession a sound cosmological argument, a cogent teleological argument, and, let’s say, an outstanding axiological argument, what we know about God is frankly very little, and certainly not nearly enough to make us privy to whether or not he would go and do something like resurrect someone from the dead! Moreover, there really isn’t anything non-question begging about Jesus – even by the most credulous historical standards – that would incline God to resurrect him: it’s not as if God would, in seeking to approve of the truth in Jesus’ message, and the importance of his movement, think “I better show my approval…let’s see…I could miraculously prevent his crucifixion…or if I don’t, I could miraculously resuscitate him afterwards…or if I don’t, I could just assume his body into heaven afterwards…no, no…I got it! I’ll resurrect him!” I hope my Christian friends take the point in good humor: it’s only to illustrate the fact that God could have shown his approval of Jesus in any number of ways, and nothing known about God from reason tells us how, if at all, he would do so.

While I am still of the mind that for reasons such as these, there really isn’t any good evidence to think that it was God who resurrected Jesus, I believe I may have come upon an interesting non-evidential reason to think that Jesus was nevertheless resurrected.

The argument does require an evidential consideration, unfortunately. However, it is one that few dispute: after his death, at least one of Jesus’ disciples took herself to have seen the resurrected Jesus.

To those for whom it is true that Biblical scholars are probably in a better position to know whether this claim is warranted (and I think, if we’re honest, that’s basically anyone that’s not a Biblical scholar), it need only be explained that most Biblical scholars think it is in fact warranted.

For example, on pages 372-73 of his The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, Mike Licona cites no less than 20 experts on the matter who say as much, a number of whom are not even Christian and describe the claim as beyond doubt and a matter of fact. This also includes the scores who belong to the Jesus Seminar and two surveys conducted by Gary Habermas, the first of which is better known and ranges over hundreds of English, German and French scholars who’ve written on the matter since 1975 and the other lesser known recording sixty more recent critical scholars. In both cases, the results were the same: those included in the survey overwhelmingly thought the claim is warranted.

Normally, in a debate setting, proponents and opponents of Jesus’ resurrection would compete to explain the experience of this early Christian, but none would start by taking it at face value. But, why not?

Consider that we should believe things are as they are perceived to be unless and until we have good reason not to. Without this so called “principle of credulity”, we could not reasonably take any perceptual experience for granted. But, then we could not verify any given perceptual experience, since such verification will itself involve taking some perceptual experience or other for granted. I’m not sure what else to call this position but crazy.

Insofar as we do endorse the principle of credulity and we do have good evidential or deferential reason to think that at least one of Jesus’ disciples perceived him to be resurrected, it should be believed that Jesus was in fact resurrected unless and until there is good reason not to.

We may simplify the foregoing by condensing it into a premise-conclusion format:

1. We should believe that things are as they are perceived to be unless and until we have good reason not to.
2. Jesus was perceived to have been resurrected.
3. Therefore, we should believe Jesus to have been resurrected unless and until we have good reason not to.

This argument, if cogent, would change the discussion in a couple of interesting ways. First, our initial attitude towards the experience of this early Christian should be one of belief, not of skepticism or agnosticism. It would therefore be inappropriate to compete explanations of this experience before we had any reason to suspect it was not veridical. Second, and as implied, we wouldn’t need any evidence that this experience was veridical in order to believe that it was: we’d only need reason to think the experience in fact occurred.

Now, I have claimed that the foregoing argument is interesting, not that it is sound or cogent. Moreover, I did not so much defend its evidential premise as I deferred to those who are best qualified to do so and have. There are many questions to ask and objections to answer, and hopefully we can delve into some of them here.

To wrap up, let’s consider a few of the benefits this argument would have for those interested in the subject. For starters, the argument makes use of premises that those who are not already convinced of the conclusion accept. Thus, non-Christians can accept it without having to become Christian. In fact, non-theists can accept it without having to become theists! How much further could the discussion advance if that hurdle was no longer a hurdle? Secondly, such an argument could begin a new era of discussion on Jesus’ resurrection, one focused not on whether Jesus was resurrected, but by whom or what and to what end. This could clarify immensely what sort of grounds Christians have for identifying YHWH as the God that the cosmological, teleological and other such arguments conclude with. Perhaps it will prove far easier for them to show that it was YHWH who raised Jesus than that it was God. Whatever the case, I’d be interested to hear what you guys think.
 
 
(Image credit: New Art Colorz)

NOTE: Christians around the world celebrated Good Friday and Easter last week, which commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus we began a six-part series on these events by Dr. Peter Kreeft in which he examines each of the plausible theories attempting to explain what happened to Jesus at the end of his life, particularly whether he rose from the dead.

