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Reasoning To The Resurrection

The Evidence For Jesus’ Resurrection, Part 7: Reasoning To The Resurrection

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by Evan Minton

This is part 6 in a blog post series (and eventually, free Kindle book) on the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. In parts 3, 4, 5, and 6 we saw that powerful historical evidence exists for the following 5 facts

1: Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.

2: His tomb was found empty by a group of His women followers the following Sunday Morning.

3: The 12 Disciples believed they saw Jesus alive shortly after His death.

4: A church persecutor named Paul converted to Christianity on the basis of what he perceived to be an appearance of the risen Jesus. 

5: A skeptic named James converted to Christianity on the basis of what he perceived to be an appearance of the risen Jesus. 

These are the 5 facts that are granted by nearly every historian and scholar who studies the subject, even the non-Christian ones (e.g., Ehrman, Ludemann, Sanders). These are the minimal facts. In part 1 of this series, I said that the case for Jesus’ resurrection involved two steps. The first step is figuring out what the facts are, and the second step is discerning what the best explanation of those facts are. We accomplished the first step in parts 3-6 of this blog series. Now we come to the second step; what is the best explanation for the 5 aforementioned facts. Did Jesus rise from the dead? Maybe. But let’s see if there’s any other explanation that can account for them first.

Over the two millennia, skeptics have proposed dozens of naturalistic theories to try to account for the resurrection of Jesus. Let’s look at them and see if any of them work. Keep in mind that any acceptable theory must be able to explain all of the evidence, all of the 5 minimal facts. If it fails to explain all 5 facts, then it will be rejected on the basis of lacking explanatory scope.

Theory 1: The Stolen Body Theory (Disciples Edition)

If you recall from part 4, the enemies of Christianity claimed that the disciples came in the middle of the night and stole Jesus’ body (Matthew 28). Then the disciples went out and proclaimed that Jesus rose from the dead. On this theory, the resurrection is nothing but a hoax, a sham. The disciples do a heckin’ bamboozle on the people.[1] Does this naturalistic theory adequately account for the evidence? I don’t think so.

In fact, this is the WEAKEST naturalistic theory there is. Recall from part 5 that church history is unanimous in that all 12 disciples died horrible, gruesome deaths for proclaiming that Jesus rose from the dead. James, the brother of John, was beheaded by decree of King Herod Agrippa, Peter was crucified upside down, Thomas was speared to death in India, Matthew died by being dragged by a horse, and Phillip was crucified on an X shaped cross.[2] They could have saved themselves simply by recanting, yet they proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus despite agonizing, brutal torture, despite forfeiting their lives. Why would they do that? Why would they die for a lie?

Now, again, when you bring this point up to skeptics, they’ll say “But that doesn’t prove the resurrection is true any more than Muslims giving up their lives in acts of Jihad proves that Islam is true.” And they’re right. I totally agree with them. But, they’re missing the point. I’m not saying the disciples’ martyrdoms prove that Jesus rose from the dead. I’m saying it proves that they believed he rose from the dead. Martyrdom doesn’t prove the disciples were right; it just proves they sincerely believed what they were saying. To put it another way: while people will die for a lie they think is true, no one will die for a lie they know is false.
And that is the fatal flaw is the Stolen Body Theory. It posits that the disciples stole Jesus’ body and deliberately tried to deceive the masses, and then they willingly endured beatings, torture, and executions for preaching what they consciously believed wasn’t true.

The late Charles Colson, who did prison time for being an accomplice in Watergate but who later became a Christian, wrote:

“Watergate involved a conspiracy to cover up, perpetuated by the closest aids to the President of the United States—the most powerful men in America, who were intensely loyal to their president. But one of them, John Dean, turned states evidence, that is, testified against Nixon, as he put it, “to save his own skin”—and he did so only two weeks after informing the president about what was really going on—two weeks! The real cover-up, the lie, could only be held together for two weeks, and then everybody else jumped ship in order to save themselves. Now, the fact is that all that those around the President were facing was an embarrassment, maybe prison. Nobody’s life was at stake. But what about the disciples? Twelve powerless men, peasants really, were facing not just embarrassment or political disgrace, but beatings, stonings, execution. Every single one of the disciples insisted, to their dying breaths, that they had physically seen Jesus bodily raised from the dead. Don’t you think that one of those apostles would have cracked before being beheaded or stoned? That one of them would have made a deal with the authorities? None did.”[3]

As if the unreasonableness of positing that the disciples willingly suffered and died for a lie wasn’t bad enough, this theory has other issues. For one, we’ve seen that Paul and James converted to Christianity because they believed they saw the risen Jesus. This theory cannot account for their conversion experiences.

This theory fails because

1: The disciples died for preaching the resurrection. Liars make poor martyrs.

2: It doesn’t explain why Paul believed he saw Jesus post-crucifixion.

3: It doesn’t explain why James believed he saw Jesus post-crucifixion.

Theory 2: Stolen Body Theory (Other Person Edition)

There’s a variation of the theory above which says while the disciples didn’t steal the body, perhaps someone else came along and stole the body. Then, when the disciples came and found that the tomb was empty, they concluded that Jesus rose from the dead. The disciples aren’t hoaxers; they were just as fooled as the people they preached to.

There are several problems with this theory. First of all, in part 5 of this series, we saw that the disciples believed that they had seen Jesus with their own eyes. They weren’t convinced on the basis of the empty tomb alone, but by seeing Jesus alive and well. Secondly, this theory doesn’t account for the conversion of Paul. Theft of the body is probably the first thing that would have come to Paul’s mind. We saw in chapter 4 that Paul went from Christian Persecutor to Christian Missionary because he, like the disciples, believed he saw Jesus appear to him. James likewise went from skepticism to belief on the basis of a postmortem appearance.

This variation of the stolen body theory cannot account for any of the postmortem appearances. The only minimal fact that it can adequately explain is the empty tomb, nothing else.

Finally, this theory is implausible on its face. Who exactly would have had a motivation to steal Jesus’ body anyway? The Pharisees wouldn’t have stolen Jesus’ body. They were well aware that removal of the body might create an appearance of resurrection, which is what they feared, which is why they had guards placed at the tomb (Matthew 27-28). The Romans don’t appear to have any motivation to take Jesus’ body out of the tomb. And we already know the disciples wouldn’t have stolen the body. If they did, they would have known the resurrection was a lie, and people don’t die for what they know is a lie. Who exactly is supposed to be the culprit here?

This theory fails because

1: The disciples were convinced on the basis of a postmortem appearance.

2: Paul was convinced on the basis of a postmortem appearance.

3: James was convinced on the basis of a postmortem appearance.

4: There’s no plausible candidate for corpse thievery.

Theory 3: Hallucination Theory

In parts 5 and 6, we saw that the disciples, Paul, and James, believed that they saw the risen Jesus. They truly believed the risen Jesus appeared to them. Skeptical scholars have tried to explain this belief in the appearances as a result of hallucination. Perhaps they all hallucinated the risen Jesus.

Ask any psychologist you come across and they’ll tell you that hallucinations are occurrences that happen in the minds of individuals. They’re like dreams in this way. Imagine a group of your friends came up to you one day and said: “Boy, we all had one nice dream last night, didn’t we?” You would probably think that they were pulling a practical joke on you. You would never take seriously their claim that they all simultaneously had the exact same dream. This is because dreams are individual occurrences. By the very nature of the case, they cannot be shared experiences. Hallucinations are the same way.

Now, the extremely early creed that I told you about in part 5 of this series tells us that Jesus appeared to several groups of people. He appeared to all of the original disciples, then to James, then 500 individuals at the same time, and finally to Paul. Do you honestly expect me to believe that they all hallucinated? They all had the exact same hallucination!? Impossible! It’s impossible for 500 individuals to have the same hallucination at exactly the same time. This would be just as likely as the entire city of New York having the same dream on the same night! But not only did Jesus appear to 500 people at the same time, but he also appeared to multiple groups on different occasions. Do you expect me to believe that multiple groups of people on multiple different occasions all had the exact same hallucination?
Lee Strobel, during his investigation of the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, asked a medical expert on the possibility of 500 people hallucinating the risen Jesus. This expert said that for a group of 500 people to witness the exact same hallucination of a raised Jesus would “be a bigger miracle than the resurrection itself!”[4]

Moreover, not only are group hallucinations statistically impossible, but hallucinations of any kind are uncommon. Hallucinations are usually induced by sleep deprivation, drugs, a high fever, or mental instability. If none of these 3 factors are present, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have a hallucination. As far as we know, none of the disciples, Paul, or James were insomniacs, sick, or druggies.

In their book “The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus”[5], Gary Habermas and Mike Licona tell of Navy Seals who were enduring through Hell week. At one point, the seals reported starting having hallucinations one night while they were paddling in a raft at night. They all hallucinated at the same time, BUT they did not have the same hallucination. They had different hallucinations. One of them said he saw an octopus come out of the water and wave at him. Another said he saw a train coming towards them on the water. Another said he saw a wall that they would crash into if they persisted in paddling. When the octopus, the train, and the wall were pointed out to the rest of the group, no one saw any of the things except the one who pointed the thing out. They were all hallucinating, but they were having different hallucinations. So, even if on the off chance, all of the disciples, Paul, and James were in the frame of mind to hallucinate, it’s still unlikely that they’d have the same hallucination. Like the Navy Seals, they’d likely all have different hallucinations, perhaps only one of them being Jesus.

Moreover, even if the impossible did occur, and the minds of all these different groups of people produced hallucinations of Jesus, that would still leave the empty tomb unaccounted for. What happened to Jesus’ body? Why is it gone?

This theory fails because

1: Jesus appeared to The Twelve Disciples, Paul, James, and 500 individuals. There were multiple group appearances. It is statistically impossible that all of these people would have the exact same hallucination, even if they were in the frame of mind to hallucinate.

2: It doesn’t account for the empty tomb.

Theory 4: Group Think 

Some skeptics have considered that perhaps the disciples were so in anticipation of Jesus’ return from the dead that they talked themselves into believing that He rose from the dead. One day they went to the tomb and John was like “Peter, I think I see Jesus, over there! Do you see him?” and Peter was like “Oh, yeah! I think I see him too!” and they kind of talked themselves into it. Well, this couldn’t be the case either. Why? Because you have to be in anticipation that you’re going to experience something like that. You have to be primed for it. They weren’t! There are four reasons why the groupthink theory is untenable.

1: Jesus died. Jews weren’t expecting a dying messiah, but a messiah who would be a conquering warrior king, one who would throw off the yoke of Rome.[6]

2: According to the Old Testament (which Jews call the “Tanakh”), anyone hung on a tree was under God’s curse. This is mentioned in Deuteronomy 21:23. Since Roman crosses were made out of wood, they were technically trees, so people would often times speak of the crucified as “being hung on a tree.” And since this was in the minds of Jews, the way in which Jesus died would have only served to convince the disciples that Caiaphas and the others were right in condemning Jesus as a blasphemer and a heretic.

3: Given what the Jews believed about the bodily resurrection, no one would have been anticipating Jesus’ return. Jews believed that all people would rise from the dead at the end of the world, but they never expected any isolated person to get out of their grave right smack dab in the middle of human history.

4: And if that weren’t enough, consider that some of the people who experienced a sighting of Jesus were skeptics… such as James the half-brother of Jesus. We know based on the historical evidence cited in the previous blog post that James did not believe in Jesus during Jesus’ lifetime Saul Of Tarsus was killing Christians because he considered them to be the worst of heretics! He experienced a sighting of Jesus risen from the dead, and he became The Apostle Paul. These former skeptics were not in any way living in anticipation of Jesus’ return.

As you can see, the disciples were not in the expectation that Jesus would rise from the dead. In fact, they had every predisposition to the contrary. And yet, they all believed they saw Jesus alive after His death!

Theory 5: The Swoon Theory 

Some skeptics have tried to adequately account for the 5 minimal facts by saying that maybe Jesus didn’t really die in the first place. Maybe he merely fainted on the cross and then the cool, damp air of the tomb sort of roused him around into consciousness. Jesus then left the tomb, came to his disciples and presented Himself to them. Since they presumed he was dead, it’s only natural that they should infer that Jesus came back to life, right? So, we don’t have a miraculous resurrection, simply a fortuitous resuscitation. This would explain the empty tomb and the postmortem appearances. This theory is known in the literature as “The Swoon Theory,” and there are several problems with it.

The following descriptions are very graphic; reader’s discretion is advised.

First of all, given the nature of pre-crucifixion scourging, and of the crucifixion itself, it is extremely unlikely that a crucifixion victim could walk away alive.

When a to-be-crucified person was scourged, they would be given 40 lashes. History tells us that the Roman 40 lashes were from a whip of braided leather thongs, with metal balls, broken pieces of sheep bone, broken glass, and basically anything sharp that would cut a person. These sharp pieces of sheep bone, metal, and broken glass were woven into the braided leather thongs. When the whip would strike the flesh, these would cause deep bruises, and the flesh would be cut severely. You can easily imagine how shredded a person’s back would be after being cut in 40 different places with multiple blades!

According to Dr. Alexander Methrell, the cuts and force of the beating could shred the back so much that the spine of the victim was sometimes exposed![7] The whipping would have gone all the way down the shoulders to the back, and the back of the legs. One physician who has studied Roman beatings said: “As the flogging continued the lacerations would tear into the underlying skeletal muscles and produce quivering ribbons of bleeding flesh.”[8]

Eusebius, a third-century historian, described scourging with the following words: “The sufferer’s veins were laid bare, and the very muscles, sinews, and bowels of the victim were open to exposure.”

The pre-crucifixion scourging was so horrific that the white of the spine was sometimes exposed (according to both Dr. Alexander Methrell and The Journal Of American Medical Association, March edition from 1986), and that the condemned victim’s veins, muscles, sinews, and bowels would become visible from the outside! This is the type of horrific beating that Jesus endured!

The result of such a hellish beating would mean that Jesus would very likely go into Hypovolemic shock.[9] Hypovolemic shock is caused by severe blood loss. It causes four symptoms to occur. First, the heart races in a desperate attempt to replace all the blood that was lost, second, the blood pressure plummets bringing about fainting or collapsing, third, urine production in the kidneys comes to an end to preserve what little liquid is left in the body, and fourth, the person has an overwhelming thirst come over them.

When you read the gospel accounts of Jesus’ execution, these symptoms are evident in Jesus. At one point, Jesus falls while carrying his cross, and Simon of Cyrene is forced to help Jesus carry his cross the rest of the way. Later, when Jesus was on the cross, He said “I thirst,” and then a Roman soldier dipped a sponge in vinegar and stuck it up to Jesus’ mouth for him to drink (see John 19:28-29). Jesus was in critical condition even before He was crucified!

Jesus then carried His cross to the site of the crucifixion, and the Romans nailed Him to it.

Now, how does crucifixion kill its victims? Scientific experiments have been done on volunteers to test what the effects of hanging on a cross would have. These were controlled circumstances, so there was no real danger of these people being harmed. While these volunteers were hanging on the cross, they would mention having difficulty breathing. They would have to push up and down in order to breathe. Eventually, they’d get too exhausted to push up and down anymore, so the scientist would take the person down off the cross at the volunteer’s request.

What these experiments showed was that crucifixion victim die from suffocation. Once Jesus was hanging vertically, the weight of his body and the position of his arms put great stress on the diaphragm, and would put his chest in an inhaled position. So in order to exhale, Jesus would have had to push up on his feet and take a breath, but each time he did this he’d be pushing on the nail in his feet tearing the muscle until it locked against the tarsal bones in his feet (not to mention he’d be scraping his back against the coarse wood of the cross). Finally, with the pressure on his chest eased he’d be able to exhale. He would push up to exhale and then come back down to inhale. Then go up to exhale, and then come back down to inhale. Over, and over, and over. But eventually, exhaustion would take over, and he could no longer push himself up to breathe. He would just sag there and die of asphyxiation. The Roman soldiers would have noticed when a person was dead once he stopped pushing up. And look, you can’t fake the inability to breathe for very long.

In fact, when the Romans wanted to speed up death, they’d break the legs of the people on the crosses with a massive club. Then they wouldn’t be able to push up to breathe, and death would come quickly. However, they didn’t do this to Jesus because they saw that He was already dead, but just to make sure, they drove a spear through him. It punctured both his heart and his lung. The gospel of John tells us that when he did that, blood and water gushed out (John 19:34). This single fact proves that not only was Jesus dead, but it also tells us what He died of; heart failure, due to shock and constriction of the heart detected by the presence of fluid in the pericardium. In this instance, the heart has ceased beating. This brought about an accumulation of fluid in Jesus’ heart, which is called “pericardial effusion.” In addition to this, it also brought about a collection of fluid in the lungs, which is called “pleural effusion.” These two fluids cannot be present if the person’s heart is still beating.

By the way, for those who want to doubt John’s description of the blood and water, I have this to say to you: we have excellent reason to believe that John is telling the truth here. For one thing, John was an uneducated fisherman. Do you think he would know about “pericardial effusion” and “pleural effusion”? Of course not! While anyone would expect to see a pierced body gush blood, not many even today would expect clear fluid to come out. Yet, that’s exactly what occurs in the case of heart failure due to shock and constriction of the heart. I didn’t even know about this phenomenon until I read about it in Lee Strobel’s The Case For Christ. Moreover, this isn’t something John is likely to make up either. Given his lack of medical knowledge, having water come out of Jesus’ side would make as much sense to him as having Skittles pour out. So, despite being mentioned in only one source, we still have reason to believe this description is true.

This theory fails because:

It was impossible for Jesus to survive this whole ordeal.

1: Jesus was in hypovolemic shock from the pre-crucifixion scourging alone! Jesus was in critical condition even on his way to the cross (hypovolemic shock), so he would have bled out quickly.

