Why do you believe that Jesus was physically Resurrected?

Great Debates
61

I have some vague notions about a sort of philosophical God, but what has never made much sense to me is belief in miracles (i.e., events that defy any reasonable scientific explanation), especially the belief in specific miracles (like the resurrection) based on the generally weak evidence presented.

Even if you believe miracles are possible, surely they aren’t the most likely explanation for any given set of circumstances. Consider the following example:

Let’s say I were to tell you that last Wednesday I saw my friend Phil walk on water, and then he raised the dead, and then he died himself (including suffering some pretty severe wounds) only to come back to life.

Which of the following explanations would you consider most likely:
(A) It all happened just as I say it did
(B) I was fooled by a clever trickster
© I’m not being honest about what I saw
(D) I’m nuts
(E) Some other explanation

I doubt that even many of the Christians among you would consider (A) the most likely. But let’s say I told you I had dozens of witnesses who could attest to the same thing. Keep in mind that you haven’t met these witnesses. You don’t have signed statements from the witnesses. You have me and, let’s say, three of my friends telling you that this happened, and that there were other witnesses. Are you suddenly going to embrace (A) as the most likely possibility?

I’m not trying to be condescending – I’m really asking, would you find this claim credible today? (I’m guessing “no”, but maybe I’m wrong.) And if not, why is it more credible when it comes from some 2000-year-old documents written by people you’ve never met? Especially when there seems to be good reason to think the documents were written decades after Jesus’s death, by people who probably weren’t there themselves. That’s like if I said to you my friend Pete saw his friend Phil die and come back to life one time back in the '60s.

“But,” you might protest, “am I (or is Pete) willing to die for that belief?” But say I was? Suppose I swore to you that God had appeared before me, and he was 100 feet tall (or in some such way it was clear that it was God), and he said “Tim, I’m here to tell you that Jesus never came back from the dead.” Suppose you told me “recant, or I’ll kill you”, but I stuck to my story. Would this make you stop believing in the resurrection? What if I had a dozen friends who were also willing to die for the belief in the non-ressurection of Jesus? (That’s more than the number of eye-witnesses we have who have left written statements that they saw a risen Jesus – as noted above, it’s quite possible none of those written statements came from eye witnesses).

One of my Christian friends recently told me that it wasn’t reasonable to expect scientific evidence of the resurrection – it’s more like a trial, where you can’t know for sure what happened, but have to judge the credibility of the witnesses. But if that’s the case, it seems like all we have is hearsay evidence that would never be allowed in any court (at least here in the U.S.)

It just seems to me that Christians are choosing to accept a lower standard of evidence than they would require under any other circumstances, because they really want it to be true. And if that’s the case, they should be honest about it. If you wouldn’t be satisfied by that level of evidence when it comes to non-Biblical claims, don’t try to claim your beliefs are based on the evidence. (In fairness, many Christians don’t claim that, instead saying they “take it on faith.” Which I guess means they believe things for emotional rather than evidentiary reasons. Whether that’s a prudent way to determine your beliefs is another debate.)

62

Exactly. And my point is that in the absence of evidence for a thing, the rational assumption is not that it is true. There’s no evidence that pigs can fly - should I assume they can fly until it is disproven?

I didn’t offer that as a literal quote of Polycarp’s words; will you at least concede that “You can’t prove it’s not true” is not a compelling argument? If you won’t concede that, then I fear we have no common ground to discuss anything.

Right, and not knowing one way or the other isn’t a valid basis on which to hold the belief that Jesus was resurrected, IMO.

63

The reasons for assuming the authors did not know witnesses do not end at an absence of evidence that they did. There are also such factors as the fact that none of the authors make such a claim themselves, that the Gospels contain factual errors which would not be expected to come from witnesses, and that the Gospels were written outside of Palestine, 40-70 years after the crucifixion (and after a devastating war had destroyed Jerusalem). The latter two elements reduce the likelihood that the authors would have had access to witnesses, but the fact that none of the authors even make a claim themselves to have known witnesses gives us no reason to assume they did and the additional elements make an assumption to the contrary to be the reasonable default.