Part 1 - 5 Possible Theories that Explain the Resurrection of Jesus
Part 2 - Rejecting the Swoon Theory: 9 Reasons Why Jesus Did Not Faint on the Cross
Part 3 - Debunking the Conspiracy Theory: 7 Arguments Why Jesus’ Disciples Did Not Lie
Part 4 - Refuting the Myth Theory: 6 Reasons Why the Resurrection Accounts are True
Part 5 - Real Visions: 13 Reasons the Disciples Did Not Hallucinate
Part 6 - Answering 5 More Common Objections to the Resurrection
 

 
No alternative to a real resurrection has yet explained six key facts: the existence of the Gospels, the origin of the Christian faith, the failure of Christ's enemies to produce his corpse, the empty tomb, the rolled-away stone, or the accounts of the post-resurrection appearances. Swoon, conspiracy, hallucination, and myth have been shown to be the only alternatives to a real resurrection, and each has been refuted.

What reasons could be given at this point for anyone who still would refuse to believe? At this point, general rather than specific objections are usually given. For instance:

Objection 1: History is not an exact science. It does not yield absolute certainty like mathematics.

Reply: This is true, but why would you note that fact now and not when you speak of Caesar or Luther or George Washington? History is not exact, but it is sufficient. No one doubts that Caesar crossed the Rubicon; why do many doubt that Jesus rose from the dead? The evidence for the latter is much better than for the former.

Objection 2: You can't trust documents. Paper proves nothing. Anything can be forged.

Reply: This is simply ignorance. Not trusting documents is like not trusting telescopes. Paper evidence suffices for most of what we believe; why should it suddenly become suspect here?

Objection 3: Because the resurrection is miraculous. It's the content of the idea rather than the documentary evidence for it that makes it incredible.

Reply: Now we finally have a straightforward objection—not to the documentary evidence but to miracles. This is a philosophical question, not a scientific, historical or textual question.

Objection 4: It's not only miracles in general but this miracle in particular that is objectionable. The resurrection of a corpse is crass, crude, vulgar, literalistic, and materialistic. Religion should be more spiritual, inward, ethical.

Reply: If religion is what we invent, we can make it whatever we like. If it is what God invented, then we have to take it as we find it, just as we have to take the universe as we find it, rather than as we'd like it to be. Death is crass, crude, vulgar, literal, and material. The resurrection meets death where it is and conquers it, rather than merely spouting some harmless, vaporous abstractions about spirituality. The resurrection is as vulgar as the God who did it. He also made mud and bugs and toenails.

Objection 5: But a literalistic interpretation of the resurrection ignores the profound dimensions of meaning found in the symbolic, spiritual, and mythic realms that have been deeply explored by other religions. Why are Christians so narrow and exclusive? Why can't they see the profound symbolism in the idea of resurrection?

Reply: They can. It's not either-or. Christianity does not invalidate the myths, it validates them, by incarnating them. It is "myth become fact," to use the title of a germane essay by C.S. Lewis (in God in the Dock). Why prefer a one-layer cake to a two-layer cake? Why refuse either the literal-historical or the mythic-symbolic aspects of the resurrection? The Fundamentalist refuses the mythic-symbolic aspects because he has seen what the Modernist has done with it: used it to exclude the literal-historical aspects. Why have the Modernists done that? What terrible fate awaits them if they follow the multifarious and weighty evidence and argument that naturally emerges from the data, as we have summarized it here in this series of posts?

The answer is not obscure: traditional Christianity awaits them, complete with adoration of Christ as God, obedience to Christ as Lord, dependence on Christ as Savior, humble confession of sin, and a serious effort to live Christ's life of self-sacrifice, detachment from the world, righteousness, holiness, and purity of thought, word, and deed. The historical evidence is massive enough to convince the open-minded inquirer. By analogy with any other historical event, the resurrection has eminently credible evidence behind it. To disbelieve it, you must deliberately make an exception to the rules you use everywhere else in history. Now why would someone want to do that?

Ask yourself that question if you dare, and take an honest look into your heart before you answer.
 
 
Excerpted from “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics", copyright 1994, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, published 2009 Ignatius Press, used with permission of the publisher. Text reproduced from PeterKreeft.com.

(Image credit: Unsplash)

NOTE: Christians around the world celebrated Good Friday and Easter last week, which commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus we began a six-part series on these events by Dr. Peter Kreeft in which he examines each of the plausible theories attempting to explain what happened to Jesus at the end of his life, particularly whether he rose from the dead.

Part 1 - 5 Possible Theories that Explain the Resurrection of Jesus
Part 2 - Rejecting the Swoon Theory: 9 Reasons Why Jesus Did Not Faint on the Cross
Part 3 - Debunking the Conspiracy Theory: 7 Arguments Why Jesus’ Disciples Did Not Lie
Part 4 - Refuting the Myth Theory: 6 Reasons Why the Resurrection Accounts are True
Part 5 - Real Visions: 13 Reasons the Disciples Did Not Hallucinate
Part 6 - (Coming soon!)
 

