The Rationality of the Resurrection of Jesus
Richard Klaus
May 18, 2019
Introduction
1. Outline of talk: three movements
a. Realism and the Resurrection
b. Rationality and the Resurrection
c. Responses to the Resurrection
Realism and the Resurrection
1. The resurrection of Jesus is of central importance in the New Testament portrait of the early church’s confession.
a. Identity of Jesus: Jesus is “declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1.4)
b. Salvation: “…that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved…” (Romans 10.9)
c. Judgment: “God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world through a Man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17.30-31)
2. New Testament’s realism about the resurrection: consequences for being wrong!
a. 1 Corinthians 15.13-19
13But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised; 14and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. 15Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God the he raised Christ, whom he did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. 16For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; 17and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. 18Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.
b. Not all share this view…
i. Interview with Serene Jones in The New York Times (April 20, 2019)[1]
KRISTOF: Happy Easter, Reverend Jones! To start, do you think of Easter as a literal flesh-and-blood resurrection? I have problems with that.
JONES: When you look in the Gospels, the stories are all over the place. There’s no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb. Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves. But that empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed.
KRISTOF: But without a physical resurrection, isn’t there a risk that we are left with just the crucifixion?
JONES: Crucifixion is not something that God is orchestrating from upstairs. The pervasive idea of an abusive God-father who sends his own kid to the cross so God could forgive people is nuts. For me, the cross is an enactment of our human hatred. But what happens on Easter is the triumph of love in the midst of suffering. Isn’t that reason for hope?
KRISTOF: Isn’t a Christianity without a physical resurrection less powerful and awesome? When the message is about love, that’s less religion, more philosophy.
JONES: For me, the message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death. That’s a much more awesome claim than that they put Jesus in the tomb and three days later he wasn’t there. For Christians for whom the physical resurrection becomes a sort of obsession, that seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith. What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie? No, faith is stronger than that.
Rationality and the Resurrection
1. Nature of the argument is historical in nature.
a. “What is decisive in historical argument is not some isolated piece of evidence, but rather the convergence of all the available evidence and of the interpretation that can be based on such evidence. Therefore, the argument is conclusive only in view of all the available evidence and upon due consideration of the relevant circumstances.”[2]
b. Miracles and historical explanation
i. Kai Nielson on resurrection
“Jesus, let us suppose—I don’t know much about such things and to be perfectly frank, I’m not terribly interested in them—but let us suppose it were the case that Jesus was raised from the dead. Suppose you collected the bones, and they together in some way reconstituted the living Jesus. Suppose something like that really happened. Suppose there were good historical evidence for it. I have no idea if there is or isn’t; I suspect for anything like that, there isn’t very good evidence, but let us assume there is. This wouldn’t show there was an infinite intelligible being. It wouldn’t give you any way of being able to detect if there is a God. It would be just that a very strange happening happened, namely, that somebody who died—or certainly appeared to have died—came together again as a living human being. It wouldn’t enable you to understand at all what you were talking about concerning an infinite individual. It would just be a very peculiar fact we hadn’t explained and indeed lacked the scientific resources to explain. And the same thing is true of the familiar resurrection story.”[3]
ii. Assessment of evidence is worldview dependent
iii. Michael Licona argument: historians make a number of philosophical assumptions about reality[4]
1. External world is real.
2. Senses provide fairly accurate perception of the external world.
3. Logic “facilitates our quest for truth rather than merely functioning as a pragmatic tool that aims at our survival and quality of life.”[5]