64

My take would be that we have to weigh the evidence for a claim against the prior likelihood of that claim being true. There’s a decent chance I had cereal for breakfast this morning, just by virtue of the fact that many Americans eat cereal for breakfast. So if I say “I ate cereal for breakfast,” it’s not unreasonable to believe me. If I say “I flew to Mars this morning”, you’d have reason to be much more skeptical, even though you have the same evidence (my word) in both cases.

We should have a high amount of skepticism towards a claim that someone rose from the dead, because this seems to violate basic scientific principles which our experience tells us are never (or at least virtually never) violated. Whereas, we have no particular reason to be skeptical of the claim that someone didn’t rise from the dead.

My point in my previous post is that Christians and non-Christians alike apply this sort of reasoning in assessing claims in their daily lives. But it seems that some Christians accept a lesser standard of proof for Biblical claims.

65

And yes, I realize that we’re talking about the claims of the resurrection being witnessed, but you have to judge those claims on the basis of the liklihood of the allegedly witnessed event occurring at all. If a resurrected Jesus is extremely unlikely, then witnesses to a resurrected Jesus are even more so.

66

Lowbrass: Yeah, the so-called burden of proof about eyewitnesses is on those who claim them. Except that that has little or nothing to do with the main point I was making, which was the nature of Diogenes’s statements regarding the written Gospels as we have tlhem. In general, I agree with his statements; they’re reasonably accurate inferences. For reasons it’s not necessary to dwell on, I think he’s just a trifle late in his dating – but that’s a technical argument he and I can have another time. The gist, though, was that they were very-likely-sound inferences, not proven statements – as I believe he’d agree.

On the eyewitness stuff, we can be reasonably sure that the Fourth Gospel seems to be the work of editors rescending the writings of a shadowy figure called John the Presbyter, who lived in Ephesus near the end of the First Century. However, John bar Zebedee, the Beloved Disciple, who is emphatically an eyewitness of the Resurrection, is held by early tradition to have settled in Ephesus, and taught there. I would note that the source of my board name is said to have learned from him, and carried the One-Degree-of-Separation banner down to the middle of the Second Century. So: John the Apostle teaches John the Presbyter (and Polycarp), who writes the first draft of what will become the 4th gospel. Editors then tweak that a bit to produce the document we have today. That is clear eyewitness evidence, one step removed. And there is nothing that says that over 80+ years a Galilean fisherman could not have mastered good Greek and the elements of philosophy, and have become John the Presbyter. It’s real easy to freeze-frame these characters and go “illiterate Galilean fisherman – couldn’t have written Greek.” But nobody today who makes these evaluations was born able to read and write Koine Greek either – they learned it. So could have John.

In the introduction to his gospel, Luke claims to “have gone over these things from the beginning” (“these things” being the vast assortment of stories, many of them fabrications even from a credulous Christian standpoint, about Jesus). He also describes himself in the next book as having travelled extensively with Paul and Barnabas. Early tradition has him depicted as having befriended Mary the mother of Jesus, and hence presumably John as well. It’s not proof; it’s evidence.

John Mark was the nephew of Barnabas, and travelled with him and Paul. There’s a lot of pious fiction associated with him, but key to it all is the repeated underlying assertion that he knew Peter well – which would make sense if Mark were travelling with Barnabas in the fairly small group of very early church leaders. And there is very little reason to doubt the attribution of the 2nd and 3rd gospels.

None of this proves anything. What it does is to cast doubt on the assertion that the actual Gospel writers were neither eyewitnesses nor people who had any contact with eyewitnesses. I could buy a “not proven” regarding accurate sources, to be sure – but I won’t grant a disproven.

“Symbolic”? Who said anything about merely symbolic? Listen, “Anna Nicole Smith was in my bedroom last night.” That is a true statement. It does not imply her physical presence, much less that she resurrected (which would certainly give the celebrity gossip people a field day). But my wife was watching TV in our bedroom, and the mandatory daily dose of ANS-ana had to be included in a newscast, including a filmclip of her while alive doing something utterly unnewsworthy. Ergo: she was present there. We heard her talk (something I could have done without). True, she was present on a CRT, in the form of broadcast clips of filmage shot weeks earlier. But I have proven the truth of my statement in quotation marks.