 
If you thought you saw a dead man walking and talking, wouldn't you think it more likely that you were hallucinating than that you were seeing correctly? Why then not think the same thing about Christ's resurrection? Here are thirteen reasons the disciples who encountered the resurrected Jesus were not hallucinating:

(1) There were too many witnesses. Hallucinations are private, individual, and subjective. Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the disciples minus Thomas, to the disciples including Thomas, to the two disciples at Emmaus, to the fisherman on the shore, to James (his "brother" or cousin), and even to five hundred people at once (1 Cor 15:3-8). Even three different witnesses are enough for a kind of psychological trigonometry; over five hundred is about as public as you can wish. And Paul says in this passage (v. 6) that most of the five hundred are still alive, inviting any reader to check the truth of the story by questioning the eyewitnesses—he could never have done this and gotten away with it, given the power, resources, and numbers of his enemies, if it were not true.

(2) The witnesses were qualified. They were simple, honest, moral people who had firsthand knowledge of the facts.

(3) The five hundred saw Christ together, at the same time and place. This is even more remarkable than five hundred private "hallucinations" at different times and places of the same Jesus. Five hundred separate Elvis sightings may be dismissed, but if five hundred simple fishermen in Maine saw, touched, and talked with him at once, in the same town, that would be a different matter. (The only other dead person we know of who is reported to have appeared to hundreds of qualified and skeptical eyewitnesses at once is Mary the mother of Jesus [at Fatima, to 70,000]. And that was not a claim of physical resurrection but of a vision.)

(4) Hallucinations usually last a few seconds or minutes; rarely hours. This one hung around for forty days (Acts 1:3).

(5) Hallucinations usually happen only once, except to the insane. This one returned many times, to ordinary people (Jn 20:19-21:14; Acts 1:3).

(6) Hallucinations come from within, from what we already know, at least unconsciously. This one said and did surprising and unexpected things (Acts 1:4,9)—like a real person and unlike a dream.

(7) Not only did the disciples not expect this, they didn't even believe it at first. Neither Peter, nor the women, nor Thomas, nor the eleven believed. They thought he was a ghost; he had to eat something to prove he was not (Lk 24:36-43).

(8) Hallucinations do not eat. Yet the resurrected Christ did, on at least two occasions (Lk 24:42-43; Jn 21:1-14).

(9) The disciples touched him (Mt 28:9; Lk 24:39; Jn 20:27).

(10) They also spoke with him, and he spoke back. Figments of your imagination do not hold profound, extended conversations with you, unless you have the kind of mental disorder that isolates you. But this "hallucination" conversed with at least eleven people at once, for forty days (Acts 1:3).

(11) The apostles could not have believed in the "hallucination" if Jesus' corpse had still been in the tomb. This is a very simple and telling point; for if it was a hallucination, where was the corpse? They would have checked for it; if it was there, they could not have believed.

(12) If the apostles had hallucinated and then spread their hallucinogenic story, the Jews would have stopped it by producing the body. Unless, that is, the disciples had stolen it, in which case we are back with the conspiracy theory and all its difficulties.

(13) A hallucination would explain only the post-resurrection appearances. It would not explain the empty tomb, the rolled-away stone, or the inability to produce the corpse. No theory can explain all these data except a real resurrection. C.S. Lewis says,

"Any theory of hallucination breaks down on the fact (and if it is invention [rather than fact], it is the oddest invention that ever entered the mind of man) that on three separate occasions this hallucination was not immediately recognized as Jesus (Lk 24:13-31; Jn 20:15; 21:4). Even granting that God sent a holy hallucination to teach truths already widely believed without it, and far more easily taught by other methods, and certain to be completely obscured by this, might we not at least hope that he would get the face of the hallucination right? Is he who made all faces such a bungler that he cannot even work up a recognizable likeness of the Man who was himself?" (Miracles, chapter 16)

Some of these "hallucination" arguments are as old as the Church Fathers. Most go back to the eighteenth century, especially William Paley. How do unbelievers try to answer them? Today, few even try to meet these arguments, although occasionally someone tries to refurbish one of the three theories of swoon, conspiracy, or hallucination (e.g. Schonfield's conspiratorial The Passover Plot). But the counter-attack today most often takes one of the two following forms.

1. Some dismiss the resurrection simply because it is miraculous, thus throwing the whole issue back to whether miracles are possible. They argue, as Hume did, that any other explanation is always more probable than a miracle. Yet this is simply unjustified bias against miracles.
2. The other form of counter-attack, by far the most popular, is to try to escape the traditional dilemma of "deceivers" (conspirators) or "deceived" (hallucinators) by interpreting the Gospels as myth—neither literally true nor literally false, but spiritually or symbolically true. This is the standard line of many theology departments in colleges, universities, and seminaries throughout the Western world today. But we've already seen why that doesn't work.

On Wednesday, we'll wrap up this series by answering five more common objections to the resurrection.
 
 
Excerpted from “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics", copyright 1994, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, published 2009 Ignatius Press, used with permission of the publisher. Text reproduced from PeterKreeft.com.

(Image credit: Wikimedia)

NOTE: Christians around the world celebrated Good Friday and Easter last week, which commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus we began a six-part series on these events by Dr. Peter Kreeft in which he examines each of the plausible theories attempting to explain what happened to Jesus at the end of his life, particularly whether he rose from the dead.