4. Natural laws in effect today are the same as those in the past.
5. History is at least partially knowable.
iv. “If they [historians] have the liberty to proceed with these five philosophical assumptions, should they be prohibited from adopting a sixth philosophical assumption that involves the existence of God who acts in history?”[6]
Note: Here’s where a fuller worldview approach may strengthen Licona’s case. “The existence of a God who acts in history” is not a bare assumption arbitrarily chosen. Rather, the existence of God (biblically understood) provides the explanatory context for the other philosophical assumptions to flourish. The Christian God makes historiography possible.[7]
v. “Thus the historian would be epistemically justified in embracing a theistic worldview while making historical considerations. After all, why should an atheist or agnostic worldview be awarded a default position, especially when good data exists for a theistic reality. Additionally if a significant majority of those in modern society hold a theistic worldview, how can an assumption of theism be regarded as ad hoc? Those historians who are not as sanguine may provide reasons why they do not agree with a theistic horizon and why their historical conclusions are different, however, this does not prohibit theistic historians from proceeding any more than postmodern historians prohibit realists from proceeding.”[8]
c. Definition of miracle: “An event in history for which natural explanations are inadequate.”[9]
d. Recognizing a miracle: “We may recognize that an event is a miracle when the event…
i. “is extremely unlikely to have occurred given the circumstances and/or natural law and…
ii. “occurs in an environment or context charged with religious significance.”[10]
2. Epistemic duties vs. epistemic rights
a. The Christian is within his or her epistemic rights to affirm the historicity of the resurrection given the evidence.
b. Rational to believe in light of the evidence.
3. Some key historical pieces that need to be explained
a. Burial of Jesus’ body by Joseph of Arimathea
i. Burial is mentioned in earliest evidence from 1 Corinthians 15.3-5
ii. Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely to be a Christian invention
1. He is a member of the court that put Jesus to death
2. Hostile critics would have called “foul” on the untrue creation of a member of the Sanhedrin being used to foster Christian belief.
3. No other competing burial stories.
b. Empty tomb of Jesus
i. Early evidence from disciples and Paul
1. No time for legend to develop
2. Why do they have this belief? If not empty why believe this?
ii. Discovery of tomb by women
1. Marks of historicity
2. “Given the low status of women in Jewish society and their lack of qualification to serve as legal witnesses, the plausible explanation, in light of the gospels’ conviction that the disciples were in Jerusalem over the Easter weekend, why women and not the male disciples were made discoverers of the empty tomb is that the women were in fact the ones who made this discovery. This conclusion receives confirmation from the fact that there seems to be no reason why the later Christian church should wish to humiliate its leaders by having them hiding in cowardice in Jerusalem, while the women boldly carry out their last devotions to Jesus’ body, unless this were in fact the truth. Furthermore, the listing of the women’s names again weighs against unhistorical legend at the story’s core, for these persons were known in the Urgemeinde [community] and so could not be easily associated with a false account.”[11]
iii. Impossible to proclaim resurrection in Jerusalem had tomb not been empty
“Even if the disciples failed to check the empty tomb, the Jews could have been guilty of no such oversight. … When therefore the disciples began to preach the resurrection in Jerusalem, and people responded, and the religious authorities stood helplessly by, the tomb must have been empty. The fact that the Christian fellowship, founded on the belief in Jesus’ resurrection, could come into existence and flourish in the very city where he was executed and buried seems powerful evidence for the historicity of the empty tomb.”[12]
iv. Jewish polemic presupposes the empty tomb
1. Matthew 28.11-15
11Now while they were on their way, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened. 12And when they had assembled with the elders and consulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, 13and said, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ 14And if this should come to the governor’s ears, we will win him over and keep you out of trouble.” 15And they took money and did as they had been instructed; and this story was widely spread among the Jews, and is to this day.
2. “Rather the real value of Matthew’s story is the incidental—and for that reason all the more reliable—information that Jewish polemic never denied that the tomb was empty, but instead tried to explain it away. Thus the early opponents of the Christians themselves bear witness to the fact of the empty tomb.”[13]
v. No tomb veneration
1. “A further strong consideration in favour of the empty tomb reports being regarded as rooted in historical fact is the absence of any tomb veneration in earliest Christianity. We know that it was quite customary at the time of Jesus for devotees to meet at the tomb of the dead prophet for worship. The practice is reflected in Matt. 23.29 (‘you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous’). And it continues to today in the veneration accorded to the tombs of Abraham in Hebron and of David in Jerusalem. Jesus the Evidence [a 1984 British documentary] provided fascinating footage of the worship still practised at the tomb of the lesser known near contemporary of Jesus, the charismatic rabbi, Honi, ‘the circle-drawer’.”