Now, here’s the point: The early Christians were testifying that they had seen Jesus, “who was dead and is now alive.” The evidence is confusing and contradictory as to what exactly was seen when and where and what characteristics it had. That does not shake their conviction that it really happened. I have only the slightest clue what “a spiritual body” in Paul’s phrase might be, what its capabilities and limitations are – but it is neither a ghost – Paul is quick to counter that – nor a mortal body subject to human limitations. Spong likes the idea of sensing His abiding presence in the Eucharist. Some people think it was hallucinations. Dear old His4Ever would claim that anyone who doesn’t believe it was the exact same body that got killed on Friday is some variety of heretic. Me, I don’t know for sure: but I do know that something happened, something life-changing. And the sense of that Presence has been felt by many, many others, only a few of whom have claimed to have seen Him in a vision.

Here would be my proposition: on Easter Day, Something happened that was not a part of human experience prior to that time. Exactly what, we’re not sure. But it left a bunch of people across many walks of life convinced that the Jesus who had been executed by crucifixion was no longer dead but again alive, however unlikely that might be. It was something objectively real, not a hallucination – but it was most likely not a resuscitation of a dead body in contra-physiological miracle. In their mindset, they interpreted it in the manner explicated by Paul in 1 Cor. 15, if they interpreted it at all. That doesn’t have to be a modern understanding – but it should pave the way toward one.

67

Sorry, I don’t speak the language of theology, so I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to say. You seemed to me earlier to be saying that you didn’t necessarily think that they witnessed a physical resurrection. You seem upset with my choice of wording, but I only speak plain English; I am not adept at couching my language in philosophical or theological jargon. If a person says that he saw another person come back to life after dying, but that didn’t literally happen, I call that symbolic. I fear that words in English don’t mean the same thing to each of us, so I guess there’s no point in continuing here.

68

Polycarp:

Brilliant. Utterly brilliant.

69

Why? The sense of the presence of all kinds of imaginary creatures is felt by lots of people all the time. Why is “Lots of people feel they’ve met Jesus” a brilliant argument? Lots of people feel they’ve met dead Elvis or aliens or unicorns, too, and in a very intense, special way that they might just fight to the death to defend the reality of. It’s not unto itself evidence of anything other than human nature.

70

Dim. Faint and dim.

71

Then it should be really really easy to counter, right?

I’m waiting…

Or is it that “things which make me feel good about Jesus” are brilliant and everything else is just a distant murmur?

72

And remember, AHunter3: I’m not saying that personal spiritual experience is invalid. I’m asking why the idea that Jesus gets a special pass into being the Truth because people have had a personal spiritual experience of him (among many other deities) is brilliant. “I know something life-changing happened and that’s good enough for me” isn’t brilliant, it’s incredibly weak, especially since such things happen outside the context of Christianity all the time. Poly is usually sharper than that, so I’m a little surprised, and maybe just didn’t understand him.

73

Thanks for that link.

What struck me is the the way Ehrman correctly separates historical scholarship from theology, and the way Craig is completely unable to do so. Without acknowledging it he weaves in and out of theology and actual historical scholarship blurring the lines where it supports his thesis and separating them when it doesn’t. It always surprises me to see highly intelligent well educated people doing that. It’s perfectly acceptable to just say “I believe” and leave it at that. There’s no need to use pseudo scholarship to support religious beliefs. Well, maybe there is if you have to believe the Bible or any text like it are historically accurate. It’s a distraction from the actual point of it’s writing IMHO.

74

I appreciate Poly and I think this is a valid point but brilliant may be overstating.
There’s no doubt that the iconic figure of Jesus has had incredible impact on peoples lives and the world. It’s also obvious that he is not the only one.

I don’t think it really matters what iconic figure you use as you move along the path to enlightenment and growth. I don’t even think Jesus himself would care. I think he would care if we cling to myth and tradition in a way that inhibits that journey. When we place the icon and the tradition in a place of reverence above truth we’re not really following the teachings of Christ. Of course thats IMHO.