Part 1 - 5 Possible Theories that Explain the Resurrection of Jesus
Part 2 - Rejecting the Swoon Theory: 9 Reasons Why Jesus Did Not Faint on the Cross
Part 3 - Debunking the Conspiracy Theory: 7 Arguments Why Jesus’ Disciples Did Not Lie
Part 4 - Refuting the Myth Theory: 6 Reasons Why the Resurrection Accounts are True
Part 5 - Real Visions: 13 Reasons the Disciples Did Not Hallucinate
Part 6 - (Coming soon!)
 

 
We've now examined two theories attempting to explain away the resurrection of Jesus, first the "swoon" theory and then the "liar" theory. Today we'll consider perhaps the most popular alternative theory today: the "myth" theory. Many non-Christians assert that the Gospel accounts of Jesus' death and resurrection are simply myths, much like the stories we find among the Greeks and the Norse. But here are six reasons the "myth" theory does not hold:

(1) The style of the Gospels is radically and clearly different from the style of all the myths. Any literary scholar who knows and appreciates myths can verify this. There are no overblown, spectacular, childishly exaggerated events. Nothing is arbitrary. Everything fits in. Everything is meaningful. The hand of a master is at work here.

Psychological depth is at a maximum. In myth it is at a minimum. In myth, such spectacular external events happen that it would be distracting to add much internal depth of character. That is why it is ordinary people like Alice who are the protagonists of extra-ordinary adventures like Wonderland. That character depth and development of everyone in the Gospels—especially, of course, Jesus himself—is remarkable. It is also done with an incredible economy of words. Myths are verbose; the Gospels are laconic (concise).

There are also telltale marks of eyewitness description, like the little detail of Jesus writing in the sand when asked whether to stone the adulteress or not (Jn 8:6). No one knows why this is put in; nothing comes of it. The only explanation is that the writer saw it. If this detail and others like it throughout all four Gospels were invented, then a first-century tax collector (Matthew), a "young man" (Mark), a doctor (Luke), and a fisherman (John) all independently invented the new genre of realistic fantasy nineteen centuries before it was reinvented in the twentieth.

The stylistic point is argued so well by C.S. Lewis in "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" (in Christian Reflections and also in Fern-Seed and Elephants) that I strongly refer the reader to it as the best comprehensive anti-demythologizing essay we have seen.

Let us be even more specific. Let us compare the Gospels with two particular mythic writings from around that time to see for ourselves the stylistic differences. The first is the so-called Gospel of Peter, a forgery from around A.D. 125 which John Dominic Crossan (of the "Jesus Seminar"), insists is earlier than the four Gospels. As William Lane Craig puts it:

"In this account, the tomb is not only surrounded by Roman guards but also by all the Jewish Pharisees and elders as well as a great multitude from all the surrounding countryside who have come to watch the resurrection. Suddenly in the night there rings out a loud voice in heaven, and two men descend from heaven to the tomb. The stone over the door rolls back by itself, and they go into the tomb. The three men come out of the tomb, two of them holding up the third man. The heads of the two men reach up into the clouds, but the head of the third man reaches beyond the clouds. Then a cross comes out of the tomb, and a voice from heaven asks, 'Have you preached to them that sleep?' And the cross answers, 'Yes.'"  (Apologetics, p. 189)

Here is a second comparison, from Richard Purtill:

"It may be worthwhile to take a quick look, for purposes of comparison, at the closest thing we have around the time of the Gospels to an attempt at a realistic fantasy. This is the story of Apollonius of Tyana, written about A.D. 250 by Flavius Philostratus....There is some evidence that a neo-Pythagorean sage named Apollonius may really have lived, and thus Philostratus' work is a real example of what many have thought the Gospels to be: a fictionalized account of the life of a real sage and teacher, introducing miraculous elements to build up the prestige of the central figure. It thus gives us a good look at what a real example of a fictionalized biography would look like, written at a time and place not too far removed from those in which the Gospels were written.
 
The first thing we notice is the fairy-tale atmosphere. There is a rather nice little vampire story, which inspired a minor poem by Keats entitled Lamia. There are animal stories about, for instance, snakes in India big enough to drag off and eat an elephant. The sage wanders from country to country and wherever he goes he is likely to be entertained by the king or emperor, who holds long conversations with him and sends him on his way with camels and precious stones.
 