2: But if bleeding out didn’t kill him, He would have eventually died of suffocation.

3: If neither of those two things got him, we can be sure Jesus’ was dead because (A) you can’t survive a spear jab to the heart and (B) that spear jab revealed Jesus’ heart and lungs collected pericardial effusion and pleural effusion, which isn’t possible if the heart is still beating.

Theory 6: The Wrong Tomb Theory 

There’s another theory that states that on that first Easter morning, the women went down to the wrong tomb and concluded based on that that Jesus had risen from the dead. The whole thing was really a simple misunderstanding! Jesus’ tomb wasn’t empty! They just went to the wrong tomb. This tomb never had a body in it at all.

There are a quite a few problems with this view. First off, I think the burial story in the gospels is historically reliable. Number 1: It’s multiply attested in all four gospel sources plus the 1 Corinthians 15 creed. And number 2: It’s unlikely to be a Christian invention. The gospel authors were unlikely to make up a member of the very group who had Jesus killed and then portray him as the one to give Jesus an honorable burial while all of the disciples (except John) abandon Jesus in his final hours in order to cower in their homes for fear of the Jews. So by the principle of embarrassment, I conclude that the burial story is reliable, but in this case, that means that the tomb of Jesus was known to both Christian and non-Christian alike. As a result, it’s very unlikely that anybody would have accidentally gone to an unused tomb, thinking it was Jesus’ tomb.

The Wrong Tomb Theory expects us to believe that everyone who would have been interested in the tomb totally forgot where it was! Not only did the women go to the wrong tomb, but later John and Peter went to the wrong tomb, and then the Pharisees also went to the wrong tomb, followed by the Romans who also went to the wrong tomb, and of course Joseph of Arimathea went to the wrong tomb. He must have forgotten where the tomb that he himself owned was located.

This is beyond implausible. But even more, devastating to the theory is that it doesn’t explain the beliefs of the disciples, James, or Paul that they had seen the risen Jesus. We’ve already seen in parts 5 and 6 that there’s good evidence that the disciples, James, and Paul believed that they saw the risen Jesus appear to them!

This theory fails because;

1: Tomb’s location was well known. Extremely unlikely everyone interested in the tomb forgot where it was.

2: The disciples didn’t believe because the tomb was empty, but because they believed Jesus appeared to them.

3: Paul was convinced on the basis of an appearance.

4: James was convinced on the basis of an appearance.

Theory 7: The Legend Theory 

Could the resurrection have been a legend? No. Why? Because, as we saw in part 5 of this blog post series, we can trace the claims of the resurrection to the lips of the original disciples! In Paul’s letters, he says he had access to the original disciples and had fellowshipped with them. I’m sure Peter told Paul whether or not he had seen Jesus when he visited them in Galatians 1 and 2. And of course, the creedal tradition dates to within five years after the death of Jesus (as argued in part 5 of this series, it’s likely he got the creed from Peter and James when he visited them three years after his conversion), this is well within the lifetimes of the twelve disciples who could have corrected this oral tradition if He really hadn’t appeared to them. Moreover, the early church fathers Tertullian and Irenaeus attest that the church fathers Polycarp and Clement were students of the apostle John and that they knew several other apostles as well. This is significant because Polycarp and Clement said that the original disciples were claiming that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them. Since they knew and fellowshipped with Jesus’ twelve disciples, they would certainly be in the position to know what the disciples believed.

The above comprise nine ancient sources that attest to the original disciples’ claims to have seen Jesus. And with the seven independent sources that attest to their martyrdom, we can conclude that they didn’t just merely claim that Jesus appeared to them, they really believed it.

We saw earlier in this series that the 1 Corinthians 15 creed dates to within five years after the crucifixion! A.N Sherwin White of Oxford University did a study of the rates at which legend develops in the ancient world, and he discovered that two generations weren’t even enough time for legend to build up and eliminate a core of historical truth.[10] But we don’t have two generations of time here; we don’t even have an entire decade! We only have five years!

Theory 8: The Pauline Conversion Disorder Theory 

This theory is one I found out about in Habermas and Licona’s “The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus,” and this theory argues that Paul’s conversion from skepticism was a result of conversion disorder. Conversion Disorder is a neurological malfunction that occurs whenever a major change comes into someone’s life. Habermas and Licona write: “Let us suppose that the year is 1968. A young American named Rick has been drafted into the U.S. Army for a tour in Vietnam. Shortly after he receives his letter from the Department of Defense, Rick begins to feel a sharp pain all the way down his right leg. The pain worsens, and by the time he goes for his military physical, he is limping severely. In this case, Rick is not faking the pain in order to get out of going to Vietnam. He may have conversion disorder. Typical symptoms of conversion disorder are blindness, paralysis, loss of voice, pain, uncontrolled vomiting, tics, and seizures.”[11]

All of these are temporary of course, as conversion disorder does not last forever. Could Paul have experienced something like this? He experienced temporary blindness at the moment he saw a bright light and thought he saw Jesus (see Acts 9). Could Paul have experienced a neurological malfunction?

This theory is plagued with problems. Not the least of which is that it only addresses Paul’s conversion and nothing else. It doesn’t explain the empty tomb, the appearance to the disciples, or the appearance to James. The resurrection hypothesis explains all of these.

But moreover, Paul is unlikely to have experienced conversion disorder anyway. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV,  women are more likely to have conversion disorder than men by as much as a 5-1 ratio. Adolescents, military combatants, and those with a low IQ are also more likely to experience the disorder. Paul doesn’t fall into any of these categories. Paul is not a woman, teenager, warrior, or dummy. This doesn’t mean he couldn’t have experienced the disorder. It just means it’s unlikely. However, when you look at the other problems associated with The Pauline Conversion Disorder theory, it makes it even more unlikely.

Not only must we employ conversion disorder to explain Paul’s experience, but we must also say that Paul experienced an auditory hallucination, as well as a Messiah Complex. Why? Because Paul not only saw a bright light and went blind, but he also heard a voice that told Him to spread the gospel message. Now, it is possible to find people who have experienced conversion disorder, people who have had auditory hallucinations, as well as people who have a messiah complex, but it’s extremely rare to find people who have simultaneously experienced all 3.

This theory fails because

1: It has an inadequate explanatory scope. At best, it gives a natural explanation for Paul’s conversion. But it doesn’t account for the postmortem appearances to the disciples or James.

2: Paul isn’t a likely candidate for conversion disorder.

3: It’s extremely rare to find someone who has conversion disorder, has experienced an audible hallucination and has a messiah complex all at the exact same moment.

Theory 9: The Twin Theory

This theory says that Jesus had an unknown identical twin brother who saw Jesus hanging on the cross one day and decided to prank the disciples by stealing the body, hiding it somewhere, and then appearing before the disciples telling them that He was the risen Lord.

This theory is kind of silly, to be frank… Turek. It’s obviously ad-hoc as there’s no reason to believe it other than a desire to avoid declaring with the Christians “He is risen!”. Aside from the blatant ad-hoc nature of this hypothesis, it has several problems.

For one thing, are we expected to believe that no one was smart enough to figure out that this person was not Jesus?  The twin would not have known the disciples very well. As a result of that, he would not have been able to copy Jesus’ mannerisms and personality. The disciples would very likely have gotten suspicious. “Jesus, you okay? You’re not acting like yourself”. Moreover, the twin would not have been able to walk through walls, nor could the twin have been able to ascend to Heaven.

Theory 10: The Alien Theory

And now for the alien theory. When I first heard of this theory, I literally burst out laughing. This theory simply shows the desperate lengths people will go to in order to avoid declaring Jesus Christ is Lord. The Alien Theory suggests that Jesus was really an alien from outer space and that Jesus was able to do things that were natural for him, but that seemed supernatural for everyone else around him. Jesus’ special alien powers are what caused him to heal from his crucifixion wounds and appear before the disciples.

1: We have absolutely no evidence that aliens even exist. 

Astronomers have not yet located a planet that can sustain life other than our own. Even if we did discover life forms on other planets, it’s still unlikely that they would have the exact same abilities that Jesus has in The Bible.

2: The amount of time spent by the Jesus alien convincing people that he was their Messiah is absurd. 

What alien would spend three years just to pull a prank on some unsuspecting Earthlings? Three years? This is like the longest episode of Punk’d ever! Do you honestly expect me to believe that this Jesus Alien would waste three years of his life fooling these Earthlings into thinking that He was their promised Messiah? Why not just put some whoopee cushions under peoples’ seats, or put some fake snakes in peoples’ cabinets? Why such a long-lasting prank? I know of no prankster who is that dedicated to his hoaxes.

3: There is no motivation for the Jesus alien to endure the suffering of being scourged and crucified.

Forget the fact that there’s absolutely no evidence to support this theory at all, what I’m wondering is why this alien would go through all the trouble in convincing a bunch of Earthlings that he was the messiah of their Jewish religion and then end up being tortured horribly for such a scam. Jesus is either the intelligent designer or a stupid alien. He had many chances to escape his horrible fate, such as when Caiaphas asked him point blank “Are you the messiah? Son of the living God?” By then he should have known he was in deep doo-doo. He should have said “Me? Messiah? No no no no no.” and then he would take off running, be beamed up to his spaceship and got the heck outta dodge. But no, instead, he dug his grave even further by saying “I am and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Father and coming with the clouds of Heaven.” Again, liars make bad martyrs…even if that liar is an alien.

Part of me can’t help but wonder if this theory was posed as a joke. I only addressed it because I wanted to cover all the bases.

The Best Explanation: He Is Risen! 

In his book “Justifying Historical Descriptions,” CB McCullagh[12]  puts forth several criteria which historians use for assessing historical theories. These criteria are (1) explanatory scope, (2) explanatory power, (3) plausibility, (4) not being ad hoc/contrived, (5) being in agreement with established beliefs, and (6) outstripping its’ rival theories. The “He Is Risen” hypothesis passes every single one of these tests with flying colors. The same cannot be said about the various naturalistic theories we looked at.

Explanatory Scope: It explains why the body of Jesus was not in His tomb, why hundreds of people on different occasions believed they saw Jesus alive after His crucifixion, and it also explains the conversion of the church persecutor Saul Of Tarsus (i.e., Paul). It also explains the conversion of the skeptic James. It explains every single piece of data that requires an explanation. The best of the naturalistic theories explain only one minimal fact at most. But the majority don’t even explain that many.

Explanatory Power: It explains why the tomb of Jesus was vacant, why folks kept seeing Jesus alive on numerous occasions, in spite of the fact that He was killed days before on a Roman cross.

Plausibility: Given the background of Jesus’ life and claims, the resurrection is an authentication of those claims.

Ad Hoc: You know a theory is ad hoc if it requires the making of quite a few other theories to save itself from being proven to be erroneous. The resurrection hypothesis is not that kind of explanation. It only requires the subsequent declaration to be true: it is possible that God exists.

In accord with accepted beliefs: I can hear the voice of the skeptic now screaming “People who die stay dead, stupid! Science has proven that dead people don’t come back to life!”, This is not a valid objection. The hypothesis isn’t that Jesus rose from the dead by natural causes, but that God raised Jesus from the dead via a miracle. This does not conflict with the conventional belief that people cannot and do not rise from the dead, naturally.

Outstripping Rival Theories: We’ve seen that none of the naturalistic theories can adequately explain all of the data. Only the resurrection hypothesis succeeds in criteria 1-4 above, and should, therefore, be preferred.

The best explanation of the five minimal facts is that “He Is Risen”!

There are no naturalistic theories that can explain the 5 minimal facts. The only theory that can explain all of them is a supernaturalistic theory.

Notes 

[1] It appears that I’ve been looking at too many doggo and pupper memes.

[2] To see some of the sources reporting these, check out part 5 of this blog post series.

[3] Charles Colson, “An Unholy Hoax? The Authenticity of Christ,” BreakPoint syndicated column 020329, (29 March 2002).

[4] Strobel, Lee. 1997. God’s Outrageous Claims: Discover What They Mean for You. p. 215, Zondervan

[5] Gary Habermas, Michael Licona, “The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus,” pages 105-106, Kregel

[6] The Jews of the first century got their prophecies mixed up. Jesus will indeed get rid of all the evil in the world, He will overthrow Israel’s oppressors, but He’ll do this in His second coming. In His first coming, He was to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 2:2 cf. Isaiah 53).

[7]See Dr. Alexander Methrell’s interview with Lee Strobel in “The Case For Christ,” chapter 11, page 195, published by Zondervan

[8] Lumpkin R: The physical suffering of Christ. J Med. Assoc Ala 1978,47:8-10,47.

[9] No, I’m not a trained medical professional. I’m getting all of this information primarily from three sources; Doctor Alexander Methrell, from his interview with Lee Strobel in The Case For Christ, the 1986 edition of The Journal Of American Medical Assosiation, and the documentary “Crucifixion” which I saw on The History Channel a few Good Fridays ago. While I’m not an expert in this field, I’m drawing on the expertise of those who are, so don’t try to argue with me ad hominem. 

[10] A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 188-91.

[11] Habermas, Gary R.; Licona, Michael R.. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (p. 113). Kregel Publications. Kindle Edition.

[12] C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 19.

 

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The Postmortem Appearances To Paul and James

The Evidence For Jesus’ Resurrection, Part 6: Facts (4) and (5) The Postmortem Appearances To Paul and James

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by Evan Minton

This is part 6 in a blog post series on the evidence for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. The Minimal Facts Case for the resurrection of Jesus is what I’ve been defending the past 5 articles, and in part 2, I explained what a minimal facts approach is. Part of a minimal facts approach is a two-step process: (1) establishing 5 historical facts through the use of “the criteria of authenticity” and (2) discerning what the best explanation is for those 5 facts. In part 3, we saw that the historical evidence that Jesus died by Romans crucifixion is overwhelming, establishing the first of the five minimal facts. In part 4, we examined several pieces of evidence that Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers the following Sunday after His crucifixion. In the previous blog post, we saw that the historical evidence is strong that Jesus’ twelve disciples had visual experiences of Jesus after His death.

There are 5 minimal facts that undergird the inference to the resurrection

1: Jesus died by crucifixion.

2: Jesus’ tomb was empty the following Sunday.

3: The disciples experienced postmortem appearances.

4: A church persecutor named Paul converted to Christianity on the basis of what he perceived to be an appearance of the risen Jesus.

5: The skeptic James converted on the basis of what he perceived as a postmortem appearance.
In this blog post, we shall look at the evidence for those last two minimal facts, and then we’ll move on to figuring out what the best explanation of these 5 facts are.

The Church Persecutor Paul

It’s pretty obvious that Paul claimed to be an eyewitness of the resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15:8, immediately after citing the early resurrection creed, he said: “last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also.” Earlier in that same letter, he asked rhetorically “Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen our Lord?” (1 Corinthians 9:1). So, from Paul’s own pen he tells us that he had a postmortem appearance experience.
However, some skeptics may balk and say “Yeah, he said he saw Jesus raised from the dead. But anyone can claim anything. I can claim I saw Santa Claus leaving toys under my Christmas tree last December. That doesn’t make it true. How do we know Paul isn’t just lying?” This is a fair question. This is why in prior writings, instead of merely pointing to where Paul says he saw Jesus, I made an inferential case for his postmortem appearance. There are several historical facts about Paul which, if you ask me, only make sense if Paul actually had a postmortem appearance experience.

*Before Paul Was A Christian, He Was A Persecutor Of The Church

We have good historical evidence that prior to becoming a Christian, Paul was a persecutor of Christians. How do we know? Because in his epistles, he says he was. In 1 Corinthians 15:9, after citing the creed to the Corinthians, Paul said “For I am the least of the apostles and do not deserve even to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God”, likewise in Galatians 1:13-14, Paul said “For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.” In 1 Timothy 1:13, Paul said: “Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.”
Now, I am inclined to believe that Paul is telling the truth here on the basis of three reasons.

1: The Principle of Embarrassment. The principle of embarrassment states that if an author mentions something that is embarrassing to himself, embarrassing to someone he cares about, hurts an argument he’s trying to make, or is in any way detrimental to him, yet he mentions it anyway, it’s very likely not to be made up. People make up lies to make themselves look good; they don’t makeup lies to make themselves look bad. Paul is mentioning details about himself that cast him in a pretty bad light.

Think it about it for a moment; if you were writing a letter to someone, would you lie about having a drug abuse problem that you don’t actually have? If you were writing a letter to some friends, would you make up lies about how you terrorized your local neighborhood? “Dear Todd, I’m doing well here in my new home in North Carolina. By the way, I became a Christian, but prior to doing so, I went into churches and cut Christians’ heads off en masse. From, Bobby.” Are you going to just make stuff like that up? I don’t think so! You probably wouldn’t even admit something like that even if it were true! But you especially wouldn’t say that if were not true. People don’t makeup lies that make themselves look bad! Paul would never say that he was a persecutor of the church if it wasn’t true. Paul would never say that he purposefully went around terrorizing people if that didn’t actually reflect reality.
2: The Principle Of Multiple Attestation. Not only does Paul say that he was a persecutor of the church, but Luke mentions it as well in the book of Acts (8:1-4, 9:1-2). Paul and Luke are independent sources, and therefore, there are multiple attestations to Paul being a persecutor. It is highly unlikely that both Paul and Luke independently fabricated the same lie. On the basis of the principle of multiple attestations, we have good reason to believe that Paul persecuted the church.

3: Paul Had A Reputation

Let’s keep something in mind here: in all of the epistles, Paul is writing to someone. And in Galatians 1:13, Paul said “For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.” (emphasis mine). Paul says that he had a reputation for being a persecutor of the church, and tells his readers that they knew of that reputation. Now, if Paul wasn’t really a persecutor of the church, his readers would have immediately called him out for lying. You don’t say “You know about that bad stuff I did. You’ve heard about it.” to someone unless you did the thing you’re talking about.