75

I quoted Polycarp. Brief synopsis here, go back upthread to read the original if you wish:

<Polycarp’s description of how Anne Nicole Smith was in the bedroom last night. Elaboration on how something can be true without being true in the most everyday & childishly simplistic interpretation possible. Statement that he believes something did in fact happen for which “Jesus, who was dead, is now alive” was a true statement, but that it is not necessarily true in the most everyday & childishly simplistic interpretation possible.>

To that I responded:

Ensign Edison then wrote a paragraph that had, as far as I could see, nothing whatsoever to do with Anne Nicole Smith or how something can be true without it being true in the most everyday and childishly simplistic interpretation possible. Blathers on about unicorns and how someone fervently believing something doesn’t make it so.

Not feeling it deserved much of a reply, insofar as it was itself not much of a reply to either Polycarp’s post or my assessment of Polycarp’s post as brilliant, I snarkily answered:

…

Jesus doesn’t get one from me, nor does anyone else. In the post to which I was responding, I did not understand Polycarp to be issuing a special pass either. He may have done so elsewhere, upthread or in a different thread of whatever. I was merely responding to the post of his directly above my “brilliant, utterly brilliant” assessment.

Does this clarify?

76

Thank you, AHunter3. I thought you were calling another part of his post – the part where he says that nobody knows what really happened in the Resurrection but since so many people felt something did, that was enough for him – brilliant, that’s all. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

77

You’ve done a good job of laying out the Patristic case, but respectfully, this is not clear evidence, it’s a hypothesis made from several unverified inferences.

Internally, the Gospel of John does not identify the Beloved Disciple as John, nor does the the author identify himself as either the BD or as John or as any other disciple. There is an appendix to the Gospel which says, “This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true,” but that part was added at some point after the original book was finished. GJohn also anachronistically places the expulsion of Chistians from Jewish synagogues during the life of Jesus (the expulsion did not actually occur until about 90 CE). Beyond that, GJohn also contains a considerably more developed theology than the synoptics and it contains a number of lengthy discourses (found only in GJohn) attributed to Jesus which are not likely to have survide oral tradition or been remembered verbatim for 60+ years by an eyewitness.

Externally, the first identification of John the Apostle as the author of the 4th Gospel comes from Irenaeus (c. 180 CE). Eusebius and Papias (as quoted by Eusebius) both indicate that Irenaeus (who was speaking from childhood memories of Polycarp) had confused John the Presbyter (or John the Elder) with John the Apostle. Eusebius explicitly says that Irenaeus had made a mistake, that Polycarp and Papias had learned from John the Presbyter, not the Apostle. Having said that, there is still no direct evidence that even the Presbyter wrote the Gospel and there was another early tradition that it was written by an Egyptian Gnostic (also living in Ephesus) named Cerinthus. Strangely, the Gospel was considered by Irenaeus to have been a response to the heresies of Cerinthus. GJohn arguably does contain some Gnostic overtones and some of the theology (particularly the incoporation of the concept of the 'Logos") would tend to indicate a Philonic, Alexandrian (i.e. Egyptian) influence. Most scholarship seems to agre that GJohn is a multiply redacted work, which may indicate that it’s a reworked Gnostic Gospel.

It’s within the realm of human possibility but there is no positive evidence in favor of it and this hypothesis would have to deal with aposynagogos anachronism.

He was referring to previously written material – “that which was handed down to us” by earlier writers. We know that he was using previously written material because we know, to a large extent, which written material he used. He used Mark, he used Q (whether he got the Q material directly from matthew or independently, it’s still a written, secondary source) and he probably used Josephus. There is some material in Luke which he seems to have invented himself (his Nativity) and some which is of an unknown source (he has some parables which are unique to his own Gospel…possibly, he used more Q material than Matthew did), but the fact that he is mostly dependant on Mark and Q would mitigate against the hypothesis that he personally interviewed witnesses (a claim he never actually makes).

He doesn’t actually say this explicitly. It’s inferred from certain sporadic passages where the author speaks in the first person plural – the so-called “we passages” of Acts. This is something for which alternate explanations exist than for eyewitness testimony. Most commonly, it’s argued that paul was copying from another written source. Another possiblity argued here, is that the use of first person was a Greel literary convention for descriptions of sea travel. The author never actually says 'I" and never says “I knew Paul.”