Here is a typical passage about healing miracles: 'A woman who had had seven miscarriages was cured through the prayers of her husband, as follows. The Wise Man told the husband, when his wife was in labor, to bring a live rabbit under his cloak to the place where she was, walk around her and immediately release the rabbit; for she would lose her womb as well as her baby if the rabbit was not immediately driven away.' [Bk 3, sec 39]

 
The point is that this is what you get when the imagination goes to work. Once the boundaries of fact are crossed we wander into fairyland. And very nice too, for amusement or recreation. But the Gospels are set firmly in the real Palestine of the first century, and the little details are not picturesque inventions but the real details that only an eyewitness or a skilled realistic novelist can give." (Thinking About Religion, p. 75-76)

(2) A second problem is that there was not enough time for myth to develop. The original demythologizers pinned their case onto a late second-century date for the writing of the Gospels; several generations have to pass before the added mythological elements can be mistakenly believed to be facts. Eyewitnesses would be around before that to discredit the new, mythic versions. We know of other cases where myths and legends of miracles developed around a religious founder—for example, Buddha, Lao-tzu, and Muhammad. In each case, many generations passed before the myth surfaced.

The dates for the writing of the Gospels have been pushed back by every empirical manuscript discovery; only abstract hypothesizing pushes the date forward. Almost no knowledgeable scholar today holds what Rudolf Bultmann said was necessary to hold in order to believe the myth theory, namely, that there is no first-century textual evidence that Christianity began with a divine and resurrected Christ, not a human and dead one.

Some scholars still dispute the first-century date for the Gospels, especially John's. But no one disputes that Paul's letters were written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses to Christ. So let us argue from Paul's letters. Either these letters contain myth or they do not. If so, there is lacking the several generations necessary to build up a commonly believed myth. There is not even one generation. If these letters are not myth, then the Gospels are not either, for Paul affirms all the main claims of the Gospels.

Julius Müller put the anti-myth argument this way:

"One cannot imagine how such a series of legends could arise in an historical age, obtain universal respect, and supplant the historical recollection of the true character [Jesus]....if eyewitnesses were still at hand who could be questioned respecting the truth of the recorded marvels. Hence, legendary fiction, as it likes not the clear present time but prefers the mysterious gloom of gray antiquity, is wont to seek a remoteness of age, along with that of space, and to remove its boldest and most rare and wonderful creations into a very remote and unknown land."  (The Theory of Myths in Its Application to the Gospel History Examined and Confuted [London, 1844], p. 26)

Müller challenged his nineteenth-century contemporaries to produce a single example anywhere in history of a great myth or legend arising around a historical figure and being generally believed within thirty years after that figure's death. No one has ever answered him.

(3) The myth theory has two layers. The first layer is the historical Jesus, who was not divine, did not claim divinity, performed no miracles, and did not rise from the dead. The second, later, mythologized layer is the Gospels as we have them, with a Jesus who claimed to be divine, performed miracles and rose from the dead. The problem with this theory is simply that there is not the slightest bit of any real evidence whatever for the existence of any such first layer. The two-layer cake theory has the first layer made entirely of air—and hot air at that.

St. Augustine refutes the two-layer theory with his usual condensed power and simplicity:

"The speech of one Elpidius, who had spoken and disputed face to face against the Manichees, had already begun to affect me at Carthage, when he produced arguments from Scripture which were not easy to answer. And the answer they [the Manichees, who claimed to be the true Christians] gave seemed to me feeble—indeed they preferred not to give it in public but only among ourselves in private—the answer being that the Scriptures of the New Testament had been corrupted by some persons unknown...yet the Manicheans made no effort to produce uncorrupted copies." (Confessions, V, 11, Frank Sheed translation)

Note the sarcasm in the last sentence. It still applies today. William Lane Craig summarizes the evidence—the lack of evidence:

"The Gospels are a miraculous story, and we have no other story handed down to us than that contained in the Gospels....The letters of Barnabas and Clement refer to Jesus' miracles and resurrection. Polycarp mentions the resurrection of Christ, and Irenaeus relates that he had heard Polycarp tell of Jesus' miracles. Ignatius speaks of the resurrection. Quadratus reports that persons were still living who had been healed by Jesus. Justin Martyr mentions the miracles of Christ. No relic of a non-miraculous story exists. That the original story should be lost and replaced by another goes beyond any known example of corruption of even oral tradition, not to speak of the experience of written transmissions. These facts show that the story in the Gospels was in substance the same story that Christians had at the beginning. This means...that the resurrection of Jesus was always a part of the story." (Apologetics, chapter 6)

(4) A little detail, seldom noticed, is significant in distinguishing the Gospels from myth: the first witnesses of the resurrection were women. In first-century Judaism, women had low social status and no legal right to serve as witnesses. If the empty tomb were an invented legend, its inventors surely would not have had it discovered by women, whose testimony was considered worthless. If, on the other hand, the writers were simply reporting what they saw, they would have to tell the truth, however socially and legally inconvenient.

(5) The New Testament could not be myth misinterpreted and confused with fact because it specifically distinguishes the two and repudiates the mythic interpretation (2 Peter 1:16). Since it explicitly says it is not myth, if it is myth it is a deliberate lie rather than myth. The dilemma still stands. It is either truth or lie, whether deliberate (conspiracy) or non-deliberate (hallucination). There is no escape from the horns of this dilemma. Once a child asks whether Santa Claus is real, your yes becomes a lie, not myth, if he is not literally real. Once the New Testament distinguishes myth from fact, it becomes a lie if the resurrection is not fact.