2. “This strange silence, exceptional in view of the religious practice of the time, has only one obvious explanation. The first Christians did not regard the place where Jesus had been laid as having any special significance because no grave was thought to contain Jesus’ earthly remains. The tomb was not venerated, it did not become a place of pilgrimage, because the tomb was empty!”[14]
vi. Naturalistic explanations for empty tomb fail[15]
1. Conspiracy theory
a. Morally implausible: disciples not charlatans/hoaxers
b. Psychologically implausible: disciples were broken, fearful, and defeated
c. Characteristically implausible: changed lives and martyrs
2. Apparent death/swoon theory
a. Physically implausible: Jesus was tortured and killed by highly skilled Roman soldiers
b. Religiously implausible: a severely wounded Jesus surviving the torture and crucifixion would not evoke worship but pit and medical attention
c. Biographically implausible: it would mean Jesus tricked the disciples and this is out of character for him
3. Wrong tomb: women went to wrong tomb
a. Arbitrary selection of data
b. Others and especially opponents would have known the correct location
c. Appearances of Jesus to many different people under different circumstances
i. “New Testament historians concur that the disciples experienced something that made them believe that Jesus had risen from death to life. The point in question is how to explain the disciple’s encounters with the resurrected Jesus.”[16]
Note: Gary R. Habermas, “Resurrection Research From 1975 to the Present: What Are Critical Scholars Saying?” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3.2 (2005), 135-153.
i. Looks at over 2000 scholarly publications on Jesus’ death and resurrection in German, French, and English.
ii. “From considerations such as the research areas above, perhaps the single most crucial development has emerged. With few exceptions, the fact that after Jesus’ death his followers had experiences that they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus is arguably one of the two or three most recognized events from the four Gospels, along with Jesus’ central proclamation of the Kingdom of God and his death by crucifixion. Few critical scholars reject the notion that, after Jesus’ death the early Christians had real experiences of some sort.”[17]
ii. Appearances of risen Jesus
1. Women
a. “The fact that women are chosen for the first appearance and not the male disciples lends credibility to this incident. It would seem purposeless to make unqualified women the first witnesses of the risen Jesus, were this not the case. In fact Paul’s formula and Luke may well omit them because of their lack of legal status. So why have such a story at all? Any conceivable purpose for such an appearance would have been better served by, say, an appearance to Peter at the tomb. That Christ appears first to the women therefore speaks in favor of its historicity.”[18]
2. Peter
a. Attested in early formula from c. AD 33-36 that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15.3-5.
3. Twelve
a. Attested in early formula from c. AD 33-36 that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15.3-5.
4. 500 disciples
a. Attested in early formula from c. AD 33-36 that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15.3-5.
b. “Why does Paul add this remark? The great NT scholar of Cambridge University, C. H. Dodd, replies, ‘There can hardly be any purpose in mentioning the fact that most of the 500 are still alive, unless Paul is saying, in effect, “The witnesses are there to be questioned.”’ Notice: Paul could never have said this if the event had not occurred. He could not have challenged people to ask the witnesses if the event had never taken place and there were not witnesses. But evidently there were witnesses to this event, and Paul knew that some of them had died in the meantime. Therefore, the event must have taken place.”[19]
5. James (Jesus’ brother)
a. Attested in early formula from c. AD 33-36 that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15.3-5.
b. James was not a believer during Jesus’ ministry: Mark 3.21, 31; 6.3-4; John 7.5.
c. Subsequently found to be a leader in the church: Acts 15.12-21; Galatians 1.19).
d. Suffers martyrdom for his faith in the risen Jesus.