Historians do not regard late developing traditions as evidence and the contention that Luke knew Mary is rebutted by the dating of the Gospel (in the mid 90’s if he used Josephus, by the lack of any claim by the author to such knowledge and by the author’s extensive dependence on written sources from non-witnesses. Which material could he have gotten from Mary anyway, the Nativity? A story which contains demonstrable historical impossibilities (and I’m not talking about the virgin birth)?

There is no evidence at all to connect this character to the Canonical Gospel of Mark. Papias (as quoted by Eusebius) says that somebody named Mark recorded the memoirs of Peter “in no particular order,” but does not say anything to indicate that whatever he was referring to should be identifified as the canonical Gospel of Mark, and the internal evidence in Mark mitigates against it as a Petrine memoir for multiple reasons. GMark also does not have any post resurrection appearances, by the way. It ends with the women running away from the empty tomb and says they were too afraid to tell anybody. So even if we were to accept Mark as represnting the memories of Peter, it STILL doesn’t give us any testimony of the Apostles having witnessed a physically resurrected Jesus.

I think it would be more accurate to say that there is no positive evidence in favor of the authorship traditions and plenty of circumstantial evidence against them. I would also contend that the traditions are not evidence in themselves, but only 2nd century assertions about them which do not hold up well under analysis.

78

That’s an interesting take on it. I would disagree with the characterization that believing there is an objective truth is “childish”. I would say it’s the other way around. Children tend to hold less distinction between reality and fantasy, and gradually come around to acknowledging the existence of an objective, quantifiable reality as they gain more life experience.

I would disagree that having an image of a person on a television could be described as that person “being here”. That’s simply a less accurate, more fanciful way of describing it. It doesn’t add any meaning beyond the objective explanation that the person’s image is on the television, and only confuses the issue.

79

OK, then. Bring a person who has never seen nor heard of a television set into Polycarp’s room and let that person experience “Anne Nicole Simpson being in the room”. Person has been made entirely aware that she is dead prior to having this experience.

Now have this person go forth and communicate to an entire village of people who have also no familiarity whatsoever and whithersoever with the existence of television.

Person may be well aware that dead people don’t become non-dead people, not merely “as a general rule” but as “a rule with hitherto zero exceptions”.

Person may be very much inclined to interpret the experience as “something WAY different going on here, NOT Anne Nicole’s dead corpse, which I was taken to see all pallid and cold in the morgue, somehow being alive” — but nevertheless, while Person cannot explain how it could be or precisely what it is that transpired, “she was in the room”.

How the hell else, and/or different, is this person going to attempt to communicate this to the others of the village, who also are very much aware that dead people aren’t alive, that dead people stay dead, that dead is permanent, et. al. – ??

Well, they might keep on emphasizing things like: “I’m telling you, man, this was eerie, different, it was an experience entirely other. I’ve seen dead people before. I’ve seen people like you and me and he and she who are not and have never been dead. I’ve seen masks and puppets and dolls and things, too. What I’m telling you is it was just like she was here in the room”.

If their culture has words for “shit we don’t understand”, they’d probably use 'em: “It was some kind of juju, man, it was magic, I know dead people’s days of walking and talking are over with, but she spoke and moved and looked around and everything. It was supernatural!”

Maybe if Person is quite good with words, there would be carefully nuanced expressions: “There were differences in how she was in the room compared to how you are here in front of me. I could not walk in back of her. I spoke but she did not seem to hear me. She appeared in a silver frame. And the sign of the FOX was upon her!”; but such a person would be unusual — most people in such a position do not tend to stipulate the ways in which their general claim is not precisely right, lest it sound like an admission that they are in fact entirely wrong. Instead, they tend to emphasize things that bolster their claim in the terms that they made it, yes?: “She was there just like you’re right here, man! When she spoke, she looked right at me and did that vapid smile thing she always did, I’m telling you it was her!”
Disclaimers:

a) I myself harbor no belief that Jesus of Nazareth as an individual person was ever alive after he was dead.

b) I do not content that the witnesses to the resurrection actually saw Jesus on TV.

c) I only have Poly’s word for it that he has a TV set.

80

  1. But how would the correct explanation, that she is on television, be more “childish”. Wouldn’t it be less childish, and more sophisticated?

  2. I still don’t understand the point. Obviously you’re not trying to say that Jesus was on television, so how does this relate to the discussion?