(6) Dr. William Lane Craig has summarized the traditional textual arguments with such clarity, condensation, and power that I'll quote him here at length. The following arguments (rearranged and outlined from Knowing the Truth About the Resurrection) prove two things: first, that the Gospels were written by the disciples, not later myth-makers, and second, that the Gospels we have today are essentially the same as the originals.

(A) Proof that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses:

1. Internal evidence, from the Gospels themselves:

1. The style of writing in the Gospels is simple and alive, what we would expect from their traditionally accepted authors.
2. Moreover, since Luke was written before Acts, and since Acts was written prior to the death of Paul, Luke must have an early date, which speaks for its authenticity.
3. The Gospels also show an intimate knowledge of Jerusalem prior to its destruction in A.D. 70. The Gospels are full of proper names, dates, cultural details, historical events, and customs and opinions of that time.
4. Jesus' prophecies of that event (the destruction of Jerusalem) must have been written prior to Jerusalem's fall, for otherwise the church would have separated out the apocalyptic element in the prophecies, which makes them appear to concern the end of the world. Since the end of the world did not come about when Jerusalem was destroyed, the so-called prophecies of its destruction that were really written after the city was destroyed would not have made that event appear so closely connected with the end of the world. Hence, the Gospels must have been written prior to A.D. 70.
5. The stories of Jesus' human weaknesses and of the disciples' faults also bespeak the Gospels' accuracy.
6. Furthermore, it would have been impossible for forgers to put together so consistent a narrative as that which we find in the Gospels. The Gospels do not try to suppress apparent discrepancies, which indicates their originality (written by eyewitnesses). There is no attempt at harmonization between the Gospels, such as we might expect from forgers.
7. The Gospels do not contain anachronisms; the authors appear to have been first-century Jews who were witnesses of the events.

We may conclude that there is no more reason to doubt that the Gospels come from the traditional authors than there is to doubt that the works of Philo or Josephus are authentic, except that the Gospels contain supernatural events.

2. External evidence:

1. The disciples must have left some writings, engaged as they were in giving lessons to and counseling believers who were geographically distant; and what could these writings be if not the Gospels and epistles themselves? Eventually the apostles would have needed to publish accurate narratives of Jesus' history, so that any spurious attempts would be discredited and the genuine Gospels preserved.
2. There were many eyewitnesses who were still alive when the books were written who could testify whether they came from their purported authors or not.
3. The extra-biblical testimony unanimously attributes the Gospels to their traditional authors: the Epistle of Barnabas, the Epistle of Clement, the Shepherd of Hermes, Theophilus, Hippolytus, Origen, Quadratus, Irenaeus, Melito, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Dionysius, Tertullian, Cyprian, Tatian, Caius, Athanasius, Cyril, up to Eusebius in A.D. 315, even Christianity's opponents conceded this: Celsus, Porphyry, Emperor Julian.
4. With a single exception, no apocryphal gospel is ever quoted by any known author during the first three hundred years after Christ. In fact there is no evidence that any inauthentic gospel whatever existed in the first century, in which all four Gospels and Acts were written.

(B) Proof that the Gospels we have today are the same Gospels originally written:

1. Because of the need for instruction and personal devotion, these writings must have been copied many times, which increases the chances of preserving the original text.
2. In fact, no other ancient work is available in so many copies and languages, and yet all these various versions agree in content.
3. The text has also remained unmarred by heretical additions. The abundance of manuscripts over a wide geographical distribution demonstrates that the text has been transmitted with only trifling discrepancies. The differences that do exist are quite minor and are the result of unintentional mistakes.
4. The quotations of the New Testament books in the early Church Fathers all coincide.
5. The Gospels could not have been corrupted without a great outcry on the part of all orthodox Christians.
6. No one could have corrupted all the manuscripts.
7. There is no precise time when the falsification could have occurred, since, as we have seen, the New Testament books are cited by the Church Fathers in regular and close succession. The text could not have been falsified before all external testimony, since then the apostles were still alive and could repudiate such tampering.
8. The text of the New Testament is every bit as good as the text of the classical works of antiquity. To repudiate the textual parity of the Gospels would be to reverse all the rules of criticism and to reject all the works of antiquity, since the text of those works is less certain than that of the Gospels.

Richard Purtill summarizes the textual case:

"Many events which are regarded as firmly established historically have (1) far less documentary evidence than many biblical events; (2) and the documents on which historians rely for much secular history are written much longer after the event than many records of biblical events; (3) furthermore, we have many more copies of biblical narratives than of secular histories; and (4) the surviving copies are much earlier than those on which our evidence for secular history is based. If the biblical narratives did not contain accounts of miraculous events, biblical history would probably be regarded as much more firmly established than most of the history of, say, classical Greece and Rome." (Thinking About Religion, p. 84-85)

 
 
Excerpted from “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics", copyright 1994, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, published 2009 Ignatius Press, used with permission of the publisher. Text reproduced from PeterKreeft.com.

