I just got through listening to the debate on the radio. For those of you who missed it, it is available to listen to here (see the mp3 player on the right look for Resurrection/Miracles debate 9/23/2012). I’d like to take the time to document some of the assertions that I made during the debate, and I’d add that you can find all of this (plus a whole lot more) in my book Extraordinary Claims, Extraordinary Evidence, and the Resurrection of Jesus. So, where do I get all my crazy ideas from?
During the debate I stated that there were nearly 400 claimed appearances of the Virgin Mary, and that only 8 of these appearances are deemed true by the Catholic Church. For information about that, see:
JC Tierney, “Marian Apparitions of the Twentieth Century” (2009)
The Marian Library, “How does the bishop of a diocese go about verifying an apparition, and what does it mean if ecclesial approval is granted?”
Joe Nickell has written a skeptical take on one of the “authentic” appearances here.
How common are hallucinations? Gary Whittenberger provides a useful summary of the studies done on this:
“In a study from 1971, William Rees tallied different types of hallucinations within a bereaved sample, finding that 39% of his sample ‘felt the presence’ of the deceased, 14% saw him/her, 13% heard him/her, and even 2% felt the touch of the dead loved one. In a more recent study from 1993, A. Grimby found that 50% of her grieving sample ‘felt the presence’ of the deceased, 26% saw him/her, and 30% heard him/her.”
The study from Rees can be found here, information about the Grimby study (as well as further information about grief hallucinations) can be found here. Of course, all of this is important because it means that if Jesus was not raised from the dead then we’d still expect his followers to have seen him.
The names of the writers on Constantine’s vision are Lactantius (writing three years after, he tells a simple story of Constantine having a dream of the cross the night before) and Eusebius, who wrote a vastly more elaborate account twenty-five years later. I use this example to argue that Paul’s report of Jesus appearing to 500 brethren (1 Corinthians 15:3-11) is very plausibly a legend. Although much of what is in that passage probably came from an early church creed that Paul was given, scholars are in agreement that Paul’s account of the appearance to the 500 was not part of the original creed. See Lewis 1998, p.32; Ludemann 2004, pp.40-42; Smith 2010, p.30. Of the three, Smith is the most useful, affordable, and interesting.
During the debate I also said that the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, were all influenced by Mark. Most scholars are in agreement that Mark was written first and that Mark was used by Matthew and Luke. The conservative scholar Daniel Wallace wrote an excellent article outlining the reasons for this. Not all scholars agree that the gospel of John was influenced by the other three. Personally, I have a hard time believing that the author of John would not have been familiar with the material of the other gospels (John was the last to write, probably many decades after the others went into circulation, how could he not have heard of them?). Further, there is evidence that John used the gospel of Luke, which is discussed in Scripting Jesus, pages 352-358.
The main argument I gave for my position (the resurrection didn’t happen) is that most miracle claims by far are false. Vocab asked in response about how we believe in “laws of nature” if there isn’t a God. I thought this question was flawed in many ways (you can believe in a God without believing Christianity specifically) but more importantly all I appealed to was the strong tendency of miracles to be made up. I decided to answer Vocab’s question anyway, and the point that I was trying to drive at (but didn’t get across clearly) was this: If you were to observe, for example, that every person you asked in Alabama said that they were going to vote for Barack Obama, and you asked this to a very large number of people from all different backgrounds, that would allow you to infer that most (perhaps all) people in Alabama are going to vote for Barack Obama. Why would you infer that? Because if most Alabamians weren’t going to vote for Barack Obama, it would be really rare to find that every single person you had asked was an Obama supporter. It’d be more improbable than winning a lottery, assuming you had asked over a hundred people. The evidence of past observation would demand that you infer that most Alabamians are going to vote for Obama, and from this you could deduce that the next person you ask will probably vote for Obama, simply because most will, and any given person is likely to be an average representation of the population. I think that this type of justification underlies all induction, and I’ve written more on that here. Notably, Christian apologist Timothy McGrew agrees that statistical inference can justify induction, as do several other philosophers.