*Paul Became A Christian, And Then Suffered And Died For Preaching The Gospel

Paul obviously became a Christian himself sometime after persecuting Christians. Like with the disciples, we know that Paul actually believed the message he was preaching because he endured terrible suffering throughout his life for the sake of the gospel, and was eventually killed for his Christian faith. Seven Independent sources attest to Paul’s suffering and martyrdom.

Paul himself recounts instances of his suffering. “Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have constantly been on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches.” – 2 Corinthians 11:24-28

Some of the specific sufferings mentioned by Paul in 2 Corinthians are also reported by Luke. One of the shipwrecks was recorded in Acts 27:14-44, Paul was stoned in Acts 14:19, and Acts 16:22-24 records an instance of Paul being scourged. The book of Acts records several other hardships Paul endured for being a Christian, but I won’t mention them here.
Clement of Rome[1], Tertullian[2], and Dionysius of Corinth[3] (cited by Eusebius) mention his martyrdom. Polycarp[4] and Origen[5] record it as well. Paul was beheaded during the harsh persecution of Emperor Nero in the A.D 60s.

In all, we have 7 independent sources that testify that Paul suffered and died for preaching the gospel. On the basis of the principle of multiple attestations, we, therefore, have good grounds for affirming that Paul actually did suffer and died for the gospel.

*The Best Explanation: Paul Actually Saw Jesus 

Now, how do we account for Paul’s radical, sudden change from Christian destroyer to Christian leader? From someone who caused martyrs deaths to someone who died a martyr’s death himself? I can think of no other explanation than the one Paul himself gave, “Then he appeared to me also, as to one untimely born.” (1 Corinthians 15:8). I think this is the only logical way to explain why Paul would go from terrorizing Christians to trying to persuade people to become Christians (even to the point of horrid suffering). Again, you can try to explain away Paul’s postmortem appearance experience if you want to, but you have no grounds to deny it altogether.

The Skeptic James 

We now come to our fifth and final minimal fact: the conversion of the skeptic James. The Gospels tell us that Jesus had several siblings. Jesus’ siblings included James, Jude, Simon, plus some sisters whose names were never given. Most skeptics I’ve conversed with love to go after this minimal fact because they say it has the least amount of evidence for it. After all, it’s not mentioned anywhere except in one line, and that line is in the creed cited by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15.

Nevertheless, I still think we have good grounds for affirming that this appearance occurred. First of all, as I said in the previous blog post, we have good reason to believe Paul got the creed from James himself. Secondly, the creed is extremely early (just 5 years after the death of Jesus) so had James not really experienced a postmortem appearance, he could have publically rebuked Paul for lying. The severe earliness of the creedal tradition and the probability that Paul got the creed from James has to count for something, right?
However, I think that just as with Paul, we can make an inferential argument for the postmortem appearance to James.

*James Was A Skeptic During Jesus’ Lifetime 

James and his other brothers, we are told, were not believers during Jesus’ lifetime. We know this based on:

1: The Principle Of Embarrassment

It was embarrassing for a rabbi’s family to not accept him back in those days. It was embarrassing for a rabbi’s family to be opposed to him in some way or another back in those days. So this isn’t very flattering for Jesus, but it gets worse! In fact, Mark 3:20-35 tells us that Jesus’ family thought he was crazy and that they had come to seize him and take him home! This doesn’t paint Jesus or His family in a very good light, given the stigmatism back then. Therefore, it’s highly unlikely that the gospel writers would have invented skepticism on the part of Jesus’ brother James.

In fact, John 7 recounts a rather nasty story where Jesus’ brothers try to goad him into a death trap by showing himself publicly at a feast when they knew that the Jewish leaders were trying to kill him! Jesus’ brothers were trying to sabotage him! Why in the world would John place Jesus’ brothers in such an ugly light if such an event never took place?

2: The Principle Of Multiple Attestation 

Not only does Mark mention it (chapter 3), but John mentions it as well (chapter 7). Mark and John are independent sources, and therefore, James’ skepticism is multiply attested. So, we’ve established that James was a skeptic.

*Just A Short Time After Jesus’ Death, James Came To Believe That Jesus Had Risen From The Dead. 

Even though James was a skeptic, we know that later in the early church, James emerges as one of the pillars of the New Testament church, and one of the leaders of the church.

Moreover, he was eventually martyred.

Multiple Attestation

This is mentioned in both the book of Acts (21:17-20) as well as by Paul in his letter to the Galatians (2:9). Again, Paul and Luke are independently reporting this. Thus, we know this on the principle of multiple attestations.

*James Was Martyred For His Christian Faith

Multiple Attestation 

We have the testimony of Flavius Josephus, Hegesippus, and Clement Of Alexandria[6] that James was martyred for his belief in his brother as the risen Christ. James’ martyrdom is multiply attested in these three sources.

*The Most Likely Explanation For Why James Went From Being A Skeptic To Being A Believer Virtually Overnight Is That The Risen Jesus Appeared To Him As 1 Corinthians 5:7 says. 

I think the best explanation for James’ rapid conversion is that he believed the risen Jesus appeared to him.

New Testament critic Reginald H. Fuller says “Even if there were not an appearance to James mentioned by Paul, we should have to invent one to explain the transformation that occurred in James between the time of his unbelieving days when Jesus was alive and his time of leadership in the early church”[7]

That’s exactly the argument I’m making here. 1 Corinthians 15:7 aside, we have historically established that James was (1) a skeptic prior to Jesus’ death, (2) shortly became a Christian following Jesus’ death, and was willing to die for his Christian faith. How can we explain James’ overnight transformation if not that James had an experience which he perceived to be a visitation of the risen Jesus? I don’t think we can.

Conclusion 
We have come to the end of the first step. We have historically established 5 facts which will undergird our inference to Jesus’ resurrection.

The 5 minimal facts that undergird the inference to the resurrection are:
1: Jesus died by crucifixion.

2: Jesus’ tomb was empty the following Sunday.

3: The disciples experienced postmortem appearances.

4: A church persecutor named Paul converted to Christianity on the basis of what he perceived to be an appearance of the risen Jesus.

5: The skeptic James converted on the basis of what he perceived as a postmortem appearance.

In the next blog post, we’ll see what is the best explanation of these 5 facts. At face value, it seems like The Resurrection Hypothesis is how we should explain them. However, perhaps we should examine other alternatives before we appeal to the supernatural.

Notes 

[1] Clement Of Rome, 1 Clement 5:2-7

[2] Scorpiace, 15, in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, eds. and trans., The Ante-Nicene Fathers.

[3] H.E. 2.26;

[4] Polycarp, “To The Philippians,” 9.2

[5] Origen, as cited by Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History

[6] Josephus, Antiquities Book 20, Chapter 9, Hegesippus as cited in “Eusebius. Church History Book II Chapter 23. The Martyrdom of James, who was called the Brother of the Lord”, Clement Of Alexandria, also cited by Eusebius in ibid.

[7] Reginald H. Fuller, The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 10.

 

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Human Nature According to Darwin – A Christian Response

Human Nature According to Darwin – A Christian Response

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By Ken Mann

The following is was delivered as a plenary session at a Biola on the Road conference in April 2017 at Faith Bible Church in Houston Texas.

Introduction

Charles Darwin. Evolution. Perhaps no other man and no other idea have had a wider influence on western culture. Since On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was first published in 1859, how we perceive our world and ourselves has been transformed. For those who have embraced Darwinism, humanity and every other living thing are the end products of a natural process. There is no Creator. There is no purpose. There is just survival. Humanity is a cosmic accident.

Since as early as 1888, scientists and academics have asserted that Darwinian evolution is a fact as certain as gravity. The momentum behind Darwin’s theory strengthened in the 20th century to the point that nearly every aspect of human behavior and culture has been subjected to an evolutionary explanation. Today, scientists who are merely skeptical about evolution risk losing their jobs if their views become known.

In the face of such an onslaught, what should a Christian think? In my own experience, I was always convinced that evolution was false. Not because I knew anything about it. Rather, I was certain of the existence of God and the reliability of the New Testament. I believed I had adequate justification to believe in a literal Adam and Eve, in the Fall, and in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

But for many years I was plagued by an internal conflict. Setting aside evolution, I have always loved science. Since studying physics in college, I have adhered to the adage that science is “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Despite the myriad of apparent conflicts between science and religion, I suspected that Psalm 19:1, the heavens declare the glory of God, meant that the study of creation was compatible with the Christian worldview.

Then in 2010, I enrolled in the Science and Religion program at Biola. During my first year, I took a class that focused on Darwin. At the time, Darwin seemed like the Mt. Everest of a “Science and Religion” program. Looking back on it now, this subject embodied everything that made the program so valuable. The tools I learned and the confidence I gained have transformed my Faith.

I always rejected evolution not because I understood the science, philosophy or history that surrounds it, but because I trusted God more. Today, I know the reasons why Darwinian evolution is not fact, and I should emphasize, none of them are based on Christian doctrine.

That might alarm some of you so let me explain. There are many myths and distortions about the relationship between science and Christianity. Perhaps the worst is that science and Christianity are in hopeless conflict, that the Christian church has been an impediment to science since Galileo. In reality, the foundations of modern science, the assumptions that made science possible, come from the Christian worldview. The pioneers of modern science were all committed Christians, most of whom saw science, in the words of Kepler as “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”

In other words, science and Scripture are merely two sources of revelation. There is the “book of nature” and the “book of Scripture.” These two “books” cannot contradict each other because they have the same author, God. When they seem to contradict, something has gone wrong with our understanding of Scripture, nature or both.

Since Galileo’s confrontation with the Catholic Church in the 17th century, there have been conflicts between doctrines promoted by the Church and the conclusions of science. In Galileo’s time, almost everyone accepted an earth-centered view of the cosmos that originated with the Greeks and had later become sanctified using certain passages from the Old Testament. Galileo questioned the conventional wisdom of his time and advocated an idea that would not be widely accepted for another century.

In the 19th century, Charles Darwin also challenged widely accepted ideas about God’s role in creating the world. Since then Christianity has been challenged by variety conclusions based on his writings.

How should we deal with these challenges? The first and more important step is to understand them. We shouldn’t run away from something that attacks our Christian worldview. We should run toward it. Engage, learn, and trust that God is sovereign.

As we engage with Evolution today, I want to reassure you that we are not going to wander off into the tall grass of the biological sciences. We are not going to talk about the Prevalence of Functionally Significant Glutathione S-Transferase Genetic Polymorphisms in Dogs. (That is the subject of a research project my daughter, a biochemistry, cell, and molecular biology major, has been working on since last summer.) Not because the science isn’t important, but because it takes a lot more time than we have available today. Further, there are far more obvious problems with Darwinian evolution.

It is assumed that Darwin’s theory was the triumph of science over the myths of religion. It is claimed Darwin was not influenced by religion; he studied nature and “discovered” how it really worked. Based on his empirical observations he proposed an idea that explained how life developed via natural processes without the direct intervention of a creator. In reality, Darwin had certain assumptions about God and how He would create that was inconsistent with what he found in the natural world. In short, Darwin was convinced his theory was true because his God would not have created the world as we find it.

My highest priority this morning is to be understood; therefore I want to be clear what I am talking about. I also want to inform, which means some of what I share might be challenging and new to some of you. I would ask for your patience as we go along. I will be around to answer questions and the substance of this talk, along with a list of some relevant books, can be found on my website under “resources.”

I am going to cover two things this morning. First, I am going to discuss some terminology that is foundational to this subject. Next, we will consider the theological ideas that were at work in the 19th century and still influence public perception of the relationship between science and Christianity.

Terminology

Whether you are engaging with someone with a different worldview or simply trying to learn more about a subject, navigating terminology is a crucial task. You have to be aware of words you haven’t heard or seen before. Whether I am reading or in conversation, I am always alert to such words. If I am reading, I will stop and look up the word. In conversation, it is difficult but still just as important to interrupt and ask the other person what a word means. If they can define the term for you, your conversation has been enhanced. If they can’t, you may or may not be able to continue. Regardless, it is important to prevent either side of a conversation from assuming what certain words mean.

Evolution

So what does the word evolution mean? That depends on the context and the intention of the author. Just on this subject, there are actually six different definitions that are routinely used. Only one definition is in view this morning, but if you read articles or blogs on evolution, you may encounter one or more of these definitions. You may even find authors who use the word in one sense, then later switch to a different meaning later in the same article.

  • Change over time. To quote the Screwtape letters, “…to be in time means to change.” The study of nature frequently entails discerning what has happened in the past from the evidence we can examine today. Clearly, no one is going to disagree with this definition.
  • Change in the distribution of different physical traits within a population. This refers to a field within biology known as population genetics. It studies the genetic composition of biological populations, and the changes in genetic composition that result from the operation of various factors, including natural selection.
  • Limited Common Descent. “The idea that particular groups of organisms have descended from a common ancestor.” The best-known example of this is the finches encountered on the Galapagos Islands. Today there are many examples of different species that probably have a common ancestor.
  • The mechanism of limited common descent, natural selection acting on genetic mutations. Darwin’s theory had three premises: organisms varied, variations could be inherited, and all organisms were under pressure to survive. Those variations that enhanced survival were passed on to other generations. Again, in a limited sense, such variation is observed, and it is plausible that survival could select certain traits over others.

None of the definitions so far are controversial. However, the next two are where most of the disagreements occur.

  • Universal Common Descent. This definition of evolution asserts that every organism is descended from a single original organism. As controversial as this may sound, it is not the final word on what most scientists believe is meant by evolution.
  • “Blind Watchmaker” thesis.
    The term “blind watchmaker” was coined by Richard Dawkins in the title of his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence for Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. Dawkins was ridiculing an argument made by William Paley published in 1802. Paley argued that the existence of a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker. Whereas a rock merely implies the processes of geology over time.
    This definition of evolution is that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through an unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material process. This process is completely sufficient to account for the appearance of design in living organisms.
    Or more succinctly, “Molecules to men by way of chemistry and physics.”

This final definition is what really drives the conflict of worldviews between materialism and Christianity. It goes by a couple of other names: “Darwinism” or “neo-Darwinism.” (The later term is a more technical and specific in that it refers to the integration of Darwinism and the science of population genetics in the middle of the 20th century.)

While you should always press for definitions, when you hear Darwin’s name or evolution invoked in a discussion about human origins or the development of life, you can be confident that the “molecules to men” idea is usually what is meant.

Science

The term science needs not so much a definition as a lot of warning labels. Being that it is in the title of my major, it will come as no surprise that I have developed some opinions on the subject. I am going to limit myself to two ideas.

First, science cannot be constrained by a specific detailed definition. There is no definitive list of criteria that says, “that is science, but this other field is not!” In other words, specific examples of science (e.g., physics, biology, and paleoanthropology) seem obvious, however, coming up with a list of criteria that separates astrology from astronomy, for example, is harder to do. Most everyone is going to agree that simply studying the movement of the stars and planets does not make astrology a science.

Second, beware of an inflated view of science as a source of knowledge. The view known as “scientism” asserts that the only things that can be known are from the natural sciences. It is a tactic designed to give the guy in a lab coat, as opposed to a theologian or a philosopher, a privileged status that ends the discussion. It is also a self-refuting concept because there is nothing we can learn from science. However you define science, that demonstrates scientism.

Theology

Theology is the study of the nature of God. I believe that the Bible is the best source for theology. But we can also learn something about the nature of God from other disciplines, such as science and philosophy.

Human Nature

Now that I’ve defined Darwinism, I should also touch on the term human nature.  Obviously, this is a subject as vast human experience. An entire conference could be devoted to addressing this subject. How you define, human nature is determined by your worldview. One may approach this question from a scientific, philosophical, or theological perspective. For my purposes this morning I simply want to address the crucial differences between human nature according to Darwinism and human nature according to Christian theism.

From the perspective of Darwinism, human beings and every living thing is simply the end result of a blind, unguided physical process. In other words, we are merely animals. The process of natural selection has been invoked to explain nearly every aspect of human culture and behavior. Many of these explanations are simply unsubstantiated stories, but they have captured the imagination of many. From religion to sexual infidelity, to altruism there is an evolutionary story for everything about human nature.

Darwinism denies the possibility of the soul; it makes no room for the existence of the immaterial. As a consequence, one must come to grips with the idea that everything we do, everything we think, everything we feel is not evidence of our soul, but is merely the output of a physical process.

According to Darwinism, the difference between human beings and every other animal is a matter of degree, not kind. Let me illustrate what I mean by these two words with an example.

Steph Curry and Russell Westbrook are reputed to be among the best point guards playing in the NBA right now. The difference between them is a matter of degree.  However, if we were to compare Curry or Westbrook to a basketball, we would have to say the basketball is a different kind of thing.

Since we are just animals, it shouldn’t surprise you that ethical decisions about humans and animals are a bit different for the Darwinist. Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, popularized the term speciesism, which refers to privileging members of a particular species over others. In other words, it is not always wrong to kill human beings under circumstances such as severe mental or physical handicaps. Some environmentalists have seized upon this idea to argue that the death of a logger or the economic destruction of a community are acceptable when weighed against the safety of a type of animal.

The Christian view of human nature is radically different. In addition to being grounded in Scripture, it is also consistent with our experience and deepest intuitions.

According to Christianity, human beings are unique in creation, a completely different kind of creature from every other animal. We are physical creatures. We are similar to other animals in many ways. Yet we also have an immaterial nature, a soul if you will. I have always been fond of this passage from the Screwtape Letters:

Humans are amphibians— half spirit and half animal… As spirits, they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. (p. 37).