(Image credit: With All I Am)

NOTE: Christians around the world celebrated Good Friday and Easter last week, which commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus we began a six-part series on these events by Dr. Peter Kreeft in which he examines each of the plausible theories attempting to explain what happened to Jesus at the end of his life, particularly whether he rose from the dead.

Part 1 - 5 Possible Theories that Explain the Resurrection of Jesus
Part 2 - Rejecting the Swoon Theory: 9 Reasons Why Jesus Did Not Faint on the Cross
Part 3 - Debunking the Conspiracy Theory: 7 Arguments Why Jesus’ Disciples Did Not Lie
Part 4 - Refuting the Myth Theory: 6 Reasons Why the Resurrection Accounts are True
Part 5 - Real Visions: 13 Reasons the Disciples Did Not Hallucinate
Part 6 - (Coming soon!)
 

 
On Monday we looked at the so-called "swoon" theory, which suggests Jesus didn't really die on the cross. But supposing he did actually die, why couldn't the disciples have made up the whole story about his resurrection? Here are seven reasons why:

(1) Blaise Pascal gives a simple, psychologically sound proof for why this is unthinkable:

"The apostles were either deceived or deceivers. Either supposition is difficult, for it is not possible to imagine that a man has risen from the dead. While Jesus was with them, he could sustain them; but afterwards, if he did not appear to them, who did make them act? The hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end, and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus' death and conspiring to say that he has risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost. Follow that out." (Pensees, 322)

The "cruncher" in this argument is the historical fact that no one, weak or strong, saint or sinner, Christian or heretic, ever confessed, freely or under pressure, bribe or even torture, that the whole story of the resurrection was a fake, a lie, a deliberate deception. Even when people broke under torture, denied Christ, and worshiped Caesar, they never let that cat out of the bag, never revealed that the resurrection was their conspiracy. For that cat was never in the bag. No Christians believed the resurrection was a conspiracy; if they had, they wouldn't have become Christians.

(2) If they made up the story, they were the most creative, clever, intelligent fantasists in history, far surpassing Shakespeare, or Dante, or Tolkien. Fisherman's "fish stories" are never that elaborate, that convincing, that life-changing, and that enduring.

(3) The disciples' character argues strongly against such a conspiracy on the part of all of them, with no dissenters. They were simple, honest, common peasants, not cunning, conniving liars. (They weren't even lawyers!) Their sincerity is proved by their words and deeds. They preached a resurrected Christ and they lived a resurrected Christ. They willingly died for their "conspiracy." Nothing proves sincerity like martyrdom. The change in their lives from fear to faith, despair to confidence, confusion to certitude, runaway cowardice to steadfast boldness under threat and persecution, not only proves their sincerity but testifies to some powerful cause of it. Can a lie cause such a transformation? Are truth and goodness such enemies that the greatest good in history—sanctity—has come from the greatest lie?

Use your imagination and sense of perspective here. Imagine twelve poor, fearful, stupid (read the Gospels!) peasants changing the hard-nosed Roman world with a lie. And not an easily digested, attractive lie either. St. Thomas Aquinas says:

"In the midst of the tyranny of the persecutors, an innumerable throng of people, both simple and learned, flocked to the Christian faith. In this faith there are truths proclaimed that surpass every human intellect; the pleasures of the flesh are curbed; it is taught that the things of the world should be spurned. Now, for the minds of mortal men to assent to these things is the greatest of miracles....This wonderful conversion of the world to the Christian faith is the clearest witness....For it would be truly more wonderful than all signs if the world had been led by simple and humble men to believe such lofty truths, to accomplish such difficult actions, and to have such high hopes." (Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 6)

(4) There could be no possible motive for such a lie. Lies are always told for some selfish advantage. What advantage did the "conspirators" derive from their "lie" ? They were hated, scorned, persecuted, excommunicated, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, crucified, boiled alive, roasted, beheaded, disemboweled and fed to lions—hardly a catalog of perks!

(5) If the resurrection was a lie, the Jews would have produced the corpse and nipped this feared superstition in the bud. All they had to do was go to the tomb and get it. The Roman soldiers and their leaders were on their side, not the Christians'. And if the Jews couldn't get the body because the disciples stole it, how did they do that? The arguments against the swoon theory hold here too: unarmed peasants could not have overpowered Roman soldiers or rolled away a great stone while they slept on duty.

(6) The disciples could not have gotten away with proclaiming the resurrection in Jerusalem-same time, same place, full of eyewitnesses—if it had been a lie. William Lane Craig says,

"The Gospels were written in such a temporal and geographical proximity to the events they record that it would have been almost impossible to fabricate events....The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a few weeks after the crucifixion shows that what they proclaimed was true, for they could never have proclaimed the resurrection (and been believed) under such circumstances had it not occurred."  (Knowing the Truth About the Resurrection, chapter 6)

(7) If there had been a conspiracy, it would certainly have been unearthed by the disciples' adversaries, who had both the interest and the power to expose any fraud. Common experience shows that such intrigues are inevitably exposed (Craig, ibid).