e. “Given James’s antipathy to Jesus during his lifetime and his leadership of the church thereafter, it seems very plausible that his turnabout was due to a resurrection appearance of Jesus to him. Paul’s personal contact with James in Jerusalem in AD 36 and his naming James in the list of witnesses makes this a firm conclusion.”[20]
6. Paul
a. An antagonistic opponent of Christianity
b. Conversion and martyrdom
d. Origin of the disciple’s belief in the resurrection
i. What caused this belief?
ii. “R. H. Fuller points out, even the most sceptical critic must posit some mysterious X to get the movement going. But the question is, what was that X?”[21]
iii. Belief is very early: not enough time for legend to develop
iv. Not from Christian influences: no Christianity yet!
v. Not from Pagan influences
1. Sometimes alleged that there were many “dying-rising” gods in the ancient world and that Christianity could have borrowed or been influenced by them.
2. “First, most scholars now agree that Fraser’s classification of ‘dying and raising gods’ is largely a scholarly construct that is not born out of the actual historical evidence. Ironically, one of the leading voices among those who continue to champion a Greco-Roman oriented history of religions approach to early Christianity—Jonathan Z. Smith—has also been a leading voice in proclaiming the demise of the ‘dying and rising gods’ thesis. In his well-known article ‘Dying and Rising Gods,’ Smith concludes: ‘The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts.’ This rejection of the existence of a ‘dying and rising gods’ pattern among ancient Mediterranean religions has become a virtual consensus over the last half century. And, obviously, if there is no identifiable concept of ‘dying and rising gods,’ then the Christian claims about Jesus can hardly be indebted to them.”[22]
vi. Not from Jewish influences
1. Jewish view of resurrection:
a. At the end of history
b. Of all the righteous or of all people
c. No notion of a resurrection of an individual within history
2. Concept of “translation” to heaven vs. resurrection
Responses to the Resurrection
1. Hallucination explanations
a. Increasing use of this concept in arguments against the resurrection
b. “The Resurrection of Jesus: A Clinical Review of Psychiatric Hypotheses for the Biblical Story of Easter” Joseph W. Bergeron and Gary R. Habermas Irish Theological Journal 80.2 (2015), 157-172.
i. Look at three different kinds of psychiatric hypotheses
1. Hallucinations
2. Conversion disorders
3. Bereavement-related visions
ii. “Based on a comprehensive Pubmed search of medical literature regarding Jesus’ disciples and related topics from 1918 to 2012, psychiatric hypotheses for the disciples’ post-crucifixion experiences of Jesus are not be found in peer-reviewed medical literature.”[23]
c. Hallucinations: three types of causes
i. Psychophysiologic
1. Due to alteration of brain structure and function
2. Tumors, midbrain strokes, localized dysfunction of brain structures
ii. Psychobiochemical
1. Due to neurotransmitter disturbances
2. Toxicity, drug effects, withdrawal, metabolic disturbances, infections
iii. Psychodynamic
1. Arising from intrusion of the unconscious into the conscious mind
2. Mental illnesses like schizophrenia
d. Hallucinations are private experiences
i. Cannot explain simultaneous group encounters
ii. “The wide variety of times and places that Jesus appeared, along with the differing mindsets of the witnesses, is another formidable obstacle. The accounts of men and women, hard-headed and soft-hearted alike, all believing that they saw Jesus, both indoors and outdoors, provide an insurmountable barrier for hallucinations. The odds that each person would be in precisely the proper and same frame of mind to experience a hallucination, even individually, decrease exponentially.”[24]
e. Collective hallucinations
i. “…such an explanation is far outside mainstream clinical thought. … Concordantly, the concept of collective-hallucination is not found in peer reviewed medical and psychological literature.”[25]
ii. “Again, it is important to note that simultaneous identical collective hallucinations are not found in peer-reviewed medical literature, and there is no mention of such phenomena in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [5th ed.].”[26]
iii. Those who have argued for the possibility of collective hallucinations note that a sense of “expectation” and “emotional excitement” would be required.[27]
1. Does not fit the profile of the disciples or unbelievers who came to believe in the appearances of Jesus (James and Paul).