I would quibble with Screwtape to the extent that we are not “half spirit and half animal” rather we are embodied souls. Our soul completely occupies and animates our bodies. Our soul can also exist apart from our bodies, but a human body cannot continue without a soul.

The most essential aspect of human nature, what makes us unique, is found in the phrase the “image of God” first mentioned in Genesis 1:26-27.

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

To briefly unpack this phrase, if we consider the Hebrew words used here for “image” and “likeness” and Greek word (eikōn), it would seem that God created us to be similar but not identical to Himself.

Consider just three ways we are similar to God.

  • We are spiritual. Part of our nature is an immaterial soul or spirit united with a physical body.
  • We are personal, that is to say, we are self-conscious and rational beings. We have a mind, will, and emotions.
  • We have the power to choose. Sometimes referred to as free agency, we have the capacity to deliberate and make choices.

Finally, no discussion of the Christian view of human nature would be complete without considering the Fall. As unique as we are, as much as we were created to be in fellowship with God and with each other, the most certain and painful fact is that something is horribly wrong.

Darwinism and the materialist worldview it supports must deny our daily awareness of evil. In ourselves, in our culture, even to some extent in creation itself, we are constantly confronted with the results of human rebellion.

Christianity explains the existence of evil, our embrace of and revulsion from it; and it offers a solution in the person and work Jesus Christ.

Theological Foundations of Darwinism

In Matthew 16, Jesus asked His disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” This is the most important question anyone will ever answer. Understanding who Jesus is and what He did is an essential step to trusting Him as your personal savior.

That question is just as relevant if God the Father asked it. What you believe about God has a profound effect on every aspect of your life. Our perception of reality, how we choose to live, how we choose to solve our problems, everything about us is ultimately effected by our view of God.

This is no less true in science. For as long as people have tried to understand nature, their beliefs about what or who created the world has impacted how they comprehend nature.

In the 19th century, there were several trends in theology that set the stage for Darwinism. Consider one example. It was argued that it would demean God to believe every animal species was a unique act of creation. Rather, God would be a wiser and more capable creator if the capacity to create species by some natural process was built into creation. This view also downplayed or dismissed other things God did like miracles in the New Testament. This was sometimes referred to as “Greater God Theology.” Ideas like this and others we will now consider motivated Darwin to reconcile what was observed in nature with the theology of his day.

Natural theology and the ‘theory of creation’

The idea that God created is not really controversial in Christianity. It’s right there in the first verse, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Now a tremendous amount of words have been written about this verse and all that it means, however, no one doubts that central phrase, “God created.”

In the 18th and 19th century the perspective of creation was that from the motion of the heavens down to the myriad of animals and plants that occupy the earth, all of creation was a perfect, harmonious system that reflected God’s wisdom and benevolence. Starting in the 17th century a variety of theologians and scientists advanced the idea that evidence for God could be found in the study of nature. Known as “Natural Theology,” this field reached its peak in the works of William Paley at the beginning of 19th century. Natural theology argued, some would say brilliantly, that evidence for design could be found in nature.

However, there was a significant flaw in Paley’s perspective. Paley believed that God’s purpose in creation was the happiness of His creatures. Creation was idealized in such a way that God’s benevolence, wisdom were seen everywhere. Allow me to read a quote from Paley’s book Natural Theology:

It is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, the water, teem with delighted existence. In a Spring noon or a summer evening, on whichever side I turn my eyes, myriads of happy beings crowd upon my view. The insect youth are on the wing. Swarms of new-born flies are trying their pinions in the air. Their sportive motions, their wanton mazes, their gratuitous activity, their continual change of place without use or purpose, testify their joy, and the exultation which they feel in their lately discovered faculties. A bee amongst the flowers in spring is one of the most cheerful objects that can be looked upon. lts life appears to be all enjoyment, so busy, and so pleased: yet it is only a specimen of insect life.

In short, the Natural theologians claimed nature demonstrated God’s wisdom and goodness but they ignored His providence, judgment or use of evil.

The problem of Natural Evil

The problem of evil is something that has harassed Christian belief for a long time. If you haven’t heard that phrase before, it refers to the tension that exists between the obvious instances of evil we find in the world and the characteristics typically attributed to God. It is sometimes put as a question: “How can God be benevolent and omnipotent and yet allow the evil we experience in the world?”

Most discussions of this topic make a distinction between moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil is simply what people have been doing since Adam and Eve rebelled in the Garden. Natural evil, broadly speaking, is anything in nature that causes death or suffering. This could include everything from earthquakes, to disease, to all the horrible things animals do to each other.

Darwin, like other naturalists, did not see happiness and joy in creation. He saw death, suffering, and waste that he could not reconcile with Paley’s “happy” creation. He was particularly bothered by the suffering and death found in the animal kingdom. One particular example was a type of wasp that lays its eggs into the body of a caterpillar. After hatching, the larva starts consuming the host while it is still alive.

Darwin’s solution, consistent with greater God theology, was that God did not create the parasitic wasp or any of the other natural evil in the world. Rather, God created a system of natural laws which resulted in the world he studied. In a letter to Asa Gray (an American botanist) Darwin summarized his view this way. “I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”

To put it another way, God directly acting in creation was rejected in order to make the existence of natural evil comprehensible to human beings. If God did not directly create each individual species but merely created the natural system that resulted in the species we have today, then God is not directly responsible for natural evil.

“Nature is not perfect.”

A second aspect of natural theology to which Darwin objected is that all of the creation reflected God’s perfection. Of course, what is meant by perfection was apparently open to a wide variety of interpretations. For Darwin and many others since it has been the claim that many things found in nature are poorly designed.

Perhaps the most popular example of bad design in nature is the vestigial organ. When an organ or structures are no longer needed, it is “vestige” of the evolutionary process. It was needed in an ancestor species, but evolution has yet to remove it. In 1895 a German anatomist published a list of 86 vestigial organs in the human body. I am not aware of a single credible example today. Vestigial organs are not evidence of evolution. They are a combination of assuming evolution is true and ignorance of a particular organ’s function.

A more modern example of a claim of bad design is known as “Junk DNA.” This term was originally coined in 1972. When research first began into how DNA worked, the first thing discovered was the correlation between certain sequences of DNA bases (“rungs” on the DNA ladder) and the production of certain amino acids (20 different organic molecules that makeup proteins). The function of vast regions of DNA outside of these “protein coding,” upwards of 98% of the human genome was dismissed as “junk” until about five years ago. The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project began publishing results demonstrating that vast regions of the “junk DNA” in the human genome are being used.

Similar to vestigial organs, ignorance combined with an acceptance of evolution, resulted in the conclusion that subsequent research has proven wrong. In short, the existence of “Junk DNA” something that was once dogma is now becoming another failed prediction of Darwinism.

Theological Naturalism

A third theological idea that motivated Darwin and many others in the 19th century has to do with how God acts in creation. In order to make this clear I have to make a distinction between primary causes and secondary causes. An event which is caused by God and impossible by any other means, a miracle, is an example of primary causation. Something that occurs in accordance with natural law is an example of secondary causation. For example, the parting of the Red Sea as the Jews fled from Egypt was primary causation, the deaths of the Egyptian army caught when the water was released was secondary causation.

For many theologians and scientists since before Darwin down to the present day, science is not possible if God acts in the world. If primary causation is possible, then it is impossible to know the difference between an event caused by natural law and an event caused by God. In order to study nature, to understand the structure of “laws” that govern it, we must assume that God never acts in creation.

The net effect of this view does not deny that God was the creator of the universe, it simply means there is no evidence that He did. Of course, that is not the worst of it. If God has not done anything since the moment of creation, the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus could not have happened.

Perhaps the simplest way to sum up this view is that God cannot be trusted. If He is capable of acting in creation, He is capable of tricking us. Science would become the “study” of the whims and unpredictable behavior of an omnipotent being.

Naturalism asserts that everything arises from natural properties and causes; supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted. For theologians in the 19th century, this meant that God acted in creation through the laws he created. They argued God was greater, glorified more if He did not intervene in creation. Dr. Cornelius Hunter refers to this as theological naturalism because theological reasoning motivated it.

Today the default position of science is a view known as methodological naturalism. This is the idea that when you are doing science, you can only consider natural causes. The actions of an intelligent agent cannot be considered. God does not act in creation. From there, it is a short trip to atheism, where God does not exist.

But let me emphasize this point–the origins of naturalism that motivated Darwin and have become dogma within science today were philosophical. Naturalism was not a conclusion of science; it was a starting point.

Conclusion

Human nature according to Darwin, how should the Christian respond? First and foremost, when confronting an opposing worldview, you must understand what it believes and why. By exploring some terminology and its theological foundations, I’ve given you an introduction into the worldview of Darwinism.

I provided a summary of some of the ideas about God and his role in creation that motivated Darwin. Since On the Origin of Species was published down to the present day, Darwinism has relied on a perception of God that cannot be found in Scripture. Either God is absent from creation and cannot intervene, or He is incompetent because nature is full of “bad design.” Evolution is accepted as true because a distorted view of God and creation seems to be false.

This is not merely about science. It is not merely about religion. It is an example of how assumptions about God, religion if you will drive the process of science. Darwinism is not fact. Darwinism is less of a science than it is a theological viewpoint that claims empirical support from science.

Human nature according to Darwinism, including its denial of the soul and denial of human uniqueness, is not learned from various scientific disciplines. It is implied by the science and therefore it is accepted because Darwinism is accepted. However, if Darwinism is false, then whatever it claims about human nature is also false.

Time did not permit addressing the evidence used to support and critique Darwinism. What I can say in terms of a summary is that the evidence for Darwinism is only compelling if you are already convinced it is true. On the resources page on my website, today’s talk is available along with a list several books that cover today’s material in more depth. I would also encourage you to check out the books that focus on the scientific critiques of Darwinism.

I would like to leave you with some questions to ask someone who believes “molecules to men by way of physics and chemistry” is the best explanation for the vast diversity of life we find.

  1. What is the evidence for evolution?
  2. What is the Christian view of creation?
  3. How did life originate?

Each of these questions, depending on the responses you get, could be followed up with two questions. (1) What do you mean by that? (2) How did you come to that conclusion? These two questions from Greg Koukl’s Columbo technique seek clarification and evidence that will help you understand the other person’s perspective better.

It has been my prayer preparing for today that the summary I would offer here would encourage believers. It is also my prayer that you would leave today motivated to learn more about this subject and others that will be discussed today. As Christians, we are heirs to a tremendous heritage of thought that I fear has been abandoned. We worship a Being that created all things, sustains all things, and knows all things. Our trust in God should not be limited to our salvation. God is sovereign over everything. He is sovereign over every domain of human knowledge. He is sovereign over every lie that could deceive.

Don’t run away from a challenge. Engage, learn, and trust that God is sovereign.

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Gotham City And Nazareth Are Not In The Same Category

Gotham City And Nazareth Are Not In The Same Category

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by Ryan Leasure

As a child, Batman held the ranks as my favorite superhero. Unlike other superheroes who could fly, see through walls, or turn into green giants, Batman fought crime in Gotham City by more conventional means. He was a great fighter, used cool gadgets, had a killer suit, and drove a sweet car. In this way, Batman was more realistic than his superhero counterparts. Now suppose I truly believed Batman was a real person. After all, I had seen him on the movie screen and at the occasional Halloween party. My friends, however, thought I was ridiculous and tried to dispel this notion from my brain. Yet, no matter what they said, I remained convinced of his existence.

Until one day, my friend suggested to me that we go visit Batman in Gotham City. This sounded like a grand plan to me. I wasted no time packing my bags — with all my Batman t-shirts — and began daydreaming about hanging out with Batman. One final step remained. I needed to purchase plane tickets to Gotham City. So I pulled out my laptop, and began searching for the next plane ticket to Gotham City, except, I couldn’t find any! I searched vigorously for hours, but alas I came up empty.

My friend, who was sneakier than I thought, used this opportunity to explain to me why I couldn’t find a plane ticket — Gotham City doesn’t exist. In order to prove him wrong, I quickly googled Gotham City’s location, only to find that it was nowhere to be found. After all these years of thinking Gotham City was where New York City is located, I became dejected. The writing was on the wall. If Gotham City isn’t real, then Batman probably isn’t real either.

IS NAZARETH A REAL PLACE?

For years, Jesus mythicists have argued that Nazareth — like Gotham City — was fictitious. The argument goes, if Nazareth didn’t exist, then Jesus didn’t exist either. After all, the gospels repeatedly claim that Jesus came from Nazareth (Mk 1:24; Jn 1:45). Prove Nazareth didn’t exist, and you can prove Jesus didn’t exist either. Skeptics make this claim based on the fact that the Old Testament, Jewish historian Josephus, and the Jewish Talmud never mention Nazareth. Surely, the argument goes, these three major sources would have mentioned Nazareth if it was a real place. What are we to make of this claim? Was Nazareth a real place? Yes, and there’s proof.

ARCHAEOLOGY

In 1962, archaeologists discovered an Aramaic tablet in Israel which listed twenty-four different priest families and their locations. One priest family’s location was, you guessed it, Nazareth.1The traditional dating of this list goes back to the year AD 70, thus indicating that Nazareth was a real place in the first century.

Furthermore, more archaeological discoveries provide further evidence for Nazareth’s existence. Within the town itself, archaeologists excavated two houses in 2006 and 2009 — homes that match a typical home in first-century Rome. Inside the homes, they found doors, windows, a spindle, and cooking pottery.

Additionally, archaeologists uncovered first-century tombs right outside the town. This fits with Jewish customs which forbade burying dead bodies inside the town. Also, within the tombs, archaeologists discovered pottery which they date to the first century. The evidence is so conclusive, that expert archaeologist Jack Finegan states, “From the tombs… it can be concluded that Nazareth was a strongly Jewish settlement in the Roman period.”2

NAZARETH! CAN ANYTHING GOOD COME FROM THERE?

Based upon the digs, scholars suggest that ancient Nazareth was a small hillside village of about sixty acres, with a maximum population of  500 people. This fits nicely with Nathanael’s derogatory comment in John 1:46 when he asked, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” One would think that if you were inventing a religious hero, you would give him a more prominent hometown. The gospel writers had no motivation to make up this detail about Jesus.

DECREE FROM CAESAR

Perhaps the most important discovery from ancient Nazareth is a marble slab measuring 24 inches by 15 inches. Archaeologists date this slab to the first half of the first century — probably during the reign of Emperor Claudius (AD 41-54). On this tablet is a decree from Caesar himself stating that if anyone steals a body from any of the tombs, they will suffer capital punishment. Bear in mind; we’re talking about Caesar, the most powerful man in the world, and a small rural village of 500 people thousands of miles away. What would compel Caesar to care about grave robbers in Nazareth? This would be the equivalent of the President of the United States addressing a grave robber in a small rural town in North Dakota.

It appears Caesar had heard stories about Jesus of Nazareth rising again from the dead. He had also probably heard that Jesus’ disciples stole his body from the tomb. Lost in the shuffle were the exact details that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead in Jerusalem.

We know for certain that Claudius was aware of Christianity because he expelled all Christians from Rome in AD 49. Suetonius — a second-century Roman historian —  writes that Claudius “expelled from Rome the Jews constantly making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus.” Luke also reports this event in Acts 18:2. Apparently, the Christian preaching that Jesus was the promised Messiah caused an uproar among the Jewish community. Think of how this radical claim would have caused dissension. The Jews had held to a strict monotheistic faith for thousands of years, and now suddenly, some of their own were claiming that Jesus of Nazareth is Lord! Perhaps violence was involved. It’s difficult to know for certain, but it was significant enough to cause Claudius to remove them all from his city.

WHAT DOES THIS PROVE?

Unlike Gotham City, Nazareth was a real town in the region of Galilee in first-century Rome. Archaeology confirms its existence several times over. Not only have we found ancient homes, pottery, and tombs, we also know that Caesar wrote a special decree to the people of Nazareth not take bodies from tombs lest they be put to death. It’s probable that he wrote this proclamation in relation to the story that Jesus rose again from the dead.

These archeological finds don’t necessarily prove Jesus’ existence, but they corroborate the gospels’ claims that Jesus came from Nazareth. For more on how we know Jesus was a real person, you can check out an article I wrote here.

Skeptics continue to cast doubt on the gospels, and more specifically, Jesus of Nazareth. Yet, archaeology continues to confirm the accuracy of the biblical narrative. Based on the archaeological finds discussed above, I think we can confidently say that Jesus coming from Nazareth is not fake news.

Tell me what you think in the comments below.

 

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2Iz7AjH

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The Evidence For Jesus' Resurrection, Part 4 Fact (2) The Empty Tomb

The Evidence For Jesus’ Resurrection, Part 4: Fact (2) The Empty Tomb

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By Evan Minton

We saw in the previous blog post that the historical evidence for Jesus’ death was overwhelming. Even several non-Christian scholars affirm it, and even say that it’s the one fact about Jesus that is indisputable. However, what happened to Jesus after He died? The New Testament says that He was placed in a tomb that was found vacant 3 days later by a group of Jesus’ women followers. This is the second minimal fact in our case for Jesus’ resurrection. But what evidence is there that Jesus’ grave was really empty? How do we know that Jesus’ body was really absent from the tomb?

There are several reasons that I know of to believe that Jesus’ tomb was empty. Let’s look at them.