In conclusion, if the resurrection was a concocted, conspired lie, it violates all known historical and psychological laws of lying. Such a lie is, then, as unscientific, unrepeatable, unique, and untestable as the resurrection itself. But unlike the resurrection, it is also contradicted by things we do know (the above points).

On Friday, we'll examine the "myth" theory, perhaps the most common hypothesis among non-Christians today.
 
 
Excerpted from “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics", copyright 1994, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, published 2009 Ignatius Press, used with permission of the publisher. Text reproduced from PeterKreeft.com.

(Image credit: Wikimedia)

NOTE: Christians around the world celebrated Good Friday and Easter last week, which commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus we began a six-part series on these events by Dr. Peter Kreeft in which he examines each of the plausible theories attempting to explain what happened to Jesus at the end of his life, particularly whether he rose from the dead.

Part 1 - 5 Possible Theories that Explain the Resurrection of Jesus
Part 2 - Rejecting the Swoon Theory: 9 Reasons Why Jesus Did Not Faint on the Cross
Part 3 - Debunking the Conspiracy Theory: 7 Arguments Why Jesus’ Disciples Did Not Lie
Part 4 - Refuting the Myth Theory: 6 Reasons Why the Resurrection Accounts are True
Part 5 - Real Visions: 13 Reasons the Disciples Did Not Hallucinate
Part 6 - (Coming soon!)
 

 
Last week, we introduced five possible theories attempting to explain the resurrection accounts of Jesus of Nazareth. Today we'll examine what's often called the "swoon theory," which suggests that Jesus never really died on the cross—he simply fainted, or swooned, and was presumed dead.

Nine pieces of evidence refute the swoon theory:

(1) Jesus could not have survived crucifixion. Roman procedures were very careful to eliminate that possibility. Roman law even laid the death penalty on any soldier who let a capital prisoner escape in any way, including bungling a crucifixion. It was never done.

(2) The fact that the Roman soldier did not break Jesus' legs, as he did to the other two crucified criminals (Jn 19:31-33), means that the soldier was sure Jesus was dead. Breaking the legs hastened the death so that the corpse could be taken down before the sabbath (v. 31).

(3) John, an eyewitness, certified that he saw blood and water come from Jesus' pierced heart (Jn 19:34-35). This shows that Jesus' lungs had collapsed and he had died of asphyxiation. Any medical expert can vouch for this.

(4) The body was totally encased in winding sheets and entombed (Jn 19:38-42).

(5) The post-resurrection appearances convinced the disciples, even "doubting Thomas," that Jesus was gloriously alive (Jn 20:19-29). It is psychologically impossible for the disciples to have been so transformed and confident if Jesus had merely struggled out of a swoon, badly in need of a doctor. A half-dead, staggering sick man who has just had a narrow escape is not worshiped fearlessly as divine lord and conquerer of death.

(6) How were the Roman guards at the tomb overpowered by a swooning corpse? Or by unarmed disciples? And if the disciples did it, they knowingly lied when they wrote the Gospels, and we are into the conspiracy theory, which we will refute shortly.

(7) How could a swooning half-dead man have moved the great stone at the door of the tomb? Who moved the stone if not an angel? No one has ever answered that question. Neither the Jews nor the Romans would move it, for it was in both their interests to keep the tomb sealed: the Jews had the stone put there in the first place, and the Roman guards would be killed if they let the body "escape."

The story the Jewish authorities spread, that the guards fell asleep and the disciples stole the body (Mt 28:11-15), is unbelievable. Roman guards would not fall asleep on a job like that; if they did, they would lose their lives. And even if they did fall asleep, the crowd and the effort and the noise it would have taken to move an enormous boulder would have wakened them. Furthermore, we are again into the conspiracy theory, with all its unanswerable difficulties (we'll deal with this theory in a couple days.)

(8) If Jesus awoke from a swoon, where did he go? Think this through: you have a living body to deal with now, not a dead one. Why did it disappear? There is absolutely no data, not even any false, fantastic, imagined data, about Jesus' life after his crucifixion, in any sources, friend or foe, at any time, early or late. A man like that, with a past like that, would have left traces.

(9) Most simply, the swoon theory necessarily turns into the conspiracy theory or the hallucination theory, for the disciples testified that Jesus did not swoon but really died and really rose.

It may seem that these nine arguments have violated our initial principle about not presupposing the truth of the Gospel texts, since we have argued from data in the texts. But the swoon theory does not challenge the truths in the texts which we refer to as data; it uses them and explains them (by swoon rather than resurrection). Thus we use them too.

On Wednesday, we'll deal with the slightly more popular "conspiracy theory" alternative.
 
 
Excerpted from “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics", copyright 1994, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, published 2009 Ignatius Press, used with permission of the publisher. Text reproduced from PeterKreeft.com.

(Image credit: Passion of the Christ film)