Another thing that was brought up during the show was the “Ice Objection.” The objection runs like this: what if a tribe of people, in Africa, let’s say, had never seen ice before. Suppose that a stranger came to them and told them about this substance. Would the tribe be justified in disbelieving this guy? Surely not. And if so, it is argued, we have no more justification for disbelieving miracles than the tribe would have for disbelieving in the existence of ice. It’s a reductio ad absurdum. My response to this challenge is the following: when someone tells us about a strange substance we’ve never seen before, they usually aren’t lying (for example, in first grade I had never seen borax and glue combine to create slime, or vinegar and baking soda used to create a “volcanic explosion” but both of those were subsequently confirmed right in front of me, and I’m sure we can all think of countless examples from our own lives that show this). So the African tribe could reasonably trust the stranger’s account of ice. The case just isn’t analogous for miracles, because unlike strange or weird substances, most claims about these events are false. Miracles aren’t rejected because they’re weird. They’re rejected because the only evidence we have for them is a scattered smear of testimonies to them, every one of which, when investigated, was found highly questionable or outright false.
Another thing that came up during the debate was the Empty Tomb narrative. The empty tomb story, of course, is based on the testimony of the gospels. I argued that it was a legend. Paul attempts to prove the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:3-11, calling on every Tom, Dick and Harry who has supposedly seen the risen Jesus. He never once mentions anyone discovering an empty tomb. Why not? This is a piece of evidence that apologists always cite when talking about this issue, so you would think Paul would be only too eager to bring it forward to strengthen his case. Strangely, he doesn’t. This is pretty clear evidence, I think, that the empty tomb was a legend that didn’t emerge until after Paul’s time, and that’s why he doesn’t say anything about. Vocab responded to this by saying of course Paul knew about the empty tomb, the gospels say Peter and John saw it, and surely Paul talked to them. I then pointed out that this was a completely circular argument: you can’t assume the reliability of the gospel stories in order to prove their reliability on the point of the empty tomb. Vocab also deployed the William Lane Craig line “Paul pictured Jesus rising bodily, the empty tomb narrative is implicit in 1 Corinthians 15,” and so the empty tomb is attested in this writing too. I noted that this is a non-sequitor: it is completely consistent for the early Christians to believe that Jesus had been bodily raised from the dead but to have not gone and seen an empty tomb. How could that be? Well, if Jesus wasn’t buried in a tomb (but in the ground, for example), or if the disciples did not know where Jesus was buried, then they would not have even been able to go and observe Jesus’ tomb. Those two possibilities are not idle speculations; in chapter 2 of Doubting Jesus’ Resurrection, both are defended at length with a considerable amount of evidence (you can read the relevant parts, pages 29-32, here).
The motif that I mentioned, Reversal of expectation, is discussed in pages 224-226 in Bart Ehrman, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene. The basic idea is that the “least shall be first and the first shall shall be least” and the idea is symbolized by a member of the Sanhedrin (an evil group who condemned Jesus to death) has the honor of burying Jesus, and the women (the weak vessels of the church) are the first to discover the empty tomb instead of the male disciples, and so on. That’s just one explanation, though. It should also be said that Vocab’s “they wouldn’t make it up” argument for a member of the Sanhedrin burying Jesus has been shown unsound for other reasons. See especially Richard Carrier’s analysis in Proving History (under “The Criterion of Embarrassment”).
The issue of gospel authorship came up, and it seemed that Vocab felt like I was constantly dismissing the “evidence” for the resurrection by finding some alternative explanation. I understand why it might seem that way to him, but the truth of the matter is that issues like gospel authorship and gospel reliability are not questions that are settled very favorably for strongly conservative Christians, and such conclusions have been the result of rigorous and careful analysis of the evidence by many people. These are not straws being grasped at to get out of an unwanted conclusion, these are well-grounded conclusions about early Christian history that cannot be thrown out or ignored without lying to ourselves. I’ve written a little bit about the authorship of the gospels, so take a look at that to see what I mean. I think if you’re a “seeker” trying to settle the issue of the resurrection debate, it would be useful to you to first settle the issue of how much you can trust the gospels. I’d recommend having a look at some of the evangelical literature (I guess I’m not a good source to ask about which ones are the good ones, so you might just try a google search to see which books evangelicals tend to recommend), and then having a look at the more mainstream viewpoint. The two books that I would strongly recommend for this view are Scripting Jesus and Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium. Both of them are fairly cheap, so if you want to begin the project of investigating the New Testament, those books would tell you just about everything you need to know without cleaning out your wallet.