Reason 1: The Jerusalem Factor

All 4 gospels attest that Jesus was crucified and buried in Jerusalem. Now, history tells us that Christianity had a lot of opposition in the first century, from both the Jewish leaders as well as the Roman government. If the enemies of Christianity, like the Pharisees, truly wanted to stamp out the early Christian movement, the easiest way to do it would be to down to Jesus’ tomb, pluck the body out of the tomb and parade it down the streets for all to see. Everyone who gazed upon the dead corpse of Jesus as the Pharisees carried it around Jerusalem would know for a fact that the disciples were lying about Jesus being raised from the dead. Christianity would be destroyed before it even had a chance to get off the ground. However, Christianity did not die in the first century. It’s still alive today? How do we explain this? I think the best explanation is that the Jewish leadership did not go down to Jesus’ grave and exhume his corpse. Why didn’t they do that? I think the best explanation for that is that Jesus’ body wasn’t even in there to be taken out!

If Jesus’ body were still in the tomb, the enemies of Christianity would have definitely taken the body out of the tomb and showed it to everyone, squashing the entire Christian movement and demonstrating it to be a hoax. This would be the easiest way at that time to refute Christianity. If they had done that, we would not be having this discussion right now. But we are having this discussion right now, most likely because they didn’t produce the corpse, and they didn’t produce the corpse because there was no corpse to be produced.

Objection: Jesus’ Body Was Unrecognizable By The Time The Disciples Started Proclaiming The Resurrection, So Producing The Corpse Would Have Done No Good. 

Some skeptics have responded to this argument by saying that Jesus’ body was unrecognizable by the time the disciples started running around telling folks that He rose from the dead, so it wouldn’t really have the effect of demolishing the Christian faith after all. Consequently, the enemies of Christianity either didn’t produce the body, or they did but people just responded: “That’s not really Jesus”.

There are some problems with this objection. First of all, in the arid climate of Jerusalem, a corpses’ distinctive wounds, stature, and hair color, and hair style would have been identifiable even after 50 days (the time when the book of Acts says the disciples started proclaiming Christ’s resurrection).[1] Therefore, it would have been no trouble to figure out whether a corpse belonged to Jesus or not. A person could examine the corpse’ physical stature, weight, distinctive wounds (“does this corpse bear the wounds consistent with a crucified victim?”), and hair color and style to see if it was consistent with what one would expect Jesus’ corpse to be like. You don’t even need to be a trained forensic pathologist to do this. Anyone of any education level could check these things out.

Secondly, even if Jesus’ body truly was unrecognizable, we should still have expected any body at all to have created a mass exodus from the Christian church, even if a small number of adherents remained. Such an exodus would surely have been picked up by Lucian of Samosata, who was ridiculing Christianity in his work and would surely have loved to use such an incident as evidence against the Christians’ claims. Moreover, we would expect the early church apologists like Justin Martyr to try to respond and explain this mass exodus and why there was a body in Jesus’ tomb if Jesus had really risen. Yet, history is silent on such an exodus. None of the non-Christian historians say anything about it, and none of the early church fathers feel compelled to address it.

Reason 2: All Four Gospels Feature Women As Witnesses To The Empty Tomb

All four gospels feature women at the first witnesses to Jesus’ empty tomb. Now, why is that significant? As I briefly mentioned in the previous chapter, women were considered second class citizens in the first century. Talmud Sotah 19a says “Sooner let the words of the law be burnt than delivered to women“! The Talmud also contains a rabbinic saying that goes like this: “Blessed is he whose children are male, but woe to him whose children are female”! And according to the Jewish historian Josephus, their testimony was considered so untrustworthy that they weren’t even permitted to serve as witnesses in a Jewish court of law! Josephus wrote: “But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex, nor let servants be admitted to give testimony on account of the ignobility of their soul; since it is probable that they may not speak truth, either out of hope of gain, or fear of punishment.” (Antiquities, 4.8.15).

Women were (A) second-class citizens, and (B) considered to be so untrustworthy that they couldn’t even stand as witnesses in a court of law! In light of this fact, how remarkable it is that it is women who are said to be the chief witnesses to the empty tomb, rather than men. If the gospel authors were playing fast and loose with the facts, they surely would have made male disciples such as Peter or John the chief witnesses to the empty tomb. The fact that it is women instead of men who are said to be the first witnesses to the empty tomb is best explained by the fact that the empty tomb narratives in the gospels are true!

To make women, your first witnesses to the empty tomb would be to insert words into the mouths of witnesses who would not be believed. Therefore, by the principle of embarrassment, we have good reason to believe the tomb was empty.

Reason 3: The Enemies Of Christianity Presupposed The Vacancy Of The Tomb When They Said That The Disciples Stole The Body

When a child tells his teacher that the dog ate his homework, that presupposes that the homework is not in the child’s possession. When the enemies of Christianity have to resort to accusing the disciples of stealing the body, that presupposes that there is no body in the tomb.

“While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, ‘You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.’ So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.” – Matthew 28:11-15

This is powerful evidence due to a historian’s principle known as The Principle Of Enemy Attestation. Now, you might be wondering why we should view this as good evidence for the empty tomb, since it’s comes from Matthew’s gospel and not directly from the Jewish leadership themselves. It’s not like it’s coming out of a book written by Caiaphas where he writes “The tomb was empty because the disciples took his body” or anything like that. Couldn’t Matthew have made this up simply to make the empty tomb story seem more credible? Well, no. I don’t think so. I say that for three reasons.

First, consider the fact that Matthew says “This story has been widely circulated to this very day.” Now, what does “to this very day” mean? Clearly, Matthew is saying that the opponents of Christianity were running around spreading this story even at the very time period that he was penning these words! They were making this claim to potential converts even during the very time period that Matthew was writing his gospel. If the anti-Christian Jews were not making that accusation, then Matthew could have easily been falsified. People could have gone to the Jewish leadership and asked them “We read in the gospel of Matthew that you deny Jesus rose from the dead. You explain his empty tomb by saying they stole the body. Is this true?” If it wasn’t true, the Jewish leadership could have said “What? We said no such thing! What are you talking about?” Would Matthew really open himself up to such easy falsification?

Secondly, people don’t usually respond to accusations unless someone actually made that accusation of them. Imagine you walk into your front yard and discover that your car is missing. In a panic, you cry out “My car is gone! My car is gone! What happened to it!? Dude, where’s my car!?” and then your friend shows up and says “Gee, that’s a shame. I don’t know what happened to your car, but it’s not like I stole it or anything!!!” You would look at your friend funny and say “I never said that you stole my car. Wait a minute, is there something you’re not telling me?” People simply don’t respond to accusations unless there is truly an accuser. In those rare moments that they do respond to non-existent accusations, they cause themselves to look guilty of the very thing they’re denying.

Thirdly, the claims of the opponents of Christianity is multiply attested. In Justin Martyr’s “Dialogue With Trypho,” he responds to this accusation from the Jews, and Tertullian rebuts it as well in his work “De Spectaculous.” This implies that the enemies of Christianity really were making this claim. It originated in the first century and persisted throughout the second and third.

Reason 4: The Empty Tomb Is Multiply Attested

The empty tomb is mentioned in multiple, independent sources. It’s mentioned in (1) The synoptic gospels, (2) the gospel of John, and (3) the early creed cited in 1 Corinthians 15.

Given the fact that the tomb is attested in 3 independent sources, it is very probable that Jesus’ tomb was in fact, empty. Remember what Paul Maier said in the previous chapter? This former professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University said that if an event is mentioned in two or three sources, it’s impregnable. That is to say; it almost certainly occurred. Well, that’s what we have with the empty tomb. Three independent sources. On the basis of the principle of multiple attestations, we have good reason to believe Jesus’ tomb was empty.

Now, some may object “Wait a minute! Paul never mentions the empty tomb in 1 Corinthians 15!” And these objectors would be right. However, while the empty tomb is not explicitly mentioned in the creed, it is implicitly mentioned. Dr. William Lane Craig explains that “The old tradition cited by Paul in I Cor. 15.3-5 implies the fact of the empty tomb. For any first century Jew, to say that of a dead man ‘that he was buried and that he was raised’ is to imply that a vacant grave was left behind.”[2]

Reason 5: Mark’s Account Is Simple And Lacks Signs Of Embellishment

Dr. William Lane Craig explains that “All one has to do to appreciate this point is to compare Mark’s account to the accounts which are found in the later apocryphal gospels. These are forgeries that arose during the centuries following the appearance of the New Testament. These do contain all sorts of wild, legendary accounts about the resurrection. For example, in the so-called Gospel of Peter, which is a forgery from the second half of the second century after Christ, the tomb is surrounded not only by a Roman guard, but also by all of the chief priests and the Pharisees, as well as a huge crowd of people from the surrounding countryside who have come to watch the tomb. Suddenly, during the night, a voice rings out from heaven, and the stone over the door of the tomb rolls back by itself, then two men are seen descending out of heaven and entering into the tomb, then three men, gigantic figures, come out of the tomb, the heads of two of the men reach to the clouds, the head of the third man overpasses the clouds, and then a cross comes out of the tomb, and a voice from heaven asks, “Hast thou preached to them who sleep?” and the cross answers, “Yea.” Now, these are how real legends look. They are colored with all sorts of theological and apologetical motives, motives which are conspicuously lacking from the Markan account which by comparison is stark in its simplicity.”[3]

Reason 6: Multiple Literary Forms 

Repeated as a miracle (John 20), creed (1 Corinthians 15:4), didactic (see Acts 2:24-32), and apocalyptic.

Reason 7: The Reason The Women Went To The Tomb – Historical Fit/Coherence

The reason the gospels say the women even went down to the tomb, to begin with lends credence to the accounts. It was a standard practice of Jews to anoint the bodies of dead friends and family members. Why the women didn’t go on Saturday is very likely due to the fact that it was the Sabbath, the shops were closed, and they couldn’t buy perfumes and ointments with which to anoint the body. They would have had to wait until Sunday when the shops were open before they could get the perfumes to anoint Jesus’ body. See Mark 16:1-5, Luke 23:56-24:1-3.

So, the principle of historical fit (also known as The Principle Of Coherence) is applicable here.[4]

Reason 8: Archeological Evidence Presents An Edict That Makes The Most Sense In Light Of Jesus’ Tomb Being Empty 

Dr. Frank Turek and Dr. Norman Geisler make mention of this in their book I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist. Geisler also makes mention of this in another work. He wrote: “A slab of stone was found in Nazareth in 1878, inscribed with a decree from Emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54) that no graves should be disturbed or bodies extracted or moved. This type of decree is not uncommon, but the startling fact is that here “the offender [shall] be sentenced to capital punishment on [the] charge of violation of [a] sepulcher” (Hemer, BASHH, 155). Other notices warned of a fine, but death for disturbing graves? A likely explanation is that Claudius, having heard of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection and Jesus’ empty tomb while investigating the riots of A.D. 49, decided not to let any such report surface again. This would make sense in light of the Jewish argument that the body had been stolen (Matt. 28:11-15). This is an early testimony to the strong and persistent belief that Jesus rose from the dead.”[5]

Why would Claudius issue the death penalty for disturbing graves? That seems like an extreme overreaction. However, as Geisler said in the citation above, it makes sense if Claudius knew of the Jewish polemic against Jesus’ empty tomb and was trying to prevent any alleged resurrections from occurring again.

Reason 9: Jesus’ Tomb Was Never Venerated As A Shrine 

The philosopher and apologist J.P Moreland explains that: “In Palestine during the days of Jesus, at least fifty tombs of prophets or other holy persons served as sites of religious worship and veneration. However, there is no good evidence that such a practice was ever associated with Jesus’ tomb. Since this was customary, and since Jesus was a fitting object of veneration, why were such religious activities not conducted at his tomb? The most reasonable answer must be that Jesus’ body was not in his tomb, and thus the tomb was not regarded as an appropriate site for such veneration. . . . It seems, then, the lack of veneration at the tomb of Jesus is powerful evidence that the tomb was empty.”[6]

Conclusion

We have seen in this blog post that the empty tomb has a lot of historical evidence in it’s favor. It is this evidence that has lead 75% of scholars and historians, both Christian and non-Christian to accept the empty tomb as a historical fact. Former Oxford University church historian William Wand writes, “All the strictly historical evidence we have is in favor of [the empty tomb], and those scholars who reject it ought to recognize that they do so on some other ground than that of scientific history.”[7]

Do we have enough evidence to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead? No. If the empty tomb were all the evidence we had, we would not be justified in concluding that Jesus rose from the dead. After all, an empty tomb can be accounted for in any number of ways. It will only be when the empty tomb is combined with the 3 other minimal facts we’ll look at in this blog series (the postmortem appearances to the disciples, Paul, and James), that we’ll see that the inference to the resurrection is justified.

Notes 

[1] Gary Habermas and Michael Licona responded to this objection in their book “The Case For The Resurrection Of Jesus,” and in the footnotes, they said they got this information from the Medical Examiner’s Office for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Habermas and Licona said “The physician in charge said that even in Virginia, which has a climate warm and damp enough to promote quick decomposition, an unprepared corpse undergoing a normal rate of decomposition should still after fifty days have its hair and an identifying stature. The wounds would ‘definitely’ be identifiable. Thus, a corpse in a much worse state than what would be expected for arid Jerusalem would still be identifiable after fifty days.” — Habermas, Gary R.; Licona, Michael R.. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (p. 287). Kregel Publications. Kindle Edition.

[2] William Lane Craig, “The Resurrection Of  Jesus”, https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/jesus-of-nazareth/the-resurrection-of-jesus/

[3] William Lane Craig, “Evidence For Jesus’ Resurrection”, from a lecture given at Southhampton Civic Hall UK, https://www.reasonablefaith.org/videos/lectures/evidence-for-jesus-resurrection-southampton-uk/

[4] Byron R. McCane, “Burial Practices in First Century Palestine”, n.p. [cited 16 Nov 2017]. Online: http://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/people/related-articles/burial-practices-in-first-century-palestine

[5] Norman Geisler, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences (1990), p. 206. The exact same paragraph appears even more recently in Geisler’s Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (1998), p. 48.

[6] J.P Moreland, “Scaling The Secular City”, Bakerback Academic, pages 161–162

[7] William Wand, Christianity: A Historical Religion? (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson, 1972), 93– 94.

 

Evan Minton is a Christian Apologist and blogger at Cerebral Faith (www.cerebralfaith.blogspot.com). He is the author of “Inference To The One True God” and “A Hellacious Doctrine.” He has engaged in several debates which can be viewed on Cerebral Faith’s “My Debates” section. Mr. Minton lives in South Carolina, USA.

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Can You and Your Kids Answer These Skeptics of Christianity (Part 1 of 5)

Can You and Your Kids Answer These Skeptics of Christianity? (Part 1 of 5)

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by Natasha Crain

Over the last few months since Talking with Your Kids about God came out, I’ve heard from a lot of parents who especially love the conversation guides provided in the book. Every chapter has one of these guides to help parents have a conversation with their kids about that chapter’s content. There’s an easy conversation starter to get kids thinking (“Open the Conversation”) and several questions to help you dig in deeper (“Advance the Conversation”). For parents with younger kids, it can be enough to just use the question from “Open the Conversation” to hit a couple of key points from the chapter on the way to school in the morning!

One of the most valuable parts of each chapter’s conversation guide is in the section, “Apply the Conversation.” This section features a quote from a skeptic that pertains to the chapter’s subject. This gives you and your kids the opportunity to practice applying what you just learned by developing a response. I didn’t provide sample answers to these in the book, as they’re intended to get you thinking on your own!  However, I’ve received so many requests for sample responses that I’ve started to write them, and I’ll be sharing them here on the blog in five separate posts over time (one post for each of the five book sections).

Today I’m sharing sample responses for Part 1: The Existence of God (6 chapters). I want to emphasize three things before you read these.

First, there are a lot of possible ways to effectively respond to any of these skeptics’ quotes! Don’t consider these answers to be the “right” answers.

Second, all of these responses are based on the chapter content itself. There’s much more that could be said, but I’m only including concepts based on what your kids would learn from reading the chapters.

Third, encourage your kids (if old enough) to try writing their own response after you talk about the chapter’s content. Writing responses really helps kids to flush out their thoughts and process the material. With my daughter’s permission, I’m sharing her response to the chapter 2 skeptic in that section below as an example.

Chapter 1: What Can We Learn about God from Nature?

Skeptic’s Quote 

Atheist author Dan Barker says, “I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.” Based on what you learned in this chapter when someone says there’s “no evidence” for God, what questions could you ask to clarify what that person means?

Sample Response

Evidence is a body of facts that require human interpretation. In other words, evidence itself doesn’t say anything. Humans can all look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions due to factors like our varied assumptions, available information, and motivations. As such, there will always be multiple possible explanations for the evidence we see in the world around us. With that as context, I’d like to ask a few questions about what you mean when you say there’s “no evidence” for God.

First, when you say God, are you generally referring to the existence of any supernatural being, or are you referring specifically to the God of the Bible? Second, when you say there’s no evidence for God’s existence, are you saying that there’s no evidence that could possibly be relevant to the question of God’s existence, or that there’s no evidence which you believe is best explained by the existence of God? Finally, what kind of evidence would you expect there to be if a supernatural being existed?

Chapter 2: Where Did the Universe Come From?

Skeptic’s Quote

In an online forum, a person asked how atheists can argue that the universe came from nothing. An atheist replied, “Personally I do not claim that the universe ‘came from’ anything at all and it did not ‘appear.’ The universe just is… it needs no creation story.” Based on what you learned from this chapter, how would you respond to this person?

Sample Response

I’d like to understand better what you mean when you say the universe “just is” and that it didn’t come from “anything at all.” Do you mean that you believe the universe is eternal, or that it had a beginning but its beginning doesn’t require an explanation?

[If the response is that the universe is eternal…]

While many people before the 20th century agreed that the universe is eternal, scientific evidence mounted in the 1900s that the universe actually had a beginning. For example, in the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered through the world’s largest telescope at the time that galaxies are moving away from us, like spots on an inflating balloon. He and other scientists realized that this expansion implied there was a beginning to the universe (if you rewind the process of something expanding, you logically arrive at a beginning point). Through this and many other discoveries in the 1900s, scientists came to the consensus that the universe began to exist and is not eternal.