2. If there was an expectation within some their Jewish context would have led them to interpret their experience not as a resurrection appearance but as a translation of Jesus into the heavenly realm.
f. Conclusions
“The proposed hallucination hypotheses are naïve in the light of medical and psychiatric pathognomic considerations. Those suffering illnesses characterized by hallucination are sick. They require medical and psychosocial support, a structured environment, pharmacological support, and behavioural treatment. Persons suffering from psychosis in Jesus’ time, not having benefit of modern medical treatment, might well be considered lunatics or demon possessed (e.g., Matt 4:24). They would be unlikely candidates to organize as a group and implement the rapid and historic widespread expansion of the Christian religion during the first century.
“In considering the possible etiologies of hallucinations, we have seen that neither the predominant Jewish view of the bodily resurrection, nor the situations, actions, and characteristics of the New Testament apostles themselves, fit typically-observed medical and psychological phenomena. This would especially be the case with those who prior to these appearances did not venerate Jesus as other than a misguided common man, such as Paul and probably James the brother of Jesus thought. Further, if Jesus’ tomb had been found empty, as a majority of scholars now concur was the case, this would be an additional factor counting against a purely psychiatric hypothesis for the biblical account of Easter.”[28]
2. “Anything but the resurrection!”
a. Again, the issue of worldviews comes to expression.
b. In responding to a debate on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew, Charles Hartshorne claims…
“I can neither explain away the evidences to which Habermas appeals, nor can I simply agree with Flew’s or Hume’s positions.”
“My metaphysical bias is against resurrections.”[29]
[1] Nicholas Kristof, “Reverend, You Say the Virgin Birth Is ‘a Bizarre Claim’?” The New York Times April 20, 2019—online: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/opinion/sunday/christian-easter-serene-jones.html.
[7] The basic idea is that the existence of God is needed to make philosophical sense of basic features of reality. In chapter four of his book Why Should I Believe Christianity (Christian Focus, 2016) James Anderson briefly examines six fundamental features of our world that “we take for granted in our lives and explain[s] why we need God in order to make sense of that thing.” The features Anderson looks at are: existence, values, morality, reason, mind, and science. For more developed argumentation on science and its dependence on God see James Anderson, “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God: The Theological Foundation of Modern Science” Reformed Faith and Practice vol. 4, issue 1, May 2019—online: https://journal.rts.edu/article/the-laws-of-nature-and-of-natures-god-the-theological-foundations-of-modern-science/. Also see my essay “Why Science Needs God: Analyzing the Religion and Science Conflict” Christian Post January 12, 2019—online: https://www.academia.edu/38140780/Why_Science_Needs_God_Analyzing_the_Religion_and_Science_Conflict.
[13] William Lane Craig, “The Guard at the Tomb” New Testament Studies 30 (1984), 279. Craig also provides argumentation for the historical reliability of the entire episode as narrated in Matthew’s Gospel. Article available online: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/historical-jesus/the-guard-at-the-tomb/.
[22] Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2007), 142-143. Also see the online article by Ronald Nash “Was the New Testament Influenced by Pagan Religions?” http://www.equip.org/PDF/DB109.pdf.
[23] Joseph W. Bergeron and Gary R. Habermas, “The Resurrection of Jesus: A Clinical Review of Psychiatric Hypotheses for the Biblical Story of Easter” Theological Journal 80.2 (2015), 3—page numbers are to online version: http://www.garyhabermas.com/articles/irish-theological-quarterly/Habermas_Resurrection%20of%20Jesus.pdf.
[24] Gary R. Habermas, “Explaining Away Jesus’ Resurrection: The Recent Revival of Hallucination Theories” Christian Research Journal 23.4 (2001), 5—page numbers are to online version: http://www.equip.org/PDF/DJ923.pdf.