The reason that this is a significant point to consider is that an eternal universe, as you say, wouldn’t have “come from” anything at all—it wouldn’t have had a beginning. But if the universe did have a beginning, as the scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows, we have to ask what caused it to exist. We know that nothing in the universe pops into existence without a cause, so it defies our experience to suppose that the universe itself did. Something or someone supernatural—beyond nature—must have caused it to exist. In order to create space, time, and matter, the cause would have to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and uncaused itself. This doesn’t tell us the cause is synonymous with the God of the Bible, but it’s consistent with Him.

[If the response is that the universe began to exist but doesn’t require an explanation…]

We know that nothing in the universe pops into existence without a cause, so it defies our experience to suppose that the universe itself did. If you are claiming that the universe indeed popped into existence from nothing despite this knowledge, why have you concluded that’s the best explanation for it? To simply assert that something doesn’t “need a creation story” is not a replacement for looking at this evidence and determining the best explanation. I could similarly claim that my computer monitor doesn’t need a creation story, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it does indeed have one. Given what we know, the best explanation for the beginning of the universe is that there was something or someone supernatural—beyond nature—that must have caused it to exist. In order to create space, time, and matter, the cause would have to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and uncaused itself. This doesn’t tell us the cause is synonymous with the God of the Bible, but it’s consistent with Him.

[As an aside, here is my 9-year-old daughter’s response after we studied the chapter the first time. While she doesn’t get every detail exactly right, it’s a great start! I love her first line, as that’s the crux of the issue.]

Chapter 3: Where Did Life Come From?

Skeptic’s Quote

A person commenting on an online article said, “Had [fine-tuning] not occurred…life here would either not exist, or it would be different. That doesn’t mean there’s some big fairy who made it happen. Just because we survived on this planet does not mean a god made the planet for us.”

Sample Response

You are correct that “just because” we are on this planet, we shouldn’t necessarily believe that a god (the biblical God or any other supernatural being) put us here. I’m not assuming that’s the case, just as you shouldn’t assume it’s the case that a supernatural being did not put us here. We both should look at the available evidence and consider the best explanation for what we see.

The fine-tuning that we’re talking about is extensive in scope–over 150 parameters of a planet, its planetary companions, its moon, its star, and its galaxy have been identified that must have values falling within narrowly defined ranges for physical life of any kind to exist. The probability of those factors individually taking a precise value and simultaneously taking those values is astronomically low (by some estimates, the probability that even one life-supporting body would occur anywhere in the universe is less than 1 chance in 10 to the 282nd power). Even most atheist scientists acknowledge that the universe at least appears to be finely tuned. The question, then, is: What is the best explanation for this remarkable finding? No one is suggesting a “fairy” made it happen, so let’s set aside facetious explanations and have a serious discussion. The real conversation is whether this fine-tuning is a product of chance or intelligence. To be clear, no one is claiming that the intelligence is necessarily the God of the Bible, so we can also set aside any preconceived notions about who He is. We are only considering whether what we see is more consistent with a series of chance events or with the product of intelligence. Given the delicate fine-tuning that has been identified, I think it’s far more reasonable to believe that it’s the result of a purposeful intelligence beyond nature. Why do you believe a better explanation is chance?

Finally, suggesting that life just wouldn’t exist to witness fine-tuning had it not happened is not an explanation—it’s just a fact. It doesn’t address whether chance or intelligence is the best explanation for the occurrence. And speculating that other kinds of life (non-carbon-based) may have existed instead if the universe was structured differently doesn’t address the fact that much of the fine-tuning we see is necessary for the universe to even exist in the first place. This has nothing to do with the specific kinds of life that may or may not develop.

Chapter 4: Where Did Our Moral Understanding Come From?

Skeptic’s Quote

“Do we really need religion in this day and age? If you know the difference between right and wrong, why do you need religion? If you can show respect, why do you need religion? If you can make a positive difference in someone’s life, why do you need religion? What matters is how you treat someone. Put a smile on their faces. It’s that easy.”

Sample Response

Your questions all assume that religions only exist to provide moral rules for living. To be sure, almost every religion includes moral directives. However, religions also make many other truth claims about things such as where we came from, why we’re here, who we are, and where we’re going. Additionally, religions make logically contradictory claims, so they can’t all be true at the same time (for example, in Christianity, Jesus is the exclusive path to God, and in Islam, he is not).

That leaves us with two possibilities: 1) no religion is true (they are all manmade ideas) or 2) one religion is true. Reading between the lines, you seem to believe the first possibility since you associate religion with a past “day and age” (in other words, you’re assuming religious beliefs are something cultures outgrow as they become more sophisticated). At the same time, you seem to assume that right and wrong in fact exist. If you do believe that there are things that are right or wrong for all people, and not just a matter of personal opinion, then you are acknowledging the existence of what would be called objective moral values. On that, I completely agree with you. I think it’s our deepest human intuition that things like child kidnapping, rape, and torturing someone for fun are wrong, regardless of anyone’s opinion to the contrary. Where we differ is on the implications of that fact. I do not believe that there can be objective moral values if God doesn’t exist. Let me explain.

If objective moral values exist, we have to ask where those values would come from. In a world that is made of nothing more than matter (physical “stuff”), there can be no right or wrong for all people because there is no moral authority. No one could say what anyone should or shouldn’t do because everything would be a matter of opinion. For example, in such a world, you couldn’t say that “what matters is how you treat someone” (unless you are only stating that as your own opinion and aren’t suggesting that’s an obligation for all people). But if objective moral values and duties do exist, that points to a higher-than-human moral authority; moral laws require a moral lawgiver.

Does that mean the moral authority is the God of the Bible specifically? Not necessarily. Knowing that requires a consideration of the evidence for the truth of the Bible. But if that evidence leads us to conclude that the Bible, and therefore Christianity, is true (possibility 2 above), then there’s much more than moral directives at stake: Jesus is the exclusive savior of the world and only by trusting in him will we have eternal life.

Chapter 5: What is the Difference Between God and a Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Skeptic’s Quote

Atheist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins says, “I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.”

Sample Response

By grouping the biblical God with all of these fictional beings, I understand you’re suggesting that there’s no difference between them—those “gods” don’t exist, just as the biblical God doesn’t exist. But simply claiming that the biblical God belongs on a list with fictional beings isn’t a “strategy” for demonstrating He’s fictional as well. It’s simply an assertion based on the assumption that there’s no evidence that any of these beings—including the biblical God—exist. It’s important to acknowledge, however, that theists do believe there is evidence for God’s existence and are not blindly guessing that He exists; it’s not a foregone conclusion that there’s no evidence for God and theists are happy to believe anyway. Rather, theists are looking at a set of facts about the universe and are asserting that the best explanation for those facts is the existence of God. Atheists are looking at the same set of facts and are asserting that there are better natural explanations for those facts. We can legitimately disagree over the interpretation of the evidence, but it’s disingenuous to imply or explicitly claim that theists aren’t basing their beliefs on any evidence at all.

Chapter 6: How Much Evidence Do We Need to Be Confident God Exists?

Skeptic’s Quote

When an agnostic college student was asked what would be compelling reasons for him to believe that the God of the Bible exists, he said, “I would have to say unambiguous, direct evidence…Some people will use their explanation for God existing as things we don’t know… [like] the arguments [that] everything is so fine-tuned, but that doesn’t do much for me. I would very much prefer to have actual, direct evidence of somebody saying, ‘This directly points to God Himself coming down and speaking.’ And at that point, I’d have to verify with someone that I’m not hallucinating…It has to be some direct evidence of God, not an extrapolation of evidence from something else.”

Sample Response

I understand your desire to have God reveal Himself in a very personal, direct way to every individual. I would love that too! However, we should acknowledge that whether or not God chooses to reveal Himself according to our personal preferences has no bearing on whether or not He actually exists. Just as a detective doesn’t get to choose what kind of evidence he has to work with, we don’t get to choose how an all-knowing, all-powerful God would reveal Himself if He exists. Rather, we have to consider the evidence in the world around us and determine what the best explanation is for that evidence.

I know you said you would “prefer” other kinds of evidence than the fine-tuning of the universe, but the fact remains that our universe and planet are precisely structured to support life. We can’t shrug our shoulders at that just because we want other evidence; we have to ask ourselves what we can best infer from that reality. We also have other pieces of evidence to consider—such as the universe having a beginning (which requires a cause from outside of nature), the origin and complexity of life, and the innate moral understanding humans seem to have. In each of these cases (which we could discuss further), the best explanation given what we know from the evidence is the existence of a universe-creating, life-designing, moral law-giving being outside of nature.

Does that leave us with absolute certainty about His existence? No…but we don’t look for that level of certainty with anything in life. We trust based on what we have good reason to believe is true.

And does that tell us this being is the God of the Bible? Not necessarily. It’s certainly consistent with Him, but we would need to look at the evidence for the truth of the Bible to connect them. This, of course, is important to consider—especially since you said you’d like evidence that “directly points to God Himself coming down and speaking.” Christians believe God did exactly that in the person of Jesus Christ. We have compelling evidence that the Gospels of the New Testament were written by or based on eyewitness testimony of those who knew Jesus personally. If we can determine that these witnesses are reliable, then we have good reason to trust their testimony that the kind of evidence you happen to want is exactly what God has given us (albeit 2,000 years ago). Would you like to talk more about the reliability of the Gospels?

If you enjoyed reading these responses, please share this post!

Click here to get your own copy of  Talking with Your Kids about God, or find it at your local bookstore.

 

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The Evidence For Jesus' Resurrection, Part 3_ Fact (1) Jesus Died By Crucifixion

The Evidence For Jesus’ Resurrection, Part 3: Fact (1) Jesus Died By Crucifixion

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By Evan Minton

In the previous blog post, I explained what the minimal facts approach was, and how it employed standard historical criterion to the New Testament text rather than it being a “Thus sayeth The Lord” approach. The New Testament is used, but only as an ancient set of documents, not as scripture. Additionally, the minimal facts approach employs a two-step process (1) Determining the facts to be explained and (2) Determining the best explanation of those facts. At this stage of the game, we are determining the facts to be explained.
Of the 5 minimal facts that there are, the first one is this: Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. What historical evidence is there to establish this as a historical fact?

Reason 1: Jesus’ Death By Crucifixion is multiply attested
Jesus’ death by Roman crucifixion is overwhelmingly multiply attested. It is mentioned in 4 secular sources, the synoptic gospels, John’s gospel, and Paul’s epistles.
Source 1: Josephus 

The first-century Jewish historian named Flavius Josephus (37-100 A.D) wrote about Jesus’ crucifixion in his book Antiquities Of The Jews in book 18. Josephus wrote: “Now, there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it is lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”  

Here we have a first century, non-Christian historian saying that a man named Jesus existed, drew a crowd of people who listened to His teachings, but was killed by Roman crucifixion under the governor Pontius Pilate at the request of “some of the principal men among us” which we can infer to be the Jewish Sanhedrin. This is historical evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus coming from a source with no theological ax to grind.

Now, some skeptics will object that this passage, known as “The Testimonium Flavianum,” really isn’t good historical evidence for the crucifixion because the passage seems to have been interpolated by a Christian scribe. I would agree that it has clearly been interpolated by Christian scribes as would a large number of historians and scholars who study ancient history. We have no evidence that Josephus ever became a Christian, so it would highly unlikely that he would say things like “If it be lawful to call him a man” for such a sentence implies that Jesus was more than human, or that Josephus would say “He was the Christ” as this is an explicit declaration that Jesus is the Messiah, a statement only a Christian would make. What’s worse is that near the very end of this passage, Josephus says that Jesus rose from the dead! Again, only Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead. Josephus, being a non-Christian, would never make these statements. This passage was obviously altered by a scribe who did believe these things; a Christian scribe.

But while I agree with the skeptic that the Testimonium Flavianum was altered by a Christian, I don’t believe it follows that we can’t use this passage as extra-biblical evidence for the death of Jesus. The majority of scholars today hold the position that The Testimonium Flavianum was only partially interpolated. That is to say; most of the passage is legitimate (it’s not like a Christian scribe made the entire Testimonium Flavianum up, but only certain phrases were inserted by a Christian scribe. There are two primary arguments that historians give for adopting this “Partial Interpolation” view.

*When You Remove The Obvious Christian Additions, The Passage Remains Coherent

Christopher Price wrote “Perhaps the most important factor leading most scholars to accept the partial-authenticity position is that a substantial part of the TF reflects Josephan language and style. Moreover, when the obvious Christian glosses — which are rich in New Testament terms and language not found in the core — are removed or restored to their original the remaining core passage is coherent and flows well. We can be confident that there was a minimal reference to Jesus… because once the clearly Christian sections are removed, the rest makes good grammatical and historical sense. The peculiarly Christian words are parenthetically connected to the narrative; hence they are grammatically free and could easily have been inserted by a Christian. These sections also are disruptive, and when they are removed the flow of thought is improved and smoother.”[1]

I think that Price is right. Compare the clearly interpolated version of the Testimonimum Flavianum which I included above with the version below:

“Now, there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, for he was a doer of wonderful works,–a teacher of such men as receiving the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”  

You can see that the flow of thought isn’t bothered by the removal of the obvious Christian additions. How often is it that you can erase whole sentences from a paragraph and still have it make complete sense? Not often. On this basis, therefore, it’s highly probable that there was an original passage about Jesus’ crucifixion and it did not include phrases that expressed belief in his messiahship and resurrection.

*The Reference to James the Brother of Jesus Suggests an Earlier Reference to Jesus

Later on in Josephus’ writings, Josephus makes a reference to Jesus’ brother James and records his martyrdom at the hands of the Jewish Sanhedrin. While the Testimonium Flavianum is hotly debated, I know of no scholar who doubts the validity of Josephus’ reference to James. The reference to James’s Martyrdom increases the likelihood that the Testimonium Flavianum is also valid. In Josephus’ reference to James, he refers to Jesus as “the so-called Christ” without further explanation. That’s all he says. All he says about James is that he’s the brother of “Jesus, the so-called Christ.” In the passage about James, Josephus doesn’t go into any explanation of who Jesus was, what He did, no claims of Him dying and rising from the dead, no mention of any miracles, or anything like that. The only thing Josephus says about Jesus in this latter passage is that He’s James’ brother. What this implies is that Josephus presupposed that his readers already knew who he was referring to. But why would Josephus make such a presupposition? If The Testmonium Falvianum is legitimate, then it makes sense why Josephus assumes his readers already knew who he was talking about; i.e. because He already briefly explained who Jesus was and what He did earlier.

For these and other reasons, most scholars think that the Testimonium Flavianium is an authentic passage. If it’s an authentic passage, then we can certainly use it as evidence for the existence and crucifixion of Jesus. However, even if the Testimonium Flavianum couldn’t be used, that wouldn’t hurt our case very much as we would still many other sources that record the event, as you’ll see below.

Source 2: Tacitus 

Tacitus was a Roman historian writing in the early second century. In the 15th volume of his work Annals, Tacitus recounts the terrible burning down of Rome by Emperor Nero and mentions how he tried to get the suspicions off of himself and onto the Christians by unleashing a terrible persecution against them. It is in this passage that he makes a reference to Jesus’ crucifixion. The Annals of Tacitus dates to AD 115.  Tacitus writes “Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign Of Tiberius…” (Cornelius Tacitus, Annals, 15:44)

Source 3: Mara Bar Serapion

Mara Bar-Serapion was a Syriac stoic philosopher in the Roman province of Syria. At some point, he was arrested, and while in prison, he wrote a letter to his son. In this letter, mentions how wise teachers who were persecuted and killed for their teachings were eventually avenged by God. He rhetorically asked what the Athenians gained from putting Socrates to death and then mentioned how famine and plague came upon them, for example. As for Jesus, Mara wrote: “What did the Jews gain from murdering their wise king? It was after that that their kingdom was abolished.”[2] 

About this passage, Josh and Sean McDowell write “Though Mara never uses Jesus’ name, we can be certain he is referring to him because no one else at that point in history would fulfill the requirements of being known as a “wise king” who was killed by the Jews shortly before they were driven from the land. Jesus is obviously in view.”[3]  

Source 4: Lucian Of Samosata 

Lucian Of Samosata was a second-century Greek satirist. In one of his works, he wrote of the early Christians as follows: “The Christians… worship a man to this day—the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account…” (Lucian of Samosata, from the book The Passing Peregrinus)

Source 5: The Synoptic Gospels

Everyone knows that the synoptic gospels (i.e. Matthew, Mark, and Luke) refer to the crucifixion of Jesus, so I don’t see any need to unpack this sub-subsection any further. I will clarify one thing though; the reason I’m throwing the synoptic gospels together as a single source is that many scholars believe that Luke borrowed material from Matthew who in turn borrowed from Mark. There is some good evidence that this is the case, such as the fact that there are passages in the Synoptics that read identically to one another.

Source 6: The Gospel Of John 

The gospel of John likewise tells us that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. Most scholars believe that John was writing independently of the other 3 gospels. Therefore, I treat John as an independent source.

Source 7: The Epistles Of Paul 

Paul’s epistles mention the crucifixion of Jesus.

In all, we have at least 7 early sources that state that Jesus died by Roman Crucifixion. 4 of those sources are secular in nature, and 3 of them come from The New Testament.

According to the principle of multiple attestations, this makes it extremely, extremely probable that Jesus’ death on a Roman cross at the hands of Pontius Pilate was a real event of history. The principle of multiple attestations says that if you find any event mentioned in two or more sources, it is more likely that the event actually occurred. This is because the more and more independent sources an event is mentioned in, the less and less likely it is to be made up. Think about it: how likely is it that SEVEN INDEPENDENT SOURCES all made up the same fictional story? Seven independent historians! Do you honestly expect me to believe that seven independent writers all just happened to make up the same thing? That is statistically impossible! It is statistically impossible for 7 independent writers to all make up the same event and treat it as history!

Jesus’ death by Roman crucifixion is multiply, multiply, multiply attested, and this makes it extremely probable that the event actually occurred. If this criterion of authenticity were the only one this minimal fact passed, it would be enough to conclude it occurred.

Paul Maier, retired distinguished professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University said “Many facts in the ancient world are established on one source. Two or three sources often make an event impregnable.”[4]  Two sources? You can’t beat it. That’s how source material works in ancient history. Meyer says two independent sources make the historical event “impregnable.” But we don’t have two sources here; we have seven!

Reason 2: Jesus’ Crucifixion Is Enemy Attested 

Moreover, not only is Jesus’ death by crucifixion multiply attested in seven independent documents, but it’s also enemy attested. Those who are your enemies are not likely to say things to help your cause.  People who are hostile to you are not going to say things to make you look good or to bolster your cause.  We have enemy attestation when it comes to Jesus’ crucifixion. Neither Tacitus nor Lucian Of Samosata was friendly to Christianity. In Tacitus’ account, he calls Christianity a “pernicious superstition”! Lucian was ridiculing Christians in the very same passage in which he affirms that Jesus died by crucifixion! So, in addition to multiple attestations in seven independent sources, we have enemy attestation in two of those sources!

Reason 3: The Principle Of Historical Fit 

Moreover, the principle of historical fit comes into play here. We know for a fact from the writings of ancient first-century authors like Josephus, Tacitus, and even Archeology (e.g. the Yehohannan discovery from 1975), that Romans crucified people back in the first century. And we know that one of those reasons was in the case of treason. Jesus being crucified on the grounds of claiming to be the Messiah fits right in with what we know of Roman executions.

Reason 4: Only Women Had The Guts To Stick With Jesus In His Final Hours

If you were making up a story of any kind, you most likely wouldn’t depict yourself, your friends, or people you respected in a bad way. You wouldn’t make up lies about them that hurt them or made them look bad. If you were going to lie, you’d make up things to help them or to make them look good. This is why the principle of embarrassment counts in favor of an event’s historicity. The principle of embarrassment gives us good grounds to believe the crucifixion of Jesus occurred in three different ways.

John 19 records Jesus’ crucifixion. However, John writes “So the soldiers took charge of Jesus. Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha). There they crucified him, and with him two others—one on each side and Jesus in the middle. Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the jews. Many of the Jews read this sign, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, ‘Do not write ‘The King of the Jews,’ but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews.’ Pilate answered, ‘What I have written, I have written.’ When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his clothes, dividing them into four shares, one for each of them, with the undergarment remaining. This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom.  ‘Let’s not tear it,’ they said to one another. ‘Let’s decide by lot who will get it.’ This happened that the scripture might be fulfilled that said, ‘They divided my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.’  So this is what the soldiers did. Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, ‘Woman, here is your son,’ and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.” – John 19:16-27

John records that 3 women stayed with Jesus during his final hours; Jesus’ mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the wife of Clopas (there were a lot of women named Mary in first century Israel). The only male disciple that John records as sticking with Jesus is himself. According to Mark’s account, the rest of the disciples all ran away in terror when the Romans came to arrest Jesus (Mark 14:43-52). The fact that most of the disciples abandoned Jesus in his darkest hour is not something the gospel writers would have made up. It gets worse when you consider that women are mainly those stay behind. In first century Jewish culture, women were considered second-class citizens, and Josephus says that they weren’t even allowed to witness in a Jewish court of law (more on this in the next blog post). In light of this fact, how remarkable it is that it is women who stay by Jesus’ side in his final moments rather than the male disciples! If John were making this up, he would have included at least a few other of the male apostles with him. Yet John puts the women in a good light and most of the men in a bad light! The women are the brave ones, and the men are cowards!

Reason 5: Jesus Was Killed In The Most Humiliating Way 

As I said above, If you were making up a story of any kind, you most likely wouldn’t depict yourself, your friends, or people you respected in a bad way. The gospel writers, whoever they were, clearly respected, Jesus. Why would they make up a story about his death that was considered at that time to be the most degrading and humiliating way to die. I mean, these people thought Jesus wasn’t just the Messiah, but God incarnate (John 1:1-3, 14)! Why would you write a story about your own God that demeans Him?[5]

As Dr. Gary Habermas said “Our Lord was killed like a slave? And, he had the best arguments in the universe, and he never opened His mouth? …..He might possibly have been crucified nude. May have happened. Didn’t always happen to crucified victims, but it did sometimes. We have a tendency to not add embarrassing things about those we love, and there are many.”[6] 

Put yourself in the shoes of a first century Jew. If you were going to make up a story of your leader dying and rising, wouldn’t you at least have him be killed in a more dignified way? Stoning was one way Jews killed people back in the first century, as we know from the book of Acts (chapter 7) and Josephus’ (Antiquities of The Jews, book 20, regarding James’ martyrdom by stoning). Maybe it’s just me, but I think being killed by having a large rock thrown at your head is a far more dignified way to die than being nailed to a stake either half-naked or fully naked. The gospel authors, if they were making up the story of Jesus’ death, would most likely have had him die by stoning.

So, once again, the principle of embarrassment gives us good reason to believe the first minimal fact is true.

Reason 6: Multiple Literary Form 

Different Kinds Of Stories about Jesus’ Death. Jesus’ death is recorded in different books of different genres of the first century. The genres are Miracles, Parables, Creeds, Didactic, Greco-Roman Biography, and Apocalyptic.

The Greco-Roman biographies would obviously be the gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
The apocalyptic genre would be the book of revelation in which Jesus shows up in Revelation 5 as a wounded lamb, and Jesus was very likely as the child born in the wilderness in chapter 12.
Creeds — We’ll talk more about creeds in part 5 of this blog post series, but Jesus’ crucifixion is mentioned in the early resurrection creed cited in 1 Corinthians 15, and in the creed cited in Philippians 2.

Parables — Jesus’ death is told in The Parable Of The Wicked Tenants (Luke 20:9-16).

Didactic – Jesus’ crucifixion is mentioned in Peter’s sermon in Acts 2. See Acts 2:36

Reason 7: The King Of The Jews and The Principle Of Dissimilarity 

When the Romans were crucifying Jesus, they nailed a plaque above his head that read “The King Of The Jews” (Mark 15:26, John 19:19). We know that this is historical on the basis the principle of dissimilarity. “The King Of Jews” was never a title used for Jesus by the early church. If this title was just made up by the early church and retroactively inserted into the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, then we would expect the early church to call Jesus “The King Of The Jews” a lot more frequently than we do, but in fact, the early church never called Jesus by this title. Indeed, Jesus isn’t even called “The King Of Jews” in any other place in the synoptic gospels, or the gospel of John except for this one place! Additionally, none of the New Testament epistles call Jesus by this title! If this title was just made up by the early church and retroactively inserted into the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, then we would expect the early church to call Jesus “The King Of The Jews” very frequently. Therefore, by the principle of dissimilarity, we have good reason to believe that this plaque really was nailed above Jesus’ head while he was being crucified, which of course entails that Jesus actually was crucified.

Reason 8: “Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me” — Principle Of Embarrassment 

In Matthew 27, Matthew’s account of Jesus’ death on the cross, Jesus cries out “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” we can conclude that this is an actual utterance of Jesus on the basis of the criterion of embarrassment. Why would Matthew make Jesus ask God why He has forsaken him? It makes it seem as though Jesus doesn’t know why he’s being crucified even though he’s recorded as predicting it earlier (Matthew 20:17-19) and even said why he had to die (Matthew 20:28). Why would Matthew make this saying up? It just raises too many questions. Even today, this saying of Jesus strikes people as something odd for him to say. After all, he predicted his death and even explained why it had to take place, why is he all of a sudden crying out “Why”?

Now, I do think there’s a satisfying explanation for why Jesus said this. It’s the first verse of Psalm 22 verbatim. Most biblical scholars consider this to be a prophecy of the way the Messiah would die. When you compare the contents of Psalm 22 with what happened to Jesus in the gospels, there are striking similarities,  but I won’t go into them now. I’ll leave it up to you to look into that yourself. Jesus was calling attention to this Psalm in order to proclaim to the people that he was fulfilling yet another messianic prophesy.

Nevertheless, even though an explanation exists for this cry of Jesus’, wouldn’t it be easier for Matthew to just omit it altogether rather than go through the trouble of explaining it? Certainly. And that’s why we can conclude that Jesus actually made this statement. Of course, since the context of this statement is Jesus dying by crucifixion, that logically entails that the crucifixion actually occurred as well.

Summary and Conclusion 

We’ve seen that the historical evidence for Jesus having been executed via Roman crucifixion is overwhelming. Jesus’ death by Roman crucifixion is multiply, multiply, multiply attested in 7 independent sources. 4 of those sources are secular, and 3 of them are from The New Testament. It is statistically impossible for 7 different writers to all fabricate the same fictional event and then treat it as history. Moreover, Jesus’ crucifixion is enemy attested by two secular sources (Tacitus and Lucian), sources that were actually ridiculing Christianity in the same breath that they affirm the historicity of Jesus’ crucifixion. Moreover, Jesus’ death is coherent with the well-established facts of Roman history. Moreover, Jesus’ crucifixion meets the criterion of embarrassment in three different ways; (1) John makes women the brave ones to stay by Jesus’ side during his final hours while the disciples abandoned him, and (2) If you’re going to make up a story about someone you cherish dying, you’d make the specific way he died much more dignified. Roman crucifixion was not only an extremely painful way to die, but it was an extremely shameful way as well. Additionally, “My God! My God! Why Have You Forsaken Me” is an awkward saying of Jesus, so it’s unlikely to be made up. Also, Jesus’ death is told in multiple literary forms. Finally, the principle of dissimilarity supports the historicity of the crucifixion because a title is ascribed to Jesus that isn’t ascribed to him anywhere else, in The New Testament or in the writings of the early church fathers.

Of the 5 minimal facts, the death of Jesus on a cross is the one that I don’t think I’ll ever doubt. The evidence for it is so overwhelming and so plenteous, it passes so many of the principles of historical authenticity in so many different ways, that I am baffled how anyone could possibly deny it. In fact, no one does. At least not among scholars. The only people who deny that Jesus existed and died via Roman crucifixion are laymen.

The agnostic historian Bart Ehrman states that “One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate. “[7] The highly critical scholar of the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan, writes, “That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”[8]  Like Ehrman, Crossan is not a Christian. Yet both Ehrman and Crossan agree that Jesus’ death by crucifixion is a historical fact. Gerd Ludemann, an atheist historian, said: “Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is an indisputable fact.”[9] 

Now, why did I go to such lengths to establish the historicity of Jesus’ crucifixion? One reason is that you have to have a death before you can have a resurrection. Additionally, most of the people who will be reading this blog post series are not scholars or trained historians, but laymen. And many of them deny that Jesus even existed altogether, but much less died on a cross. But among scholars, both Christian and non-Christian, the crucifixion of Jesus is just taken for granted.[10] It isn’t even debated among Christian and Non-Christian scholars. I think that’s why Dr. William Lane Craig skips this one and goes right to Jesus’ burial or the empty tomb. Which, by the way, is the next minimal fact in our case that we’ll examine.

Notes 

[1] From the online article “Did Josephus Refer To Jesus?” by Christopher Price http://bede.org.uk/Josephus.htm

[2] British Museum, Syriac Manuscript, Additional 14,658

[3] McDowell, Josh; McDowell, Sean. Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World (p. 150). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

[4] Paul L. Maier, In the Fullness of Time: A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the Early Church (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 197.

[5] The American Biblical Scholar John P. Meier makes this same argument in “How do we decide what comes from Jesus” in The Historical Jesus in Recent Research by James D. G. Dunn and Scot McKnight 2006 ISBN 1-57506-100-7 pages 126–128

[6] Dr. Gary Habermas, transcribed from the lecture “Evidence For The Minimal Facts,” given at The National Conference On Christian Apologetics, October 14th, 2017.

[7] A Brief Introduction to the New Testament by Bart D. Ehrman 2008 ISBN 0-19-536934-3 page 136

[8] See John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 145; see also 154, 196, 201.

[9] Dr. Gerd Ludemann, “The Resurrection Of Christ: A Historical Inquiry,” 2004, page 50.

[10] See RE Brown, The Death Of The Messiah, 1994, page 1373

 

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The Evidence For Jesus' Resurrection, Part 1 Why This Matters

The Evidence For Jesus’ Resurrection, Part 1: Why This Matters

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By Evan Minton

Did Jesus really rise from the dead? How can we know? Most people, both Christians, and non-Christians alike, will tell you that if you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, it has to be on either the basis of a religious experience (for example, you were addicted to drugs but prayed to Jesus to free you, and if He did, you would follow him all the days of your life) or blind faith. The general public is under the impression that Jesus’ resurrection cannot be believed on the basis of evidence. However, while this perception is common among the general population, it isn’t true. There is actually a wealth of historical evidence for the truth of Christianity, and many skeptics have become Christians by looking at this evidence.[1]  I’m glad that such evidence exists for a number of reasons. For one, I consider myself a generally skeptical and critically thinking person. I like that I can believe that Christianity is true on the basis of more than “The Bible tells me so.” If there were no evidence for Jesus’ resurrection other than the claims of The Bible, I would have a hard time maintaining belief in it. Especially since other religions make equally radical claims. How would I know to accept The Bible’s claims about God rather than, say, the Quran’s? Secondly, it is important to our eternal fates whether we know that Jesus rose from the dead if He actually did. As C.S Lewis eloquently put it: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance. But if true, it is of infinite importance. The only thing I cannot be is moderately important.”[2]  Christianity is of no importance whatsoever if it isn’t true. If Jesus were just a wise teacher or a false prophet who met an untimely demise, who cares? On the other hand, if The Bible is true, if Christianity is true if Jesus was God incarnate who died and rose from the dead, then it is infinitely important that we listen to what He has to say and that we apply it to our lives. If Christianity is true, and we don’t believe it, we’re in for one Hell of an afterlife (pun intended), since The Bible teaches that whoever does not believe in Jesus will be under God’s wrath (John 3:18, John 3:36), who will be thrown in a lake of fire to be tormented forever and ever (Revelation 14:10-11). It is therefore vital that we believe Jesus’ claims about Himself. Not to do so result in us dying in our sins (see John 8:24). This is why C.S Lewis said that Christianity is infinitely important if it’s true. But if it’s not true, then the warnings of judgment in scripture are nothing but empty threats.

So if it’s true and we don’t believe it, eternal agony awaits.[3] If it’s false and we don’t believe it, no biggie. This is why Lewis said it’s either infinitely important or not important at all. But under no circumstances can it be somewhat important.

Why The Resurrection Is So Important

As you’ve probably noticed, I used “Christianity” and “Jesus’ resurrection” interchangeably in the paragraphs above. There’s a reason I did that. If the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth can be historically established, then that means that the entire Christian worldview is established as well. If Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true and any worldview or religion that contradicts Christianity is false.

Why do I say that? Is this some unjustified leap? “Are you seriously saying that validating one of The Bible’s claims validates the entire Bible? Aren’t you committing the hasty generalization fallacy in making this assertion?”[4]  I understand why you would raise this question. Before I get into making a case for Jesus’ resurrection, I need to first unpack why it would validate the entire Christian worldview.

First of all, there is strong historical evidence that Jesus claimed to be God. If Jesus said that he was God, but he wasn’t, then he was either a lying heretic or else he was crazy. If that were the case, there’s no way God The Father would resurrect Jesus from the dead knowing that that would vindicate his blasphemous claims and lead many people astray. God would never raise a heretic and a blasphemer. But if God did raise Jesus from the dead, then God implicitly put his stamp of approval on everything Jesus said and did. If Jesus rose from the dead, then that means God The Father agreed with Jesus’ claims for which his enemies killed him as a blasphemer. If God The Father raised Jesus from the dead, then that means He agrees with Jesus’ claims to be divine.

If that’s the case, then whatever Jesus teaches carries a lot of weight. Well, what did Jesus teach? He taught (1) that the Old Testament was the divinely inspired Word of God. He believed and taught that every word in The Old Testament was true. (2) Since he handpicked the writers of the New Testament, this means the New Testament is divinely inspired given that Jesus is God, (3) He also seemed to believe that Adam and Eve were historical individuals, that (4) the flood story in Genesis 6-9 actually happened, that (5) angels and demons really do exist, and (6) that if you place your faith in him, you will have eternal life but that if you don’t place your faith in Him, you’ll end up in Hell (John 3:16-18, John 8:24).

So if Jesus rose from the dead after allegedly blaspheming the One who raised him, we can believe all of these things as well simply because Jesus believed them. This is why you’ll often hear Christian Apologists say “I don’t believe in Jesus because I believe The Bible. I believe The Bible because I believe in Jesus”.

But, how do we know that Jesus actually claimed to be divine and that he believed the Old Testament was inspired, that he believed angels and demons existed, etc.? I unpack this in my blog post “What Is The Significance Of Jesus’ Resurrection?”  

“Oh no! Not Another Blog Series!” 

I’ve come to learn that not everyone likes blog post series[5], so I plan on making this both a blog post series as well as a book. I know of no one interested in researching these matters who hates books, so if you’re one of those people who hate blog posts series, you can wait and the series compiled in book form. Though this particular paragraph and subsection will be missing.

Be Willing To Follow The Evidence Wherever It Leads 

If you understand the importance of knowing whether or not Christianity is true, then you’ll take the time to either read this blog post series or read the book adaption of it. If you do take the time to listen to my arguments, please follow them to their logical conclusions. My friend Neil Mammen has a saying “Don’t let the consequences of your logic cause you to abandon that logic.”[6]  Not everyone who denies the resurrection of Jesus does so purely on intellectual grounds or on the grounds that the evidence isn’t sufficient. Some people deny that the resurrection occurred simply because they want it not to have occurred. Some people aren’t Christians because there isn’t enough evidence to establish that it’s true, but because they don’t want it to be true.

If Jesus rose from the dead, then Christianity is true. If Christianity is true, then several implications follow. It means that if you’re living in sin, you’ll have to repent. Jesus said that if you even look at a woman with lust, you’ve committed adultery in your heart (Matthew 5:28), and adultery is one of the things God said not to do (Exodus 20:14). If you like to spend your evenings downloading and looking at pornography, you’ll have to get that out of your life or answer to God for it (2 Corinthians 5:10). But porn watchers don’t want to do that. Watching porn is fun! It’s exciting! Porn watchers don’t want to give up porn because they enjoy it too much. Others may want to sleep around, bouncing from woman to woman as Charlie Harper did on the hit sitcom Two and A Half Men. According to Hebrews 13:4, this is a no-no. If someone engaged in this behavior doesn’t repent, they’ll be facing judgment. Romans 1:26-28, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, and 1 Timothy 1:9-11 prohibit homosexual relationships. Some people don’t want Christianity to be true because it means they’ll have to stop having sex with their same-sex partner. 2 Corinthians 6:14 prohibits a believer marrying an unbeliever. Some people may not want Christianity to be true because they know that if it is, they need to become Christians, or else they face Hell, and if they’re Christians themselves, they’ll be prohibited from marrying their boyfriend or girlfriend who is also an unbeliever.

For many people, it’s a purely intellectual issue. Merely being presented with the evidence in this blog series will be sufficient to persuade them to become Christians. For others, they’re resistant to following the evidence where it leads because they’re in love with their sin, and don’t like the idea of having to exchange their pet sin for a relationship with Jesus. Jesus talked about this when he said “This is the verdict: that light has come into the world. Yet men loved the darkness rather than the light for their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will come nowhere near the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” (John 3:19-20). Echoing Jesus’ words, the mathematician and Christian Apologist John Lennox said: “If religion is a fairytale for those afraid of the dark, then atheism is a fairytale for those afraid of the light.”[7]

So again, “Don’t let the consequences of your logic force you to abandon that logic.” Don’t let the consequences of Christianity being true to force you to swim against the current of evidence pointing against it. The Christian Apologist Frank Turek of CrossExamined.org often exposes someone as resisting Jesus on emotional or moral grounds by asking them one simple question: “If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?” That’s the question I’m posing to you, dear reader. If you knew beyond a reasonable doubt that Christianity is true, would you be willing to give up whatever lifestyle Christ might not approve of in order to follow Him and serve Him? If you were convinced that God exists, would you bow to Him as your Savior and Lord? If you hesitate or if your answer is “no,” then your problem isn’t in your head, it’s in your heart. In that case, this series and its e-book adaption will be of no use to you, since your problem isn’t intellectual, to begin with. So, before you proceed, do some introspection and determine whether you’re on a truth quest or whether you’re on a happiness quest. If your answer to that question is “Yes,” then keep reading! God promises that those who sincerely seek Him find Him when they seek Him with all their heart (see Jeremiah 29:13).

Moreover, if your answer is “No, let me ask you something. Isn’t it better to live in the truth than in a lie? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if life didn’t end at the grave, but that an eternity of uninterrupted bliss followed? Wouldn’t it be infinitely awesome if the death of a loved one wasn’t a final goodbye, but an “until we meet again”? If Christianity is true, life doesn’t end at the grave, death is the beginning of an eternity of uninterrupted bliss, and I will see my loved ones again someday. I would think you would want Christianity to be true, not false! Yeah, you’d have to give up some worldly pleasures, but isn’t an eternal life worth more than a night of porn or a marriage to someone of the same sex?

Of course, what we want to be true doesn’t matter one iota. What matters is where the evidence points. My point in the previous paragraph was an attempt to change your desire if you fell into the category of people who say “No” to Frank Turek’s question. I wanted to make you want it to be true, or at least find Christianity attractive so you might be less prone to suppressing the truth (Romans 1:18-20).

Addressing The Elephant In The Room

Moreover, when you examine the evidence, make sure you don’t go in with a presupposition that miracles cannot occur. What is a presupposition? Josh and Sean McDowell explain that “A presupposition is something assumed or supposed in advance. … A presupposition is something that is assumed to be true and is taken for granted. Synonyms include prejudgment, an assumption of something as true, prejudice, for judgment, preconceived opinion, fixed conclusion, preconceived notion, and premature conclusion.”[8] If you go into this concluding from the outset that miracles cannot occur, that will distort your ability to interpret the evidence.

The biochemist Michael Behe gives an amusing illustration of this in his book Darwin’s Black Box:

“Imagine a room in which a body lies crushed, flat as a pancake. A dozen detectives crawl around, examining the floor with magnifying glasses for any clue to the identity of the perpetrator. In the middle of the room, next to the body, stands a large, gray elephant. The detectives carefully avoid bumping into the pachyderm’s legs as they crawl, and never even glance at it. Over time the detectives get frustrated with their lack of progress but resolutely press on, looking even more closely at the floor. You see, textbooks say detectives must “get their man,” so they never consider elephants.”[9]

Behe was writing in the context of Darwinists ruling out Intelligent Design theory out from the outset, but the analogy is just as applicable in looking at the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. If you presuppose that a miraculous resurrection cannot occur and then interpret the evidence in light of that presupposition, you’re like the detectives who refuse to consider that the corpse on the floor may have been killed by the elephant standing directly adjacent to it. Of course, if a naturalistic explanation can account for the data, that’s one thing. But to think, either consciously or subconsciously “No matter what the evidence says, Jesus could not possibly have come back to life” is wrongheaded. If a human culprit could be found, tried, and convicted for the murder of the person in Behe’s analogy, that would be one thing. But to say “No matter what the evidence says, an elephant couldn’t possibly be the culprit” is wrongheaded.

Why I’m Writing A Whole Series On This

I have written about the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection elsewhere. I’ve written about it in “The Minimal Facts Case For Jesus’ Resurrection PART 1” and “The Minimal Facts Case For Jesus’ Resurrection PART 2”. I’ve also written an abbreviated version of that first article called “A Quick Case For Jesus’ Resurrection.” And I’ve done a 20-page chapter on it in my book Inference To The One True God: Why I Believe In Jesus Instead Of Other Gods. Given this, one may wonder why I’m doing a whole series on it. The answer: because the evidence is far more powerful and plenteous than I was able to present in the space allotted to me in those linked articles and book chapter. For example, I gave three reasons to believe Jesus’ tomb was empty in the writings above, but there are actually a lot more reasons to believe that this is true. Other criteria of authenticity establish that Jesus’ tomb was empty and that Jesus did die by Roman crucifixion. I just didn’t mention these in these above writings because (1) I didn’t know about a few of these arguments until recently, and (2) I didn’t want the above writings to be lengthier than need-be.

In this series, I’ll be covering familiar ground while also talking about the evidence I had not talked about in my prior writings on this subject.

Conclusion 
In the next blog post, I’ll explain the methodology of how we get from the question “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” to the answer “He is risen!” Most of the non-Christians I engage with simply don’t understand the reasoning behind the arguments, and therefore make all kinds of misguided accusations, such as that we’re reasoning in a circle. It’s vital to understand the process of the case for Jesus’ resurrection if one is to properly respond to it (either by falling to their knees or in rebuttal).

Notes 

[1] Such as Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, J. Warner Wallace, Frank Morrison, and C.S Lewis. They came to believe that Jesus claimed to be God and rose from the dead on the foundation of the historical evidence that we will be looking at in this series.

[2] C. S. Lewis Quotes. BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2017. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/cslewis164517.html, accessed November 6, 2017.

[3] Some people think The Bible’s teachings on Hell impugn God’s goodness. I don’t, but it’s beyond the scope of this series to get into why. If you’re bothered by The Bible’s teachings on Hell, I recommend checking out my book A Hellacious Doctrine: A Defense Of The Biblical Doctrine Of Hell which addresses this biblical doctrine in depth. Each chapter takes on a different objection to the doctrine of Hell, from the “Eternal torment is overkill” argument to the “What happens to the unevangelized” question.

[4] The Hasty Generalization fallacy occurs when someone takes a small sample of a class and then makes an unjustified conclusion about the totality of that specific class in which the sample was found. For example, someone would be committing the hasty generalization fallacy if they said “All men are pigs” based on their past relationships, or if they said “All white men are racists” just because they knew a couple of white men who were indeed racists.

[5] Tony Lee Ross Jr. expressed his dislike of blog post series in an article he wrote titled “Why You Should Stop Writing Blog Post Series (Part 1). — https://www.sinnersinthehandsofanangryblog.com/2017/09/why-you-should-stop-writing-blog-post.html

[6] Neil Mammen, “Who Is Agent X: Proving Science and Logic Show It’s More Rational To Believe That God Exists”, page

[7] I could never find a place where Lennox said this in writing, but I know he said this in a debate he had with Stephen Hawking. In fact, it’s a rather popular quote of his.

[8] McDowell, Josh; McDowell, Sean. Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World (p. lxi). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

[9] Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1996), 192.rft

 

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Your Kids Need to Think Critically About the Resurrection

Your Kids Need to Think Critically About the Resurrection… Because Secular Media Does Not

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By Natasha Crain

This month’s issue of Scientific American magazine features an article by atheist Michael Shermer entitled, “What Would It Take to Prove the Resurrection?” It’s boldly subtitled, “How to think about claims, even the Resurrection.”

Wow! This article in a popular magazine says it’s going to teach us how to think about the resurrection. I couldn’t wait to read it.

It was even worse than I thought it would be.

Every year at Easter time, secular publications feature articles on the resurrection, and every year they’re cringe-worthy.

In this post, I’ll highlight two key ways this particular article actually teaches bad critical thinking, then provide a three-point framework for helping your kids think more logically about the subject.

By the way, if you have time for Easter baskets, egg hunts and egg dying, you have time to have these conversations with your kids. Seriously. This is important.

Bad Thinking 1: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Shermer stakes his argument against the resurrection on a favorite motto of skeptics: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If you haven’t heard this before, it’s a standard line skeptic throw out as an attempted conversation stopper. It’s meant to wave off any supposed evidence for a miracle as inadequate for demonstrating that something as improbable as a miracle actually occurred.

This idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, however, falls squarely in the category of things that sound good but don’t hold up to logical scrutiny.

While much could be said here, the most important point is this: Why must extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Extremely improbable—“extraordinary”—things happen every day, and ordinary evidence is often sufficient for demonstrating that they happened. It’s extraordinarily improbable, for example, that a terrorist attack would happen in a specific place at a specific time. But when investigators evaluate the scene, they look at perfectly ordinary evidence to determine what happened—security footage, weapons at the scene, and the word of eyewitnesses.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is not a test we apply in any other area of life. Skeptics use it to subjectively set the evidential bar for miracles so high that no miracle could ever be believed.

That’s not critical thinking…that’s simply maintaining one’s presupposition that miracles don’t happen.

Bad Thinking 2: Proposing Explanations Without Considering Evidence

After saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, one might expect Shermer to lay out the evidence for the resurrection and demonstrate how that evidence fails to meet his (extraordinary) standard.

He does not.

Without considering any evidence for the resurrection, he simply lists possible reasons the Bible would even report such a thing:

Maybe the eyewitnesses were “superstitious or credulous and saw what they wanted to see.”

Maybe they reported, “only feeling Jesus in ‘spirit’ and over the decades their testimony was altered to suggest they saw Jesus in the flesh.”

Maybe accounts of the resurrection “never appeared in the original gospels are were added later.”

Each of these hypotheses can be strongly refuted, but because I want to focus on Shermer’s proposed method of thinking and not his specific hypotheses, I won’t go into that now. Instead, I want to simply point out that rather than look at historical data and consider what hypotheses best explain the historical facts, he looks at no evidence, lists three hypotheses anyway, then concludes any of these is necessarily more likely than the resurrection…because they don’t involve miracles.

So, to recap, a popular and well-regarded magazine has suggested that the way we should think about a claim like the resurrection is to:

  1. Identify it as a miracle claim.
  2. Accept that any natural explanation is more probable than a miracle explanation.
  3. Reject the miracle claim.

In other words, we’ve just been taught that the way to think about miracles is to assume they aren’t possible. Brilliant!

Sorry, Scientific American, but I’m not impressed.

Please Teach Your Kids to Think More Critically Than This

Parents, we need to do better than this. Our kids need to learn to think more critically than the world around them because they will encounter this kind of poor thinking everywhere. And I assure you they won’t learn this in Sunday School, so the responsibility falls to you. Here’s a 3-point “miracle evaluation” framework every kid should understand. (I talk about this subject in multiple chapters of Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side, so I’ll reference those chapters for each point if you want to read more.)

  1. Are miracles possible?

Shermer, and many skeptics like him, simply presuppose supernatural miracles aren’t possible. They effectively say, “Miracles aren’t possible, so the resurrection didn’t happen.”

Circular logic is not good logic.

Here’s better logic to learn: The possibility of miracles depends on whether or not God exists.

If God exists, supernatural miracles are possible because the supernatural exists. If God does not exist, the natural world is all there is, and supernatural miracles are therefore impossible by definition.

  1. What are the facts surrounding a given miracle claim?

Unless you’re simply throwing out the possibility of miracles because of your prior commitment to atheism, miracle claims must be investigated on a claim-by-claim basis.

In the case of the resurrection, there are four facts that are so strongly attested historically that they are granted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject, including the skeptical ones. Drs. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona lay these out in their book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Because this is a blog post and not a book, I’m only going to explain each fact briefly. See Habermas’ and Licona’s book for a comprehensive discussion, or chapter 21 in Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side for a summary.

  1. Jesus died by crucifixion.

Jesus’ crucifixion is referenced by several non-Christian historical sources, including Josephus, Tacitus, Lucian of Samosata, and the Jewish Talmud.

  1. Jesus’ disciples believed He arose and appeared to them.

Habermas explains, “There is a virtual consensus among scholars who study Jesus’ resurrection that, subsequent to Jesus’ death by crucifixion, his disciples really believed that he appeared to them risen from the dead. This conclusion has been reached by data that suggest that 1) the disciples themselves claimed that the risen Jesus had appeared to them, and 2) subsequent to Jesus’ death by crucifixion his disciples were radically transformed from fearful, cowering individuals who denied and abandoned him at his arrest and execution into bold proclaimers of the gospel of the risen Lord.”

A skeptic may claim there are natural (as opposed to supernatural) explanations for what happened to the disciples, but very few deny the disciples experienced something that led them to willingly face severe persecution and death.

  1. The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed.

Paul seriously persecuted the early church (Acts 8:3; 1 Corinthians 15:9; Galatians 1:13; Philippians 3:6). But everything changed when he had an experience with whom he claimed was the risen Jesus (Acts 9). After that experience, he converted to the Christian faith and tirelessly preached Jesus’ resurrection, eventually being martyred for his claims.

  1. The skeptic James, the brother of Jesus, was suddenly changed.

James was not a believer in Jesus during Jesus’ ministry (Mark 3:21,31; 6:3-4; John 7:5). However, 1 Corinthians 15:7 says Jesus appeared to James, and after this alleged resurrection, James was described as a leader of the church (Acts 15:12-21; Galatians 1:19). He, too, was martyred for this belief, as recorded by both Christian and non-Christian historical writings (Hegesippus, Clement of Alexandria, and Josephus).

Again, these are the facts that virtually all scholars agree on…facts which require explanation and facts which weren’t even considered by Shermer.

  1. What is the best explanation for the facts?

In chapter 22 of Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side, I lay out seven theories people have offered to explain these facts:

  • Jesus only appeared to die.
  • The disciples lied or stole Jesus’ body.
  • Someone other than the disciples stole Jesus’ body.
  • Witnesses went to the wrong tomb.
  • The people who saw Jesus were hallucinating.
  • People invented Christianity based on pagan myths.
  • As Jesus’ teachings spread, they were embellished with supernatural details.

As I show in the book, not one of these explanations fits all of the known historical facts. A supernatural resurrection, however, easily accounts for them.

There’s good historical reason to conclude that a supernatural resurrection is the best explanation of the facts if you don’t have a prior commitment to atheism.

As theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg concludes, “The historical solidity of the Christian witness [to the resurrection] poses a considerable challenge to the conception of reality that is taken for granted by modern secular history. There are good and even superior reasons for claiming that the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event, and consequently, the Lord himself is a living reality. And yet there is the innumerable repeated experience that in the world the dead do not rise again. As long as this is the case, the Christian affirmation of Jesus’ resurrection will remain a debated issue, in spite of all sound historical argument to its historicity.”

I don’t expect Scientific American to come to the conclusion that a supernatural resurrection best fits the historical facts because it’s a secular publication. But I would challenge them in the future to present a more thoughtful approach to considering such issues.

I won’t hold my breath for that to happen.

In the meantime, if Christian parents spent as much time talking about these issues as dying Easter eggs, it might not be as much of a concern.

Can we make that happen?

 

Natasha Crain runs her Christian apologetics blog for parents, ChristianMomThoughts.com. She obtained her MBA in Marketing and Statistics from UCLA and obtained a Christian apologetic certificate from the University of Biola. She currently resides in California with her husband Bryan along with her three young children.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2G9wWEj

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